I dreamt that I had my own apartment. It was small, modest, but charming. With a huge window, offering a direct view of the ocean. The house was on a hill, and the water outside was a transparent turquoise, with the sun, sky, and people enjoying the ocean in striped and unstriped swimsuits. The landscape resembled Italy – cliffs, travertine buildings, and turquoise water. Definitely not Redondo Beach.
My apartment number was 9. And strangely, the numbering went 2, 3, 4, 5, and then suddenly 9. So, here I was, sitting in my apartment number 9, enjoying the view of the emerald water, when suddenly I saw, in the middle of the day – and I must say, a very sunny day – a gigantic wave rolling toward the shore from the ocean. Actually, not just a “giant” wave, but maybe a twenty-fifth wave, in terms of size. It was clear that this wave would wipe out the entire shoreline along with all the striped and unstriped vacationers, but fortunately, we would only get splashed a little.
Still, I started to feel uneasy, as the wave was approaching, and my legs were inexplicably stuck in a chair. I have no idea why I was wearing a chair on my legs at that moment. I tried to free my legs, just in case we would get washed away and I’d need to swim out of the wave. My legs weren’t coming out easily, and I witnessed the massive, incredibly beautiful, transparent emerald mass of water crash against the shore and hit my window.
Fortunately, as I had assumed, the window held up, and the wave receded without causing any serious damage to our building. The chair fell off my legs just in time, and I rushed out to the veranda – a shared space for the residents of the building. A neighbor was already standing by the fence, watching the beach, which had turned into an ocean, where vacationers had just been sunbathing. The beach was gone. In place of the vacationers, the wave was now splashing.
The surviving beachgoers were now splashing around in the wave.
Despite all this, the day was still incredibly sunny, and nothing suggested the impending disaster, except for the fact that, if we looked closely, we noticed cheerful, joyful sharks in the wave with the surviving beachgoers. The sharks were of various sizes, and all of them were swimming upside down, comfortably turning their mouths upward so that beachgoers would fall right into them. The sharks had a very satisfied look, anticipating a feast, and this, of course, horrified my neighbor and me, though the sharks couldn’t reach us.
We started running around trying to find ropes to throw to the splashing beachgoers caught by the hungry, toothy sharks, but then we saw the new approaching disaster. A new wave, though smaller, was steadily approaching our travertine shores, carrying a whole group of enormous, Godzilla-sized octopuses.
It’s well-known that octopuses are very intelligent creatures and can even form companionships with humans as cold-blooded pets. They have a well-developed consciousness and even a sense of humor. But now imagine a Godzilla-sized octopus, multiplied by the intelligence difference due to the size.
My neighbor and I quickly realized that the octopuses were the consciousness-bearers who were about to invade us far worse than any aliens – and we tried to hurry and get off the platform where the new turquoise wave was bringing the highly intelligent octopuses.
We ran into the courtyard of our building, hoping to escape the wave, since the building was protecting us from being swept away by the sharks. When the wave receded, I rushed back into the house to grab some things and try to escape the invading octopuses, but it was already too late: somehow, they had infiltrated my apartment. I tried to close and barricade the door from the outside so they wouldn’t break through into the courtyard, but they were already attacking the door with their slippery tentacles, and I realized I had to run right away.
I fled from the house. As I ran past the lobby of our complex, I noticed emergency kits laid out on a table. Without checking too carefully what was inside, I grabbed several, threw them into a bag, and added a bottle of water and some toothbrush replacements. Now, I needed to get a backpack, find a sleeping bag somewhere, and – most importantly – find some sneakers (I had been running around in flip-flops the whole time, and you can’t outrun Godzilla-sized octopuses in flip-flops).
Fortunately, our building also had a store for tourist supplies, but the panicked citizens had already grabbed almost everything. Only giant-sized men’s sneakers were left.
I had to leave empty-handed. But it was clear that this was the beginning of the global apocalypse, and the world was about to be taken over by evil octopuses.