I dreamed I was translating an ancient folk story that had been recorded in Spanish. It was an assignment for the Spanish class I was taking, that was taught by the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond. The tale was about a Native American warrior who came into town to be a matador. The story beautifully and poetically described his proud posture as he rode his horse into town, and the amazement and admiration of the townspeople as his buckskins fell away to reveal the tight, ornate matador garb beneath.
The story went on to describe how after the first bull fight, there was a performance, where the most beautiful young girl in the town told a story, the wisest matron in the town told a story, and the oldest man in the town told a story, before the next bull fight began. After we finished our translations, we were going to go to a reenactment of the tale, that was held every year in a small Mexican town.
We all set to work on our translations. the first word that gave me trouble was "osage", which I took to mean that the young warrior was of the Osage tribe. This didn't make sense to me, because I thought the Osage ranged farther north. Ree looked over my page while I was pondering, and explained that "osage" was a generic word for the young, indigenous warriors, not a specific tribe in the Spanish. Others of my classmates were translating it as "savage," but I didn't like that. I settled on warrior, for the time being.
Suddenly I looked up, and all my classmates were done and packing up to go, and I had only finished the first paragraph. But I knew that they had all basically just written down literal translations, and the imagery and language was so beautiful that I was working hard to find an echo of it in my English. I finally finished and went to the festival, but I'd missed the first bull fight. Honestly, I wasn't too broken up about that. But I found the festival in complete chaos.
The woman reenacting the part of wise matron was actually a young, single woman, who was jealous that she hadn't been picked as most beautiful girl in the town. The man playing oldest man was actually not that old, but he was the wise-matron actress's father, and they were sabotaging the event out of jealousy. He was running around harassing the lovely young woman's suitors, and she had turned herself into a mouse and recruited other mice to run around pestering people, climbing up pants legs, devouring festival treats.
I helped the folks trying to bring everything under control, and I personally killed the very last mouse by decapitating it with a red rubber spatula. That mouse turned out to be the jealous woman, and when she died, she and her father both just evaporated, and everything went back to normal. So then I went on a cruise with my family, and had this whole thing where I couldn't take a shower because people kept trying to barge into my stateroom's bathroom, and then I woke up.
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