A Dream of Wagner.

A few months ago, I dreamnt -

I'm like two-thirds towards the back of a big formal sloping theater that's fairly full and that I can't see the walls of, and a high-cost production of Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung is playing onstage, and there's some kind of wedding feast scene happening with a lot of drab but artfully-dressed people standing around the edges of the stage as well as this giant nineteenth-century-looking clown up there centrally with a white painted face and a frilly collar and a stumpy cap, him like being all very large and very very white and completely the center of attention.

And, my mother is with me, and she leans over to talk to me.

"This is really good, but I have to go to the bathroom!", she was like, and she gets up to go to the aisle, and I'm not sure if they'll let her back in until a change of scene or even act, and I think that it's her decision to miss something or not, though, though I wish she wasn't so old and didn't have those kinds of bladder problems.

Later, I'm in a different auditorium that's more like a high school auditorium with a stage at the side of a gymnasium, and there's hardly anyone there and I'm standing right up in front of the crappy stage, and this one slightly off doctoral student who I know from years ago is standing there singing, and it seems improvised but also part of Goetterdaemmerung, like it's some kind of amateur community production, and for some reason I'm profoundly uneasy with what's happening, perhaps because I don't actually think it's Goetterdaemmerung that they're doing.

Then, I'm outside on a grass parking lot and a high school friend who I haven't seen in years and who married an evangelical bodybuilder is getting into a car, and she's telling me that it's good and she liked it, but it was going on for too long and that she has places to be.

And then, I woke up.

. . .