Medusa’s Nightmare of Poseidon (2020)

Medusa’s Nightmare of Poseidon is an excerpt from an in-progress opera titled Protectress based on an eponymous novella by Kendra Preston Leonard. The opera opens with Medusa bolting awake from a nightmare. Still, half-stuck in the dream and panicked, she calls her sisters, the gorgons Stheno and Euryale. They try to calm her, and she tells them of the nightmare. She has had dreams about her rape by the sea god Poseidon before, but this one is worse. Though Medusa does not yet know it, this dream has been sent by Athena, the goddess who cursed her millennia ago for the crime of being raped and is now beginning a renewed campaign of torments. The nightmares Athena inflicts on Medusa will threaten her sanity and eventually drive her to confront her former patron.