ANALYZING "THE DREAMING" (1982) BY KATE BUSH, A THREAD:
By the time of her fourth album, the already widely acclaimed British artist had decided to produce her forthcoming release all by herself. The album took approximately two years to be written, recorded and put together, as Kate is well-known for her perfectionism.
Shortly before the official release, several promotional singles were put out, however they were received with a lukewarm reaction from the critics. The album itself was met with polarizing reception as well, as many reviewers seemed not to understand its themes correctly.
“The Dreaming” is supposed to dive into the subconscious tactics of the human mind. It contains several mentions of waiting for the unknown, unexpected, moreover wishing to escape said unknown, sort of presenting a liminal space within the human psychology.
The very title refers to an era in Aboriginal culture, either called Dreamtime or the Dreaming, where free spirits of humans and animals lived together in perfect harmony, taking the same physical form and experiencing mystical, ethereal events together.
As Kate said in several interviews, the title came to her as the last idea for the album, as a way to sum up its material, and so it became a title for one of the album’s songs, also connected to the Australian Aboriginals’ history.
The cover shows Kate with a golden key on her tongue, kissing a man in chains – a representative of a famous illusionist Harry Houdini. The picture’s a direct reference to the song “Houdini” & its lyric “With a kiss, I’d pass the key”. It was taken by Kate’s brother, John.
The theme of key is vividly present in the songs, especially in the very ending. On the start of their journey, the protagonist demands to find the answers to all the unknown they are surrounded by, and the mention of key possibly means coming to the final conclusion ...
... and finding previously desired knowledge within the vague mechanisms of the mind. The heroine constantly explores her inner quirks, wanting to cope with her own self and with the dangers of surroundings.
The key is also a metaphor for one’s safety and attempts to avoid paranoia. As the main character continues walking their path, they get confused with brutality of the world and so they prevent themselves from facing the reality again, escaping into their own world and locking...
...themselves up. The theme of key is a triple entendre – in the context of the cover, it also symbolizes unreachable freedom.
People try to escape their lives and dream it away, but soon they confront the truth – that life is nothing else but a fever dream they tried to escape to.
Kate wants to manage human emotions, as she felt holding any of them back is a core of most problems in our relationships. This theme is linking all of the songs on “The Dreaming”, whereas every other topic occurs rather on certain songs.
Another vigorous theme is the one of the mule, which contrasts particularly with the theme of key. Mule, perceived as both a stubborn and a stupid animal in British culture, may represent how the protagonist, by desperate thirsting for the knowledge, is actually depraving ...
... themselves of it. The theme of mule is especially prominent on the last song on the album, “Get Out Of My House”, where it goes beyond the meaning above and forms into an even broader trope, uniting all the primary themes.
Of course, as the title might also suggest, dreams are also an important aspect of the album – many of the songs might seem idle or febrile, as they confront subliminal structures of thinking, playing on fear and agitation.
The album’s sound was a complete departure from what the world would usually hear from Kate – grand, at times grotesque, at others sinister instrumentals seemed quite frightening to an average listener.
The artist herself said “The Dreaming” “was made to be played loud”. A change in the sound felt necessary to her, because she admitted to changing rapidly at the time, and sticking to one particular expression method appeared way too restricting.
Kate said that while making the songs, she felt a certain sense of liberty. This bold statement in the form of “The Dreaming” was downturned later by Kate herself, which could be influenced by how the album was overwhelmed with criticism.
She said that “look[ing] back at that record, it seems mad. (…) There is a lot of anger in it”.
1) SAT IN YOUR LAP, the opener track, starts with lavish drums and rhythmic piano, just to be led by synthesized horn instrumentation.
Kate, with her characteristic high-pitched voice, sings from the perspective of an impatient person who desires to possess all of the universal knowledge, but isn’t able to notice such ability can never be reached by a human being.
Just as the person starts perceiving themselves as highly skilled (“king”), they begin to feel like an imposter and lose the will to continue on learning anything (“I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a scholar, but I really can’t be bothered”).
Consequently, the more they learn about the world, the more demotivated and ignorant they become as they discover more territories of knowledge they haven’t expanded yet.
The visuals of the song, both the music video and the single cover, shows Kate dressed up as a dunce – a stereotypical British vision of a person considered incapable of learning – with a characteristic white hat with a big “D” written on it.
