(If you haven’t already read the previous essay introducing The Ninth Wave, I’d recommend reading it before this one, as they are meant to be read in sequence.)
Alone, drifting in the ocean, waiting to be rescued, fighting for survival. This is where we find our narrator in “And Dream of Sheep”, the first track in Kate Bush’s song cycle The Ninth Wave. She is already in the water – we don’t know exactly how she’s got there – and the song follows her thought process as she grapples with her truly frightening predicament. She’s fighting off sleep, but is struggling to stay awake as she is lulled into drowsiness by the waves and by her own exhaustion.
Musically, this is probably the most straightforward song in the suite. It’s based around Kate’s piano and vocals, with some extra little flourishes as the song goes on. The feeling of the song is warm and wistful – the calm before the storm, if you will – but we know she’s got a whole night to get through without succumbing to the waves, so there’s a sense of foreboding as well. It hovers around just a few chords – C# minor, A major, B major, E major. In contrast to many of the other songs on The Ninth Wave, this song is cloaked in reverb, accentuating the rising figures in the piano and Kate’s voice, and has an ethereal quality to it.
When Bush performed her run of concerts in 2014, called Before the Dawn, the Ninth Wave suite formed a major part of the show, and a video was filmed for “And Dream of Sheep” with her singing live while being filmed in a water tank. She contracted mild hypothermia in the process, but returned to filming after a day off. Now that’s dedication!
The song begins:
Little light shining
Little light will guide them to me
My face is all lit up
My face is all lit up
The ‘little light’ in question is the one on her life jacket. These lights attach to the jacket and flash on in emergencies to illuminate the person who is in trouble, so that rescuers can see them when it’s dark. Our narrator is hoping that her ‘little light’ – also possibly a metaphor for the soul – will guide her rescuers to her, before it’s too late.
If they find me racing white horses
They’ll not take me for a buoy
‘White horses’ refers to the froth which fringes the waves as they move, but it could also have a deeper meaning. White horses are often associated with heroism or with gods. Our narrator could be said to be going on a hero’s journey – or rather, a heroine’s journey – here. Though she is relatively helpless in a physical sense, it is her inner conflict which she must face and overcome, where she must decide to survive or to surrender. If she survives, she will be irrevocably changed.
White horses are quite rare in the real world, and this rarity is linked to their symbolism for exceptional acts of courage or of power. The white knight usually rides a white horse – and as she is waiting to be rescued, our narrator could probably use a white knight right about now, though probably flying a helicopter rather than riding a horse. White knights are usually opposed in a story by a black knight, who is usually a villainous figure. Sir Galahad from the Arthurian legend is one example of a white knight character. He is the perfect knight, gallant and pure in heart and soul. This opposition of light and dark, good and evil, life and death, is a common theme in any story, and The Ninth Wave poses a similar scenario of someone striving to stay alive despite the forces compelling them to go under.
Let me be weak, let me sleep
And dream of sheep
At this point, our narrator’s exhaustion sets in and she starts to long for sleep. But if you fall asleep while drifting out at sea, you roll over in the water and drown. Going to sleep would be fatal, but she’s so weary that she finds it difficult to resist. She wants to let her body relax, to be weak, and drift off into a dream. Dreams are constructions of the unconscious mind, and they often contain information about the inner conflicts and dynamics of the dreamer. Dreams can be rather nonsensical, or have a clear defined plot and events, and will often contain familiar locations or familiar people.
It’s unclear why she wants to dream of sheep specifically, apart from the connection with counting sheep, which is a technique used when you’re trying to nod off; or the internal rhyme with ‘dream’. In dream symbolism sheep can represent innocence, and maybe our narrator is longing for the simple comfort of sleeping in a warm bed, rather than the cold ocean. But the other side of innocence is naivety, and that can be dangerous: she’s in enough trouble already.
