Lee had a nightmare last night. Of course he joked that it was due to an upcoming mission with Jiggs Starke along.  And Kowalski might have been exaggerating as well when he pounded on my door to tell me. Still, when the Captain groans and moans in his sleep loud enough to wake the dead, according to the Chief ( I had earphones on listening to a tape of a seminar I’d missed ) the crew can get on edge. I had to do something.

I dismissed them both telling them I’d take care of it, and headed to Lee’s cabin. Doc was already there, being fussed  at by his indignant  Captain  as he tried to take Lee’s blood pressure, and Chip was patting  his apparently fevered brow dry with his handkerchief.

I sat down on the edge of the bunk as soon as Doc said his BP was a bit elevated, but otherwise  he seemed okay, and I asked Lee to tell me about it. I think he might have yelled at me too but he sighed and told me he was fine, that it was just a bad dream and he’d already forgotten all the details. Yeah, sure, Crane.

 Just then Cookie appeared with a huge mug of hot chocolate heaped with toasted marshmallows. Said it was just the thing to bring on a dreamless sleep.  For a moment I thought Lee just might fling it out of Cookie’s hand, he was so angry.  But seeing that  Chip positively drooling at the sight of it, he took the offered mug and sipped at it. With great relish and noise.  To taunt him, no doubt.   Then he turned to everyone and said if they didn’t mind, he’d like to be alone.

I stood or rather sat my ground as everyone left, and demanded Lee tell me  all the sordid details of his nightmare, though I didn’t exactly use those words.

Lee shivered, I thought more from his dream, than from his sweat soaked pj’s. Still,  I told him to go shower and change and I’d keep his cocoa warm.  It certainly was good (I was sure he wouldn’t mind if I had a few swallows) and I wondered how much would be left by the time he returned from the head, so , with regret, I forced myself to put the mug on his desk, and began to strip the bunk and change the  sheets. When Lee sweats, he sweats hard. I was  surprised Doc hadn’t ordered that done at once.

My task finished, I took another satisfying slurp of the frothy brew wondering why it tasted so much better than normal. This was not your ordinary packaged cocoa in the little envelopes you just added water to that we had in great supply aboard.  Surely  Cookie hadn’t had enough time to make it from scratch, had he? Still, when the Captain has bad dreams, his crew takes it as a personal insult  to their commander and will do just about anything for him.

Finally Lee emerged from the steamy head. He’d even washed his hair. He was going to sit at the desk, but I motioned the bunk and was surprised that when he removed  his robe to get into it, he revealed that he was wearing soft  white flannel pj’s  with little red kisses on them. His glare  dared me to say anything at my own risk. As he crawled back into the bunk he mumbled something about his spare pj’s being Lola’s gift  for ‘those long cold Arctic nights’.

I handed  him what was left of his cocoa,( and hoped he didn’t notice the marshmallows were almost  gone), resumed my seat on the edge of his bunk and waited. Finally, he could stand my silence no more and began to tell me his dream in between guzzling the rest of the hot chocolate down.

Apparently his dream had been triggered by an appearance on TV by  Angela Madison, one of Dr.’s Winslow and Jenkins’ amphibian conversions.  She (and three other kidnap victims) never did regain much of their cognitive abilities after being returned to civilization and I’m sure Lee was just as affected as I seeing the girl who’s life had been turned upside down.

In Lee’s dream, he said, I had chosen to have  the same series of drugs and the operation giving me artificial gills and that  I delighted in  finally being able to go ‘outside’ and play with my fishes and other creatures.  At first, he said, it was amusing. I had acted like an excited child. And then I changed. Every bit as much as Winslow and Jenkins, I became egocentric, opinionated, and spent less and less time aboard Seaview, less time with the crew ,and less time with him. He said he was so jealous that something he sometimes ate for dinner meant more to me than our friendship.  But what caused him to lose it, (groaning, moaning, and yes, even screaming if Ski was to be believed) was when I began  to grow scales, webbed fingers and toes, and my eyes began to bulge.

That of course, was taking things really too far. At no time did Winslow, Jenkins or their prisoners ever grow scales!

By now, he was almost finished with his mug and seemed to be snuggling down a bit into his pillow, so I took the hint, relieved him of what was left of his mug, finished it myself, said goodnight, and told him to have sweet dreams.

‘Don’t count on it, ’ he muttered.

I was  trying to think of some psychobabble to say to help put him into more of a restful mood,  but there was no need as he’d quickly  succumbed into the arms of  Morpheus.

But even so, I was concerned. He did not need another nightmare. Perhaps I should sit with him awhile to assure myself none were in the offing.  I guess I was more tired than I thought as the next thing I knew Doc was at my bedside chair, with an arm on my shoulder, whispering that the cocoa had been for Lee, not me. So it had been tampered with.

And so I was half steered half pulled to my own cabin for the rest of the evening, Doc informing me it wasn’t a strong sedative, just enough to insure Lee sleep without dreaming and I had probably only had enough to make me drowsy.

 I wish I could say I slept like a log, but instead I found myself dreaming of swimming underwater without benefit of aqua lung and for a moment in betwixt this world and the realm of sleep I was afraid I too was having the same dream. But I needn’t have worried. As I swam around playing with my fish, it was with relief that  I didn’t have fins, scales, or bulging eyeballs.