Nondescript dream quickly turns ugly

I was in Seattle with a group of younger people. I don’t know how we hooked up, but apparently, we had some history.

I rode my bike to the shed where a meeting was going to be held. Only three or four of us would meet at a time. We made it a practice to hold drills, a kind of impromptu game of hide and seek, keeping our location a secret even from other members.

“Get your bikes into the shed!” the group’s defacto leader shouted at me and another guy. “And turn on the sprinkler to make it look like we’re not here!”

We rushed to do as he said, but it was too late. Several other group members had spied us. Now we would have to move the meeting to one of the member’s houses, which was not ideal in the cause of secrecy. For my part in the lapse of security, I was told to wait outside.

Looking in at the group from the front porch, I was singled out by the leader, a pudgy kid who seemed to remember me from somewhere.

“I don’t like that one,” he said flatly, instructing the others to make sure I stayed on the porch.

“What did I ever do to you?” I protested.

I got the vague sense that this was an old elementary school beef come back to haunt me, and I quietly accepted my fate. Ultimately, it didn’t matter because the meeting had to be moved yet again, this time to an outdoor venue in the park.

My friend E____ was with me now, and we were about to watch one of the group members make a speech. Just then, an ambulance drove up and parked nearby. Some men jumped out and presented something akin to a gray nightie to my friend.

At first it seemed that she had just been chosen to receive a gift of the free article of clothing, but it was a ruse. As soon as she got to the front of the crowd, they grabbed her, wrangled her into the dress and then threw her into the ambulance. Atop the back of the ambulance, David Lee Roth leered at me evily as they sped away, with me running after them, screaming.

My first thought was that this was some kind of intervention by her parents to get her to come back home and live with them. But given the political climate, I began to suspect a larger plot. She was the only young woman of prime breeding age in the group, and this place was looking more and more like the dystopian Gilead of the Handmaid's Tale.