Also, as the walls were like glass, he could also make out things through them that were on the floors around him, and below. He looked down to the next level and he could see and recognise his spiritual helper, just as Dave had imagined him to look like.
It was Dave but as a cross between a famous penguin scientist, the angel Gabriel, and dressed like Gandalf holding a staff with a beard, coming towards him to greet him with a warming knowing smile.
As Dave appeared in the doorway at velocity his guide’s expression changed to that of complete horror realising the situation. “Oh Christ!!!” his higher self shouted and reached forward to grab Dave as he sped past.
But he was not quick enough, and Dave looked up to see his head disappearing above, with arm stretched downward and shouting out again “Oh….” something begging with ‘f’ and ending in ‘…ing’ that Dave didn’t recognise, and then a long “hell, nooooooo” came the fading cry from above, and wide eyes disappeared into the darkness above.
The last thing Dave heard was his spiritual guide’s faint voice calling out in the distance above, “Grab the cables, grab the bloody cables” and then it was gone.
Dave looked around behind him, and sure enough there were a couple of twisted cables or ropes; there one was silver one and one gold, but they were well out of reach, even if he had hands.
He was now passing the Theta levels, or so it said on the signs on the doors to the floors, as they flashed past. Inside the floors there were brilliantly coloured, intensely vibrant, lands of highly elaborate decoration and fauna.
He had seen lots of them in films like the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but whoever had put these together must have been very busy. They all looked so real, vivid and intense. He was very curious to try and see more, explore them, be hypnotised by the never-ending stories, and imaginative constructs, dimensions and alien places.
One level had colourful coral and fish, with mermaids and alien penguins, all of which he had never seen before. There was even a land full of soft white powder that looked very like home and very inviting, with lots of brightly coloured stars and lights in the sky, like diamonds. Very dreamy like the spectrum of colours you got in the sky in the South some nights. But he had never been there.
The levels started to change and became much harsher, extreme, darker, denser, less colourful and yet more intense. He also started to feel very sleepy. He was now starting to pass the Delta levels.
There were warning signs in funny languages written all over them, and symbols. It was all getting quite brutal, hard, less hypnotic, and very much more threatening, and felt dangerous.
He was very tired now, but he couldn’t go to sleep – mainly as he didn’t have his teddy with him. Which was very lucky for teddy.
His mind started to reduce its frequency of working, and everything slowed, as if he was watching a slow motion film, the scenes where people would hang in the air for several seconds, arms and legs raised, groaning at each other.
He was now seeing lots of things he didn’t like - scary, intense, powerful, dramatic things. It was like being inside a whirlwind of thoughts, visions, and sensations, but unprotected, exposed, unshielded. All this would normally be filtered and translated by his unconscious mind in his sleep.
There were lots of things there he hadn’t seen before, and couldn’t describe, and seemed to come from somewhere else, somewhere dark, dangerous and brutally unrestrained. He tried closing his eyes and tapping his heels together as he had seen in a film, but he forgot that being a penguin he didn’t have any heels, and neither did he have his special weekend sparkly red shoes on.
What had at first been very entertaining views, and an interesting journey, were now getting a little unpleasantly uncomfortable, and all far too much to take in to his small conscious mind.
It was very much more feral, and primitive, animalistic but from animals he didn’t recognise, and from long ago.
It was getting darker too, and colder; he was a very long way down now.
It certainly took a long time to fall inside a skyscraper, and he wasn’t liking where he was going.
His dreams would normally translate and protect him from all this, but not now. He was now reaching terminal velocity, and he was going to hit the bottom.
Dave tried flapping his wings but it was useless, he was no butterfly. It just resulted in him tipping upside down. He looked down but it was just blackness below with the sides of the shaft opening out and disappearing into nothingness.
He was now facing the cables or whatever they were, that had been behind him. In the darkness they had changed, and they now looked dark blue and black, the only colours he could see.
He waved his wings sideways a bit more slowly and he managed to get his feet around them, twisting. He began to spin upside down, and the cables span with him, and wrapped around his feet. Faster and faster he span until he became very dizzy.
Then suddenly the walls vanished completely and he was out, out into some vast dark cavern, but still falling. Just like Gandalf when he fell with the Balrog.
He couldn’t see the sides of the cavern but he could feel the vastness of it, the depth.
Down, down, he could see dark water far below him now - black cold, and deep, like you had deep below the big icebergs, far out in the ocean at night. It was swirling around, like giant whirlpools off as far as he could see into the dark. A giant whirlpool below him, vast, with smaller whirlpools within it, churning and flowing. He was going to die, he knew that now.
