"The exotically shaped creatures that began to sprout silently all over the cozy lecture hall were soon spilling onto empty chairs and into women’s laps and shopping bags.“ Uh oh. "When fully grown, these curiously animate forms will find a home as part of a mammoth version of the Great Barrier Reef.“ This waking dream, reported by Patricia Cohen ("Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Hooks,“ The New York Times, 04 Mar 08) has the feel of a science fiction movie. However, the scenario can be rationally explained: these weird shapes "were emerging at a remarkable pace from the rapidly flicking crochet hooks wielded by members of the audience.“
The rational explanation, though, presents its own puzzlement. Why are people crocheting a woolly Great Coral Reef? "This environmental version of the AIDS quilt is meant to draw attention to how rising temperatures and pollution are destroying the reef, the world’s largest natural wonder, said Margaret Wertheim, an organizer of the project. It has grown 'to an exhibition that, so far, spreads over 3,000 square feet.‘“
All dreams have roots and histories. "Ms. Wertheim, a science writer, and her twin sister, Christine, who teaches at the California Institute for the Arts, came up with the idea of creating a woolly homage to the reef about two and a half years ago. The Wertheims, 49, grew up in Queensland in Australia, where the approximately 135,000-square-mile reef – and the billions of tiny organisms that it comprises – is located.“
But, as happens when dreams are explored, their meaning and significance is to be found on more levels than one. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, Ms Cohen informs us, also "marks the intersection of the Wertheims‘ various passions: science, mathematics, art, feminism, handicrafts and social activism.“
This waking dream is a Waking World manifestation of a mathematical dream. "As it turns out, the gorgeously crenellated, warped and undulating corals, anemones, kelps, sponges, nudibranchs, flatworms and slugs that live in the reef have what are known as hyperbolic geometric structures: shapes that mathematicians, until recently, thought did not exist outside of the human imagination.“ The mathematicians‘ dream did not include a waking reality aspect.
However, waking reality had already dreamed these geometric structures up. "These hyperbolic forms can be glimpsed all around, in the ruffled edges of kale leaves, the ruching that "Project Runway“ designers favor, rippling ballerina tutus and drugstore scrunchies that girls use to gather a ponytail.“ The problems was that "mathematicians hadn’t focused attention in their direction.“
A curious and attentive waking dreamer made the mathematical dream tangible. In 1997 "Daina Taimina, a mathematics researcher at Cornell who had learned to crochet as a child in Latvia, realized that by continually adding stitches in a precise repeating pattern she could create three-dimensional models of hyperbolic geometry. For the first time mathematicians could, as Ms. Wertheim said, ‘hold the theorems in their hands.‘ It was from these odd, frilly forms the Wertheims got the idea for the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef.
Ah, the world of dreams: hyperbolic geometry, crocheting, Latvia and the Great Barrier Reef come together in a grand pattern of coherence!
"In the university’s auditorium Ms. Wertheim opened a large bag and began throwing out long snaking tubes, tightly scrunched blooms, fat textured spirals, and hairy coiled cactuses created out of yarn, thread, plastic bags, ties, can flip tops, videotape, ribbon, tinsel and more in a riotous splash of reds, blues, pinks, oranges, greens, tans, purples, and yellows.“ How wonderfully, ironic, incorporating symbols of the waste and disregard that are killing the living Reef in the creation of this woolly reef! Once again, life imitates art, imitates life, imitates art.
The nature of dreams, both the waking and sleeping varieties, is quintessentially hyperbolic. They present us with patterned infinities of thought, feeling, and tangibilty. Out task is to pay careful attention to them and understand what they are teaching us.