Through the Heat Whispered Trees

Dreams are an all too natural subject for songs. As in film or fiction, they can be a handy narrative device, a magnet for metaphor, an excuse for poetic imagery, a stand-in for memories or wishes, or a literal font of inspiration.

But music is already a kind of real-life dream state and lyrics a form of imagining, so there can be a trap of redundancy in literally singing about dreams. Measured by their sound, nearly all of Roy Orbison's songs could be subtitled "In Dreams," and at least one way to hear the music of R.E.M. is as an embodiment of their name.

This is all by way of preamble to my consideration of John Lennon's "#9 Dream," which I would rank as the finest musicalization of the dream state in pop or rock. Sleep, or its lack, was a recurring Lennon preoccupation, and not only lyrically: Songs like "I'm Only Sleeping," "I'm So Tired," even "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" enact their subject matter in their sound with eerie precision. Lennon was nothing if not a kind of musical Method actor, playing out the drama of what he was singing about with his voice, his guitar, his songcraft, and the possibilities of the studio. Similarly, what sets "#9 Dream" apart is the dream logic of its construction, which comes out in its cryptic lyrics but especially in its smoothly bumpy music.

Partly cribbing a string part from his arrangement of Harry Nilsson's cover of "Many Rivers to Cross," the song has a shifting major-minor chord progression, lingering moments of suspension, and vertiginous left turns that powerfully evoke both the out-of-time quality of dreams and their sudden tectonic changes of scenery and mood. The strangeness is concentrated in this section, which hangs around the key of G for 11 bars while unison strings woozily echo Lennon's melody, in what feels like a disorientingly free tempo. This is my best attempt to notate it:

That last transition is as jarring as a tape splice; this is clearly still the same composer who invoked a Phrygian scale for the line "Nothing is real" in "Strawberry Fields Forever." After expanding that E-minor chord with a series of repetitions of ("hear" here, "feel" the next time around), the form concludes with some Lewis Carrollian nonsense syllables, delivered with a kind of ecstatic deadpan, over a Gm/C exchange with some delicious harmonies (a seventh and a sixth interval on "ah" and "kow"):

If that ii-V progression implies an F tonic, there's another surprise in store: The song makes a sudden shift to a slow-tempo orchestral turnaround in D, concluding on G, before gearing up for another run-through of the whole form.

Meanwhile the lyrics don't take us very far in terms of literal content; in the first form we hear a Yoko-like voice intone the singer's name, and there's that amazing image of "heat whispered trees," while the second verse wonders vaguely about "magic in the air" before begging off with "more I cannot say." Ultimately this is more a song about dreaming than about any specific dream. But these sweet, strange musical choices—ones that feel distinctly like choices no one but Lennon would even think to make—make this Morphean exercise as rich and redolent as a sense memory.