Duck's Musical Flashback: 1976 - A Dream Within a Dream

Alan Parsons launched his epynomous Project in 1976 with the conceptual album based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, "The Telltale Heart". Parsons combined lush, evocative and aetherial choral and orchestral flourishes with percussion and electronic keyboard effects to create a unique and dreamlike sound. A subject fitting for this treatment was Poe's poem "A Dream Within a Dream", here with a prologue recited by Orson Welles from some other unidentfied work of Poe. Enjoy.


A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe