In honor of shark week

He did not awake immediately from his dream, but stayed asleep in both, finding a double sort of restfulness in sleeping in his real life and sleeping in his dream. So deep was his sleep that it took him a few minutes to feel the gentle swaying of the boat beginning to subtly change. He awoke, not with a start, but slowly, pushing up through the veils before arriving in his dream back in the small boat, admiring the silver fish who bathed in the light.

The shark came quickly, barreling through a school of fish and leaving only faint traces of them in the water behind, a small veil of blood made its way out of the light and towards the ocean floor. Within moments the creature, a shark, he thought, had scattered all of the fish that had gathered beneath the moonlight to feed. And when it had finished, he could feel it out there, the shark began bumping up against the boat, slightly at first, as if were a small dog come to rest its head at the foot of its master. And as the night wore on, the bumping became more insistent, and he looked around for a piece of the ship that he’d be able to use to fend it off. He had forgotten by now, that he was dreaming. He really thought that he was probably going to die, and in his haste he tore off a piece of the boat, fashioning a crude weapon and slapping helplessly at the water as the shark passed through the waves in that awful silence before hitting the side of the boat with increasing frequency. He took off his shoe and threw it at the approaching shape. He swung the bit of board. He prayed that the silver fish might return, so that the shark might dine on more of them and forget that he existed. He prayed to every God that he knew in every language that he knew to no avail. The shark kept knocking at the side of the boat.

In some ancient cultures they thought that a person who died in their dream would die in real life as well. And if any documented cases are true it would probably be, as I think we all know, that the person passed away from cardiac arrest, from the fear that their death was actually happening rather than subconsciously happening. Or perhaps death was real, and the ancients were right. 

It was true that the shark was a metaphor for desire, and the fish a metaphor for opportunity. And he understood that the metaphor had become a necessity, like Jonan’s trip into the bowels of the whale. He understood that it was his own desire that would wind up eating through thousands of opportunities without ever stopping to savor one of them. This was how he interpreted the dream in which he was eaten alive by a shark. He was often wrong about these sorts of things.