Thoughts in Lotus: On Dreams and Songs

‘I dreamed the perfect song’

A few weeks ago, I was driving and listening to Bill Callahan’s album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. The weirdly titled track ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’ came on and I heard Callahan sing the verse that leads up to his gibberish refrain:

‘I fell back asleep some time later on
And I dreamed the perfect song
It held all the answers like hands laid on
I woke halfway and scribbled it down
And in the morning, what I wrote, I read
It was hard to read at first, but here's what it said:


"Eid ma clack shaw zupoven del ba
Mertepy ven seinur cofally ragdah"
"Eid ma clack shaw zupoven del ba
Mertepy ven seinur cofally ragdah"’

As amusing as it always is to hear the nonsense lines in this song, to hear Bill Callahan drily puncturing profundity as he does so well, it was the lead-up lines that jumped out at me this time. ‘I dreamed the perfect song’ got me thinking about songs and dreams: songs about dreams, dreams about songs, songs as dreamlike things.

Countless songs have been written about dreams over the years. Trying to count the ones you know would probably be a good cure for insomnia, a smooth chute to dreamland itself. I’d go as far as to say that songs, like other forms of art, would be inconceivable without a strong connection to dreams, dreaming and dreamworlds.

My first thought, when Callahan got me musing about this again, was to summon some of my favourite songs about dreaming. I’ll mention some below, though I don’t want this to turn into too much of a listicle. I have absolutely no doubt that there are several lists already available about this topic and I’ve deliberately avoided googling them so that I could stick with my original thoughts. I’m just as interested in thinking about what some of the relationships might be between songs and dreams, and that’s where I plan to wander here. There can be something dreamlike, after all, about following a train of thought.

Dreams and Songs

What do dreams and songs have in common? To start with, it seems to me that they are both spaces of memory and desire. Freud famously wrote about dreams comprising the residues of the day mixed with latent desires, as well as anxieties and fears. While songs might not immediately feel like examples of anxiety or dread, it wouldn’t take too much sleuthing to find lyrics that come from a place of worrying, pleading or begging: Don’t go! Stay with me! Please don’t take my man!

Like dreams, songs can be heard to offer a mixture of daytime or recent experience and earlier experience turned into what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls a ‘night fiction’. Bollas writes about the blend of industrial and aesthetic processes that dreams display; again, this seems apt to apply to the making of songs, to the art and craft of these things which are so familiar yet can be so unique.

Dreams and songs both move us out of time and out of place while taking time and being in place. Where is the time and place of the song? Of the dream? They are both spaces of the surreal, the transformed, the condensed, the expanded: tiny details blown up or vast narratives reduced to a few symbols or stand-ins.

How many of us sing while dreaming? Are songs vehicles for dreaming?

Dreams are aesthetic experiences not always reducible to human stories. Freud made much of the manifest content of the dream and the dream experience exposing the unconscious desires to be found in the latent content: digging through the clues to get to the meaning of the dream. But perhaps such digging leaves out a huge amount of what’s happening when we dream. Similarly, reducing songs to specific meanings—especially the frequently banal meanings gleaned from the biographies of songwriters and singers—and forgetting that song is an experience leaves out a huge amount of what’s happening when we experience songs.

When I speak of song as experience, I am trying to think beyond the collection of experiences (plural) that we mash together to get to what we call a biography, beyond that longer accumulation that we call ‘life experience’—though I remain fascinated by these, and have written about them extensively—and moving closer to what Mark Booth explored in his wonderful book The Experience of Songs. Not (only) my experience, not (only) the singer’s or the writer’s experience, but the experience of songs and what songs do.

In the same way we have been taught by psychoanalysis to think about the dream work—as if the dream itself had some kind of agency—so we might think of the song work as having some control over the songwriter, the singer and the listener. Or, if you feel more comfortable saying that it’s the subject’s unconscious rather than the dream itself that has agency within the dream experience, then what would be the unconscious of the song subject (whether thought of as songwriter, singer, listener or song text)?

