Scenes From a Night's Dream (inspiration)

We were in a hotel room and she was in a box and she would not come out.

"He is Bob, eager for fun.
He wears a smile, everybody run."
(Twin Peaks)

Had the opportunity to attend a run-through of Scenes From a Night's Dream on Thursday night. The first act is a dream, and by that I mean it takes place inside a dream. There are so many entrances and exits, it's dizzying. But it's delightful. It's also horrifying.

My wife sent me to the basement to rub toothpaste on a couple of fuses. I went to the basement, the light was out, but I knew there was a fluorescent light on a cord down there, so I hurried down the stairs and found the light. I could just see the old fuse box, way across the room. I could see other things, too, and that scared me so I fled back up the stairs as fast as I could go.

The subject of my dreams has been a major part of my waking life, especially in the past couple of years. Is that true for others? Or is that incredibly self-indulgent? Musing on random imaginings which make sense only to me.

It was so big inside my parents’ house. Their bedroom was massive, with flocked wallpaper and Trompe-l'œil ceiling. But there was terrible mold and water damage. I offered that anyone who needed a place to stay the night might live there.

"Mama! Papa!"
(In the Night Kitchen)

In the past several years, between the death of my mother and the pandemic, these amorphous journeys have loomed large, featuring undocumentable trends which are difficult to trace.

With my brother and his wife in a crumbling old house. I was lecturing them about not setting the spider webs on fire.

During the lockdown, my subconscious was out there, in the world that I was visiting with much less frequency. For the past year or so, interiors have played a strong role in my dream space. And while they can be grandly spacious they are also worn and aged.

There was this rap act. They had a demo that they tried to re-record but it wasn’t as good so they made a video from the demo. For some reason, I held this particular act in contempt and used an app on my phone to change the lettering on the marquee to read “Comedians Rap Now.”

My parents stately home is often a location I return to. They may or may not be there, and the rooms are not actually the rooms as they were, but physical manifestations of the emotions those rooms represented. 

A large school many kids, flooding. High water. Lots of snacks. A beautiful schoolroom. So many kids.

Source: Cleveland Clinic Foundation

Returning to these neglected rooms, I lamented not having sold my parents' house when it was still in good order. I woke relieved because I had actually sold it. I once held a great sense of responsibility to keep the place, but that would not have made me happy. And so my dream actually reminded me that I had made a good decision, which is a useful thing for a dream to do.

Tooling down a street in my old neighborhood, noting homes that had been torn down we missed the turning and drove into the cemetery, which appeared from the opposite end to be a packed theater house.

The first act of Scenes From a Night's Dream tells a story where nothing is real but everything is true. James plays a menacing character (actually, he does that in both acts) and the other night he told me he'd unlocked the entire play in one line. I was shocked because he was absolutely correct, but I was unaware of it. You'll have to come see the show to figure out what that line is. 

Different rooms, different spaces. A big event. I was dressed as a mime, but I had to go around. Part of the performance included a shadow play in which a ballerina got stuck but was rescued by a fox with the voice of Prince.

"Scenes From a Night's Dream" by David Hansen and directed by Cory Molner, closes out the NEOMFA Playwrights Festival at Convergence-Continuum, February 16, 17 & 18, 2023