A Series of Dreams
Illustration
Stories
In 2004 Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan published the book Chronicles: Volume One. Nearly thirty years later and there still hasn’t been a Volume Two, but that’s no never mind. There’s a neat quote from that book: “A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true.” It comes from the chapter titled “Oh Mercy” named after his 26th studio album, recorded in 1989.
In the 80’s, Dylan produced some of what some critics consider his worst work, but “Oh Mercy” is considered one of his best albums. One of the best songs recorded for that album, “Series of Dreams,” was excluded, even though there were those who thought it ought to be the first song on the album. Dylan had brought in Daniel Lanois to produce the album and according to Dylan’s account in “Chronicles: Volume One,” “…although Lanois liked the song, he liked the bridge better, wanted the whole song to be like that. I knew what he meant, but it just couldn’t be done.” (194)
The song is filled with layers of images plucked from dreams that remind the listener how vivid the experience can be, and yet how difficult it is to express that in words. Dylan sings about “thinking of a series of dreams/ Where nothing comes up to the top….” At one point he recalls
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
The song was eventually released as part of the “Bootleg and Greatest Hits” series. There was also an official video in which archival footage of Dylan is slightly altered and animated so that the images take on a dreamlike, and sometimes nightmarish quality.
Poets, dreamers, and playwrights write about, and even agonize about dreams. William Shakespeare often referred to dreams in his works. In sonnet 87, for instance, the playwright imagines he has achieved a higher station in life, one in which it is possible to imagine he could associate with others he admires in the royal court. Though “…a dream doth flatter,” he playwright admits he is, “In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.”
King Henry IV, in the second play written about him, imagines that the poor may have difficult lives, but their sleep is blessed and undisturbed because of their exhaustion, while sleep eludes him. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
In another play, King Richard III is visited by the eleven ghosts of people he murdered in a dream, warning him of his doom the next day in a battle where he will famously cry, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” Those same eleven bless his opponent, Richmond, and bid him restful sleep before that same battle.
Two persons close to each other may dream quite differently. In the second part of Henry VI the Duchess of Gloucester wakes blessed and refreshed, while her husband the Duke is exhausted and out of sorts. “What dreamed my lord?” she asks. “Tell me, and I’ll requite it with sweet rehearsal of my morning’s dream.” Alas, Gloucester’s dreams are of the fall of many loyal subjects.
In his famous soliloquy that begins “To be or not to be,” Hamlet wonders if life is worth living — and worth ending, but comparing death to a form of sleep, he realizes the dreams that follow may be — well, as he puts it, ‘To die, to sleep — to sleep — perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.’
Some dreams are so beautiful we hate to wake up and discover they were not true. So in the play “The Tempest,” the monster Caliban, enslaved by the magician Prospero, laments, ‘When I waked, I cried to dream again.’
And in that same play Prospero himself, after renouncing magic, blessing the coming marriage of his daughter to the king’s son, and resigning himself to his impending death, compares life itself to be as insubstantial as a dream. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Which, when you think about it, is the same profound ending as the child’s tune:
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.”
And then there’s the question of who’s the dreamer, and who’s in the dream. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, wrote two books about the famous Alice and her dreams. In the first, “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice’s adventure falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland concludes with a rude awakening when she discovers that all her adventures were a dream.
In the second book, “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There,” a question without an answer arises — “Whose dream is it?” Alice steps through a mirror into Looking Glass World, where everything is backwards, and finds herself part of a giant game of chess. At one point she runs into Tweedledum and Tweedledee, characters from a nursery rhyme, who point to the Red King, who is sleeping soundly and insist Alice is a part of his dream. Tweedledee takes special delight in pointing out, “And if he left off dreaming about you… You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
Tweedledum adds, “If that there king was to wake…you’d go out -bang!- just like a candle!”
And in the end, when Alice returns to her world, she asks the kitten, who she decides must have been the Red Queen in the dream, if she has any idea whose dream it was. The kitten pretends it hasn’t heard the question and refuses to answer.
