The Making of “Theme to Being Stuck in a Dream”

Lyrics and music inspired by 2 dreams from 8/27/2020 and 6/28/2021

Written June 2021

I had a dream that I heard a 20-minute Sonic fan soundtrack or something that was so viscerally horrifying that it made me close my music app and throw my headphones across the room, and I was too scared to listen to it again. The beginning was plunderphonics-influenced, with samples of songs that were similar to the work of The Caretaker, but it gradually turned into something like harsh noise that was devastating and sent tingles down my spine. I wasn’t sure whether I hated it or whether it was the best thing I’d ever heard. So, of course, I had to recreate it. I decided to make this a track within the album instead of its own album because I thought that would be an insane idea. 

My idea for the basic structure of the song was to start with instrumental plunderphonics, fade into harsh noise and spoken word, and then end with a repetitive ambient melody. 14 minutes of experimental hell with something somewhat poppy for the last 4 minutes would be such a cool effect. Where would this ambient melody come from, though? I had an epiphany during a lucid dream. I was in my house in the dream, and when I realized it was a dream, I tried to wake up, but truly couldn’t. As I struggled to open my eyes, a simple, sad melody on an electric keyboard was playing; as I listened to that strangely beautiful song, I implicitly thought, “this must be the theme to being stuck in a dream”. And so the lyrical theme for this long experimental song evolved into “being stuck in a dream”. I was so enthusiastic about this beautiful song idea that I finished writing it on the same day I woke up with it.

“Writing” this song was weird because, instead of making chords or melodies, I was writing descriptions of dream sounds. For the lyrics, to convey the experience of dreaming, my structure was inspired by the stages of sleep. The spoken word section is the early stage of dreaming, during slow wave sleep, where dreams are vague, surreal thoughts. It doesn’t feel like sleeping; when you wake up, you usually deny that you fell asleep at all. I wanted to express the feeling of trying really hard to sleep, when you don’t realize that you’re sleeping already. In a state of delusional insomnia, you start thinking these weird urges that keep you from sleeping, like “I can’t sleep unless all of my body parts are laid down like rocks and thoroughly put to sleep individually”.

Except the lyrics of the spoken word section weren’t written for this album. I reused my old lyrics from a 1-minute song called “Shape Your Arm” from Requirements For Sleep. When I wrote “Shape Your Arm”, I attempted to start with a dark, experimental, electronic part with lyrics that expressed that insomniac experience... but I was extremely inexperienced with production and songwriting in 2019, and had no idea how I was gonna do that. So I just said, fuck it, I’m going to speed-read the lyrics and just make the song super chaotic, even if it doesn’t accurately convey the experience of insomnia. At least no one else has done that in a song yet and I can be unique, I think. 

3 years after writing “Shape Your Arm”, now that I have some experience, and people who’re willing to collab with me, I think I can finally make what I originally wanted to do with “Shape Your Arm” and convey insomnia and slow-wave-sleep dreams. So I just lifted the old lyrics directly for the new song. I revisited my a capella demo of that “dark experimental electronic version” of “Shape Your Arm”, and lifted the melodies for the brief singing parts. That was a super complicated 3-year process to write a song, but I hope that makes sense.

The final section of the song is inspired by a lucid dream, which happens during the REM stage. I sang it over the ambient melody that I heard in my own lucid dream, which I mentioned earlier. Lucid dreams sound like the most fun and cool experience, but it’s not really been that way for me, sadly. I’ve tried to live out my fantasies in lucid dreams, but I’m apparently not very skilled at conjuring things to appear in the dreams. I just see empty space, or end up walking around an area that’s something I could already see in real life. And if I do get a person or thing to appear, it’s usually silent and emotionally empty, like some kinda clone, or the dream visual starts turning black and I start waking up. These are interesting experiences to write about, but I wish I could have a “normal” lucid dream. 

While producing the album, my main collaborators were Tobias and Ramiel. Because of their different creative processes, I decided to give songs to Ramiel that they could take a lot of creative liberties on. On the other side, I gave songs to Tobias that he should be able to make according to my precise vision. I gave an outline of “Theme to Being Stuck in a Dream” to Ramiel... all I had on the page, for the first 7-minute section, was a vague description of the song that I heard in my dream. I said that it was made up of “samples”, and I wrote down some experimental songs that could be an inspiration. I was pretty scared how it was gonna turn out because I’d given such a vague description of what I wanted. 

But somehow, it turned out really good when Ramiel sent me their composition for the first instrumental section of the song. I guess the inspiration tracks that I provided were enough to communicate the vibe! Ramiel decided to only use samples of my old songs, instead of songs from random other artists, which was an excellent call. I hadn’t even considered doing that. Even though the “Sonic soundtrack” from the dream had more of an “old music” vibe like The Caretaker, this still worked really well with samples of my music. Being a big plunderphonics fan, Ramiel also used some clever sampling and editing techniques that put my song snippets into completely new contexts. 

And for the middle section of the song, I already had a “noise” song that I’d made ages ago that catalyzed the production of this whole thing. This has an even weirder backstory, so buckle in. During an awkward video call with my online friends, I was playing guitar, Joey was playing keyboard, and Tobias pulled up FL Studio and said he was gonna sample us. I said jokingly, “turn it into harsh noise”. Tobias took a 7-second sample of us playing and heavily distorted it, making an intense noise song in about 10 minutes. Everyone was laughing hysterically when he played the tune for us. After the call ended, I took the noise song and played around with it a bunch, making it into more of a Dark Ambient style. 

Months later, Tobias asked me if he could use the noise song as the closing track on his next EP. I hesitated to allow him to include it, because I was planning to also use it on my album -- but Tobias suggested that we could both use it, and it would actually be pretty cool if people were listening to my song and recognized that part from his EP. It kind of felt like a joke because this thing was absolutely grating to listen to, but “Flood” ended up being the final track on Carndye’s The Darkest Day EP, and I have a featured credit on it.

The final section of the song was straightforward to make, as I produced it myself with synthesizers. I considered adding another collaborator, but I was happy with the version I made on my own anyway.