Had a dream that a man selected me to help kill himself.

He was a friend in the dream but is not anyone I recognized.

He had a wife and four children.  The children were all married.  They were a happy and energetic family. He was old and had decided he was ready to die.

Now it gets weird.

The wife and family all knew this was planned.  They were pleased the old man had selected me to help him. They trusted me. I was much more leery about it than they were, and felt awkward around them.  We went to dinner.  One daughter spoke to me, quite cheerfully, talking about how it was a little odd for her because she had known me all these years, and now her father had told her she was to take orders from me and treat me with the respect and reverence she had treated her father. 

The father went off to wait for me.  I slept in a bed they provided me, not large but not small, with a brown bedspread.  I don't know how long I slept. I slept dressed but then cleaned up in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and the like. The wife and father had a business of dregging a body of water for precious minerals. I didn't understand how it worked but she made a run in an old ship, then turned the ship over to the old me.  It was to be in this ship that the old man killed himself, with my assistance.

He had given full guidance for everything to be done.  I just had to follow instructions.  I did. The result scuppered the ship, drowning the old man in the hull. Oddly, I could see that happening.  

Afterward, there was some paperwork to complete, verifying what I had done and seen.  The family thanked me.  I explained my next steps, notifying various entities.  The paperwork would prove it all, along with some photos I now had.

Now the dream gets strange.

I returned to a place and ended up in a training process. Another was sitting beside me.  There was nothing significant about the training, just sitting with others, watching television in a lit room. I set the paperwork down.  The younger man beside me, a stranger, snatched it up.  I asked for it back.  He insisted that it wasn't mine.  I knew it was but could not prove it and didn't want to get into a fight over some papers.  Somehow it came to the point that he was going to tear the papers up. I told him, if he tears the papers up, to put them onto the copying machine so I could copy the torn papers.  He agreed to this. 

I tried again to get the papers but couldn't.  I went off to get coffee.  When I returned, he was gone, along with the papers.  

I awoke. After feeding a cat, I returned to sleep.  The dream continued.

I was in a coffee shop with others. It was not a coffee shop I recognized but everyone seemed to know me.  On the other side, around a corner, was where I'd been watching the training. It was not very crowded. I was looking for my coffee, then found and drank it, and then remembered the papers and the copying machine. I realized the young man who had taken the papers was gone.  Going to the machine, I lifted the cover and found the torn papers in a pile. I began sorting through them, trying to put them back together.

Then I awoke.

Most of the dream was very clear. I can describe the water where they mined as smooth and flat muddy jade. Cattails stuck out of it.  The sky is overcast. It's dawn when I help the man kill himself, and it's chilly, with a slight mist rising from the water. The ship is large and old, worn and rusty, painted white above the water line but dominated by orange rust. The things that are unclear are the people.  I can't describe any of them except that the husband and wife were old and small. 

I have to think more about what this dream means.  I'm usually able to put some meaning to it when I think about it and write down details but nothing has come to me today.  I'll tell my wife about it later.  She's good at helping me sort through dreams.