Dreams

Our latest single, Dreams, was inspired by the wandering dreams of Fleetwood Mac’s, Lindsay Buckingham, related by his creative and romantic partner at the time, Stevie Nicks. The power couple of 8 years had become fractured leading up to the recording of Rumours, the follow up to their acclaimed debut on the eponymous Fleetwood Mac album. The song Dreams was apparently the result of that breaking point.

20 minutes or so in its gestation and the song came into being. Nicks brought her demo recording of vocals and piano to the band and it was recorded the next day. The rest is history… and rumours. Endless rumours, some of which were no doubt manufactured by Warner Bros. Records PR agents to achieve their dream of releasing one of the largest grossing albums in history.

The story of the song, the album, and the band in and of itself is a tale of dreams. Dreams of fame, fortune and ultimately, the lost love that results. A tragic romance, for sure, but one that produced some excellent songs about heartbreak that still resonate with the world to this day. Rumours is one of the Top 10 selling albums of all time. That’s a lot of ears.

Stevie Nicks & Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac

Our music video for this latest and last cover song of ours features water, a symbol for the subconscious, the realm of the dreaming dating back into antiquity. But what are dreams, really? The truth is that no one honestly knows.

The material sciences have placed their bets on dreams being merely recycled accounts of past experiences, no matter how small. That lawn mower you heard off in the distance earlier in the afternoon combines with the flowers you saw at the shop across the street on the way home from a stressful day at work. While in REM that night, they manifest as a nightmare about a peaceful patch of phosphorescent flowers, all singing the most beautiful song in unison harmony, before being suddenly and violently cut to pieces by a giant whirling blade machine. The nightmare is due to high levels of anxiety, according to the materialist ontological perspective. The symbols in the dreams mean nothing. It’s just feedback of the human mind, and like “junk DNA” it’s entirely useless.

But, like any opinion, that’s just one way of looking at it – one sided and entirely incomplete. In truth, the materialists haven’t a clue what dreams are, what causes them, why they occur, or why we even have to sleep. Very few people in this day and age can honestly make that claim to knowledge, least of all being the nascent material sciences who are only beginning to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients, albeit with the hubris of drunken teenagers.

“The fundamental mistake regarding the nature of the unconscious is probably this: it is commonly supposed that its contents have only one meaning and are marked with an unalterable plus or minus sign. In my humble opinion, this view is too naïve. The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these, there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche. In this sense, we can take the theory of compensation as a basic law of psychic behaviour… When we set out to interpret a dream, it is always helpful to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate?“
Carl Jung

Carl Jung described dreams as the doorway to the psyche, or “pure nature”. Whenever waking Ego becomes dominant or represses the subconscious, it is thought that dreams appear to provide balance to that impulse, leading to a path of integration that restores order between the conscious and unconscious. Dreams provide the feedback system for coherence within the trinity of mind, body, soul.

Combined with the work of Joseph Campbell, dreams reveal mythical archetypes that are prevalent around the world, regardless of culture. When viewed alongside the dreamer’s interpretation, these symbols can communicate the depths of our innermost being to our conscious mind. Symbolism contains numerous layers of meaning. It is the language of dreams and also the language of the ancients. The hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, for example, contain multiple levels of interpretation.

In some indigenous cultures, dreaming is where the everyday waking life we experience originated once upon a time. In Gnostic traditions, this is represented by Sophia, or divine wisdom, falling into her illusory creation of matter. Alice down the rabbit hole would be the modern analog. As such, dreams are often seen as prophetic messages from that source, beneficial to the future of the dreamer in some way, either as omens of truth or warnings. Many shamans throughout the world use dreams for healing.

As we mention in our Ancient Technology: Handbook for the Recently Released, these indigenous cultures retain a connection to time before modern distractions existed to fracture our psyche from the harmony of nature. The handbook is a manual for how to use the artwork on our vinyl EP, The Labyrinth, to help you focus your mind and bring you into a state of coherence. It also contains guided meditations to facilitate this balanced state of being between the underlying current of the subconscious and the hubris of the conscious mind. This homeostasis allows for vivid archetypical dream states, be it in REM or meditation. In some practitioners, it also provides the ability to see the future.

Get your Ancient Technology: Handbook for the Recently Released

Both Tara and Sködt have dreampt of future events on multiple occasions, all of which have come true, for better or worse. On one occasion, their individuated dreams gave them the same message on the same night about a very powerful influence on both of their lives leaving this material plane. That person was David Bowie and they each had dreams of his death the night he died. This, in part, brings us full circle back to The Labyrinth EP, inspired by the film Bowie starred in that introduced the pair in childhood to not only his music, but to magick, The Mysteries, and more.

