The dreams, they always start different but end the same. I'm in some place "familiar", my house, a friends house, a popular Byram hangout, my grandma's house. I'm surrounded by familiar faces, friends, family. There is always some kind of revelry, a big dinner, a party, drinks and music. In the dream someone always comes to me early on and wants to do something removed from everyone else. Tom wants to go to the guitar store, my mom wants me to go sit on the porch with my grandmother. The urgency and frequency with which they ask me progressively builds as the dream goes on. Its not that I don't want to go with them, its just I'm caught up in the social atmosphere and everyone being together that it isn't until towards the end of the dream that when they ask a final time I happily comply.
This next part is the dream's greatest hit. I go to leave with said person, we exit through a door, and things outside are entirely unfamiliar. Instead of stepping out onto my front lawn, the BAGS parking lot, or my back porch I'm standing in the middle of the Mongolian landscape. Miles of steppe, hills, and plains stretching on endlessly on all sides. Nervously I take a step back, but the door in which I came through is gone, the whole house, the popular hangout is gone. I'm alone standing in the center of the steppe. I'm frozen in place, this overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness comes over me and I take another step back towards that place that isn't there. That's when the music starts. I look up towards an expansive blue sky, its source. It echos with distorted sound as if it were being broadcast from underwater. It fades and grows like it were being carried by wind that can't decide which direction to blow. Its a song I've heard countless times by a band I never tire of listening to. I recognize the song as AOD's "Arc of the Sun". Suddenly I'm overcome with a new feeling, confidence, self purpose and direction. I look out at the never ending grassland, the music grows and fades, grows and fades. I take a step forward and wake up.
