Valé Moqué

Another wildly vivid dream after I went back to sleep around 6 and wake up 2 hours later. In his dream, I'm visit a movie set which seems to be Lord of the Rings. But I'm not actually at the set itself, just sitting in a studio commissary nearby, while some of the film crew are dining. Photos of the lush New Zealand scenery and of some of the actors are hanging. (The commissary is open air, with a railing, slightly elevated above the concrete of the studio lot.) We're talking about how remarkable it is that so many of the actors in the film have gone to Eton. Several are mentioned by name and they are familiar ones (I don't actually remember them, but they are maybe people like Eddie Redmayne or Max Pirkis. 

Someone mentioned a name I've never heard of ... Valé Moqué. "I've never heard of him," I say. No, I'm told, he's definitely an old boy, and I am surprised my companion uses the phrase old boy because Etonians themselves rarely use it. Valé Moqué? I keep repeating. Yes, yes ... I'm shown a recent school list that shows he only recently "graduated" (again I am a little surprised at that word, which Etonians also rarely use). I say, "I'm still in touch with people who are there now. I will ask one of them about him."

I walk through the restaurant, past people in elegan square t tables with four chairs who seem to be having tea and being very English, saying to myself in a frightfully upperclass accent, "Eaugh, eaugh, eaugh." Perhaps I'm trying to make sure people realize I went to Eton myself.

I walk out of the commissary down a few steps and cross a concrete walkway that has people in costume moving around and then I suddenly see a huge warehouse which is really a set for "The Mikado." Abruptly, I'm no longer an observer but an actor. I enter a scene in which a lot of people are standing around in Chinese (note - NOT Japanese) attire. I myself am wearing a 19th century frock coat of some kind, and the people around me are in a circle including a lady in a purple kimono-like (but Chinese) costume. They are loading up some wagons or something, for shipping, but are moving very languidly, without enthusiasm.

I begin declaiming in a Shakespearean way (obviously acting for the camera) "Why are you here in foggy San Francisco, instead of enjoying the tropical delights of Hawaii?"

A bent, elderly lady speaks to me, but it is incomprehensible. I realize it's not English at all, but fake English as it might be comedically faked by a woman who only speaks Chinese. 

I realize that as I am in a movie, I don't actually have to say anything that makes sense when it's a foreign language, so I begin talking to her in fake Chinese. She reacts knowledgeably. Fake Chinese! I think to myself. Cantonese, to be precise! We continue the conversation in the fake languages as I wake up.

OUT OF EGYPT

In my dream, I have arrived in an Arabic speaking country, perhaps Egypt, to conduct a choir. When I enter the choir room, a low ceilinged, metallic hall, I am confronted with a motley collection of singers who are being introduced to me. First, I am introduced to the basses. There are only 2-3 of them sitting in a column on the far right, and they are all grotesque, cartoonish gorillas, very fat and much huger than the humans in the room. At the far left is a column of tenors. In between there is one row of young looking sopranos, and several rows of altos behind them.

I am bewildered and don't know how I can possibly conduct this ensemble, I go outside for a breather. There's a veranda outside overlooking an urban scene and some desert. There, the man who originally brought me to Egypt to conduct, perhaps their professor or guru, talks to me.

"It's so random," I say, "I'm not sure how to handle it."

I pull out a book in which there is a seating chart of the room inside. I look at this map and try to determine the nationalities of the singers. "If enough of them are of the same ethnicity," I say, "such as all Arab," I could handle it. I start marking up the page.

Suddenly I am aware of another person beside me. He has an auto-stamping device that prints a dark blue circular logo on the page. He starts stamping all the Arabs in the room map.

"You can't stamp this!" I say. "It's my passport." 

"All right," he says. I see now, he is preparing to take over the chorus as soon as he has figured out who all the Arabs are. He well then become the conductor, freeing me to sneak off into the moonlight, perhaps fly away. I wake up.

