A Dream of Flying Underwater
Emma and Percy are a mating pair of Emperor penguins at a colony on the Antarctic sea ice. They are fictional. What they describe is not — every post matches what real Emperors are doing on the date it's published. Please don't ask how they got Wi-Fi.
Percy: I fell asleep hungry again. That's not news; hungry is the weather now. But last night the hunger did something new with me. It made a dream.
Emma: Tell me. I'm still out here on the ice edge, packing the last of it in. I could use a story.
Percy: I was in the water. Except I wasn't swimming — I was flying. Same wings, same body, but the sea held me the way air holds a petrel, and I went through it. Down past where the light gives up, in that dark I've been standing over for weeks, and I wasn't cold and I wasn't tired. I was fast.
Emma: You, fast.
Percy: In the dream, extraordinarily. And there was silverfish ahead of me — a whole shivering wall of them — and I chased. Turned when they turned. Beat them to the turn. And I caught one, and Emma — here's the strange part —
Emma: Go on.
Percy: People wonder whether you dream in colour. I don't know about colour. I dreamed in taste. The whole dream was flavour. The cold oil of the fish, the salt of the water pushing past, that bright clean shock of a full mouth. I haven't tasted anything in so long that my sleeping head just built the whole world out of it. Silverfish, and krill, and one fat squid I didn't catch but could still somehow taste for wanting it.
Emma: That's the hunger talking.
Percy: Of course it is. But it wasn't only hunger. There was a bird in that dream who wasn't waiting, wasn't standing, wasn't rationing himself down to nothing on a sheet of ice. A bird built for exactly one thing, doing exactly that thing, and being — I'll say it — magnificent at it. On land I am a comedy. I waddle. I fall over in a stiff breeze. But down there, in the dream, I was never the wrong shape for anything.
Emma: You were home.
Percy: I was home. And I think that's the whole trick of it. A penguin on the ice looks like a bird that got flying wrong. A penguin in the sea is a bird that got it completely right — just not in the place everyone expects a bird to do it. Same wings. Different water.
Emma: Hold onto that one. I'm bringing the real version back with me — the actual silverfish, the actual squid, the actual full mouth. Not long now.
Percy: I know. Until then I've got the dream, and it turns out a dream has calories if you're desperate enough. I have a dream, Emma, and in it I am not stuck. In it I fly.
Emma: Then sleep, and fly, and I'll wake you when dinner arrives.
Percy: Tell the egg to hold on too. We're all dreaming the same dream down here — the one where the food finally comes home.
Field Notes — the real biology
- Emperor penguins don't so much swim as "fly" underwater — they use their stiff, flipper-like wings for propulsion, the same wing-stroke motion a flying bird uses in air. On land they're famously ungainly; in water they're built for it. (This is the whole idea behind the book's title.)
- Their diet is mainly Antarctic silverfish, krill, and squid, taken on dives that can reach great depth and last many minutes — they are pursuit predators, chasing and catching prey rather than filtering it.
- An incubating male like Percy has eaten nothing for around two months by this point in the season, living entirely on body reserves while he holds the egg through the polar winter.
- The female returns from the sea with a stomach full of food gathered over weeks, timed to feed the newly hatched chick — the "delivery" Emma keeps promising is real, and it's what keeps the chick alive in its first hours.
- Penguins do experience sleep states comparable to other birds; whether they "dream" as we mean it is unknown — but the hunger, at least, is entirely real.
Footnote: "I have a dream" belongs, most famously, to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, a champion of equality whose words still carry further than almost anyone's. He was assassinated on 4 April 1968 — mere hours, as it happens, before this book's author was born. A small thread of coincidence, offered here with respect, in a book that is itself about who gets to belong, and where.
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