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I had a very strange dream a couple nights ago. Perhaps it was due to looking at too many capybaras the night before — but one can never look at too many capybaras, as they are absolutely adorable. (Speak, though hilarious on The Tick, was not terribly adorable, unlike real capybaras. Real capybaras also cannot speak. Though it’s arguable if Speak could either.)
The dream itself involved meeting a family with a lot of capybaras — I believe it was a sanctuary, and I believe I was meeting them on some sort of professional or quasi-professional basis. Perhaps I was making a documentary on them, or going to interview them, I don’t recall, and it’s rather irrelevant. The interesting thing about the family — or, rather the more interesting thing about them as having a lot of capys in and of itself is pretty dang interesting — is that their son was a capybara in a human body.
He was about seven years old, and it was made clear that he didn’t THINK he was a capybara, as sometimes children enjoy playing pretend for extended periods of time, but rather that he WAS a capybara — his brain was that of a capy, and all that goes with it. The boy COULD talk, but it was rare, and when he did, it was on the level of things a capybara would say if it had speech — basic, simple wants and needs.
The family had mentioned that at first, they thought he had some sort of mental retardation, but after tests, the truth became clear. It was not revealed HOW he turned out to be a capybara, but perhaps the family didn’t really know either. And they loved him greatly, as he was still their son, even though they knew they’d have to take care of him for the rest of their lives, as while capybaras can fend for themselves, being a capybara in a body that looks like a human child and is legally a human child lends itself to a whole host of difficulties.
The other capybaras were accepting of the boy, seeing as they’re rather docile creatures, and they knew that he WAS a fellow capybara, even if he didn’t look nearly at all like them. He’d wander around and play with the others, and everything was good and happy.
Unfortunately, however, the boy was growing into human size as boys are wont to do (though not in the immediate scope of the dream), and it was mating season, and the boy was becoming TOO large; the other capybaras started seeing him more as a threat to their own mating. Afraid he would end up taking all of the potential mates and leaving the other capybara out in the cold, they started to attack him. (As it should become clear, this is NOT based on any factual capybara behavior; in the real world, females choose the mates, and while the dominant males do get the first attempts, they will often fail and the subordinate males will be successful.)
The method the capybara chose to attack was to create from the colony a catapult — wholly made up of capybara bodies, to fling other capybaras at the boy. Luckily for him, the capybaras were a poor shot, and none hit him — though he did scurry away, hurt and confused as to why everyone had turned on him. Luckily, too, for the flung capybaras, most landed on the grass and were able to get up and walk away. Unfortunately, though, as the boy ran closer to the house, the capybaras started hitting the concrete — not gorily, however, but the impact did kill many of them – however, once the boy was inside the house, it became clear that while a good portion of the concrete-hitting capybaras were dead, many were only stunned and staggered off, back to the group.
The dream ended there, with the capybara-boy being sad and confused as to what happened, but unable to really put it into words, as they were rather complex feelings for a rodent, even one of the world’s largest.
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