Stress Dream - Manic Pixie Jerk Friend
I just had a stress dream about some non-local friends. They had bet and been befriended by this person who was just completely taking advantage of their kindness and generosity in ways that seemed subtle but were really glaring from the outside, and I just didn't know what to do. I have no idea were this dream came from!
So first of all, I think this dream started as more of a fantasy thing, because there was definitely magic in part of t - I remember that less clearly now, but we kept encountering/fighting these people who had secial powers and could used these magic items (best term I can think of) that were headbands and bookbags. But we couldn't. I am not 100% sure who 'we' all were at that point - I think myself, my sister, and my friend Vess? Or maybe Vess was running the 'game' we wee in at this point. We managed to capture one of these people, and they greed to join us so that they could use this stuff for us, or maybe show us how to use it - I'm not really sure. We had been following along a trail, and even eventually we got to the place where my friends lived. I my dream it was like a big, open, airy version of my mom's family house that she grew up in, that was next door to where my grandparents lived. In real life, when I was a kid my great aunts and great-grandmother lived there, and when they all died, my aunt moved inn to the place. It was kind of a borderline hoarder home when they moved in, just from people having lived there for so long, but they didn't really help that. In the dream though, it was both bigger (the rooms themselves) and more empty - to start.
The person, whose name I forget, was a very crafty ad creative person, who had great and grand plans for things. She might have been this person we captured? I'm not sure how exactly that ties in. I think we felt like we'd 'won' after we made it to their place, anyway, and we made some loose plans for...? Something? doing stuff to figure out who these people were? I've really lost to cool adventurery part of the dream, anyway.
Anyway, after all that, I guess we left. I started hearing more and more about this person, and at first she seemed to be 'helping' - contributing supplies and ideas to various projects that my friends needed help doing. I remember talking to one of them about how hard a time she was having finding out how to do certain things she wanted to set up parts of her farm, how local people wouldn't come out, or wouldn't explain things, how she couldn't' find supplies and such that she needed. This other girl seemed to have ideas, they just never seemed to materialize into action. Instead she got my friend to help with her own projects which were large, unfeasible, steampunky projects. They took up space. This woman had a lot of art/project clutter, and a lot of straight up junk (dusty boxes and cabinets knicknacks and old mouldering almanacs and just *stuff*). I think at first I was wasn't overly concerned because... I think this person in theory had access to that magic or whatever that let the stuff we had encounter earlier work, and that I just didn't understand it. But no. The longer it went on the longer it seemed like she was just using my friend as someone to mooch off of - she lived there, either just in essence or in actuality I'm not sure. She kept her stuff there - her huge projects, her junk - she used my to 'help her work on these things, which never seemed to materialize, and while they talked to her about working on her own things, they never actually *did* anything, and everything stayed in the planning stage.
My friend enjoyed this person's company. I think in my dream she was lonely for someone to hang out with in person, and this other girl was cute nd fun and creative, and would encourage her in her ambitious dreaming but not in the actual accomplishing of things. The almanacs were there to help provide 'advice' and such. It was just really all about her - but my friend was enjoying herself, enjoying having a friend, enjoying indulging her creative side, enjoying not having to face all the things she didn't feel capable of doing. It was so clearly a destructive relationship, and I had no idea what to do.
I went to visit with my sister and some other people - I think ostensibly I was invited, but in a 'drop by anytime' kind of way that was both sincere - their house was open to any friends, really - but also did not guarantee me any kind of attention from them. I arrives and the house was just cluttered, there was a big dining table that was ful of boxes, The second floor landing - which was very open and air, as I said before, with a large skylight. There were three tall clear cylindrical tanks - like, as large as a person, with clear tubes coming out of them. It was very mad science - they were all filled with different thing. The two further away had different coloured liquids in them, and the one closest was filled with fireflies. This was part of one of the projects which was incomplete, and was now just taking up space, and also was potentially dangerous. I have no idea what it was supposed to be for if it ever were completed.
Meanwhile, my other friend, the husband of the pair, was there, and I was able to talk to him some. It just made me more anxious to hear all the stuff that was happening - how much time this girl was spending here, the ways in which it was clear to me that she was alienating my friends from other local people who could have helped them. Lke, undermining the advice and authority of other people they could have asked for help with things that needed doing. And he was happy to see his wife have a friend, and generally is the sort of person who doesn't like to see bad things about people or do things that will cause conflict. So he just didn't really *see* it, or of he did he didn't see the depth of it, and plus, he was distracted. There were these guys who were 'friends' with this woman, and they'd taken to including him in stuff that they were doing . For example, when I showed up, he was waiting for them to go kayaking! Which I thought sounded really fun, and was initially glad that he was going to have a chance to get out and do some active stuff that I thought he would enjoy. He said (and meant) that he would have liked to invite me, but it wasn't his place to do so, and when these guys did show up it was clear they were not interested in having anyone else, especially a woman, come along. But again it was all subtle like 'oh, no room, not enough kayaks, we wouldn't want you to be bored, so sorry'. Which sounds reasonable, but I knew that it wasn't, it was more than that. There was other exclusionary stuff going on, body language wise, and how they just pulled (not physically, but with the press of Obligation) my friend away, the kinds of stories they were telling (not to me, but while ignoring me). They were ex-military types, and while that is not automatically a strike against them, it was clear that they held a lot of macho values that can come out of those kinds of experiences. I knew that my friend was not the type to tolerate misogyny and racism, but I also knew that they were going to wear him down, that he wasn't going to really have an option to stop hanging out with them because they weren't interested in letting that happen. It was another way to isolate my friends, both from the communities they already belonged to, as well as from each other. And it was so clear to me that this was something they were *trying* to do, that the longer this went on the less accessible my friends would be to outsiders, that we were losing them, because I couldn't figure out how to expose the pattern and make them see. It was upsetting and sinister, and I don't know what the end goal was at all.