In Tara’s dream, a huge and beautiful supernatural bird that was unmistakably the essence of David Bowie visited her. He was multicoloured and shimmered in the light. The Bowie bird communicated with Tara that it was time for him to leave this realm, now. That he would eternally be a part of everything and everyone on earth, but would no longer be around on this plane of existence physically. After their conversation, the bird that was the essence of David Bowie flew into the centre of Tara’s forehead, her 3rd eye. She awoke that morning to learn of Bowie’s death, just days after he had released his Black Star album on his 69th birthday.

That same morning, Sködt, who was visiting his parents, got out of bed in an unusually depressed state. When he moped into the kitchen, his mother asked him what was wrong. He explained to her that he had had a vivid dream that David Bowie had died, and that Bowie himself had told him as much in the dream. Bowie explained that his mission here on this planet was complete, so he could now move on. The intensity of the dream woke Sködt in the middle of the night and felt so real that he couldn’t shake it or get back to sleep. His mum’s jaw dropped as he explained this. She pointed to the morning tell-a-vision news broad casting on the muted living room screen. She told him that they had just announced Bowie’s death not 20 minutes before he had gotten out of bed.

What is interesting about all of this, is that studies show that musicians dream about music twice as often as non-musicians. That makes sense, given the nature of what we do. But what really makes you think, is that a controlled study done on musicians suggests that the music recalled in dreams by musicians was non-standard. In other words, the music composed in the dreams was original music!

This alone is backed up by over a hundred known hit songs claimed to have been received in dreams by artists. There are so many examples of this to choose from over the years. From one of our favourite songs about dreams, Across the Night by Silverchair, to one of the most psychedelic songs of all time, Purple Haze by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, to the most covered song of all time, Yesterday by The Beatles. All were received in dreams, and that’s just getting started.

Musicians inherently learn that we can write in our dreams in the same way that inventors can invent in theirs. Some of us take this to extremes in order to ride that wave, like our hero, David Bowie.

“There’s a thing that, just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated you will never go below the dream stage. I’ve used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed. I keep a tape recorder by the bed, and if anything comes, I just say it into the tape recorder.“
David Bowie

And as Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said,

“To me, the best songs are the ones that come to you in dreams. I wake up, put it down on a cassette next to the bed, turn over and go back to sleep. I wrote “Satisfaction” that way.“
Keith Richards

Grant Cameron’s book, Tuned In: The Paranormal World of Music, explores the stories of numerous musicians who have received their music from dreams. He also introduces others who, like us, have encountered UFOs and extra dimensional beings. We turned one of our own such experiences into the short film for our song, Aria, the idea for which appeared during a daydream. You can read about it in this previous entry.

Have we received any other music from dreams?

If you’ve been following along with us this far in our journey, you can probably guess that the answer is a resounding YES! Like Bowie, we’ve received music in our dreams, and lyrics, too. Like Bowie, we have also learned how to willingly enter the dream state of consciousness to harvest the ideas floating around in the ether. All of our music to date has elements that originated from the dream state of consciousness, be it lyrics, melodies, riffs, etc. A handful of songs have even been delivered and received completely formed, too…

The upcoming songs, Autopilot Disengage, Slow Burn, Shapeshifter, Grace, and For a Time from our forthcoming album, Ultreya, were all composed by consciously invoking a dream state. The entire body of work that will follow that album was written this way, too, but more on that another time. All of these songs were received, written, performed and recorded in less than 48 hours, some in less than 12 hours. This is one of the reasons that we learned how to record ourselves, in order to catch these moments as close to the source as possible.

A contemporary example that you can hear right now where we utilized this process is Dark Crystal, a song which was received entirely in an invoked dream state. It was conjured, performed and recorded in less than 48 hours. Have a listen to the sound we alchemically distilled from the depths of a dreamstate…

In our opinion and experience, our best songs are the ones where we work as conduits or channels for the music to flow through. To get out of the way of the ‘transmission’ and serve the song is our goal as musicians and songwriters. This is something we’ve been working towards since before we met. The less that our conscious brain is involved in creation, the better the song. The faster it is communicated from that dream state and recorded, the more authentic it is to the original vision from that plane of ether and forgotten frequency.

What about you? Do you dream in music? Let us know on social media.

Until next time… Sweet dreams!