So, there are many different ideas and approaches when it comes to dreams — but what are we to think of the series of five dreams that Joseph and the Magi receive in the first two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel?
(Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One was published in 2002 by Simon and Schuster).
In the 80’s, Dylan produced some of what some critics consider his worst work, but “Oh Mercy” is considered one of his best albums. One of the best songs recorded for that album, “Series of Dreams,” was excluded, even though there were those who thought it ought to be the first song on the album. Dylan had brought in Daniel Lanois to produce the album and according to Dylan’s account in “Chronicles: Volume One,” “…although Lanois liked the song, he liked the bridge better, wanted the whole song to be like that. I knew what he meant, but it just couldn’t be done.” (194)
The song is filled with layers of images plucked from dreams that remind the listener how vivid the experience can be, and yet how difficult it is to express that in words. Dylan sings about “thinking of a series of dreams/ Where nothing comes up to the top….” At one point he recalls
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
The song was eventually released as part of the “Bootleg and Greatest Hits” series. There was also an official video in which archival footage of Dylan is slightly altered and animated so that the images take on a dreamlike, and sometimes nightmarish quality.
Poets, dreamers, and playwrights write about, and even agonize about dreams. William Shakespeare often referred to dreams in his works. In sonnet 87, for instance, the playwright imagines he has achieved a higher station in life, one in which it is possible to imagine he could associate with others he admires in the royal court. Though “…a dream doth flatter,” he playwright admits he is, “In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.”
King Henry IV, in the second play written about him, imagines that the poor may have difficult lives, but their sleep is blessed and undisturbed because of their exhaustion, while sleep eludes him. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
In another play, King Richard III is visited by the eleven ghosts of people he murdered in a dream, warning him of his doom the next day in a battle where he will famously cry, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” Those same eleven bless his opponent, Richmond, and bid him restful sleep before that same battle.
Two persons close to each other may dream quite differently. In the second part of Henry VI the Duchess of Gloucester wakes blessed and refreshed, while her husband the Duke is exhausted and out of sorts. “What dreamed my lord?” she asks. “Tell me, and I’ll requite it with sweet rehearsal of my morning’s dream.” Alas, Gloucester’s dreams are of the fall of many loyal subjects.
In his famous soliloquy that begins “To be or not to be,” Hamlet wonders if life is worth living — and worth ending, but comparing death to a form of sleep, he realizes the dreams that follow may be — well, as he puts it, ‘To die, to sleep — to sleep — perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.’
Some dreams are so beautiful we hate to wake up and discover they were not true. So in the play “The Tempest,” the monster Caliban, enslaved by the magician Prospero, laments, ‘When I waked, I cried to dream again.’
And in that same play Prospero himself, after renouncing magic, blessing the coming marriage of his daughter to the king’s son, and resigning himself to his impending death, compares life itself to be as insubstantial as a dream. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Which, when you think about it, is the same profound ending as the child’s tune:
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.”
And then there’s the question of who’s the dreamer, and who’s in the dream. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, wrote two books about the famous Alice and her dreams. In the first, “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice’s adventure falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland concludes with a rude awakening when she discovers that all her adventures were a dream.
In the second book, “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There,” a question without an answer arises — “Whose dream is it?” Alice steps through a mirror into Looking Glass World, where everything is backwards, and finds herself part of a giant game of chess. At one point she runs into Tweedledum and Tweedledee, characters from a nursery rhyme, who point to the Red King, who is sleeping soundly and insist Alice is a part of his dream. Tweedledee takes special delight in pointing out, “And if he left off dreaming about you… You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
Tweedledum adds, “If that there king was to wake…you’d go out -bang!- just like a candle!”
And in the end, when Alice returns to her world, she asks the kitten, who she decides must have been the Red Queen in the dream, if she has any idea whose dream it was. The kitten pretends it hasn’t heard the question and refuses to answer.
So, there are many different ideas and approaches when it comes to dreams — but what are we to think of the series of five dreams that Joseph and the Magi receive in the first two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel?
(Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One was published in 2002 by Simon and Schuster).
