The deck of the Pearl was sort of... grey, and glittering oddly, and James squinted at it curiously.  He knelt, and put a hand to the deck, brushing over the wood.  A great swipe of black appeared where his hand had been, and he realised that the glittering substance on the deck was granules of something, sugar or crystal or- he sniffed, raised a hand to his mouth- salt.  He stood suddenly, staring out over the vast plains of Davy Jones's Locker, all flat and white, and saw in them a strange movement, a crawling, as though billions of tiny insects were making their way towards him and the ship.  He would have said it was wind, perhaps, if there had been wind in this place.  He leaned over the rail to see better, peering down at the hull of the beached ship, and a short gasp escaped him.  There was.... whiteness, crawling up the sides of the ship, thousands of millions of grains of sand, encroaching like water until they poured over the gunwale, flooding the deck, and James looked down and realised with a sick shock of terror that he could not distinguish the deck from the flatness around him; everything white and nondescript, utterly featureless, like the Locker was absorbing the Pearl into itself, denying James even the faintest hope of a way home-

His eyes open.  Or one of them does, at least; the other seems gummed together with sleep and the residue of tears.  He runs a rough hand over it, and after a few blinks, he is able to see clearly.  He is lying on the deck of the Pearl, legs splayed out, one arm resting beneath his head, the other flung out as if to catch at something; his head is pounding dully, and he winces at the unnaturally bright light of this place. The ship, he is relieved to see, is just as it was the day before, and quite free of anything out of the ordinary.  He chastises himself vaguely for even thinking that it might be otherwise, but he is still half asleep, and the dream was vivid and disturbing.  It is, he supposes, morning, though as there is neither sun nor moon in the Locker, there technically aren't days or nights at all.  He props himself up on one hand, thinking to get up to shake himself futher into wakefulness, but the hand gives out with a lance of pain, and he looks down at it, realising that it is his right hand, and that it is crusted with dried blood, the fingers crooked with pain.