Sting’s Dream of the Blue Turtles

How creative is your dreaming mind at weaving what’s happening around you while you sleep into a dream? Someone knocking on your door, an alarm clock that fails to wake you, a snoring partner, a cooking smell, a cold blast of air, can all find their ways into a dream, but usually in a surreal way.

Should we read into the way our dreams introduce these stimuli into the dream plot, consider it part of the interpretation, or simply smile and applaud the magnificence of our sleeping creativity?

Sting, the singer-songwriter, had such a dream, for which he named his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles. I came across the dream in his book, ‘Lyrics by Sting’ (Simon & Schuster):

“I dreamed I was sitting in the walled garden behind my house in Hampstead, under a lilac tree on a well-manicured lawn, surrounded by beautiful rosebushes. Suddenly the bricks from the wall exploded into the garden and I turned to see the head of an enormous turtle emerging from the darkness, followed by four or five others. They were not only the size of a man, they were also blue and had an air of being immensely cool, like hepcats, insouciant and fearless. They didn’t harm me but with an almost casual violence commenced to destroy my genteel English garden, digging up the lawn with their claws, chomping at the rosebushes, bulldozing the lilac tree. Total mayhem.”

Sting had this dream on his first night in Barbados, where he’d gone to record the new album. He was woken from the dream by the sound of one of the jazz musicians he’d just recruited riffing wildly on his tenor sax in the room above him. The bluesy jazz upstairs had become the cool blue turtles wrecking his peaceful sleep. But was there more to this?

How else might the sound of the sax have been woven into Sting’s dream? There are a hundred million ways. Consider even the smallest of variations, the blue turtles dancing and singing mayhem instead of ripping up the garden, or totally crowding out the space, a sea of turtles swimming in roses. Or one might have burst into dream-song under the lilac tree, giving a new rendition of Lilac Wine.

It’s what the dreaming mind does with the intrusion, how it works it into the fabric of the dream that is revealing. Why did Sting’s dream choose the destruction of the garden theme? Was it as simple as the music destroying his lovely peaceful dream? Why not a less violent intrusion, the singing, dancing mayhem version instead of the chomping and bulldozing?

Sting was in Barbados to record his first solo album after leaving his previous band, the Police. The band had just enjoyed huge success with their Synchronicity album, yet Sting was ready to move on, saying he needed to follow his instincts, “no matter how irrational they seemed to everyone else”, and particularly looked forward to more creative freedom. No doubt his dreams were processing his conscious and unconscious pros and cons. Were there shades of his irrational instincts let loose in those blue turtles ripping up his genteel English sensibilities and values, breaking through previous musical or personal limitations, creating mayhem en route to a new order?

And why turtles? Had Sting noticed turtles in Barbados? Had one of his musicians had a turtle kind of face? Did Sting associate jazz and blues with very old men, all turtle-headed or turtle-necked? Or was there significance in the way his dreaming mind transposed the music into aquatic creatures quite happily thriving in a fish-out-of-water kind of way? How comfortable does an Englishman in New York – I mean Barbados – feel? (Lyrics from another of his songs: “I’m a legal alien, I’m an Englishman in New York”).

Turtles have shells to protect them, shells they can retreat into, just as Sting, in his dream, enjoyed his peaceful, safe retreat within the protective walls of his English garden. In dream analysis, spotting a motif is usually a strong clue to the deeper meaning of a dream.

For one, I’m glad Sting followed his instincts, whether they were to retreat from the Police to tend a new garden, or to open himself to a Shiva-like mayhem, digging up and bulldozing old ways, creating space for the new, which turned out to be something quite wonderful. Actually, aren’t they much the same?

For the record, here’s ‘Dream of the Blue Turtles‘ on You Tube (instrumental: just over one minute).

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