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I dreamed I was taking photos at a Moby concert happening inside an elementary school slated for destruction. The audience consisted of me, two or three other people, and many empty chairs haphazardly thrown into piles. The camera with which I was photographing Moby was a sheet of paper with a small circle in it, like a cell phone camera, and it kept flopping in my hands so that I had difficulty angling the shot. Moby was smiling at me as I struggled with the camera, and I could see my reflection in his dark sunglasses and in the shine on his teeth as he sang. After the music was over but still ringing in my ears, I tried to touch him, but couldn’t reach him. The laws of physics bent against my will.

The next day, driving to work, I spun the wheel on my iPod to the album Hotel and listened to his voice weaving through the notes of “Where You End.” I remembered the first time I’d listened to anything by Moby—lying drunk on someone else’s bed in college, looking up at the blue Christmas lights strung around the ceiling. “Natural Blues” floated out of the computer speakers and I felt something shift in my mind, felt myself drop into that space between sleep and consciousness, those few lucid moments of dreaming before sleep overtook me. So many times, in that state, I’d hear music coming from inside my soul—the sound of the energy that made me what I am—only to forget every note of it upon waking, left with just the memory of how it felt. It nearly cracked me to be lying there in the oddly-cast dimness on an unfamiliar bed, suddenly listening to someone singing along to the music running through my head. I came out of my trance and spent the next days searching out every note I could find that this man had committed to recording equipment, listening to someone else play what my soul sounded like. I felt violated when I came across a video of a European stadium concert Moby played—so naked in front of so many people!

In the car on the way to work, listening again to this music I loved so much, I felt this time that it was me who was invading Moby, rather than the other way around. That was his real voice, coming from my speakers. The real vibration of vocal cords, the minute muscle movements that created tone and words and inflection and sound. The endless moment was so intensely private that I felt humbled and honored to be allowed into its beauty.