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 what's it to you? who go blather from