Author’s Note: These Dream Sequence stories each start with an actual vivid dream I had. After I finish writing the details of each dream, I use Sudowrite artificial intelligence as a collaborator to continue the story in an attempt to connect all of the dream sequences somehow. Each story is a mix of human dreams, artificial intelligence, and conscious storytelling.
I’ve been taking care of aquarium fish since I was seven. Until a fateful day last year, I had two albino cories, a tetra, and a few zebra danios in a small tank at the corner of my bedroom. Now, an empty fish tank sits in its place.
You see, I was sick with some kind of a cold that stuffed up my head and made me cough and make these loud, gross-sounding sniffling noises. Worse yet, that afternoon I had a wedding to attend.
So when I woke up in the morning on wedding day, groggy and light-headed, I fumbled at my glasses on the nightstand and stumbled into the bathroom. I must have been in the middle of some weird dream, because I remember thinking, “the fish are sick,” and it seemed to make sense in my head at the time. So naturally, I opened my bottle of cough syrup, shuffled back into the bedroom, and poured some into the fish tank.
Well, that snapped me awake real quick. Suddenly lucid, I realized that I might have just killed all my fish! Without wasting a moment, I grabbed a cup and began scooping water out and dumping it into the bucket I kept under the fish tank stand. Once I had removed most of the contaminated water, I had to rush to replace it. I left the fish swimming in shallow cough syrup water as I ran to the bathroom, bucket in hand, to get fresh water.
After dumping the bad water, it seemed to take forever to fill the bucket with enough fresh water to replenish the tank. Then I remembered that I had to dechlorinate the water before I gave it to the fish, and I stored the chemicals to do that next to the fish tank. So I ran back to the bedroom empty-handed.
But as I was running, I noticed something out of place in the short hallway between my bedroom and the bathroom. One of the albino cories was thrashing about on the floor, struggling to find water. Confused, I scooped the fish into my hands and ran it back to the room, then deftly deposited the dying fish back into the tank of shallow cough-syrup water. I could see the other fish sluggishly swimming around in the red-tinted water. Grabbing the bottle of chlorine remover, I ran back to the bathroom.
After squeezing chlorine remover into the bucket of fresh water and swishing it around a few times, I picked up the bucket and speed-walked it back to the bedroom to save my fish. But when I peered into the tank, all the fish were gone. I searched the area around the tank to see if they had jumped out, but found nothing. Then I went back to the hallway where I found the albino cory earlier, and also found nothing. The fish had disappeared without a trace.
I never did find my aquarium fish. I like to think that when fish die, they fly out of the water with their little fins, away to fish heaven.
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