Mermaid Dream

Early this morning I had a dream about a mermaid who longed to tread land under her feet and experience the world of humans.  So she managed somehow (the details are forgotten, if indeed there were any) to acquire the means to transform her tail to legs (painlessly), went ashore, met a man she loved, and settled down.

It was all on borrowed time, however, as there was a time limit on the magic that turned the mermaid's tail to legs.  The date of her forced return to the sea was known to the man from the start -- she had not hidden anything from him -- and when the day came he threw a grand farewell party for her by the edge of the sea.  Everyone had too much to drink and fell into a stupor;  the mermaid-woman was the only one who remained alert, and at the appointed time she walked into the sea.  And here is the part I remember most vividly, as if I had been watching a movie instead of sleeping:  she waded in until she was waist-deep in the water, then she suddenly fell back, indicating that her legs had turned back into a tail;  she took one last poignant look at the sleeping man, then turned and swam away into her original home.

That "ending" was so cinematic that after I woke I actually wondered if I hadn't been remembering a movie rather than dreaming.  I remember her long wavy black hair, her round face, her serious expression, and the bitttersweet mood of the ending scene.  I actually did an online search to see if indeed there had been a movie with such a plot (despite the fact that I could not recall seeing such a movie) but came up empty.

All in all, the dream seems to have been an amalgam of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of "The Little Mermaid" and another, similarly haunting mermaid story I once read as a child in a collection of Korean short stories.  That book was either lost or left behind when I moved to the US, but even though I could only vaguely recall part of the actual plot I never forgot the impact the story had on me -- at one time, many years later, I went looking for it in bookstores in L.A.'s Koreatown, but I never was able to find it again.

I also could not find an image online that illustrated something similar to that last scene, but then I came across this shot I'd taken earlier this year, of a bicycle that aspired to fly like a bird, and thought it was a visual analog of the mermaid's longing to walk on land.