Evening Magazine
Dreams are one of the most fascinating and least understood parts of the brain’s complex machinery. Science tells us that dreams are an essential component of sleep, that they help us generate memories and process all the information that we take in over the course of the day. No one knows for sure what their significance is, although everybody from Freud to Fleetwood Mac has a theory about what dreams mean. But for the most part, we’re all just guessing. All we know is that when we go to sleep we enter into a hazy, psychedelic netherworld where David Lynch seems to be directing and the earthly laws of physics don’t necessarily apply.
Some people have really mundane dreams, full of shopping lists and workday trips to the copy machine. Other people still have bad dreams (or “night terrors” á la Homer Simpson) well into adulthood when most of us have either chased down or come to terms with our personal demons. Stress dreams also seem to be universal, haunting people with incomplete work assignments and unplanned nudity in high school class rooms.
Personally, my dreams are a mixed bag. They almost always feature a bizarre and disconnected narrative that is more like a low-grade acid trip than anything that could possibly happen in real life. They are definitely weird, but I usually don’t get any of the cool stuff - flying, sex with hot science teachers, the ability to shoot lasers from my finger tips, etc. I don’t even dream about midgets, which I guess negates the David Lynch comment from the first paragraph.
There is one pervasive quality to all my dreams though: they are really fucking dreamy. The plots always twist and turn in opiate waves. Earthquakes and aliens come and go like character actors. Through it all I always get the feeling that I’m a spectator watching a very realistic demonstration of the five senses. I feel and understand things as much as I see and hear them. I’ve never had the opportunity to go sleepwalking, but I imagine that’s what it feels like to bare witness to one of my dreams.
If I was to give them each a soundtrack, I would say that more than one of my dreams would synch up to the track “Eddie” by Philadelphia’s Evening Magazine. The keyboards float over the whole song like a blue fog while the drums crash in and out of the picture, dragging a serrated bass line close behind. The singer may be telling a story, but I can’t quite catch what it is. Instead, individual words and ideas come in and out of focus. Through it all there is an acoustic guitar that you don’t really realize is there until you realize it’s been there all along.
A lot of times you hear star athletes and contest winners describing their success as a “dream come true.” The dreams they talk about are day dreams, flights of fancy or glorified wishful thinking. But what if real dreams were to come true? The world would be a strange assortment of monsters, naked high school students, and midgets loaded with abstract symbolism. I don’t know what role David Lynch would play in this hypothetical world, but Evening Magazine would have my vote for house band.
MP3: ‘Eddie’
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