Beach Fun

My family had decided to spend the day at the beach. There I was, walking the boardwalk with my sisters and my parents. We bought tickets to participate in some interactive amusement thing. We were given wristbands and told to meet up at a specific location in half an hour to start our adventure. Before we could go to the meet point, we had to find somewhere to change into our bathing suits. My mom, my sisters, and I entered an indoor shopping area to find a bathroom. We passed a couple places before finding a bathroom we'd be allowed to change in. I was the last one to finish changing. When I left the stall I'd been using, I noticed that my mom had left her clothing on the floor in the bathroom. (But it didn't look like clothing she'd been wearing. It looked much more like a pile of my ex girlfriend's clothing. Which was weird because she never appeared in my dream). I called my mom back into the bathroom and told her to shove her clothes into her backpack - she'd need them later.

My mom and I then walked to the meet up point. We found out that the thing we'd signed up for was an Amazing Race type game, but the groups were formed randomly by the people who'd put the event together. Each group had four team members and an official volunteer driver. My group was made up of a few other girls who I kinda sorta knew and a guy who would turn out to be my boyfriend as the dream progressed. We jumped into our driver's car when the time came and raced off to the event location.

My group was the first to get to the location. Waiting for each team was a young goat standing on a platform. Next to each goat were different types of food in bowls. The objective was to feed your team's goat without getting your hand bitten off (the goats were so hungry that they'd snap at your hands if you tried to touch the food, but they wouldn't eat the food out of the bowls - you had to hand feed them). My dream-boyfriend ran over to another team's platform to grab some food not guarded by our goat (apparently the goats could only bite the team trying to feed them, so he was safe stealing food from another goat's platform). He fed it to our goat and our team started celebrating. But I didn't celebrate yet, because I was worried it wouldn't count. We'd cheated. I made eye contact with the woman overseeing the event and the said she'd allow it because he'd been the one to do it and she could make a special exception for him because he was just one of those boys. Mr. Dream Boy took me in his arms and suddenly I knew he'd done everything for me. I couldn't have been happier. I felt safe and loved and cared for. I no longer cared if we won or lost (but we'd totally won).

"Helping" Out Backstage

I was supposed to be helping out backstage with a collegiate performance of some play, held in a high school's theatre. I went to take a shower three hours before the event, but the only shower working in my house was my parents' shower and they had a bunch of guests sitting in their room. These guests, for whatever reason, had made it their mission to keep me from showering. There was a weird situation with the door to the bathroom where instead on being a normal door on hinges (as it is in real life) it was three layers of door pieces mounted on tracks in the ceiling. So I had to align all of the pieces properly or someone would be able to watch me undress for my shower. Every time I got the door to work, someone would come over and bump it. I would not allow these people to see me naked, so I eventually gave up on the idea of showering.

Suddenly, the room I'd been standing in became a backstage dressing area at the theatre. We were only a few minutes to curtain. I just needed to change into my black clothing (worn by technicians so as to be less visible to the audience), pee, and go figure out what I was supposed to be doing. I'd been given my position title (which I can't remember for the life of me now, but I know it was not something that exists in real life) but I had no idea what it meant. I asked one of the techs by the changing area if they knew what I was supposed to be doing and they told me to go find Angela (name changed because she was actually a tech goddess at my college, so it seemed totally rational to me that she would help out with this college's production now that she no longer had to do every one of our college's productions) after I'd finished changing and she'd explain my role to me.

For some reason, I left the stage right backstage area I'd been in and went searching for a door to the stage left side of the backstage area. I followed infrequent signs up and down stairs, through corridors full of doors that may or may not have been the one I was looking for, and past many actors and technicians who wouldn't pay attention to me long enough to help me out. I finally found my way back to the stage right door and gave up on whatever I'd been trying to do so I could change my clothes. By this point, the performance was well under way.

There were plenty of black articles of clothing lying around in the dressing area, but I couldn't find mine where I thought I'd left them. After digging thru my bag and the pile beside it in search of something suitable, I threw on a short black dress of mine and prayed that I wouldn't get yelled at for not having something black to cover my legs. I finally went on a search for Angela. By this point, we were at intermission. (I guess whatever I was supposed to be doing backstage wasn't integral to the show.) Instead of Angela, I found another girl I'd known at college who seemed to be training new techies, so I checked in with her. Instead of talking tech with me, she started throwing masked insults my way. (I always suspected she didn't like me when we we in the same circles at school and in the dream I'd apparently started dating a boyfriend of hers not long after they'd broken up, which is pretty not cool, so I deserved some of it.) At this point, my bladder decided to remind me that I still hadn't found a bathroom and sill really needed to pee - and I woke up.

