I’ve always found dreams to be so interesting. A sort of second life, we are able to live out our wildest fantasies simply by shutting our eyes and going to sleep. Unfortunately, this sort of freedom of imagination doesn’t come without some drawbacks. With few exceptions, we have little to no control over what we dream about. On one hand, this can lead to some really wild and memorable dreams to tell your friends about in the morning, while on the other hand it can lead to memories of times and people whom you thought were out of your life coming back to haunt you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sk-41h0tdE
The moment the song begins, you can immediately imagine being in an arena full of people singing along with the floaty melody. Reminiscent of something by Coldplay, the lyric-less melody effortlessly soars over the instrumentation which consists of a piano, bass guitar and drums. Deceptively simple, the background vocals fill out the sound, creating a wonderful piece of ear candy. Once the opening melody ends, the song suddenly gets smaller but slowly begins building back up with various synthesizers and sounds. Lead singer, “PB,” sings of his dreams, which continue presenting him with scenarios which he knows aren’t true, “I woke up / From another dream / I’m always seeing things / That I should not believe.” Ambiguous at first, the next verse brings in more clarity as to what he is seeing in his dreams, “I feel you fade / Don’t look now / What was here has gone away.” These verses seem to describe a recurring dream PB has about someone with whom his relationship didn’t go as planned.
After a brief return to the soaring melody, the song closes in again around another two verses. Continuing his thoughts, PB sings, “Just like that / I can’t find myself / Are there two of me? / Or am I someone else?” Although he can recognize he shouldn’t be seeing this person in his dreams, he still is, and it’s making him question himself. It would seem that this person, who he had believed to be out of his life, is still haunting him on a nightly basis. Further cementing this inner conflict, he sings, “I can’t quite stop this / I can’t quite listen / I can’t quite speak the words / That spin around my head.” In this incredibly relatable verse, as I’m sure everyone has been in this situation before in their life, we can see PB at his most vulnerable. This person is torturing him without even being present, and he isn’t sure how to climb out of the rabbit hole he has fallen down.
We are suddenly thrust into the hook of the song, in which PB questions his relationship with this person. In the previous sections of the song, we saw someone going through some sort of inner conflict, but now we can see him realizing that this burden does not entirely lie on his shoulders alone. He asks, “How did we get miles from nowhere? / I thought we were heading somewhere.” Clearly in reflection now, he is trying to figure out how things went wrong despite them seeming to go right. Perhaps it is these two trains of thought which are preventing him from truly moving on. The next two verses continue this sense of reflection and trying to figure out exactly what is going wrong in his head, “I might as well try / To figure this out.” After taking the time to slow things down and reflect, he comes to the conclusion that, “No it’s not gonna work / It doesn’t make sense.” With that, we are treated to two more runs through the hook of the song and then left with that soaring melody which started the whole thing off.
