5023

 

photo source: susted.com

On an ordinary day. On the sidewalk of an empty highway. Zora stood thinking of her home in a remote village in Africa. 

Compared to the city she was in, her village and her home were crowded; richly, she thought. 
Her family had cows, sheep, chickens, dogs, and cats. 

The mornings like these were never silent there. The cacophony of meows, coos, clucks, bow-wows and moos; thinking of which, a smile appeared on her face.

Ah, the smell of those mornings! She mused. She tried to picture in her mind, her favourite dog, Abiba, chasing a chicken.

In the car that passed Zora on the highway, was a girl, Chunhua, from China, a medical student, who sat thinking of her forthcoming vacation in Africa. 

She closed her eyes and saw a dog chasing a chicken and a girl running after the dog, calling out loud, ‘Abiba, Abiba!” 

She was surprised, "I never used to have such strange yet specific thoughts before. Something odd is happening to me." 

She inhaled the fragrance of Bush Lilies and heard a cow mooing. 

At that same moment, a truck and a truck driver entered the highway near where Zora's car was moving.

The truck driver kept thinking of the buttermilk pancakes his mother would have made if he had informed her that he was coming.

His mother lived in a tiny hamlet up south. As the truck passed her car, Zora could suddenly smell pancakes. 

Surprised again, she looked around. There were no houses nearby, on the highway. 

She could only see the clock tower of a nearby town at a long distance. 

The truck driver, on the other hand, heard a constant beep.

He stopped the truck; the beep was from the heart monitor in a hospital where Chunhua volunteered.

In Africa, Abiba the dog, dozing off on a fallen tree trunk, watching Zora’s grandmother thresh flour, dreamed of a car and a girl in it driving with a stethoscope on her lap. 

Abiba had no idea of what he was seeing. 

He focused on the snake-like thing resting on the girl’s lap. He growled in sleep.

Thoughts and dreams of people mixed throughout the world on that day. Minds got messed up by them. 

Even animal minds.

No one could any more differentiate between one's thoughts and dreams, from those belonging to others. 

No one even knew that they were sharing their dreams and thoughts with others. 

They only felt themselves ridiculously confused.

The origin of the problem was neither in heaven nor in hell. 

God was not to blame for this mess up and not Satan either. 

Life was finding its long-lost connection with all its varied manifestations. 

It was a dormant gene hiding deep inside the brains of every living thing, waking up.

“Actually,” explained the Nobel laureate and geneticist, Ariel Ayala, to the UN Security Council, “what we are witnessing could be the rediscovery of a connection long lost. Wait, let me try to explain this to you by an example. Why do we have dreams when we sleep and why are they always weird, disconnected, and without a coherent meaning? Because they are the shadows of thoughts of some other living being. So far, only in dreams, have our thoughts overlapped. However, the trigger gene has awakened now. So our thoughts overlap even when we are wide awake. This will get far more complex and chaotic if my assumption about the cause of this odd phenomenon is right.”

“What is it?” The question came from the UN Secretary-General, Ibtisam El Shaer, who was gasping to come to terms with and understand what was so far presented to her. 

Her mind was also getting increasingly jam-packed with other people’s thoughts in the room. 

She felt her head would blast open trying to separate them.

The Nobel laureate said, “Global warming could be triggering it. Certain dormant gene parts exist in all living beings, which wake up only when the entire species is in survival mode.”

“But why? How will this confusing state of mind help our survival?”

"Life on earth, taken as a whole, has a great task ahead. We must train to think as one entity rather than different individuals. That includes animals too. 
If achieved, that will exponentially enhance our thinking powers and the collective mind will find a solution for life to survive global warming. 
We all know that we have just crossed the 2-degree threshold and now we fear getting outside our air-conditioned indoors without a cooling suit. 
The collective mind will also function as a failsafe to ensure that the interests of all life on earth are protected in our future decisions.”

The scientist continued, “It will be extremely confusing and chaotic for the first few years. But I think gradually the more empathetic ones among all the living things will learn to bring order and structure, to our collective thought. 

In this new order of things, intellect alone will not have much command. 
We would have to accustom ourselves to intuitive thinking that feels and touches all the other life forms and their brains. And when we begin to ‘think’ the thoughts of all species, our entire perspective will change.”

The scientist found multitudinous voices competing with each other within and she, even with her exceptionally sharp mind, was grappling with thoughts to put them in order and find her true voice.

More than half of the population just went mad. They were sent to rehabilitation centres. 

They underwent therapies surrounded by plants and animals to calm their minds. The thoughts of plants and animals were soothing to hold inside their minds. 

Humanity realised that non-human species had far simpler and more beautiful thoughts than any human has ever had. 

The human brains, holding all those thoughts together for the first time inside them, healed through the years. 

Gradually, the collective voices inside their minds brought them back to sanity and taught them a new way of thinking.

Years went by. Industries and technologies that were harmful to the environment were put away. 

Nation states withered away. Wars were not fought and were not necessary anymore.

Human species developed new traits, learning from all other life forms. 

Pollution and overexploitation of natural resources became history. 

A new harmony of thought and action evolved. 

Earth began to witness prosperity and real peace…

“Now, in 5023, when we read out this story again and again, sitting beneath our mammoth ancestor trees, as we meditate upon each line of this story while we levitate in the skies flapping our lovely wings, and when we swim with our brother dolphins to the golden corral forests of the ocean bed, we must not forget how human life changed 3000 years back,” 

Grandma ended her story there. There was a full moon that day. The children went to bed. When they started dreaming their collective dreams, a night owl began to sing a sweet lullaby in a human voice.