I am the matriarch of a threatened people. Our land the riparian between a crashing sea and steep tall dunes. Branchless trees stick out of the dunes like toothpicks from a ham. They are big, bigger than palms, crowned with a mass like green hair.
I am teaching an anthropologist how we live. Abalone, seaweed, fish. Sometimes we fell one of the trees, toppling it upslope then sledging it down. Under the bard is a layer of flesh-pale orange, half translucent, cool and nearly tasteless, like the scrapings of a pumpkin once the strings and seeds are gone. We cut the tree-rind like cork. The inner wood is made of bundle of tubes, like bamboo, so it is not a tree but a grass, four stories tall. Poles for our houses and our fishing gear, the scaffolds we build over the surging sea.
Civilisation -- beach houses with many windows, terraced decks -- creeps in on all sides. A structure is built for us -- a home more in keeping with our new neighbourhood. We don't' like it. Take the carpet from the livingroom and fill the floor with round stones.
In the livingroom we hold a coming-of-age ceremony. We must chant -- a murmuring breath with words -- and dance -- a seaweed sway, with the hands above the heads. The dance is our whole history, and also, the dancer must tell her own story. It is a soft dance but it is hard because it takes three days. The pain in the shoulders. We eat the cool, crisp tree-flesh.
Suddenly outside the sliding doors is one of the Older People, a blackback, the new people call them -- a primate, upright, yellow furred with a gibbon's flat harelquin-sad face. These are creatures half-people, half-wild, cousin to us. I decide to give it refuge but it is too wild, it trips the dances, gnaws down the rare trees which we need.
The neighbours --their carelessly lit houses -- hate the blackback. They have it chained on the deck overlooking the see. I am chained, too, a band around the waist. A great wave comes up and I rise with it -- but then the chain catches me short and the water keeps rising.
I wonder if the ape-person came from your reading my outline the previous evening?
About the rest, does it reflect a sense of being set apart, or alienated, and possibly being swamped by the aliens? (I don't mean being among Canadians--I mean being among people whose minds work differently from yours?
No, I dreamt this before reading your Chimp book outline. "Blackback" was the name of one of my goldfish.
The rest -- I don't know. I often have underwater dreams, and sometimes underground dreams too.