“One of John’s favourite songs”: The mind-bending track that John Lennon wrote in a “dream”
John Lennon was once called the “laziest man in England”. When Maureen Cleeve, a close friend of The Beatles, wrote those words in March 1966, she didn’t mean them as a slight to Lennon. She was simply expressing a fact that he himself was very proud of as songs like ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ would attest. Indeed, it was that same idleness that allowed the Beatles member to write some of the most mind-altering songs of his career.
Responding to Cleeve’s claim, Lennon specified that he was only “physically lazy” before adding: “I don’t mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more”. But Lennon was far from lazy when it came to the working of his mind. As Cleeve observed, the musician’s room was filled with books and his willingness to write songs and express himself was an insatiable talent.
From collections of Tennyson’s poetry to Oscar Wilde’s plays and books on natural history, Lennon clearly had an unstoppable appetite for literature. “He approaches reading with a lively interest untempered by too much formal education,” Cleeves wrote. “I’ve read millions of books,’ he said, ‘that’s why I seem to know things.’” In this century it is hard to imagine being in the presence of such a library.
It was in this same room that Lennon finally broke a serious case of writer’s block that had been afflicting him for months. After falling into a half-sleep, Lennon heard a mysterious voice speaking to him through the void. It spoke in a language Lennon didn’t understand, perhaps one that he had invented entirely himself. Nevertheless, when he was jolted awake, the words, “Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé” continued ping-ponging around his sleep-addled mind.
Lennon quickly sat down to write the rest of the song, which, for the first time in months, came without being forced. “That’s what I call craftsmanship writing, meaning, you know, I just churned that out,” he later told the BBC. “I’m not putting it down, it’s just what it is, but I just sat down and wrote it, you know, with no real inspiration, based on a dream I’d had”.
After blending the dream-inspired lyrical and melodic fragments with a song he’d started earlier in the summer, ‘So Long’, the melody of which he based off the string arrangements he’d written for Harry Nilsson’s version of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘So Many Rivers To Cross’, Lennon wound up with ‘Dream #9’. According to May Pang, an employee of Apple Corps with whom Lennon had a Yoko-Ono-authorised short affair, the track was one of his favourite songs from his 1974 album Walls and Bridges.
“This was one of John’s favourite songs,” Pang recalled, “Because it literally came to him in a dream. He woke up and wrote down those words along with the melody. He had no idea what it meant, but he thought it sounded beautiful. John arranged the strings in such a way that the song really does sound like a dream. It was the last song written for the album”.
Like the Beatles track ‘Revolution 9′, Dream #9′ is one of those songs that betray Lennon’s fascination with the recurrence of the number nine throughout his life – I can’t blame him either. Not only was he born on October 9th, but his first home was on 9 Newcastle Road, Wavertree, Liverpool – three names which each containing nine letters. And it doesn’t end there. The Beatles first gig at The Cavern Club took place on February 9th, 1961, while Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, saw the group perform on November 9th that same year. The group’s contract with EMI was confirmed on May 9th, 1962, and their debut single ‘Love Me Do’ was on Parlophone R4949. Weirder still, Lennon’s son Sean shared his father’s birthday.
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