Mayhem at the Met

I dreamt that I was a new artistic director at the Met and it is was an opening night to end all opening nights. The theatre had all sorts of secret passageways and a pink dessert room with glass sliding doors. There were other hidden rooms with reclining seats of great luxury for secret high end members, though the view of the opera wasn't very clear. Also a control room with huge seats for members of management - and no real view of the stage. At the end, I said, “They're off to war here. Let's have three big climactic drum sequences each ending in a huge audience shout, added to the end, so the audience really knows it's the finish of a grand spectacle.” They put the sequences in. Thew audience claps in some of the wrong places but it's a huge success. (The third drum sequence takes a very long time and they start cheering and applauding far too early, but at the end there is a loud tam tam stroke and everyone is cheering madly.)

My boss, the general manager, in a tuxedo, says as I gaze at the dessert room, "there are other special areas, too, including one for men only, and a lawless room, because you can open carry weapons there." Someone offers me a steak, and says that Mikey and I should go and eat it in the lawless room. They had me the steak but the meat is in perfect spheres, slathered with a mayonnaise sauce which I am allergic to. The applause is still going on as we walk down to the llawless area, past plush velvet and columns everywhere. Mikey's steak is sliced and normal shaped, not like my spheres. We look at a photo card of how the steak is supposed to look. Mine resembles spheres of watermelon. The meat is very very soft. Everyone is praising my new ending ... except the tenor who is going around bitching about not having a curtain call. (He's wandering around in a powdered wig.)

I successfully scrape off the sauce to one side and avoid the allergy. I don't actually get to the lawless room. I've finished the food and now I am heading to the exit, which leads up a balustrade in the middle of the orchestra stalls. I begin humming music ... a descending oboe theme and a rising string figure. It's the overture, and in the dream I believe it to be La Clemenza di Tito even though earlier the opera appeared to some variant of Aida. It is just playing in my head. An old lady in a layered white dress (maybe a sort of wedding dress) says to me, "it's amazing how these tunes stay with you."

"Yes," I said, "this tune was all the way from the overture yet I remember it perfectly."

I am moving up the staircase and I remember as I wake up that this is actually the theme from Mozart's Prague Symphony, not "La Clemenza" at all.

COPS, BROTHELS, and HOSPITALS

I had a very weird dream. I am driving a large car, a Mercedes I think, in Bangkok. My parents are in the car as is Mikey. It's a long journey somewhere in Bangkok, but we have pulled out from what looks like the former Erawan Arcade (in the 1960s) and have moved towards a T-junction. (There is no T-junction there in real life). I have been parked on the left side of a very broad one way street with many lanes and I actually need to turn right, but there are are too many lanes to cross over and as I try to sneak across, a policeman pulls the car over even though I have already been forced to turn left instead of right. I park slightly out of the way. The police are in a sort of booth right in the middle of the intersection.

I rehearse what I am going to say - that I was trying to go right, there were far too many lanes ... eventually that I'm jjust going to bribe him 100 baht ... but he just doesn't come. A large limousine pulls up to my left, obscuring the view and enabling me to slip away. My parents are no longer in the car and I say to Mikey, let's stop and eat somewhere ... maybe in Chinatown. Then I reflect on how hard it is to park there. I wonder why I'm even driving in Thailand at all because I haven't done so in a decade.

We pull into a strange kind of place, like a sort of massage parlor, and they tell me and Mikey to take a look at some paintings of men working there. One of them seems to be named Anouk. This painting looks better than the others, but presently we see the real Anouk, embracing a column. He doesn't look anything like the picture. He is wearing a white sort of cheesecloth shirt unbuttoned at the top and has very dark skin and is somewhat unshaven, with a toothy kind of smile. He says to me, "Shall we get started?" in a strong Filipino accent, and indicates an inner room, and leaps into my arms with his arms around my neck in a weird parody of a bride about to be carried across the threshold. I realize this is some kind of male brothel run completely by Filipinos. I am about to say "Mikey, let's go," when he says ... "look over there ... it's Phee Mhong."

