This Morning's Dream

Debbie and I and some other friends are scuba-diving in a warm tropical lagoon. We are swimming around a sunken ship. (In my mind, it was the Prinz Eugen, in Kwajelein Lagoon, but it was more like the Japanese freighter my father and I once explored in Truk Lagoon.) Here are interesting fish, typical inhabitants of a coral reef. There is the boat's single small gun on its bow. And over there is a dangerous-looking fish: a long thin creature, like an eel, swimming through the open water in a sinuous ribbon. (Here, perhaps, is where my conviction that the ship is the Prinz Eugen came from. While diving by that ship in Kwaj Lagoon with my father, a five- or six-foot shark swam quite close to us, although seemingly ignoring us.) We should get back to the surface and out of the water now.

The others go up ahead of me. on ahead. I'm taking care to breath carefully, exhaling as I ascend to prevent embolisms, watching the giant eel swim past. I ascend slowly, out of concern for decompression and the bends. At length I reach the surface and swim over to the boat, where the rest of the party is already on board. I cling to the ladder, take off a flipper, and toss it over the side onto the boat. Debbie laughs and says, "That's dirty!" and tosses it back to me, while I'm taking the other flipper off. "Hey!" I answer, "don't throw them back, I don't want to lose them over the side!" I toss both flippers into the boat, and then my facemask, and start climbing up the ladder into the boat.