I was just remembering a funny dream I had some time ago.

I was in a room in my house (both house and room were not known to me in waking life, but it was clearly where I lived). The room was full of beautiful acoustic guitars, and they belonged to me. They were all fabulously expensive. Some were unique and custom-built, others simply rare or antique. Some were opulent, with exquisite inlays and carvings, others elegantly plain and clean. I wandered through this room, hushed and awestruck, thinking, “I can’t believe these are all mine!”

I picked one up, and tenderly began to play. I formed an open G chord, and then moved that chord form up and down the neck. It was the only chord I knew.

I was strumming a creditable 4/4 rhythm, but I couldn’t think of even one other single chord. “Hmm, I really thought I knew a few chords besides this one. Let’s see…uh…” I would contort my hand into what seemed like a “typical” chord configuration. Nope, I just kept making that same chord.

“Maybe if I try a different guitar?…” No luck. Still G.

The funny thing about the dream was that instead of finding it nightmarish, I was, even as I dreamed, amused at my sudden and nearly complete amnesia.

Many years ago, an acquaintance of mine, C., died of brain cancer. Leading up to his death, they performed a number of surgeries to try to remove the tumor. Because it was malignant there was, of course, no way to remove only the tumor. After awakening from one operation, he discovered quickly that he was no longer fluent in Mandarin. Gone, completely. This wasn’t like your high-school locker combination, or the procedure for transferring a call at a job you haven’t worked at for a decade. This was a language he’d studied for years; he’d travelled extensively in China, and had even lived there for a time. He laughed about it, eventually spinning a whole Pythonesque routine around it.

An entire, complex skill-set quite literally cut out of you. Can you imagine? I couldn’t either, until I had this dream. I only hope that if such a fate awaits me, I will face it as C. did (and as I apparently did in the dreamtime): with equanimity and humor.

This is a dream I had in high school. I’d had actor’s nightmares before this, of course – and I’ve had many others since. But this one was astonishing in its duration and complexity. Also, even as I was dreaming it, I thought it was hilarious.

It begins with our whole cast and crew crammed onto a coach bus as we speed across a vast empty parking lot toward a sports stadium. Out the windows, we can see other coach buses converging on the stadium. We yell to the driver to go faster as we frantically run our lines.

We are participating in a cross-country competition in which different theater companies race to be the first to arrive at a location, set up, and stage a play. Then we strike as quickly as we can, get back on the bus, and hit the road for the next location, which is sometimes several days’ drive away.

The dream jump cuts to the interior of the stadium. We are running up and down stark concrete corridors, pushing costume racks, carrying carpeted blocks and other set pieces, frantically trying to find our dressing room. We’ve been assigned a room, but the numbering system doesn’t make sense. Each room we look in is a cluttered storage closet or a utility space full of pipes and mysterious, bizarre equipment.

Another jump cut. Now we’re on stage: the performance has begun. The houselights are on, so we can see the packed audience under the glare, watching us disinterestedly. Whenever it’s not their line, actors slip offstage to the green room to get fitted for their costumes, or to scavenge for necessary props. The stage manager is studying a fuse box as the lighting designer is puzzling over the light board, pushing dimmers up and down to see what, if anything, happens. The crew is building the set around us, so we’re shouting our lines over the constant din of hammers, drills, and the occasional circular saw.

Sometimes I’m an actor, sometimes I’m in the crew, but in the final scenes of the dream before I wake up, I’m one of the playwrights. We’re crowded into the green room beside the seamstresses at their sewing machines. We’re writing the play as it happens: brainstorming, jotting notes, and banging away at large manual typewriters. When someone finishes a page, they pull it out of the typewriter and run to the copying machine. When the copies come out, someone else grabs the sheets and runs out into the house. Weaving between the members of the orchestra (who are crammed in the space between the front row and the stage, sight-reading music they’ve never seen before), the runner then feeds the sheets up to the actors, who pass the script out as surreptitiously as they can while carrying on the performance.

I remember I woke up laughing. I was relieved it was only a dream but I was sorry I didn’t know how things turned out. How, for example, did anyone actually win this competition? As with any actor’s nightmare, however, it was both worse and better than some acting experiences I had in waking life.