I dreamt, quite vividly, that I was at the beach with a group of people, I think I was part of a class. We were wading in the water for something, and we noticed bubbles coming up through the sand, moving along a line. The person in charge directed us out of the water, and we watched as a part of the shallow shelf sank. The person in charge explained there were underwater tunnels that were filling in because this was unstable sediment. There were tremors and more of the beach sank. I was worried that the next thing would be a tsunami, but although huge waves came in and rearranged a bunch of gravel in front of us, it did not reach us. The water level actually went down with the beach, twenty or thirty feet. I assume the underwater tunnels were collapsed.

It appeared there was a small peninsula in front of us which had sunk, the change now looking more like 100 yards, because we were looking down at half-submerged spruce and speculating whether this was high tide and the upper ones would survive, or whether all of these trees would die from the salt. Some of the trees were already red-needled and dying because of spruce bark beetles. We decided it wasn’t yet safe to investigate, because there might be further tremors, and went back inside.

I looked out the window, and noticed that all the water was draining away, and quite quickly. ‘Fuck!’ I said, fully aware that this was not the sort of language expected of me in front of the person in charge. ‘There’s a fucking whirlpool!’

We went back outside, which was now more of a lakeside than a seaside location, and watched as the water swirled down, in an honest to goodness whirlpool, and disappeared into a manhole-cover-sized hole, right next to a manhole cover drain for the sewer.

At this point I recieved a phone call from Alex, except it was Emily on the line. They’d discovered they had some class together, or next door, or something at UW, were having lunch together at Alki, and wanted me to come over, except I seemed to be somewhere on the East Side on Lake Washington. So I started heading towards town, marvelling at the empty lake bottom, and there were already people driving across it in heavy machinery. I reached a plac where I would catch a bus, and there was still water there! So I started running back, trying to figure out how/which section of the lake had managed to be isolated enough to drain, and then I ran into a little boy who was selling spaniel puppies, and I thought ‘wow, I want a dog! ..but I don’t want a spaniel,’ and this is the point when my alarm started going off.

I can see so much latent information in this dream, but the whole ‘get ready for work’ thing prevents me from detailing it.