The Dream of My End

We all have dreams, some frightening, some spectacular, all end upon wakening… or do they?

I thought once I’d mastered it in some way, given it musical justice so it wouldn’t haunt me the way it does.

Haunt — a strange word for something that came to a sleeping mind, filling it with incredible beauty. Yet no other word truly represents the circumstance in which I’m continually visited and revisited by the vision of this dream.

I always wake up tearful, sometimes sobbing, not tears of distress, but joy — the sheer joy of finally understanding something that perhaps lies beyond this world.

I say perhaps because, ultimately, I’m a writer, but before that, I’m a human being, a mortal with a soul as different and as complex as the next. Sure, it’s a dream; how could anything so splendid, huge, enthralling, and unbelievable be anything else?

I was a young man the first time the dream enraptured me. I didn’t understand it; the strange, poignant, beautiful sound, then a boy appearing carrying a torch, and as he enters the valley, this galactic, sumptuous cavity buried between the hills of my life, thunder rolls in from every corner of the sky.

The rumble is not menacing nor brings with it any sign of rain; more, it is heralding. But it is the boy; his complexion the color of every skin, his hair wild, and his face… well, his face, yes, but that’s for later.

I see him enter the valley from my lookout high on a hill but have no idea why I’m here or why I feel so infernally alone. I’m a spectator to what is coming.

And come they do, battalions, legions of men, women, and children following the boy with the torch and carrying bright banners, streams of silk entering the valley. Their faces full of joy, dancing to the endless rolling thunder as it peels across the valley floor.

I feel as if I sit on the hillside for days, blissfully deranged, listening to the thunder and the beat of the drums, watching the millions pass by. Each face known to me, of my kind, my nation, their lives born for dancing and following the boy with the torch.

Darkness comes and goes; hunger is satisfied without eating, sleep, I don’t know. But, from deep within the valley’s flowers, reverberating upward through wind-shaken willows, the drums sounding from the outriders on their horses, a feast of music, every taste exciting, a constant breeze of pure sound that I cannot turn away from, nor want.

I have this urge to join in.

Who is the boy with the torch? Why do legions follow him? Is it the light in his face, his constant peace emanating from his being, his youthfulness? Where is he going… from where? There seems no reason or rhyme, just endless nations of people joining hands as if they’d never known borders, war, or religion.

Or they’d known all of it.

I cannot say how the feeling possesses me as I watch from the hillside. When the last perfection disappears from the valley’s far end, I’m left wanting, hungry for more, and waiting for something.

The thunder of all humanity rumbles into the distance, and the music dies on the breeze.

I know the serenity of it all is leaving me, a troubled boy seeing something of the way it all should be. The whole of humankind, marching to what lies beyond, and I feel less fearful, caught up in the whirling celestial tide of humanity.

Finally, overtaken with silence, the music spirals out toward another place. I see on the far hill, in the hand of the boy, his torch, held high.

That boy is me. I am him.

I lay my head down again, to sleep soundly amid the peace of knowing what lies beyond my body.