Thursday, June 15, 2023

Unsafe Dreams

I've participated in a fair amount of force-on-force training of the "sims guns and dull knives and inert pepper spray" variety, but I'm certainly not qualified to conduct any. Not only do I not consider myself an instructor, I have absolutely zero desire to be one.

Yet in my dream last night, I was conducting this force-on-force scenario for a group of people, and it was a fairly complex one. There was a narrow street, lined with shops and cluttered with market stalls and populated with role players, and the participants would navigate their way from one end of the street to the other, with a couple role players who would interact with them in varying levels of annoyance, insistence, and even aggressiveness if sufficiently mishandled.

All fairly normal, except people kept wandering through the middle of the scenario. Various TV reporters and their camera crews would come traipsing in, or people who wanted to watch the class, or whatever.

Now, if you've done this stuff, at least with a reputable instructor, you know that the scenario area is supposed to be completely sterile, with nobody in it who hasn't been patted down and had their pockets emptied of anything even vaguely weapon-y. Yet here I had people just wandering through and I kept having to call the whole thing to a halt and shoo them out and try and restart the scenario.

I woke up feeling maddeningly frustrated and the day hadn't even started.

"Whaddaya mean there's someone behind me?"