For the fun of it, I decided to climb out on the cabling of this vast, floating wind harvester, a machine that was part of a long stream of similar metal air ships, all of different colours, shapes and sizes, but all looking to some degree like massive grain combine harvesters. In the blue sky, the sun was cheerfully shining down onto wide fields of green farmland about half a mile below us. I was with a couple other guys, both of whom seemed less knowledgeable about all this than me, but who nevertheless followed me out onto the cables.
At one point I looked backwards into the stream of air harvesters behind us, and just above them a vast, new one in yellow was bearing down on us. It was longer and slimmer and obviously faster than the older, more upright, bulkier machines. It seemed to be coming right at us, but instead blew by just overhead, noiselessly but causing a tremendous wind.
I looked around to the front, in the direction it had disappeared, just as a small, old machine was blown out of the air and crashed, its wide catcher-conveyer section smashing into that of the machine I was on. I said, "Look at that," as it balanced there. Then it toppled over and fell out of sight towards the ground. I was trying to understand what happened and said to the others, "It's the big, flat forward section that makes these machines very vulnerable to a sudden wind."
As I was waking, I was amazed that I had no fear of heights at all way up there. Maybe that was the point of the dream, the exuberance that comes with a lack of fear, the way I'm feeling about people lately! And I thought the machines were like an air version of sperm whales that open their great mouths and sieve out plankton. I couldn't see any animals in the air that these machines were after, like birds, so maybe there were vast numbers of insects up here in this particular air stream on this planet. And where did the idea of the flying harvester come from? When I was a kid on the farm, I used to watch combines mow down wheat fields, lifting the stalks up into their bellies where the grain would be taken from the chaff that was shaken out the back. On large farms, a number of harvesters, one at an angle behind another, would mow down an entire field fairly quickly.
At one point I looked backwards into the stream of air harvesters behind us, and just above them a vast, new one in yellow was bearing down on us. It was longer and slimmer and obviously faster than the older, more upright, bulkier machines. It seemed to be coming right at us, but instead blew by just overhead, noiselessly but causing a tremendous wind.
I looked around to the front, in the direction it had disappeared, just as a small, old machine was blown out of the air and crashed, its wide catcher-conveyer section smashing into that of the machine I was on. I said, "Look at that," as it balanced there. Then it toppled over and fell out of sight towards the ground. I was trying to understand what happened and said to the others, "It's the big, flat forward section that makes these machines very vulnerable to a sudden wind."
As I was waking, I was amazed that I had no fear of heights at all way up there. Maybe that was the point of the dream, the exuberance that comes with a lack of fear, the way I'm feeling about people lately! And I thought the machines were like an air version of sperm whales that open their great mouths and sieve out plankton. I couldn't see any animals in the air that these machines were after, like birds, so maybe there were vast numbers of insects up here in this particular air stream on this planet. And where did the idea of the flying harvester come from? When I was a kid on the farm, I used to watch combines mow down wheat fields, lifting the stalks up into their bellies where the grain would be taken from the chaff that was shaken out the back. On large farms, a number of harvesters, one at an angle behind another, would mow down an entire field fairly quickly.
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