What a gorgeous weekend it’s been. Matt and I walked over to Battery Park City this afternoon and strolled along the promenade overlooking the Hudson River. Deep, clear blue sky; hot, shirtless runners; calves everywhere. (As in legs, not baby cows.) On the way back, we bought some smoothies; mine was banana/mango.

It’s always so surprising when the first beautiful weekend of the spring arrives. It’s like it’s come from a different universe. Was it in this same lifetime that I last lived in a world like this?

The ancients were wrong about history being cyclical. History is linear. The world changes a little bit every day; we grow older and (perhaps) wiser; institutions rise and fall. But within that progression, we do live in cycles. The circadian rhythms of daily life; the circling around of the seasons; the repeating of the days of the week. We live on an upward spiral, always re-encountering the same things on our journey, but each time we’re a little different than we were the last time around, whether it’s a year later, a week or later, or even just the next day. I think this tension between progression and recurrence is why it’s hard for us to make sense of time. Was it really in this lifetime that I could walk outside in a short-sleeve shirt and drink a smoothie?

Yes, it was. It’s just that — whether I realize it or not — I’m a little different now than I was last time.

This week I’ve had two similar dreams. The first was several nights ago. I dreamed that my chorus and I were performing our upcoming concert. A few weeks ago, our conductor told us he wants us to do all the songs from memory, which we’ve never done before, and some people are worried about this. In the dream, we began the concert, from memory. But after several measures, we started to forget things. Our conductor waved his arms and we didn’t know what we were supposed to say or sing. As this was happening, a few late straggling chorus members came onto the stage, and then a few more. It was a disaster. Everything was falling apart.

Two nights ago was the second dream. I dreamed that I was performing as Moonface Martin in a production of Anything Goes, a role I played in high school. Several of my fellow cast members from high school were in this production, too. Except I didn’t know my part very well, and I hadn’t rehearsed. Eventually I found myself sitting at the side of the stage with a few other people as the performance continued. With an audience sitting right there! Completely the wrong thing to do.

I’ve had a series of recurring dreams along these lines for many years. The general narrative is that I’m in a performance of a show, but the show doesn’t start on time, or people forget their lines or aren’t in costume, or the director has to come onto the stage and fix stuff, and things finally devolve into a lethargic chaos. The fourth wall completely breaks down, we’re totally not showing the audience what they’re supposed to be seeing. My emotional response in these dreams is frustration: we’re supposed to be following the script, but nobody is — not just one person screwing up, but everyone — and it’s completely out of my power to fix it.

In some sense, we write our own dreams. So why am I writing my dreams this way?

I have a profound fear of deviating from the script. We’re all born as ourselves, with nothing but our personalities, but as we’re raised, each of us acquires a certain “script” about how we’re supposed to act in the world. I still have a conflicted relationship with the script that was imposed on me in childhood: impress my teachers, win praise, grow up more quickly, act like an adult (instead of like a child), act like a man (instead of like a woman; no more dabbling in music and theater, stop being so close to your mom). A desire to break away from the script and write my own life, and a fear of doing that. A desire/fear of letting myself be me. A desire to not be afraid of my own voice, to not be afraid of success or self-praise. To take the risks I need to take.

To dream the dreams I want to have, and then to act upon them.

Congress may extend Daylight Saving Time. “Lawmakers crafting energy legislation approved an amendment Wednesday to extend daylight-saving time by two months, having it start on the first Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday in November.” Yay!