
Though the dawn may be coming soon There still may be some time Fly me away to the bright side
of the moon Meet me on the other side
Ooh, dream weaver I believe you can get me through the night Ooh, dream weaver I believe we can reach the morning light
If anyone skipped over the lyrics then you need to go back and check them out. There’s something going on there. I've never really taken the time to notice but he says that he needs someone to fly him away to the bright side of the moon.
Not the dark side of the moon. Hello? Is there anybody out there?
He needs to be taken to the bright side of the moon.
In either an homage to Pink Floyd, or perhaps a thumbing of the nose to their seminal album —released two years prior and still at #1 on the Billboard album charts—it would seem that Gary Wright is intentionally choosing the polar opposite of Pink Floyd’s preferred side of the moon.
It feels intentional. There’s a sense of desperation present in the lyrics. He continues:
Fly me high through the starry skies Maybe to an astral plane Cross the highways of fantasy Help me to forget today's pain
Gary is hurting. Everyone thinks this song is a big joke but this song is a cry for fucking help. The pain is so great that he’s thinking he needs to get to an astral plane of some sort to find relief.
Maybe an astral plane. He's not sure.
I hope the people who have cemented this song’s fate as a comedic trope— destined to be forever featured in romantic comedy dream sequences and poorly written commercials—I hope those people are happy with themselves.
Did anyone ever stop to ask Gary if everything was okay at home?
I have three recurring dreams.
One of them, I’ve had for as long as I can remember and the other two started when I began my career in advertising.
It’s not unusual for a person to have recurring dreams. Two-thirds of people have at least one recurring dream. Women are slightly more likely to have recurring dreams than men. And children are more likely to have them than adults.
Bless their hearts.
The most common recurring dreams are:
falling,
losing your teeth,
taking a test that you haven’t prepared for,
getting chased by someone and/or something
and being covered in insects.
When I was six or seven years old, my father took me to my first professional basketball game. It was the Houston Rockets vs the Seattle Supersonics. The game was at The Summit. That’s where the Rockets played and also our hockey team, the Houston Aeros, played there too.
The Summit later became the Compaq Center but everybody still called it the Summit.
Then it became the Toyota Center and people still pretty much called it the Summit.
Now it is the home of Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church and no one calls it the Summit anymore.
Fortunately, none of that has anything to do with my dream.
I remember being really excited to be going to the game.
I can’t remember if this was the first live professional sporting event that I had ever attended, but it very well may have been.
The bulk of the dream centers around our seats.
We’re dealing with a childhood memory here, so things may have been different than I recall. If nothing else, one must factor in the possibility that things seen through the eyes of a child may be vastly different than what is seen through the eyes of an adult. But unless I’m mistaken, my father had somehow managed to purchase the Summit’s two seats furthest away from the actual basketball court.
I want to be clear, that in no way am I knocking my father for this. In fact, it’s just another example of how much better my dad was than me at being a dad.
I have kids now and I’ve purchased good seats for professional sporting events. It’s stupid and a total waste of money. The seats mainly function as a home base from which to embark for things like giant pretzels, miniature helmets filled with ice cream, overpriced souvenirs and trips to ride the Ferris wheel.
I’ve taken my kids to half a dozen baseball games and we’ve probably watched a total of three innings. Don’t be dumb like me and buy your kids good seats. Be smart like my dad and buy the shittiest ones you can.
Which is what these were.
We were literally sitting at the summit of The Summit. The basketball players, who were so legendary for their enormous size, looked like ants to me. And our seats felt like they were precariously perched on the edge of the world’s tallest skyscraper.
I couldn’t look down.
Every time I looked down, I got scared. If you’re sitting in the nosebleed section of a basketball game and you can’t look down, you’re not going to see much basketball.
I don’t even remember if we made it to the tip-off. I think I might have lost it and my dad had to get me out of there early.
But in my dreams, I’ve been falling from that seat for the last 45 years. It’s not altogether unpleasant though because at the last second, I can fly. Which is wonderful. But in the dream, which I’ve had for the last 45 years, for some reason I can never remember that I can fly so the whole thing is fairly harrowing until it reaches its exciting conclusion.
According to dream interpretation experts, in general, dreams about falling tend to signify a loss of control over an important situation.
I don’t know what sort of important situations I was concerned with losing control of as a relatively carefree six year-old but I’ve always been a worrier so who knows?
Carl Jung was big into dreams. Not Freud big, but he definitely had some opinions on the matter. According to Jung, dreams about flying compensate the person’s feelings of deficiency in regard to their personality and warns them of the dangers of their present course.
Freud says dreams about flying indicate sexual arousal. Which is just so Freud. It’s always about sex with that guy.
So, in one dream I’ve got a few different themes going on.
