dream_play epitome of incomprehensibility I'm in an indoor auditorium, watching a Shakespeare play. I think it's Hamlet, which I've never seen in real life. Before a famous soliloquy, Hamlet breaks character, or rather changes character: now he's an actor just beginning to learn Hamlet's part. A screen rolls down and projects the words of his soliloquy, which don't start with "to be or not to be," which are in a compact paragraph rather than rhythmic lines. The character he's just been talking to? He becomes the director of this play-within-a-play. Sternly, he advises the actor to put more emotion in his voice. 240930 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Two dream plays. I guess both relate to how I_joined_a_band_of_musical_pirates, but the first was explicitly Pirates of Penzance, dreamed up before I did the actual thing in mid-March. As in real life, I didn't have to come on until Song 6. But I was worried because I was missing some hairpins. I needed those pins. When I found some, they were all different lengths - I needed two the same length. I started to panic. Then there was an announcement booming into the dressing room. Unfortunately, this performance would be postponed. John F. Kennedy had just been shot, and in light of such a sad event, it seemed right to postpone the silly musical. The man playing the Major General walked in, boasting that he'd found out about the news before we did. "I was outside on a smoke break," he said, "and some guys told me." (In real_life. I told Gilbert this (I'll call him Gilbert) when we were both at McGill's performance of Iolanthe, waiting for it to start. He laughed his booming laugh. "Your dream got [Major General's] personality right, at least.") 250330 ... e_o_i The second dream play was last night. it started irrelevantly, with me emailing a man in Germany. In my dream_mind, it was one year instead of two since I'd gone to the country for immer_immersion, and I was going again that summer for the Level 4 course. I had TK as a roommate again, but a new host: a young couple with a toddler instead of an older pair with two adult daughters. The man had emailed me, and I found it only polite to reply. He replied right away. It felt like a chat. I'd already told him a bit about myself so I wanted to tell him how great TK was. The dilemma: 1) If I send message after message it might annoy him, or even worry his wife - she might think I'm hitting on him. 2) If I don't say anything about TK and just talk about myself, I'll seem selfish. Besides, I'm not just faking my praise for TK - she's genuinely a good person. The dilemma was resolved the way only a dream dilemmas can be: that is, I was magically de-aged to a teenager and tasked with performing in a high school play. In the play, I might have had an imaginary bird. Or I might have been mixing things up with my actual Grade 11 play, where I was a sidekick madwoman in The Madwoman of Chaillot. In any case, I remember intermission. All the participating classes were sitting in the cafeteria, chatting excitedly. Our talk resounded off the walls. The atmosphere was warm, buzzing, vibrant. It created a space of mind where I could nurture my own creative ideas and be social at the same time. Then a teacher interrupted. "Quiet down in here! The audience is in Hall 15 now!" I knew, everyone knew, that this was a room where cafeteria noise easily filtered through. Chastened, we shuffled outside, in between cylindrical blocks that would stop cars from going through. As if someone would want to ram a car into the school doors. Our non-carred bodies slipped through, just as worries from dimly remembered news events had apparently slipped into my dream_mind. But here my worry was just that people would wander off and not be back in time for the play's second act. 250330 ... raze i think i've walked onstage for every play i've ever performed in while dreaming completely unprepared. which is pretty funny, because in my waking_life i was always more prepared than anyone when it came to this stuff. in dreams i always end up having to wing it, either improvising a one-man show or forcing the rest of the cast to adapt on the fly when they realize i don't know my lines and we're all going to have to throw the script away. my best dream play was probably the one that mutated into an impromptu musical, with me growling a song called "something alive". it sounded a little like tom_waits singing on top of the "matlock" theme. honourable mention goes to the christmas play in which i was a foul-mouthed santa claus. 250331 ... e_o_i I'm in a college auditorium to see a Gilbert and Sullivan musical with others in the "light opera" group. The assistant director assures us that this performance will be "exactly like ours this year." Same play, same staging directions...maybe not the same costumes, but still. Too much sameness. Won't it be killing some welcome suspense to see something *exactly* like our upcoming performance, even if it helps me prepare? So I skip the play, sneaking out into the hallway to respond to a dream_note. 250912 ... e_o_i (Also, the upcoming play will be NEXT year. Tsk, tsk, dream Daveen. Daveen and Colleen, Halloweenly haunting dreams.) 