I DREAMT I WOKE UP…

…to the world in which I fell asleep, except that during the night technology had disappeared from the face of the earth. It wasn’t some Mad Max post apocalyptic war over the last drop of fuel for the last working gadget or a useless grid for the electric prosthetics in every home. There wasn’t a trace of a gadget more technical than a straw on which to collect ants to lick off for their protein. No man made object existed, everyone was naked. Everyone knew whatever it was they knew the night before, but the worth of each individual among fellows suddenly became the degree to which they had already lived symbiotically with the nature upon whose bounty the lives all humans depended no matter how aloofly exploitive for the profits of raping the ecosystems they might have been.

The first effect was starvation and murder of at least three-quarters of the population furthest from access to farmland where crops were rotting in the fields awaiting manual harvest. That part flashed by in snapshots of months of hoarders finally being overthrown or running out of their stash without having planned to renew it, being so busy defending it and all; people roaming the countryside looking for signs of food, reverting to using a straw to get protein from all kinds of once disgusting, now delicious insect stages of life; packs of dogs banding against owners in competition for food and cats the meal for all.

It wasn’t pretty. But it was the natural result of being unable to adapt to natural conditions without inherited means to artificially make nature adapt to ours.

Indigenous people didn’t even notice until the ice returned, the hunting was better and the rivers were clear and full of fish again.

The one saving grace for the domesticated breed of homo sapiens was the "back to the garden" exploration of the dirty hippies in the sixties and seventies havig fostered the ones who learned and still followed the precepts of symbiotic coexistence with our natural sustenance. The naturally reduced population of survivors relocated around the most naturally fertile farmlands and took up tending crops from the seeds of edible plants indigenous to the local ecosystem. Each acre tended manually by families that ate the food produced ten times the nutrition than what the same amount of land had under the agribusiness chemically enhanced automatic food factory approach. Not to mention the sense of wellbeing being personally responsible for one’s life as opposed to shopping for packages of processed food-like stuff is beyond compare.

They made shovels and man powered plows but refrained from casting the labor upon other beings than themselves to feed themselves. Other species often found ways to communicate with humans that served their mutual benefit, such as the vegetarian animals were encouraged to defecate in areas adjacent to the areas of distribution of their share of the harvest in appreciation for their precomposted manure being so easily collected to fertilize future mutual harvest distributions.

Over generations, feral mankind rejoined the natural curve and the evolution of the mind now unstifled by fearfully incurious certainty that mankind is god’s special child in a playpen made just for us. Unstifled hell. The only thing stifled were guffaws whenever anyone mentioned wondering if the earth was flat or whether someone who created us is pulling our strings.

That was how it was going when my miraculously surviving cat climbed on my chest and did the old nose rub to remind me to arise and greet the sun from our perch in the garden shed, collect the eggs from the Dawgranch chickens, sip my ganjava to ward off the fall chill and wonder if this is any different than the last of my dream.

Then, the perversity in my character came inside and tuned in Amy Goodman, and I remembered the difference.

I am as free as Nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
——John Dryden