Gold Underneath

“Gold Underneath” began with one of the most vivid dreams I can remember.

It was just before 4 a.m. on February 4, 2026. In the dream, I was in the mountains. The wind was strong, gusty, and inconsistent, moving in different directions. Somewhere above me I could hear the unmistakable whir of an RC airplane struggling in the wind, although I never actually saw it. Ahead, strange gray clouds were gathered around a hill or ridge. They did not look like normal clouds. Their wispy lower edges seemed almost coiled, and from a distance the whole scene felt ominous.

I remember looking at it and saying aloud, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Then I moved closer.

As my perspective changed, the clouds changed with it. What had looked gray and threatening from farther away became brilliant yellow-gold underneath, almost like one of those optical illusions that only reveals its real form when you stand in the right place. The entire scene opened into intense golden light, and thousands of winged beings began pouring out of the clouds.

In the dream I exclaimed, “They are angels. It’s beautiful!”

Then I woke up.

That part matters because I have been woken up by bad dreams plenty of times in my life. Some childhood nightmares have stayed with me for decades. What I could not remember was being forcibly woken by something positive, beautiful, and overwhelming. This was not fear waking me up. It was awe.

I got out of bed and sat down in a chair. That was when the physical emotion arrived. Tears welled in my eyes. My nose started running. I felt what I later described as adrenaline awe, along with an unusual internal glow, peace, and calm. The experience was intense enough that I wrote down the time and date because I wanted a record of exactly when it had happened.

For a while I wanted an explanation. The emotion felt so powerful that I wondered if something had happened somewhere outside of me, perhaps involving someone I loved. I even checked social media. At the time, several people in my life were facing major health crises or nearing the end of life, and mortality had already been on my mind. I had also recently been thinking about pancreatic cancer after seeing research that reminded me of losing my mother to the disease.

I never found an external event that explained the dream, and I do not claim to know whether it was spiritual, psychological, or simply the work of my subconscious.

What I do know is that its shape fit my life at the time. I had been trying to lean into fears and concerns instead of avoiding them, then plotting a course to resolve what I could. In the dream, I approached something that looked dangerous and discovered that my first view had been incomplete. The darkness was not the whole picture. There was something astonishing underneath it.

That became the heart of the song.

By the time I had worked through the idea, I realized the lesson was not only about courage or persistence. At the core of so much of what I do, including the music itself, I keep arriving at the same place: love. “Gold Underneath” became a song about perspective, fear, awe, spirituality, and the possibility that moving toward what frightens us can sometimes reveal something beautiful that we could not see from where we were standing.

Fun Fact

The dream’s two spoken lines were real. I actually said, “I’ve never seen anything like it” before moving closer, and later exclaimed, “They are angels. It’s beautiful!” immediately before waking.