Overboard

It's been three nights in a row now where I've woken up in the morning in the middle of (or toward the end of) gnarly dreams. I wonder what makes a dream cycle act up?

This dream started on some sort of fishing ship; it was large and passing through a narrow canal (maybe 10x the width of the ship). There was some guy on board that insisted on hitting on me repeatedly and I was not happy to find that something had gone wrong and I needed to gear up and jump into the water with him.

I'm not sure what was wrong, it may have been something about a killer whale in the water? I don't know what we were supposed to do, but we got our wet suits on and went to the bottom deck of the ship which was right at water level and was open to the outside via a passage through the entire width of the ship. Just as we were getting ready, something happened to the ship and it jerked forward in one huge movement.

I had been putting my hair up and all my hair ties had fallen into the water along with myself and the man. We were now in the water and I was trying to find my hair ties for some reason...as though that were possible. I also realized later that my camera had fallen into the water during this accident and that my brand new camera had been lost! I was upset and intent on diving down all over the canal to find it.

After some time swimming/moving up and down the canal, I found myself with a few other people walking along a trickling, forested stream. My cousin Adele was one of the people but I'm not sure who the others were. We were searching for something but I don't remember what. We were traversing the stream over many obstacles; there were animals of all sorts disguised all along the banks and in the water that would hurt us if/when we disturbed them. There were huge eel-snakes that would whip you with their bodies, some sort of hyena that would bite you, and gigantic slug-looking things that would hurt you in some way if you stepped on them, which was almost impossible to avoid.

We had many dealings with these threats and were being continually accosted as we passed. I remember at one point someone in the party was being attacked by one animal or another and Adele was watching them a few feet away from me. As she watched, she stepped into one of those giant floor slugs and it started to freak out and flail all over the place trying to injure her. She wasn't paying attention so I called to her to move off the animal, but she didn't seem to hear me. I called her name again and again but she never heard me.