Dream LXXII

I was at the beach, and as I rounded a turn on the path, I came out of a forested area and onto the shore.

There in the sea were several gigantic sperm whales. I recognized the barrel shaped head and blunt nose. They seemed to be rolling lazily, though I noted that the water looked to be choked with weeds. One large fish—I recognized it as a whale shark—appeared to be dead; it was on its back, mouth open in the air, every now and then weakly flapping a fin.

An engineer I knew happened by and I pointed out the whales. Up on top of a nearby tree, another engineer called down to ask if I could lower a thin branch for him. I reached up, but noticed that there were a lot of webs in the trees and, on closer inspection, I also saw that there were a lot of spiders arranged in neat rows. So I called up and declined.

In the middle distance, one whale leapt high into the air and plunged back into the sea with a resounding crash. An enormous wave swept toward the engineer and I, but before we could react, the water washed over us and we found ourselves washed out to sea.

In fact, we were on the back of one of the largest whales, which bucked under our feet. I could see that more waves were coming, so I grabbed the engineer by the waist and tried to carry us both along the length of the whale toward the shore. He laughed said there was no need to run, since the next wave would carry us back to the shore.

The water roared over us and I lost my grip. I ended up tumbled back onto the sand, and the water pushed me further into a buried structure made of wood and metal beams covered in rust.
A woman, Pam, who I recognized from work helped to pull me out. I offered to drive her home, and we soon left in my car. However, when we got to her driveway, she remembered an errand she had to run, so we turned around and went to another, more touristy part of the beach.

She said to wait, she would be right back. After a while, I left the car and walked over to a bulletin board.

It had an exhibit on shark babies, including photos to compare them with human babies. (They were roughly the same size.) One poster was a video loop of a scared swimming baby trying to escape from a school of shark babies. I thought this was somewhat disturbing, but a person connected with the exhibit told me it was all staged and the baby was fine.

I went back to the car, but even though I waited through the night, Pam never showed. I looked in the back seat and saw a camera that wasn’t there before—a camera I knew was hers. I looked at the pictures. They were all nighttime shots of various festivals featuring mascots from a local Hawaiian-style theme park.