Theater Dream

I had a dream that I was going to a theater and was excited to see the play. I had just recently seen a musical or opera and it was great to go see live theater again.

I wore a 1920s style pale dress with a mustard yellow velvet jacket. I was talking toward the theater’s entrance and other people were doing the same.

Next I was in the theater lobby and there were double doors wide open into the auditorium.  I pulled out my ticket and took a look at it. It was a comp ticket—$0. I also read the seat location… but now I’ve forgotten it. I think it was right of center. Looking around, I realized I was running out of time but also that I needed to use the restroom.

Next I entered a small, four-stall restroom. One woman came out of the furthest stall. She glanced at me and seemed disdainful. I didn’t want to go in the stall where she had just been. Next to that stall was one with a sign taped to the door, so I assumed it was out of order. I was about to go in a closed one. I remember seeing a knot mustard yellow cloche hanging from the corner of one stall—and I think that was seconds after I wished I was wearing a cloche.

Dreams of Theater & Fabric

I dreamed about a woman in her 60s—she had short white hair and was an actor. She was sitting in a dressing room in a post-modern sort of building, and she kept looking at the enormous, wide, doorless entrance to the dressing room. She needed to change before the show, but there was a large yellow hallway right outside the entrance, and people kept walking past. She wanted to change in private, without people being able to see her from the hallway.

Next she was in the hallway with another woman about her age who was seated at a white plastic table across the hall from the dressing room. This woman was also an actor who had the same issue with that dressing room.

I had a dream set in a huge, plain, white kind of building with tall ceilings—I think part of a university. I was with one other person… and this guy in his thirties who was tall and very fit joined us.

He seemed like a teacher of some sort. He talked a lot, but he wasn’t loud or aggressive—his voice wasn’t annoying or anything like that. He talked about how he did things, and with a different voice he certainly would have sounded arrogant, but as it was I was slow to stop and think that.

He got onto the subject of sewing and wanted to give me advice on it or talk about something—maybe a specific sewing project.

While he was on this topic, we ended up at the far end and almost in the corner of a huge room that had lots of long folding tables and here and there people sitting around talking. It was like a school cafeteria, complete with the drab white tile look. But just behind that last long folding table I had set up a sewing area, with a sewing machine and piles of fabric, entire bolds of rayon challis.

He was talking about something and approached one bolt of fabric, hesitated, turned to another bolt of fabric, reached for it and touched it briefly… and he ended up picking up a bolt of pale peachy rayon challis as he talked about whatever sewing project he was talking about.

Costume Shop Dream

I worked in the costume department of a theater in that last dream. People bustled around a warehouse-like area.

At the end of the dream, I was with a small number of people in this narrow section with white countertops and maybe mirrors–I think it was a narrow section surrounded by a huge room.

A young woman (I think we were all young) came by with a paper bag full of stuff and a white receipt. She was talking about laundry for a specific show. She said, “I can’t believe how little they spent on laundry for that show.” I pictured a dry cleaner, but I was about to say that nobody did laundry for that show, when I looked up at the slip of white paper she’d taped up on the mirror across from us. It said $7.60.

That confused me. I went from believing there wasn’t a dry-cleaning bill for that show… to agreeing with her.

Another person in that little space with us was a very slender gay guy (also very young) with whom I was kind of obsessed. He had short, dark hair and was very pale. He was flaming and elegant and was that day wearing dark pink jeans–like cranberry-colored–and an off-white with cranberry dots (or some pattern) satin collared shirt. He wore a lot of make-up, maybe even a white foundation like a geisha or an 18th century aristocrat. He had a cute little purse that matched his outfit…but it was really a trinket box rather than a purse, and it was homemade, with an assemblage of little red things (such as tiny plastic animals) decorating all around the edge. He soon left, saying, “Goodbye, darlings,” to us (two females), and he left the trinket box behind, so I cheerfully was trying to close it (it was completely empty, an oval about six inches long, and looked like white cardstock inside). I struggled to make the top and bottom line up and close, because the assemblage was getting in the way.

He was really cool and charming and probably wasn’t as into me as I was into him, although when I was in my twenties, quite a few gay guys liked me.

(Yesterday, I was typing up a letter I’d written when I was a theater student. So many memories.)

Queer Fish

I had a dream in which I was at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It looked completely different. I was in this maybe outdoor theater with grey wooden seating forming perhaps a circle.

People were wandering around on the steps between the seats, I think after a performance. There was a buzz of talking. Actors may have been wandering among the patrons.

Suddenly, a giant, slimy, yellow fish dropped out of nowhere. It was right behind the wooden auditorium, at the bottom of a set of wooden steps. Two male actors in Renaissance costumes struggled to pick it up, as it flapped around. I think it attempted to crawl along the ground.

I climbed down, near to the fish, and a much smaller fish, maybe a foot long, dropped out of nowhere. It was mostly off-white but with fins and tail made of rainbow colors, and it had a rainbow-colored unicorn horn. It was as though a trout mated with a queer narwal.

I soon forgot the huge fish (which was about the size of 2 humans) and was the only person who concentrated on the rainbow fish. I chased after it, though it was trying to crawl away in grass. I think grass. I grabbed it, and one of its fins or something slipped off.

