Winter

I had found, I thought, the perfect girl. We were in love, and thinking about marriage. However, some of our family was against it... mainly because of the "our" part in that last phrase. We were relatives by marriage: my father and her mother were recently married (or vice versa; it wasn't specific in the dream). They would have preferred us to think of each other as brother and sister. One of them told us (in a threatening tone) to look up the laws on incest. (These characters had no resemblance to my real parents.)

I remember the setting of the dream included two apartments which were close to each other, in the same building. Perhaps one was ours and one was theirs. I could give some detail about the layout, but just imagine that nothing is flat: no rooms or hallways are on the exact same level as everything else; all the floors are broken by stairways or ramps, and even single rooms will typically be divided into parts, such as a raised stage. The ground floor of this building seemed to be a school.

Deep winter outside. I was helping out with a class, but for some reason, we needed to call a temporary break and go to get something. I have the sense that my brother was part of "we" in this section, but there was also a teacher. The children were left unsupervised. I was somewhat unsettled by this, but apparently it was normal; they were considered capable of taking care of themselves. We went out.

It seems we had made this same journey many times. There was another character who we met along the way; we made the comment that we always seem to meet him on these trips. There were many people out today, but we made the observation that we had walked this path on days when almost no one went out, for the cold.

I don't remember much else.

Fragments

I am trying to remember the dream as I write this.

I recall a village which was distinct for having almost all women, with only a few men. This place was next to a lake. There was a rich man who thought that he could live in this place and have many women; however, when he approached the women sexually, they would cut him in a ritualistic way. He had many cuts, which formed patterns across his arms and face, but it seemed as if he was not learning to behave differently. Perhaps he enjoyed the cutting.

I think he was acting as our guide in the village. We arrived at the beach. The beach had two different areas, which I thought of as two different "rooms". I didn't figure out exactly what the two areas were for; perhaps one was for children (families with children) and the other was for adults. The area with more children had many different toys, which I figured out were brought by the families, not belonging to the village. These toys were mostly different kinds of artificial walls, to build fortresses, slides, et cetera with. I slid down a wall one child had placed against a large, unusual structure of sand (a natural wall, with a somewhat solid flat top).

I'm sure there was stuff before all of this; specifically, travelling to the village...