The Sound That Sets the Soul Free

—a reflection on a dream, a flight, and what nature might still be trying to tell us—

Once, I had a dream that I was a white bird. A seagull, perhaps? A dove? I couldn’t say for certain. Yet within the dream, I didn’t just observe this bird—I was her. Not separate from her wings or her longing, not watching from afar, but living inside her small body with a soul too wide for the cage I was in.

Yes, there was a cage. Or something like it—a restriction, an invisible wall. Oddly, I was also still myself—human, flesh and thought—yet the bird-self felt even more real than the body I knew. The two versions of me overlapped. One bound by gravity and questions. The other drawn toward sky.

And I was flying.

I remember the feeling: my wings, my breath, the clouds wrapped around me like old songs. I was following something—not a path, not a person, but a sound. A pulse. The low, magnetic murmur of waves. The hush of warmth. The invitation of somewhere I had never been before, yet knew like a memory etched into bone.

As I followed the sound, I found myself passing through darkness. Not just the absence of light, but a place. A realm I might have visited before in spirit, but never like this. This darkness didn’t threaten me—it pulled at me. Seduced me with the heaviness of something ancient. Something I could not stay inside without losing who I was.

And when I could no longer bear it, I began to rise.

I fought through waves—strong, thrashing ones—the kind that demand your full surrender, the kind that have swallowed many before. I wasn’t sure I would survive. But I kept rising, one beat of light against another.

And then, there it was.

A soft glow in the distance. Golden. Quiet.

I pushed through it—broke the surface—and became the dove. Pure light. My body and soul crashed upward through the ocean of shadow, through the cage, through the memory of pain.

Free.

It made me wonder—

Are the sounds of nature here on earth part of our rising? Could the wind, the waves, the hush of a tree, the cry of a bird, be echoes from a higher home, gently calling us to remember?

And if that’s true, what have we drowned out?

In all our noise and distraction, have we silenced the sacred rhythms that were once meant to carry us from this life into the next? Have we forgotten that it’s not just wings or belief that carry the soul upward—but a listening heart?

Maybe heaven is not just above. Maybe it hums beneath our feet.

Maybe we rise, not by escaping this world, but by remembering how it sings.