I kept going after it, near a wooden staircase, and the next time I grabbed it, its unicorn corn fell off, and it kept quickly crawling away from me. It was so slippery, I was having trouble grasping onto it. I felt horrified that the fish was falling apart while I chased it.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Aside from the Bad Vibes couple in my left, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor was beautiful. It was on the Elizabethan-style stage, based on that in Stratford-on-Avon.

It was sort of like a 1980s musical, with music from that decade (including Blondie’s “I’m gonna get you”). The music added to the humor. The costumes were a mix of Elizabethan and 1980s. I’ve never been a fan of 1980s fashion, not even in the 1980s, but it worked.

Falstaff’s bombasted codpiece doubled as a fanny pack. He unzipped it to take out letters and a pouch of coins. In one scene, the codpiece fell off.

Falstaff was played by a woman, as were a couple of the other male characters. I think that’s perfectly justified, considering that in Shakespeare’s time women weren’t allowed to perform onstage. (At the New Globe in 2004, I saw an excellent all-female production of Much Ado About Nothing.)

Creepy Couple

Aside from the Creepy Vibes couple sitting to my left, The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was beautiful. The costumes! The Elizabethan stage! (Yes, it was different from the New Globe, particularly the modern seating, but the stage itself was quite elaborate and half-timbered).

I’m finally reading up on empaths and have confirmed that I definitely am one and that it certainly explains a great deal about me (and about the toxic people drawn to me). I do wonder if it’s common for empaths to have a lot of relatives who have Cluster B personality disorders (sociopathy, narcissism, and borderline personality), or if that was just bad luck and/or terrible karma. If it was karma, then perhaps I was a serial killer in a previous life. The people I most need to have No Contact with are the ones who are most drawn to me and the ones who are extremely easy to find.

But I digress, perhaps because I don’t want to write about those people and would rather write about anything else. But the book on empathy I’m currently reading emphasizes journal writing and such.

The seats are assigned (no groundlings in that theater), and as soon as I got to my seat and sat down, the woman seated on my left gave off hostile and judgmental energy. I didn’t hear her exact words, or I don’t remember her exact words, but she asked her husband if they could sit in the two empty seats to their left, despite the little detail that this was about half an hour before curtain and she knew, or should have known, perfectly well the seats were assigned. I clearly sensed that she didn’t like my sitting next to her. I didn’t do anything to her, and I took a shower and shampoo and put on deodorant before driving downtown from the hotel that afternoon. I had a creepy sense that she was judging me because I’m fat, and that she’s a fatphobic misogynist. Just because this narcissist is shaped like a twig doesn’t mean that all women should be shaped like twigs. Her husband did tell her that they were assigned seats. But that wasn’t the end of it.

 

Who knows, it’s possible that because of how I was dressed, she assumed I was a dirty hippie, despite my lack of stench or cannabis aroma. And maybe, especially with all my exposure to sun lately, she was hostile toward me because she’s overtly racist and/or anti-Semitic. However, I sensed that she was just overtly fatphobic, and life has taught me that I should take my instincts and impressions seriously. If I had done so while I associated with The Worst Frenemy in the Galaxy, I would have dumped her years earlier than I did. (For that matter, one of these books on empaths says that empaths can almost seem to read minds. It’s not literal mind reading, and it doesn’t involve understanding the words going through someone’s head, but it’s more like a basic sense of what they’re thinking.)

 

As though the creepy narcissist beside me thought I was deaf, she said “her” a few times and made it openly clear that she disliked me for no valid reason whatsoever. She even switched seats with her husband at one point. Meanwhile, the last two people in our row were the ones whose assigned seats were to the left of the Bad Vibes couple; to make it easier for them to pass me, I sat up stiffly and pushed my Nepalese bag beneath my seat and generally made myself as small as possible. While her husband sat beside me, the cunt said something like, “She doesn’t seem to be in the way, after all,” (again, I didn’t catch the exact words), and so—to my dismay—they switched seats back.

 

The reason I call them the Bad Vibes couple rather than only describe her that way was because they both came off as negative, bitchy humanoids who complain about this and that, and they both struck me as misogynistic. Reading the program, he learned that, horrors, a woman would be playing the role of Falstaff, so he had a fit and ranted about it. She joined in. They both seemed to think that because it’s been a long time since women weren’t allowed to perform on the English stage, and this is the twenty-first century, that casting cisgender women in male roles is inappropriate. They clearly had an extreme belief in gender binary. They both kept going on and on about it, and she barked in her raspy, jarring voice, “We should file a complaint! We should file a complaint!” (Yeah, I’m sure the people who work at the theater wouldn’t think you’re close-minded assholes if you complained about such a thing.) If they had seen the all-female cast of Much Ado about Nothing that I saw at the New Globe in, they would have pissed their pants.

