A dream of temporal largesse

I bore witness to, and influenced, the birth of civilisation.

I had a dream once where I had a vast temporal perception on the order of centuries, as if I were ascended to the fourth dimension. In it, I perceived the many steps humanity took in prehistory, mostly across deserts and into fertile crescents. Oddly, I had little to no geospatial perception, and so was unable to get my bearings on where I was looking at without extreme straining that eventually cost me the dream. Until that point, it was not clear to me if I was even looking at Earth as it really were, or some rocky lookalike with hominids and our flora and fauna. It was also not clear at what scale the landmasses I was seeing were at.

Yet I watched over this landmass, in a simplified yet still satellite fidelity, and I could feel in my bones the very slow stretching of the first muscles of civilisation. In my gut was this long, yawning expression, spanning thousands of years of time, of me moving my arms in a metaphorical way, and biasing the people to move here or there as I wished. Remarkable it was that it would happen so slow, as if it were just fast enough for me to perceive and steer without making mistakes except out of sheer carelessness. Eventually, I steered the people, in their caravans with donkeys piled and children running behind or in the arms of mothers, into a valley, and they settled into place, again in this temporally vast motion that felt like a plant taking root, or of sap hardening into place.

From here, my expressions changed character as civilisation began. No longer was I to merely herd people from one place to another, but rather to influence their climate so to speak, once again biasing the frequency and ferocity of weather, plague, and so on. Additionally, I could “give them ideas” – for example, I very soon wanted them to mine some nearby ore-bearing rocks. Without any explanation, they soon did this, again on these yawning time scales that span generations for them but a few moments to me.

Unfortunately I did not manage to go farther than this, as my curiosity of the spatial context got the best of me, and furthermore I suspect I was also running out of time to be asleep anyway. The dream ended.