Background Pony

II - Lunatic's Dream

Dear Journal,

What happens to us between sleeping and waking? Every night, when the moon rises, we march like sheep into that deep darkness, not knowing what truth mechanizes the spaces between our heartbeats during such long and noble silence. Are we really the same ponies when we wake up? Or is what rises with the morning merely a carbon copy of the thinking creature that had laid itself down the evening before? What a strange homunculus that thing must be, a golem crafted after the flimsy blueprint of a slumbering soul's final thoughts, that it is no wonder that all of our ambitions, aspirations, and hopes are only residually pursued until the bitter end.

What, then, should we call our dreams? Are they the manifestations of regret? Are they the substance of all our attachments thrown into a searing crucible of mortal fear? Do we dream because we know of loss, of all its colorlessness, across which our wills and desires shatter like eggshells dashed against a brick wall?

I used to believe in these things. I saw the fall of night like the mistress of death. Dreaming was a threadbare, skittering whisper-like the a flutter of gray wings or the curling legs of an overturned moth after a short and fruitless life of chasing the invisible purpose behind flame. When a pony is alone-and lucid-whilst cast before the great looming darkness of a world that forgets her, dreams serve nothing more than a dissonant overture to a symphony of screams.

It was with a very mad notion, then, that I once stumbled upon a miraculous epiphany: a dream is much like a song. Very often do ponies forget the title of the instrumental. On other occasions, ponies are even likely to forget the name of the composer. What is not lost between that impermeable gap of sleeping and waking is the tune, the indefinable voice that plays with our ears like a mother licks her newborn foal. And when we open our eyes to the golden glow of a new dawn, it is something more than our bodies that animates us, something that gives us the tempo to which our hearts can dance, something that makes us crawl out of our beds like a resurrected soul is blessed to climb out of a tomb.

Life is a very impossible thing, bleak and dark and dastardly at every turn. But something in the cold void of night-something as black if not blacker than death itself-slips a tune into our meaty hearts as a gardener plants a seed in inert soil. What grows from our dreams is a symphony, at times an orchestra that has no artist. And like that orchestra, we blossom against the nothingness, until our search-our growth-becomes life itself, becomes something impossible, like remembering the name of a musician that you were never introduced to, only to learn that it was yourself the whole time.

I do very much love to dream. Does that make me mad? I daresay, it makes me alive.

It was the eve of the Summer Sun Celebration. All across Ponyville, ponies gathered in happy little clusters, forming circles around brilliant bonfires that shone like amber plumes under the crimson kiss of a sunset. The air was filled with laughter, murmur, and music as the villagers prepared for the annual tradition of an entire night spent awake in the joyful sway of camaraderie. Princess Celestia was visiting Baltimare that year, but that didn't stop the Ponyvilleans from eagerly greeting the morning sunrise and giving thanks to their patron alicorn for bringing light to Equestria each day.

One soul, however, was anything but jubilant. The earth pony sat alone beside a bonfire, displaced from the thick of the crowd. There was a sullen shadow over his orange coat and earthen brown mane that night, and it matched the stallion's melancholic expression as he stared tiredly into the flames, his ears barely pricking to the music that wafted over his slumped shoulders. As the day slowly died around him-forming a purple roof to the village full of summer merriment-his eyes closed and he exhaled a cold sigh.