“Mirage” is one of the key tracks in the Virgin Mind album — a project centered around the inner workings of human perception. This particular piece reflects on the nature of illusion — not as deception, but as a unique, internal creation of the mind.
The track opens with a quiet but unsettling admission:
A flash of light, a silent trace / It came to me without a face
From the start, the listener is drawn into a moment of private vision — an experience that leaves no evidence, no proof, only a memory that won’t go away. It sets the tone for the song’s central question: if no one else sees it, can it still be real?
Later lines deepen this theme:
No one could see, no one believed / Yet I remember what I perceived
With sparse, haunting lyrics, Mirage explores how illusions — these fleeting constructs of the mind — are often deeply personal. Unlike reality, they are unverifiable, and therefore both sacred and vulnerable.
As the song progresses, it shifts its gaze outward, toward how society interprets such experiences:
They praise the lies that bring them gold / But silence turns the pure to cold
And when the vision breaks the law — / They name it sickness, flaw, or war
Here, Mirage critiques the inconsistency in how we treat mental phenomena. An illusion that entertains or inspires is called art. One that disrupts is labeled pathology. The same imagination can be genius or madness — depending on its impact.
Musically, the piece is written in D minor, reinforcing its somber, introspective tone. While inspired by the emotional structure of Adagio in G minor by Albinoni (as reconstructed by Giazotto), Mirage takes a more intimate direction. The arrangement features deep cello lines, minimal piano, ambient textures, and long instrumental pauses that allow silence to do the speaking.
The chorus, simple and devastating, captures the fragility of inner truth:
Mirage — a shadow made of dust / A dream I never chose to trust
It stayed with me, it left no mark / A flicker deep inside the dark
Mirage doesn’t explain, resolve, or define.
It simply holds space — for the things we’ve seen that no one else has, and the quiet knowledge that sometimes, that’s enough.
A flash of light, a silent trace,
It came to me without a face.
No one could see, no one believed,
Yet I remember what I perceived.
***
They called it false, a fevered fire,
But it was born of no desire.
Mirage — a shadow made of dust,
A dream I never chose to trust.
It stayed with me, it left no mark,
A flicker deep inside the dark.
***
They praise the lies that bring them gold,
But silence turns the pure to cold.
And when the vision breaks the law —
They name it sickness, flaw, or war.
***
Mirage — a shadow made of dust,
A dream I never chose to trust.
It stayed with me, it left no mark,
A flicker deep inside the dark.