Capture the Flag

I was playing an outdoor game with a bunch of people I knew from TMC and Pocatello. It had originally been Capture the Flags, but had been modified so that there was just one big flag, with one team guarding it and the other team trying to get to it. The terrain consisted of a small bowl-shaped valley with steep hills all around it, such that the tops of the hills on two sides were inaccessible for some reason. The offensive team would start out on one ridge, and the defensive wherever they wanted aside from that ridge (e.g., on the opposite ridge or down in the valley itself. The flag (a white rag on a long stick) was always somewhere on the opposite ridge. The jail had been eliminated; if a player from the attacking team got tagged, they were out for the rest of that game. For the attacking team to win, it was simply necessary for one of them to touch the flag. For the defending team to win, they just had to tag all the attackers. With these modifications the games went very fast, which I think was the idea. The defenders usually won.

When we were choosing the teams between games, this was done inside a building, in a room with a bunch of folding chairs. I don't remember there being any transition between the playing area and that room; the scene would just shift in the dream. There would be two team captains, but the method used to pick the teams was a bit unusual. They would start out taking turns claiming players, until each had filled up half their team. Then, to divide up the other half of the players, the "divider/chooser" method was employed. One captain would divide the remaining players into two groups (with the requirement that they be equal in size) then the other player would pick which group he or she wanted.

For some reason I ended up on the defensive team in every game. In the last round before I woke up, I very nearly got to the flag. Part of the way around the opposite ridge, there was a thick barrier of sagebrush. The flag had been placed behind this. I was running along one side of the sagebrush, looking for an opening, and someone on the other team was running along the other side, trying to block me. I caught glimpse of the flag and ran straight up towards it, through a narrow opening between bushes, but got tagged as soon as I gained the summit, within a foot of touching the flag pole.