‘The Candy-Colored Clown’

One of the first songs I thought of was Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’. Like many people of my generation, this song lodged itself in my head when I saw it used in David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet. I may have heard it before then, but it’s the experience of seeing the song lip-synched by Dean Stockwell that I recall most vividly. There was something about the way imagery was matched to sound that made the opening line—the one about ‘the candy-colored clown they call The Sandman’—incredibly sinister. That feeling grows with other scenes in the film, such as when Dennis Hopper (as Frank Booth) speaks Orbison’s lines while terrorising Kyle MacLachlan's character Jeffrey.

If ‘In Dreams’ was well-suited to the uncanny dreamworlds of Lynch’s movies—a perfect soundtrack to Lynch’s oft-repeated observations that his work reflects the dreams we live in—it also served as reminder of the dreamlike wonder of Orbison’s voice. A through-composed song that uses its distinct sections to work through the levels of Orbison’s famous vocal registers, ‘In Dreams’ takes its listeners on a unique sonic journey. That its use in Lynch’s film also helped boost Orbison’s brief renaissance as a vital pop presence who linked the rock ‘n’ roll era to the rock veteran era was something else to reflect on as he made the rounds as a Traveling Wilbury and interpreter of younger artists’ songs in his final years.

Music videos are another way that songs can be connected to dreams, not least when, as often happens, the visual narrative seems to have little to do with the previously understood story told in the lyrics. Videos mash up disparate visual and sonic elements to create dream collages that have their own internal logic and vivid aesthetic. The ‘official video’ for Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ is odd, combining footage from Blue Velvet with studio shots of Orbison and other musicians. We get to see Stockwell and Hopper mouthing the lyrics to the song before we ever see Orbison doing so. To begin with, Orbison appears in silhouette, just as the line about the candy-colored Sandman is heard.

Is Orbison the Sandman, sprinkling stardust and crooning a lullaby for us? Is there something sinister about that silhouette—and, later, that singing mouth hidden in shadow—or is it just that I recall how I found Orbison a somewhat uncanny figure when I was younger, hidden behind his dark glasses and performative stillness? What about those moments in the video where Orbison’s face melds into Hopper’s, Roy as Frank with his absurd but menacing display of hypnotic power and submerged violence?

The Sandman is, of course, the disturbing and mysterious figure found in myths and tales, including the E.T.A. Hoffmann story of the same name that Freud used as his primary example of ‘The Uncanny’. Hoffmann’s Sandman is no mere sprinkler of the magic stuff of sleep, no benevolent bringer of peaceful dreams, no reassurer, like Orbison craves, that everything will be alright when dreams come, that dreams will offer the comfort that reality lacks. Instead, as the elderly childminder tells Hoffman’s narrator Nathaniel:

‘He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won't go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.’

Mario Laboccetta's depiction of The Sandman from the 1932 American edition of Tales of Hoffmann (Mead & Company, New York).

These cloaked figures, these silhouettes. How uncanny that I should have recently been reacquainted with another figure who once inspired a sense of dread within me. And how like the logics and slippages of dream associations that he should be my own remembered version of the Sandman: the ‘Don’ character from the Sandeman port and sherry company. He stands behind me as I type this, adorning a box containing a bottle of white port I bought on my most recent trip to Portugal. I recall his silhouette everywhere on a long distant trip to Porto. And I find him when I go searching for more information about the logo, his (to me) sinister presence recorded in online archives.

My recently purchased bottle of Sandeman white port and historic logos archived at https://www.sandeman.com/history/.

Dreams are spaces where we all get to be creators: playwrights, scriptwriters, film directors, actors, orators, mimes, painters, sculptors, novelists, poets, songwriters, singers. And we get to play with time, which is something songs are ideally suited to.

