I’d like to tell you about a dream that I had last night. As far as I can recall this is the first time I’ve mentioned my dreams in about 14 years of regular blogging. I dream almost every night: vivid, highly immersive, realistic, often weird, sometimes scary, frequently funny dreams that, each morning, I can usually recall in some detail. That’s always been the case, ever since I was a small child.

If I drink beer or eat blue cheese my dreams become stronger and weirder, presumably because of the chemicals produced by the hops (which belong to the same plant family as cannabis) or the fungi. But regardless of what I ingest, I’m almost guaranteed to dream.

Last night’s dream involved the SCAPE meeting. In the dream, some colleagues had submitted the abstract for a talk at the conference and, when I checked it, I discovered that it was full of spelling and grammatical errors. So I did what I normally do – I started to revise the document. Suddenly, I found myself at the said conference and my colleagues were telling me not to change anything because it had been written by the first author – a gorilla* called Merrill.

I started to argue that, regardless of our semi-literate co-author, we ought to make some corrections, when Merrill looked at me with his big, dark, doleful eyes. So I reached over and scratched his head, which he seemed to enjoy. I can still recall the texture of his short, wiry hair under my fingers, because at that exact moment I woke up thinking…..WTF?!

Dreams such as this often have some basis in things I’ve seen or read about or done, so I spent the morning thinking about what could have prompted it. And I believe that I know what it was. There’s been a lot of discussion recently about scientific paper authorship and responsibility – not least in the context of AI – and I’ve seen stories about research papers with non-humans, such as pets, as co-authors. So was my brain sublimating these ideas into a fantasy about having a gorilla as a co-author? Who knows. It was an amusing way to spend my sleeping hours, though.

*Before anyone comments that “gorillas are apes, they’re not monkeys, the title of your post is incorrect”, I’d like to point out that, phylogenetically speaking, apes (including ourselves) ARE monkeys in the sense that they (we) are nested within that larger grouping of primates.