I had a weird dream last night.
It had more to it, but the one part I remember [18 hours later] is walking into a house, a typical SoCal suburban sort of house. The house had off-white walls, thick carpeting, folksy-looking woven shelves, little ceramic sculptures of angels and Victorian ladies, and other 60-year-old-Midwesterner artifacts. And birds. Lots and lots of birds, macaws and parakeets and finches, in lots and lots of different cages. I was being lead to the back.
In the back, among cages with yet more birds, was a cage with a little red rabbit. Yes, cinnamon-colored—very cute and fuzzy. There were about a dozen long eggs in the cage, and the rabbit trying to incubate on the eggs. But, of course, the rabbit couldn’t sit on all of them at once, so it was sort of frantically going around, scrambling onto an egg, barely covering it, and then sliding off and climbing onto another egg.
At this point, the old farmer-looking guy (overalls, straw hat, wrinkles) next to me said “A-yup, she gets ’round to all ‘ems. We watched her, she takes turns tryin’ and a-sittin’ on each one.”
Then I woke up.
(Ever notice how dream write-ups always end with “then I woke up”?)
People wonder why I seem to know a lot of words—it’s because I look up a bunch of stuff.
The following are words (plus respective page) I looked up while reading Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.
- Apocrypha (30): “As for Ravintzer and The Little Apocrypha“
- simulacra (68): “that I had defeated the ’simulacra’”
- serous (69), serum, coagulate, serous membrane: “they exuded a serous liquid”
- ampoule (73): “I remembered I’d left these… these ampoules in a drawer.”
- demonomania (76): “a sort of elementary demonomania” *not in dictionary
- cerebroside (77): “one of the constituents of the cerebrosides”
- discomfiture (77): “enjoying my discomfiture”
- laconic (81): “the entries in the log were laconic and negative”
- colloidal (82), emulsion, miscible: “a thick colloidal substance”
- treacle (83): “it was like a very thick treacle”
- apiary (84): “that I recognized an apiary”
- compress (96): “Do you want a compress for your forehead?”
- auscultation (101): “A little auscultation, eh?”
- corpuscle (102): “red corpuscles”
- albumen (103): “nebulous outlines of threads of albumen”
- perspicacious (107), keen: “less perspicacious”
- cretinous (108): “cohabiting with a cretinous dwarf”
- monograph (115): “already relatively obsolescent monograph”
- obsolescent (115), obsolete: “already relatively obsolescent monograph”
- alimentary (118): “conveyed alimentary materials”
- mimoid (118): “The ‘mimoid’ formations are considerably more complex” *not in dictionary
- vehement (118): “elicit a more vehement response”
- conscientious (119): “The conscientious Giese”
- tegument (119), integument: “ejects a thick tegument”
- capriciousness (122): “the total instability and capriciousness”
- vitrifies (123): “vitrifies and begins to shine”
I think the translators went a little nuts. They’re probably linguists or something.
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