The dream began without announcement. There they were, his old band-mates, standing around as though no time had passed. Someone made a joke he had forgotten. Someone complained about a soundcheck. They laughed in that peculiar language bands invent after years of vans, late-night diners, and audiences who either changed your life or barely filled the front row. There was no awkwardness. They were simply friends again.

In the dream, arguments over money dissolved into irrelevance. Nobody was keeping score anymore. They picked up their instruments and played. The music arrived with the effortless familiarity of a conversation resumed after a brief interruption. He remembered why they had chosen one another in the first place, because together they made something none of them could have made alone.

Then he woke.

The room was quiet. The ceiling was the same ceiling. The years returned one by one. Reality reassembled itself. They were not friends again. The ending had remained unfinished, the way some endings do. It wasn’t dramatic anymore. Yet the emotional force of the dream lingered. Reconciliation was still worth rehearsing, even if only in sleep. It struck him that dreams are strange editors. The improbable faith that four or five people could climb into a van and, for a while, become something larger than themselves. Whether that dream was a wish, a memory, or merely the brain tidying old shelves, he couldn’t say. He only knew that for a few minutes after waking, he missed not the band, but the version of all of them that had existed before money taught them how fragile harmony could be.