Invasion of the Skating Shrimp (Night of Mon/Tues May 27/28)

I was somewhere before this part of the dream, but that's gotten fuzzy now.

Walking in a large crowd across a large bridge, perhaps the Steel Bridge in Portland, heading towards a very large city across the water. I turned to my left and saw two women, African exchange students, one carrying a baby who was her nephew. I knew them, and they caught up to ask me a question about where we were going.

I talked with them for a minute, facing their way as we walked. As I returned my gaze frontwards, my eyes passed over creatures just below the surface of the water not far below the bridge.
There were many, giant bright red and bright blue shrimp creatures. They were all much larger than people, perhaps the smallest of them were the size of a rhinocerous.

 I paused, thinking about taking a photo, but not having a camera on me, and other people looked at them.

We walked on, continuing to cross the bridge, but then the giant shrimp creatures started pulling themselves up onto the bridge, and walking across the bridge, and the dropping back over the other side into the water.

Out of the water, they were a shimmery metallic brown color, and glistening wet, almost slimy. They didn't seem to acknowledge the existence of the people walking on the bridge, and so we continued, warily, to walk. One somehow caught the arm of a man near me, biting into it. The man kept quiet as we helped free his arm, but his nearly panicking almost brought the attention of the rest of the shrimp monsters on us.

We got into the city and time passed. The shrimp had taken over the city and perhaps even the world. To get food, we had to go on daring missions to raid bodegas for old canned goods. We would go when the streets were deserted of shrimp giants, and once we had our haul, we'd throw old, rotten milk containers and other smelly foods down dark alleys and then run. The scent of our decoys luring in all the nearby shrimp, as we got away, climbing up the beams of modern architecture high rises.

It became winter and the shrimp couldn't survive underwater in the freezing temperatures, and instead skated on the frozen lakes and rivers. At first they skated like hundred-legged cockroaches might, on the tips of their sharp little legs, worming back and forth across the ice quickly and in great masses to stay warm. We caught glimpses from the tops of high rises we squatted.

One day, we received an invitation from The Shrimp inviting us to one day of amnesty, for an ice skating party. The shrimp looked more cartoony at this skating party, which we of course attended. Great masses of shrimp now stood on hind legs and wore ice skates. They towered over even the tallest people, twice their height. We skated around, having a lovely time, but wary of the shrimp. They stuck to the thicker ice, while the people could skate out over thinner ice. We came to a plan. We would create a conga-line of skaters, humans at the front, skating in circles again and again on the thicker ice. The shrimp would join our line, at the end of it, and as we got faster and faster, our circle would get bigger and bigger, and then we would skate out over the thinnest ice when the shrimp were caught up in the fun, and lose them to the depths of the icy water.


Note: This marks over 1 full month of nightly dreams.