Throwback Thursday: Dreaming of Dylan

Two nights ago I met Bob Dylan. The meeting took place in a dream, so it was not a real encounter with the legendary singer/songwriter. I'm not sure how old I was in the dream, but he seemed to be somewhere in his fifties or sixties.

In the dream we were standing in a room with rather dim lighting, talking. It was a very normal conversation. He didn't smile much but he wasn't cold or aloof. Unfortunately, when I woke I didn't write down any of its details. We met and we talked, like people do sometimes. 

What it made me think of, though, was Mary Lee Kortes' book Dreaming of Dylan, which I wrote about in April of 2019. The book was definitely a fun read. Here are a few excerpts and my review from that time.

* * * * *

Dream 103 / Dylan Vs. Paulsen
I am sitting at the kitchen table with my parents. I’m very young in the dream, only seven or eight years old, and the presidential election is coming. My parents are fighting about who to vote for: Bob Dylan or Pat Paulsen.

* * * *
Dreams are one of those amazing phenomenon that fall into that area of mystery as regards what it means to be human. Studied by psychologists and now the domain or neuroscience, who can definitively say where they come from or what they mean. One thing for certain, our minds produce pretty wild stories sometimes.

What is is that makes our dreams so vivid? The fun part, though, is sharing those dream anecdotes and stories with others, in part because often there doesn't seem to be any kind of logic to the dream at all. It just goes where it wants and you go with it.

And that's what makes these 115 dreams so much fun. Even if you're not a Dylan fan, you'll enjoy these stories because after a lifetime living in this world you will undoubtedly have formed a certain kind of image of the Nobel Laureate so that when he appears in dreams, he's often the caricature of his persona. Or not.

The book, published by BMG Books, is titled Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob. The author is Mary Lee Kortes, a recording artist and performer who has actually opened for Bob, so in a sense she's already had a dream come true, I suspect.

I don't know how long it took to assemble this collection of dreams, but the final outcome is a totally first rate execution of concept. It's a beautiful book as well as totally entertaining, especially if you're a fan. The contributors come from all over the world, from painters to poets to Patti Smith.

If you're a Dylan fan, you already know where the title of the book comes from, the title of a song on Bringing It All Back Home. The spirit of the book itself is in alignment with another familiar song, Talkin' World War III Blues, which ends with this famous stanza:

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody’s having them dreams
Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said that

* * * *

One other feature of the book that is somewhat amusing is the irregular structure. That is, the dreams all have numbers but they are not in the order of the numbers. You might expect 1 to be first and 115 to be the last dream in the book, but then again, tell me a dream in which the story makes sense and I will tell you 50 where it's a jumble of unexpected juxtapositions. I think the absence of a table of contents and the jumbled structure just makes it all that much more fun.

Here's the author's dream, which she shares at the beginning of the book.

Dream 106 / Wrong Key
I was rehearsing for a Losers Lounge show (an NYC series that takes place at Joe’s Pub). I was scheduled to sing Townes Van Zandt's "No Place To Fall" and was rehearsing with the guy who is going to accompany me--Bob Dylan.

We were in a dark dirty white room, just the two of us. He was sitting on the floor strumming a lute and playing the song in a weird key.

"That’s the wrong key," I told him. "I sing it in D. What key are you playing it in?"

He looked up at me. "The key if I"

I was so annoyed. "There’s no such thing," I said.

“That’s the key I play it in,” said Bob.

--Marie Lee Kortes
Musician, Author / Brooklyn

Some of the dreams are more developed and more detailed, stretching two to four pages. Others are brief, and hilarious like this one.

61 / Space Visionary
I have had many dreams about Dylan, and he has never spoken to me in them until recently when he named a hill near where I grew up. “You can see the city from there," he said. But you can’t.

--Jeff Ward
Writer, Singer/Song Writer / Ireland

* * * *

Illustration for Dream 103 / Dylan vs. Paulsen

The titles alone are worth the read... Or, you can skip the words altogether and enjoy the illustrations, photos and design. Yes, Dreaming Of Dylan is an enjoyable experience any way you choose to engage it.

Here are some of the titles of the various dreams...

Desk Set
Fur
Sobering
What's In Your Freezer
Duet With Dog
Meet Me In The Morning
It'll Cost You
Walking The Room
I Dreamed Bob Dylan Had A Crush On My Mom
Time Traveler
O Captain
Not Alone

You can find the book here at Amazon. Dreaming of Dylan. I am confident it would make a great gift for any Dylan fan, including the Dylan fan in your life.

Related Links
For more about the author, visit https://maryleescorvette.com/about
Schedule for Duluth Dylan Fest 2023 

Six Minutes with Singer/Songwriter Mary Lee Kortes, Author of Dreaming of Dylan

Mary Lee Kortes with full band. Photo: Jim Marchese

This past month a friend asked if I'd seen Mary Lee Kortes' Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob. I'd not, but the concept certainly had me intrigued. When I acquired a copy of the book I was more than impressed. It was seriously fun and I proceeded to write about it.

