Without a Script

I have a recurring dream that I have been rehearsing for a minor part in a play and just before the curtain rises on opening night I am told that I must play a different, much larger role, but I do not know the words or the cues. The last time I had the dream there was a new, even more frightening twist: the play was a musical. I can’t sing a lick, so I would have been anxious even if I had known the songs or my lines, but of course I knew neither. I thought for a while when I was a young teacher that the dream was about stage fright, about getting up in front of people every day who were expecting me to perform. But I have come to realize that the dream is about not having a script for the really important performance that is life. Joan Didion confirmed this for me when she wrote in The White Album: “my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it.”