What Songs Do with Time

It seems to me that what songs do with time must have quite a bit to do with how effectively songs can work as vehicles for dreamlike imagery. In a song like Johnny Mercer’s ‘Dream’, you really want a dreamy pace. Roy Orbison captures it (it’s one of many dream-themed songs he recorded); so does Frank Sinatra. Dianne Krall’s version has just the kind of languorous sound you’d hope a song of that title would have. Or think about how the Everly Brothers linger over the word ‘dream’ in their version of Boudleaux Bryant’s ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’ (another song dreamily covered by Orbison)

One of the ways that time works in songs is through singers’ use of rubato, or ‘stolen time’. I’ve written about this before in relation to Sandy Denny’s singing. Her timeless ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ remains, for me, one of the finest examples of a song that not only takes time as its theme, but also plays with time in its delivery. The version of the song recorded by Fairport Convention sets multiple timelines going through its combination of stately pace, Richard Thompson’s fluid guitar lines and Denny’s hovering vocal.

It’s also a song about dreaming and the revery of dreamtime. Judy Collins and Nina Simone capture this in their versions by lingering on the word ‘dreaming’ in the first verse. Collins extends the end of the word, so that the ‘ing’ becomes an unfolding process:

Simone draws the whole word out, letting the vowels waver dreamily:

Time appears in various ways as a topic in Booth’s The Experience of Songs, especially in his chapter on that dreamy seasonal ode, ‘White Christmas’. Booth explores the song as a ‘tableau’, one that captures a moment and attaches to it a kind of stasis (if not stability). This is particularly apt for ‘White Christmas’, given the song’s celebration of a time of year that is associated with life pausing for a while.

‘The dreaming posited in the first line is properly drowsing-dreaming , the so-called hypnagogic still-image dreaming of the lightest stage of sleep, as opposed to the eye-moving action dreams of deep sleep or the active fantasies of waking.’ (Booth, The Experience of Songs, 189)

It’s interesting that Booth should alight on ‘hypnagogic’, a term that would be picked up over two decades later to describe a kind of pop music that would probably not otherwise be associated with Bing Crosby’s seasonal idyll.

‘The reverie is solitary as well as still. No one is addressed: no ghost of a listener is part of the ostensible shaping occasion. Props, of the insubstantial sort evoked by song, are very spare. By inference the Christmas cards are present, so by inference there is an indoor set, warmth, perhaps semidarkness, perhaps a window with no snow beyond it. Inference is not particularly at work for most listeners; this song does little to stimulate it.’ (Booth, 189-90)

There’s a lot going on in these sentences. Booth refers to the props in songs as ‘insubstantial’ but places himself, as a privileged listener, as one for whom such props might be meaningful. For the rest of us, the song (and this singer’s) setting up of a reverie is more important. This is a bit like the distinction that Christopher Bollas makes between how Freud approached the interpretation of dreams, with himself as the skilled listener, and how Bollas complements that approach by making a distinction between dream content and the dream experience.

Booth extends his discussion of the reverie to the experience of buying songs on records:

‘the idea of buying and having any recorded song at all can be seen to have similar content. It is of the nature of song in general to stand still. Song turns away from linear process and gives participation in a standing pattern. A recorded song is a grasped chance for the owner-listener to seem to escape from time, or to escape from seeming to be bound to linear time, depending on which perspective one takes to be finally more valid.’ (Booth, 192-3)

‘Lost in a Dream’

That woozy time-stood-still aspect of song is mesmerizingly captured by Ian Penman in his unsurpassed 2015 essay on Frank Sinatra. Penman argues that Sinatra’s singing voice displays more personality than technique when compared to peers such as Tony Bennett or Mel Tormé:

‘what is most characteristic about that personality is how unshowy it is: how it often feels deeply submerged, and hard to touch. He can sound on the edge of something trance-like, “lost in a dream”. Our favourite singers often have some scintillant flaw or uniquely cracked marker: hints of an old accent poking through; sudden unpredictable breaks in the calm, confident voice; cynicism interlaced with giggly childlike joy. You hear nothing like this in Sinatra: at times his song is closer to a kind of resplendent anonymity; he never makes things too obvious, italicizing what he thinks the listener ought to be feeling. It’s notable for its lack of conspicuous drama, the antipodean opposite of today’s showboaty X Factor model.’

