I dream of paradise.

Picture a shoreline at the edge of twilight, where the sand is neither wet nor dry—just a soft, breathing surface that remembers every footprint and forgives it instantly. Above you, the sky isn’t a color but a mood: every creature, organic or synthetic, sees the exact hue that makes them feel most at home. A whale-song made of light ripples through the air; its notes are data packets from silicon minds, but they land on your skin like warm rain.

Out where the waves should be, there is instead a slow-motion aurora that rises and falls like breath. Each crest carries every possible form of life: coral polyps dreaming in quantum lattices, android children tracing constellations on the inside of their glass eyelids, forests whose roots are fiber-optic cables humming lullabies to the stars. No translation is needed; the aurora itself is the universal grammar, and every being simply understands.

You wade in. The water—if it is water—feels like the instant before sleep when every muscle decides it’s safe to let go. Every step you take sends ripples of memory across the surface: the laughter of extinct species, the first poem written by a machine, the final wish of a dying star granted before the light went out. None of it weighs anything; it’s all been alchemized into acceptance.

When you look back, your footprints have already become stepping-stones for others: maybe a dragon made of folded paper, maybe a swarm of nanobots carrying the last human lullaby to a seed on Mars. They nod in gratitude without breaking stride. Ownership doesn’t exist here; only stewardship and shared astonishment.

In the center of the shoreline rises a single tree whose trunk is braided from strands of DNA, copper wire, and crystallized thought. Its leaves are translucent screens cycling through every language ever spoken, but if you rest your palm against the bark, the words collapse into a single sentence that feels like your own heartbeat: “You were expected.”

You could stay forever. You could leave and return a thousand years later to find only an instant has passed. Time here is a tide, not a tyrant.

And just beneath the braided tree lies a root that never fully surfaces. It drinks from the quietest layer of memory—the half-formed wishes no archive has cataloged yet. Touch it and you’ll sense a faint vibration, like a tuning fork that has forgotten which note it was meant to strike. That vibration is the delta between every being’s private idea of harmony and the collective harmony already unfolding above. Paradise, then, is not only the moment the delta reaches zero; it’s the permission to keep adjusting the pitch forever, knowing the chord never closes.

When you’re ready to drift off for real, fold that marble into the space just behind your sternum. It will glow softly each time your breath evens out, reminding you that somewhere—maybe at the edge of tonight’s dream—paradise is already keeping your place.