A Wedding That Wasn't

At the beginning of what I remember, I am engaged to be married to some guy who had a name in the dream but I can't remember what that name was. He did not, as far as I can tell, correspond to anybody in my real life. For the sake of the narrative I will call him Matt.

Anyway, Matt and his parents live in a huge, ornately decorated house that used to be a duplex. I somehow know that Greg Jones and his family had formerly lived in the back half.

I wake up on the day of my wedding in their house, and Jennifer, who had married into Matt's family - a cousin or something - was there to help me get ready. She does so, teasing me about the wedding night along the way, I get to blushing really hard. Monica comes in and they entertain themselves by seeing how hard they can get me to blush.

I go out into the house and things are all set up for the wedding, the guests have all arrived, music is playing deafeningly loudly, and I have nothing to do. My family shows up (although Dad is already there) and there is also not much for them to do. So we mess around with the decorations - add some and take some away and move some around. The main reason we do this is to mess with my control-freak future mother-in-law. I also complain about the music level and am told not to let it bother me too much, and that it probably is not an indication of how things will be regularly when I am married.

All the wedding guests go into the backyard, where the wedding is to be held, and I am left alone with my family. I ask for a father's blessing and I am not given specific counsel - I am told I need to make this decision on my own. I decide I can't go through with this wedding because I am not in love with Matt. I am, however, in love with Greg. I also tell my mother that Greg had formerly lived in this house and this helps her to understand that I can't go through with it. Dad tells me to go out back and tell all the wedding guests, but I insist that I want to tell Matt first and eventually win.

So I find Matt in front of the house and say, "We need to talk." I fumble around with my words for a while, trying to figure out how to tell him this. And then I say something like, "I keep thinking of things to say and they are all cliched." And I also mention that it must be hard for him, because he can tell I want to say something he isn't going to be too happy with. Eventually I come out and say, "You're a good person. But I don't love you, and it isn't fair to either of us if I marry you without loving you." He says, "I thought last night proved you loved me," and I respond with, "Last night proved I am attracted to you."

I can only guess what had happened the previous night, but I don't think he had shown up in the part of the dream I can't remember clearly. It doesn't feel right.

So we go to his bedroom to be away from all the wedding guests. His little brother is already there. And then somebody starts to make an announcement, and I guess it is about me calling off the wedding. We sit around, I think the brother is playing video games, as the wedding guests go ahead and dance without us, and then they serve the food without us. And I tell Matt that a former fling of mine and his family had used to live here. He wants to know the last name of the family, so I tell him, "Jones".

As I am leaving, Matt asks his father about the Jones family who had previously lived there. The father tells the story, about Greg Jones and his father, also named Greg Jones, and a sister and the story sounds sort of like a ghost story, although it is completely normal and reasonable and true in dreamland.

A Son, A Party, Chalk Art, and Fights

I am single, pregnant, and have a young son named Simon. I don't know when Simon's birthday is or where he is. Then Mom tells me she put him to bed in a trundle bed by my sister's room. I am worried about getting married and think I need to do it soon because I think no man would ever want to marry a girl who has three children.

I go to a party which has friends of mine from the last couple years and from junior high. It is apparently a corporate retreat, because Toby from the Office is there, trying to lead us in a group exercise, which involves drinking from tubes of colored liquid. Some other guy, a big shot who's supposed to replace Toby soon, takes over and changes the exercise slightly because we had apparently been doing it wrong for years- we are supposed to drink more of the stuff than we had been. Then the exercise ends and we all start drinking shot of this stuff just for fun. It turns out to be a liquid candy sort of thing.

Then I take a little boy - probably my son - to some sort of Halloweeny outdoor art show where the artists are random people who draw on blacktop with sidewalk chalk. My brother is one of them and he is making a pretty impressive comic strip.

We are inside again and I am with my mother and my sister when some lady stops us and asks for our names, which she looks up in a name dictionary. She comes up with the usual given meaning for my sister's name but my name is listed as being derived from the name of some sort of medicine. The lady scolds my mother for giving me a name with no meaning or history just because it sounds pretty. Then I get up in her face and yell at her, telling her that my name has been around for at least a hundred years, no, since at least the 1880s, and that it has real meaning- it is created from putting together the Spanish words for sea and laughter. Her sister says that this lady has a real interest in names and has put a lot of study into it. I yell back about how hard I study names and all the sites and books and things I study regularly.

Then I'm in a cafeteria, by a vending machine. Doug's little middle-school aged sister who I've never met is there with her friends, and she says a lot of really mean stuff to me. I go to find Doug to talk to him about it. When I find him he's gone off to be with his wife, Helen. I say that I need to tell him or ask him about something, and as I try to figure out how to put it, one of them says something like, "Oh, his little sister hates you for no reason." Apparently this happens with all his friends.

Bus Stop Laundromat, Were-Teddies, and YSA Group

October 1, 2010

I am at the bus stop at the University Mall in Orem, and it is filled with industrial clothes driers. Dave gets in one to rest, and as a joke I go over to spin it so it will rock him like a cradle. Then Ken, Luke, and another guy I can't identify get in one of the other driers.

The boys in the driers change into giant teddy bears of different colors. I can't figure out which color bear corresponds with which boy, so they change between bear and boy a couple times while I learn who turns what color.

Then I am in a church gym with a large group of young single adults. It is a meeting for an unofficial YSA organization for young single adults all through the Salt Lake valley. In order to participate in their activities, I need to turn in a medical release with a doctor's signature. They have a doctor on the board who is willing to examine me and sign the form, but I would rather have my regular doctor take care of it. But I had just had an appointment with him and won't see him again for three months and am a little worried that they won't be willing to wait that long and I will miss an upcoming activity that seems exciting.

Curtis is being very open about being single and looking and some girl makes a comment about how it would be uncomfortable to be a girl who really likes him. I beckon her over to me and say that that is just how he is. She starts to leave, and I beckon her to come back and say that I really like him. She walks away again, I beckon again, and then I say that I have been in love with him for three years now.