Some dreams are easier to analyze than others ...

I had a dream last night - long and a little convoluted - wherein I was passing by my ex's house and noticed that it seemed to be on fire.  Yes, it had a fire in the fireplace on the first floor, but it was a pier and beam house, and there was also fire that I could see in the crawl space under the house.

I went up and banged on the front door.  When she answered, I told her, "Your house is on fire!" expecting some alarm in her reaction.

She merely said, "Yes, I know. We're taking care of it" and then walked out the front door with a handful of things she was saving from the fire.  She was emptying the house one small load at a time.  Granted, the fire wasn't growing quickly, but she was more concerned about saving bits and pieces of things than saving the whole.  There was someone else living there, maybe one of our children or maybe another relative on her side, but they were even more passive than she was about the danger.  There was also a younger male, maybe a renter, who had gone down to what was now a basement, and no longer just a crawl space, and was working the edges of the fire with a fire extinguisher. Really, all he was doing was keeping it contained in a certain horizontal space, without trying to keep it from burning anything above. She was trying to encourage him and didn't want to interfere, though she actually said, in the dream, something she had told me in the waking world, "Relax. I'm just a lot more comfortable being codependent than you are."  The first time I heard it in real life, I imagined a pod waiting for me, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I tried to be patient - far, far too patient, as I usually was during our marriage, and even helped carry a few heavier things out to the front yard, while still urging her to do something about the fire.  Finally, I accepted the fact that, I needed to either put out the fire or walk away, because I wasn't helping anybody - me, her or anyone else in the house - by being "helpful."

By the end of the dream, I had put out the fire and then left as well.

It wasn't exactly a cut-and-dried dream about the end of that marriage, though, because, in the dream, I was no longer living there, and just happened to be passing by.