I first encountered tardigrades, or water bears, when taking a biology class at Michigan State University. I found the near-microscopic aquatic animals to be adorable as they wiggled around on their eight legs. Even more fascinating is their pure durability. These are, without a doubt, one of the heartiest living creatures on earth. They can live on earth's highest peaks and deepest oceans. They have even survived going into space and have been shot out of a gun (they didn't survive that one...) In December of 2021, they became the first multicellular organism to be quantum entangled. That's pretty badass for a common aquatic invertebrate.

While it seems unlikely that these simple creatures dream, I do wonder how they experience the diverse environments and creatures to which they have been exposed. From the hard glass of a microscope slide to the freezing cold of the Himalaya Mountains, from the fringes of outer space to the quantum realm, what have they seen? This collection is a lens into what that reality could be.

This collection was created using the DALL-E artificial intelligence system (https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/). I was really impressed with the ability of this system to create photorealistic images and went through many, many text prompts removing the ones that did not fit the collection to come up with these images.