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‘115th Dream’: The first sign of Bob Dylan’s fascination with ‘Moby-Dick’

Thu 4 June 2026 1:00, UK

“Moby-Dick is a fascinating book”, Bob Dylan said in his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, which he delivered, days before his deadline, in early 2017.

He expanded, “A book that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes demands on you. The plot is straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab–captain of a ship called the Pequod–an egomaniac with a peg leg pursuing his nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he pursues him all the way from the Atlantic around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. He pursues the whale around both sides of the earth.”

Dylan said all that (and more) about Melville’s masterpiece (or at least, one of Melville’s masterpieces) relatively recently, but he’d been fascinated with the tale of Ahab and the Whale for decades by that point. Dylan mentioned in his lecture that he first encountered Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in grammar school, and clearly, it left an impression on him.

In the 1967 Basement Tapes recording ‘Lo! and Behold’, Dylan sings the offhand line “What’s it to you, Moby Dick?” at one point, and then, much later, at a Rough and Rowdy Ways show I attended at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2021, Dylan announced to the crowd that “Herman Melville was born here!” But, until his 2017 Nobel lecture, his biggest allusion (or, illusion?) to the great novel came in his 1965 song, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’.

Though it opens with Dylan declaring that he was riding “on the Mayflower”, the ship which sailed from Southampton into the New World, bringing with it the famous pilgrim settler families who made the move to colonise America, the song weaves a healthy dose of Moby-Dick into its seafaring story as well and conflates one mythical tale of the ocean with the other.

“I yelled to Captain Arab, I’ll have ya understand,” Dylan sings early on in the song (though, surely he knows full well that the character in Melville’s book is actually called Captain Ahab), “Who came running to the deck and said, ‘Boys, forget the whale, we’re goin’ over yonder, cut the engines, change the sails’”.

From there, the song, understandably, takes on the fantastical feeling of a fever-dream. Images flash by before you have time to process exactly what Dylan is singing or saying. He rapidly reels off the story of the birth of America, a jailbreak, exploding restaurants, bank jobs, and stick-ups; this song doesn’t seem to be about Dylan’s 115th dream as much as it is about 115 separate dreamlike images flashing by, all at once.

Though Captain Arab follows along on Dylan’s fanciful spree throughout, by the end of the song, they’ve lost contact. “Well, the last I heard of Arab he was stuck on a whale”, Dylan drawls before announcing an encounter with another famous captain, singing that “He said his name was Columbus, and I just said good luck”.

Back in his Nobel lecture, Dylan concludes his examination of Moby Dick by summarising the plot. “Moby attacks one more time, ramming the Pequod and sinking it. Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave. Ishmael survives. He’s in the sea, floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the whole story,” he said, before suggesting that it wasn’t only in ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ that you can find the spirit of Moby Dick amongst his vast, ocean-like back catalogue: “That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs”.