Perchance to Dream

Last night I had the strangest dream.
Wait, isn't there an old song that starts like that?
Oh yes, it was about putting an end to war..
Well, ok, my dream lacks that social conscience quality. or if it has it, I don't see it.

I was about to play a duet with another pianist in a huge outdoor concert, only the piano was backstage and the orchestra was out front so I couldn't see the conductor. The sun was going down, and there was no light, and then someone told us that the composer himself was in the audience. Panicked, I opened the score and realized I had never seen it before.

Not only that, but there were no musical notes on the page. It was made up of objects and pictures arranged in groupings. I turned to the other pianist and hissed, "Have you practiced!"

He said of course he had, and I said, well what IS this!

Rolling his eyes, he pointed to a page that had recliners grouped in lines on the page.

"Play this in the style of Gregorian chant," he explained.

Now the weird thing is that, in the dream, that made sense to me. The orchestra started to play, and I started to accompany them reading the recliners as notes. Only the other guy started elbowing me off the bench. I ended up playing everything in the lowest octave.

During the intermission, the composer came back and said to me, "No wonder you were having problems. This was written for two pianos, not one."

"Well, I have to take my cat home anyway," I said. "Bring another piano in and I'll try again when I get back."

The reason I had to take my cat home was because there were very large jackrabbits running around the piano and I was afraid they would eat him.

Well, as you can see, this dream is ripe for interpretation. But what could it be?
It began with the basic element of the actor's dream of not knowing your lines, but wandered far afield. Why the recliners? And why jackrabbits?

SOmeone in my book discussion group last night said he thought sleeping was boring and a terrible waste of time. I so totally disagree. My dream life is much more interesting than my real life. In my real life, all my music has notes on the pages and I have no cat.

Of course, they are similar in that I often don't understand my real life either.

Perhaps tonight I'll return from the intermission and finish the concert.