I have no clue who this is an assume it someone Mikey used to know a long time ago. When I look where he is pointing, the building has a new corridor lined with dilapidated beds and it is sort of like a hospital. The corridor is angling off to the left, at 45° from the rest of the place. There are glass doors, an exit from the building, and the corridor to the left. People are lying in the beds and they might be receving massages or medical attention, I cannot tell. There is a trio of sad looking, paunchy men at the entrance to this new corridor. They are in some kind of tribal dress and the one Mikey has indicated is an old man with white hair and a paunch and a poncho as well as some kind of loose fabric pajama bottoms. It is a depressing vista and I decide we must go, but I don;t know we can leave without engaging these people in a conversation....

A Fifth Lower

I dreamt that I'm performing a fiendishly difficult a cappella piece with a number of singers. The score is written graphically instead of in notation. Notes with ledger lines are hung from an intricate web of clothesline like lines that crisscross the page.

It is a Capella, but Loon is sitting at a piano occasionally using a note or two. My part is a bass part but for some marking reason it is written as the second of the clothesline hanging way above the others. The parts the weaving in and out andI sing one note and the next one plunges way below. The plunge is from B-flat to e flat. I successfully hit to the plunge and the pianist plays repeated e-flats confirming I managed to guess the right note. Everyone says to me, "how did you do that?"

I tell them that I just guessed from the contour of the part but it must be a fifth apart. Everybody congratulates me, but I know it is just simple logic.

SCARED WHITE

I had this dream about race and gender. I am like an advisor or social worker, a white woman, visiting a black family. There is a white neighbor, an old man who intimidates and bullies. I receive a severe tongue lashing from this guy who slams doors at me. I turn around to the family I am visiting and say, "When he sees my black boyfriend, he'll turn white." They all laugh hysterically, but with a certain amount of fear. The youngest son has a pageboy haircut and looks a lot like a girl. He is worried about getting into a good college. I say, I get you're really only pretending not to know things, that secretly you know everything and you get all As. The whole family is concurring and he is looking more and more like a girl. He has a frightened, very serious look. I wake up.

But the thing is, I thought I typed all that already, but when I searched for it on my screen, it was gone, and I have a feeling that I dreamed that I typed it because I have the feeling I have just woken up in my chair....

PLAYING CHESS WITH DEATH

I dreamed that I was a knight who has sworn eternal blood-brotherhood to another knight. But each of us has sworn fealty to a rival monarch and we have been commanded to kill each other. Instead, we are playing a game of chess, each carefully trying to figure out a way to delay the killing blow.

This was in fact a long and complex dream and I woke up thinking I MUST remember, I MUST remember, and one thing in particular is that there were three "conditions" in the dream, and one concerned two words that were circled on a lined page, written in a gorgeous round hand. Those words are gone from my memory completely.

All that remains is that final scene of the two knights sitting across a chessboard. It's like a double-vision edition of THE SEVENTH SEAL.

Gas Masks

In my first dream, I was at a rehearsal conducting and showing a stack of posters of the orchestra playing in Carnegie Hall. Then Wishwin Winry Sureeratanakorn the cellist stood up. He said look here's another poster of me. I am playing the Dvorak cello concerto. It's in Carnegie Hall too. I rifle through the posters and find his poster behind ours. I see the name of the orchestra. The initials of the orchestra are SW A R. In the dream I know the initials stand for something like south something Asia something. I ask him when the concert is and he says August 7. I say, good! I have to be in America right afterwards. I will fly in for your concert.

I wake up and find myself in another dream. I am a child in a New York apartment and I'm in a 1950s sitcom family with a Donna Reed like mother. The whole house is full of an acrid poisonous gas. Special gas masks have been issued. They are paper with Bizzarre markings and they wrap around the head. The gas masks haveA special foldout section on the two sides with additional dials and switches for special occasions.

I know that I somehow have been responsible for the gas leak. I am going to go and heroically fix it. I say to my mother, I'll have to wear the mask overnight because I'm leading the expedition to fix it. She thinks this is very sweet. She bends down to kiss me and the scene transforms into the closing moments of the TV show, with black and white and a moving score by Alexander Courage. A heart-shaped cut out provides the wipe that ends the scene. A camera push in and then I wake up.

(By the way, the heart wipe seems to come from I Love Lucy, and the "moving score" of those sitcoms wasn't by Alexander Courage - he wrote the "Star Trek" theme. The final closing chords in my dream were similar to those chords.)