When they left to go kayaking, anyway, he told me where to find his wife, and this other woman. They were in a side room, surrounded by junk, talking and giggling about plans for imaginary things. The sort of conversation about conceptual worldbuilding that I would usually love - except it was clear that they had so many in jokes that I could never really participate no matter how much my friend (always her) tried to explain, and that taken as part of the larger patter I could see that it was just a time waste, another delaying tactic from facing reality, another way of isolating my friend and creating this place of intimacy from which she would be easier to manipulate. It was heartbreaking. When I found them, my friend was like "Oh, you've been here enough time to have been able to guess where we were!" and it was sort of true - I had been there a few times before this started, and was fairly familiar with the house. But it was one of those things that should have come off as 'you're an old friend, you're welcome, like one of the family, make yourself at home', but in fact just came off as rude - like she didn't needs to pay more attention to me, it was okay to continue in this little cocoon of conspiracy and in jokes with this person who was actively feeding all of her worst impulses when it came to responsibility and self control. It was just a step away from her being resentful of my interruption. Not there yet, but inevitable in the future, when this other woman had time to plan and nurture those seeds.
Like I said, it was heartbreaking, because my friends are such warm, friendly, caring, hospitable people, and these other people were just slowly turning them into something else, and they couldn't see it, and I didn't know how to stop it. And that's when I woke up :/
Despite saying I have no idea where this dream came from, I can probably piece together a few things. My friends have been dealing with family health stuff and not around much, so I am concerned about them being isolated. I'm worried about my own ability to fit in to new communities and make friends. And of course I've just been reading a lot about, basically, radicalization of young white dudes into the alt-right. Apparently these things are not a good mix for my imagination.
So first of all, I think this dream started as more of a fantasy thing, because there was definitely magic in part of t - I remember that less clearly now, but we kept encountering/fighting these people who had secial powers and could used these magic items (best term I can think of) that were headbands and bookbags. But we couldn't. I am not 100% sure who 'we' all were at that point - I think myself, my sister, and my friend Vess? Or maybe Vess was running the 'game' we wee in at this point. We managed to capture one of these people, and they greed to join us so that they could use this stuff for us, or maybe show us how to use it - I'm not really sure. We had been following along a trail, and even eventually we got to the place where my friends lived. I my dream it was like a big, open, airy version of my mom's family house that she grew up in, that was next door to where my grandparents lived. In real life, when I was a kid my great aunts and great-grandmother lived there, and when they all died, my aunt moved inn to the place. It was kind of a borderline hoarder home when they moved in, just from people having lived there for so long, but they didn't really help that. In the dream though, it was both bigger (the rooms themselves) and more empty - to start.
The person, whose name I forget, was a very crafty ad creative person, who had great and grand plans for things. She might have been this person we captured? I'm not sure how exactly that ties in. I think we felt like we'd 'won' after we made it to their place, anyway, and we made some loose plans for...? Something? doing stuff to figure out who these people were? I've really lost to cool adventurery part of the dream, anyway.
Anyway, after all that, I guess we left. I started hearing more and more about this person, and at first she seemed to be 'helping' - contributing supplies and ideas to various projects that my friends needed help doing. I remember talking to one of them about how hard a time she was having finding out how to do certain things she wanted to set up parts of her farm, how local people wouldn't come out, or wouldn't explain things, how she couldn't' find supplies and such that she needed. This other girl seemed to have ideas, they just never seemed to materialize into action. Instead she got my friend to help with her own projects which were large, unfeasible, steampunky projects. They took up space. This woman had a lot of art/project clutter, and a lot of straight up junk (dusty boxes and cabinets knicknacks and old mouldering almanacs and just *stuff*). I think at first I was wasn't overly concerned because... I think this person in theory had access to that magic or whatever that let the stuff we had encounter earlier work, and that I just didn't understand it. But no. The longer it went on the longer it seemed like she was just using my friend as someone to mooch off of - she lived there, either just in essence or in actuality I'm not sure. She kept her stuff there - her huge projects, her junk - she used my to 'help her work on these things, which never seemed to materialize, and while they talked to her about working on her own things, they never actually *did* anything, and everything stayed in the planning stage.
