Cheap Trick— Dream Police
Every single night they're driving me insane -- those men inside my brain. Dark matter, idle chatter, over-active bladder.
I try to sleep, they're wide awake
They won't let me alone
They don't get paid to take vacations
Or let me alone
They spy on me, I try to hide
They won't let me alone
They persecute me
They're the judge and jury all in one- Cheap Trick’ “Dream Police” from Dream Police (1979)
My Late Night Triptych: Insomnia, Earworms and Nightmares
It’s not a surprise when I wake up at 1 am, 2:20 am, 4:08 am, and 5:17 am with a song fragment looping in my head.
A variation of this process has been part of my nighttime ritual ever since I began collecting 8-track tapes at age 10.
Despite knowing I will rarely sleep continuously for more than 90 minutes at a time, I still whisper a surprised, jaw-clenched “Goddammit!” every time I’m jolted wide awake, my brain in the middle of auditioning for The Voice, belting out “My Heart Will Go On,” or “I Write the Songs,” at full out-of-tune volume.
On rare occasions — usually, when I’ve been keeping up with a daily meditation practice, eating plenty of veggies, and exercising — the cursing will morph into a more gentle and supportive: “Oh, you again? You do write the songs, don’t you?”
The main difference in my sleep disruptions today — from, say, age 10 through 50 — is that now I have to get up to pee at each of the four (and sometimes five or six) intervals. I guess that can be considered exercise.
Nocturnal earworms are a given. They are what inspire most of these essays.
What I want to know is whether I am making things worse or better by writing about them. I suppose the answer is “better” since I’ve now got a few hundred followers/readers/fans eagerly dreading awaiting my next earworm exploration. But that’s more ego-better. What about neurologically better?
Am I making positive changes to my brain by writing this Substack?
If I were a real investigative journalist, this is where I would tell you about how I proposed this question to a neurologic research science department (or whatever they are called). Where I would report that a well-funded study was set up to determine whether writing about earworms lessens their chattiness. How, via some sort of special pillow-helmet device that measures the worm region of the brain, they were able to determine how active the earworms are the day after writing a post versus the rest of the week.
I imagine the hippocampus would be the most responsive brain segment, as it’s the area that stores memories. It’s also, I am told, the area that stores and summons bad jokes. Like this one:
Q: Where do large, semi-aquatic mammals go for higher education?
A: The hippo campus.
I expect that 40 percent of you have now unsubscribed, and the other 60 percent have thrown your phone/tablet/laptop across the room in disgust amazement.)
A plug: Paid subscribers can repurpose this joke for free!
My mom told me that when I was a baby, I usually slept through the night. That, compared to my younger sister Lisa — who couldn’t sleep more than an hour without crying — I was the perfect infant.
I want to believe her, but it’s hard to imagine, considering how long insomnia has been my constant companion.
As a kid, I would often wake in the middle of the night after some nightmare — a cackling witch chasing me down an endless flight of stairs was a recurring one — and stay up reading a Hardy Boys mystery until I fell back asleep.
It wasn’t something I fretted about. Being awake was simply more appealing, more exciting, more under my control, than being asleep.
I would often catch up on my sleep on car or bus rides to and from school, the reverberations of the road lulling me into a calm that I rarely accessed at night in bed. To this day, long drives and road trips will knock me out. I’m convinced my chronic neck pain is from hundreds of hours with my head slumped forward in narcoleptic slumber.
In the passenger seat, of course.
Thankfully, this isn’t something triggered while being the driver.
If song lyrics from balladeers and ‘80s hair metal bands were the only things waking me up at night, I would chalk them up as unfortunate side effects from listening to a ton of yacht rock in the ‘70s and ‘80s and adapt to a life of irregular sleep patterns.
My fantastical, Wizard of Oz-like childhood nightmares of witches chasing me down flights of stairs have morphed into nightly cinéma vérité arguments with my aging parents — fruitless attempts to convince them to move out of their house and into an independent/assisted living community. My loving suggestions that they sell their cars before they cause a serious accident (or worse) are interpreted as callous threats to their independence and dignity.
My dreams have become a combination of reenactments of stressful moments from my recent past and rehearsals of stressful moments likely to come in the soon-to-be future. Essentially, a more vivid variation of what my brain already reenacts and rehearses when I’m awake.
Only at night is it much more difficult to keep myself continuously busy so that I can avoid fretting about the weight of responsibility that sits on my shoulders as the only family member left to take care of my parents (and my aunt, who lives in a memory care facility.)
Going to sleep requires slowing down, relaxing, feeling cozy beneath blankets. Letting the worries of the day melt away. Or so I am told.
Having an aunt with Alzheimer’s and a father with mild cognitive impairment has left me worried that I’ll soon follow the same degenerative path. I’ve been obsessively reading articles on “improving your brain health,” “how to stave off dementia,” “foods to eat to avoid developing dementia,” and “drugs that are risk factors for dementia.”
The last one really hit me hard.
It claimed that many drugs designed to calm the nervous system — over-the-counter sleep aids, muscle relaxers, benzos — are potential brain deteriorators. As a person with anxiety and insomnia, I’ve been taking drugs from all three of these no-no categories. Not on a daily basis, but often enough to send my inner hypochondriac into hyper-worry.
Is the damage already done? I struggle to remember anyone’s name. I call my dog-walking client pups by the wrong name all the time. The other day, I couldn’t think of Neil Peart, the drummer from Canadian rock band Rush, when asked who influenced me to pursue percussion. Maybe this is natural forgetfulness that accompanies aging, but if I can take steps to slow or even reverse it, I damn well am gonna try.
A week ago, I stopped taking my over-the-counter sleep aids, the muscle relaxer Flexeril, and my favorite anxiety med, Lorazepam. I started playing Wordle again. And I’ve been taking online memory quizzes.
I’m managing the added anxiety and tight joints as best I can, but falling and staying asleep is more elusive than ever.
Thankfully, as I’ve gotten older, I haven’t needed as much sleep. I’m not energy-crashing mid-afternoon. I don’t take naps.
But I’d still love to be able to experience the calm, ecstatic feeling that comes after having a refreshing, rejuvenating night of sleep. To make it through the night without being jostled and beaten mercilessly by the dream police.
Robin, Rick, Tom and Bun E.
Outside of the Meat Puppets, there is no band I’ve seen in concert more often than Cheap Trick. I would guess I’ve witnessed the Rockford, Illinois, power-pop legends tearing up the stage about ten times.
The first was at an amusement park in Southern California called Magic Mountain (now Six Flags Magic Mountain). It was the spring of 1984, I was 17, and Cheap Trick was touring their 8th album, the Todd Rundgren-produced Next Position Please.
The park’s live-music outdoor amphitheater held maybe 1000 people, and it was general admission. My friends and I didn’t want to wait all day in line for the show when we had rollercoasters to ride and fried food to eat. My friend Judy Eckerling smartly thought ahead and brought a pair of crutches with her when we (me, Judy and our friend Lisa) entered. Knowing that the facility let in handicapped people first, we arrived at the concert venue about 15 minutes before the doors would open. Judy played up her “injury,” hobbling with Meryl Streep-like dramatic accuracy. They let us in along with a half-dozen people in wheelchairs (and their posses), and we found our spot right at the front of the stage.
We were less than 10 feet away from Rick Neilsen and his 5-necked checkerboard guitar. Known for flicking his custom-designed guitar picks into the crowd while he played, all three of us ended that magical, mountainous night with a special memento from the show. Though I’ve since lost mine, the internet provides images that bring that concert back to the present. So did I really lose the pick?
I’ve seen at least 500 concerts, and Cheap Trick is, without a doubt, one of the great live acts in rock history. Even the most recent time I saw them perform at the Sonoma County Fair (in the early aughts, during a serious lull in their popularity), they were able to transfix the fried-butter lovin’ crowd of middle-aged mullet wearers, the lot of us singing along to every song.
Like most of my favorite songs, “Dream Police” has evolved along with me. When I was a teenager, I interpreted the lyrics the way Rick Neilsen explained them in many interviews — as an Orwellian warning that we, if we aren’t careful, can be controlled by nefarious forces, even when we sleep. But as I’ve gotten older, I hear the words in a more personal context. The “men inside my brain” seem less interested in trying to control me and more concerned about reminding me to pay attention. A message of what can happen when I get caught up in stories and old patterns of thinking that no longer serve me.
None of this would make a bit of difference, though, if “Dream Police” wasn’t a kick-ass song with hooks for days. Without Robin Zander’s harmoniously gritty vocals, Rick Neilsen’s iconic guitar riffs, and Tom Petersson’s bass and backing vocals holding down the fort so that Bun E. Carlos’ frenetically syncopated drums can run wild and free, this song would drift away like a forgotten memory.
And it’s this truth that gives me some bit of solace when I worry about my aunt and my father’s decline and even my own potential for developing dementia. When names and places fade and new memories last but an instant, the music always remains: in our bones, in our marrow, in our blood, and in our spirit.
“Dream Police.” Top-5 song by Cheap Trick? It’s okay to be wrong and answer no.
Have you seen the great CT live? Tell me about it in the comments.
Do you suffer from insomnia, late-night earworms, and/or nightmares? How do you treat them?
What practices do you turn to in times of stress and anxiety? I have my toolkit, but there’s always room for more tools.
I hope there are no police in your dreams so far in 2024.
Cheers - Steve
I'm a big fan of Cheap Trick. I saw them the first time just after the first album came out at the Whiskey A-Go-Go in LA. Just an insanely powerful show, although the downside was the audience was a mix of true power pop fans and bored industry weanies.
Truly a great song - and one of my favourites. But, for me, the best Cheap Trick track is 'Surrender' - I love the imagery the lyrics paint: 'Some Indonesian junk that's going 'round', 'Rock n rolling, rollin' numbers, got my KISS records out'. They captured that period of teenage life perfectly. Really enjoyed this post!