Sweet dreams

Some of my favourite songs are about dreams. As it happens, they all come from my youth in the previous century. Here’s my short list of top dream songs: Sweet Dreams by Patsy Cline, Dream Baby by Roy Orbison and Sweet Dreams Are Made of This by The Eurythmics.
While all three have dreams described as “sweet” in their titles or opening lines, how sweet are those dreams when you actually listen closely to the lyrics. It’s surprising – not very sweet at all.
Patsy Cline’s song about a sometime lover has heartbroken lyrics such as, “You don’t love me, it’s plain.” As for Roy Orbison, he had a terrible life. His first wife died in an accident. His two older sons died in a house fire and Orbison died at 52 from a heart attack. Lamented Orbison: “How long must I dream?” Not long enough, it turned out.
The offering by The Eurythmics is by far the least filled with love among all three of these dismal songs that I used to like until I really listened. They sing scary lines like “Everybody’s looking for something … Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused.”
Maybe it’s a good thing we can’t remember our dreams, sweet or otherwise. I woke up the other morning with the tail-end of a happy dream still lingering in my brain. I thought, “I’ll remember this.” But try as I might, by mid-breakfast everything had evaporated from my pin head.
The thesis I’ve come to believe is that you’re meant forget your dreams, sweet or otherwise, because if you remembered them, you’d confuse dreams with reality. Who wants to look silly talking about a conversation with a friend that you dreamt about but didn’t actually happen. Or refusing to go to Italy because you dreamt about being there even though you never visited.
Psychiatrists appearing in movies seem to be able to pull dreams from their patients’ heads but that’s made-up Hollywood stuff happening under made-up faces. So, what I want to know is this: do real patients devise fake dreams so they have something to tell the shrink to whom they’re paying $180 an hour?
Still, it would be nice every so often to retain even a modest memory of a dream. Not a bad dream, mind you. But maybe with the kind of discouraging lyrics used on so-called “Sweet Dreams” songs, we can’t expect much by way of heartfelt remembrances.