Darchelle (I think) and I are packing to go on a trip from a house belonging to her parents, who have already left. There are actually two houses, one big one on top of the hill and another partway down a mostly open slope of lawn and a few trees. In the lower house, we pack a suitcase in an upstairs bedroom then go down to the basement where we put a rifle and what looks like an antique but functional machine gun into the storage area of what looks like an upholstered piano bench, as if it were a second suitcase. Darchelle points out that the machine gun won't fit so I rearrange things to fit it in. As we are taking the piano bench and the suitcase outside I notice that the propane fireplace is still on and remind Darchelle that we need to turn it off before we leave. Once outside, I realize that it will be cumbersome to travel with the piano bench so I try to repack everything into the suitcase but the rifle is too long to fit.

One of our bus tickets is partly buried in the sand about 100 feet away by the corner of the house so I run over there to get it but as I run, I do a couple of long jumps. Daniel (I think) notices and comments that I am probably showing off for the young woman who is running ahead of me. I concede that he is probably correct. Reaching the ticket, I see that it is bright yellow and in the shape of a Maple or Sycamore leaf, but I do not pick it up.

We are now partway up the hill to the other house. I realize that I do not need to bring the machine gun with us so I hop on a child's bicycle, the kind with no pedals, and coast down the hill to the lower house. As I do so, someone asks if the gun is loaded so I look down and see three bullets in the magazine, which is a cylinder about a foot long and several inches wide made of wire mesh. The lead tips of two of them are broken off but one looks intact.
On the lawn in front of the house I pass someone playing a game like croquet with a flesh-colored ball.
Reaching the house, I find a woman checking the mailbox and I assume that Darchelle's parents have asked her to check on the house and pick up mail in their absence. She is perhaps in her 30s, slender with sharp features neither particularly pretty nor unattractive, and wearing a blue dress. Feeling that I should let her know who I am, I tell her, "I am Brian Pendleton and I am married to their daughter Susan, I mean Darchelle", referring to Darchelle's parents and feeling a little embarrassed about my slip of the tongue. "I was married to Susan before", I explain.
As we sit down on the porch railing to talk, the woman leans forward and the front of her dress falls open, almost revealing her breasts. We talk about how most of the berries have gone bad this year but as we do, I notice that on the bush hanging over the porch, many of the berries are still good. It is not clear what kind of berries they are. They grow in clusters like a Viburnum but the leaves are oval, rugose and leathery and the berries themselves are translucent and somewhat greenish like a gooseberry. I point them out to the woman and we pick a few to taste them. Darchelle's mother Donna sits down with us. Wearing a long pink dress, she sits still and is silent.

The details of this dream were elusive as I lay in bed trying to remember them but I think that what I have recalled is reasonably accurate. Other than Donna and the woman in the blue dress, the characters were vague and I had only a sense of their presence but never saw them or definitively identified them. The objects on the other hand - the piano bench, the machine gun, the bus ticket, the bicycle, the mailbox and the berries - were mostly detailed and clear. The setting, as I understood it in the dream, and Darchelle's mother appearing as she does in a photo from my wedding celebration with Darchelle on Orcas, both clearly reference Darchelle, whom is also the person accompanying me in the dream. On the other hand I clearly associate the woman in the blue dress with Susan when we were first married. The two houses themselves could suggest two marriages. Taken together, these associations suggest that the dream is comparing aspects of my marriages to Susan and to Darchelle.
Given that framework, it should be straightforward to identify the meaning of the other symbols but that is not the case. I and my companion, with whom I am both familiar and comfortable even though in my dream I do not clearly identify her, are packing to go on a trip. That trip is not identified but could be a honeymoon, or a significant change of life situation such as marriage. If so, the machine gun from the basement could represent emotional defenses, defenses which like the antique and perhaps nonfunctional gun, may be ineffective and apparently unnecessary anyhow. With Susan, I brought my defenses into the marriage and never relinquished them; that has been much less true of my marriage to Darchelle. The process of packing and the items we packed suggest that entering into marriage, I did not know what to expect, which was also more true with Susan than with Darchelle. The piano bench might refer to setting up a home together since in both marriages, one of our early acts together was to purchase a piano. The child's bicycle, which like the machine gun I decide we do not need on our trip, may reflect that Darchelle and I do not have children together.
With the woman in blue I look back at my marriage to Susan. Symbolized by the glimpse of her breasts, sex was part of Susan's appeal, something I did not recognize until after we were married. An interest in gardening, and even berry-picking, was something I brought into my relationship with Susan as well. The berry bush is a complex symbol; the clusters of berries resemble Viburnum bushes, which I associate with Jackson, but the leaves are similar to those of the Daphne bush which is currently flowering in Darchelle's and my front yard and the berries resemble the gooseberries which grow in our backyard. Jackson, where I grew up and my parents have lived since I was first married to Susan, is also suggested by the ticket which looks like a yellow Maple leaf and the flesh-colored ball which I associate with croquet and also, albeit inexplicably, with youth and naïveté, i.e. childhood. Jackson, while important in both my marriages, was probably more significant in my marriage to Susan. Tension with in-laws in Jackson has cropped up in both relationships.
Donna's cameo at the conclusion of the dream suggests that ultimately, the dream is about my marriage with Darchelle and the life which we, secure in each other's love, are living out together.