What was going on when I was born?

The other evening I had a nightmare. I dreamed I was present at the creation of a new form of theater that was fated to replace opera, plays, films and all other forms of drama. In my semi-conscious state I felt something like the excitement that must have stirred the Florentine band of connoisseurs known as the Camerata when, around the year 1600, they brought into being the art we now know as opera. The thought flashed across my mind, like a subtitle, that opera and other categories of music drama would never again be the same. I had been granted a vision of a wondrous future in which all art would be processed in highly condensed form, like uncut heroin, and served up to audiences in short, jolting injections.

''Let's not make this a struggle between the Speaker and the President,'' Representative William H. Gray 3d, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is chairman of the House Budget Committee, said last week. ''That's ludicrous.'' But as President Reagan went off to Camp David after his first week back in the White House following cancer surgery, House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. sat in his office calling for Mr. Reagan's approval on ''even part'' of a sweeping new Senate plan for breaking the deficit-reduction impasse before taking any action. At the White House, Presidential spokeman Larry Speakes said Mr. Reagan would not comment on the specifics until the House responded and there was ''some sort of jelling on the Hill.''

BEFORE this summer, Richard Virgilio's artistry could be seen throughout the East Side of Bridgeport - spray-painted on walls amid a growing clutter of graffiti. Now, however, 14-year-old Richard is enrolled in a city-sponsored art program, studying drawing and painting techniques and visiting art collections. He still paints on walls - but now he is asked to. And instead of his name, he paints murals.

Senator Richard G. Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said today that he favored moving rapidly on legislation imposing economic sanctions against South Africa, and that he expected President Reagan to go along. Alluding to the two separate measures already voted on in the two houses of Congress, the Indiana Republican said through an aide: ''I want a bill, I want the House to agree to the Senate bill if the House wants something done quickly, and I think I can get the President to sign it.'' Senate Voted a Milder Version The Senate bill provides for a milder set of sanctions than the House bill does. House and Senate conferees are to meet Wednesday to iron out the differences.

THIRTY rapt first graders stared upward into an artificial evening sky as the planetarium and observatory director at Milford's Joseph A. Foran High School, Alan Sacharow, conducted a guided tour of the universe. Mr. Sacharow showed the children how Earth moves in relation to the Sun over the course of the seasons. He pointed out constellations, helped them find the North Star and told them about the moons of Jupiter. Then, near the end of his presentation, he projected a huge comet on to the dome of his planetarium. The comet, which was fainter than most of the stars but carried a spectacularly long tail, was a stand-in for Halley's comet, due to appear in the sky at summer's end and be visible to the ordinary viewer at year's end. ''I hope it looks like this,'' said Mr. Sacharow. A moment later the comet was gone, and the children found themselves caught in an artificial lightning storm, complete with raindrops splashing on the backs of their necks.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz has become a target of a new drive by Republican conservatives who accuse him of handling terrorism too gingerly and of being too soft in dealing with the Soviet Union. Three former ambassadors and leaders of several conservative groups have called for his resignation, accusing him of ''undermining President Reagan's foreign policy.'' Next Thursday, several groups, including Moral Majority, the Conservative Caucus, the Conservative Digest and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, plan a conference to mount a campaign against Mr. Shultz and the ''the Foreign Service bureaucracy.'' House Republicans Irked In the House of Representatives, 52 Republicans signed a letter in mid-June asking Mr. Shultz to appear before the House Republican Conference to answer criticism. Some are irked that he has not appeared. The State Department says it is a scheduling problem.

In one section of her autobiography, the literary agent Audrey Wood recounts the triumphs of Tennessee Williams, from ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' through ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'' She entitles the chapter ''The Catastrophe of Success.'' The phrase is hardly flippant, for Williams met head-on the consequences of achievement - self-doubt and heightened expectations, sudden wealth and celebrity status - and his collision with fame, like so much else in his life, was a study in excess. Few other playwrights may match the dimensions of Williams's dilemma, but, for almost any dramatist, critical success represents the consummately mixed blessing, something both sought-after and distrusted. The moment of critical anointment may itself come suddenly, but the process of writing a breakthrough play often has taken years, even decades. There is, then, something in the arrival of the ''promising, young playwright'' - as the cliche invariably has it - that is reminiscent of the man who has lived in a cave for years and, upon being discovered, is not only thrown into sunlight but asked to tell all about it on the ''Today'' show.

A FEW miles from its futuristic headquarters in Irvine, Calif., the Fluor Corporation is building an $18 million sewage treatment plant for a planned community near Mission Viejo. About an hour's drive from its headquarters in San Francisco, the Bechtel Group is constructing the $75 million Sacramento County Jail. Fluor, Bechtel and other giants of construction -Parsons and Morrison-Knudsen, for example - were nothing less than 20th century pyramid-builders just a few years ago. They would barely consider projects with price tags below a billion dollars. Marshaling armies of men and machines, they erected refineries, petrochemical plants and huge nuclear power facilities in the United States. Overseas, they built entire industrial cities and vast copper mines.

An impasse in Congress over the budget has caused great uncertainty about how much money the Federal Government will spend next year. Nevertheless, the usual legislation to establish or renew programs and to appropriate money is moving forward on Capitol Hill. Almost every day some members of Congress express frustration at their failure to reach agreement on a budget plan setting overall spending levels for the fiscal year 1986, which starts Oct. 1. By law, Congress was supposed to complete action on the budget resolution by May 15, but there are no penalties for failure to meet the deadline.

THREE years ago, after Roger and Nancy Kleinberg of this Ocean County community adopted a 20-month-old blind, hydrocephalic girl, they decided to join a support group for adoptive parents. However, they soon found that they had little in common with the other members, almost all of whom had adopted healthy children. ''The milestones for parents of special-needs children are much different than for parents of so-called normal, healthy kids,'' Mr. Kleinberg said. Moreover, the Kleinbergs sensed that their presence made the other couples uneasy.

WITH a little more than a month left before school begins, education officials in the state are grappling with a recent Supreme Court ruling that prohibits public school teachers from conducting remedial programs in parochial schools, a service that has been given for the past 20 years. The ruling affects 60 public school districts and 2,500 nonpublic school children in Connecticut. Because it leaves intact the Federal law requiring remedial programs for both public and private school students in poor neighborhoods, the ruling means that the so-called Chapter I programs that have taken place in sectarian schools must still be provided by local school districts, but in new locations. Disagreements over who will pay for the added costs, concern about the time crunch and a general confusion about how to adhere to the decision are widespread in Connecticut.

NICARAGUA Revolution in the Family. By Shirley Christian. 337 pp. New York: Random House. $19.95. On that tableland scored by rivers, Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever Are precise and alive, Auden wrote of Spain in 1937. And so: To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting. Spain, 1937. Nicaragua, 1985. After so much ideological fever, so many boring meetings and flat ephemeral pamphlets, it is marvelous to find a book that spends most of its considerable length just telling us what actually happened - facts, dates, names, quotations recorded at the time by a professional journalist, and most of it (to the best of my knowledge) nowhere published in book form before. So anyone seriously interested in contemporary Nicaragua will have to read it.