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Some Details From A Possible PL Dream

Shiftkitty

Registered User
I had what I believe to be a PL dream last night, but I'm trying to nail down a location. I recall a baboon-like creature that featured prominently in the dream. Maybe if I spell it out, someone can help. I don't think it was Africa, but trying to find out through meditation is like asking a dog for his mailing address. He knows where he lives, he knows what it looks like, smells, like and sounds like, but he couldn't give you an exact location.

There was a lot of detail in this dream, but I'll spare the lengthy version for now and give the pertinent details. I am very dark-skinned. Not African dark, more like Middle-East dark. My mate and those of his tribe are lighter-skinned, but I wouldn't call them "white". They're only slightly lighter than I am, but it's just enough to see the difference. I am not of those people, but as I showed up right at the start of a period of prosperity, I'm seen as bringing good luck. As long as I do things their way, I'm welcome to stay. I don't recall much about the language, but our tongues weren't that different. Sort of like comparing American English to British English.

Here's where the baboon comes in, and I found the mindset interesting. We live in a hilly area with a couple of caves. We're not hut-builders quite yet, but lean-tos are not unknown. The period of prosperity that I seemed to have ushered in has led to an increase in our population. There is a small valley nearby fed by a river. Good hunting, good gathering, BUT...

The propsperity has also seen an increase in the population of our rivals, a baboon tribe. (I say baboon because that's the creature that they seemed most like.) The valley has abundant resources, but there's not enough to support both tribes. To ensure our growth, we will have to "own" that valley. The baboons feel the same way and we have frequent skirmishes. We are on the verge of war, and both sides are confident that they can take the valley.

The mindset that amuses me so is that I didn't have the sensation of "human vs. animal". It was a sensation of "hill people vs. forest people". We saw them as people, albeit people who sometimes walk on their knuckles and have a strange language that sounds like a lot of screaming and howling.

A couple of days earlier, one of our hunters confronted the baboon "chief" at a distance. He had gone to scout for meat when the baboon appeared. Without going into detail, the baboon gave ground when more hunters appeared, and the tale was told back at hills. At the time of my dream, I was relating the story to some others, really hamming up the baboon's way of walking all puffed up and confident. We called him "Big Walker" and I had my arms up over my head in an ape-like manner and was walking by stepping very high. When I got to the part where our hunters showed up, I squeaked and started running, inadvertently letting some gas go out the back as I did. (Laughter is a sound that hasn't changed through the ages, by the way!) :laugh:

I'm trying to nail down where this place was. The trees that I noticed were mostly deciduous, no evergreens, and I don't recall tropical varieties. Where would there be trees like that with baboon-like creatures?
 
well, depending on how far back you go, it could possibly be Europe in an inter-glacial period. If you go back to around 500,000 years ago, there were hippos and hyenas as far north as Britain! Barbary Macaques (the monkeys that are found on the Rock of Gibraltar) have a fossil record across Europe that ends about 30,000 years ago. Europe and the Middle East then would have been an odd mixture of temperate and tropical (for Britiain at this time, think rhinos and hippos with wolves and bears, living amongst temperate foliage).


Asia is another possibility, there was a giant ape called Gigantopithecus living in Asia which was contemporaneous with H. erectus (and later H. sapiens) for thousands of years before going extinct 300,000 years ago. it seems to have lived in similar habitats to modern giant pandas.


These are just a few thoughts that came initially on reading your post. my background is in palaeontology, so I've tended to go quite far back in time, but from what you described about living in lean-tos and caves made me think this might have been a more ancient PL, and I apologise if this isn't what you intended. :)
 
Thanks for your response! Yeah, it's a pretty old one. Hippos in Britain? Really? Wow! I have got to brush up! Ever since I was a kid I have been interested in paleontology and archaeology, but money and circumstance have kept me from getting much study except for what they print in National Geographic. I had posted another dream/memory that I thought might have been neanderthal, and some while later I saw a Nat Geo with a neanderthal face on it that looked almost exactly like one I had seen in my dream. It was pretty trippy.


Do you know anything about skin tones? I remember being pretty dark toned.
 
Skin tones are difficult to judge, as they don’t fossilise, and as far as I know, there hasn’t been any DNA analysis of fossil hominids looking at skin tones. But its generally agreed that the earliest humans (H. sapiens) out of Africa would have retained their dark-skin colouration, possibly for a few thousand years, until natural selection kicked in to reduce skin pigmentation (too much pigmentation at higher latitudes prevents absorption of vitamin D, leading to deficiancies). From the memory you had, if you were remembering a population of H. sapiens outside Africa, then they may have been living in more temperate climates for possibly a few thousand years. H. sapiens arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago, but I think by then the interglacial fauna had mostly disappeared (but may have still been present in the Middle East/southern Mediterranean, would have to do more research on that). H. sapiens started to leave Africa around 100,000-60,000 years ago, so an earlier date is possible for the Middle East (which may coincide more with a temperate fauna, but am not certain).


