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In The Secret History of Dreaming, world-renowned dream expert and author Robert Moss explores the vital role dreams, coincidence, and imagination have played throughout history.
The following is an excerpt from the book that offers both a manifesto and a challenge, showing how dreams of all kinds can and do change the course of history, and how it is possible for us to reclaim and use that power now.
“Truth moves through us when we sleep,” Roseanne Cash wrote in a song she titled “The Wheel.” Many musicians and composers will recognize what she meant.
Musicians listening to dreams
Billy Joel has kept a notepad by his bed to jot down ideas and lyrics for songs that come to him in his dreams. Sleeping in an attic room in London in 1965, Paul McCartney dreamed he heard a classical string ensemble playing and woke with 'a lovely tune' in his head.
He played it on an upright piano in the room. “I liked the melody a lot, but because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, ‘No, I’ve never written anything like this before.’ But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!” When fellow Beatles reassured him the tune was something new, he found the words and recorded the hit song Yesterday.
Another popular Paul McCartney song, Let It Be, was based on a dream visitation by his dead mother, Mary. He was run down from drug use, and the Beatles were beginning to break up. He fell into bed, deeply troubled, and dreamed his mother came to him and told him, “It’s all right. It’ll be all right.” When he woke, he wrote down these words for a new song: “Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”
John Lennon frequently received his inspiration in dreams or hypnagogic states. He told his biographer Frederic Seaman that he felt his “inspired” songs were usually far superior to “formula songs,” as he characterized many of those that he and Paul McCartney had produced in the early years of the Beatles. “Writing formula songs is like painting by numbers.” The good stuff comes to you in the middle of the night, out of a creative space, and you have to get up and write it down.
The dreams saved Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash lost his beloved elder brother, Jack, to a horrible sawmill accident when both of them were teenagers. Throughout much of his life, Cash received dream visitations from his dead brother who appeared to grow older from one visit to another, just as he would have done in ordinary life, and who emerged as the preacher and wise elder he had aimed to be.
Though Johnny Cash’s rise in the country music business was meteoric, his life was dark and hard. Trapped in a loveless early marriage, lonely at home and on the road, he became addicted to amphetamines. Two things saved his life - June Carter and his dreams.
June Carter was a gifted singer-songwriter. She was also a woman of profound religious beliefs, and as love between the couple grew when they toured together, she found herself thrashing in a terrible personal conflict, a choice between passion and hell. From her torment she created a song called “Ring of Fire.” She was so conflicted about it that she turned it over to Johnny to record, at a time when his career was slumping and he desperately needed a hit.
The night before he was set to record Ring of Fire, Johnny dreamed he heard himself singing the song with an arrangement he had never heard before. Ring of Fire, with the trumpet chorus, became a monster hit and made Johnny Cash a superstar.
Cash continued to track his dreams until the end of his life. He dreamed he called on Queen Elizabeth and she told him he was “like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.” The phrase haunted him, got him thinking about passages in the Bible, and eventually this gave birth to his later hit song And the Man Comes Round.
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Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.
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