Member-only story
Dream Creatures
A Vivid Dream 4
This is a piece in a growing series of mine about dreams and lucid dreaming. In these stories, I give first-person accountings of some of the dreams that I have each night. Identities and locations can shift around with little to no warning and the narratives don’t follow typical plot structures. For more of these stories, click here.
I’m walking down the street of my old camp in the aftermath of a storm. Hours before, the entire camp had been flooded out by what lingered from the hurricane that had just hit Florida. Large tree limbs litter the muddy streets. I look into the stream and notice some bizarre creatures floating through the water. The water is elevated, but where it’s usually clouded over with mud in the hours after a storm, it’s a spectral transparent now.
The creatures glisten in the water. They’re as colorful as koi but they have strangely alien features. Their limbs are gnarled in a way that seems purposeful. They must be adaptations suited to whatever curious environment they once called home.
As they glide through the water with irregular movements, their skin glimmers eerily beneath an overcast sky. The sun is hidden beneath a dense wall of churning clouds but the velvety scales along their contorted limbs dance with a colorful indifference. There’s an oddly sentient look in each of their eyes…
