As usual, only a fragment remains, and i can only guess where the dream started, or where it took me after it scarred me. This was not the end of the dream. I don’t even think it was the most important part. These waters are deep, and i can only see the monsters within when they choose to rise to the surface. Even then, i see only parts of them: a fin here, a reflection of white bodies there. Shining jaws, more often than not. I’ve been to this bay of monsters before, but i never saw the sea creatures. I think I’ve been to the places we went afterwards, too. This is all part of a larger dreamscape.
We are out on some sort of two-decked pier or catwalk, running all around the base of the cliffs that fall straight into the water. We are watching the sea move, rolling fragments of the sun with it. There is mist.
Suddenly i see something moving between the crests - a huge, spiny fin, like the dorsal fin of some pugnacious aquarium fish but a thousand times bigger. It rolls along the water, and for a moment i see a tail fin that matches.
“Look!” I’m shouting and laughing, standing up to see it better. “Look at that!”
“It’s a fish.” He smiles at me.
“Don’t tell me it’s a fish. Look at the size of it!”
It keeps moving, outlined by the last reflection of the sun, which has almost risen out of the mist and the water. Now i can see into the water a little bit. It’s huge - twenty, twenty-five feet long. Longer. It’s like a whale.
“That’s not a fish,” i grumble. That’s a fucking destroyer.”
There is another one out there. As the sun becomes less blinding, i see its long, thin body running in the water like a surfacing submarine. It’s a different kind - small, flat triangular fins, long pale body.
“You see that?” I’m jumping now. They are all smiling at me.
“They’re all over!” There are dozens of them, all different sorts, all impossibly huge. Fishes and sharks and whales, all the same size, rolling through the water.
I’m running along the catwalk on the upper level, around the curve of the cliffs, into the bay itself.
I stop for a moment. There is a thirty-foot great white shark lying with its snout out of the water, resting on the lower level of the catwalk. It looks at me and lifts its head, rolling off the platform and swishing around in the water. I can see a dozen other fish swimming around it in this bay of impossibly deep, clear water.
I run further into the bay on the top level of the catwalk, wanting to see more, and suddenly that enormous shark is lunging out of the water at me, hurling itself out onto the catwalk. It’s up on the second level now, my level. And it twists towards me and opens its mouth. I could fall into that maw with my arms and legs stretched wide, fall straight into it without touching a single tooth, swallowed without a mark on my body. But I’m not ready for that. Instead, i duck and turn, and the teeth scrape over my shoulder, slicing off chunks of me without even slowing down. I run back to my friends, blood going everywhere, and the shark flops along the catwalk for a minute before losing its balance and falling back into the water.
I have wounds that will leave deep scars. None of my friends care. We go back up into the cliffs, our sunrise with monsters over, leaving the deep where the deep should be.