42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

I am looking into a small preserve of animals, a strange combination. A rednecky sort of guy, saves animals and puts them in a small swampy-like area. At the same time, it also feels like it has a door, that perhaps it’s enclosed in a room.
The guy points out the huge toad half-secluded under a log. I wonder at the toad; it must be 10 pounds. I’m fascinated by this huge thing, and keep staring at it, and hope it will come out. But it resists my pleas to come out.

I try to spy out some of the other animals; the man says that he’s got a cat here too. But I can’t imagine how a cat would put up with other animals under such conditions. I feel sorry for the poor creatures.
The guy leaves, and I’m left alone with the animals. Then I step into a puddle of water, and then fall as it becomes deeper, like a shallow pond. The water is murky, and I don’t like it.
I’m struggling to swim or walk out, and then I touch something soft, smooth. It feels like the cap of a wet mushroom. I stroke it. I feel it again, it feels like what I’ve always imagined a dolphin would feel like. Surely it’s not a dolphin.
I get a glimpse of it, and the skin is gray. Perhaps it is. How terrible to stick a dolphin in this murky water.
Then I get another look as the creature is butting up against me, almost affectionately. Rows of teeth.
I try not to act alarmed as I realize it’s a shark. I just calmly work my way out of the pool, and hope to leave the shark behind. But it has taken a liking to me, and in that, it reminds me of No-Face in Spirited Away. Nobody likes it, and it is gratified when someone pays attention to it.
So I leave the room, and shut the door, but I can hear the shark scrabbling up out of the water, and beating its head against the door.
Now I run away, and somehow I’m in my own apartment, and I shut the door of my bedroom. I think I’m safe, but then eventually I hear heavy breathing. It is the shark, out of its element, but somehow able to breathe our air, breathing patiently at my door, waiting for me to come out.
I don’t wish harm to many creatures, but now I’m scared for my life. If a shark can follow me out of the water, no one is safe. I don’t know what its intentions are. Perhaps it was happy to get the accidental attnetion I gave it. Perhaps it now wants to eat me.
I hope that with prolonged exposure to the air and no water, that it will shrivel up like a slug with salt. This is the only way I will be safe, I think.

Another part of my dream I’ve lost to being awake, just a fragment with a shower, but the third part I still remember.

I’m at a convenience store, and I’m carrying a little boy, about 3 or 4, on my shoulders. He seems like an annoyance but I’m trying to be nice to him anyway. He reminds me a little of my stepbrother when he was much younger. The clerk, a middle-aged woman with that straw-colored fried fake color hair looks at us wearily and warily. She doesn’t seem to want customers, and she has to watch us all the time.
We’re shopping around for food, and the boy picks out some things. I get tired of carrying him on my shoulders and put him down. But he won’t hold my hand, and wriggles away from me. I get tired of watching him every second and move off to the other side of the store. Now I’m pushing around a shopping cart (is this the first materialization of shopping carts in my dreams? I don’t remember) and loading up stuff. I must be hungry.
I’m trying to find something vegetarian to eat, but everything has meat. There’s one thing that I think might be meatless, but when I examine the ingredients, it has sausage gravy inside.
Then I find a cheese pizza, freshly cooked, and I take a bite just to make sure I like it, and then put it guiltily in the basket as I realize I shouldn’t have done that. I look up at the clerk, but she doesn’t seem to care.
Now I remember the boy, and call out his name. Sound off, Merlin, I tell him.
I’m here, he answers in a shrill voice. It seems that I’ve transferred the name of this boy from my youngest cat, who will be three this year. Perhaps I dreamed about him this way because I often think of him as a child, one of my children. And he’s the naughtiest one, the most childlike. The one that you’d need to watch all the time if he were a human child, the one that you’d be annoyed by because he talks too much. And Merlin meows too much sometimes when he thinks he’s not getting petted enough.
Then I go to check out, and there’s another clerk, this time with dull brown hair, loading stuff onto a conveyor belt that goes up into another story of the store or perhaps a dock. I didn’t know stores shipped supplies back out.
She looks annoyed at having to leave what she’s doing to help me checkout.
And I look down and see a cart full of food. I didn’t mean to buy this much. And I know I’m going to have to explain the half-eaten pizza. But maybe she won’t care.