Earlier this week I dreamed that I found Trifolium breweri, a clover that hasn’t been collected in Oregon in years, one that I hope to find this spring. I carefully examined the white flower. I was happy. Only when I woke up did I realize that there were anomalies. My dream flower was radially symmetrical (those of clovers are bilaterally symmetrical), the flowers weren’t clustered in heads, and the leaves were entire (not compound). Also, I had a vague sense of being in NE Oregon, not SW where the plants grow. The only things my dream plant had in common with Trifolium breweri were flower color and the sprawling growth form. An odd attempt at wish fulfilment, I guess.
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Yikes! I hope that never happens.
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I once dreamt of walking around and looking at various alcids with David Attenborough. Another time, I saw a yellow warbler and a house wren. I even have a life list of birds I dreamt.
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I had a couple very strange dreams last night. As odd as they were, the animals in them all seemed very scientifically correct, and I was able to identify a lot of them to at least family or genus.
In the first dream, my family and I went over to my neighbor’s house which I found out was a giant beach on the inside with sea stars (ochre sea stars) and a huge dead octopus, but I had forgotten my camera (that is getting pretty old). I had to run and grab it, but by the time I got back, the house/beach had turned into a giant movie theater with the dead octopus draped over the chairs. Everyone was telling me to be quiet, so I decided to just sit and watch the movie.
In my second dream there was a giant tank full of all kinds of isopods. One of them (a pillbug) had died, and two others (an isopod in the genus Saduria, and a fish isopod) were saying how they wished more of them would die so they could be pinned like insects. Then I dreamed that I woke up from my dream and checked iNat to see that another one of the isopods (either Pentidotea montereyensis or Pentidotea kirchanskii) had died and someone had posted it.
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Yeah, me too! For like a year leading up to my trip to Hawai’i I kept dreaming that I hadn’t been able to find any of the honeycreepers.
Like two nights ago I had a very strange dream related to nature (something that strangely enough, rarely happens, but when it does, it gets really interesting). I had a dream in which I was ‘‘diving’’ in a very strange coral reef. When I dream I’m underwater it is usually in a way in which water is like air and I can breathe it and stay underwater as much as I want. I think I was like in a crew of divers and then I looked upwards and there was like a cave that takes you to the freshwater caves of the Yucatan peninsula. but it was very vertical, and I was very scared of getting lost in the cave but one diver was in and insisted to me in trying to get in. To get in I had to swim upwards through a high and wide vertical tunnel with rock walls until I reach the cave system. So I did not want to go in but the diver insisted, so I tried to swim upward but I was too tired and strengthless, and my fear of getting lost in the cave increased so I desisted.
And then, I forgot to add, I appeared in a public bathroom covered all in these ‘‘don’t trespass’’ ribbons. I think someone with HIV had been there ore something.
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I had a dream where I was on a trail I know in Pennsylvania in February, but it was extraordinarily lush and green (I couldn’t account for it), and as I walked, I flushed out a beautiful luna moth and then found a bright green tree frog. My guess is that I am desperate for spring–I really hate February.
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I’m pretty sure that the consensus is that they did. All of the species that I know of were capable of at least some powered flight, but even today’s birds (avian dinosaurs) will take advantage of an above-ground-level starting point for a glide assist. There’s also some informed speculation that smaller pterosaur species might have used the big sauropods such as Diplodocus for mobile hunting platforms, just as certain species of today’s birds use elephants and other megafauna.
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Not as many as I had expected, given that a lot of Forum threads give the impression that nature-related = iNaturalist-related for a lot of people here.
I think that of all the nature-related dreams I have had, only within the past few months have any of them been iNaturalist-related in the sense of being about trying to photograph organisms. I can think of two that were about that. Before that, none of my nature-related dreams involved cameras or photography in any way – although I have experienced the disappointment of waking up to realize that a really cool observation doesn’t count for my Grinnell journal.
This may be because my immersion in nature long predates iNaturalist. I wonder if people who discovered nature because of iNaturalist are more likely to equate them in dreams?
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What is a Grinnell journal?
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It’s a technique advocated by the late Steve Herman: a journal in the format that Joseph Grinnell used. It has three sections: the first section is day-by-day narratives of field observations; the second section is species accounts; and, if you are a scientist who collects study specimens, the third section is the catalog of specimens. Each year is its own volume.
Herman described it fully in his book, The Naturalist’s Field Journal.
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I had a really weird dream last night with some very odd looking rainbow trout, which looked more like miniature basking sharks.
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I think I had a dream of me actually having a good quality photo and taking a photo of a birdie but then I woke up and it wasn’t real.
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I had a dream last night where the woods behind my house magically transformed into an amazonian jungle. I remember pulling out my camera after I began to notice the number of organisms around me. I found a tree that just didn’t seem like it belonged there - it looked distinctly North American, it looked almost like a cottonwood but with perfectly symmetrical spade-shaped leaves. I also found a very spindly flower that was blooming directly out of the ground. It had many thin, droopy white sepals. I remember thinking to myself that I was somewhere in
Ecuador.
After walking around I found my way to my house, and my newly landscaped backyard (we had a guy come in and clear our property line, so very open and muddy now where there used to be lots of ferns and shrubs). I found an earthstar (Geastrum) and a large amount of unidentifiable clustered mushrooms with red stems and brownish caps. They were all shooting up from the mud in tight bundles, and the red color was very vivid. I suspect that this is my subconscious eagerly awaiting the spring - more specifically the morels that I believe will be popping up again and in larger numbers due to all the soil disturbance back there (I found some over there last year).
I love dreaming about fantastical and bizarre organisms :> It also makes me think what type of cool fungi really grow in the Amazon. Perhaps my clustered red-stemmed agarics are out there somewhere waiting to be discovered?
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I’ve had dreams that start like that. They usually end up being very surreal.
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I recently had a dream in which I was trying to photograph a badger walking through my neighbor’s yard. It’s only just occurring to me that I’ve never seen a badger in person. They’re not common in my area.
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Who needs dreams to shock? I get really rattled when I’ve squeezed into a difficult location, eg on a cliff face, and start taking photos of a particularly noteworthy species, precariously balanced, and my camera battery runs out…
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And that’s why you should always carry an extra battery. I think that’s a good lesson to learn from this thread.
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Definitely! Now if only I could persuade my subconscious self to pack some the next time I start dreaming about photographing things.
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Don’t worry, it’s better than photographing a rare species, only to find out it’s a dream.
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