Dramamine Can't Help You In This Place

Another particularly vivid and violent dream I had a few months ago.

 I dreamt I was a tour guide of sorts. I was a marine biologist in another world, another dimension. I studied the open sea, but to help pay my bills I also worked at a local aquarium as a tour guide on the whale watches. But these were no ordinary whales. They were huge, horrific beasts with arms that reached down to the ocean floor to scoop up their prey and feed them into their huge, gaping jaws. They were relatively passive, slow moving creatures- not known for any intentional attacks on anything other than their food. That isn't too say they didn't regularly kill things that weren't a part of their food chain. 

It was the acid. 

As part of their hunting skills, their skin secreted a potent acid that would first stun a creature with the intense pain as their flesh began to melt off of their bones and later aided in digestion after the animal was scooped up and delivered to those horrific jaws. 

As a marine biologist, I specialized in these whales. I had advised against the Aquarium's decision to try and open whales watches to the public. So far no one had even managed to contain one of these creatures in captivity. As a tour guide, I led people out onto the open water on experimental rafts that were supposed to be resilient to the acid cloud that surrounded the whales. It was the first trial run with civilians. Among the guests were former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

It all went wrong.

First a child put her hand in the water and began to scream as the acid irritation chewed at her soft pink skin. We decided to turn around and head back to get her proper medical attention. But the chain of rafts on which we floated were too slow and the whales were following us back to shore. This meant that we would be forced to get off the rafts in the shallows with the acid floating all around us. I disembarked first, before the concentration of acid in the water got too high. 

From the docks, I saw it happen. The rafts began to dissolve. Whether it was because the shallow water meant that the acid concentration was 50 times higher than it was out in the open water or because the whales began to secrete a more potent form, we weren't certain. People panicked. The water frothed up into a poisonous green foam as they scrambled for the shore. Most made it to the beach intact, but the rest disappeared beneath the surface, never to be seen again. My assistant and I did our best to save who we could. In the end, the beach was covered in a thick mucus- the dissolved dead, and the rocks sizzled as waves, thick with acid, crashed against them in violently green sprays. 

Afterward, there was a charity dinner in honor of the dead. I was enraged at the arrogance of the national Aquarium- that they would dare honor the people they had murdered with their relatively untested rafts, and in the meantime, lay all the blame on me for my 'incompetence'. I chose to attend, if only to see who would dare stand up and accuse me of murder. 

They announced my name at the door, and I remember feeling a strange outside discomfort that this girl I was watching had the same name as me. She had dark, short curly hair. She wore a red velvet dress with lace trim that came to her mid-thigh. The left side of her neck, shoulders and face were dotted here and there with red blemishes where the acid had sprayed against her as she escaped from the rafts. And then I was her again. 

I stopped at the Presidents' table first. I expected to be cursed at, reviled for the injuries these men had sustained. Both of them showed me their swollen, blistered hands and laughed. Their wives commented on how beautiful i was, and offered me a seat at their table. 
Dumbstruck, I floundered in my self-righteous anger, and woke up.