That, for some reason, have a connection in my mind:

One: Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover

Two: The Monkee’s Daydream Believer

Three: The Monkees’ I’m a Believer

As a side note, looking up the Monkees on Wikipedia, I discovered that instead of being the first “boy band,” they were actually hired for a TV show about musicians (it had the same name as the band). Being musicians, they also put out songs and albums based (in part) on the music made for the show. It’s a subtle difference, of course, but they’re more like Spin̈al Tap or The Folksmen. As a side-side note, I’ve heard that it’s a bit confusing for Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer that they’re in two fake music groups (with very different musical styles) that do real concerts together.

Back to the songs: I presented them in the order I did because Daydream Believer is the thing which links the other two songs together, sharing dreams with Dream Lover and belief with I’m a Believer. Belief is, however, a concept inextricably linked to dreams, since the whole nature of dreams is to seem real but to be fake. (If you’ll pardon another side note, if you ever need to tell the difference, look at something complex and detailed, like dirt on a window or dust on a table; in real life these things stay constant as you get closer and see more detail, but in dreams they are unstable and usually fuzzy. It’s easy to see whether a thing is made by God or by us by the level of detail, since God can handle the details and we can’t.)

Dream Lover is, for me, a very poignant song. It’s possible to take it in a hopeful light, but it always seems far more sad than hopeful, because of that line, “Some day, I don’t know how, I hope she’ll hear my plea; some way, I don’t know how, she’ll bring her love to me. Dream lover, until then, I’ll go to sleep and dream again. That’s the only thing to do till all my lover’s dreams come true.” They’re pretty lyrics, but they’re the path to misery. Emphatically, the way to be happy in this world is to be awake and live in the real world, the world that God created, and not a heaven which only exists in our heads.

It’s not always easy, because this world is so full of disappointments. We wish for grand adventures, big responsibilities, fame, fortune, lots friends; we wish for a dream lover. And we so rarely get these things. That’s why it’s important to remember The Lessons of Beetles.