Sheep appear a lot in the Bible as well. Jesus is said to be the ‘Lamb of God’, referring to sacrifice, i.e. the sacrificial lamb. Is our narrator being compelled to sacrifice her life? There could be a spiritual element here – our narrator longing to let go into passing over the border between this life and what comes afterwards: the infinite. Dreams, like religious experiences, are things that cannot be proven to be true except in the experience of the individual, but they can nonetheless have a deep effect on someone and even change the course of their life.
In the instrumental section that follows, a clip of a radio shipping forecast can be heard:
Attention shipping information in sea areas:
Bell Rock, Tiree, Cromarty, gale east
Malin, Sellafield…
This foreshadows the mention of a radio later on in the song, and also acts to establish the story in a certain location, which is, as the sea areas suggest, around the British Isles. Also in this section is a short clip of Bush’s mother, in a gentle, comforting voice, saying, ‘Come here with me now.’ The decision to put that in came from a memory Bush had of going into her parents’ bedroom when she had bad dreams as a child, where her mother would wake up and say something like what we hear in this part of the song.
These voice clips could represent our narrator starting to hallucinate. She hears a radio playing, she hears her mother’s voice; not typical things to hear when you’re in the ocean on your own. After this long in the water, hypothermia would probably be starting to set in. Or it could just serve to enhance the atmosphere and give a sense of how our narrator is feeling.
Oh, I’ll wake up to any sound of engines
Every gull a seeking craft
Our narrator starts to reason with herself that she’d be okay if she fell asleep, because at the sound of anyone coming near to her she’d wake up. She’s wading further into dangerous territory. The instrumentation starts to build here as we hear a bouzouki, played by Donal Lunny, subtly accompanying the piano. At the mention of ‘engines’, a brief but intense orchestral moment emerges from the silence, low and foreboding, as if imitating an engine itself.
The gulls are likened to helicopters, with the clever play on words of ‘seeking’ and the Sea King aircraft, a helicopter developed for the British Royal Navy which is often used on search and rescue missions. We also hear a recording of gull calls, which sound curiously similar to flares from a flare gun, a piece of equipment used to signal distress and reveal your location so that you can be found.
I can’t keep my eyes open
Wish I had my radio
I’d tune into some friendly voices
Talking ‘bout stupid things
If she had her radio with her, she would be able to keep herself awake by listening to it, even if the programme was about ‘stupid things’. It would be a welcome distraction from the situation she finds herself in. The ‘friendly voices’ would comfort her and keep her from drifting into unconsciousness. Speaking of which:
I can’t be left to my imagination
This is a pivotal line because it underscores the main source of our narrator’s fear. Physically, she’s in a dangerous situation, but she’s able to stay afloat as long as her life jacket holds out. But what is perhaps even more dangerous and frightening is the power of her own mind. Speaking in 1992 about The Ninth Wave, Bush elaborates on this line:
In such an emergency situation, it wouldn’t help to panic or to go insane – but stranded in the vast ocean, it’s hard to keep irrational thoughts from surfacing out of the depths. You can convince yourself of things that are not actually true, you can see things that aren’t there, you can lose touch with reality. Water itself is a symbol of the unconscious, and going too far into that realm, submerging yourself too much in it, can be fatal. And as our narrator moves through the subsequent songs of The Ninth Wave, she encounters some of these dark and destructive figures of her own mind – as well as some of the good ones.
Sometimes, though, the unconscious taking over is what helps you to survive. In Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, the protagonist suffers a similar fate to our narrator in The Ninth Wave, as he finds himself on a lifeboat adrift in the Pacific Ocean after a shipwreck, with a tiger whom he has to tame so that he will not be eaten himself. Eventually they wash up on the shore of Mexico, and the tiger runs off into the jungle without a farewell. The tiger can be interpreted as a figment of Pi’s imagination, an image of his own unconscious that he must face up to and overcome; to master himself, in a sense. The tiger is also a companion, so that Pi is not alone on his perilous journey. Whether or not the tiger is ‘real’ is besides the point: it is real in his experience. But once the journey is over, the tiger leaves suddenly, unceremoniously; he is no longer needed. Pi has completed his task and is reunited with himself.