Loss of control.
Personality issues.
Sexual arousal.
If you take a step back from those three phrases and look at them as a whole—or write them on a white board— you can probably figure out why at times in the past I’ve made some less than stellar dating decisions.
The next recurring dream that I have involves nudity.
Mine to be specific. I do apologize for putting that type of imagery in your head. But we’re in this thing together. It’s no less uncomfortable for me than it is for you.
This one’s another common, recurring dream. It’s not in the top five, but it’s definitely airing in heavy rotation.
It’s one of the ones that started when I began working in advertising.
Basically, I show up to work naked.
I don’t know how it happens or who forgot to make sure I was dressed before leaving the house, but somehow, I’m at work, I’m naked and everyone is laughing at me. Which I certainly can’t blame them for.
Unfortunately, there’s no flying in this dream. So there’s no quick getaway. Depending on the context, I usually fashion some sort of covering for myself out of items that happen to be laying around in the dream— but it varies.
Nakedness in dreams often reflects a person’s insecurities and their fear that those insecurities will be revealed to others. They also indicate a person’s fear of being exposed as a fraud or a phony.
Gee, I can’t imagine why a writer working in advertising would be insecure or worry about other people thinking they’re a fraud. So weird. I just don’t know where this stuff could be coming from.
When you’re growing up, especially during those super awkward getting-your-pubes years, being seen naked is quite possibly the worst thing that could happen to you.
That’s why whenever you’d play the “what would you do for a million dollars” game, it always came down to running through the mall naked and no one ever took the money.
Sure, you’d be rich. But everyone would know what your wiener looked like and you’d die from embarrassment before you could spend a penny.
I wish I could play that game today because I’d do it for like $2500. Absolutely zero fucks given.
The third recurring dream that I have also started when I began my career in advertising.
In the dream, somehow, through some set of circumstances, someone has determined that I am a few credits short of my college degree and I have to return to school and finish it before I can go back to work.
Which is really fucking ridiculous.
I’m an advertising copywriter.
You don’t have to be certified to do what I do.
You don’t need a license.
You don’t even really need to be that good at it.
We aren’t doctors or lawyers. While it certainly helps to attend a good portfolio program, you don’t really need any specific training to safely produce ad copy for human consumption. One could argue that there should be. But the fact remains, you don’t.
Never-the-less, in the dream, I’m back at The University of Texas sitting in a classroom and totally stressed out because despite my advertising license being temporarily suspended while I complete the necessary coursework—I’ve still got deadlines at my job that I have to make.
It’s a shitty dream and I have it at least a couple times a year. For the record, I completed all of my courses and my degree is legit. I don’t have it hanging up on a wall or anything but those five years were not wasted.
Being back in school is a very common dream with many different interpretations. Most of them are about unresolved issues or fears that one’s past decisions will negatively affect their future.
After a while, all this dream interpretation stuff starts to sound a bit like astrology. There’s absolutely no scientific proof that because I was born a Leo that I can be stubborn at times but fiercely loyal to those who are close to me. That’s just a bunch of hooey.
What starts to get interesting to me though is a prevailing theory that dreams were actually an evolutionary mechanism that helped us learn how to learn from our mistakes.
Way back when we first came down from the trees, we had a lot of things to figure out. Like how to eat. All those tasty animals running around but how do we actually get our hands on one and turn it into a burrito?
Some researchers believe that’s where dreams came in. Regardless of all the sketchy science around dream research, it’s mostly regarded as fact that dreams are bits and pieces of memory that the brain stores.
It’s why I have such a vivid recollection of those crappy seats my dad got us for the basketball game at Joel Osteen’s church. It’s a memory that my brain is holding onto for any number of reasons.
But I have Taco Bell. Early man did not. And to survive, we needed burritos.
So to improve our chances, our brain began serving up these memories in our sleep so we could learn to relive a moment, visualize our mistakes and perhaps strategize a more successful approach.
It was the brain’s way of making us learn from our failures. Dreams forced us to watch the instant replay in our sleep so we could get better at getting our hands on all those tasty animals.
It reminds me of high school football.
When you played a good game and you won on Friday night, the coaches patted you on the back and told you to have a good weekend.
When you played like shit and you got your asses dragged up and down the field, the coaches did not pat you on the back and tell you to have a good weekend.
They told you to be up at school first thing Saturday morning to watch the game film.
They’d have all the worst moments cued up on the reel so you got to see yourself fuck up in slow motion over and over again.
The worst part is that we were terrible. I was at school every Saturday morning.
It was a fucking nightmare.
I've just closed my eyes again Climbed aboard the dream weaver train Driver take away my worries of today And leave tomorrow behind
Thanks for reading. I'll see you again real soon. Stay tuned for Part 2.
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