Dream Date at the Courtyard by Marriott

In last night's dream, I was in a dating situation. The situation was a pre-arranged, sleepover date at the Courtyard, a hotel chain with lots of fancy side businesses going on. One of them was a dating service, which had paired me with a single mother of two. The kids weren't disclosed in our original setup, but she'd smuggled them inside an oversized diaper bag, disguised as a large purse. I wasn't too put off, although I did wonder how she'd managed to slip a six year old in there. The other child was an infant, which she managed to keep hidden in there until the date had progressed further down the road. 

I spent much time fiddling with an antique film camera, loading an old style roll of film onto the rollers and winding the film to get the camera to a place where it would function to take a picture of the two of us. I found her attractive, and perhaps she found me that way as well, but we were going to have to get through a ton of preliminaries. 

There was plenty of awkwardness, tiptoeing around and getting the basic questions answered. Neither of us wanted to let our guard down, so as to not reveal our most basic flaws. Me, I was worried about her finding out I'm missing a tooth. With her, the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, with the children. 

We ordered room service, not sure what it included, but after all the camera fiddling and a lot of strained conversation we found it was nearing check-out time, the next day. Apparently, we'd been comfortable enough to nod off to sleep, and although it was in the same bed, nothing happened but the sleep. 

One of the hotel's side businesses was that they were a tequila distributor. As a part of their promotion, each guest was to select a grocery bag with six assorted bottles of their liquor. Some were fancier than others, so the guests were scrambling to put together the most expensive choices.  I snatched up one with a jeweled double bottle, split down the middle, so it looked like bookends that fit together in a perfect bottle shape. 

I forgot to mention that another thing she'd failed to disclose was that she had an ex-boyfriend, or another suitor, who was violent. He'd shown up on the first day, bashing in the door and punching holes in the TVs, before finally leaving, his display of petulant love being unrequited. As checkout time neared, we decided there was enough interest to go ahead and book another night. We were about to do that, but we got separated. 

I went to get something to eat and found myself quite lost. I wound up eating my tray of food in a small entryway to the bathroom. A lot of the hotel's personnel radio equipment was stored there, so I grabbed one and flipped through the channels, listening in on what sounded like government agencies secret communications. I felt that this was going to get me in trouble, so I unplugged the radio and took it with me, while I wandered around trying to get back to my date. 

I never did get reunited with her, and felt I should probably return the radio equipment. Unburdening myself of it became the next primary focus of my dream. When I finally did, I was still of the frame of mind that there was a possibility of salvaging my date, if I could just find her. The Courtyard proved to be too big, however, and I woke up before I got the chance.

Meanwhile, the Courtyard by Marriott keeps calling me daily with scam promotions using the same non-responsive robocall program. I'm going to go to war with someone over this, I just don't know who it is yet.