The NYTimes and Rolling Stone are among the many who had this to say about Mary Lee the performer:
"Songs so meticulously crafted they sound completely natural."
--Jon Pareles. The New York Times
“Mary Lee Kortes's voice—the high mountain sunshine of Dolly Parton with a sweet-iron undercoat of Chrissie Hynde."
--David Fricke, Rolling Stone

The following interview should give you a pretty good glimpse of Ms. Kortes's spirit. There's a link at the end to her website as well as to Amazon where you can get a copy yourself.

EN: First off, the production values on this book are A++. Who did the design and layout? How did the look and feel of this book come about?

Photo credit: Barry Sutton

Mary Lee Kortes: The designer is Mark Melnick. When I conceived the book, I always wanted to have a mix of original art/drawings/paintings to illustrate the dreams, along with some other visuals, like lesser known Dylan photos. I also didn't want it to look tidy; I thought there should be some chaos to it. So as the dreams came in, I gathered up illustrators I knew (Rina Root, Kevin Walters) and got recommendations from friends for some others (Stanley Mouse, Jerry Pagane, Jenny Laden). I didn't want there to be just one illustrator—part of my chaos theory. Then I selected dreams that I thought might match up well with different designers and sent them out, something like a casting agent you could say.

Also, I'd met up with Mitch Blank several years ago. He's a Dylan archivist with a collection of Dylan memorabilia and artifacts that is quite stunning. (He's now officially an archivist with the Dylan archive in Tulsa, although he still lives in NYC.) At the time I started putting the book together, my publisher, Kate Hyman from BMG, was coincidentally meeting with Mitch about some Dylan photos for another project. We went to his apartment together and realized that we could photograph a lot of his collection and use it as part of the visual component of the book. It was definitely kismet: One of the dreams in the book (dream #12, "A prom with Bob") features both Dylan and Rick Danko. When we were roaming through Mitch's apartment that day, we came upon a glass cabinet with a collection of baseballs signed by famous non-musicians. Side by side, smack dab in the middle of the case, there sat two baseballs—one signed by Dylan, the other by Danko.

So we brought photographer Daniel Root to the apartment along with Mark and photographed everything we could. That's the source of most of the photos you see. Mark played with some of them to combine other elements, etc.

EN: The concept is fab, of course. There are a lot of Bob Dylan books, but what’s fun is seeing the variety of approaches. Yours knocks my socks off. When did the concept emerge and did you imagine you could pull it off?

A bit of Dylanesque playfulness.
Photo: Barry Sutton

MLK: I had the idea so long ago I'm embarrassed to get specific! The Foreword tells the origin story, which is really something, particularly with my Dylan connection that came after I'd started having dreams about him, and long, long after my "television hallucination."

I wasn't sure I could pull it off, although my early efforts were good and encouraging. I was able to collect over 60 dreams and a few illustrations after I first started working on it. I'm not sure how long I had been working on it when someone offered to share the name of an agent with me. I sent it to him/her (I can't even remember anymore if it was a him or her! Been that long.) That person told me it wasn't a book, it was a blog, or something else less substantial.

I think I was going through a hard period at that point and so the project faded onto the back burner of a back burner and sat there simmering invisibly for quite some time. Then in a meeting with Kate one day she mentioned BMG had started a book division doing books only related to music. I smiled and tilted my head. "I have a book related to music," I said. I reviewed what I'd done and was surprised to realize just how much work I'd already done on the book, sent BMG a sampling, and we were off to the races.

EN: How did you get all these dreams? Did you just talk to lots of people? Crowdsourcing?

MLK: Initially, I posted only on ExpectingRain.com and told my friends what I was doing. Later on of course, I used Facebook and everything I could think of.

Photo credit: Lisa Lyons

EN: Not only is the book concept original, but also the mixed up way you present the dreams with 106 then 17 and 103. Whose idea was this? What gave you this idea?

MLK: That idea was actually my husband's, Eric Ambel. Maybe he was feeling my wish for a bit of chaos! He's very smart and very perceptive.

Mary Lee's Corvette. Photo: Jim Marchese

EN: While putting this all together, were there some stories that you especially enjoyed? Can you share a couple favorites, or is it like children where you feel obligated to love them all?

MLK: I do like all these dreams and I have some favorites because they're funny or moving or weird. I love dream #38 "Dig it" because the whole thing is sort of a punch line; it's the zen koan of the book. Another is dream #103 from a dreamer who withheld their name but clearly grew up with the Smothers Brother's TV show. I also love dream #22 "Unwelcome Guest" for how it reflects people's view of the reported grumpier side of Dylan (his hood is up in the dream).

I'm personally biased towards one of my own, dream #106 "Wrong key." I had this dream after I'd gotten the publishing deal. I was afraid I might stop dreaming of him, but lo and behold I had one of my favorites. I'm rehearsing for a show where Dylan is my accompanist on a Townes Van Zandt song I've sung many times in real life (I always sing it in the key of D). Dylan starts the song in some weird key and I ask him what key he's playing it in. He says, "The key of I." I get horribly perturbed and tell him, "There's no such thing as the key of I." "That's the key I play it in," he replies. Images in these dreams and others were the inspiration for a song I wrote called "Dreaming of Him" (video to be released on Bob's birthday!). I'm really proud of it.

