Raptor Mesa

The first part of the dream I remember is running across the dusty orange brown desert in search of a place to take cover before the sun came fully over the horizon. I wanted to stop running and be tucked away long enough for the chill of night to take away my excess heat. I spotted a mesa in the distance and angled over towards it.

The mesa was further away than I thought, but that meant the shadowed side would stay in shadow much longer, so I headed in that direction, waking up a pack of raptors as I ran by their hidden den. They may a sort of odd howling noise and bolted after me. I just kept running, knowing that I was faster than them, and would outlast them. Though they might stalk me for hours if I couldn’t find a route that discouraged them.

That route seemed to offer itself up as a climb to the top of the mesa, or at least near the top. I made my way around to the north side and found a likely crack that rose all the way to the top of the stone mountain. I started climbing, only having to kick one of the raptors back down as he grappled with my foot. When he collided with the ones below him, they all backed away and sang mournfully all the way back to their den. I still kept climbing.

Once near the top, I found a passage through a narrow tunnel into the depressed top of the mesa, I was surprised to discover that it was shaped more like a caldera valley than a mesa. I started down the ridge when I spotted more raptors. I began to head back, when I realized that they were wearing clothing, and had much larger heads than the ones in the desert below. They seemed to come to the same conclusion about me and we compared clothing for a moment before they beckoned be down. I was still wary of their rather large collection of long sharp teeth, but something about them seemed peaceful enough.

The whole dream was sort of Burroughs-like, but without the wildly proficient protagonist. In fact, on that score it seemed more like I was a complete newbie to the world, and had been dropped in place with nothing but a few chocolate bars, a canteen and a pocket knife.

We reached the intelligent Raptor’s village just before the dream ended, it was a series of round, thick-walled domes planted over with tall grasses and under the shade of several very large trees. They had round windows, with a thick bulgy glass deeply set into them. (Which is how I could tell the walls were thick.)