Early yesterday morning, between 05:30 and 06:00, I had a dream. I know this for a fact. Usually, I rise at 05:30 after listening through earbuds on a bedside radio to the 30-minute news bulletin on the BBC World Service. But yesterday, I dozed off again for another thirty minutes and awoke with a bang from a dream where I was frantically trying to stop a trilobite from entering a swimming pool. Let me explain.

The dream was vivid and, unusually, I still recall most of the detail. I was at a family event in the summer at an outside swimming pool. Children, some of whom I recognised as being my offspring and my grandchildren, were playing in the pool, swimming, splashing water at each other, showing off with athletic dives and death-defying bombs, or just sitting on the edge chatting. Adults sat in poolside loungers and deck chairs, drinking exotic cocktails or frothy beers, reading books or talking among themselves but with an occasional wary glance towards their respective offspring by or in the water. All was peaceful – a typical family gathering on a warm afternoon around a welcoming pool.

As for me, I was sitting in an upright poolside chair (I can no longer rise unaided from a deck chair), starting to nod off but, like the other adults, keeping a watchful eye on the frolicking antics of the youngsters. Suddenly, in my peripheral vision, I spotted something black moving along the grass to my right, heading straight for the pool. It was a beetle, specifically a trilobite, about 10cm (4″), hellbent on entering the water. How did I know it was a trilobite? I’ll come to that in a moment. For now, believe me when I say it was a trilobite. My immediate concern was to prevent the beetle from reaching its target and, undoubtedly, cause consternation and panic from those in the water and those watching those in the water. I stood up and looked for something to trap the trilobite – a glass, for example, or a towel to throw over it. There was nothing. I had not been drinking a beer, nor had I any intention of swimming. ‘What should I do?’ I thought frantically. Run over and squash it? No. I have an aversion to killing insects, even spiders which I loathe, and, in any case, I knew even in the dream that trilobites are supposed to be extinct, in which case this was a very special trilobite.

As I pondered my course of action, I was acutely aware that time was running out. The beetle was less than 2m from the water’s edge. I had to do something very quickly. I started moving towards the trilobite, probably intending to catch it in my hands – a thought that filled me with dread, repulsion, horror – all the emotions Winston Smith experienced when taken to room 101 in the Ministry of Love by Party official O’Brien. In his case, it was rats about to enter the cage wrapped around his head. In my case, it was the thought of a large black beetle writhing around in my cupped hands. I woke up. With a bang. As I said.

Later, after a strong coffee, I thought about this dream. Why, 24 hours later, do I still remember it? Most dreams that wake me up dissipate within seconds once I’m awake. I am still trying to figure out the answer to this question. I may need to read up on the findings of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Speilrein, or at least re-watch the excellent 2011 movie, A Dangerous Method.

But, more intriguingly, how did I know that the beetle moving towards the water was a trilobite? I racked my brains on this one. Am I an entomologist with a particular interest in arthropods? No. Have I ever seen a trilobite in real life (no, they are extinct), as a fossil (maybe, but where?), in a book (same question), or in a film (no, but see the footnote)? In which case, how did I recognise it immediately? Like all difficult memory-recall questions, I put it aside and concentrated on other things while my subconscious went to work trawling the depths of my memory cells, looking for the answer. It came to me late yesterday afternoon, twelve hours after the dream: it was at school when I was sixteen years old – sixty-five years ago! For sixty-five years, the image of the trilobite has lived in my deepest memory banks. Here’s what happened.

One of my O-level subjects at school was history. In 1957, the year I took the examination, I wrote an essay on prehistoric eras and the animals therein. I recall studying the Paleozoic era (542 > 250 million years ago) and the following Mesozoic era (250 > 65 million years ago) and becoming transfixed by the dinosaurs that existed mainly in the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods that make up most of the Mesozoic era. The trilobites lived in the earlier Paleozoic era, particularly during the Cambrian period (542 > 486 million years ago). (In case you are impressed with my million-years-ago accuracy, I don’t remember these dates, but Google does!) In my essay, I included pictures of the animals, usually by tracing images I found in books in the school library. I had terrific pictures of the significant dinosaurs – tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus, triceratops, brontosaurus, pterodactyls and diplodocus. (This list is straight from my memory; no Google cheating – honest.) I must also have included a trilobite drawing in the Paleozoic section of my essay, which is why I recognised the beetle in my dream for what it was.

It is incredible what the human brain can remember. If two days ago, you would have asked me to describe a trilobite, I would have said, ‘It’s an extinct beetle.’ After yesterday morning’s dream, I would now say, ‘It’s an extinct oval-shaped beetle, usually black but sometimes brown, with a large flattish head containing big scary eyes and with what looks like two arms or long whiskers stretching back from the head; a body made of articulated segments like an earwig’s body; not much of a tail; and lots of legs underneath that allow it to scurry at a frightening speed!’

All that from a dream that recalled something I knew sixty-five years ago but thought I’d forgotten. Here it is:

Copyright: Black Hills Institute of Geological Research
Image source: https://bhigr.com/trilobites/
Permission to reproduce requested

Footnote. In my search for a movie featuring a trilobite, I came across a 2001 horror film, Deep Freeze, also known as Ice Crawlers, in which the monster is a large man-eating black trilobite. The reviews are not good (IMDb rating is 2.8/10), but if I can find the film, I might watch it. Then again, I could replay my dream and include what happens when I grab it with both hands!

(^_^)