The Frantic Woman

MORNING OF JUNE 15, 2009

I'm a member of a "Meetup" group that gets together to see movies every few weeks. In my dream, I was with some people from the group, only we weren't at a theater but in an old, abandoned house. I remember being gathered in one of the upstairs rooms, just sitting around a table, talking.

Suddenly this frantic woman walks in and starts threatening us. She was alone and had no weapons, yet we still somehow seemed to feel intimidated by her. We listened to her rant for a while. I can't remember specifics, except she did say something about somehow trapping us in this house while she stole all of our stuff from it.

At one point while she was ranting, I sneaked out of the room and walked up a narrow flight of stairs to what looked like an attic. Most of the junk stored in the attic seemed to be old board games that had collected cobwebs and mildew. There was an old TV playing something in black and white in the corner, and an old man in overalls and a baseball cap sitting with a young boy off to the side. They seemed unaware of my presence, and I paid them little attention myself.

I was going to head back down the stairs from the attic, but I now noticed they were covered with slushy ice, like half-melted snow. I didn't want to slip and fall, so I sat down on the stairs and carefully inched my way down them that way.

Next I went back into the room with the other movie group people, and the woman was still ranting. She noticed me coming back in and tried to say something about it. I got up in her face and shouted her down, basically telling her she was ridiculous and her demands and threats were ridiculous and she could just shut up and get out. She was properly shamed and had nothing left to say.

We all left the house together, including the woman, only now the outside of the house looked like the outside of a theater. We were standing in a sort of semicircle and suddenly the woman tried, very clumsily, to steal something from one of the other girl's purses. The girl stopped her and shouted, and the woman ran off, emotional, into the parking lot.