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Fire-Breathing Tigers
During my night at Ica, Peru, where I stayed at the wonderful El Carmelo hotel, I had an unusually long and satisfying sleep notwithstanding the fact that I experienced a series of memorable and colorful dreams. While I woke up with a sense of the many things I had experienced in my dream state, I retain at present only one specific memory, and that is of dreaming of fire-breathing tigers. Yes, really, fire-breathing tigers.
The most marvelous thing about the dream was that the fire-breathing tigers in my dreams were not any fairy-tale apparition or figures from fantasy like fire-breathing dragons, but real flesh-and-blood tigers of a robustly naturalistic character.
In fact, in my dream, as soon as I saw the fire-breathing tiger I was immediately fascinated from an evolutionary standpoint, and I asked myself in my dream how many times the adaptation of fire-breathing had emerged in history, as it seems prima facie to be a powerful selective mechanism. Thinking of this, and still in my dream (in so far as it is possible to “think” in a dream state), I remembered that there is a species of insect that stores chemicals inside its body and combines them in an effect that is not too different from a flamethrower (the Bombardier beetle).
In my dream, there was nothing at all outrageous about fire-breathing tigers, and seeing them inspired in me no fear at all, nor even any superstitious reverence, but only a desire to formulate a list of the convergent evolution of remarkable survival mechanisms like sight, flight, venom, and the capacity to breathe fire at will.
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