Bob Dylan's 115th Dream
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"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" is a song by Bob Dylan, released on his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. In 2005, Mojo magazine rated the song as the 68th greatest Bob Dylan song.[1]
The title is an allusion to a Dylan number from two years prior: "Bob Dylan's Dream". It commences with Dylan beginning to play the song alone after the rest of the band miss the entrance cue, before bursting into laughter and starting over; this was kept on the final recording. Bruce Langhorne recalls in No Direction Home:
[Dylan] was playing all by himself at first and then he stopped and everybody laughed; and then, two seconds later, he started it again and everybody came on, just bang, like gangbusters.[2]
The song is a satirical and highly surrealistic story that gleefully jumbles together historical and literary and narrative reference points from the Voyages of Columbus to Moby Dick to the present day. A protagonist, "Captain Arab" (making reference to Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick)[3] is in the narrator's mind for much of the tale. Numerous bizarre encounters and happenings take place in a highly sardonic, non-linear dreamscape parallel cataloguing of the discovery, creation and merits of the United States.
