The Rehearsal

My dream last night was interesting. It’s one of those that just sort of hang on. Now I know I haven’t been up that long, but it’s going to be with me all morning.

There were two parts to this dream. The first part was that I became my doctor’s healer. He was a young man, and I was a young woman in the dream. He was wounded in the war, I’m assuming it was Viet Nam, but the war was unnamed, maybe he was wounded by life and there was no war; he was spiritually wounded none the less.

He wounds manifested as a bad back that gave him tremendous pain. His pain was so severe at times that he would roll into a fetal position and stay there for days. His friend came to me an asked me to help him. I was reluctant because he was my doctor and that was outside of our range of relationship and since he was a doctor, he might reject my efforts. However, I agreed.

I laid my hand on his forehead and prayed. He responded and was healed. He became a “believer” and changed his opinion about how medicine should work. He then went on his way to live his life.

The first part of the dream melded into the second part, I was rehearsing a play. It was one act play with two players. I was the female lead. There is also disembodied voice that comes from off stage, this part is played by a young kid. This voice is a God like entity that speaks to the hero of the play. I don’t really remember now what the voice says to the hero, but it helps the hero to see what he should do.

So, we rehearsed. The plot of the play was very like those awful black and white movies from the fifties, very dark and dramatic. Our hero was a tortured soul and I was co-dependent. We rehearsed and had it down pat. We then decided to perform our play before an audience.

The audience was small, in fact so small that the audience sat on my patio. One of the people in the audience was my brother’s childhood friend Ed. I haven’t seen Ed in forty-five years, but he was in the audience, he was still a young man just as he was all those years ago. Along with Ed were my doctor and his friend that had asked me to help.

The play began and from my first line the play was different than we rehearsed. I went to say my first line and it came out completely different than it was written. In the dream, I thought, “that’s not right, but let’s see where this takes me.” So, the play went on, something completely different than we rehearsed. I liked it.

Evidently, our audience did not, they left in the middle of it.

My co-star and I just shrugged and stopped. We liked what we had created. We knew we were going to take this play on the road… next stop Chicago.

The dream went on after that. There was a statue that would have been worth a lot of money if it hadn’t been broken. In the dream, I said, “Of course it is broken. Everything in this house is broken.” Then I had some interchange with Ed from my childhood that I don’t remember now. But, the important part was the rehearsal.

Life is like that, isn’t it? We rehearse. We plan our lives and imagine things a certain way that never really seem to pan out. Many of us dwell in the disappointment; we harbor bitterness. Yet in my dream, the rehearsal turned out nothing like the performance, it wasn’t successful, and yet I enjoyed that switch. I went with the flow and decided to try it again in Chicago.

I think that is my lesson learned in the last few years. I dwelled in the bitterness that my life didn’t turn out the way I planned, oh, so many years ago. My lesson is that in the end things are good. It all worked out for the best. No, I’m not living in New York City wearing designer shoes, working at a high powered job with a house in the country. But, my life is pretty damn good. I healed my wounds, just as I healed my doctor’s wounds from the first part of the dream. We are our own healers.

So, rehearse; but be prepared to change in mid-sentence and what comes out might be pretty incredible… even if you lose your audience.