Yeah, Right
I had a strange dream last
night. OK, they’re all strange, but this one especially. I was in a Shakespeare
play, or a Shakespeare-like play. I didn’t recognize it. It seems now that it
might have been King Lear or perhaps The Tempest. It’s not clear because I
never read either one and can barely remember ever seeing them, unlike, say, Romeo and Juliette, which I have seen
way too many times. At least one scene was set in a library and I was Prospero.
It seemed upon waking that some of the words and images were from the Peter
Greenway film Prospero’s Books. The
library was filled not with books but with DVDs, and I was unpacking new DVD
players and stacking them on shelves while reading my lines.
In the dream I was filling in
for another actor and I was “on book.” Now here’s the thing: even though I was
reading my lines in the dream the words poured forth in a torrent without pausing
to try and remember what comes next, meaning my unconscious mind had either memorized
and stored away lines from a play I hadn’t seen in approximately 20 years or I
was unconsciously writing the script as I went along, with page after page of
Shakespearean words tumbling out in a tempest of language. The thing that
astounded me when I woke up was the realization that the unconscious mind could
do such a thing, which I could never come close to doing while awake. Perhaps
there was a half-awake moment when I realized that, and maybe that’s why I was
reading my lines instead of reciting them. In whatever part of my mind the
words came from I knew that I could not even read so many lines without
stumbling, so in the dream I did stumble at one point but recovered nicely with
passionately dramatic gestures.
Hey, I’m an actor. In my dreams. In my waking
life I think I’ll stick to reviewing the work of real actors.
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