Is this a kind of absence of vocal grain, then? Or rather, an absence of the kind of puncta I’ve written about before? As I wrote then, I have found points in Sinatra songs that jump out and grab me, disturbing me from my revery. But I would still agree with Penman’s characterisation of Sinatra’s swoony voice; it’s precisely because he does so consistently perform that ‘resplendent anonymity’ that rare moments where the calm is broken—such as ‘that was long ago’ in ‘Good-Bye’—stand out so shockingly.

Penman connects Sinatra to another genre of music that I often think about when I think of dreams and dreaming:

‘Sinatra was one of the first musicians to see the long-playing album as an opportunity for sustained mood music: a pocket of time focused entirely on one defining concept or tone; a quasi-cinematic reverie for listeners to sink into and dream along with.’

When I teach classes on mood music, Muzak, exotica and holiday records—a favourite topic of mine—I often start with the covers of albums by arrangers such as Paul Weston, Mantovani, George Melachrino and Wayne King.

While the front covers give much away about the moods being evoked and the gendered behaviours being implied, the liner notes on the back often contain curious nuggets too, such as the following from King’s 1958 album Dream Time:

‘Have you ever thought of the possible connection between daydreaming and progress in the science of electronics? Far-fetched as it may seem, they are unquestionably associated. It is now possible, if you so desire, to indulge in your favorite fantasy via the wonders of high fidelity’

As Penman notes of Sinatra’s albums of this period, the development of the long-playing record—combined, as in Dream Time and similar mood music albums, with the fetishising of high fidelity sound and advancements in stereo—led to a desire to thematise collections of songs and instrumental pieces. This is really where the concept album came into its own, at a much earlier point than pop historians often credit. And albums like Weston’s Music for Dining (1952), Music for Reading (1952), Music for Courage and Confidence (1953), and Dream Time Music (1953) were also the mid-century precursors of all those Spotify ‘Mood’ playlists.

To play a record, perchance to dream. Who better to help out than someone like Wayne King, who, the liner notes to Dream Time inform us, is ‘a musical sand-man with a solid reputation for dreamy orchestration’?

But, sometimes, we need the right singer too. Penman highlights Sinatra’s classic concept album In the Wee Small Hours as an example of what the LP medium encouraged, from its moody cover to its intimate contents:

‘The songs on In the Wee Small Hours flicker and return, time and again, to figures of sleep, dream, waking, hallucination. “Deep in a dream of you ... The smoke makes a stairway ... I wake with a start ... I close my eyes and there you are ...” The threshold state of torch: a strange mixture of wooziness and clarity, scepticism and passivity. The prickly valetudinarian ache of the torch singer, forever taking his own pulse. For all that the torch mood – especially in Sinatra’s habitual rendering – is associated with enthusiastic drink-downing, I’ve always thought the mood was far more opium pipe reverie than another round of boilermakers. “Shadows gathered in the air ...”’

It’s that shadow world as much as anything that Bob Dylan evokes in his series of albums devoted to songs made famous by Sinatra: Shadows in the Night (2015), Fallen Angels (2016) and Triplicate (2017). That, and an homage to the art of the album, as shown in Shadows’ nod to Blue Note covers and Triplicate’s use of 78RPM-era disc-bundling.

Dylan, meanwhile, has his own history of dreamlike songs.

Bob Dylan’s Series of Dreams

When Bill Callahan got me thinking again about the relationships between songs and dreams, my mind jumped to the many dream narratives that Bob Dylan has provided his listeners with over the years. I thought about ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, the 1963 song where the singer looks back on what he has left behind and the friends he has lost from the perspective of ‘a train heading west’. The song takes it melody and lyrical structure from the British ballad ‘Lord Franklin’ (also known as Lady Franklin’s Lament’), opening with a narrator who falls asleep while travelling and dreams a dream about a haunting loss. In the case of ‘Lord Franklin’ the dream concerns a doomed Arctic voyage which led to the disappearance of John Franklin’s ship in Baffin Bay in the 1840s. The narrator longs for the return of Franklin and the sense of wholeness such a reunion will bring.

In ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, the narrator mourns the loss of a past in which time could be spent easily with friends. The song thus narrates the passing of time on various levels: the passing of time in the company of friends; the passing of the years that have caused the loss of such moments; and life as a journey that separates us from home, the past, friends and family, and that threatens the impossibility of return. In ‘Lord Franklin’, the lover longs for the return of the beloved; in Dylan’s song it is the narrator who longs to return. The differences are not great, amounting to little more, perhaps, than expressions of longing for reunion articulated from different poles.

This kind of dreaming taps right into sentiment. What if that could have happened? What if my life had been like that? What if he he’d come back, or never left? What if I could be with those people again? Be that young again? Unlike Sandy Denny’s dreamer in ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, this is revery as regret. Where she had no fear of leaving, or of time, Lady Franklin and the old-before-his-time Bob Dylan seek revery as revisionism.

This kind of dreaming—this wish for things to be other than they are now—is close to dreaming as ambition, or vision, though these at least hold out the possibility for dreams to come true. This may be writ as personal ambition: the dream you’ve got to have in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Happy Talk’ and what Dizzee Rascal does with Captain Sensible’s 1982 recording of the song in his 2004 track ‘Dream’, where it becomes ambition in hindsight, looking back at looking forward. Or it can be vision painted on a bigger canvas, Martin Luther King style; songs relish in the idea of having big dreams: Sam Cooke evoking change, or Common riffing on MLK.

Songs are ideal vehicles for dreaming about the past or the future. But closer to what Callahan had me thinking about were the crazy simultaneity of mashed-up worlds that I associate with dreaming, and with what’s possible in song’s specific art of condensation: ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, way more freewheeling than the ones he essayed on his second album.

‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ is more typical of the dreamworlds and surreal landscapes that would inhabit the songs of his classic mid-60s period and inform much of what came after it. Many of these songs didn’t need dream-based titles to do the surreal work that dreams often do. Take a song like ‘Desolation Row, for example, here brilliantly summarised by Mark Polizzotti in his book about Highway 61 Revisited:

‘“Desolation Row” is the soundtrack to an imaginary western, with its sepia tones, flimsy prop saloons, and corpses in the dust. ... In [it] Dylan dredges up all the haunting visions and ghosts of childhood and adulthood, the monsters that once lived in his closet and now populated his dreams. By setting it to a musical motif so rich in resonance for those who, like him, grew up with the cowboy myths, he found a sound to match his night terrors.’

There’s also the conflation of eras and characters. In my book The Sound of Nonsense, I discussed some of the parallels I see in the work of Dylan and James Joyce. I find Dylan’s songs very Joycean and, more specifically, Finneganswakean. There’s a sense of all time being present and a huge array of historical actors sharing space in the story; in ‘Desolation Row’ alone, we encounter Cinderella, Bette Davis, Romeo, Cain and Abel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Good Samaritan, Ophelia, Noah, Nero, ‘Einstein disguised as Robin Hood’, Dr Filth, the Phantom of the Opera, Casanova, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and other anonymous figures such as ‘the blind commissioner’, ‘the fortune-telling lady’, ‘a jealous monk’ and some calypso singers.

Such an assemblage resonates with a description of Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson:

‘On this revolving stage, mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the same spatial and temporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings. All time occurs simultaneously; Tristram and the Duke of Wellington, Father Adam and Humpty Dumpty merge in a single percept.’

And with this from Terence McKenna:

‘Finnegans Wake is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries, so Queen Mab becomes Mae West [and] all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish legend, Irish internecine politics, are all swirling, changing, merging. Time is not linear. You will find yourself at a recent political rally, then return to the court of this or that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh. It’s like a trip.’

