I always wake to a song ringing in my head. Sometimes it gets chased out by something that needs immediate attention like a small black cat who thinks it’s time to play fetch at dawn, but frequently it pesters me for most of the morning until I can supplant it with something I choose. The irritating part is it often is just a few seconds of a song playing on a loop. Sometimes I can’t even identify the artist, but it’s often music I own and know, although one time it was a mix of Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper” to the tune of another song, both of which I don’t even like.
At the end of June I woke up with Carly Simon’s “You’re so vain” running on a little loop. I don’t even own the song, but I knew the dream technicians had swapped some of the words because what I was hearing were the lines:
Well I hear you went up to Saratoga and your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun
Except they’d switched Nova Scotia and Saratoga and I could feel them giggling in the control room.
I thought about the dreamtime soundtrack all morning and decided I’d record as many as I could remember through the month of July and see if there were any patterns.
July 1, 2014 Aztec Camera, Walk Out to Winter
July 2, Howard Jones, No One is to Blame
July 6, Stone Roses, Made of Stone
July 7, Stone Roses, Made of Stone (no joke)
July 9, 4:30 am Sheryl Crow, I Don’t Wanna Know
6:45 am Abba, Waterloo
7:50 am Stevie Nicks, Planets of the Universe
July 15, 5:50 Wilco, Heavy Metal Drummer
7:45 Men at Work, Blue Sky Mining
July 16 Blondie, Fade Away and Radiate
July 17, The Fixx, Secret Separation
July 20, Sheryl Crow, Motivation
July 21, Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
July 22, U2, Surrender
July 24 Concrete Blonde, The Sky is a Poisonus Garden
July 26 Echo and the Bunnymen, The Killing Moon
July 28 Fiona Apple, Get Gone
I don’t get much of a pattern, but I do own all of it, except the ABBA song. I don’t think I heard much of it recent to the occurrence, except maybe the Blondie “Fade Away and Radiate” I think played a day or two previous to the dream. A couple of them I couldn’t quite place the song until I poked through my iTunes collection for the artist that it sounded like. I’m quite the Sheryl Crow fan, but haven’t listened to her newer albums much, which surprised me that the two songs of hers that came up were off an album I hadn’t listened to more than a couple times. From the clips in my head I knew who it was, but I had to listen to the songs to find out which ones they were.
This morning I had a different clip from “Motivation” than the part that was playing in July, but it was so strange that I made a clip for this post, so listen to it on loop just to get a feel of what my mornings are like.
But do it with a cat jumping on your stomach.