After months of semi-contented compliance, interspersed with an occasional visit to the 'rebel base' mostly for entertainment - Dax's feeling of contentment started to turn a bit hollow. Lying awake in bed one night, he started wondering again about, well - everything. Perhaps it was just in his nature to question. Maybe he was just destined to be discontent even while actively practicing contentment.
On this evening his mind was quite active, and until he could numb it through pointless repetition he could not sleep. Finally he drifted away into a very deep sleep. That night, in his dream he was visited by a muse, almost like one of the angels he had read about in some of the forbidden ancient texts. Or perhaps it was a god of the sleep world - like the legendary Morpheus.
[Scene: A birds eye/third person point of view of the world through all time and the people going about their routines. Daily activities were observed, like farming the land each day, or working in factories, or sitting in desks in a school. Dax would sometimes see himself within this collage of images.]
The muse guided Dax through many scenes, almost as if he was flying far above. He could see things as closely or distantly as he wanted - giving him quite an interesting perspective. They traveled magically it seemed through the time space continuum. On their journey they were steered toward various life events that either Dax or the muse felt were most relevant. As they toured these various scenes, the muse posited numerous ideas to Dax in the form of a song.
[See song lyrics here]
To Dax it seemed the muse was questioning his newfound contentedness, and the muse seemed to highlight scenes where people were going about their existences as if on auto pilot. Like a vast a sea of robots, they seemed to be just going through the motions. Producing to consume, consuming to produce, working to live, living to work.
Upon awakening, Dax quickly jotted down all the words that he could remember. The rhymes made it easier to recall. While Dax knew the muse was just a figment of his imagination, he nonetheless took the conundrum posed by this dream figure quite seriously. He carefully weighed all the ideas - and while some of these were posed with some apparent bias by the muse, Dax could still see the validity in either all of the alternatives.
The last line of the song stuck with him the most - 'Will you be warriors or will you be slaves?'. Dax, in a typical vacillating fashion, chose to believe that he would prefer to be neither. After all, the question assumed only two opposing alternatives and could be seen as a false dilemma. That is, a question that sets up two alternatives when in fact there may be additional alternatives not given as options within the question.
He often heard this line reverberating through his mind in the following weeks, yet there was still no clarity.