Rest, Rhythm, and What We Are Expected to Perform

I dreamed that I was hiding under a table in a music classroom. The score in front of me showed a long rest: twenty-five measures of silence. Nothing complicated. Nothing dramatic. I simply was not supposed to play yet. Sunlight fell across the room, and for a moment the space felt peaceful, the way only music rooms can. I followed the instructions exactly as written, waiting quietly for the next cue.

But the teacher kept stopping the rehearsal. Each time, she insisted that someone was making noise. The room went still. Everyone turned to look around, searching for the source of the disturbance. Somehow, her eyes always ended up on me. I tried to be motionless; my friend tried to be motionless. We held our breath as if silence itself had become something we were responsible for maintaining, something we could be accused of breaking.

When the teacher stopped us again, she finally asked, “What are you two doing?”

I answered softly, “It’s a twenty-five-measure rest. We’re supposed to wait.”

For a moment, the entire classroom froze. Then, in a way that startled me, the teacher sat down, leaned over her desk, and began to cry. These weren’t angry tears. They felt like the sudden collapse of someone holding too much for too long. I wanted to comfort her. I feel no guilty yet only confused. But before I could move, my old homeroom teacher appeared and blocked my path. My high-school counselor entered next to console her, and suddenly the whole scene shifted. It became a conflict between adults, a drama in which I was no longer a person but a suspected cause.

Then the dream turned stranger. A group of unfamiliar people walked into the room carrying large bags, claiming they needed to “collect evidence.” They took the teacher’s phone, covered most of the screen with stickers, and photographed the remaining fragments as if they were building a case out of pieces. I watched in silence, feeling that I was being blamed not for anything I had done, but simply for being present in someone else’s unraveling. I followed the music. Yet somehow, I was still wrong.

When I woke up, the music classroom stayed with me. Not the crying teacher, not the absurd “evidence collectors,” but the feeling of being punished for following a rhythm that was written, clear, and correct. It made me wonder how often we are told we are “not participating enough” simply because we are in a phase of life that requires rest. How often we follow the instructions given to us, only to be criticized for not performing in ways others silently expect. How often silence is mistaken for defiance.

In music, a rest is not an absence but a part of the structure. It creates shape. It prepares the next note. But in daily life, resting often feels like a failure. Pausing can look like disinterest. Quietness can be misread as guilt. In my dream, I was held responsible for emotions that did not belong to me, for expectations I never agreed to, for a performance I was not meant to give.

And this, I think, is why the dream felt so real.

So many of us move through the world like that classroom: navigating shifting rules, being evaluated through fragments, absorbing reactions that aren’t ours, and being judged for a rhythm that others don’t recognize. We are expected to perform constantly, even when our internal measure says “rest.” We are asked to explain ourselves, justify ourselves, and prove ourselves, even when all we are doing is following the score.

Waking from the dream, I kept thinking about how brave it is to honor our own timing in a world that demands noise. Maybe the dream was not accusing me but trying to free me. Maybe it was reminding me that I don’t have to match someone else’s tempo, someone else’s expectations, someone else’s unraveling.

Silence is not failure. Rest is not wrong. And not every misunderstanding requires us to perform a defense.

If someone misreads my rhythm, let them.

Because sometimes the most honest thing we can do is listen to the rest inside our own life, and trust that our music will still make sense—even when others cannot hear it yet.