Wedding dreams, anxious

The dream was convoluted.

( First it was my wedding, then it was a friend's )

Then I shifted context again and realized it was actually my Sister's wedding. Everything was going horribly from my perspective, and my social anxiety was triggered as hell. I was trying to hold it together and not quite succeeding. Mom was trying to calm me down and get me to act more appropriately, which was making it worse. I was remembering to myself that my sister's actual wedding went better than this, so how was it all possible?

That caused me to "remember" in the dream that my brother-in-law had died in a tragic car accident a couple years before, and my sister had basically refused to go on more than two dates with anybody until this charming, creepy (to me) guy named Ray Finn McCool came into the picture. They haphazardly arranged a wedding in a few month's time. I was supposed to be my sister's attendant. Ray refused the idea of me officiating again, saying he wanted somebody more "neutral" and that he wasn't comfortable with a Pagan minister. Even so, Ray somehow got her to cut me out of the wedding entirely at the last minute. I was a basket-case about it, again, saying I'd have worn a better-for-me dress and skipped the makeup had I known, but actually being upset over the loss itself.

Then I spent a chunk of time with them setting up the altar space for the wedding, only to realize belatedly that they'd wanted the time alone, but my sister was strangely not telling me what she needed. Once I realized, I pointed out to her that she could have just told me. She looked slightingly at me and said I should have known - using those words specifically so it would sting more, although it wasn't clear if that was her conscious choice or not. (Most likely it was my brain's choice for maximum drama.)

At some point in there, I spent a little bit of alone time with Ray. For some reason he had both latex condoms and essential oils on the altar, and I laughed and pointed out how incompatible those two things were. He said that was the whole point - he's fixed, so he wouldn't get her pregnant, they'd be monogamously married and thus wouldn't need protection against STIs, so this was a symbolic way of declaring that they needed no protection from each other. I had a nagging feeling that it was a way of symbolically *breaking* her remaining protection against him, but I couldn't tell if he chose it purposefully or not.

All the while he talked down to me as though he liked me but considered me basically crazy and stupid, and I "remembered" that he'd always treated me like that, and over the time my sister was with him, she'd started treating me that way too. I kept telling myself "He's nice, he likes me", but couldn't shake the sense that something was deeply wrong.

After walking away from my sister and Ray, I realized that his name was Fionn mac Cumhaill, the Irish hero of legend, and that he had my sister snowed somehow.

I ran to the back room where D was watching all the kids, to ask her about Fionn mac Cumhaill, but for some reason Mom stopped me - I think saying there wasn't time for such things, as the ceremony was starting.

So I had to watch them get married, knowing that this guy wasn't who he seemed, and that he was gaslighting me to keep me as unstable as possible whenever she could see me, so she wouldn't trust my judgement, and isolating her. Obviously the beginning of an abuse pattern, but WHY? He wanted her for himself for some reason, and I realized he considered her kids with her previous husband a threat as well.

I dropped into Otherspace to go check him out, and caught him negotiating with some Power or other to get me out of the way - I was the one he found most threatening, apparently. She already wouldn't trust Mom's judgement about him, and none of the others could see his nature clearly enough to give feedback. When I heard him mention intent to get my niece and nephew out of the way, I went up to him, invisible, grabbed him by the hair, and whispered threateningly into his ear that if he laid so much as a fucking FINGER on MY KIDS (by which I meant any kids I cared about, but ESPECIALLY the children of my blood) I would have his blood.

I then came out of that space, and ran to tell my Mom and Sister what I'd learned. I looked to my sister apologetically and said, point blank, "You shouldn't have married him. I'm sorry." She wasn't happy, but I'd broken the spell. It remained to be seen what would happen next - weddings are, before the gods, binding, rule-changing events.

I then woke up feeling urgently the need to write up the last part and tell it to my sister, and to look up Fionn mac Cumhaill, although I see nothing pertinent in the stories about him... I notice his childhood includes a run with cooking the Salmon of Knowledge/Wisdom, like the bit in how Taliesin was created, but that doesn't really clarify.

Now I'm trying to figure out if the last part of the dream really mattered, and whether I need to tell my sister about it.

-E-