The song’s title implies a possible connection between the state of one’s mind and sexual instincts, something that’s further expanded on “Get Out Of My House” as well.
2) THERE GOES A TENNER is an oniristic song with characteristic bridges played on the Fairlight CMI synthesizer. It describes a planned robbery from the point of view of one of the robbers, who is simultaneously excited and startled by their task.
This song speaks in a few distinctive time plans. The protagonist constantly asks their comrades if “they remember” elements of present and past, whether they refer to the act of robbery as performed now, or mentioned after many years as a distant memory.
The character seems to relieve the exact moment before the robbery, increasing anxiety with each mention, and so with each verse. During the bridge, Kate sings “we’re waiting”, highlighting the ethereal feeling of anticipation, as if her soul is stuck halfway in a dream.
Further lyrics also suggest the character is arrested for the crime, but it’s vaguely mentioned, as they constantly relieve the same moment over and over, unable to move on.
They compare themselves and their partners to actors, giving famous examples from crime melodramas of the 1930’s and 40’s.
They constantly promise themselves they’ll never get caught, but eventually they do, as suggested by the metaphorical line “A star in strange ways”, which could also mean “A star in Strangeways”, where Strangeways is an infamous Manchester prison.
Last verse implies they eventually get free, refreshing their sense of stability from before the crime, as they mention outdated decimals which were in circulation at the time of their robbery.
The track serves as an obscure commentary on Margaret Thatcher’s administration, with the last lyric “That’s when we used to vote for him” pointing out that the characters opposed the infamous Prime Minister during the election.
3) PULL OUT THE PIN speaks from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam war. The sonic jungle landscape of the song is achieved with reverb guitar effect and helicopter samples. Kate is accompanied by David Gilmour from Pink Floyd on backing vocals.
The song was inspired by an Australian documentary on the Vietnam war from a Vietnamese point of view, where Americans were presented as ignorant invaders with no knowledge of the land they are fighting on and no connection to the instinctive life led by locals.
A direct inspiration for the song was the image of Vietnamese soldiers popping their Buddha necklaces into their mouths when going into action. Kate was allured by the fact they treated their fighting as some sort of precious craft, calling it “grotesque beauty”.
This is reflected in the line “With my silver Buddha/And my silver bullet”. The theatrical chorus (“Just one thing in it, me or him/And I love life”) suggests that Vietnamese never wanted to dismiss their morals in the name of war; they had to fight because they were forced to.
4) SUSPENDED IN GAFFA is an introspective song, at moments reminescent of operette music. In its meaning, it refers to “Sat In Your Lap”, as the protagonist yet again faces a higher force or capability with a wish to take it over, although here they become more self-aware and ...
acknowledge their flaws directly. Kate tries to confront the Roman Catholic idea she was brought up in of trying to find God in one’s life as the only way to fulfillment. The character wishes to see God just once, but even that one time may be impossible to reach.
The struggle of trying to achieve the unreachable is compared to being stuck in the mud or the titular gaffer’s tape. The uptempo song is solely led by piano and Kate’s skillful vocals, ranging from calm and whisper-like to off-the-wall screams.
5) LEAVE IT OPEN is one of the more experimental cuts on “The Dreaming”, featuring heavy vocal modulation and backmasking as primary atmosphere builders on the track. The song was inspired by the sudden murder of John Lennon, which terrified Bush as she felt she might ...
... become a target as well. Disturbed about how privacy of famous pop stars can be easily demolished, she unveiled her worries through music.
Lyrically, the song touches on fragile senses of the human intellect and teaching oneself how to control it. The character first says they have learnt how to “keep it shut”, meaning they adapt themselves to the dangerous circumstances and keep their emotions on a leash.
But as the song progresses, they realize taming their feelings is an equivalent to taming their productivity and, therefore, achieving their goals, and so they “leave it open”.
The chorus (“Harm is in us, but power to arm”) says that there is a pinch of evil in every single human being, but it’s dependent from us if we decide to wake it up and use it as a weapon.
In the background, we hear the first references to the mule theme in Kate’s vocalizations. At the end, a mysterious backmasked line “We let the weirdness in” is featured.
