Max's Musings

In Dreams

In Dreams, Roy Orbison, and Ray Lynch


The soundtrack of my life wouldn't be complete without Roy Orbison.

It's not just his remarkable three-octave range. There's the operatic character of his ballads. Even more, there's the haunting melodies. His songs have layers of meaning, and invite listeners to find their own truths in his music.

Hemingway once said, ""I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish, and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough, they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

Orbison was the Hemingway of popular music.

Legend has it that Orbison first "heard" the song in--where else?--a dream. He woke the next morning and wrote the song in twenty minutes. It opens with hushed, half-spoken, half-sung words about the Sandman bringing sleep, and with it dreams. The opening is almost a recitative, a technique common in opera. The music progresses into a dreamlike state as the song recounts memories--dreams--of his love. But then the singer wakes to find his love missing. It rises in pitch and power to a falsetto, where he sings, ""It's too bad that all these things / Can only happen in my dreams." It concludes, an octave lower, with the lament, ""Only in dreams / In beautiful dreams."

On the surface, this song is a romance, a tale of love, loss, and sorrow. But it has multiple levels.

Ray Lynch used the song--without Orbison's knowledge--in the movie Blue Velvet. That movie is about obsession, power, and the dark secrets lurking beneath misspent and mundane lives. "In Dreams" is the perfect song for that movie.

The movie came out in 1986, at a time when Orbison's career had stagnated. Orbison initially hated the movie and its use of his song, but came to understand and eventually embrace Lynch's alternative vision.

I'm sure I encountered the song prior to seeing Blue Velvet, but it was Lynch's film that awakened my interest in Orbison and his music. Later, in Mulholland Drive, another Orbison song, "Crying," was the critical lynchpin of that movie. I'll probably write about that one later, since Mullholland Drive is one of my all-time favorite movies and that song is therefore on my personal soundtrack. But it was Lynch's use of In Dreams in Blue Velvet that first revealed to me the depths of Orbison's music.

Not long after I started attempting fiction, "In Dreams" makes an appearance in a story I wrote.

STATIC

In Dreams  (18+) Sleep eludes Matt, while snow falls and his wife and best friend argue downstairs. #1800027 by Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈

The song provides the title of my story, but it's also mentioned in the text. In fact, it's the fulcrum on which the story turns. This is my most-read story on Writing.Com, but I'm not sure anyone has ever quite realized what I was trying to achieve, or the significance of the song to the story. On the other hand, people seem inspired to bring their own interpretations to this story, so I could aspire to no higher goal. After all, Lynch found something in Orbison's songs that the composer didn't intend. The song "In Dreams" is truer than true. There's no higher aspiration for any artist.

                                       

Links

Cuts from Blue Velvet with Orbison singing "In Dreams" in the background

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtjiVTSs8pc
                                       

Orbison singing "In Dreams" Provided to YouTube by Monument/Orbison Records/Legacy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tEdYQozrM8
                                       

Ray Lynch on Orbison, Blue Velvet, and "In Dreams."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7zukRlfzh8