contemplativeI was a different person, didn't look like me at all. Young, thin, blonde. And I was at the childhood home (3518 Allison) of a friend of mine, although she wasn't living there in the dream. It belonged to a guy I'd sorta fallen in with. He was older than me, better than me in so many ways. I was a sort of a street rat with a miserable boyfriend who'd gone missing. This guy who was about 10 years older, in his 30s, and his friends, who were somewhat closer to my age, convinced me to write to the Bible verse service for advice. You wrote them a question on their green questioning form, and they sent it back to you with a Bible verse to help provide you guidance. I took their advice and sent off the postcard at the beginning of the dream, shortly after said boyfriend went missing. I didn't tell them what my question was.
Then I went to stay at his house. I wasn't the only lost cause there. Anyway, we were in the kitchen, and suddenly my friend went a little crazy. We'd been talking about his ex-wife and suddenly he started dancing naked on the table, demented with grief. Well, it wouldn't have been a big deal, except that the guy next door, the utterly evil neighbor took pictures and told us he planned to take them to the neighborhood association and the police.
I told him that what we did in the privacy of our own home was our business, and he told me that if he could see it, it wasn't private, and I told him that he was tresspassing. The only way to snap that picture was from our backyard. And even though we shared a common driveway, that didn't give him the right to hang out in our backyard.
Anyway, while he was taunting and dancing up and down with his camera, his shirt fell off and revealed that he was wearing some sort of harness, like a B&D kind of thing. I shouted for one of the friends to bring a camera to take pictures of that indecency.
Me and my friend got in the car to go somewhere, but while we were in the car strapping our seatbelts, the evil neighbor and his wife left in their car. Right after they left (but before they'd driven down the street), someone else pulled in.
I said, "She looks like a realtor. Do you think they're selling?"
We watched as the realtor went in, and came out cursing. Apparently they'd decided to abandon the house because they were in some sort of trouble.
Behind us, we watched as the evil neighbor pulled into the house across the street from us and went in.
He said, "They bought another house?"
As we watched them unpack stuff from their car into the new house, I told him a story about me and how I'd had to dismiss the evil neighbor from my self-defense class.
He asked, "What?"
I asked, "What: self defense class? or What? I had to kick him out?"
"Both."
"You think I'm not good enough to teach self-defense? I assure you I am."
"That I never questioned. You've just never mentioned it before. Why did you have to kick him out?"
"He was creepy. He approached me with pictures of me." I could picture the image in my mind, me in a cheerleading outfit, that was how I met my boyfriend. I somehow told him the story without telling him, just by reliving it in double-flashback. How he'd come up to me after class with a picture of me bent over, bottom sticking out towards the camera, looking cheap, feeling cheap to look at it. And the flashback wherein the picture was taken, how I'd been invited to a wedding, but the wedding never materialized, how I'd bent over to retrieve an envelope addressed to me, explaining that there had been some mistake. That was when someone, apparently him, had taken the creepy picture of me. And then he'd signed up for my self defense classes to be close to me. I felt dirty just recounting the story for him.
So we drove across the street. They were just closing the garage, but we attached a rope to it, and pulled with the car. It wasn't coming off, until I added my strength (how? No clue.) to the pulling.
"Ah," I said after we'd gotten it off. "It's a double-thickness door. That's why it was so hard to remove."
Then my friend asked me to pull off the connecting door between the garage and the house, so they wouldn't be able to hide. I did, and we went back to his house to call the police. Our friends (his friends) met us at the door. They had gotten the mail, and in it was the distinctive green postcard. They hadn't read it, but they'd seen how close me and him were getting, so they were concerned by what it said. They all clustered around me as I read it. My question: "Do I deserve better than Kevin?" The answer, "By your efforts, you will change your life." Corinthians (which is ironic because I've never read Corinthians, although I suppose that makes it easy for me to make up quotes from it.). I burst into tears of joy, and hugged my friend, because I was so overwhelmed with joy at this sign that I could do better, in fact, was doing better already, and deserved to do better. I handed him the postcard and he read it and hugged me and hugged me before handing it to someone who read it outloud and started a great cheer for us. I knew it was the beginning of something amazing in my life, a relationship that was meaningful and healthy, and loving. And then I woke up.