Cinderella Not Invited to the Party

I had a disturbing dream the other night which brought to the surface one of my little hang-ups.

I dreamed that I was in some kind of gift shop/tourist shop/tattoo and piercing place. I was wandering around from room to room (it was almost as though it had been added onto as it grew). In the building were M (a work acquaintance), my sister E., and my ex-husband.

I was killing time because somehow I knew that the other three people in the dream were planning to either give or attend a big party and I was kind of lingering around to give them a chance to invite me. At the same time, though, I wanted to play it cool in case they weren't planning to invite me (this is where my hang-up comes in...I'm often not invited to social events for whatever reason).

I wandered through the tattoo/piercing place, where my ex was getting a really gory and weird piercing somewhere on his neck. I was grossed out, so I wandered on. M was leaning against the wall in another room, so I gave a vague smile and passed on. I looked around a room full of tourist knick-knacks, and decided to give it one more pass-through.

I started to go back to the rooms with the people I knew, but through the cracks in the door, I saw one of them donning a costume for the party. It was a Sideshow Bob costume, and the hair/wig was enormous, easily larger than the person wearing it. I realized that they'd decided not to invite me (or had forgotten me), so I went out to the parking lot and got in my car. It turned out to be a rental car, so I thought, "Well, since I'm not busy tonight, I'll just get this returned early."

Marriage

In an unusual twist on the wedding dream, last night I realized that my boyfriend and I had somehow gotten married. Concerningly, however, I couldn't remember having a wedding. When I thought back, I could "remember" some sort of ceremony, but without any of my own friends or family. When I realized that my mom hadn't been at my wedding, I got so sad I almost started crying. I thought that maybe the marriage should be annulled, since we hadn't even had a proper wedding. I was somewhat comforted by the fact that we could have a reception when we got back to Minneapolis, and that I could send cute invitations for that (I was thinking something with black and white stripes, vaguely French).

I decided to go to bed or take a nap, and to listen to my neighbor's "audio logs"--kind of a streaming audio blog, I think, and entirely a dream invention--for comfort. Somehow, though, I ended up at a party she was hosting, with a bunch of people I knew from various lives. One friend was telling me about the single-wide mobile home he'd bought with the help of another friend (she said she'd put in $1200, and when the housing market crashed, that investment had disappeared). My neighbor came over and asked me how I was doing, and I was about to tell her how sad I felt about the wedding debacle. Then I woke up, and was SO relieved that I wasn't married or in the middle of wedding business in real life!

Invitation

I can't remember all of this dream, but this scene stands out. My sister and I were at our childhood home, both of us adults. We were there for some kind of holiday, I think. Anyway, Ellen was packing up to go somewhere, and I asked where she was going, and she made it pretty clear that she was going to be with friends, and that I wasn't invited. I was pretty hurt, and decided that I would just go ahead and travel back to my home because clearly my sister didn't like me anymore.