A dream from 1996:

For a brief moment the world spins and I feel myself on the verge of chaos... then I regain my balance and open my eyes to...

Nothing moves, nothing touches my senses, no sound, no sight, no breeze upon my skin... the absence of everything begins to press about me, then out of the nothingness comes the gentle sound of shepherd’s pipes, their tone so pure and perfectly pitched that tears begin to well up in my eyes. The melody wraps itself around me like a delicate spider web, capturing me as sure as if it had been chains. Almost unnoticed, a deep soothing harmony slips in, working into my skin, seeping into my blood, whispering to me and singing to me of life itself. The song blends together and sweeps me along, the tempo and intensity building up, different sounds, each as pure as the one before it, slip into my soul. A deep pulsing races upward, my heart struggling to keep time to what can only be the very heartbeat of time itself until I touch a point where I know I must explode from the intensity...

In a heartrending wrench the music is gone, and I feel with certainty that my soul must have been pulled out with it and I open my eyes to see what death looks like...
Velvet black. I stand in the midst of a field of stars, there is no up or down, no sense of perspective, simply blackness sprinkled with a myriad of lights. Slowly as I watch around me, I see a spectacular silent dance going on in the very stars and I am awed as I see the song that I had only heard before. My senses begin to reel as they are washed over, seeing the dance of stars for what it is... the patterns of life, all of the ‘what is’ and ‘what could have beens’, the ‘what was’ and the multitudes of ‘what may be’ and I begin to fall, spiraling ever downward through a sea of infinite possibilities...

The sensation of falling stops abruptly as my body is blasted by an onslaught of sensations that it had forgotten in the eternity of the past moments...
Soft grasses caress my skin as a breeze blows gently around me.
I hear the rustle of leaves and the scurrying of life around me. The smell of wildflowers lingers as the breeze moves by and the taste of warm damp earth invades my mouth. I open my eyes to a dazzling palette of colors; rich greens roll out before me sprinkled with patches of vivid purple and yellow flowers. Deep browns rise up from the grass then burst full of many hues of green leaves then turn into the softest blue of the sky blanketing over it all. LIFE moves around me, a cycle of living and dying and decaying, then life springing from the decay to rise anew... I hear the song and see the dance and rest at peace and simply... live.

Silence
12/13/96

Silence, sweet silence,
Like a cloak of midnight black,
Slips over my soul
As I walk an endless track.
Sweet, sweet silence.

An ebon tunnel
Through an eternity of stars,
That wraps around my mind
Against the bright light noise that jars.
Oh, sweet silence.

Not for me the light
Of piercing pain or joys,
But for a single moment
Give me freedom from the noise.
Calm, sweet silence.

So rich a quiet
As to almost be a sound;
My soul, drained by chaos,
Can revive as it is drowned.
Sweet, sweet silence.

Copyright @ Kelly Bowron