I had two or three or five dreams that were connected. I think.
I was visiting the beacon unitarian church. now, beacon is usually a rented room in the basement of a community centre, but not now: now it was an enormous grey and glass cathedral built in a huge baobab looking tree. a brief flashback sequence shows me the process of its construction. it involves a lot of flimsy looking thatch that somehow becomes a solid tower. inside, it looks just like the community centre basement, complete with stacking chairs. a board member hits a switch and the back wall is retracted, revealing a huge empty space with enormous clear glasswork, full of sunshine. "Here's where we'll meet when a few more people join." Ivar, or a person standing in for Ivar (when it's not Ivar, the person is 99.99+% Ivar compatible, I understand), is there. He's the caretaker of the tree.
I am at a play with my friend tina. We watch an hour of movie trailers before the play starts. The first one is for a movie detailing the entirety of Robert Jordan's obscenely longwinded and as-yet unfinished Wheel of Time series. I am put off by the trailer - for 20 minutes they show nothing but the evil characters. I know somehow that this is to prevent people from figuring out that the movie is, in fact, the Wheel of Time series. Finally, at the end, a scene with Rand al'Thor, the irritating hero, is shown. Except it's actually the Capulet Ball scene from Zeffirelli's production of Romeo and Juliet. Eventually it moves on to another trailer, and then all the backstage crew come out and perform some obviously improvised dance scene with masks - there's some massive technical issue that's delaying the play. Finally, the play starts. T and I have to change seats and I end up sitting on a railing next to a very ditzy woman, while tina's chair is positioned sideways so she can only see the very edge of the stage. we keep almost complaining, but the amazingly shallow woman keeps distracting us and we're too polite to ignore her.
at some point during the play (which is about pirates), ten people are chosen from the audience to come jump off the stage as comic relief. tina and I and joe, my boyfriend, who appears in the nick of time, were among the ten. Joe jumps gleefully off the highest part of the stage and lands heavily, leaving two permanent dents in the stage with his police shoes. Tina drives off the stage in to the orchestra, who pull out umbrellas at the last second to keep their instruments from harm. I see an onstage pub and confuse it for the edge of the stage. It's more than three times my height and I flee, gibbering in terror, back in to the audience. This causes some sort of memory problem in me, and I do and do not remember the rest of the evening. Joe tells me about it later, but only the parts I remember, because of some weird ethical code he adheres to as a man with dark hair. The staff of the theatre are convinced Tina was badly injured by driving in to the audience, and make her go to a hospital. Tina, uninjured and pissed off after being patronized all night, refuses an ambulance or a taxi and drives by herself to the nearest hospital. I say "but there's no hospitals in east vancouver!" and she rips the Hospital page out of the yellow pages with an east van address circled. "Oh, okay."
I'm in a salvation army thrift store called Value Village with my dad and my sister. We're looking for a gift for tina, in the hospital. She's been wearing an engineer's hat for ten years which is now very ragged. I find an even more ragged one, this one made of white yarn, to replace it with. At the cashier (the desk looks like the check-out area at the Metrotown branch of the BPL, I think, though in reflection it actually did not), I have second thought about the crappy hat, and go back for something different. I find two interesting beads chipped out of red rock.
It turns out tina didn't actually go to the hospital and just went straight to the skytrain home since she was, in fact, in perfect health. I discover this as I visit the hospital whose address she gave me. It's a rest home with a few extra rooms that look like a fire station. It's very tidy, but completely abandonned.
I'm at a public parks day use area. There's an island that you can visit in the day that's accessible by a small ferry. (it is somehow equivalent to the stage at the play I was at in that previous dream) The staff are death on alcohol. Everyone who visits the island is shown a slide show with scientific proof that anyone who drinks as little as 10 mL of an alcoholic beverage during the day and then misses the last (6pm) ferry off the island will freeze to death, even dressed in polypropylene and next to a bonfire. There's a man with a follow spot set in an old cannon at the mainland who, after 6pm, flashes different colours and shapes of light at the island. Anyone who is stuck on the island needs to find some light source to match exactly the colour and shape he is flashing, and then they'll be rescued. If they flash something different, the man will assume he's seeing things and not send a rescue boat.
I'm at summer camp. I've been coming there for 8 years but am still 13 and still a camper, and not 15 as I was my actual 8th year, when I was a member of the staff there. I cluck my teeth at the disorganized state of the dining hall - nothing is put away in the right compartment. The cookstaff agree with me, shaking their heads. I whiz around setting tables since the current campers don't know what's going on. I tease old counsellors about former pranks and events from previous years. Everyone who has been coming for 8 years is at this session. I stick my head out the door and wave at them all, because I've met all of them before.