30th
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Another Girl, Another Planet: The Only Ones (1978)
I just had this dream. Someone was playing music. It was a live album by an artist that I don’t really care for, one of those late 70s post-punk singer-songwriters. But then this really fantastic song came on. I was excited the way one would be excited if a hundred dollar bill was found on the sidewalk. I checked the sleeve to find out the name of the song and resolved to look it up later. (I was really hoping that I could find the studio version since I generally hate live recordings.) And then I woke up.
At first, I was trying hard to remember who the artist was – still convinced that the song existed, all I needed to do was look up the live album by that artist. But the more I thought about it, the less clear it became, until eventually, I could barely remember anything about the song. And now thirty minutes later, it’s completely gone. The song was so clear in my dream that I could actually hear it. Drums bass guitar and vocals. Lyrics even. It had a title. And an album cover. The details that I was given told me this was real! But the only thing that is clear to me now is the disappointing reality that this song does not exist and never will.
It’s classic. The subconscious mind, safe in the dark recesses of night, invents things while we sleep, behind our backs. And then it cruelly sends the conscious mind off in merciless, harsh daylight to find it. This is why we are unhappy, stumbling about the material world looking for things that don’t exist. This is what drives artists mad – dedicating lives to painfully recreating what the mind flippantly reveals in the night. This is why relationships fail. The subconscious hangs a wanted poster in the mind’s foyer – an amalgamation of all the desirable qualities of our parents, friends, and celebrities rolled into one, impossible, fantasy face. The mind means well, but it will never understand the limitations of life outside the skull. This arrangement represents a reverse universe, one where infinite possibilities exist within a fixed, finite, and unforgiving planet.