This is all to say – the unconscious is ambivalent, multivalent; it can be your best friend or your worst enemy. You can’t trust it too much, but nor can you disregard it entirely. The role of consciousness is to discern between what is and is not real, to mediate with the unconscious forces of the psyche. In The Ninth Wave, our narrator has an encounter, in the truest sense of the word, with herself – she encounters the forces inside herself that want to kill her, but also that which wants her to survive, wills her to keep going even in the darkest moments. She must face up to the task if she is to survive the night.
The refrain from earlier is then repeated:
Let me be weak, let me sleep
And dream of sheep
The pull of sleep is still strong, and the repetition of this phrase emphasises our narrator’s struggle to resist it. Then, she starts to imagine the sheep themselves:
Oh, their breath is warm
And they smell like sleep
And they say they take me home
Like poppies, heavy with seed
She is beginning to drift into unconsciousness here. Musically at this point in the song, the soothing sound of whistles enters the mix, played by John Sheahan. They contribute to an atmosphere of someone being lulled into sleep. The sheep tell her that they will take her home – the meaning of which is somewhat ambiguous. It could mean her literal, physical home where she lives; or it could be home in the broader sense, a place where she can be safe. It could also mean the afterlife – people who are dying often speak of wanting to ‘go home’, meaning exiting the physical plane of existence to wherever the spirit goes when it leaves the body. There’s also an ancient Chinese proverb which goes: Life is a dream walking. Death is going home.
The ‘poppies heavy with seed’ are a clear reference to opium, which is made from the seeds of the papaver somniferum, or the opium poppy. The plant is a main source of opiate drugs such as morphine and codeine. Opium has been used around the world as a sedative and a painkiller since at least ancient times, and was especially popular in the 19th Century as a cure-all drug. Opiates are potent but highly addictive, and are now largely prohibited except for medical use. Poppies themselves are associated with sleep, dreams, and death, all likely connected to opium use. They are also used as symbols of remembrance for soldiers who have died in combat, particularly in World War I.
In his poem “To Sleep”, John Keats references poppies as sleep-inducers, and also makes a similar connection as Kate Bush does between sleep and being free from the troubles of the mind:
We know that Bush is well-versed in poetry from her references to Tennyson which I explored in the last essay, so perhaps she also knew of this poem. Interestingly, Keats associates the troubles of the mind with consciousness, the ‘Conscience’, while Bush links them to the unconscious, the ‘imagination’. In both cases, the escape is through sleep – but for our narrator in The Ninth Wave, sleep brings troubles of its own.
Another possible reference could be to The Wizard of Oz. In the story, Dorothy and her merry gang are just within sight of the Emerald City when they come upon a field of poppies, which they must wade through in order to get to the city itself. But even being around these poppies has a soporific effect, and Dorothy is overcome with tiredness and flops down on the ground to sleep. The poppies are poisonous, and being around them for too long means death. Thankfully, she is saved, much to the chagrin of the Wicked Witch of the West. Bush draws a similar line between poppies and falling into a dangerous sleep, and our narrator in The Ninth Wave has a similar innocent naivety to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy is also trying to get back home.
They take me deeper, and deeper…
This concluding line of the song shows our narrator losing her grip on consciousness, drifting into sleep, and going down into the depths of her own mind. Around this point we hear the whistling sound of wind in the background, which stays for the remainder of the song, and forms the link into the start of the next one. We have entered the land of dreams.
Next time, we go deeper, into the dream world of “Under Ice”.
Great stuff
.We do of course spend one third of our life sleeping which involves two regular patterns.
The dream state wherein everything is a fluid indefinable psychic/plastic, all of which with rare exception is created by the individual dreamer.
And the state of deep formless sleep wherein we are relieved of the intrinsic stress of having to deal with other beings and "things".
A good night's sleep necessarily involves "accessing" that bliss-full state.
The poor or every-man's Samadhi.
That is why we gladly go to sleep every day.