A dream of opera.

The other night before bed I was reading a history of opera, and I had just finished reading a part about how with Beethoven's only opera he wrote he wrote multiple overtures for it that he was dissatisfied with but some of which were really good and so sometimes people would find a reason to insert them into some place in the middle of the opera, and then I dreamnt:

I'm in the front row of an opera house, but also above it, and the lighting is dim and there's an open boat full of like cargo sitting on water, and somehow I know it's the hold, and there's a man in rags lying down, and I know that soon the music in the score will stop, and he'll rouse from his sleep and start singing and that's the point where they'll insert a song that's not supposed to be in the opera.

Then, that happens, and the man gets up, except now he's a woman, and he's on the stage, which isn't a stage now, but it's water, and she's slowly swimming in the water towards the front of the stage while singing operatically, and the music is quiet and simple and the words I can remember are just a repeated Latin-y phrase that's supposed to be an imperative plural and a vocative plural, but both are nothing I recognize vocabulary-wise, and the next thing I know the woman is at the very front of the stage and there I am in my seat, and I see how the stage has been turned into a giant pool, with like a big barrier with big crinkles that is holding all the water in, though some sloshes over a little bit at the top, and I think how experimental that all is, and how incredible it is that a woman can sing like that while swimming.

. . .

And then I wake up.