Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

I was in a band (with three schoolmates who I was in a band with, years ago, in The Real World), and we were preparing to play something like a huge awards ceremony.
We were planning to play songs by The Smiths (we weren’t a tribute band, though), but as we went onstage, I was still asking my bandmates what we would play.
As is the way at these things, we weren’t playing for long. We started with 'Still Ill and didn’t even get through the whole song. I think I forgot the words
(I later woke up in a panic , bewildered and disgusted with myself that I had forgotten the bit that goes

“And if you must go to work tomorrow
Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t bother
For there are brighter sides to life,
And I should know,
Because I’ve seen them -
But not very often.”

Which is the best bit.)

Milling about waiting backstage, I heard the band playing Disco 2000 by Pulp, and incredulous, ran to the side of the stage (which, by now, I saw, was actually the top floor of some kind of palatial tower, and the audience were gathered on the hillside below. It was like a court scene from a Disney film. Or Star Wars.)

Who was on keys? It was only fucking Jarvis Cocker, wasn’t it? Singing away with MY band, playing one of HIS songs, when we were supposed to be doing a few Smiths songs. The Bastard.

So, I was watching my bandmates/schoolfriends playing a song we used to like (we were just the right age when Pulp's album 'Different Class' came out - 14/15, and I remember talking about that song, and wondering if we would still know each other....) and feeling like I'd been left out of it all - and angry about the fact that it was Pulp and not The Smiths they were covering. And they were getting to play with Jarvis, not that I would want to.

(In the dream, I was pretty much myself at the age of 15, but I looked more like I do now.)

I went back on, alone, and while the band were still arsing about, not being ready, I played Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want, but there was nowhere to plug my guitar in, so I leaned into the microphone with it, trying to get it to pick up the sound. The microphone was, however, about two feet off the ground, for some obscure reason, so I had to crouch right down to reach it, and with leaning the guitar in as well, it was a bit awkward.

And I couldn’t see the crowd, as I was crouched below the window.

I was really annoyed at the band, they’d played without me, not been ready, stopped halfway through a song, before the best bit, and generally made me look the prick.

But it did grant the song extra (and largely unneccessary) pathos and me extra (totally unneccessary) self-pity, especially as I couldn't see the crowd, who by this point in the dream seemed like peasants gathering to cheer a royal proclamation or wedding or something. I did wonder about that, in the dream, as I do in The Real World - who does that? (And, more importantly, why?)

And I was troubled all morning by the dream, wondering

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?