The Joelist Book of The Dead, pt. 2, “The River of Dreams”

In case you missed part one of this series, you can find it here. This post will make more sense in context. As with “Lullaby (Goodnight, My Angel),” I have not sought out other analysis from either Billy Joel or other sources.

Apparently, a common theme in dreams (human dreams, at least) is trying to cross a bridge or a river. I have this dream a lot; sometimes I can cross the bridge, other times my car blows off into the river (one of my worst fears and the reason I dread crossing the Mackinac bridge every year). On the occasions I’ve made it across the dream-bridge, I’m usually then involved in some kind of incidental meeting with a dead relative. I was shocked when I relayed this dream to Bronwyn Green and she told me she’d had similar dreams, and that pretty much everyone has them, like the naked at school dream or those dreams where all your teeth fall out.

Can we talk about that for a minute? Because I always have way more teeth in those dreams than normal people should have in their mouths.

Anyway, when listening to Billy Joel’s “The River of Dreams” one day, I began to make some connections between my river dreams, the river dream he describes and, well, everyone’s river dreams. And as the song comes directly after “Lullaby (Goodnight My Angel),” a song I previously analyzed to be a message about immortality and a connection between the world of the living and the dead, I began to think of “The River of Dreams” as a universal interpretation of life, death, and the collective human consciousness.

Let’s consider the lyrics:

In the middle of the night

I go walking in my sleep

From the mountains of faith

To a river so deep

I must be looking for something

Something sacred I lost

But the river is wide

And it’s too hard to cross

Here we have a poetic description of a dream, a journey from “faith,” a belief so strong as to become reality to the faithful; here I’m interpreting it to mean knowledge of the waking world, and trust in what our conscious mind shows us. Moving from the conscious to the subconscious, the traveler begins a journey for knowledge of something that escapes upon waking. The source of the knowledge, however, is made unobtainable by an obstacle, i.e., the river.

And even though I know the river is wide

I walk down every evening and I stand on the shore

And try to cross to the opposite side

So I can finally find out what I’ve been looking for

This is a reoccurring dream, and so familiar that the dreamer has begun to consciously see a pattern. They are aware that something lies beyond the river, and that to learn that knowledge they have to cross over.

In the middle of the night

I go walking in my sleep

Through the valley of fear

To a river so deep

And I’ve been searching for something

Taken out of my soul

Something I would never lose

Something somebody stole

In our waking thoughts, fear of our own mortality might prevent us from speculating on the nature of our souls, but in the subconscious world of our dreams, we are free to meditate upon it. The sense that something has been taken from the dreamer, something that they should be able to access, but can’t, is perhaps because of the manipulation our cultural beliefs have in forming our thoughts.

I don’t know why I go walking at night

But now I’m tired and I don’t want to walk anymore

I hope it doesn’t take the rest of my life

Until I find what it is that I’ve been looking for

When conscious, the dreamer is frustrated at the lack of easy answers, without realizing that it won’t just take the rest of their life, it will take the end of their life to understand their place in the collective conscious. More on that after the next verse:

In the middle of the night

I go walking in my sleep

Through the jungle of doubt

To a river so deep

I know I’m searching for something

Something so undefined

That it can only be seen

By the eyes of the blind

In the middle of the night

“The jungle of doubt,” here could mean doubting the existence of a life after death. Likewise, the “eyes of the blind” can be interpreted as the knowledge gained by the dead in the world beyond. “Blind” and “unseeing” have been used to describe the dead in literature and spirituality, especially in Christianity, where Jesus “opened the eyes” of Lazarus in his tomb. Hence my earlier assertion that only through death can we truly “cross the river.”

I’m not sure about a life after this

God knows I’ve never been a spiritual man

Baptized by the fire, I wade into the river

That runs to the promised land

Christian theology points to baptism of fire to refer to the trials and tests faced by Christ and his disciples. So, baptised by the tests of life, the dreamer once again tries to cross the river to gain entrance to the land beyond.

In the middle of the night

I go walking in my sleep

Through the desert of truth

To the river so deep

The “desert of truth” refers to absence of divine spiritual truth in our conscious lives.

We all end in the ocean

We all start in the streams

We’re all carried along

By the river of dreams

In the middle of the night

The final verse leaves us in ambiguity; is the “promised land” a conscious state that exists only in dreams, a world we access upon death (our permanent sleep)? If so, that means that the life of each soul is entwined in the “river of dreams,” that forms one collective human experience in some kind of universal subconscious.

From this song, I’ve formed the Joelist belief in an afterlife built around the familiar locations in recurring dreams. When we die, we cross the river of dreams, and enter into communion with the thoughts and minds of others. Until then, our subconscious self still tries to unite us with that collective consciousness, even though we can’t cross the river yet.

The next part of the Joelist Book of The Dead will be “2000 Years,” a song that details the evil and the divine in human nature, and the eventuality of fate.