"that floating, receptive state of the recently asleep"

[from To Touch A Wild Dolphin © 2001 by Rachel Smolker, p1-2:]
A loud, percussive pfhooo awakens me from the shallow half-sleep one has on board.  I lay still for a moment, wide-eyed, listening.  No doubt a dolphin breathing and, again, surprisingly close.  After pulling back the salt-damp covers, I clamber out onto the deck of  Nortrek, our forty foot catamaran.  A persistent cool breeze blows out of the southeast, and the stars are blinking fiercely, a broad and brilliant arch overhead.  The moon is trailed by a strip of shimmering water, but otherwise the water is dark and calm.  The flow of an incoming tide tugs gently on Nortrek's moorings and slips back along her twin hulls.  There in the moonlight I see the silvery shape of a dolphin's back rolling at the surface as it breathes and submerges in one fluid motion.  Then a burst of glittering phosphorescence shoots forward like a comet and dissipates in a sparkling splash as the dolphin lunges after a fish, then breaks through the surface to breathe again.
---I can just barely make out the dorsal fin, squat with nicks along the top edge; it is Nicky.  She moves past the line of moonshine, and her silver-smooth skin glows as she rolls back under the surface and is transformed into another comet of phosphorescence.  I know by her breathing and the way she is moving that she is hunting.
---My mind still in that floating, receptive state of the recently asleep, I settle down on the deck to admire the spectacle:  the phosphorescent comets below and the Milky Way above.  The magnificence of the scenery pulls me far above and beyond myself.  Shark Bay is a tremendous, wide-open expanse, jutting out into the Indian Ocean.  Distant from any city lights, it is a place where the night skies offer up a slowly rotating banquet of constellations, pulsating multicolor planets, bright clouds of star clusters, and dark, eerie nebulae.  The occasional passing satellite and shooting star are the only objects that disrupt an otherwise constant and by now familiar geometry.  Right now Orion is low on the horizon, so it must be about three A.M.

[I used to be such a dolphin fanatic; if possible, i would have become a dolphin when i grew up.  If this book had come out when i was younger, i probably would have gone into marine zoology & aquatic mammal behavior studies (or something).

I hope that everyone out there, humans and dolphins alike, takes the time to enjoy the grandeur of the world around us.  Especially the oceans.

And happy Friday the 13th to all!]