Cloned Mammoth Runs Amok

Yesterday, I mentioned that we watched some of the Discovery Channel's Raising the Mammoth special. There was still some of the episode to go by the time we had to leave, but it was fascinating just the same. It's hard to even imagine how exciting such a find would be; just like the mummified hadrosaur found in North Dakota. News like this makes me wish I had been able to pursue my anthropology passion more (if you didn't know, archaeology is a branch of anthropology). So, from a scholarly standpoint, the show about the mammoth was captivating for me.

However, for reasons unknown, I spent the night enveloped in a chain of mammoth-related nightmares. In my dream, scientists had used the extremely well-preserved DNA of the frozen mammoth to clone it. They now had a living, breathing, extinct, ice-age animal to study. But the animal got out. Maybe it was the intense Maryland heat and his thick fur that made him do it, but he started rampaging. The more-massive-than-life creature went through buildings and brick walls, and stomped on cars and people. The dream-animal, of course, managed to stomp its way through the night to my dream-neighborhood in its frenzy.

I spent most of my dreams trying to keep tabs on the thing (it was big, but it was dark) and trying to keep people from running into its deadly path, having to check myself and get out of the way more than a few times. This caused me to wake up in a cold panic quite a lot when the dream got too intense, but then I'd go back to sleep and pick right up where it left off. The last segment of last night's extensive nightmare had me in my house watching the enraged animal approach.

I suppose it sounds a little funny when I retell it like this, but while it was happening, it was terrifying. I don't know what my brain could have possibly been thinking. It's not like archaeology, in general, is a foreign subject to me. I wonder what about that amazing discovery prompted my mind to make me spend the night running from it.

Well, hope with me, gentle blog readers, that those frightful dreams don't come back again in any form for a long while!