The moment you hit the water after sliding off the boat, you’re overcome by an overwhelming sense of nothingness. At times, you get a feeling I’d compare to vertigo as you try to orient yourself. When you look down and around your fins, you only see blue. There’s a vastness and scale to the ocean that you can’t process. Yet, when you dip your head below the surface, amid all the nothingness, something appears. Unlike with most terrestrial wildlife, the third dimension comes into play in the water. You soon find yourself surrounded by animals larger than anything you’ve seen before. Only a few miles off the coast of Dominica, the ocean floor plummets thousands of feet, making these close encounters even more fanciful.

Sperm whales dive to great depths, sometimes for an hour or two at a time, to hunt for giant squid in the pitch-black waters. Their bodies push the boundaries of physiology. On rare occasions, when they resurface for air, they may take a brief moment to sleep, sometimes vertically, in a scene that would look right at home in a Spielberg science fiction film. 

Whether it was the Bee Gees or Calvin Harris that came to mind with the title, the sentiment remains the same. In the seemingly endless expanse of the sea, comfort comes from closeness, not distance—from touch, not personal space. And it’s in these peaceful moments in the water that you realize how we might just have more in common with these giants than we initially thought.