Was I not Gil Vas?

I dreamt that I had been out hiking in the woods with some family members and was just coming back to the cabin we were staying in. My wife asked how the hike had gone, and I said it was good and that I'd discovered some new trails. She was very interested to hear this and wanted to see photos. I said I didn't think I'd taken any photos, but I took out my phone to check. All I could find were photos of trails she already knew.

I also found some videos I had made in which I was playing with a big bull elephant, getting it to charge me and running away. It reminded me of a game called Runs-for-Its that I had played as a child, which involved climbing into the neighbor's sheepfold and then trying to run to the other side without being butted by the ram. Watching the video, I reflected that a bull elephant is a lot faster and more dangerous than a sheep and that my game had been a very stupid one.

Everyone was at the cabin now, and they were all preparing to leave. I said, "Wait, are we leaving now without going back into the woods? Because I left my shoes out there." I had to go back into the woods to get my shoes, and a few people went with me.

I had left my shoes down in a river valley. The terrain was a mixture of Hell Hollow in Ohio; Liberty Circle in Derry, New Hampshire; and a ravine where I sometimes hike in Taiwan. As I approached the valley, I found that it had all been dug up and was now a gigantic stone quarry with very steep sides, making it impossible to climb down to the bottom.

I was outraged that someone had done this, and I declaimed rather theatrically, "Was I not Gil Vas? Did I not play here?" I thought of the name as being Russian, spelled Гил Вас. I think I had some idea that Gil Vas was one of a pair of people whose initials were ГВ, but I can't remember the other name.

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In another episode in the dream, I saw a large black animal in a tree. I thought at first that it was a spider monkey but then realized that it was an enormous fruit bat, almost as big as a man. I drew everyone's attention to it.

Later, we found that we were sharing the cabin with some fruit bats, too. These were also very large and had evolved to look very similar to human beings. They walked upright and wore their wings folded around them like cloaks. Some of them could almost pass for human, but what gave them away was the fact that the skin on their foreheads was unusually tight and smooth. Although everyone was clear that these were fruit bats and thus not predatory or dangerous, we still didn't really trust them and thought it best to keep children away from them. Something about them reminded me of the Zimwi in the the children's book Bimwili and the Zimwi, though I'm not sure what. They weren't green or wrinkly or anything. I think it was just that they were not-quite-human and thus seemed vaguely menacing. (That book terrified me as a child.)

By the way, I had completely forgotten the fruit-bat part of the dream until late this afternoon, when I happened to pass a Japanese ramen restaurant. This made me reflect that when I was growing up ramen was synonymous with cheap instant noodles, and the idea of a ramen restaurant would have struck me as ridiculous. With the noodles-in-childhood theme established, my train of thought then went to fact that we used to think it was funny to call noodles noofles. That random consonant substitution made me think of the Monty Python sketch where a man can't pronounce the letter c and always replaces it with b. He says it's because he was once bitten by a bat. "You mean by a cat?" "No, a bat!" And then the bat dream came pouring back into conscious memory.

I assume that Gil Vas was influenced by my recent sync post about "Picaresque narrative," since The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane is generally considered to be the granddaddy of that particular genre. (Gil Blas was not mentioned in the article that occasioned the sync, but I'm sure I had that title filed away in my memory somewhere.)