I was back in a familiar place the other night, a recurring setting for dreams, and one of the primary locations in my first novel. It was an aquarium, but a strange one that was half amusement park and half zoo. It began with me observing a tour where some workers were displaying a bunch of dead fish packed into icy tanks, and how they spliced their genes to make creative and exotic new breeds. "Behold the humble goldfish!" one worker declared, picking up the dead and frozen goldfish and throwing it into the audience. I yelped and stepped away. "We take the essence, but morph it into forms both new and interesting."
He showed us the fruit of their labours, a whole wall display's worth of freakish fish with stumpy limbs and queer body structures. They were in separate tanks with frost around the edges, as though products in the frozen ailse of a supermarket. Another worker turned up, holding a very large ray or skate that had a long spike sticking out of its nose. I was jostled closer to it by the crowd, but I frantically elbowed myself away, lest the wriggling specimen came into contact with me. "We take the boring ray, and we give it a unicorn horn of robust design!" the employee explained, wrangling the flapping fish.
With some difficulty, I managed to extricate myself out of the corridor where this tour was taking place, and emerged into a wide chamber displaying larger animals. They were wondrous and fantastic to behold, but also rather frightened. Club-headed sharks, octopi with double the amount of tentacles, huge bloated groupers, and viper-like eels.
My family turned up, and I took an indoor train ride with them. This ride went underground and led to the ice pools in another part of the aquarium, part of the polar zone. The train reached the main highlight, which was the killer whale tank. It wound up in a glass tunnel beneath the pool, showed some of the marine show from an underwater perspective, and then shuttled back to its starting position. I got out of the ride and returned to the ice pools on foot, eager to see what other animals they had.
There were penguins behind glass, and smaller fur seals, raising echoing honks at me as I approached. The place had a rundown, dilapidated sort of aspect to it. Deeper into the polar zone, larger species of seals rose their heads out of the icy water to greet me. Hooded seals inflating red flesh sacks, tuskless walruses, and even enormous elephant seals which are never kept in zoos. The honking of the seals reverberated all around the chamber. Past the seals, I saw the ghost white bodies of belugas sailing through the water, and past them, the outdoor pool housing the killer whale.
I found out that the killer whale shared a tank with a polar bear, and although they normally got on well, today there had been a fight. As such, the polar bear was being treated by a zoo vet for its injuries, sprawled out on the ice in a separate enclosure. Half tranquilised, it lay flat on its stomach whilst the woman gently applied balm to its wounds. It's long, snaggle-like snout was covered in scars. Amazingly, after the vet asked how it felt, the polar bear summoned up a deep growl and replied to her that it was doing well. Another of the marine biologists' experiments in genetics? I had the sense that the bear was on the verge of reverting to its natural instincts and attacking her.
I moved on, to an outdoor section with more rides. An open areas with lots of kids found me joining in with a game of laser tag. The fake guns were not supposed to be used at point blank range, but I had not attended the briefing. I opened fire on a boy. hitting him square in the chest. The pellets from the machine gun stung him badly, and he fell to the floor bawling. Lest I get in trouble with surrounded parents, I quickly tried to diffuse the situation, pretending to use a toy first aid kid to simulate me giving him first aid. The attempt did not work, and he only cried louder. I quickly left the area with my own daughter.
Next we saw a rich family jumping the queue for some of the more intense rides, many of which were in an arcade. I encouraged my family to go on some rides, but they were all split up across the aquarium doing different things. I took Lulu outside and we saw a paddock with camels and a wildebeest. These then escaped and began galloping around out of control, so again, we hastily departed the area. The dream fabric was beginning to unravel by that point, and things did not make as much sense, so I woke up. Another interesting aquarium dream, and the first in quite a while.
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