Dream 01/14/2023 - My Staged Play, "The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi."

I dreamt that I was at a mid-sized theater in early August at an amusement park named Rye Playland.  The theater seats were soon filled with a sizable crowd.  Some of the audience members were shaking my hand and patting me on the back.  Then it occurred to me the production was a musical I wrote:  The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi.

The curtain draws back.  It reveals King Dumuzi of the kingdom of Uruk seated at a canted desk with a wet clay tablet.  Queen Inanna stands next to him and teases him.  Dumuzi notices his clay tablet is drying.  Inanna and Dumuzi fuss with the tablet to keep it wet.  The pour water on the clay and their regal attire gets soaked.  Soon they begin to flirt in increasingly graphic ways.  I shrank in my seat, hoping that my mother is not present.

Finally, Inanna and Dumuzi confess their love for one another.  Dumuzi follows the trope of picking up the very tall Inanna and carrying off to a four post conjugal bed that appeared on center stage.  You can hear their moans and sighs set to music as the bed recedes upstage.

Finally the curtain falls.  I brace myself for a violently negative response…

Instead I hear lively applause.  People approach and and give me congratulations.  The actors step out from behind the curtains and congratulate me as well.  The audience and the actors ask me several questions about the characters of Inanna and Dumuzi as we file out from the seats.  They tell me I have created a masterpiece.  I am brought to tears by all their questions and congratulations.

Among the faces in the audience I see girls I knew from high school and college who smiled and nodded at me.   Wish fulfillment?  Well it is my dream.

I meet up with my wife and we step into the family car.  We drive away from Rye Playland and onto a cloverleaf section of a highway.  

My wife asks me what I plan to do next.  I tell her I’m going to work on another draft The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi to make it “Broadway ready.”

I wake up.  I asked myself, “Will my dream come to fruition?”

I still don’t have an answer.

- JJB

Note:  I realized that I wrote this entry varying between the present tense and past tense.  The more I tired to unsnarl the vacillation between tenses, the more disorganized the entry looked.  So I am leaving the entry as is.  I apologize for the unevenness of the writing.