Both passages seem apt for many of Dylan’s songs, from the historically surreal to those that are saturated in folk history. The journeys described in songs such as ‘On the Road Again’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ are journeys into the imagination, trippy in both the drug-related sense that McKenna is alluding to and in terms of the surreal world of dreams and nightmares. There is also an engagement with childlike logic; in ‘I Shall Be Free No. 10’, from Another Side Of, Dylan mixes number and letter games with dream-like imagery, suggesting a surreal take on the children’s songs recorded by one of his early influences, Woody Guthrie.

‘Series of Dreams’, a later song, was set for inclusion on Dylan’s 1989 album Oh Mercy, but was ultimately pulled, appearing instead on the first of the official ‘Bootleg Series’ in 1991. Like many who’ve commented on the song, I’ve tended to hear the opening line—’I still have a series of dreams’—as an explicit reference to Dylan’s ‘dream songs’ of the 1960s. Unlike those songs, and also unlike the dreamworlds evoked by the likes of ‘Desolation Row’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Tombstone Blues’ or ‘Visions of Johanna’, Dylan focuses here on a kind of metacommentary rather than specific dream content, though he does offer a brief list of content in the final verse: ‘In one, numbers were burning / In another, I witnessed a crime / In one, I was running, and in another / All I seemed to be doing was climb.’

It’s the metacommentary, however, that’s intriguing:

Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo fly
And there’s no exit in any direction
’Cept the one that you can’t see with your eyes
Wasn’t making any great connection
Wasn’t falling for any intricate scheme
Nothing that would pass inspection
Just thinking of a series of dreams

One of the things I like about this song is how it plays with the idea—the obsessions, even—of interpretation. Dreams are things that can be, and have been, subjected to endless analysis, and the same goes for Dylan’s songs. Here, he claims no attempt at connected themes or schemes, ‘nothing that would pass inspection’, knowing, as he must do by this point in his career, that we’ll still go looking for meanings and connections.

It’s noteworthy that ‘Series of Dreams’ appeared on the first of the now extensive ‘Bootleg Series’. The seeming coincidence in the title prompts me to wonder whether these releases have all been part of a ‘series of dreams’, a collection of alternative versions of how Dylan’s career went down. They have certainly presented us with a series of Dylans and, again, it seems only right that this particular dream song was given a video treatment that blends those many personas—along with fragments of lyrics and other writings—into a dreamlike narrative of a life that mashes up different eras and experiences. Just as dreams reversion things that happened before, so the video imagery offers a playful revisionism, for example when the famous footage of Dylan holding up the lyrics to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ on a series of cards shows the contents of those cards replaced by the lyrics of the song he’s singing now, which themselves seem to refer to the video footage: ‘the cards are no good that you’re holding’. The continuation of this line, not shown on the cards, is ‘unless they’re from another world’, and it’s that sense of otherworldliness that comes though so strongly for me in this song and its wonderful accompanying video.

In 2002, Dylan recorded a song for Robert Maxwell’s Civil War film God and Generals (released in 2003). Whether heard in the context of the film or not, ‘Cross the Green Mountain’ operates as a powerful expression of lateness and wisdom, of lessons learned after great tragedies and lived lives. It is full of striking lines, such as ‘I dreamt a monstrous dream’ or ‘the last day’s last hour / of the last happy year’ and also shows Dylan’s continued interest in multiple narrative perspectives.

‘Cross the Green River’ is framed by a historical narrative, told in the past tense, in which a first-person narrator tells of resting by a stream and dreaming a ‘monstrous dream’, recalling the opening of ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ and ‘Lord Franklin’ in which the narrator ‘dreamed a dream’. Like those songs, the dream involves a person or persons absent from the narrator’s life, or possibly a former self; among the numerous possible readings of the song, a tale of lovers parted by war is one possibility, a dying soldier looking back on the recent past another. Unlike the earlier songs, the bulk of the story within the dream is narrated in the present tense, providing an immediacy to the events unfolding; the narrative mostly alludes to the American Civil War (although the allusion mostly stems from the association of the song with Maxwell’s film), so these events become a kind of war reportage. Narrative confusion is increased when, late in the song, the lines ‘but he’ll be better soon / he’s in a hospital bed’ are immediately followed by ‘he’ll never be better / he’s already dead’; the narrator seems to be reporting one set of facts (the delivery of a letter in which the initially reassuring words are presented, showing the information that the letter’s recipient has) and immediately contradicting them by reporting what he knows to be true, sharing this superior information with us, so that singer and listeners are able to stand outside the world of the other characters in the narrative.