EN: You opened for Bob… once or on several days or weeks of a tour? Sounds like quite a privilege. How did it happen and what did you learn from this experience?

MLK: I opened for him once at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. There had been a blackout on the night of the originally scheduled show and the regular opener already had a gig on the night it was rescheduled for. So they called me! He came on stage during my soundcheck, which I didn't know until I turned around to talk to my drummer and saw him standing at the back of the stage. He was wearing a cowboy hat and tipped it to me. What a moment! What did I learn? To enjoy the moment.

Related Links
https://maryleescorvette.com/
Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob
Dylan's "You're A Big Girl Now" by Mary Lee Kortes

EdNote: We're one month away from the 2019 Duluth Dylan Fest. There's a another strong lineup of events in store. Here is the schedule. If you see us, say hello.

Dreaming Of Dylan by Mary Lee Kortes is a Rollicking Good Read

Dream 103 / Dylan Vs. Paulsen
I am sitting at the kitchen table with my parents. I’m very young in the dream, only seven or eight years old, and the presidential election is coming. My parents are fighting about who to vote for: Bob Dylan or Pat Paulsen.

* * * *
Dreams are one of those amazing phenomenon that fall into that area of mystery as regards what it means to be human. Studied by psychologists and now the domain or neuroscience, who can definitively say where they come from or what they mean. One thing for certain, our minds produce pretty wild stories sometimes.

What is is that makes our dreams so vivid? The fun part, though, is sharing those dream anecdotes and stories with others, in part because often there doesn't seem to be any kind of logic to the dream at all. It just goes where it wants and you go with it.

And that's what makes these 115 dreams so much fun. Even if you're not a Dylan fan, you'll enjoy these stories because after a lifetime living in this world you will undoubtedly have formed a certain kind of image of the Nobel Laureate so that when he appears in dreams, he's often the caricature of his persona. Or not.

The book, published by BMG Books, is titled Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob. The author is Mary Lee Kortes, a recording artist and performer who has actually opened for Bob, so in a sense she's already had a dream come true, I suspect.

I don't know how long it took to assemble this collection of dreams, but the final outcome is a totally first rate execution of concept. It's a beautiful book as well as totally entertaining, especially if you're a fan. The contributors come from all over the world, from painters to poets to Patti Smith.

If you're a Dylan fan, you already know where the title of the book comes from, the title of a song on Bringing It All Back Home. The spirit of the book itself is in alignment with another familiar song, Talkin' World War III Blues, which ends with this famous stanza:

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody’s having them dreams
Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said that

* * * *

One other feature of the book that is somewhat amusing is the irregular structure. That is, the dreams all have numbers but they are not in the order of the numbers. You might expect 1 to be first and 115 to be the last dream in the book, but then again, tell me a dream in which the story makes sense and I will tell you 50 where it's a jumble of unexpected juxtapositions. I think the absence of a table of contents and the jumbled structure just makes it all that much more fun.

Here's the author's dream, which she shares at the beginning of the book.

Dream 106 / Wrong Key
I was rehearsing for a Losers Lounge show (an NYC series that takes place at Joe’s Pub). I was scheduled to sing Townes Van Zandt's "No Place To Fall" and was rehearsing with the guy who is going to accompany me--Bob Dylan.

We were in a dark dirty white room, just the two of us. He was sitting on the floor strumming a lute and playing the song in a weird key.

"That’s the wrong key," I told him. "I sing it in D. What key are you playing it in?"

He looked up at me. "The key if I"

I was so annoyed. "There’s no such thing," I said.

“That’s the key I play it in,” said Bob.

--Marie Lee Kortes
Musician, Author / Brooklyn

Some of the dreams are more developed and more detailed, stretching two to four pages. Others are brief, and hilarious like this one.

61 / Space Visionary
I have had many dreams about Dylan, and he has never spoken to me in them until recently when he named a hill near where I grew up. “You can see the city from there," he said. But you can’t.

--Jeff Ward
Writer, Singer/Song Writer / Ireland

* * * *

Illustration for Dream 103 / Dylan vs. Paulsen

The titles alone are worth the read... Or, you can skip the words altogether and enjoy the illustrations, photos and design. Yes, Dreaming Of Dylan is an enjoyable experience any way you choose to engage it.

Here are some of the titles of the various dreams...

Desk Set
Fur
Sobering
What's In Your Freezer
Duet With Dog
Meet Me In The Morning
It'll Cost You
Walking The Room
I Dreamed Bob Dylan Had A Crush On My Mom
Time Traveler
O Captain
Not Alone

You can find the book here at Amazon. Dreaming of Dylan. I am confident it would make a great gift for any Dylan fan, including the Dylan fan in your life.

Related Links
For more about the author, visit https://maryleescorvette.com/about
Schedule for Duluth Dylan Fest 2019 
Fund Raiser for the Hibbing Dylan Project