My friend enjoyed this person's company. I think in my dream she was lonely for someone to hang out with in person, and this other girl was cute nd fun and creative, and would encourage her in her ambitious dreaming but not in the actual accomplishing of things. The almanacs were there to help provide 'advice' and such. It was just really all about her - but my friend was enjoying herself, enjoying having a friend, enjoying indulging her creative side, enjoying not having to face all the things she didn't feel capable of doing. It was so clearly a destructive relationship, and I had no idea what to do.
I went to visit with my sister and some other people - I think ostensibly I was invited, but in a 'drop by anytime' kind of way that was both sincere - their house was open to any friends, really - but also did not guarantee me any kind of attention from them. I arrives and the house was just cluttered, there was a big dining table that was ful of boxes, The second floor landing - which was very open and air, as I said before, with a large skylight. There were three tall clear cylindrical tanks - like, as large as a person, with clear tubes coming out of them. It was very mad science - they were all filled with different thing. The two further away had different coloured liquids in them, and the one closest was filled with fireflies. This was part of one of the projects which was incomplete, and was now just taking up space, and also was potentially dangerous. I have no idea what it was supposed to be for if it ever were completed.
Meanwhile, my other friend, the husband of the pair, was there, and I was able to talk to him some. It just made me more anxious to hear all the stuff that was happening - how much time this girl was spending here, the ways in which it was clear to me that she was alienating my friends from other local people who could have helped them. Lke, undermining the advice and authority of other people they could have asked for help with things that needed doing. And he was happy to see his wife have a friend, and generally is the sort of person who doesn't like to see bad things about people or do things that will cause conflict. So he just didn't really *see* it, or of he did he didn't see the depth of it, and plus, he was distracted. There were these guys who were 'friends' with this woman, and they'd taken to including him in stuff that they were doing . For example, when I showed up, he was waiting for them to go kayaking! Which I thought sounded really fun, and was initially glad that he was going to have a chance to get out and do some active stuff that I thought he would enjoy. He said (and meant) that he would have liked to invite me, but it wasn't his place to do so, and when these guys did show up it was clear they were not interested in having anyone else, especially a woman, come along. But again it was all subtle like 'oh, no room, not enough kayaks, we wouldn't want you to be bored, so sorry'. Which sounds reasonable, but I knew that it wasn't, it was more than that. There was other exclusionary stuff going on, body language wise, and how they just pulled (not physically, but with the press of Obligation) my friend away, the kinds of stories they were telling (not to me, but while ignoring me). They were ex-military types, and while that is not automatically a strike against them, it was clear that they held a lot of macho values that can come out of those kinds of experiences. I knew that my friend was not the type to tolerate misogyny and racism, but I also knew that they were going to wear him down, that he wasn't going to really have an option to stop hanging out with them because they weren't interested in letting that happen. It was another way to isolate my friends, both from the communities they already belonged to, as well as from each other. And it was so clear to me that this was something they were *trying* to do, that the longer this went on the less accessible my friends would be to outsiders, that we were losing them, because I couldn't figure out how to expose the pattern and make them see. It was upsetting and sinister, and I don't know what the end goal was at all.
When they left to go kayaking, anyway, he told me where to find his wife, and this other woman. They were in a side room, surrounded by junk, talking and giggling about plans for imaginary things. The sort of conversation about conceptual worldbuilding that I would usually love - except it was clear that they had so many in jokes that I could never really participate no matter how much my friend (always her) tried to explain, and that taken as part of the larger patter I could see that it was just a time waste, another delaying tactic from facing reality, another way of isolating my friend and creating this place of intimacy from which she would be easier to manipulate. It was heartbreaking. When I found them, my friend was like "Oh, you've been here enough time to have been able to guess where we were!" and it was sort of true - I had been there a few times before this started, and was fairly familiar with the house. But it was one of those things that should have come off as 'you're an old friend, you're welcome, like one of the family, make yourself at home', but in fact just came off as rude - like she didn't needs to pay more attention to me, it was okay to continue in this little cocoon of conspiracy and in jokes with this person who was actively feeding all of her worst impulses when it came to responsibility and self control. It was just a step away from her being resentful of my interruption. Not there yet, but inevitable in the future, when this other woman had time to plan and nurture those seeds.
Like I said, it was heartbreaking, because my friends are such warm, friendly, caring, hospitable people, and these other people were just slowly turning them into something else, and they couldn't see it, and I didn't know how to stop it. And that's when I woke up :/
Despite saying I have no idea where this dream came from, I can probably piece together a few things. My friends have been dealing with family health stuff and not around much, so I am concerned about them being isolated. I'm worried about my own ability to fit in to new communities and make friends. And of course I've just been reading a lot about, basically, radicalization of young white dudes into the alt-right. Apparently these things are not a good mix for my imagination.