Earlier this year I started having nightmares. Not dramatic horror-film ones. Just persistent. The kind that cling to you after you wake up. I’d open my eyes and still feel like I was mid-chase, mid-fall, mid-something I couldn’t quite name.
I wasn’t in a great place mentally. I felt stuck. In work. In my head. In loops I kept telling myself I’d grown out of. And then my dreams started replaying that back to me.
For most of my life, I’ve barely remembered my dreams. I sleep deep. They dissolve. But these didn’t. They followed me into the day. Little flashes. Images that felt half-real. Emotions with no obvious source. It made me uneasy… but also curious.
What if dreams aren’t just noise? What if they’re your mind trying to show you something you’ve been stepping around?
That question became Dreaming.
Sonically
I wanted it to feel like the inside of your own head at 3am. Cinematic, but slightly off. Beautiful, but not entirely safe.
It opens gently, almost like a lullaby. Piano, space, breath. Then it pulls you under.
The verses repeat the same melody and structure on purpose. A loop. The feeling of going round and round the same thought, the same fear, the same memory.
Later the track drops into something heavier, more physical. Drums hit harder. Guitars cut through. There’s tension in the low end. Like your body reacting before your mind catches up.
There are gasps, textures, little sounds woven through that you almost miss unless you’re listening closely. I wanted it to feel like something moving just out of sight.
Lyrically
“Falling fast but I never land”
“Faces flicker like broken screens”
Those lines came quickly. The sense of instability. Things almost making sense, then dissolving again.
“Am I dreaming reality?” wasn’t meant as a big philosophical statement. It was more literal. That disoriented feeling where your inner world feels louder than the one in front of you.
“Haunted by the memories I didn’t make” is one of the lines that still gets me. How the mind can produce images, fears, stories that feel real, even when nothing “happened.”
Visually
The spiral in the artwork came from that sensation behind your eyelids when you’re trying to sleep but your mind won’t settle. That slow, inward pull.
In the lyric video it moves. Subtle, but constant. Like you’re being drawn somewhere without noticing at first.
Why this one matters
Writing Dreaming didn’t fix anything overnight. It just gave the feeling somewhere to sit outside of me. It helped me notice the loop instead of being fully inside it. That small shift matters.
Sometimes naming the feeling is the first step out of it.