Dreaming Weirdness

As I was waking today, I had a very strange dream. As someone who's performed on stage and given speeches before, I'd almost be inclined to call it a nightmare, if it hadn't been so amusing to me after I woke up.

See, one of the ways I help out at church is by doing readings during the service. For each service, there are two Eucharistic Ministers, and one of them reads the Psalm and one of the Bible readings, while the other reads the Prayers of the People later in the service. Then both of them help the Priest serve Communion. During Advent season, there's also a script the two EMs read from at the beginning of the service, during the lighting of that week's Advent candle. So now that you have the background....

In my dream, I was the EM for the fourth Advent Sunday, which is tomorrow. (In reality, I am not supposed to be!) I processed in with the choir, as I usually do, but instead of taking my seat with them, I stayed out front to do the script-reading and candle-lighting. Now, for some reason, there was no other EM with me, and it wasn't like someone had forgotten and was hurrying to the front-- in the context of the dream, I was supposed to be the only one up there. Everyone was looking at me expectantly, so I started to read from the script.

It was absolutely unreadable. The words were in some foreign language with non-Roman letters, the letters/glyphs were blurry, and the things were moving around on the page! I'm sure there must have been a look of abject horror on my face. The actor's nightmare! Even worse, there was no one around who could help me out-- the Priest and Parish Coordinator were nowhere in sight (and why on earth I'd be up there without them around is a mystery too strange to contemplate), and none of the other choir members seemed to understand my gestures to let me look at the script in their bulletins. (you know, in case maybe mine was just defective or something!)

Apparently my dream-self is much more poised and self-possessed than my real self would be, because I started giving a completely off-the-cuff speech about the end of our Advent journey, and the quiet waiting in Bethlehem for the Child to be born. It was really very lovely and poetic, and I wish I could have remembered it when I woke up! I gave this beautiful speech, lit the fourth candle, and went to sit down in my usual seat in the choir stall.

There were no seats available in the choir. In real life we have seven members and twelve chairs. In the dream, every seat was taken! Eeek! So I wound up having to walk across the front of the church in my blue choir robe, all the way across to the chairs where the Priest and the non-choir-member EM would have been sitting. You know, if there had been a Priest. Or another EM.

Luckily for me and my stage fright-induced heart palpitations, I woke up as soon as I sat down over there and thus didn't have to worry about trying to continue the service!

So, any amateur dream interpreters care to take a try at this one?