There was one part of it that I remember from earlier on where I was being taught some kind of fabric crafting method. I can’t remember what it was called,but it involved a flat sharp pointed blade about a quarter inch across pulling a strip of fabric like a bias strip up through itself, and it made this flat reinforced border. It could be used for reinforcing seams or it could be used decoratively.
Later, I was helping people evacuate from a known fake zombie apocalypse. We were living on an island in a sound. It was an exercise the town was running where it sent out notices to people who were supposed to pretend to be “infected” so that everyone could practice getting away from them – no guns allows except the paint guns that the military traded for the real guns people had in their houses. I remember specifically talking to people who were trying to get onto the ferry and pointing out that if there were any infected on there, they’d have nowhere to run.
There was a large tree with massive branches that drooped almost to the ground, and children were playing on. It was almost a game of “Lava” where they had to stay in the tree and not touch the ground, “or else”.
Later, I met up with someone who was apparently a boyfriend or potential lover. He was pretty young, maybe mid-20s, maybe 5-foot-9, dark hair, medium-brown eyes, slender build without being skinny. We were talking about how the exercise had gone and how some people were taking it a little too seriously. We shared fun things but were not serious, poly and negotiated but still very new in the relationship. Not really an NRE type thing, just exploring.
There was a theme through the whole dream of identifying what kinds of derelict ships and objects where laying just below the water off the shore. I went diving to a “popular attraction” spot where a mini-sub had been sunk, but then I noticed that it was stuck in a much larger body. It was clearly a full-sized submarine, and I needed to find out which one since there was an historical event that was still unresolved involving a nuclear submarine gone missing. If this derelict was that submarine, there could be a serious problem.
This boyfriend and I were going back and forth between the shore and the house and the library, trying to figure out which ship it was. Finally, we determined that it was a missing submarine (had never been accounted for), but it was probably not the nuclear one. The federal agency overseeing the zombie exercise got a group of divers together to double-check, make sure, and investigate the whole thing.
There was some kind of complicating factor where all my kids were at the house on the island while the exercise was going on, and this boyfriend and I were talking about some of the plans I had cooking concerning a series of shops I was in the process of opening. We were laughing and joking, and I think my sister (not an actual sister, a dream-figure sister) was there helping with the kids – Daniel was lounging on couches playing with a Nintendo DS (this was a specific piece of noted information) and Joseph was helping him, and Lili and Miles had these hand-held games that they were using to play against each other.
Then, this squat little younger woman with longish hair dyed a very bad color showed up and started showering the boyfriend with big sloppy kisses and hanging on him like a bad suit. I was confused, but didn’t “defend my territory” or anything because I wanted to figure out what was going on. She was loudly “his girlfriend”, and I asked for a moment of his time for him to explain all this. He said it would have to wait just a minute because he promised her he’d help her with this problem. They sat down at the table, and she pulled this massive tangled knot of yarn out of her purse – the look on her face suggested that maybe she’d been saving that for him, to make sure that he wouldn’t leave because there was something about “relationship” in this dream-universe that said that you couldn’t leave a relationship in good conscience if any shared projects were undone. I did not subscribe to this and recognized it for the blatant culture of manipulation it was.
I was still in the process of finding out about the submarine and going back and forth to the house with the boyfriend (I think it was my house, but I had another house on the mainland to the south), and I came back into the dining room to find that the squat woman was wearing red contacts. I got thoroughly and completely hurt because that stepped over a line – costuming was something that only he and I were supposed to share, and I knew that she wasn’t into costuming before that, so he must’ve introduced her to that. She finally got the clear message that there was something going on between us, and she started to very loudly let me know how she was there first and she was better than I could ever imagine being and that her and the boyfriend had all of these projects that weren’t finished yet. I told her, in no nice words, that she was a pathetic little troll if she had to rely on projects to keep someone in her life. I turned to leave (get some air?) and the boyfriend followed me.
I asked when they’d gotten the contacts, he said just that afternoon, and what was the big deal? I was poly, so I should be fine with this. I got pretty upset and smacked him across the face, which was mostly ineffective, and he chased after me. We’d find a little quiet spot to try to hash it out, but then the troll would show back up, flapping her gums and being generally obnoxious. We’d get a little further away, and she’d follow us. Finally, she showed up again, I popped her in the face, and I told her to wait in the house like a good little twat. (I guess I was pretty irked at this point.) She did, however, leave, while saying to the boyfriend that this was proof that I wasn’t right for him. He rolled his eyes at her.
I explained the poly was about being honest first and that included everyone. She clearly didn’t know about us, or if she did, she wasn’t okay with it, and that’s disrespectful. And there was the issue of the fact that costuming was our thing, something that he and I shared together, along with the body modification (she might’ve gotten wind of our thing and started trying to “look cool” with the really bad dye job on her hair), but that he needed to make a choice. Stay with the needy little troll all by his onesies, give her the option of sharing (in which case, it wasn’t going to go well), or be rid of her because she wasn’t right for him, not because it has anything to do with me.
By this point, we’d gotten far enough away that she wasn’t harassing us, and we were in a diner having some barbecue. He seemed really torn, but then he took my hand and opened it up to look at it. The barbecue sauce had filled these scars and mods in my hands that made a pattern almost like mehendi, palms and all, and he started licking it off, mumbling about how it couldn’t get better than this. There was a flash where I “fast-forwarded” to many years from then, and I had tattoos on my face as well as the scars on my hands and body being converted to tattoos as well. It was the “code tattoo” language, but modified for the part of the body where it was placed.
I said, “I can’t promise you’ll ever see that, but that’s what you’d be in for if you stayed. You can’t be first, but you can be present.” He asked questions about if he could have a first, and I said, “Of course, it’s not like I’m the only one you can be with.” And suddenly he understood it all the way. He accepted that now was okay, that forever was a different kind of thing than with a first, and that that was okay.
We went back to the house where he had to deal with the troll and make his choices. She flew at me screaming that I was trying to ruin her boyfriend, and I shoved her off like swatting a particularly large and uncoordinated fly. I said, “Oooor, maybe you could try being the kind of person that people want to be with instead of relying on manipulation and emotional hostaging to keep someone.” She didn’t want to hear that and tried to latch onto the boyfriend, who in turn tried to pry her off of him with a “hey, cut it out, we need to talk.”
I got a call from the Saint that he was all done with his part (not sure exactly what he was talking about, but it was something about an emergency system we were building and he was installing the parts on the mainland) and wanted to know if I had a good time. I said something to the effect of it probably being more trouble than it was worth, but at least someone got some life wisdom out of it, and the emergency exercise was a lot of fun. I gathered the kids and got them in the van, and then the troll started trying to throw herself under the wheels so that I wouldn’t go anywhere, demanding that I go back and “fix her boyfriend”. I thought about just running her over, but instead I got out, pulled her out from under the van, told her I did fix her boyfriend and maybe she should listen.
I pulled around the block, went over the bridge, stopped to get the two Cs, and woke up.
Huh! That was interesting lol there is no simbelisme there at all 🙂