"Dreams are a scientific fact"
About this Quote
"Dreams are a scientific fact" lands like a wink from someone who’s spent a career smuggling the surreal into three-minute pop structures. Coming from Robyn Hitchcock, the line isn’t a pledge to lab coats so much as a sly attempt to repossess the word "fact" from people who use it to flatten the world. Dreams: messy, symbolic, unbillable. Fact: clean, verifiable, authoritative. Hitchcock jams them together to make a third thing - a permission slip.
The intent feels twofold. First, it’s a defensive move against the reflexive modern sneer at interior life. You don’t have to prove your dream “means something” for it to matter; the brain produces it, night after night, in every culture. Second, it’s a little provocation aimed at the way we rank experiences. We treat waking life as real and dreaming as disposable. Hitchcock flips that hierarchy by appealing to science, the cultural bouncer at the door of legitimacy.
The subtext is that rationality and weirdness aren’t enemies; they’re roommates. Dreams are literal neurological events, yes, but they’re also private cinema, raw material for art, and sometimes the only place a person tells themselves the truth. In Hitchcock’s orbit - post-psychedelia, post-Freud, post-ironic rock persona - the line reads like a rebuttal to the idea that imagination is mere decoration. If dreams are facts, then the strange images we carry around aren’t frivolous; they’re evidence of what being human actually costs.
The intent feels twofold. First, it’s a defensive move against the reflexive modern sneer at interior life. You don’t have to prove your dream “means something” for it to matter; the brain produces it, night after night, in every culture. Second, it’s a little provocation aimed at the way we rank experiences. We treat waking life as real and dreaming as disposable. Hitchcock flips that hierarchy by appealing to science, the cultural bouncer at the door of legitimacy.
The subtext is that rationality and weirdness aren’t enemies; they’re roommates. Dreams are literal neurological events, yes, but they’re also private cinema, raw material for art, and sometimes the only place a person tells themselves the truth. In Hitchcock’s orbit - post-psychedelia, post-Freud, post-ironic rock persona - the line reads like a rebuttal to the idea that imagination is mere decoration. If dreams are facts, then the strange images we carry around aren’t frivolous; they’re evidence of what being human actually costs.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|
More Quotes by Robyn
Add to List