Yet the water was very beautiful though, in its own way - dark, forbidding, vast, cold, yet beautiful. It was like he was inside an unimaginably vast well; a well of penguin souls and minds, with all their memories and knowledge held therein, and he was the bucket.
He felt the cables tighten around his ankles and the soles of his feet. Where the spiralling had become too much for the cables they started to tense and stretch, then they went taut in an elastic reaction slowing his descent. Slowing, slowing.
It was the mother of all bungee jumps, his mates would be so proud.
The water came up fast. He flinched as his head went into the icy water. It was instant and vast. In that split second he knew everything, everything that every penguin had ever known; all the experience, skills, knowledge, understanding and comprehension was there all in his mind, all at once.
It was as if his mind was in some vast swirly flowing field thing, where all information was instantaneous, and there all at the same moment. There was no time here, no distance, no space, yet everything made so much sense.
This was the collective penguin mind consciousness thing he had been told about, but it was not in a form that he could cope with in his own conscious mind. Amazing, he thought.
While he was there, he thought, he would maybe try and influence things, change what was in the mind with his thoughts. It was something to do after all. So he imagined a sea full of fish in the waters where he lived, they were all big and tasty, slow and easy to catch, millions of them.
Worth a try, he thought. But it was somehow exhausting draining all his energy, painful to do, and his mind ached.
He knew he could get the answers to Everything. He thought for a moment, How do I defeat polar bears? As he thought, images of polar bears; what they were, what they looked like, everything about them came into his mind.
Then the answer came clearly and precisely to him in his mind, without ambiguity, and the answer was ….
.. Don’t be so bloody stupid…
… then it all stopped.
He was being pulled out of the water fast, flying back up, out, out of the cavern, and up, up, up into the shaft again. Someone was pulling him up, he looked up again past his feet, and there was light, light coming from above at the end of the tunnel above.
It looked so attractive, welcoming, warm, away from the cold depths he had been in, something was pulling him out. Probably Gandalf he thought.
&n
bsp; Then it all vanished. It was dark, and he woke up. He opened his eyes, sat up, and he realised now that he was back on the beach again. But everyone had gone, vanished, the sky looked different, and so did the snow and ice.
He still felt upside down.
There was a growl from behind him. He turned in horror to see a massive white four-legged polar bear with massive teeth snarling at him several feet away; it had long claws and a hungry look, and he could smell it’s breath.
Dave’s stomach turned, which was quite a significant manoeuvre. Fear took him and he froze, he closed his eyes as he could not face the thought of seeing his own death, and this was as near death as he had ever come.
Then there was a loud click.
The tape had stopped, and the Play button had popped back up on his tape recorder.
Then he REALLY woke up this time.
Dave slowly opened his eyes, and looked up to a sky that he recognised, and sounds around him of other penguins. His body felt like heavy rocks, everything was brightly coloured and vivid and intense around him, he looked around all the other penguins on the beach and they all looked very strange, sort of glowing.
But they were also all very excited about something, and they all seemed to be preparing to go off somewhere, somewhere out to sea. Dave wondered what the fuss might be all about.
It had all been a bit much for Dave, a crash course into the depths of the mind and into everyone else’s.
Down all the way to the bottom without stopping, and yet having a clear picture of what was going on without being hypnotically drawn in to the other levels on the way.
Mistakes happen in life - that’s how we learn, evolve and change. But then again sometimes things aren’t mistakes, and it was surprising what things you could find on a beach that weren’t necessarily there by coincidence.
Dave didn’t just throw the tape away, that wouldn’t be very ecologically friendly, he just put it in the bottom of his rucksack, and got out his Meatloaf tape again.
He stood up, and waddled back to his patch to look after the egg again, resembling in the twilight, a somewhat pedestrianized and slightly overweight Bat Out of Hell.
If you were kind…. and squinted a lot.
4 Something Fluffy this way Comes
It was six o’clock in the morning and Dave was just in the middle of a dream.
He had programmed his mind to set an alarm off in his head, and it had gone off as it was supposed to, bang on time.
Dave had never worked out how it did that, it was a real mystery. Especially as his higher self or his consciousness thing knew less about clocks than he did.
However, when asking his ‘spiritual guide’ to set his mental wake up alarm for the morning, he had neglected to specify the day of the week, and consequently a whole week had gone missing, somewhere.
Dave hadn’t slept at all well through with all that sunshine, and his dreams had been vivid and dramatic and memorable. Which was always an indication that something was going on somewhere, and not just in his head.
He opened an eye wearily, and looked forward, which was usually the easiest direction.
Standing a few feet in front of him was a large ball of grey fluff, with a beak, feet, and two black expectant eyes looking straight at him.
