dream fragment

This dream was during a period of a few days that I didn't pay much attention to my dreams due to a little bit of real-world stress, so here is a fragment...

I remember going mini-golfing by myself in a place where there were lots of other people already there, in groups, in couples, with their kids... I felt sort of out-of-place but perfectly fit-in at the same time. Anyway, I started talking to some other guy there a couple years younger than me, who had come there with friends but split up with them for some reason. We were in the middle of a casual conversation when my friend Adam (my usual DM in RL) came up to me to tell me about a new DnD mission he had for me in the DnD world, a different dimension, but that i had to keep it under wraps. He left really quickly. Apparently I didn't keep this new mission thing serious, because I started bragging to this other guy about how I play DnD and about how much I loved it. I knew I shouldn't be bragging, but I couldn't stop my dream self from doing so...This other guy told me that he played DnD, too, but not as long as I had, so we had a conversation about DnD.... I think later on we both had to work on the mission together, and the other guy ended up being smarter and stronger than me. I don't remember any of what the mission was, but I distinctly remember waking up feeling incredibly ashamed that I had opened up my big mouth in the first place.

This dream made me wish I could go back to the days where I was quiet, too shy to talk to anyone. Everybody assumed I was smart because I did my homework and got all A's, but I never had to say something and have it proved wrong... Whereas now I'm a little more open, but don't know how to say what I really mean a lot of the time, so I end up sounding like an ass or trying to make myself look a little better than I really am, and turn out to be an idiot. I habitually open my mouth even when I shouldn't.

My boyfriend Sean and I were on the shore of some beach, searching for seashells. We had already collected many, but were sent back to look for more because the previous ones were either not enough or not the right ones. My most prominent memory of this dream is a close-up of Sean, bent down serenely on the shore to pick up a shell as the waves lapped onto his legs. He was still wearing his sneakers and his pant-legs weren't even rolled up. But he looked so calm, like an angel, as his dark skin gleamed in the low sunlight. My dream self was somewhere behind him, minding her own business and searching for shells...