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.