I dreamed barnacles were responsible for creating and destroying universes. Each universe was cast out into spacetime like one of the nebula projectors Bo Burnham uses in his performances. I was part of a group that was combing intertidal zones all over the world looking for the barnacle that was casting our universe. We needed to figure out how to make that barnacle live forever or how to transfer our universe to another barnacle before the current barnacle died.

The barnacles had been doing this handoff successfully on their own up to this point for the past 500 million years but, because of climate change, their ability to keep our universe, and therefore all the universes that our universe made possible through other barnacles, was in jeopardy. I know this makes no sense. It was a dream. There’s a lot more to the dream that I don’t remember. I did think, This is the most amazing dream ever, and I can’t wait to tell everyone about it, as I was having the dream. I’m pretty sure the parts of the dream I’ve forgotten wouldn’t make it make more sense.

Yes, I know barnacles are younger than the universe. That’s one big problem with my dream. Maybe some other system was in place before the barnacles took over. Or maybe the barnacles weren’t the whole story but rather a subset of a larger experiential phenomenon organized like a social network with an infinite number of dense, centralized, and fragmented components that are loosely tied to one another and maybe even jostle loose from time to time.

Maybe the barnacles were dreaming worlds much the way humans dream worlds while asleep and awake. Maybe every living thing is casting out universes every moment, ones that either do or do not die when they do.

Image: Acorn Barnacle Anatomy #1, a photograph by Science Photo Library that was uploaded July 12, 2016. Link in comments.