I jumped awake in the early morning darkness this morning from a nightmare. In the dream, I was standing on the seawall watching a pod of dolphins surface for air, hearing them expel, then suck in new oxygen through the blowholes near the tops of their heads. Except suddenly the dolphins weren’t here on the east coast of Florida in my warm blue water, they were in the Gulf of Mexico. And when they surfaced to breathe, they were coated in thick brown oil, which they sucked deep into their lungs. Then they began to spasm and die…

The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico already showed that BP has a basic disconnect between words and actions. The whole “Beyond Petroleum” campaign was just that: a media campaign, a tagline, an empty slogan. BP and the other oil companies have done almost nothing to move beyond petroleum, nor has there been any real pressure — by consumers, shareholders, or legislators — for them to do so.

But the company’s crisis communications is shaping into an even bigger sham. BP has done all the right things, according to the new media ethic. They have profiles on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. The message is the same at each of these sites: “BP cares, and no one is working harder than BP to make this thing right. Check out for yourself how hard we’re working.”

No one seems to have told the operations folks at BP about all this openness and transparency. In an article titled, “Let the Press See the Spill,” the New York Post listed recent obstructions on BP’s part.

Reporters trying to visit coastal public parks and lands in a Louisiana community were repeatedly turned away by BP officials. When they complained to the local sheriff, he referred them to a number to obtain written permission. It was a BP phone number.

According to the [New York] Times, the Coast Guard suddenly reversed itself on allowing a small group of journalists to accompany Florida Sen. Bill Nelson on an inspection trip aboard one of its vessels. When the Democratic lawmaker’s office asked the Department of Homeland Security for an explanation, his aides were given the patently ridiculous excuse that it was department policy not to allow elected officials and reporters on the same “federal asset.”

A Louisiana seaplane operator who wanted to fly a photographer for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans was denied permission to enter the controlled airspace over the spill — by BP.

Most recently, Matt Gutman of ABC News was hassled by a BP manager when he set up his equipment for a live Web chat on a public beach in Alabama while a cleanup crew worked quietly in the background. And CBS News told the Times that one of its crews was threatened with arrest for filming on a public beach.

If you visit any of BP’s social networking sites, you’ll find such facts as the number of barrels of oil their “LMRP Cap containment system” has captured since they got it to work (119,300 total), but nothing about the 30,000 barrels pouring out each day since the explosion on April 20. You’ll see photo after photo of workers in full hazmat suits but none of oil-coated shore birds and sea life. The closest you’ll come is a shot of a bird in a warm, sudsy bath, surrounded by smiling folks. Happy horse manooty, as they say.

Meanwhile, in Florida and probably the other gulf states, there is a new addition to our weather reports. We now get the oil spill forecast, which shows the looming threat hovering just off our shore.

BP’s claim that it will make this right, like the rest of its marketing campaign, is just so many words. One can only guess that the reason BP doesn’t want people to know the extent of the disaster is because they hope to be allowed to continue drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. And that doesn’t sound like the strategy of a company that is moving beyond petroleum.