What Dreams May Come

Dreams, and the subconscious mind can be such fascinating things. How your mind can create just about any image in the world, and beyond it. How dreams can know what is on your mind, even when you do not. How the parts of your brain that control dreaming can take actual facts from waking life and convert them somehow into imagery in your dreams.

The whole process becomes even weirder, and more intriguing when you find yourself asleep enough to be dreaming, but awake enough to have outside stimulus make its way into your dreams.

"Ty, what has all this got to do with acting and theatre", you are asking. Good reader, stay a while. I will be faithful.

I was not feeling well and I lay down for a bit. I had my Monster Ballads collection in the CD player, so I clicked that on and I started to doze off.

About half way through the album I was in that mind-bending state I mentioned; I was dreaming, but could also in the vaguest way sense what was happening in the waking world of my bedroom.

This is when "The Angel Song" by Great White came on the CD.

I don't remember what I was dreaming before the Angel Song came on, but I know what the dream became once the song began. I could hear the song in my dream, but in that context it was not coming from a specific source. It was just omnipotent, as though coming from the air itself, filling the whole world.

As I hear the opening piano bit from the song, I am standing alone at night in the aisle of the Old Opera House. I am facing the stage. It is filled with thick fog which is back lit by intense white light. It is so obscured by the fog, however that I can look right at it without squinting or anything. It just gives the fog a sort of white glow.

I hear the first line of the song;

"Fallen angel ripped and bruised, think on better days..."

I notice a few people walk onto the stage in a rather slow manner. I cannot see anything of them but black silhouettes. Four of them in all, who end up forming a line.

I am, for whatever reason, fascinated by all of this. As I walk closer I come to realize it is the four actresses who portray the "Angels" from Anything Goes. I could not see their faces, but I just understood who they were.

The chorus of the song goes like this;

"Fly, lonely angel, high above these streets of fire..."

As I hear the chorus, the four "Angels" raise their arms high and wide as though they were wings. I also start to feel a wind blowing across my face. It was this wind sensation that upset the delicate balance of this state. I woke up.

Since the CD in the waking world was in fact what I was hearing my dream, the song continued from where it had left off in the dream. In other worlds, the dream world ended, but the continuity of the song was of course perfectly preserved. That made it more disorienting than it would have been had I been totally asleep. I had to look around, and go splash water on my face before I could acquaint myself with the surroundings again.

It was a rather mesmerizing "dreamlette". I wanted to record it somewhere before I lost it.