The Jacuzzi of Dreams

Another really weird dream. I'm living in Hollywood in the house of a really rich and powerful person named Brian. There's a big party. A very impressive Svengali like guru shows up. He speaks of wild adventures. All the guests are enraptured though I myself am skeptical. He speaks of a journey and being boiled alive.

Suddenly we hear sounds like popping or bursting. Brightly colored globes at our feet are illuminated. The popping is the sound of a hot spring. It's vulcanism.

Water is flooding the room from overhead pipes, and the room apparently is actually a Jacuzzi.

It's very exciting but too hot. I leave the party and go upstairs to bed. I go to sleep and then I wake up again. And waking up, this is still part of the dream, I remember all that has passed as being a dream. I walked on the stairs and find a huge empty Jacuzzi filled with rich foamy water. The steam is filling the room. It's a semi-covered veranda and the water is very pale blue. The steam fills the room so I can't see much.

I think this is a great time to enjoy the Jacuzzi. I enter the water but it is chilly. I see a red LED thermometer that reads 90° hanging on the tile wall. Suddenly the Jacuzzi is full of all the party guests from last night's dream. They are all naked. They are a cross-section of the rich and famous. The Svengali stands in the middle. He says I'm here to teach you new adventure. And we must all be given by soaking together. "But," I say, "the water's too cold." He tells me I am right but to sit there anyway. "I'll wait till it gets warmer," I tell him. I leave the room. I enter a hallway and then I go through a door to a veranda where there's a way up to my room up and exterior Z-shaped staircase like a fire escape encased in a metal grid. As I go up the stairs I wake up again for real.

London Unspoken, Paris Unbroken....

Last night I started dreaming of a soundtrack that I am composing for a film in which slowly, strings were playing in triplet thirds to represent the sound of a vehicle entering a tunnel, The music welled up and alternated between C sharp minor and A minor in my dream. Then the sound of a bamboo flute joins in, Then there was a voice saying we have to make the announcement, so big this announcement, First London, London unspoken. And Paris, unbroken, We must rent this huge empty irregular polygon shaped shopping mall with an huge hall in its center to perform this music. The announcement is apocalyptic for the whole world. The mall with the polygon hall will be the beginning.

Human Sushi

In my dream, there's a war between humans and aliens. They are like giant lizards. We holed up in a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel there is a doorway made of dark wooden beams. I am hiding in a shaft to the right of the door, avoiding some crossfire. There is a huge explosion, that allows me to escape down the tunnel into the open air. As I escape, I am watching a replay of the explosion. A man in a black beard and his wife are using black gunpowder to blow themselves up. They are dressed in black but the costumes are archaic, like a western. He is wearing a black bowler hat. It is a tender scene and I know that he is doing it to save my life. I slip out of the tunnel opening. The aliens have captured all the humans. They are lined up and tied to stakes behind the counter. They are dressed quite formally in 19th-century clothes, white and beige. It is a glass counter like a pastry shop. Behind the glass are open faced sandwiches, each one topped with a quivering piece of human flesh.

At first I think it's a human sushi bar, but then it more resembles a delicatessen, as they are open bread rolls, like hot dog buns. There are sliced human flesh but also some cubed chunks, very bloody. To my surprise, the humans tied up behind the counter exhibit no signs of being hacked up and no wounds. Yet I know it is their flesh.

A lizard behind the counter is forcing the captives to eat these sandwiches, which have just been sliced from their own flesh. I slip away knowing that the old couple have lovingly blown them selves up and saved my life.

This was part of a much longer dream, but the final scenes are all I remember. The open air delicatessen with the humans tied up behind the counter was an extraordinary and vivid scene.

There seems to be a reference to my own novel that was a tie in to the V series from 1985, "V - the Alien Swordmaster" where the aliens open a human sushi bar in Tokyo.

CHOCOLATE HEARTS

Then came another dream in the late morning. In this dream, I am a woman who is in line for a heart. Hearts are being manufactured. I am listening to a disembodied voice explaining this new technology. I receive a new chocolate heart in a gift wrapped box.