It was jigging from side to side in a keen sort of ‘motivational’ manner…. Dave just looked at it, blankly.
It was also at that point that Dave was surprised at how cold and draughty his feet felt. It was one of those hypnogogic disoriented moments, where you were trying to make sense of a situation, and get a perceiving grasp on a reality.
A stark harsh unprepared reality feeling, that you had been thrown too many large spanners at once.
He tried the ‘closing the eyes and opening them and blinking again’, thing.
It didn’t work, it was still there, jigging and beaming.
His brain was trying to form coherence in a logical progressive lateral manner, and started off on the was it male or female thing, with the first of the 20 questions. Was it a girl penguin thing or a boy penguin thing? Somehow he couldn’t think of the gender collective name for penguins.
Why couldn’t he think of it, what was the term ?
He had to somehow come up with the right gender name, bring it to mind, or the thing in front of him couldn’t be given a name, and subsequently it wouldn’t exist.
So, for the moment, he decided to call the thing ‘IT’ - just to be safe. IT was still there. Dave squinted, but it still didn’t help.
Everything was still all too much, so he closed his eyes again, just to rest for a moment, just for a five more minutes, just ease himself back gently into the dream he was in before.
His dream had been nice soft and fluffy, welcoming, and he mentally went to wrap himself back up in his quilt, and press the Snooze button on the bedside table in his mind.
He pressed it – but the button wasn’t the same, somehow it had changed, now it had the ‘F’ word on it, in big flashing illuminated letters. Which then set off a different alarm, a sort of panic alarm, and all sorts of things happened at once.
His body and brain kicked in the door of his mind’s bedroom. His eyes opened wide, adrenaline flowing. His heart raced, and he stood bolt upright, breathing hard, and stared at the now grinning face in front of him.
“Hello Dad!” IT said.
Dave was doing the maths in rapid jerky equations.
A few moments later, Dave gave a tentative nervous wave, and smiled, awkwardly.
IT waved back. Dave looked left, and then right for more reality. But there were no more handles with which to grab.
A moment later, Dave’s wife arrived with some fish in her beak, and without looking at Dave she bent forward and posted the fish into the now open mouth of …… IT.
This had clearly been going on for some time. Surprisingly though, she didn’t give Dave any of the ‘you useless father’ looks that he was expecting, she just looked at him and smiled and whispered something to the… to the… chick, which giggled, and then she wandered off again.
Over the next few weeks he would be let off fatherly duties altogether, which in the state he was in was just as well.
He tried, but thankfully it was a good thing they had chick nurseries these days, where all the chicks could be grouped together in the middle of the colony, safe and protected, and away from harm, and useless fathers like him.
Dave couldn’t see why they couldn’t do things the way the turtles did, what was wrong with just dumping the eggs on a beach covering them over and legging it? Then there was no responsibility, no having to look back, and no school fees.
Mind you turtles were very stupid creatures; perhaps there was something in the nurturing process, or something to do with warm sand rather than the only option here which was snow. What was wrong with the concept of sink or swim? All the turtles he knew were good at both.
However, penguins thought that bringing up their young properly was a very responsible thing, and everyone was very clear about what had to be done and how to do it.
Dave just wished he was better at it, and had more energy, and that he didn’t feel so guilty.
He remembered seeing with everyone else a natural history documentary with a Rockhopper penguin in it that had adopted a group of stray Emperor penguin chicks. It had, surprisingly, protected them from an evil Petrel, and had then gathered them together. However it then started herding them, pushing and encouraging the chicks, onward, and over to the edge of the ice into the sea.
There had been gasps. It was obvious to Dave, and all the other penguins watching the documentary, that the chicks couldn’t swim, they hadn’t grown their waterproof feathers yet, and they would drown with their soft fluffy ones.
Young emperor penguins should never be made to go into the purifying water, and should always be allowed to make their own choice of jumping in, if they wanted to, when they were older and ready.
This didn’t happen with Rockhopp
ers, they were pushed in to the water from an early age, but this wasn’t this Rockhoppers flock, and the same rules didn’t apply. Instead of leading them to safety, he was leading them to be drowned, through blind ignorance.
There were screams of fury directed at the screen.
Luckily the chicks had all survived but there was still outrage, and it nearly caused a war. If their colony had been any closer, and not the other side of the sea lions, there probably would have been one.
The Rockhopper was probably just doing what it thought was right, protecting the chicks and getting them into the water, but that was always the risk when you did things that you thought were obvious, when you didn’t understand what you were doing….. The implications could be catastrophic.
Dave The Penguin Page 5