Pink Floyd: Julia Dream Meaning

Julia Dream Lyrics

Sunlight bright upon my pillow
Lighter than an eiderdown
Will she let the weeping willow
Wind his branches round
Julia dream, dreamboat queen, queen of all my dreams

Every night I turn the light out
Waiting for the velvet bride
Will the scaly...

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   #1 top rated interpretation:
   anonymous

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   Mar 22nd 2016 !⃝

   This song is about the feelings of loss and desire that dreams can leave you with. It explores the way dreams can hold more hope and meaning than the waking hours, but also greater terrors.
   
   The first verse is of waking and experiencing the loss of a great love evapourating along with your dream. Dreams can be very real, as can the feelings experienced within them.
   
   Sunlight upon the pillow signifies morning. The singer is the "weeping willow"; grieving at the loss of waking from a dream of Julia, a great beauty ("dreamboat") whom he worships in his dream, and suffering the loss of realising the the love was a dream. He weeps, trying to get back to sleep, to see if he can return to Julia's embrace ("will you let the weeping willow wind his branches round").
   
   From then on, every night he hopes to return to Julia in his dreams. She is his "velvet bride"; velvet often being a similie for both night and softness or gentleness. However, dreams are rarely coherent and the dreamer is as likely to be hunted by strangeness (the "scaly armadillo") as be visited by his perfect love.
   
   The final verse runs with the unpredictable and often frightening nature of dreams. It also explores their captivating nature and prophetic potential. He is seeking within his dreams, seeking Julia, but this twists into seeking for meaning and answers to life in general. He feels there are answers to be had there, but the questions are as frightening as the potential answers; his dreams have become his master, his obsession, and he wonders if they will unhinge him ("will the misty master break me?"), or whether they will give him the answers he seeks ("will the key unlock my mind?"). The fear of mortality raises its head in the last two lines; the fear of being inexorably pursued by death and confronting that which we all confront eventually. Will he age and die before he finds love, in his dreams, or his waking hours?

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   #2 top rated interpretation:
   anonymous

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   Aug 8th 2013 !⃝

   Michael Quercio leader of Three O' Clock once said that his group played music for "kids who don't have any friends". This song expresses the love of a young socially-isolated (because of his atypical sensitivity) boy for a beautiful girl from afar. I know this feeling well. Today I have been married for over 30 years, but I still dream of Pamela, a girl I was secretly in love with when I was 12 but never got to know.
3. anonymous

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   Mar 7th 2020 !⃝

   Succubus.
4. anonymous

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   Jan 31st 2020 !⃝

   Una Joya, musical y literaria, lo mejor de Pink Floyd. ese claro oscuro que a muchos nos perturba en la noche- y en el día - el amor al amor idealizado.

   This interpretation has been marked as poor. view anyway
5. anonymous

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   Aug 6th 2019 !⃝

   Probably my favorite Floyd song. It's actually
   very dark and symbolic. This is what the lyrics mean to me:
   
   1st verse:
   Sunlight bright upon my pillow,
   Lighter than an eiderdown.
   Will she let the weeping willow
   Wind "her"* branches 'round?
   
   Julia dream, dreamboat queen, queen of all my dreams (after each time dreams is said, you can hear Roger Waters say "Syd" or "Save me". Either one would be fitting for this song in my opinion.
   
   To me, the lyrics start with the light disrupting you when you just want to escape to the thing that brings you comfort (pillow, darkness and a dream). Eiderdown are small, soft feathers from the breast of the female eider duck. So the light is softer than a feather yet you're bothered by even the smallest thing to the point you want to run and hide from it. You want to hide from the light to chase a dream or fairy tale or whatever you think gives you comfort in darkness. This becomes your 'Julia Dream'. The weeping willow is the place you want to hide and take cover from the light (*weeping willows trees are all female so I think the lyrics are or should be wind "her"* branches round"). I do hear an "s" at the end though and it sounds more to me like "wind her's branches round". When it says “will ‘she’ let the weeping willow", I think the ‘she’ is referring to the dream to allow the weeping willow to cover you. Weeping willows branches, if not trimmed, will grow and hang all the way to the ground all around the tree and you can hide in them. The next verse mentions the place you're hiding. You're hiding in the weeping willow to escape from the light and reality.
   
   2nd verse:
   Every night I turn the light out,
   Waiting for the velvet bride.
   Will the scaly armadillo
   Find me where I'm hiding
   
   Julia dream, dreamboat queen, queen of all my dreams
   
   Every night you turn out, run and hide from the light to find your velvet bride, which is your dream/fantasy in darkness. The light is too abrasive for you so you want to escape the light to find an alternate reality...smooth and easy like velvet. The scaly armadillo is the thing you fear of seeing you while hiding in the weeping willow/living your dream in darkness. Armadillos are characterized by a leathery armor shell and long sharp claws for digging and can move very quickly. So to me the scaly armadillo would be the thing you can't easily shake or defeat, it's rough, keeps coming at you and is chasing you quickly to find you out and expose you. It's digging at you and haunting your dreams. It's also a progression from light to the armadillo. It started as something lighter than a feather but now it scaly as an armadillo chasing after you. This is mental deterioration and it gets worse in the next verse.
   
   3rd verse
   Will the misty master break me?
   Will the key unlock my mind?
   Will the following footsteps catch me?
   Am I really dying?
   
   Julia dream, dreamboat queen, queen of all my dreams
   
   The misty master is the end result: You’ve gone from dealing with something lighter than a feather, to a scaly armadillo to a mental break down. The misty master is paranoia and mind trips that are about to break you all because you wanted to escape reality and chase a fantasy. It's misty because it’s like a vapor, a mental illusion and it's taking over and mastering your mind. The key to unlock your mind is your final desperate thoughts and plans to get away and beat your break down or death that you think is just about to happen. However, now the paranoia keeps following you like footsteps and it keeps you in a constant state of impending doom and fear of death. It's all a figment of your imagination that progressed up behind you.
   
   Julia Dream is all about chasing a fantasy to escape from reality, living in a dream that unfortunately turned into a mental state of paranoia and constant fear of death at the end. Reminds me of a bad trip I had before.
   
   Sorry to tell you, there's no Julia, it's only a dream and the dream is actually a nightmare. You should have faced the light but you chose darkness.
   

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