The fair Ophelia! Nymph in thy orisons/Be all my sins remember’d…
Last night I had the most bizarre but fascinating but, in it’s own way, excellent dream…
In this dream, drunk on magical oneiric energy, I was an actor who had been cast in a high school production of Hamlet. I wasn’t younger or back in high school in this dream, I was me, just as I am now, almost ten years removed from the high school game. I had been cast as the Prince of Denmark in a high school play in which all the other cast members were high school students. It was wild.
It was a few hours before the show and there was a rally going on at the school, in the auditorium, so the masses were at that, and the more theatre crowd (and to be fair, weren’t the drama kids at your high school kind of weird?)(No offense if you were a drama kid, but… well, you’d be all that much better at attesting to the weirdness, wouldn’t you?)(Also, at my high school[s], the drama kids were the ones more prone to orgies, but that’s a story for another time…) was all hanging around back stage and in the peripherals. Some of the kids were assembled in little clusters, either talking about which set of tights made their package look nicer and worried about a zit here or there and whether or not whatshername from their Science class would go with them to the prom.
And somehow, naturally, I’ve forgotten all my lines. For this play that we’d be rehearsing for weeks for! And so there I was, exactly as I am now, prepared to go into this performance with only the remembered lines and bits from the play that I currently possess (which, to be fair, is a good deal more than the average person I’d think since I am quite a fan of the play and… well, that’s a long story too). And I’m sitting there, trying to think, in this dream, of how I’m going to play all the scenes, which choices I liked, how big I wanted to take certain parts of it, how masculine or little boy-ish the main character would be. I’m rewinding and playing back parts of both Mel Gibson’s Hamlet and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet in my head. And even the Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet, which did have some good moments, but all of them with my favorite character and none of them having to do with the main character. I’m remembering that I saw The Bad Sleep Well, but that was so long ago. The same with Olivier’s Hamlet. I’m trying to remember all the choices actors made in those films and ponder which ones I like and which I abhored and which I’d go a different route altogether in…
And can you believe I couldn’t get anyone to go over some last minute rehearsals with me? The fuckers. I hope whatshername doesn’t go to the prom with them. I hope she goes with the captain of the whatever team or one of the guys from the FBLA.
Anyways, it was an awesome dream, if I can sound like a nerd for a moment. Very cool stuff. I mean, the dream itself was tense, a lot of running around and panicking while at the same time trying to explore so many options in my head, but… just exhilarating, you know?
