Once in a while various bloggers post dreams they've had. So I'm going to talk about one from earlier this week that I just thought of.

I was acting in a play. It was a Shakespeare play (but no Shakespeare play that actually exists in this world). It was also a musical. It was set in Imperial Japan. (One of the songs was "We are Gentlemen of Japan" so although it was supposedly Shakespeare, I guess the only thing of Imperial Japan that my brain knows is The Mikado).

It was complex. I don't remember the plot exactly, other than that there was a small child and several dogs in the production - written in, in part, because the director of the play was having an affair with the costume mistress and he wanted to stay in her good graces by putting her kid in the play.

I was playing what the director insisted on calling a "Mandarin," even though I protested that Mandarins were Chinese, not Japanese, and that really the role was more of a "scholar" than anything. Oh, and I was sort of en travesti, as the theater folks say, because the director said, "There were no FEMALE Mandarins." So I was walking around, dressed in a long formal man's kimono, wobbling around on ghetta (did men wear ghetta? I don't know) and wearing a complex wig that looked kind of like a samurai type hairstyle.

At one point there was a picnic for all the actors and the costume mistress' dogs and child got in trouble because the dogs tore up some of the costumes.

And then, towards the very end -as we were preparing to go on for the first performance (no dress rehearsal, I guess), the director fired one of the other "Mandarins" and gave me all of his lines to say. And I protested that as it was fifteen minutes until curtain time, there was no way I could learn the lines in that time. So he shoved the book containing the play into my hands and told me to just READ them. And I'm standing there, going, wait, they didn't have books in Imperial Japan, they had scrolls, this is going to be an anachronism (as if the "Mandarin" scholar wearing a samurai wig wasn't) and people will be confused.

And I crept to the edge of the stage and kind of peeked out from the wings to look at the "house," and it turned out they had done it as dinner theater without anyone telling us. And that my parents were in the audience.

And I stand by what the author of xkcd said: dreams are strange. We go unconscious for a few hours and hallucinate vividly, and then think it's not strange at all.

Brains are odd.