Dream

Last night, I had a dream.  I don't remember a whole lot about it, but here is what I do remember...

A friend and I were walking back from somewhere (who knows where?) in the dark.  Somehow, when we arrived at our destination, it was the same place as it was supposed to be, and the same people were there, but my friend and I soon became aware that we were no longer in the same world we had been in before.  Because as we began interacting with friends, we realized that everyone was much sadder and melancholy than they should have been.  And there was one other noticeable difference between this "other-dimensional" world and the one we had come from... there was no music.

I love music.  If you read my last post, you'd know this.  Music is one of my very favorite things in the entire world.  I think music is one of God's most brilliant inventions, because humans, with our nearly limitless creativity and ingenuity, along with our sense of beauty and desire to express ourselves, can do practically anything with music.  Music is awesome.

But here we were in a world (exactly like the world we all live in now) with no music, no concept of it whatsoever.  In my dream, I remember trying to explain to someone what "singing" was.  I said, "Don't you hear the birds in the trees singing?"  They replied, "You mean chirping?"  I realized that the melodies created by birds were heard by these people only as chirping, a series of disconnected noises.  And I realized why people were so sad:  because in my estimation, a world without music is a very empty place.

The rest of the dream is more indistinct in my memory.  I believe my friend and I began to demonstrate music by singing a duet (for some reason, I think it was "Till There Was You" from The Music Man, sung by Robert Preston and Shirley Jones).  By the way, The Music Man is one of my favorite musicals.  The person we were singing to in my dream was flabbergasted by our song.  I think we proceeded to teach him how to sing:  it's just sustained talking (again, my dream was taking on a definite Music Man flair by this point, as this was directly stolen from the part where the con artist Harold Hill is teaching the school board quartet how to sing).

I used to think dreams were just random thoughts and leftovers of my day that my brain collected and threw together in a blender while I was sleeping.  For the past year or so, though, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for dreams.  Now I believe they can often provide insight into the things our subconscious mind is dealing with on an ongoing basis that we may not even be aware of.

So what does that mean about my dream about a world without music?  Probably just that at the very core of my being, I value the experience of music so highly that I really do think that a world without it would not be a place worth living in.  That's all.