Songs in Falsetto

(Now, I have quite a few songs to jam in here from the same studio album but please stay with me as I’m hoping it will bring about a revelation. We’re going back to the noughties. It’s all very smooth crooning and sexy time – so sit back and relax)

Can you believe now, when you’re on your knees now. Begging and pleading now, can u believe?

I woke up so happy. My dream was incredible, it was utterly riveting. Fast paced, clever, mysterious, symbolic and inspiring. It was so good that I think it’s time I lend myself to a dream clinic. Did anyone else see that poster on the tube that turned out to be a hoax? it was a promo for Tom Waites’ new song. Only special people rang the number. I didn’t ring the number just stared at it in my hand. Anyway, yes I need to have my head checked but I digress, my dream, my amazing dream.

All the things I’ve done before this – they don’t mean a thing. And all the words spoken before this won’t be said again. Suddenly so much of me has no need to pretend

My dream itself will not be remarkable to you but as I awoke in that moment when the soul is transferring with the physical body, the brain is awake but the mind doesn’t quite know which plane it’s on and one fails to separate the dreamworld from reality, in that instance, as I opened my eyes, all my senses hit at once.

And every night I thank the universe that I found you. Angel, my angel

I was Paula Patton. From what I can deduce my dream began when she gets divorced. The dream had me running around the place, jumping timelines looking for my soulmate and seeking happiness. Hmmm? now that I think about it perhaps it was more a curious dream than amazing but it made me think of him as most things do and I heard the music and well, I need him to know.

The messages appear as much in the lyrics of the songs I hear after the dream than the story within it. That’s the incredulous beauty of my dreams, they are giving me clues to things I already know, words, lyrics, theories – I can’t explain it fully yet but one day I will and you’ll be the first person I tell.

I woke up and listened to an album I bought in 2006 and it was so out of date but the words, the lyrics … Anyway, I don’t know much about her, Paula, I know her husband. His music breathed life into me and he’s probably the reason I’m not married so let’s start there.

I want a fresh girl, I want to drink my drink. I want to get high, I can’t have everything

I’ll tell you a brief story of the days when I were miserable but still had hope. I were about twenty five and I was choosing a wedding dress. I was talking to a designer on Facebook about measurements as she was in LA and we would never meet. She was a lovely lady called Dolly. I was caught up in the wedding fairytale because even though I was miserable with life I believed it would all magically change if I got married. Around that time I bought an album about a man who was feeling as hopeless as I was. He was doubting that he’d ever make it in life. His wife was emerging as a movie star so he drank, did drugs, wrote songs and stared gloomily into space asking God to save his wretched soul. It was all very familiar to me.

I want a house and kids, a big family … oh I want, I want everything … I can’t have everything.

I’m not really into R&B but it was popular back then and this album was quite jazzy. My favourite song is Everything I can’t have (featuring a Peruvian sample) it’s technically mambo and I love it but there was another song sang in falsetto that I played over and over. A love song. It didn’t make sense as I couldn’t believe anyone would ever sing anything like it to me. Long story short, one day I was telling Dolly about the song when she messages “oh Robin? He’s my brother in law, maybe we can do a two for one deal” I shit you not, true story. There are only six degrees that separates us and I knew right then that I wasn’t really in love but I wanted to be.

A ti solito ti quiero yo, en tus brazos me quiero morir (I love you alone, in your arms I want to die)

In my dream ‘Paula’ walks for Karl Largerfield dressed in the sexiest lingerie ever, it’s a publicity stunt to get back at Robin for cheating. She’s given crystal studded Chanel clutches, Rolexes, pearls, has more money than she could ever need but she doesn’t want it because her heart hurts. She wants to leave the after party. She desires love (maybe it’s in Peru?). Paula runs away and boards a TVR to Dijon. Personally I think she’s heading for Besançon as it’s quite special to me but she doesn’t get there, the train heads over the mountains instead and time leaves the present and enters the past, ancient times.

