The Glassless Tank

Albino dolphins. Why are they so pale? They don't have red eyes but rather human eyes, as though the rest of them were once normal too. I'm in a car full of strangers yet somehow I know them. I'm in the passenger's seat and I'm busy trying to convince the driver (male) that going in is not a good idea. We're going down what appears to be a water slide and wet, rubbery bodies are squeaking against the car as we muscle our way through. The car is in no condition to go any further--the engine should have stalled by now but it keeps going against my protest. I'm in the middle of explaining the dangers when we are face to face with a miniature shark. The head is icepick shaped and it's ominously close to our from window. 

  Now we're in an airy room with a large tank. I realize that it's the dolphin show tank and find an audience is already gathered and watching the show above me. I walk around the perimeter of the tank and spot yet another tank on the side. The dolphin inside is forlorn and falling apart like an overused sponge. As I slowly climb up a flight of stone steps, the scene changes above water, revealing a penguin show. The penguins are lined up with their trainer. She's in a royal blue polo shirt with a whistle in her mouth. I look above her; there is a curious polar bear, pacing his cage. He jumps and the hill shifts. The bear comes rolling down the hill to join the penguins at their master. No one moves. I'm taking shallow breathes waiting to see what happens next. The bear noticed that there is an escape--the side panel of his new environment is missing and he is inexplicably free. Unfortunately, the open side is nearest me and the bear soon spots dinner--me. I panic and start climbing frantically up the large stairs that turn into a slope of boulders. I'm slowing down and the panic within heightens; the bear is closer than ever despite in manic attempts to escape it. I stand up looking around for a way out. The audience remains seated and watches the chase as though it were a part of the show. I look down and notice a hallway. It looks like a lab.

  I wake up with the distinct memory of having had jumped. It takes me a moment to process the dream but when I do I realize that what I had just imagined was the prequel to my original dolphin dream. I'm torn between relief, awe and fright as I realize that my mind has played out an entire nightmare from start to end in a non-chronological order. Like a Quintin Tarentino film. Creative yet creepy. It's 5a and I can't go to sleep after this thought crosses my mind.

The mermaid eyes

It was starting again. That dream she always had when she was least expecting it. The darkness slips around her as she walks down a familiarly foreign corridor, the rubber sole of her shoes giving her way in the loud silence. She doesn't bother to see what shoes she's got on although that sound is seriously irksome. But there's no one around in the dark that she would never venture into in reality. This realization crawls up her spin, leaving every hair standing. Why is it so silent? No--not silent. As if on cue like a bad cliché from a B-rated horror film, she starts to hear water. Not splashing but lapping as though it were contained in a large container.


The corridor is gone and but the darkness remains. She finally looks down to see what her shoes look like and her delusional courage finally fails her as she nearly trips over something rubbery and cold and wet. She kneels close enough to see beady eyes staring blankly into the distance.


The mysterious water sound is solved as she looks up knowing what comes next--the tank with all of the others, gently bobbing in the ripples caused by the bloated carcass of decapitated dolphins. Make it go away, make it go away!, she desperately thinks as she simultaneously wonders if something is seriously wrong with her, mentally. 

But she knows that her lucid night terrors were not quite done. As she forced her self to find the door that she knew would only be on the other side of the room, she hop-scotched around more dead dolphins as they became noticeably bigger and more beastly. There were fewer fishy bodies to step around but in return she was no longer certain of if they were really dead or not. She pressed herself against the wall--she was almost there. Pausing to take a deep breathe, she tried to look away without success as shuffled cautiously, trying to avoid the big, black sinister pool, made spookier still by a silver tarp covering most of it. She knew that he would be in there, watching his prey as she held her breath, hoping for a second that she didn't get noticed. The faster she shuffled, the further the door went until at long last---

Gasp! The dizziness hits me like a brick wall as I sit up too fast. Fucked up dream again. I decide go to the bathroom, humming to myself because I'm secretly still afraid of the dark. I can't help it--that dream gets me every time. I've been having vivid and uncharacteristically disturbing dreams, ever since I could remember. Ironically, this one about  dead dolphins recently stopped. I waited for it to happen after watching that equally disturbing documentary, The Cove. I've often wondered if I had a "gift" of being able to see into the metaphysical but I highly doubt that theory. After all, my dream took place in an underground marine-biology science lab that I've never been to before. However, upon closer inspection, I have seen elements of this particular dream in various parts of my life.

When I was younger (and by younger I mean preadolescence), My grandmother took me to an aquarium in Japan. It was, by far, the largest aquarium I've ever been to, not that I had many to compare. The closest thing to this Japanese aquarium was Sealife Park on Oahu and that looked like a fish bowl next in comparison. Anyway, it was huge. And they housed actual whales in there, in dark rooms where giant sheets of glass were the only thing separating you from the cetacean. The exhibit that made the biggest impact on me was the one such room labeled "the world's first mermaid ever caught." I walked in cautiously, afraid of what I might see. As I looked in to the glass ocean, I saw her--a pearly white beluga whale with an unusually human face. She looked towards us--my brother and me--with piercing eyes that scared me enough to walk out.

Perhaps I never really recovered from it. I'm not quite sure why a look from a captive beluga fascinated yet scared the living daylights out of me. Nevertheless in my dream, it's always those eyes that haunt me. The same eyes stare at me through dead dolphins on the floor, in a tank, and from the bottom of a black pool in my dreams when I least expect it. At the very least, I'm glad that it hasn't occurred in a while. I hope it doesn't ever again.