Mixing in an element from one of my most common recurring dreams, of course I had forgotten that I had paid for this thing and was supposed to show up, and had forgotten how to get there, and had to look it up all over again and figure that out and bla bla bla. But that was over with pretty quickly. A footnote.
So here I am in this Gormenghast of meet-new-people-or-else facilities, and a big knot of people - I don't know, probably 20 or 30 of each gender - is just sort of hanging out in an impromptu line in some hallway. Leaning against the wall, or whatever, basically guy-girl-guy-girl. And at first I think, well, these girls aren't so bad - at first glance they all look reasonably attractive if uniformly unimpressive, all dressed in a pretty flattering way - but they're getting WAY too much in my personal space. Like my little dog does when I'm eating pizza on the couch. HEY I AM HERE I'M NOT YOU KNOW BARKING OR WHINING OR ANYTHING TO GET YOUR ATTENTION BUT SEE THAT CUTE LITTLE FACE LIKE THREE INCHES FROM THE TIP OF YOUR NOSE YEAH THAT'S ME.
And then, although they initially all looked basically okay, on second look I notice that there's something really weird with every single one of the women. Like... a lot of them are pretty much microcephalic. Or there's just something really, deeply weird about their figure - like, the kind of gut a male construction worker gets. Stuff like that. The guys... are all acting like they're in high school, although they're all age 25-35 or so. I mean really acting like high school - somebody even keeps roaring through the fucking parking lot in an '82 Camaro. What the fuck. I am not comfortable here.
After that - still at the dating camp - I witnessed a murder. Either performed by the dude with the '82 Camaro, or else his ride got jacked by whoever did it, because they, well, roared out of the parking lot in it after killing the other dude. Then in a big group of people waiting for an elevator somebody delivered a thunderous roundhouse slap to the back of my head anonymously, and I got pissed off even more about it because when I turned around there was a FUCKING COP grinning his ass off and he wouldn't admit to having seen it happen. Bizarrely, the cop looked just like Clarence from Boston Legal. So I roughed up the cop until he admitted who did it (and collared him).
The weird thing? I'm pretty sure I've had this dream before and just never remembered it. It had that "oh, fuck, not THIS again" feel to it. Well, the dating camp part in general. Not so much the murder and the roughing up the cop thing.
It does not take Sigmund fucking Freud to analyze this dream. I hate "dating". Sigh.