In the late 90s, I got interested in dreams.
Really interested.
I tried every technique to remember them, every herb to enhance them, every mantra to learn to be lucid within them.
I had a pen with a built in light on the end, and I trained myself to wake up multiple times per night, writing down any scraps of dreams that I could remember.
Like anyone who did this will tell you, the more I wrote them down, the more I would remember.
I wasn’t really interested in dreams as a method of therapy or analysis, but more as an alternate landscape, a place to explore and play, a world to be surprised by.
But things got really interested when, as I discussed on a recent Weirder Together podcast episode, I started dreaming songs.
I would dream I was hearing music by other artists. It was only when I would wake up that I would realize that I had indeed unconsciously composed the songs myself.
I dug up 7 or 8 of them recently and thought I’d share them here. They are pretty much unfinished single ideas that I recorded in the morning hours following waking up from a dream song.
The first was a song that Harry Nilsson sang me around a piano in one dream.
Haha. So you get the idea. I don’t know what that means, or what any of these really mean. But there is some kind of weird dream logic at work in them. They make emotional sense in some strange way.
One night I dreamed about a new U2 single coming out. Hilarious that this was what my dream mind thought that might sound like!
This one presented itself as a Belle & Sebastian 7” single that I bought in a dream. I wrote the verses right away - so this is the most complete demo I have from this period. The chorus was the part I dreamed…