Orcas Whale

What a strange dream I awoke from this morning. In my dream I was in Egypt, browsing through a market. I came upon the shop of a fabric merchant and went in with, for some odd reason, the intention of buying a length of cloth for a quilt I was going to make. He took me to the back of his little open air shop and unrolled a large roll of fabric for me. He unrolled it further and further and as he did so, the fabric became more strange and lively with embroidered images of people and landscapes. The first images (which I don’t remember) made me sad but a later image in particular grabbed my attention and excited me. It was an image of island people at the beach, sewn in bright oranges, pinks, reds, and greens. And in the water, past the beach, was a great slippery whale. I begged the fabric merchant to stop unrolling the fabric so that I might look closer at this new scene. The image was inexplicably luminous and I noted that the aquamarine stitching of the water was waving and splashing on the silk, that the Mattissesque sunbathers and fisherman were moving on the yellow sand--that in fact, I was no longer in a fabric merchant’s shop in Egypt at all but on a tropical beach under a blinding white sun. Everything on and around the beach was of overwhelming fascination to me, especially the Orcas whale splashing about before me. The atmosphere of the beach made me glad until it was disturbed by a hillbilly of a bayou man who arrived loudly with an alligator on a leash. The terrible man, who I took to be a hunter of some sort, and his gator, clamored down to the shore and into the sea. The gator which was now at least as big as my friend the Orcas, thrashed out after the whale and they fought each other. Surely the whale has no chance against the gator with his long snout full of razor teeth, I thought, looking on in a panic. The whale proved to be more of a fighter than he looked and after a long struggle, the whale defeated the gator and I woke up.