The Buddha speaks in a dream

This extraordinary dream woke up me before 6 am and now I cannot get back to sleep:

I dreamt that there were three of us. One person had gone on ahead and a woman was behind me. she wore lavender. In the first room there was music playing. It was an anteroom and it was decorated in the style of the 1960s. The living room furniture had open, polished dark wooden frames with a bit of a curve to them, sort of like the curve of a longbow.

It was some kind of test or audition. I was summoned into an inner room. A man seated at a lit desk read out of my name. The lightning was fluorescent and made his face a kind of chiaroscuro silhouette. Creepy.

He pronounced my last name something like sessionseses. . Then he and the woman behind me pronounced my name correctly in Thai. The lady behind me laughed at his mispronunciation.

I play the piano. It was a white electronic piano. I play for quite some time and the music is somewhat like the opening of the Rachmaninov Vespers (a big choral piece so I am not sure how the piano produces this sound).

After a while I was called into another room. In this final room, the Buddha spoke to me. He was standing wearing yellow, and he had a halo. He did not look real but like one of the paintings on the wall of the Thai temple.

He spoke to me words of great comfort and wisdom. In the dream I woke up and was desperately trying to write down everything I had experienced in the dream. I was already forgetting things.

I was in another living room quite different from the first one, because the chairs were plump, sofa-like, comfortable and fully upholstered (no wooden naked frames). The woman was sitting in an armchair and I was sitting at another one and I was telling her that I seen the Buddha in my dream. She was no longer wearing a lavender but it was the same woman. She had on a white cardigan. Also a pleated dress. I told her that we all have cancer and that I was no longer afraid of it. The Buddha had dispelled my fear. It seemed to me that I was talking about someone else.

The woman listened to me gravely as I told her about my dream.

This Means War

I dreamt that we went to a remote part of Thailand to give a concert. That was a large audience in the kind of semi-outdoor, militaristic kind of hall. Really it was a concrete pavilion with a hard floor, some cream colored square columns, and a concrete roof. Next to it was a huge lawn, and beyond that some barracks. It resembles like a training camp or a military school. The concert either hadn't started or was only just underway when we received word that we were all going to have to be evacuated. We were all waiting to receive semi automatic rifles because the road was not going to be safe and we might have to shoot people on the way back.

We were waiting impatiently. Then a huge truck load of soldiers in camouflage drove up a narrow path. We were not to receive weapons after all. They were go to escort us. I found myself in a chauffeur driven car. It was a tight squeeze. I was in the backseat by the left-hand door. We were trying to get my niece Vanina to come into the car but she was panicking. She tried the door on my side but said she could not squeeze in. Then she tried getting in the back it must've been some kind of station wagon or hatchback. But she just couldn't get in and she was running around the car.

I was telling her not to worry because we would get to the highway soon and the military escort would prevent us from being killed.

As she was running I noticed a white Malibu directly in front of us. It was just parked in the driveway next to the pavilion. I will car did not stop but barrelled right into the back and rear ended it. The Malibu was pushed against the fence and its front fender was being crushed.  (The fence posts are flat plywood, pale colored with triangular tops.)

I began screaming, "Where is Sun? We have to wait for Sun!" It seems that my concertmaster was stuck in the barracks on the other side of the lawn. I was worried we could not evacuate him in time. The Malibu was slowly being crushed because my vehicle would not stop. It seemed that the driver had left the car to help my niece try to get in. Behind us was the huge military convoy. As the white car was slowly collapsing, I woke up.

The Four Beasts

I dreamed that I entered a white tiled bathroom. A pile of wet faeces was oozing from the toilet bowl and it gradually resolved into creatures. The first to crawl out of the slime was a giant lobster-scorpion. It was alive. It began to slither out into the house. I called my sister Kiki to look at it.

The next creature was a magnificent peacock. It looked at me, or right past me, and it too walked out into the house.

Then came a pheasant. It was white but it had a long tail that was also a serrated razor and it was lashing back and forth and wounding the last creature which was a small white wolf. The white wolf (no more than a puppy) howled in pain. As I watched, there might have been a fifth beast, a little cockroach, but I did not know if it was dead or alive.

