Young Maine coon cats in a writers' colony need editors, who mostly appear in the form of vacuum cleaners smoothing their fur. This distresses them.
Snails, ants, crabs, and so on are kept in confined conditions, fed erratically, and occasionally turned loose to the floor where they may be accidentally stepped upon; they cope with their environment of what appear to be mostly takeout salad boxes filled with sand by huddling together immobile waiting for food, surging to escape when the time comes. Some of them develop intelligence, or rather express their native, usually hidden, verbal selves. The majority of the snails become almost as fast as ants. Let's hear it for punctuated equilibrium!
I've seen all these characters before, or at least in this dream I think there was a previous episode in which the writers' colony was introduced and I put the crabs and ants and snails in the boxes. This time around the crabs had been without water for some days, and some of them were dead, but the survivors fell on a quarter of an old tomato I gave them and rehydrated themselves successfully.
Is my subconscious trying to tell me I shouldn't get a pet?