From Metallica to Jeff Buckley: The five best songs about nightmares
‘Send Me The Pillow That You Dream On’, ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’, ‘California Dreaming’, ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’, ‘You Make My Dreams Come True’ – the list of songs about dreams is never-ending.
Whether it’s about dream lovers, dreams coming true, dreaming of a better future or dreaming about cherished times past, the theme of dreams resonates deeply in music. Eddie Hinton was called a dreamer. Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers were chasing one down. Dean Martin dreamed a little dream of you, while Tom Waits reminded us that we are innocent when we dream. Bob Dylan, true to form, had a whole series of them.
But what about the flip side? Those darker dreams, night terrors or horrible hallucinations that follow a visit from the Sandman? The stuff of nightmares. Well, there are plenty of great songs about those, too. Motörhead felt ‘Like a Nightmare’ when you set them free. Steve Vai had ‘Erotic Nightmares’. Metallica would hunt you down ‘All Nightmare Long’, while Rob Zombie dreamed ‘The Great American Nightmare’ (something it feels like we’re all living through, right about now).
Nightmares about falling from a height are the most commonly reported bad dreams in America, though, and in England it’s the one about your teeth falling out. In Holland, the most recurring bad trip in your sleep is a dream where the theme is work. In Finland and in Russia, in India and Brazil, the Philippines and plenty more places beyond, a nightmare about a snake is most likely to keep you awake, whilst in rock and roll, it’s usually a lost love that’ll keep a singer up into the wee small hours of the morning.
‘Let It Be’ famously came to Paul McCartney in a dream, while Morrissey is famously a nightmare to work with. Here are a handful of songs that are a nightmare, as well.
The five best songs about nightmares:
5. ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’ – Alice Cooper
“Welcome to my nightmare; I think you’re going to like it,” Cooper sings in the first song on his first solo album.
A funk and disco-infused glam rocker, the track is a disorienting dance number. But if Cooper’s nightmares sound anything as good as this song, then he isn’t wrong in saying we’re going to like them. Next on the album, ‘Devil’s Food’ and ‘The Black Widow’ are far more likely to frighten you. However, it’s at the album’s conclusion, in ‘The Awakening’, that Alice Cooper cranks the terror all the way up. Here, we awaken from his dream world into an even more nightmarish reality.
4. ‘Enter Sandman’ – Metallica
Probably the most well-known track on this list, most bands could only dream of having a song as successful as this one by Metallica. Telling a tale of childhood nightmares (“And never mind that noise you heard, it’s just the beasts under your bed, in your closet, in your head”), and incorporating elements of both the ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’ prayer and the opening lines of ‘Hush Little Baby’, it’s no wonder the song gives you chills.
Exit light, enter night, indeed.
3. ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’ – Bob Dylan
Not all songs about nightmares need to be so nightmarish. Bob Dylan even has plenty of tracks about dreams which are more haunting than this one. Full of inventive rhymes, snapshots of surreal imagery which teased and toyed with all the red-scare anti-Communist fears and feelings which were everywhere at the time, and a breathless delivery, on ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’ it sounds like Dylan is trying for all the world to keep from cracking up as he reels off each next absurd stream-of-consciousness lyric.
“Yeah, I dream,” Dylan’s character Jack Fate says in his sprawling 2003 film Masked & Anonymous, “In my dreams, I’m walking through fire, with intense heat. I don’t pay any attention to my dreams”.
2. ‘Nightmares By The Sea’ – Jeff Buckley
Jeff Buckley is best remembered for the only album he released in his lifetime, Grace, and his cover of Leonard Cohen’s modern standard ‘Hallelujah’. But when he drowned in the Mississippi River, he was working on new music and already had plans for his next record. Taking tracks from his completed sessions, the follow-up Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk was released the year after Buckley’s death.
His second album has a more fleshed-out sound than its predecessor. Buckley was working with a full band on the record and had big plans. The first song on the second disc, ‘Nightmares By The Sea’, starts with a guitar part that wouldn’t sound out of place on a song by Metallica or Alice Cooper, but it is the lyrics that are truly haunting. Singing about drowning, coral graves, and darkness, the song is a difficult listen in light of Buckley’s tragic story.
1. ‘Last Night I Had a Dream’ – Randy Newman
While he might call it a dream, you only need to listen to this track from Randy Newman’s classic 1972 album Sail Away to know that it was really a nightmare. “I saw a vampire, I saw a ghost,” he drawls. “Everybody scared me, but you scared me most.”
The song lurks and lurches. It creeps, and it crawls. It’s other-worldly and it’s ominous. Based around a descending piano part with a funky bass line and slide guitar supplied by Ry Cooder, the track has a hazy quality, an eerie edge. You wouldn’t want to be having this dream yourself.
