A light is not a beginning, and the darkness is never an end.

An odd light bent down on John’s desk that morning. He had been sleeping again, at his desk. The pens that usually lay in perfect order to his right had been knocked askew by his elbow as it bent under his head, his hands forming a small pillow to suit his slumber. John awoke suddenly, his head buzzing, as if stung by one of the yellow jackets that made nests in the earth of his back yard. He jolted, reached for his left temple and gave an odd yawn mixed with a burst of discomfort. The pages before him, where his head had been moments before, were scrawled with notes and diagrams dotted with loosely written symbols, much like the quantum theory equations he studied daily. John had been working from a dream he'd had. He had dreamed that the world, earth, was not quite what it seemed; in fact he had dreamed that this big bang, the creator of all things, the father of all energy, was not the first of its kind after all. The concept had come to him just after, in his dream, he had spoken to the most magnificent representation of the female form and had discussed in length the difference between male and female, to which the female representative had so eloquently made her case for the latter. In the dream, they both were seated atop a large precipice that laid view to a dark ocean textured with small whirlpool shapes of which she explained to be galaxies. She spoke of the natural existence of expansion and retraction, or ebb and flow to put it simply. The ideas in Johns head, in his dream, were running wild as she spoke further elaborating on the idea of the beginning and end, and the connection between the moments where recession and expansion are so close, ultimately the zero factor. This is where Johns mind stopped and he saw, in his dream, the ocean full of whirlpool galaxies evaporate while another pool appeared in its place playing host to galaxy shapes he, as a physicist, had never seen before.  “This is the universe of the first from the last. A countless amount of time before this moment and waking we are in now.” She spoke with a golden voice matching her eyes and hair. “There have been many since this formation, but this,” she gazed out into the ocean reaching with her hands to showcase the colors and beauty before them both, “this is the beginning of creation, and from here has all came and been repeated and varied.” Her hands broke color as they slid through the landscape causing the ground beneath them to evaporate and a feeling of weightlessness to take John over. He gazed outward into the beginning and was overcome with a combination of fear and bliss, he knew that he must study this new enlightenment, and share this new gift that lay before him. There was no theory that could count this thought, this feeling, and there was no choice for him; he must work, he must think, and he must understand the chance he had been given. “So our universe, ever expanding, billions and billions of years old, is not the beginning of everything?” he heard himself speak, a little too loud to still be dreaming. Then as the darkness lightened and his body once again sensed weight and gravity, his eyelids began opening, and he heard a the faintest hint of a whisper. “The beginning is now, and the end has been.”