Japan Aquarium

I recently returned from a two week holiday in Japan, where some of the aforementioned zoo and aquarium dreams came to pass, most significantly the latest one involving a hippo attack. I may blog about it at a later date. However, it is not just dreams that have a habit of forming my reality, the reverse also occurs. The other night I had a dream influenced by my last day in Japan, where I visited an aquarium in Sunshine City, Ikebukuro, Tokyo. The aquarium was on the roof of a high rise shopping mall, yet in the dream it was part of a leisure centre, or onsen.

In the dream, it was my penultimate day in Japan, and I went to the swimming pool with my family. The indoor pool was enclosed by glass panels, on the other side of which was a restaurant and expansive aquarium tanks holding many species of tropical fish and manatees. It was time to leave however, so I made the decision to return the following day with Li to explore further. True to our plans, we came back the next day and paid our admission. It was a wild, stormy day with a pink sky and frequent squalls of rain, a typhoon on its way.

The aquarium was divided into three zones: tropical, coastal, and polar. The largest zone, the tropical, was the one I had glimpsed the day before, with the fish and manatees. Because I had entered from a strange angle, I was unable to find this particular section again. The coastal zone was situated outside, adjoining the sea, and a number of sea-lions frolicked in pools and performed tricks. There was also a fun fair here with rides, arcade machines, and various cafes. The polar zone was indoors and was essentially a massive tank filled with floating ice floes and polar bears. There did not however, seem to be any solid land for the bears to climb onto.

Over the top of the polar tank was a fancy restaurant where diners could look through the glass tables  and see the bears swimming around beneath. Some of the tables had holes cut into them where cubs could poke their heads through and be fed and petted. I stroked the neck of a polar bear cub and it felt warm, despite the freezing water it had emerged from. I snapped a few photos of the other polar bears performing underwater acrobatics, then spent the rest of the dream trying to access the manatee hall but getting lost in gift shops instead.

Colchester Zoo Hippos

In my dream last night, I went to Colchester Zoo with family, most notably my mother who has never been, but we never made it past the gates. After parking, we discovered a sign saying that the elephants were currently off-show due to winter conditions. This 'off-show' message simply meant that they were now housed in a temporary shack on the outskirts of the car park, along with several other animals. This dream was triggered by my recent research into zoos and the fact that many are now opting out of exhibiting elephants after it has been proven they do not adapt well to captivity and are prone to psychological trauma and stereotypical behaviour.

We went over to see the elephants in their 'temporary' accommodation and they greeted us with curled trunks. I was soon distracted however, by the barn-like exhibit next door housing hippos. Colchester Zoo has never had the common species of hippopotamus, only pygmies, so I was understandably excited. Due to the muddiness of their pool, I couldn't tell how many there were, but I watched them swimming around for a long time. There were also other animals in this mixed enclosure, including waterfowl and small antelopes. As I watched, one of the duikers went charging into the wired electric fence on the perimeter and got its foreleg hopelessly tangled. Unable to move, the antelope fell onto its side, twitching spasmodically as the current coursed through its leg. An African wood stork flew over and clamped its long yellow beak over the leg, hoping to free it. The electricity then got both of them, and I moved away from the pathetic pile-up to see the hippos.

Hoping to get a good photograph of one yawning, I leaned over the fence as a large male reared his head from the muddy pool. He then opened his jaws wide, mud pouring from his cavernous maw. My mother was pressing into me from behind, towards the mouth, as I desperately tried to backpedal out of harm's way. We both toppled over onto the ground as the hippo's mouth came within inches of us, its rancid breath reeking of rotten vegetables. My sisters laughed at us as we lay in the dirt, shouting "Honeyford!" which is our mother's nickname. I've been dreaming about hippos an awful lot lately, so I'm wondering if some big event concerning them is on the horizon.

Hippo Attack

This dream is raw with its immediacy and I set it down whilst fresh. I was visiting a small zoo out in the countryside with a limited number of animals including baby elephants, chimpanzees, gibbons, various hoofstock, and hippos. After watching the baby elephants prancing about their outdoor enclosure, I went inside the indoor paddocks to see the hippos. There were two of them, male and female, grazing on piles of hay in adjacent but separated stalls. The male was hemmed into a green metal pen not much wider or longer than the dimensions of his considerable girth. Heavy jowls wobbled with every chomp of the hay, whilst next door in a more spacious holding area, his mate also fed.

As I watched the slightly smaller cow feeding, a strange woman suddenly appeared in the enclosure. She had climbed a fence and sneaked in through the back which led to an outdoor area. Creeping closer, she reached out an arm as though to stroke the hippo. The hippo, noticing her presence, stopped chewing and let the hay fall from her mouth. There was a brief moment where woman and beast stood frozen, eyeing one another warily, then the spell broke. The hippo swung round with a speed belying her immense bulk and charged at the lady who broke into a run. The woman made it outdoors before the hippo caught up, and what happened next occurred beyond my line of vision. The shadows cast by the sun however, showed the woman's fate. I saw her being tossed around like a rag doll in the jaws of the hippo, in a similar fashion to how I witnessed the shadow of my sister being chinned the day we went to Catholic Confirmation.

The next thing I knew, the lady was chasing me, screaming for help and gushing blood from multiple puncture wounds, mostly notably a deep laceration on her shoulder. I ran as fast as I could to get away so she wouldn't bleed over me, hoping that a keeper would appear and assume first aid responsibility. Eventually a member of staff came to her aid and bandaged her up, telling her she was lucky to be alive but the wounds were superficial and not life threatening. Later on, the woman came over to me, still shaken up, and expressed her amazement at how fast hippos could run.

