I had this nightmare last night.

I dreamed I was a dolphin.

It sucked.

I realize that dreaming you’re a dolphin is like some kind of New Age nirvana, and you’re supposed to embark on a ten minute video with background music by Yanni, swimming through a sea of stars and pastel planets while miraculously unimploded white tiger cubs drift by. And that might, indeed, be fun, if you’re into that sort of thing and there’s nothing good on TV.

I, however, had this complicated dream that I won’t tax you with, mostly involving fragments from those feudal Japanese mysteries I’d been reading, which culminated in pursuit of a criminal into a Conan-esque injection-molded castle, into the obligatory watery pit (mysteriously full of wrecked lab equipment) and then, just as I was about to nab my criminal, some unscrupulous bastard turned me into a dolphin.

It’s like snorkelling without hands. First I nearly asphyxiated because I couldn’t make myself breathe with my…err…snout in the water, even though I had a perfectly good blowhole, (the breathing trouble was particularly vivid, which makes me wonder if I’m developing sleep apnea, or if James just had me in a headlock or something) and then my efforts to grab something or pull myself out of the water or whatever were foiled by my lack of prehensile appendages. In a last ditch effort to be saved, I tried typing out “Help me, I’m a friggin’ dolphin,” on a keyboard in the wrecked computer equipment, only to discover that a dolphin snout covers about half a standard keyboard. (Sonar might have been interesting, but my subconsious didn’t see fit to provide.)

There is no moral to this story, except that while I got nothin’ against dolphins, they seem like smart, inquisitive creatures (if not the completely happy friendly types that “Flipper” would have us believe) I never, ever want to be one.

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