#17 - MG - When she woke up the dinosaur was still there

While I was fabricating clay dinosaurs during daytime, I conducted another experiment at night. I convinced myself that, if dinosaurs were my primary concern when I was awake, I should certainly achieve to see them in my dreams as well. I was very excited about the prospect of my nocturnal encounters with these long-lost species, but each morning I woke up in disappointment, as I had not retrieved the slightest bit of prehistory from my subconscious. To this day, I never saw a single dinosaur in my dreams, which made me wonder: if my subconscious does not have the faintest interest in this prehistoric species, is it because it does not have a clue what I’m thinking about, when I think dinosaurs during my waking hours? Does it ignore this mind blabber, for the simple reason that dinosaurs are only part of our conscious existence? Etc? Etc? Any possible encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot and is thus immediately subjected to the laws of fiction. Dreams are only fictional in the sense that they are reality in disguise (or in full exposure?).

I did dream other things. One night, I found myself without a head. I realized I didn’t screw it onto my neck in the morning. It was an awful routine to begin the day, it wasn’t painful or anything, just very uncomfortable and inhumane. Mechanic; machine-like. I couldn’t see what it looked like – the screw inside my neck – but when I explained my dream to a friend and demonstrated the motions of connecting body and head, it was clear to him that I had been photographing that day: my actions resembled those of a lens being fixed to a camera body.

✸

#11 - MG

#9 - MG - In the beginning, the T. rex. was a T. rex.

The T. rex holotype at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The first complete T.rex skeleton was excavated by fossil hunter Barnum Brown. It was first mounted at the Museum of Natural History in New York and, since the 1940s, has been on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. T. rex has long been presented standing vertically; recent studies show the dinosaur actually kept its body horizontal.

✸

#5 - MG - A Peso A Piece

Algunas figuras de la collección Waldemar Julsrud.
Museo Waldemar Julsrud, Acámbaro, Guanajuato.

Waldemar Julsrud was a hardware merchant and amateur archaeologist. In 1944, he excavated some pre-hispanic artefacts at the foot of a mountain in Acámbaro. Unable to dig for more, he offered a peso a piece for every object that was found here and brought back to him intact. This resulted in a vast collection of more than 30.000 ceramic objects, some of which - due to the 'economy' of this archaeological enterprise - inevitably turned out to be awkward anachronisms, like a digital watch on a knight's wrist. A substantial part of Julsrud's collection comprises dinosaurs (two-feet; three-feet; four-feet; three-clawed; two-clawed; mostly friendly in appearance), sparking the imagination of Waldemar Julsrud who concluded that here, in Mexico, people and dinosaurs had once coexisted. For Julsrud, the anachronism turned into a plot.

With Monterroso's short story still in mind, which part is most astonishing: that the dinosaur is still there, or that the human is already there?

✸