Dream #1
I was at a funeral for Michael Jackson. The room was smallish and almost looked like a waiting area in an airport terminal. The room was full of middle-aged, black men and women who were all dressed in cheap looking clothing. Natural light came in through a window-wall to my right.
Michael Jackson's body lay, basically, on the floor, at my feet, its head to my feet. The body may have lain atop a few tiered layers of vegetation, like flowers or fruits or gourds. At the four corners of this "bed" were posts, either of thin iron or of vegetation. The four posts were joined by thin, old rope.
The people who were here were, apparently, all members of Michael Jackson's family. They all looked to me, as if I were to minister all the rites of the funeral. I had no idea that I was going to be called on for this. I really had no idea what these people would even want for this ceremony. I possibly thought I'd begin by talking about Michael Jackson's life. But instead, I opened my mouth and began singing the Lord's Prayer in a kind of "soulful" (to me) style. As soon as I began, everybody followed.
The room was now dim, even smaller, with dim, green, fluorescent light, the source of which wasn't even in the room, and with tall walls, like the landing of a fire escape stairwell, or like a little intersection between a hallway and some other part of a building.
I realized as I sang that I only "led" the singing by a change in my tone or rhythm at certain points. For the rest of the song, everybody else was in control. Nevertheless, I felt like every choice I was making was wrong. The song sounded less "soulful" and more and more quasi-classical as I made my choices. I wondered when people would begin to question me, or comment on what an awful sham of a job I was doing. I decided jut to let everybody else make the choices and just sing along with them.
My view was drifting around, as if I were a handheld camera. I eventually fixed on a nativity scene, which may also have been related to a scene from Michael Jackson's life. The nativity scene was maybe two feet tall and made of plastic that was lit up with incandescent light from the inside. It stood on the floor at first. Then, as my view drifted through the crowd, it stood atop a small ledge of wall-like plaster. The nativity scene had a lot of red coloring in it and the lights within shifted from left to right, so it almost looked like ripples of water moving along the scene.
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