A strange dream. I dreamed that a boy was playing a song very similar to "Nella Fantasia" — but on the clarinet, not the oboe — and that I was playing the piano. That person looked a lot like Rit Parnichkun but I know he doesn't play the clarinet.
After a while, the clarinet vanished and "Rit" (or the person who looked like him) was singing instead of playing, and this was an astonishing voice, a soaring, pure soprano that went up to a sustained high C. As he sang the C, a brilliant, blue-white light washed over us.
A woman, in her 40s or 50s with piled up blond hair was standing behind the piano (it was a brown upright) with perhaps a blackboard behind her, so we might have been in some kind of school room. And she said to me, "What does the song mean?"
And I said, "It's about letting go, detaching from the conscious self."
She said, "So it's a song about death?"
"I guess so."
"So what IS death?" she asks me? (I remember now she has a white blouse with a frilly neck, slightly similar to an Elizabethan ruff.)
"I don't know what happens. I think we just become one with nature and the universe, and later we get reconstituted as something or someone else."
"So you don't believe in life after death?"
"I guess, not as a thread that continues."
"That's what I think, too," says the school teacher. The singing goes on — angelic — and I play chords on the piano, accompanying the boy soprano who looks like Rit Parnichkun.
And I slowly woke up — not all at once. The sound of the song in my mind went on past my waking up for a few moments.