I'm back in Olympia, in a representation of the house where I lived last winter. It isn't really the house, and the images my brain is throwing at me at lightening-fast speed aren't really Olympia. They're just stand-ins.
I'm in the house, renting from the same guy. In my dream he and his girlfriend live there. I'm taking care of a little girl who isn't his daughter. She's someone else's child, but I have to take care of her. We're at the house and I ask her if she's hungry. We talk about going out to eat. But then there are other people in the house. Dangerous people. A man wielding a knife. A teenage girl who's crazy. I think they must be ghosts. But the guy who owns the house is suddenly there and he says they're real people who used to live there. The man is a killer. The teenager is his daughter grown into an adult. She's crazy because of the killer. The killer was in jail but got out. The killer is chasing all of us, and I'm trying to protect the little girl and get her out. We climb through a window and the killer slashes at me with his knife and misses.
Then we're climbing on top of a network of bunk beds sticking out of the water in an aquarium, like the skeleton of some kind of fort. Three giant, dark blue sharks circle in the water. I'm conscious that we're re-enacting scenes from the movie Deep Blue Sea, and I'm the Saffron Burrows character who dies a grisley death at the end. I know this and I'm trying to stop it from happening to me. I'm also trying to figure out how to get the little girl and several other people past the sharks and out of the aquarium. The sharks keep attacking the bunk beds we're standing on. They shake. Some of them collapse and broken bits jut out of the water. There are fewer and fewer places for us to climb to get away from the sharks.
A large window with a ledge wide enough for us to stand on leads out of the aquarium. But there's another strip of water on the other side and we'd have to swim across it to get to solid land and get out. The sharks keep attacking. I'm sitting on top of one of the bunk beds with a man -- the Thomas Jane character? -- and a shark leaps up at us. Its teeth are at our toes, just barely missing us. We jump to another bunk bed, one that seems to be solid. Others are crowded there, but the sharks are circling and we know it's only a matter of time before this last island of safety is destroyed.
Then everyone decides to get married before they die, and the man I'm with wants to marry me. I'm surprised by this, but I agree. Everyone cheers. Apparently, they've known all along that we should have been together. The noise of their cheering attracts the sharks, who start thumping against the structure where we're standing. Someone falls into the water and there's a streak of blood. We're screaming and scrambling, trying to get higher, to stay out of the water.
Somehow we strike an unspoken bargain with the sharks, my new fiance and I, that everyone else can go free if the sharks can have us. We climb up onto the window ledge and the sharks allow everyone else to cross the strip of water at the top and scramble to safety.
We're down to the last two or three people, and I'm making plans how to kill the sharks before they come for us. I have a chemical in my pocket that will make them explode if they swallow it, but I have to get into the water for it to work.
I get in and swim across the strip to the other side, letting the chemical flow into the water as I swim. The sharks are coming as I reach land. They swallow the water with the chemical. I can see them react to it as I climb out of the water. Two of them explode in a rain of water and blood and skin and teeth. But there's still one left.
My fiance -- perhaps he isn't now that it seems we might live -- swims to me and we try to think of another plan for the last shark, the mama shark, the biggest and most powerful shark. As we talk, a train vibrates by overhead. The concrete shimmers and cracks, and we realize the mama shark is trying to make the train crash down on us and there's nowhere we can go to escape except back into the aquarium.
I wake. My body is tensed, stiff as a board, and I still have to go to the gym yet today for my daily laps in the pool.
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