Dancing in dreams.

The past 24 hours would be utterly dismal if not for last nights dreams. I retired to bed a little after two a.m., where I had been reading Wollstonecraft and Radcliffe and frantically compiling notes into a literature essay for school.

I dreamed last night I was rehearsing alone for the “Balcony scene” from the ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” The studio was small and dark but lights from outside flooded through the windows. My mother and sister were there, and I was outfitted in Freed’s and a thin dance dress. Prokofiev was blasting.

My dancing abilities in my dream were far from exceptional—in the real world I haven’t taken a ballet class in 8 months (I was such a mess that executing a sloppy brise vole was an achievement), but the true beauty in this vision was that, no matter how horribly unstable my turns were, or how awful my feet looked in my shoes, I was satisfied with my movement, a luxury I never had when I was a dancer in real life. In all my years, I was never pleased with anything I produced, even the simplest steps. To look in the mirror while dancing was gut-wrenching for myself, even in the event that my teacher liked what she saw, I never did.

I woke a start and looked at the clock. It was 5:33 a.m.