 

The narcissist wouldn’t leave me alone, either. While her husband was gone for a few minutes, she gave me a creepy look and didn’t say anything to me. She had no problem talking about me insultingly and in the third person right in front of me, as though she assumed I was deaf or hard of hearing, but she couldn’t talk to me while we were the only two people sitting in the row. I had my program open in front of me and found it difficult to focus on it, especially while the two of them were bitching. (Their harsh, hostile, negative voices drove me crazy.) While it was only the two of us, the tension made me very nervous, but I was not about to start a conversation with this toxic human. As long as her husband was there, she had no problem with talking to him about me and giving me nasty looks and giving off toxic vibes.

 

I sensed that she didn’t consider me a real human being, but something subhuman.

 

At the beginning of the performance, actors were on the stage and addressing the audience. They referred to audience members in certain parts of the audience. In response, I turned toward that part of the audience, as did many people, and I chuckled. The harpy next to me looked me up and down, from head to toe, in a very openly rude and creepy manner.

 

By then, the two of them had succeeded in putting me in a bad mood, since as an empath I am an emotional sponge. But that last bit creeped me out the most. I get nervous if someone just looks at me with a neutral facial expression rather than a smile. In contrast with this rude cunt, I never looked at her directly; though in hindsight, maybe it would have been satisfying if, while she was giving me this creepy and insolent look-over, I had suddenly turned and stared right back at her. I did see her well enough to know that in addition to being skin and bones, she had very plain features and obviously dyed too-bright titian hair, so I know for a fact that she’s no beauty queen herself.

She wouldn’t shut the hell up and frequently talked to her husband throughout the performance, as though to make absolutely sure she reminded me that her creepy and distasteful presence was right beside me. She even exclaimed aloud, as though she were a teenager, “This is so cool!” Indeed, she and her husband seemed like perpetual junior high brats.

 

If only I were in a position that I could, like Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, arrange to be the only audience member watching plays! (The closest I’ve experienced is being in the sparse audience during dress rehearsals.)

 

Respect is a very important need, not a luxury. Just because a pile of excrement sits beside me doesn’t mean I don’t deserve respect. Maybe if the parasite had any empathy at all, she’d know that treating an empath in such a hateful and rude manner means that the empath knows that you’re hateful and rude toward him or her.

 

I tried not to let this ruin my enjoyment of the play. I paid as much for my ticket as that narcissist did. Probably more, if her husband paid for it. And yes, I intellectually know I shouldn’t take things personally and that it doesn’t matter what toxic, arrogant, and judgmental humanoids think. But intellect and emotions don’t always match up.

 

I have decided that I need to not be around many people tomorrow. I’ll just check out of the hotel and head home to my cats, who will be happy to see me. Well, okay, three of them will be happy to see me. This is about taking in the energy and moods of other people and having a hard time in crowds and in public. I guess the real reason I need so much solitude is less about being introverted and more about being an empath. I had meant to take advantage of the hotel pool one more time before checking out and afterwards going downtown and having lunch at a pub, but now that doesn’t sound as appealing as being alone and heading home to my cats. Cats and dogs give you unconditional love.

 

Especially after all those years with The Worst Frenemy in the Galaxy, I have had more than my share of soulless monsters projecting their soulless monsterhood onto me.  It may seem like the fate of empaths, but now that I’ve started reading up on empaths, I surmise that’s mostly if you don’t understand boundaries and know how to psychically protect yourself from toxic humans. I’d better keep studying up on empaths and learn quickly. That is more practical and wholesome than becoming a total hermit, with no contact with other humans, never mind how tempting that can be.

Full Day in Ashland, Oregon

Yesterday I drove three hours to Ashland, Oregon, located in Southern Oregon. It somehow didn’t occur to me that the temperature would change drastically, so during the hours that I explored downtown (and shopped) before checking into the hotel, I thought I was sweating profusely simply because I’m middle-aged and the sun was burning hot. However, although it was eighty-four degrees when I left Eugene, in downtown Ashland it was about a hundred degrees.

Ashland has a lovely downtown, with Victorian houses behind the parking garage, a downtown park—Lithia Park, specifically—that proved considerably larger than at first it appeared, and with a lovely pond and creek.

Across the street from the park entrance is a visitor’s center and a fountain from the 1920s where you can drink spring water…and it tastes disgusting, like a mixture of salt and liquid metal. Yuck.

Main Street seems to have a bookstore on every block, or pretty close to every block. I made a point of not setting foot in a bookstore that I think specialized in children’s books. However, an hour or so later I couldn’t resist stepping into a spirituality bookstore. After all, I was sweating and figured it would be air-conditioned, which it was. I left with a bag of books and statues. I also wandered into a fabric store and got myself an owl pincushion and a set of iron-on embroidery designs.

I saw the intense tragedy Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles; it shook me up, and it was a relief to walk around downtown after the sun had set. Window shopping, I realized that this is a progressive and hippie-friendly town; I also noticed that restaurants are more likely to be open late than they are in Portland. Main Street is still lively and hopping with pedestrians, whether they just saw a play or are smoking pot and playing music. The antique store’s window display featured vintage Asian clothing, including a sparkly Indian tunic and a cotton Afghani nomad dress. There was also Japanese and Chinese cloisonné to ogle. A Tibetan-owned shop sold new items, such as figurines of fierce deities and Tibetan thangkas. These shops were so colorful and sparkly, I suspected I might visit them the next day, while they were open.