I’m lost without you, can’t help myself, how does it feel, to know that I love you

A ‘Villanelle’ style assassin follows her and Paula runs through the carriages jumping off the roof of the train at an old logging town. She meets a troll or some kind of faerie folk who takes her up a mountain and tells her she must toss a log that is carved with ancient symbols in order to find out who her true love is.

The mountain is steep, the log is ten foot tall. Paula fears that she will drop the log and never know. She tries to read the symbols on the log which is both logographic and Cyrillic. It tells her she will toss the log and it will remain perpendicular. Have no fear. That made me think of him, he wasn’t in my dream or maybe he was but as I woke up I knew it had something to do with him as it always does. At the end of the dream the faerie troll marries a spryte with a deer and a nymph with a dog. Love is love he says, be happy.

I wish I could change … stop placing the blame … there’s no way I can get back that girl cause I’m too complicated

The next part happens in the swirl. As my body awakens and my soul, thoughts and dreamlands evaporate I have an urge to listen to music. It’s all so complicated and I wish I could explain it properly to you because I know, I think, I feel – as I listen to these songs, songs I haven’t heard in over a decade I nod my head, yes. It’s not romantic. There are signposts everywhere throughout my life.

Once upon a time I saw her (Paula Patton’s) beautiful face in a music video and thought that I wanted to be her, to be loved like that, but, just like the Thicke’s marriage, I myself went rogue and I don’t think like that anymore.

Ok now he was close, tried to domesticate you, but you’re an animal, baby it’s in your nature. Just let me liberate you, you don’t need no papers. That man is not your maker. And that’s why I’m gon’ take a good girl ( I know you want it)

I’m a hot tamale. No, I’m more like the larvae at the bottom of a bottle of mezcal – I’m less spicy more let’s take a shot and party. I want to enjoy life and all it’s wonders. I want it alright, I want it all!

I get so excited writing these things you cannot understand. I don’t care if you know the songs, don’t know the songs, listen to them after or sit there baffled and bewildered. This morning I realised something and I want to share it with you. I want to go south and I have for a very very long time. The signs are all there: Spinning around in folk style character skirts aged eight, researching the Nicaraguan quicksand and contemplating the truth of Charrière’s Papillon at eighteen. A random love of Latin music, Bogotá to Lima, Machu Picchu, Pumapunku, finding out the faerie folk are real and alive in the Amazon…

If I wrote you a love note and made you smile with every word I wrote (what would you do?) See, what’s the point of waiting anymore because I’ve never been more sure (that it’s you)

I can’t explain my dreams and have no idea why I want to share them with you but once and only once ever in my life someone shared their dream with me and it meant everything. Everything.

Seen the way you talking up my phone last night, on God. Wanna make love? she ain’t even in denial. We can get away maybe to Guatemala. Got me going deep, got me all in freshwater

In the Christopher Nolan film Inception there are those who get hooked on dreaming. This is me. Dreaming is my drug. My dreams are my subconscious reality. In the film Yusuf’s assistant remarks “The dream is their reality. Who are you [we] to say otherwise?”

Sometimes I wonder why I wake up in the mornings but then I remember I haven’t been south of the equator.

Reaching out to touch a stranger, electric eyes everywhere. See that girl, she knows I’m watching, she likes the way I stare. If they say why, why? Tell them that it’s human nature … I like living this way.

I get all of this from one dream. Layers and layers of information, memory and sound. I prayed to the angels a couple of weeks ago. I asked for it to not just be a story, let it be real. I do not want another character for a book I may never write. There is a vacancy for a fellow wanderer, for someone who wants to join me in Peru, Bolivia or Guatemala.

To that person who is somewhere, out there, this space can be filled by you.

~ what did you dream of last night? ~

• Songs featured are from The Evolution of Robin Thicke: Can U believe, Angels, Complicated, Everything I can’t have, Lost without you.
• Mambo no.1 by Yma Sumac.
• Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke, Pharrell & T.I.
• Let Me Talk To You/My Love JT, Timbaland & T.I. (It’s a medley My Love starts at 1 min 40
• Guatemala by Rae Sremmurd, Slim Jxmmi & Swae Lee
• Human Nature by Michael Jackson

Image from Lonely Planet