Dreamt the orchestra played a rest for forty minutes

I'm standing on the podium and the score says rest, so the whole orchestra just sits there — no vibrato, no breathing, no page turns. Somebody in the third row tries to cough and the sound is so enormous it ruins the piece. I wake up angry at them, like they'd broken a sacred object, and I can't shake the feeling that whatever we're automating out of the world is exactly that: the almost-silence where the real music lives.