I saw Angela Madison on TV last night. Poor kid, still can’t speak. I hope Dr. Jenkins rots in hell for what he and Winslow did to their captives. It’s one thing to experiment on themselves with artificial gills and drug therapy, quite another to force it on others.

In any case, the whole thing triggered a whopper of a nightmare and to my utter disgust, it had the entire crew on my case. Chip acted like an old mother hen, saying ‘now, now, it’s all over,’ as he patted my forehead. So I was a bit sweaty. It happens. Doc, summoned no doubt to my bedside, to do those Dr. things to assure him I wasn’t at death’s door, as Ski and the Chief seemed to think.  Then Harry had to rush in and that’s when I began to seriously consider sleeping pills on a regular basis.

The only good thing was Cookie bringing me his 'own special remedy' for a good night’s sleep. The hot chocolate was richer than the ordinary kind he makes, and he’d used a torch to singe the jumbo marshmallows on top. I could see Chip wanted some too, so I got my own back at Mother Hen Morton and slurped it greedily. So there.

I ordered  everyone  to clear out, which they did, but Nelson, who’d decided to play the concerned  father (well okay, he is, sort of) and had sat on my bunk  since he'd come in, didn’t budge.

He all but ordered me to shower and change. Can’t say I blame him. I do sweat heavily and I suppose it had stunk up the cabin a bit.

I only had one spare set of pj’s that weren’t in the laundry and for a moment I almost decided to climb back into bed in the raw. But in the end I decided I would sleep better in the nice soft flannel.

Harry had a hard time not laughing. My pjs were a gift from Lola. White with little red kisses on them. But my mood had already lightened, and with Harry using his ‘patient look’(worse than any scolding can be) I relented and began to tell him about my dream.

It wasn’t so much that the amphibian Nelson grew huge bulbous eyeballs, webbed hands and feet that upset me to the point of screaming, not really, though that’s what I told him. It was that the  near ‘fish man’ he’d become had all but  abandoned the Institute, Seaview, and even me. He means a lot to me, does Harry Nelson. And the thought of him just, well, casting me adrift, if only in a dream, hurt.

Everyone knows Harry and I are good friends to the point of being father and son, and I’m not ashamed to say that indeed, he’s become more a father to me than my own brief time as Edward Crane’s  adopted son, and he was a man in a million. Only Harry’s more like a man in a billon trillion.

Oh, I still cause him grief of course. Part of my job as any good son. And I’d almost told him to keep his grubby paws off my cocoa as I’d headed to the shower. But I left him to it, supposing  that having disturbed him with my nightmare, I wouldn’t mind if he had a few sips if he wanted. As long as he left me most of the  marshmallows. He didn’t. But I was too tired by then to care. Next thing I knew it was almost noon and I felt as if I’d been drugged.

I really must have a little talk with Doc about  his apparently having put  something in my cocoa. What if Harry had drunk the whole thing? Wouldn’t  have put it past him.