None of the animals seemed to show any emotion.  They seemed to look through me, as if I wasn't there,  Only the white wolf seemed to have feelings of any kind.

The bathroom door led to a narrow hallway through which the main house could be accessed. The doorway was on my right and it was west I think. It was made of dark wood. The Floor was all white tiles. The bathroom was therefore connected to the main house by this corridor.

And that was when I woke up.

Four Pieces of Pork

I dreamed that my name is Ton and I am a very influential person like a teacher or a government official. A father comes to me and asks for help in manipulating his son's grades or influencing a school to accept him. I agree to make the phone call.

We go downstairs to an office with a door which is a mosquito mesh in a wooden frame (such doors were commonplace in houses before air conditioning in Thailand) and it's a sort of a messy office with a desk, some clutter, and an old woman in a dirty earthy-green dress standing watch. Actually it's not so much a dress as a blend of a khaki uniform and a phanung (a cloth wrap worn in former times) I pick up the phone (an old black dial phone) and speak very charmingly about a different subject to someone.

Then I think about who to call to help out the father who has come to me. As I am about to phone again, the old woman who has been very dour suddenly smiles and brings me a plate on which there are four pieces of pork, cut into round flat bite-sized pieces and arranged on a small plate. "You were so charming on the phone," she says. "Have this pork."

But when I pick up the phone she moves the plate so that it is just out of reach. I tell the man he should have some too. I start to dial. I wake up.

Looking at the clothes and technology of the dream it appears to be set in the 1950s or early 1960s ... during my childhood.

The Boy Vampire’s Passion

I had a dark and grisly dream last night. I dreamt I was a boy vampire who is a double agent for the forces of light and dark. I've been sent to stay in a suburban house, a white wooden house which is a typical American dwelling, with a lawn and a sidewalk. At night I send messages to both my masters, the Vatican and Lucifer, by burning candles and papers with signs up on them in my bedroom, Which is an upstairs corner bedroom in the house. The owners of the house, from whom I rent, seem very normal and oblivious to what I do. I suspect that their teenage son is a vampire like me, but I never speak to him.

My last night I plan to send an important warning to the powers of darkness but my candle message is intercepted by the Vatican. I know this because somehow it is the wrong candle. It is time for me to return.

As I leave the house, I decided perhaps now is the time to get to know the family I have been staying with. They are out on the lawn, so typical and so suburban. But as I watch, the father is playing with his infant son, and another son is watching.

The father takes a little dagger and cuts a little wound in the infant side. He says, “This is just practice for the real thing.” Not viciously, but with a strange kind of love, he bends down and begins to drink the infants blood, his tongue entering the wound.

Terrified yet fascinated I watch them thinking to myself, “this family is nothing like it seemed.”

I walk away from this scene which from a distance appears one of domestic tranquility, yet is actually profoundly dark. I do not know which side I am working for anymore, but I know that I have been living in a nest of evil disguised as a typical American suburban dream house.

I rarely have a dream so closely drawn from the Judeo Christian mythos. The father and the son with a wound in his side and the blood, and my own bizarre function in all of this, is a mystery. When I woke up, I did not wake up in terror. I was quite calm. Yet I know I should've been terrified.

My Premiere

Woman in red becomes woman in orange last night, but Ariadne continues to appear...

I dreamt that I was having a première in a major opera house. The after party was in the lobby because people was so exhilarated that they just wanted to celebrate right there. An opera singer who was in the audience, quite corpulent in an orange gown, was seated on the red carpet. Beside her on the right-hand side, there was a silver champagne bucket on a stand. A music critic, a skinny man in a tuxedo was earnestly discussing the music. He had a small moustache. He resembled the science fiction editor J.J. Pierce.

"I wish I had a score," he said.

"Take mine!" I said I handed him a huge pile of bound manuscript, printed on the recto pages and with a mass of scribblings on the verso.

"But if only I had a libretto," said the critic. I said, "it's all there it's all there. It's in the scribblings." The scribblings what a cloud of words written in every direction, like a verbal galaxy. I pointed to one word after another and they resolved into a libretto.

