the foxes lair

I am at a small sea-front park with a beautiful young girl, about 6 or 7 I am pushing her on a swing. Our attention is caught by a commotion on the beach so we all run over.

We find a crowd has gathered around a creature that has beached itself, it looks like a cross between a seal and an eel - it has beautiful big round eyes and the plumpness of a seal, but a length and razor sharp spine more like that of an eel. We are considering how to save it and I think that I step forward and begin to move it; but then it manages to flip and push itself back in to the sea without assistance.

Now I am moving into the sea following the creature. I have no body and no need to breath and move effortlessly through the dark cold substance. I see dogs, lots of dogs - they are forming into a long train, each one holding the next ones tail between it's teeth (the pattern they form doing this reminds me of DNA? of the basic chains and molecules that form life...)

I follow their train into the darkness, as if being guided by a length of string I had left to find my place back to somewhere really important.

Deeper and deeper they take me till I reach a wooden door, it is wide, old, heavy and made of thick wooden beams of the kind that might be salvaged from a ship wreck. The door is closed but I sense it will soon open. I am greeted by a presence, the spirit of a fox. His presence is huge, but not at all malevolent. He is much bigger than the dogs and looking again I realize that they are all beagles, the dogs that used to be employed in the hunting of foxes.

Only in his lair the fox is the king and the dogs are his loyal servants.

I stand awaiting the opening of his lair with a feeling of peace, knowing that I have been seeking this doorway for some time, and finally, I have arrived.

(later in the day when I am swimming, the dream surfaces once again from my subconscious, only this time the fox is a shark and the dogs are sea-lions; this daytime reconfiguration is althogether more fearful).