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Thursday, March 12, 2009
DREAM BABY
Roy Orbison
1962
Available on : The Soul of Rock and Roll
Sony Legacy : 2008
[Buy It]
I HAD A DREAM
Howlin' Wolf
1967
Available on : Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
Universal : 1994
[Buy It]
DON'T WAKE ME UP, I AM DREAMING
Arthur C. Clough
1911
Edison Amberol 696
DREAMS, DREAMS
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
1969
Available on : Whatever Makes You Happy
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
BOB DYLAN'S DREAM
Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Columbia : 1963
[Buy It]
I DREAMED I SAW SAINT AUGUSTINE
Bob Dylan
John Wesley Harding
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]
This week I had a conversation about dreams, and then a dream about that conversation about dreams, and then another dream that came true, and then a conversation about the dream that came true.
The conversation about dreams happened one afternoon this week, and it must have stuck in my head, because that night I repeated it, with variation. In the real conversation, I was sitting across a table from someone who was talking about dreams: not specific dreams, but the entire category, what dreams might mean, what they can't mean. That night's dream was about a conversation, too, but in the dream-conversation I was talking about renting a truck. The person in the dream, who wasn't quite the person I had spoken to in real life, explained to me that the truck I was interested in renting had a compartment behind the driver's seat filled with tools that I wouldn't recognize. That's the phrase that stuck: "filled with tools you wouldn't recognize." Even at the time, while I was sleeping, I assumed that this was a dream about my conversation about dreams.
Before I woke up, I had a second dream. I dreamed I was at a conference somewhere rural--there were mountains and a lake--and a friend of mine was at the same conference. This wasn't a fake friend that my dream invented, but a dream version of a real friend. The whole thing was faintly documentary. I was attending this conference alone, and I called my wife and my kids to say hello; in the dream my phone number was the same as it is in real life. (Again, faintly documentary.) My friend was attending with her mother and her sister, and we were all called to a breakfast meeting. Just after the food was served, my friend left the table. Her mother looked upset but said nothing at the time; a few minutes later she asked me if I would go find my friend. I found her sitting in a meeting room by herself. She had written the word "blue" on the dry-erase board in red marker. "Your mom wants you to come to breakfast," I said. She explained that she couldn't because she needed to write a thank-you note to the owner of the shop that had repaired her boot heel for free. "Look," she said, lifting up her foot to show, "all fixed."
I sneered at her. "Who cares?" I said. "It looks worse than ever." It looked fine, actually. I went back to the table and she showed up a few minutes later, and we had breakfast and talked with her mom and her sister about the conference we were attending. It was a nice dream: no monsters, no missiles.
Today on the phone I mentioned that dream to the real-life friend. "What?" she said. "I just took a boot to have the heel fixed this morning."
"Right," I said.
"I'm serious," she said. "What else did you dream?" I told her the few other things I remembered-- that her phone wouldn't work, that she was wearing a brown skirt--and none of that rang a bell. She hung up, relieved, but evidently it was still bothering her, because she sent me an email a little later: "Tell me if you have any more dreams about what happens to me. I don't trust that you're not dreaming things that might be true. Or, maybe even better, don't tell me anything about them at all."
I understood the problem, partly. Everyone likes dreams but everyone has mixed feelings about the process by which they are shared. Dreams, we tend to believe, are ways of dealing with areas of our lives that we can't politely discuss (fear, libido), and so there is always something a little unclean in the retelling. What did the boot heel represent? Was it something more intimate? Even if a boot heel is just a boot heel, why would I feel connected, even for a second, even asleep, to a female friend's footwear? And why did I have to go and be rude? She was just trying to show me the repair.
Dreams may or may not be psychological skeleton keys. The jury has been out on that for centuries, and then especially for the last century. But they are, at many levels, powerful creative acts, and because of that they have featured regularly in human artwork: paintings, novels, movies. In pop songs, dreams tend to have a more specific function: they provide evidence of life's nasty habit of snatching away objects of desire. Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby," among the most famous dream songs in rock and roll, is about an unattainable woman--"how long must I dream?" he asks, as tortured as he is pleased--and in that it harmonizes with other songs like Howlin' Wolf's "I Had a Dream" or Arthur C. Clough's "Don't Wake Me Up, I Am Dreaming," where love and joy and power are attainable in sleep but cruelly withheld by waking life. There is a countermovement, of course, where dreams aren't a sign of what's been taken, but a reminder to firm your resolve and bring about the dreamed-about thing. This principle is encapsulated in Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech and much of the positive-themed soul that ran parallel to and followed it. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Dream Dream" makes the argument, as Parliament would make in "Fantasy is Reality":Dreams oh dreams baby
Go up like a puff of smoke
Dreams oh dreams baby
Wake up and your heart is broke
And I've got to do something bad
Because it's getting the best of me
I've got to make these dreams a reality Bob Dylan has dreamed liberally throughout his career, from "Bob Dylan's Dream" (a melancholy lament for lost innocence) to "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" (a rollicking, stoned bit of surrealism) to "Series of Dreams" (an intentionally fragmented lyric that challenges the very idea of interpretation). In the most beautiful of his dream songs, "I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine," he goes deep into the past, where he meets with the fifth-century philosopher and witnesses the ways that leaders can be destroyed by the crowds that follow them:I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive as you or me,
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery,
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold,
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold. Here, the object of desire, a comfortable relationship between saints and the rest of society, is taken violently, as Augustine is hanged (this did not, of course occur in real life). The dream is fully realized in the technical sense: it ends mid-song, and Dylan's narrator (who is, most likely, Dylan himself) wakes to consider what he has beheld:I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried. Augustine himself, of course, had an abiding interest in dreams. He admitted that they could be deceptive, ways of betraying the world as it is presented to us, though he also thought they could be a form of communication with the divine. Beyond the epistemological dimension, there was an ethical one: if your dream self does something morally wrong, Augustine wondered, are you responsible? (In this he was following the inquiry of several other theologians, including John Cassian, who wondered about assigning culpability for impure thoughts experienced while dreaming.) Augustine decided that a dreamer wasn't responsible for the contents of a dream, but wasn't certain why not. This is obviously one of the issues that Dylan is addressing--if he is there while the mob hangs Augustine, is he implicated? Maybe the dream revealed a secret desire to hang. Maybe an ethical man would have objected, even in his own dream. I'm interested in going back to my conversation about dreaming to discuss this at greater length, but it's trapped in the past and unavailable--or rather, I'm trapped in the present and unavailable to it. Maybe I'll have another dream about a conversation about dreaming, and I can sort it all out. Until then, it's left to me to wonder, and to feel bad for the thing that I said about the boot--again, it looked fine, a nice boot in a nice dream.Labels: ben, folk-rock, rockabilly
posted by Ben
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