The singer learned to sing the phrase backwards, resulting in alike-sounding “They said they won’t let me in” and the latter sentence is how Kate actually recorded it, just to reverse it on tape and go back to the original one.
They both recall the bridge, where backing vocalists sing “What you letting in?/Tell me what you’re letting in!”. And so, the meaning of the song is left open.
6) THE DREAMING, starting with didgeridoo and heavy drumbeat, features Kate singing in strong Australian accent, as the song is a difect reference to white British colonisers’ mistreatment of the indigenous people of Australia.
As it was previously mentioned, the title refers to cultural elements of the Aboriginals. Lyrics mention Woomera, a town most notable for becoming a nuclear weapons testing facility during the 1940’s. This negatively impacted the presence of indigenous population in the area.
At the end of the track, Kate samples spoken Aborigine phrase from a song “Airplane! Airplane!”, dealing with white Australians’ superiority complex, introducted to the indigenous as “civilization”, but in fact becoming a cultural wipeout.
“The Dreaming” ends with fading-in Irish traditional melody, which smoothly transitions into the next song and contrasts with the traditional Aborigine didgeridoo, which also had started the track. It is also reminescent of how the two cultures clashed.
7) NIGHT OF THE SWALLOW is a tale of a smuggler being confronted by their lover not to begin another quest. The protagonist wants to break free, just like a swallow – the bird is a metaphore for personal liberty; the lover, however, cares deeply for them and doesn’t want them...
...to get caught. While they might be truly concerned, the hero thinks of this offer as egoist and refuses to conform it. Kate herself has said the song is about the lover being scared for the smuggler’s wish to be independent as she’s insecure of their relationship.
The smuggler, just because he sees he is so desired at home, thinks of it as a trap and in result, demands freedom even more. This auctorial definiton conveys how heterosexual relationships are often destroyed by lack of mutual understanding.
While the smuggler wishes to “let [him] go”, Kate – representing his lover – sings “But you’re not a swallow!”, implying it won’t be that easy for him and that freedom is just a paradox.
The song during the choruses is led by the same dynamic Irish pipe melody played at the end of previous track, while at verses it shifts to calm piano. The traditional influence was important to Kate due to her Irish ancestry.
Because of this intense Irish theme, the lyrics could be easily shifted to another meaning, interpretating the two characters as the English, trying to restrain the territory and people they forced to be dependant on them, and the Irish, longing to finally set free.
8) ALL THE LOVE is a downcast, mellow song, with a sound recalling Kate’s previous albums, concentrating on piano and bass. As in the title track, breathing plays a rhythmical role, and the choruses are more of oniristic bridges than a proper pop structure proposes, similarly...
to "There Goes A Tenner". It is sung by a solo choirboy Richard Thornton. Kate’s voice is mournful and miserable, highlighting the gloomy, heavy-hearted tension of the song.
“All The Love” speaks of contradictory loneliness experienced by someone surrounded by a lot of people. Kate speaks of all the cases where we have to hide our real feelings to conform our relatives and friends’ consciences.
We often “didn’t want to let them see [us] weak”. Their remorse shows in the chorus, saying “We needed you/To love us too/We wait for your move”. This means that despite our good intentions to not bother anyone with our problems, ...
... we actually have to share our griefs with them, because human relationships are meant for people to rely on each other. The relatives might actually interpret locking ourselves away as ignorance towards their own concerns.
Communication is the base of solving the problem. It’s reflected in the last verse of the song, where Kate decides to “let them in”. The song ends with Kate’s friends and family voices sampled from her answering machine.
It is due to the fact that when she was struggling with loneliness during the hectic recording sessions, she tried to answer all of them and realized how far she has moved away from them.
She also mentioned that sometimes, loneliness is actually needed to process events and memories on your own and then, with all the thoughts rewired, return to the world.
9) HOUDINI, a song cited on the album cover, refers to the story of Hungarian-American illusionist Harry Houdini and his wife Bess. The man became known as a “Handcuff King”, as he could free himself from handcuffs and chains.
In the song, Kate offers a narrative it was his wife’s kiss that enabled his escape, as she’d pass him the key. The meaning of key becomes broader when lyrics give us a bigger hint of Houdini’s history.