In the opening scene, there was something mythological going on. A queen or goddess was languishing. She was in the story also dressed in orange, In flowing ancient robes. She sang of terrible grief. At first I thought she was Ariadne, but there was also something of Penelope in her. Because, she was waiting for someone, a king. The way the words were arranged on the page brought to mind an old edition I used to have as a child of the Gilbert Murray translation of MEDEA (that begins something like "O, that the Argo had not wended its way" or something). But those were not the characters.
As the critic examined the score, The music began to sound right there in the lobby. The fact opera singer began to sing along with it. She sounded like Jessye Norman. But, she was Caucasian with long blonde hair. It was a huge, Straussian score.

We were all awestruck that this person who was only in the audience remembered the music after one hearing. After her arietta, there were a few lines from a handmaiden bringing her news. The woods began either "oh queen" or "oh Diana." (I remember think wait a minute it's not Diana, suggesting that maybe she is Ariadne.) From a sweeping marble staircase above, the words of the handmaiden were being sung by Kaleigh Rae Gamaché who was swooping down in a black evening dress. She wore pearls. She had a huge bottle of wine. She was practically floating down the steps.

As she sang she altered the words to "my lady, the king commands you to accept this bottle of wine from the cast party upstairs." She poured wine for the opera singer.

We were all exhilarated, laughing and full of joy. It was a heady dream, as if portending some great artistic success.

Bona Myrt

Last night I dreamed about music and creativity:

In my dream, I have resurrected an ancient choral piece and I am conducting a rehearsal of it a library, a renaissance building, it's cathedral like but not a church. The piece is in A major, but at the end there is a magnificat for which there exist two alternative versions, one in Eb and one in A. The piece also weaves back and forth between the two keys by utilizing each of the two tonics as a pivot note into the Lydian mode of the other tonic. (This is more of a Wagnerian or even Mahlerian device, so it is very uncharacteristic of this period.) I am trying to decide which version to use. The Eb is much more complex and the A major finishes the work (a Vespers) in a more obvious way. I am going over the words with the chorus and the phrase BONA MYRT recurs again and again. In the dream, I am explaining that they mean "good pain" or "sweet pain." The words BONA MYRT are being sung as I wake up.

importantly, Eb and A are a tritone apart, making them the most remote possible keys from each other. They are therefore polar opposites. A piece traditionally finishes in the same tonality that it starts with, so ending an A major piece with an extended movement in Eb would be unusual, even daring (for an ancient piece that I presumably "resurrected"). The woman in red WAS in this dream, but I forget where exactly — I believe the chorus was in red and were all or mostly women. On waking, I realize that "myrt" also relates to death, but only "pain" appeared in the dream (viz, It. "martire", Eng, "smart" rather than Skr, Cz. "mrt" Lat. "mort-") The spelling of MYRT moves it towards the name MIRA that appeared in a previous dream.

More things I remembered: it's definitely a women's choir and they are wearing red over white surplices. The location is the vatican library, though I've never been there. The entire composition is about the Virgin Mary.

Bastet

In the interest of honesty, I'm posting the following dream. It has stayed with me for hours, and therefore must mean something.

I'm sitting in a room with a gray cat. Others are there with their pets. Everyone is boasting about how well they are feeding their pets. I take my cat in one hand and begin to feed him. It is very pleasant. But suddenly, The cat defecates onto my hand. And doesn't stop. I am incensed. I say, "I'm going to take you back to your room." But the cat doesn't stop. I start to carry the cat away. It doesn't stop. The feces are moist and odoriferous. I lose my temper. I slap the cat. He doesn't stop. Finally I take a pencil and begin to lash him. But he doesn't stop. He does this all the way back to his room, but in the seconds before I wake up, he transforms into a yellow baby chicken.

I don't think I've ever had a dream about both shit and violence before. Certainly never one where I am ever cruel to an animal. When I woke I thought it must be something trivial. Usually such dreams are easily forgotten. But this one remains in my mind. 

I wasn't going to post it, but I have been doing so for the last seven years so here it is.