I had a dream last night -- a rare occurrence for me. They say we always dream, whether we remember our dreams or not. It has been ages since I had a dream I remembered. Last night I had one.

I was sitting at an outdoor café, distracted by the chatter behind me -- a young couple arguing about music. Arguments like these were not uncommon when I was young; music was all we cared about, all we wanted to do. Usually they revolved around who was the better band, something recently brought to mind by artist Brady Cranfield, whose Music Appreciation Society asked, Who is better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?

Cranfield’s question is a familiar one, and a question I have always refused. Even at fifteen I knew my response would be grist for a larger set of reductions. To wit: Of course Michael Turner doesn’t like strawberry ice cream – he’s a Rolling Stones fan. As for my response, I could never get past the choices, which is why I always said the Kinks.

What was strange about last night’s dream was the content -- there wasn’t any. The argument was about music, but there were no details, only a proposition that had success predicated on the failure of something else (not unlike Gore Vidal’s adage: It is not enough to succeed; others must fail). Thus, all I had besides the intensity of the combatants was an equation. So I did something I had not done in years: I attempted to introduce some content.

The content had to do with the Beatles and their use of instruments not associated with pop music -- specifically the French horn and the sitar. Not which is better, but how these instruments informed the recordings in which they were used.

In the past, attempts at content introduction were met with waking, the realization that dreams, no matter how good we might make them, are best forgotten. Last night was no different, though I did learn who played the French horn solo on "For No One".