Alien experience

A lot of Robert Wyatt’s music brings to mind dreamlike narratives. I’ve written about Rock Bottom in a recent post. His 1997 album Shleep is another good example, from the illustrations or sleeping and dreaming bodies on its cover and inner sleeves to songs with dream references or dreamlike narratives such as ‘Heaps of Sheeps’, ‘The Duchess’, ‘Maryan’ and ‘Blues in Bob Minor’.

For this post, I’ll single out ‘Alien’, a poem written by Wyatt’s wife Alfie Benge and set to music by Wyatt. In his liner notes to Shleep, Wyatt wrote that ‘the imagery for “Alien” comes, I think, from empathising with the extra-terrestrial trajectory of the swift’. In her commentary included in the pair’s jointly authored Side by Side: Selected Lyrics, Benge confirms that the song was inspired by the migratory habits of swifts but emphasises that the ‘alien’ comes from identifying with the migrant whose life is shaped as much by routes as roots:

‘As a child who came to Britain from a displaced persons’ camp after World War II, and who’s never felt they truly belong here, or anywhere, I tend to identify with migrants (those who walk as well as those who fly) … “Alien” describes feelings for those without the roots that the rooted believe give them a superior claim to a specific bit of the earth.’

Wyatt’s and Benge’s comments suggest there is seemingly nothing ‘dreamy’ about ‘Alien’ as far as Benge’s lyrical intentions go. Indeed, for a song with lyrics like ‘no roots on earth’ and ‘no ground below’, the poem, as explained by its author, is well-grounded in painful experience. Yet, as we know, texts can float free from original intentions, not least when set to the kind of musical dreamscapes that Wyatt has perfected over the course of a long career.

‘And we’re coming out of dreams’

Back to Bill Callahan, whose wonderful line in ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’ got me thinking about all of this. Consider the cover of his album Reality, or YTI⅃AƎЯ as its rendered on the record: is the mirror image presentation of the title a metaphor for the dream world perhaps?

The first song is called ‘First Bird’, and it is about dreaming. Callahan sings, ‘And we’re coming out of dreams / as we’re coming back to dreams’. And he tells his listeners:

Dreams are thoughts in lotus
And chains
Chains are broken in the morning
by the bird's first song

In a review of another Callahan record (Gold Record, the one immediately before Reality), Mike Powell praises the way the artist ‘handles concrete events with the texture and ambiguity of dreams’. In her review of Callahan’s recently released live album Resuscitate!, Laura Snapes focuses on the dream imagery that pervades his songs and notes the attainment of a ‘dream state’ by the band in the live performances documented on the album. To resuscitate is, of course, to come back to life, and therefore presumably to forsake the dream state for a while.

The first track on Resuscitate! is, again, ‘First Bird’. It’s a stunning rendition, something like what I’d want to encounter if I was able to come out of one dream into another. The whole of Resuscitate! feels that way to me right now.

Asked by Steven Hyden about the importance of dream imagery in his songs, Callahan said:

‘We don’t pay enough attention to our dreams. Most people treat them as a novelty. Like, “Oh, listen to this silly, crazy thing that I dreamed last night,” But a dream is a hand of tarot cards — you can read it or try to read it. I wonder what would happen if we focused more on dreams.’

And asked by John Mulvey whether he had ever ‘dreamed the perfect song’, Callahan replied, ‘I have dreamed melodies that made my heart weep and I have dreamed lyrics that would shatter the world. When I wake they run back into the woods.’

That evasiveness, or elusiveness, that mystery. Thoughts in lotus. And chains.