D is for Dreams

This is D Day, Day 4 of the A to Z Blog Challenge.

I love dreams - I'm not always a great sleeper, but when I do, my dreams are like movies and a lot of them stay with me throughout the next day.    I keep hearing stories about songwriters who get a full song in a dream but unfortunately that has never happened to me.    However this is a song that I wrote from dreams I had back in 1994 in the middle of a tour in Germany and before the ceasefires here at home.

Click here to listen to Dreaming

Things were very bad in Northern Ireland at the time  .... Everytime Tom and I headed away on a tour we both had been feeling that we didn't want to go back again.   But at the same time while we were away I was incredibly homesick.

We were staying in a remote part of East Germany, by the side of a huge forest, where nobody spoke any English, and while I loved the place, I still couldn't settle.   Every morning I woke up feeling a compulsion to get back to Ireland as quickly as possible.

One night I dreamed a very vivid dream and our host suggested I write it down into a song ... The first 5 lines are exactly what I dreamt.

"I saw the devil, he was running after me
Past the Madonna who was happy just to be
In a room that was falling around her with thunder
That was coming from the floor not above as it should be
But when i turned around the door I'd just come running through was gone
And I awoke to find myself in the middle of this song
I'd been dreaming"

On the following two nights I had more dreams - I was very taken by the strength of the East German people who had stood up for themselves and brought about the collapse of the Wall.  We were doing Q&A workshops for school kids studying English and we couldn't answer all their questions about the workings of life here.

Then I saw the women from the Eastern world come walking
'cross the desert from their homeland in the search for something better
And my answers to their questions didn't measure to their strength
And someone murdered someone and the money'd all been spent
And the cause they'd all been working for got swallowed in the greed
And I thought about these women and their struggle to be free
While I'd been dreaming.

Chorus:

  Only dreaming, I'd been dreaming

  Dreaming, only dreaming

  And I thought about these women and their struggle to be free

  While I'd been dreaming.

After all - at home we were all just the same, worshipping different named Gods but otherwise the same.

Then I saw a building with three women in the scene

One threw a bomb and the second one she screamed

As she pulled through the broken body of her child from the chaos

To the third dressed in green in the uniform of order

And as I calmly watched I suddenly could see

That they all looked the same and they all looked like me

But I'd been dreaming

  Chorus:

  Only dreaming, I'd been dreaming

  Dreaming, only dreaming

  And as I calmly watched I suddenly could see

  That they all looked the same and they all looked like me

  But I'd been dreaming

I didn't feel we were able to speak out at home and was feeling the effects of living under the stress of constant fear for so many years.   

Well do you wonder what it means?

All these pictures in my dreams

All the yearning and the fears

And all the terror and the screams

Well I can still feel the devil round the corner of my memory

And he's waiting for a woman who won't stand up and be counted

And I'm sure there's others like me

Afraid to have their say

Simply sitting back and hoping that it all will be ok

But that's just dreaming.

  We're just dreaming, only dreaming

  Dreaming, only dreaming

  And I'm sure there's others like me

  Afraid to have their say

  Simply sitting back and hoping that it all will be ok

  But that's just dreaming.

We've been back to Germany many times since and I still love the country.  I've never been homesick again, but I've never had another song that came in a dream.

I hope you like the song .... I'd be very interested to hear your comments.  How have dreams affected your work?   Do you get any inspiration from them?   How do you remember them?

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