Working with a Wraith

I was working in a shop. I couldn't tell you what kind of shop it was, because that seemed to change every five minutes. At the beginning of the dream it was a fast food establishment. At the end it was an electronics store. I don't even remember what it was in between those two things. But no matter what the shop sold at any given point, I was working there.

At the start of the dream, I was working a night shift with some buddies of mine. We had no patrons at the time, so I was slumped against a wall, trying not to fall asleep. My mom came in and told me that if I was so tired, I should just go home. Forget about the job. Quit, if that's what it would take to get me out of there. She didn't want me working that job anyway. I don't know why she wanted me home so bad, but I didn't listen to her. I told her to go home. I was fine. And I'd see her when my shift was over. I should have listened to her.

Flash forward to the next scene in the dream, when I was once again in the shop. I knew everyone who worked there (was even dating one of the guys), so we were all hanging out and chatting between customers. I can't remember how it happened, but we discovered that the shop had a ghost - one that didn't seem to like us too much. He couldn't physically harm us, but he'd been around long enough to know how to get to us emotionally and psychologically. One of the guys got so angry that he started to beat the ghost up. The weird thing about this ghost was you could actually land a punch on him, even though he couldn't do the same to you. I didn't like the idea of the guys in the shop beating up a defenseless victim, no matter how cruel he was being with his words, so I got them to leave him alone (for now).

Days passed, and the ghost seemed to be intent on taunting the guys until they had to be pulled off of him. One day my boyfriend was alone in the shop. The ghost appeared and started to convince him that I didn't love him, that we didn't have a future together. My boyfriend went into a blind rage and started to beat the pulp out of the ghost. Slowly, the ghost began to grow more solid beneath his fist, but he didn't notice. Then the ghost took full physical form and knocked my boyfriend off of him, easily taking control of the situation. He taunted my boyfriend once more, this time saying things like "I'm going to wait for your girlfriend to come back and, when she does, she'll be mine" and "You were the one who made this possible, you know. Every time someone punched or kicked me I was able to work on regenerating into my human state. Your fury helped me to walk the earth once more." My boyfriend was devastated. In an effort to "protect me" he'd brought me so much closer to harm.

Somehow, the guys were able to learn that the ghost was not so much a ghost at all. Rather, he was some sort of magical being who had been trapped on another plane through the use of a film camera. Every time someone laid a hand on him, it was like laying a hand on the filament of the photograph that kept him trapped. My boyfriend came to my house and told me everything that happened while I had been out of the shop. We started to search for a film camera, but all we had were digital ones. Finally, we found a Polaroid camera. We hoped it might do the trick without the time needed to develop film. We got in the car and were on our way to the shop - and that's when my alarm rang and I woke up.

Hogwarts is my Home

It was the middle of the afternoon and I was back at school, sitting in my on-campus apartment with some friends. We'd decided to have a Harry Potter marathon. As we were watching the first movie, I suddenly remembered the small role I had in one of the later movies - in which my child acting was so bad that the producers decided to write my character out of the rest of the series. I was really proud of my appearance in a Harry Potter movie, but really ashamed of my performance. I decided not to say anything to my friends, hoping we wouldn't make it to that movie before calling it a night.

Flash forward to late that evening - the sun's gone down and even though the campus is a pretty safe one I don't want a female friend of mine to walk home alone. I walk her back to her dorm, no problem. On my way back to my apartment, I run into an acquaintance and we stop to have some awkward small talk. A professor comes up behind us and tells us to run. I look back in the direction of the dorm where I'd just dropped my friend off and see Voldemort swooping through the air, heading in my direction. The acquaintance and I take off, running towards my apartment. Professor Lupin is on our heels, his robes billowing out behind him. We get to the building and I fumble with the key. Finally, I hear the lock click and I pull the door wide open. The acquaintance runs inside with me and we quickly close the door behind us. Apparently a locked door has the power to stop the Dark Lord. Lupin stays outside to fight off Voldemort and protect any other students who might wander outside.

Safe inside the building, I make it up half way up a flight of stairs before my heart stops racing and I am able to turn and look at the acquaintance beside me. The acquaintance has morphed into Draco Malfoy and I, a proud Gryffindor, scoff at him, "What are you doing here? You don't belong in this apartment tower. You sleep in the dungeon." To which he responds, "Yeah, well, I didn't want to end up dead, so I had to come in here. Sorry." He was clearly not sorry. He turned and went downstairs to the lower level of the apartment building. Draco would wait there until morning, when Voldemort would be gone and he would be safe to return to Slytherin's on-campus housing (whatever that may have been). Meanwhile, I marched up the rest of the stairs to my apartment and preceded to go to bed.