So I had a peculiar dream that went back to a familiar theme in that it was set in an opera house. In this dream I am directing a TV series, sort of reality show, about audience members in an opera house in an imaginary country. It must be imaginary because they speak English and it's a two-class society consisting only of aristocrats and serfs.
In the dream, the city has built an opera house to service both sectors of society and my TV series follows some high society, super-pretentious people and a group of ragamuffin teens who also happen to adore opera.
First we're on the "first class" part of the opera house were I and others and watching and being profoundly moved by a scene in which a dying soprano is being comforted by a mezzo servant. It's a typical middle-period Verdi sort of scene and the soprano is Leonie Rysanek - though for some reason in the dream she is known as Ingrid Bjoner. (During the dream I keep thinking that's not Ingrid Bjoner, why are they calling her that and only on awakening do I realize it was Leonie Rysanek the whole time.)
It's one of the endless and very weepy death scenes and Rysanek is just belting it out as she dies. I sneak out and descend a mysterious metal staircase to the "servants area" of the opera house. Now I am narrating to a camera, explaining how these serfs became addicted to the opera when their masters insisted on taking them to the opera in order to be at their beck and call during the shows.
I run into the excited teens who are like the stars of a typical teen series ... dressed in what in my dream is described as "delinquent" clothing, riding motorbikes etc. I follow them with my camera. They go down to multi-level parking area ringed with a metal balcony and watching across some railings, they see the same scene I just saw in the plush red velvet house — except the two singers are reenacting it on the other side of a parking lot. The teens creep closer and closer.
Suddenly the soprano stops in mid-aria and screams, "you're too close! you're too close!" and she starts to go into convulsions. She also emits strange whiffling noises, Curiously, the mezzo just barrels through the scene, ignoring the fact that the woman she's comforting is fibrillating or something.
The teenagers lean in closer and closer and suddenly the mezzo notices them too and begins screaming. And suddenly I see that there is actually a hard screen separating the kids from the singers and that the singers are in fact two-dimensional projections. The kids's world is an illusion; they're living in a space surrounded by screens and everything is just a projection. Then I wake up.