This will mark the fifth time that I’m documenting a dream that has Shakespeare in it:
Blogging Shakespeare Dreams (November 2005)
Shakespeare Dreams (July 2010)
Bad Shakespeare Dreams (June 2012)
Dreaming in Shakespeare
I wish I could remember more of this one. I was on some sort of sports team, can’t tell/remember whether it was an adult thing or I was a kid again. But the coach was actually using a Shakespeare speech for motivation! Like so many of my dreams I kind of sort of recognized it, and desperately wanted to head for my search engine to double check my sources. It had a vague Coriolanus-like “make you a sword of me” type of feel to it.
Anyway, here’s the kicker, the coach asks everybody (sitting crosslegged on the grass, listening intently) whether they know where that speech comes from. I do not raise my hand because I am unable to verify the source. But sure enough just about every other kid(?) does! It was mortifying.
That’s about it. Nobody pointed and mocked. Nobody even really noticed. It was entirely in my head, thinking “Wow an actual opportunity to be asked an actual spontaneous Shakespeare question and I have to choose between not answering at all, or possibly getting the answer wrong?”
It’s always funny when insecurities show their little ugly heads. That looks like a pretty clearcut case of “Impostor Syndrome”, this feeling that one day I’m going to walk into a situation where everybody not only knows Shakespeare, they know it far better than I do and look at me like an idiot for thinking I knew something.