250912 ... ovenbird I’ve returned to high school where I am auditioning for a part in a theatrical version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I will be competing for a lead against Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan, which strikes me as completely unfair. Everyone says that Alyson is a shoe-in for Willow, given that she literally WAS Willow. Alyson is very modest and tries to encourage the other people waiting for an audition. Unfortunately I discover that I am not even remotely prepared (I do not know how to dance, I have not memorized a monologue). I decide to bail on my audition and am leaving the auditorium when I run into Sarah Michelle Gellar and she convinces me that I could just make up a monologue on the spot. I decide there’s nothing to lose and get up on the stage where I proceed to give a humiliating performance in which I pretend to be a self absorbed teenage boy. After, I watch Sarah Michelle Gellar give a passionate monologue which even has dramatic music piped in at the end. I’m sure that I’ll never be given a part in the play and my suspicions are confirmed as I’m leaving the auditorium and overhear the choreographer and the director whispering about how horrible my monologue was. I don’t know who was ultimately cast in the play, but it sure as hell wasn’t me. Improv was never my strong suit. 251112 ... e_o_i I'm back at school with younger people; they have a habit of casting me in plays where my character's in danger. Amanda starts it. Not my childhood friend Amanda, but someone I know only from the Holocaust literature course last year...so my dream_mind must have connected her to that. The play she's writing is set in the imaginary girls' school from Charlotte Brontë's The_Professor, which takes place maybe ninety years before WW2, but in dreamworld it's the scene of a historical war crime: when the Nazis invade Belgium, they shoot a number of teenage students in this school - misaimed revenge for another attack. (Like Lidice in then-Czechoslovakia?) Anyway, I'm to play Hortense, an annoying girl who keeps talking in class but still doesn't deserve to get murdered. Amanda studies me critically. I have blond hair, like the character, but she thinks Hortense's face should be different. Younger, for one thing. But she gives up on the face, saying with authority, "It's disrespectful to make face masks based on war victims, but you should at least have the school uniform." I look at what she and another girl are wearing: a bluish-grey smock over a white collared shirt. "I don't have a shirt or dress in that colour," I say, as if costume departments don't exist. "Oh...all right." Amanda is impatient. "Wear this." She hands me a purple tie. It's too long for me, and, I think, perhaps historically inaccurate: girls' school uniforms at that time (1850? 1939?) wouldn't have "men's" ties. But once I have it tucked in and fairly neat, a boy with a long mane of dark hair accosts me in the hallway. He seems to be a teenager himself. He needs an actor in his play for his final project, and could I possibly help? Can I help it? I'm walking down the hall with him as he's telling me about a story he wrote that got good marks. It was about a trans boy, or young man, rather, who was moving away from home for the first time, but he didn't want to adapt that into a play because it wasn't true enough to his own life experience. "I don't want people to think I'm being inauthentic," he explains. "Like if I did that World War 2 story..." I shake my head a little. Maybe Amanda was a bit impatient with me, but she didn't seem to be doing anything wrong. She wanted to be respectful, even if her ideas about respect were a little weird. So I ask him something like "What does being authentic mean to you?" He tilts his head with its shaggy hair and says something like, "I have to be me, but the character can't be me." Cut to the play. I'm in a boarding school and all the beds are in one room. My character has a funny monologue about this situation: when masturbation is discouraged, you have to collect hair elastics. But they turn out to be twist ties. Or coffee stirring sticks. In any case, they have to be rounded up and returned to the "dorm leader." At last I don't have to talk anymore. And now I'm in a more exciting scene. But I can't see the stage. Tent canvas surrounds me. And then I realize: this is the scene where I'm caught in a convoluted tent during a rainstorm and I have to escape before I drown. Genuine fear grabs me. At least for the historical play, I knew how it ended and I knew I was just playing the character. Is this me - am I caught? Do I have any way of cutting the canvas and escaping? 251204 what's it to you? who go blather from