1625: From the Subconscious Mind

I had a weird dream last night, or possibly this morning, I’m not sure. It’s been a while since I had a truly weird dream, so this one sort of stood out a bit. It wasn’t quite a nightmare, but it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, either. It was vivid, though, and unlike a lot of dreams it appears to have stayed in my memory for longer than five minutes after it happened.

I’m not sure if there was a “setup” to the situation in which I found myself, but I was in a play. I was convinced it was Twelfth Night (which I have both been in and directed on two different occasions) but it clearly wasn’t, because I was playing a character called Lord Parry, who is not in Twelfth Night. I was then half-convinced that it was The Wizard of Oz (which I have also been in) but there is not a character in that called Lord Parry, either. (I played both Uncle Henry and Lord Growlie, both of whom only appear in the stage version and are consequently largely unknown to anyone who has only ever seen the movie.)

Anyway, the point was, I was in some sort of play. And I wasn’t ready for my scene. I wasn’t in costume. For some reason, I found myself putting on a suit, even though I knew somewhere inside me that the suit wasn’t my costume. I did up my tie and was ready, and realised that it was time to get on stage, but that I was at the wrong end of the theatre. I had to run downstairs and get into the backstage area — quite why I wasn’t getting changed in the backstage area is a mystery I guess we’ll never solve — and prepare to go on, but I was suddenly hit with stage fright.

This wasn’t normal stage fright. I realised that I had forgotten my lines and cues — and wasn’t sure that I knew them at all in the first place. I found a copy of the play lying backstage and tried to flip through to where the on-stage actors had got to, but was completely unable to find it, however frantically I searched. In the meantime, I could hear what was clearly a cue — someone calling Lord Parry’s name. It came again, and I still wasn’t ready. Eventually, the actors on stage started improvising — initially with some simple lines that drew giggles from the audience, eventually culminating in what appeared to be a full musical number that they had collectively pulled out of thin air.

Meanwhile, I was still backstage, frantically leafing through the book, hoping to find my scene, when I realised that I was fully visible to the audience. I was standing behind a chest-high wall — possibly a bookcase or something? — and I looked up to see the audience gazing at me, or were they paying more attention to the increasingly elaborate improvisations of my castmates on stage?

Eventually, the on-stage shenanigans had deviated so far from the plot of the play that it had become absolutely impossible for me to make an entrance, so I simply ran. And then I woke up.

How odd. Not the most pleasant thing to experience, but equally a peculiarly fascinating incident. And probably one that has disappeared into my subconscious, never to be seen again.