During his fame, he tried to expose spiritual seances as press stunts. But before he died, he promised his wife that after he went to the other side, he would communicate with her using the code “Rosabel, believe” during the very seances he tried to dismantle.
The code was supposed to be a proof of how his presence is real and not just another foolery. And so, in 1929, Bess actually contacted Houdini during one of the seances. It was amazing to think that this man could find the right key and break out from the barriers of life/death.
Unfortunately, Bess soon discovered someone had betrayed the code and tricked her. The whole story was quite emotional to Kate and she ensured she put all of her passionate sentiment in this song.
The artist’s intense vocals reach their peak especially on the chorus, where she switches quickly from the sweet melody to a grand roar. This effect was reached by a certain diet - Kate had only fed herself with chocolate and milk to achieve such a dramatic vocalization.
Sonically, the song picks up from “All The Love” with just piano and bass, just to finish with lush orchestral arrangement. It is once again a reminder that something we so desperately crave for is unreachable for a mortal human being.
10) GET OUT OF MY HOUSE is probably the most intense and sinister song on the album, as it is the closing track which sums up the whole equivocal experience. Its main theme was inspired by Stephen King’s “The Shining” and Ridley Scott’s movie “Alien”.
Haunting guitar instrumentations and aggressive, gruelling vocals probably make up for the loudest track on “The Dreaming”. The lyrics to this track are ambiguous and are open to many interpretations. Kate’s main goal was to present results of fear and isolation.
The main character locks herself up in her house, refusing to let anyone in after being mistreated in all her past relationships (recalling “All The Love”, where she’s first let them in). The house is also considered a metaphor for the heroine’s body and personal life.
Despite fear of being alone, she remains in there unbothered. The protagonist mentions in the first verse that when someone important to her left her house, her life suddenly collapsed, and so to restore it again she had to do it on her own, without outer intervention.
So, she locks her home with her key. She changes her personalities throughout the song, from the house to a concierge. She is so desperate to defend herself from other humans that she turns into her own retainer, as if she was stepping out of her body – her house – to defend it.
During the choruses, there is a man in the background asking to let him in, but Kate sweeps him away with desperate screaming. There is a sexual undertone to the line “No stranger’s feet will enter me”, as in the Bible, feet were an euphemism for genitals or sexual intercourse.
She doesn’t want to let the man for any of the reasons people usually do – love, sex or money. She denies everything in the name of her own well-being. “I wash the panes” might symbolize crying, because if her body is her house, then her eyes are her panes.
She mourns over her past mistakes, trying to “clean the stains away”; she admits “this house is full of madness” and “mistakes”, so she attempts to clean it up with “her keeper”, who probably also is just another of her personalities.
The man, played by Paul Hardiman, begs her to be let in. He wants to bring in the “devil dreams”, and the woman is aware of them being just another mistreatment and manipulation she so desperately tried to defend herself from, so despite there being some good memories and ...
wish for the relationship to come back, she refuses and turns into a bird. This form might be a reference to a symbol of freedom a bird was on “Night of the Swallow”. But the woman isn’t safe in this form either – the man changes into wind and tries to blow the house down.
So, to be able to confront the wind, she changes into the mule. As it was mentioned in the very beginning, the mule in British culture is reminiscent of stubbornness and stupidity.
The woman loses her mind just for the sake of her own stance, and still refuses to let the man in. She was so determined to move away from people that she moved away from herself. But even the final form of mule isn’t enough to stop the man.
And so he, as stubborn as her, changes into the mule too. In the end, they both hee-haw, unable to hear each other over the mule noises. This references the “Night of the Swallow” trope of how a relationship can be destroyed by lack of understanding and dialogue.
Kate included a direct hint to the British folk song “The Twa Magicians”, where a maid refused to marry a blacksmith, and so she changed her forms to escape him, but got stuck in a transformation chase as he was able to do it as well.
“Get Out Of My House” ends with Esmail Sheikh reciting rhythmic Hindi syllables known as Bol. The album fades out here, but you could say it fades into “Hounds of Love”, where the opening track, “Running Up That Hill”, is an offer to make a deal with God ...
... between a man and a woman for them to finally understand each other. And so the mules from “Get Out Of My House” transformed into the hounds of love.
This album was made to be played loud on September 13th, 1982. Play it.
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