Night Dream

Music by Wayne Shorter
Solos by Wayne Shorter and Lee Morgan
Lyric by Kurt Elling
Originally titled "Night Dreamer" from the 1964 recording Night Dreamer

Lonely the roses of Avondaire / sing as though somebody still may care.
They live only for the dream of living / so come follow where / they will take you there.

I once was apprenticed / to a man who was living
in the eye if the hurricane / to know despair,

He knew all the dreams by heart / just like sailing in a boat of
crystal silence / seeing visions / of the world / of life within a life.

In a turning / like a burning / came turning /
out of everything stirring / and what had begun before

but all wrapped up / in one great godly becoming -

Tumbling / and fumbling / and stumbling
into bumbling / and rumbling along -

whirling it / and swirling it / and twirling it / and hurling it /
and overturning it / and burning it again.

I shared a whirling dervish out on the side of a hill called metaphore vivace
swinging en route to a nascent solar / with the scissored visored blizzard wizard /
gizzarding planets and secrets within / like an avatar.

While meanwhile / in turnstyling / and spinning over him
spells bespeaking kingdoms in the dark

calling me to yield / knighting me in a field / covered with armies
and with princes. All were signing / cannons shining / pennants flying.

And when he spoke to me he sang / and his words really rang -
this child of the knowledge of the beauty of the night -

he sang to me of masters passing on / of father after father after father
climbing up into the lotus bloom / upon the tortoise's back
and of grandfathers / who danced through their living a longer time ago.
He showed me a palace in time / in which all the talismans
from all the zeuses / swing upon a pendulum of secrets
in a circle that remembers / and when asked a question will surrender

every secret key to every hero's message / given to every heart in time
but only known to but a few /or so it seems.

When I asked of them / what shall I do / to see the god?
They only said / the goldenrod / which grows inside of
every secret dream you dream / while waiting for the god -
it-s a symbol from the man in the fire.
ling you the thing you desire
is a garment that covers the riddle of everything secretly wished for
and of the world of which you are an inheritor.

Suddenly the chamber was flooded with light /
hurling me skyward like a meteorite/

When I fell to earth / I saw everything in a blur.
I saw that time was accelerating in a curve

and the palace in which I had stood / it was flowing, like lava, on acres of woodland
like a pompei-an mountain volcano / making archipelago
and destroying the planet / at fortissimo

bulldozing everything down / to make room for what
was a byzantine / a labarynthine / knotty mess of
manifolding passageways / a tangle of confusion /
where the walls made / an asylum of baroque.

Like a joke / words were spoken
to provoke me / and to toss me
nude and empty / to the sea.

But I would have none of it.
I simply turned my back and walked out/ of the dreamscape/
into landscape / like a bedroom / where I heard that

Lonely the roses of solitaire / sing as though somebody still may care.
They live only for the dream of living / so come follow where they will take you there.
Stay awake - no mistake - dance the dream awake - and awake."