Ink Mathematics

Hi-

It’s been a second but I am back with a real treat, a real treat. Now this record “The Dream World Of Dion McGregor”, which I will post in its’ entirety, was a childhood favorite of mine that my Father purchased on a whim years ago after reading the strange brief description listed on the back of the record sleeve. Dion McGregor was the most prolific somniloquist in recorded history. A Somniloquist, or voluble dreamer, is a person that talks during their sleep. Through the 1950â€™s Dion McGregor’s roommate taped his surreal narrations and in 1964 an avant garde record was released to minimal fanfare. Dion is incredibly unique due to the way in which he sleep-talks. Rather than mumbling random incoherent words like most sleep-talkers, Dion narrates his dreams eloquently at a conversational tone making them an incredible and surreal experience for the listener. I hope you like these dreams as much as I do. I’ll be posting an actual MUSIC mix up here soon, so stay tuned. Oh, and I don’t know if it is true or not, but while researching this post I came across a site that described Dion McGregor as a “homeless gay bohemian”…..for some reason I have always pictured him as a sort of business man with an incredible imagination and a boring monotonous daily routine trapped in some NYC office, all his creativity came out in his sleep…this changes everything.

bye, Collin

PS. That educationally endowed duo of Jamie and Adrienne have whipped together something special for y’all on their WRUV 90.1 Burlington radioshow, Educational Showdown. It’s a whole two hour show devoted to the topic of “Somnioloquism and the Sleeping Dimension“, chock full of Dion and interesting tidbits…it is far fucking out. Bottomline, I urge you to check out this show in particular and also keep an eye on The Educational Showdown cause I believe they will have plenty of treats for all of us in the future.From the back of the record:

At a moment like this I wish that I were a writer so that I could properly explain what you will hear when you play the record inside this cover. Perhaps it would also help if I were a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, a clinical psychologist, a hypnotherapist, etc…etc… But since I am none of the above, i think it best that I simply report to you what I know about this record as the result of my work in connection with it.

About March of 1963 my wife, Nancy, came rushing into my office to tell me that she had just heard some tape recordings of a man by the name of Dion McGregor, who has a habit of “talking in his sleep”. Naturally I said, “go away wife, I’ve word to do.” She didn’t go away so I had to listen to her tell me all about McGregor’s “sleep talking habits…he tells crazy stories that are funny, terrify, serious and pathetic”, she said, “and he does this 3 and 4 times a week”. When she told me that Mike Barr, McGregor’s roommate, got up every morning (at 7:00) to turn on the tape recorder I was really upset, as obviously McGregor’s “talking habits” played havoc with Barr’s health. Then, to top it all, when she told me the “dreams” were coherent, naturally I had to agree to listen for myself. I listened and couldn’t believe my ears, and 150 tapes later I was still amazed. I found the subject matter fascinating, exciting, and with a touch of genius.

I sold the idea to Decca and the problem of what tapes to put into the album began. It took us three months to make the selections and to decide how much editing we should do. We wanted to put together an album that you would find interesting and enjoyable listening without destroying the feel of the unexpurgated versions.

There are many tapes which we would have like to include, but time and subject matter precluded that. Since we felt that so many of the tapes made good reading we convinced Bernard Geis Assosciates to publish them in book form.

Incidentally, I did some detective work on my own to get a little better understanding of the McGregor phenomenon and my only conclusion is that scientifically Dion is quite a difficult phenomenon to define.

P.S. the imperfections of the sound are the result of the conditions under which the recordings had to be made. The background disturbances are the actual sound of the traffic and street noises on First Ave., New York City, as Dion insists on sleeping with his windows wide open.

Jules L. Green

Side One