Dream: Going to the Wine Dark Sea

Dream 20020729, 9 AM:

Going to the Wine Dark Sea

I’m outside a building; it is night. There is a woman inside who is a friend of mine. I can see her through the window. I know that she’s working at a radio station; I can see her talking into a microphone. The windows appear to have some sort of gap in them; I call to her through the space, and she comes outside, around to the back door, and goes out with me. We get into my car, or perhaps a motorcycle – I have a sense of it being open on top. We are driving away, towing behind us a long, pointed boat. The boat looks like a cross between a canoe and a motor speedboat – it is very long-nosed, with a flattened back side. It has decorative markings on it that remind me of Greek pottery painting. I ask if she knows where we’re going, and she guesses something, but I don’t remember what. I say, “No, we’re going to the wine-dark sea!”

We go to a marina. The woman has become a man somehow; I don’t remember a transition. We are getting geared up – the thing that I remember specifically are the odd, pointed shoes. They are red and black, and decorated like the boat. They remind me of the boat in shape, as well. He puts on a pair of black rubber socks first; they look like the booties divers wear. They make the pointed shoes fit, but only barely. I put mine on, but without the rubber socks; they are way too big in the heel, and I pinch the heel up to show how much space there is.

Beside where we are, we see a dolphin / whale flip over a small boat – apparently the boat needed to be flipped, and the dolphin did it as a favor to the boater. It’s like it removed the boat from some kind of restraint. The man with me says, “That whale flipped his boat over for him!” and seems quite surprised. I say that they’ll flip ours out too, all you have to do is ask. I say I could make a hundred dolphins dance around him in mid-ocean if he likes – he seems like that would disturb him. Some of the times in this dream, they seem like dolphins; sometimes they are very distinctly beluga whales.

A dolphin flips out our boat for us. We are in it and paddling, and I realize that I’m starting to pee. I stop, and get out of the boat – at this point, it is still going through part of the marina, a long narrow lane like a boat slip, but sideways, with planking on either side. I sit down on the ground in a space like a flower bed, and finish peeing there. I wonder briefly if there are ants that will bite me; the ground feels spongy like an anthill. There aren’t, fortunately.

There is a brief flash like a memory, of a woman pulling back the covers of a bed, and saying that the sensor had incriminated me. She points to a wet spot on a blue mattress. I think it’s because I was dreaming I had to pee.

Then, I get up and get back into the water. My friend has continued to paddle ahead, and is way out in the open water now. I am floating in the little marina lane, and I realize that I won’t be able to catch up to him swimming. I feel something bump me, and reach around underneath me and feel the head of one of the beluga whales; I feel its face and touch the corner of its mouth. I somehow communicate to it that I need to be out with the boat; it pulls me along through the water. Then, after I am in the boat again, the whale tows the boat and both of us out further into the sea.