1990

I dream I take an Earth globe off its stand, and try tilting it differently, trying out new poles to maximize fertility. At last I decide on an orientation, and drill holes in central Africa and the central Pacific. Put it back on the stand in its new orientation and spin it. The equator now runs through Tokyo, Alaska, Hawaii, Tierra del Fuego, the Antarctic Peninsula... Ha. Lush!

2003

12-13 years later, I did exactly this--made Tilt!, a set of four Earths with different poles, two maximizing fertility in different ways, one deliberately putting land under both poles to see what massive glaciation would do, and one simply swapping north and south poles--effectively, reversing Earth's spin, shifting winds & currents. One of the four, Jaredia, is almost EXACTLY the globe I dreamed 13 years earlier.

As close as cartographically possible, at least--the poles are in Chad and Polynesia, the equator follows the Pacific Rim (the Chinese coast not Tokyo, though), including Alaska, the New World's spine (though not Hawaii, too big a zigzag) down to Tierra del Fuego, then the Antarctic Peninsula...

And it works. Lush! East Asia, most of Siberia, all the New World, Antarctica, much of Australia--a vast tropical strip of green.

But by then of course ten thousand dreams had gone by. I didn't remember at all!

So how did I find out? Well...

February 2020

17 years after finishing Jaredia, I was transcribing my handwritten journals from the early 1990s and stumbled on this dream describing Jaredia in detail. And nearly had a heart attack. Planetocopia, the one art project of mine that I'd swear wasn't dream-based... is.

Oops. Thirty-year oops.

March 2020

Over the next month I found two more:

• A 1993/8/10 dream proposed an Earth with two Antarcticas--not colder overall, yet a low sea level baring continental shelves and many new islands, looking MORE fertile overall--in a word, Shiveria.
• A 1990/6/10 a dream proposed a whole series of hand-crafted globes (180,000 of them, to be exact! Whew... and I've found a dozen or two exhausting.) In all but name it's Planetocopia.

I'm transcribing one last dream-journal (1987) and reach August 15th--and find an even earlier Planetocopia dream. In it, I found myself exploring a world with continents just like Earth but with its the poles shifted along a great circle. I was fascinated how different the continents seemed. Unlike the 1990 dream anticipating Jaredia, this dream specified no particular tilt, just explored the fundamental constraints--shift the poles freely but leave geography alone--letting climate-zone and sea-level shifts turn the world alien. Yet familiar...

It's clear now my unconscious mulled this idea over for decades.

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