I like a writer who enthuses about dolphins. My friends criticize him: "By treating cetaceans like they can do no wrong, he paints a falsely negative picture of us humans." Falsely?

Suddenly I'm on a raft, with human people. We meet the sea people. Others know the language and customs better--they hesitate to introduce me to their best friend, a vigorous, extraverted dolphin. But we like one another. Stroke, hug, pet...

Let the dolphin lead us on as we swim over the Sea to the West. Warm water, pale blue, even very deep down. We stay up till we pass the anchor-cable for the sky, here in Gaea or Rhea (the world is a great wheel, as in John Varley's "Titan"--the floor of the sea's held up by anchor cables). Below us is a Drowned Ziggurat. Dive down to examine the structure. The bricks can be loosened, and there's gold at the seams!

It hides a secret. I wanna find out, but others say they have a gift for me, and lure me away to the far end of the sea, to a winding cobble-street in a hilly old town, where they sit me down and...

Show me films. First, all the film I've shot of and by myself over the years. Soon as I've seen it, it'll be ritually destroyed, to free me from my past, to make room for growth and change.

Then they show the New Film, their gift to my new self. But it's silly, pointless--just male relatives holding up a baby, drinking with grannies... all posed on a wagon or a casket, around 1900. Or even earlier. This isn't future-looking at all, it won't do!

I have to shoot my own new life. And/or fight to preserve my old one. What the hell were my friends thinking?

NEXT MORNING

As I write the dream out, puzzled, my mother calls me. She says "Something fell in the garage and crushed those plasticine figures you sculpted for that claymation film you made in your teens." My early film... gone.

Off with the old, but on with no new, huh?

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