Jersey Zoo

As well as zoos, another recurring dream features my old neighbourhood of Looseleigh in Plymouth. After visiting there again last summer, the frequency of these dreams increased to an almost nightly basis. I was staying in a hotel with Li, my line manager, and two friends Darren and Irina, on the same road where I used to live overlooking the woods. Because the neighbourhood was in a valley and the woods on a ridge, it always seemed as though they were looming over the houses. It was night time and the trees presented a black, formidable screen against a starlit sky. We were informed that at 12 o'clock noon the sun would rise and all the trees would glow a glorious green, so we sat around the window waiting for this to occur. The minutes ticked away with slow solemnity and I felt my anticipation rising. I made myself a cup of coffee to pass the time and to stop myself from falling asleep, but unfortunately the dream shifted before we got to witness the sunrise.

In the next part of the dream I was at Jersey Zoo, but it was a very different place to the green Eden of reality. When I was a kid I had a video called 'A Day at the Zoo with Phillip Schofield' (back before he had white hair) and this was my introduction to Gerald Durrell's famous conservation-minded zoo. Now renamed the Durrell Wildlife Park in recognition of the naturalist's legacy, it's a place I've always wanted to visit but never had the means to. In my dream, almost the entire zoo was shoved into a warehouse, with plain concrete pens for the animals. Three featureless dens separated by electric wire housed various species and subspecies of bear, including polar, Russian, Asian black, sloth, spectacled, sun, and Tibetan blue. The Russian bear rolled around the exhibit on its back, bored to death of the sterile surroundings. The gaunt polar bear was kept apart from the others and had nothing to entertain itself with. On the edges of the warehouse were filthy, cramped primate cages. A jumbled assortment of small mammals, birds, and reptiles made up the rest of the zoo.

It seems like I had some form of authority in this dream, because after witnessing the squalid conditions, I went straight to the director of the zoo and told him that he had to make some major changes. The director agreed that these changes were necessary and was only too happy to cooperate. Working together with a small body of staff, we drew up a redevelopment plan that would open up the enclosures and expand the zoo beyond the warehouse. I told them they had a year to effect the changes, and that they must prioritise the primates and bears. True to my word, in a year's time I returned to the zoo and was pleased to see improvements in progress. The monkeys had green and spacious outdoor exhibits, the gorillas enjoyed a lavish, tropical playground, and the bears... well, the bears were moved on. Much like the real Jersey Zoo, most of the animals were critically endangered, and attendance figures had proliferated since the revamp.

I took a walk around the zoo surveying the new developments, paying particular attention to the 'Bat Arch' where visitors could stand under hanging Rodrigues flying foxes and Livingstone's fruit bats.
On a sour note, I was unhappy to discover that the old warehouse had been turned into a booming entertainment arcade with obnoxious pop music blasting from speakers. I told the staff that this noise level was unacceptable for sensitive animals and she agreed to speak to the technicians. Li was with me by this point, and we were both entranced by a beautiful giant Pacific octopus that had the ability to float in the air as though underwater, and also turn invisible by mimicking its surroundings. We watched it bobbing around the arcade hall, twisting its tentacles into weird and wonderful patterns. Things took a sinister turn when it decided to attack a wheel-bound elderly woman with a bald head.

Striking out with its tentacles, the octopus grabbed the wheelchair and began dragging the woman towards an elevator shaft. Her carer let out a scream and tried to pull her away, but the animal proved too strong and won the tug of war. With the wheelchair in its clutches, it squeezed through the elevator doors and ascended the shaft. The disabled woman jumped out at the last moment and clung to a metal beam, screaming and kicking. I managed to get her down and then climbed the building's stairwell onto the roof to retrieve her stolen chair. The octopus had melted into the tropical foliage of the rooftop atrium and was beyond locating. I radioed security to keep an eye-out for it, suggesting that they confined it to a tank from now on. Despite this hiccup, I believe that my short stint as deputy director of Jersey Zoo was a resounding success.

Midnight Seal

This was the first dream featuring Hao House so I suppose it's notable enough to write down. Bear in mind that I dream a lot and only a small percentage of them make it to the blog, most often as not they're not fit for public scrutiny! In this dream I was sitting in the living room at night with my older sister watching animal documentaries when my other two sisters, who were in the garden, shouted for me to join them. I went outside into the summer night and heard the gentle rushing of surf not far away. The whole back garden had opened up and was no longer bordered by the neighbours' fences on either side. I saw reflections from the moon dancing on undulating ripples and smelled the sharp tang of sea salt. The sea had come to our garden, separated from the lawn by a stretch of pebbled sand and gorse.

Far out on the water, I saw the sleek forms of dolphins cavorting in the moonlight, streaking through the calm like flashes of quicksilver. I then saw something bulky and ponderous hauling itself along the shore towards me in the dark. It seemed like a big dog crawling on its belly, rolls of fat quivering during its approach. My sisters ran down to greet it and the animal snorted affectionately through slitted nostrils, a large grey seal come to pay a visit. Once it reached the grass, it rolled onto its back and waved its flippers around as my sisters tickled and stroked its belly, clearly familiar with the animal and its antics. I believe the dream was most likely inspired by the two hedgehogs who visit the garden on a nightly basis. Over the weekend Li and I watched their midnight courtship for a full twenty minutes.