Its also interesting to note that modern humans didn't migrate out of Africa once, but did so on numerous occasions, so later waves of migrants would likely have come across populations decended from earlier waves of migration, who may have already developed physical and cultural differences to suit the environment.


It would be interesting to identify what type of ‘baboon’ you saw, if it was one of the many baboon species or a related monkey species. All very intriguing! The Wikipedia page for baboons is very good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baboon although it looks like all living baboon species are sub-Saharan, so maybe a related primate is more likely if you feel like you weren’t in Africa.


Your experience recognising the Neanderthal must have been very exciting :D I’ve had something similar, on a programme about Dogger Land (the dry North Sea basin of the Ice Ages) had a reconstructed view across the landscape, and it hit me like ‘yes, that’s right!’


Sorry if this is all a bit waffly, but I got quite carried away with researching human origins and baboons today :rolleyes:
 
Yeah, that neanderthal one was interesting. The tribe was moving, heading to better hunting grounds, and I was impatient to see what was going on up front of the line. I dashed on up ahead, which it seems wasn't too advisable to do so close to a cliff. One bad step and I was a goner.


The baboon, Big Walker, seemed to be most similar in general appearance to an olive baboon, but he was pretty big. His face was a bit longer, but not as long as the chacma, though the two may have been close in overall size. He was a pretty fierce fellow. His reputation was well-deserved.
 
Wow, what a dream! Bet you weren't thinking of that when you went to bed...That goes waaaaay back. Can't help you much on the geography, not really sure. Hope you can learn more though! :thumbsup:
 
It truly wasn't what I was thinking about, but I sort of couldn't resist it. It was weird. I closed my eyes, hoping to get to sleep quickly because I'd had some stress that had me clenching my teeth for the past couple of days. It was nothing specific, just general stress, and I had finally felt like I had let go of it. (It happens from time to time.) I had been having fitful sleep because of it, and I was happy to feel myself dropping into such a relaxed state so quickly. In my mind I saw a forest. I can usually steer my imagery pretty easily and I wanted to be at the beach, so I started shifting the image around, but everytime I let a piece go, it would revert to the forest. I finally gave up and went with it.


As the dream settled in, I was amazed on waking how much of it stayed with me as though it was right there at the surface along with being glad it was Friday and making a quick list of what we needed at the store. I knew how I came to be with that tribe and what I did for the tribe to earn my "place at the fire" (besides gathering fruits, nuts, and vegetables and watching the young ones, I had a knack with some kind of sewing or weaving). I know I enjoyed looking at the sky, especially at night, wondering what clouds and stars were, my mind basically going a mile a minute. Today we might suggest I had a light touch of ADHD. I felt that the rest of the tribe thought that I had an unusual sense of humor and that I was quite the story teller in spite of my accent. I enjoyed mocking our rivals every chance I got. It carried with it the same air of mocking the leader of an enemy nation.


I knew about Big Walker and his people and the long-standing rivalry we had for each other. I felt the same confidence that the rest of my tribe had regarding the impending conflict because of a distinct advantage that we had that Big Walker would never have; we could make the noises his people used to communicate, but they couldn't make ours!


All of this and more has stayed with me since I had that dream, and it's fascinating for me to meditate on it, feeling that I'm looking at the stone age through modern eyes. Sadly, though I was telling a story, I cannot recall any of the vocabulary. I thought I might have recalled a name of some sort, or a sound that got my attention, but I'm not sure. It was directed at me, but it's not so clear in my memory at the moment. If I'm recalling it even close to correctly, it sounded kind of like "shabba", "chabba", or something like that. It would have been awesome if I could have remembered the language!
 
Shiftkitty, that is amazing...I just got the impression while reading your words that all you need to do is "take your time...it will come" and you will be able to fill in the blanks. It reminds me of "Clan Of the Cave Bear." I don't know if my memories do not go back that far or what, but all my stuff has been from people as people...your neanderthal and potentially older stuff is simply incredible.
 
I never saw the movie, but I read the book. She was a cro-magnon raised by neanderhals, wasn't she? I think that story was inspired by those cave bear skulls they found that were all pointed the same direction. Oddly, though I read the book, nothing in it tripped any memories, and my first memories of this life were before that point. (I had questioned, as I got more details, if the book had influenced any of it, but so far I don't think so.)
 
From what I've heard of baboons, the males can be pretty agressive when protecting their families, wouldn't like to get on the wrong side of one! The males have also been known to hunt and eat antelope fauns. Big Walker must have been a very intimidating guy to have become leader of his troop.


I'm always amazed by anyone who has memories going back so far in prehistory, especially such clear ones as you have here. :thumbsup:
 
I had a thought about the baboons being like people. Humans and animals were nowhere near as separate as they are today - I imagine people had to fight with them for territory and food quite a bit! So perhaps it was less human versus animal, and more that your tribe recognized itself as being more intelligent, yet still equals on some level.
 
That was sort of it. Big Walker's people were just people who were a lot hairier and walked differently. We didn't understand their language, but we could imitate it, whereas they couldn't imitate ours. We were beings who shared a world. It's just that we needed that valley and so did they, but it was only enought to sustain one group. Better us than them!
 
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