Released March 22, 1965 Label Columbia | Length 6:32 Writer(s) Bob Dylan | |
Recorded January 13-14, 1965 at Columbia Recording Studios, New York City Genre Folk rock, blues rock, talking blues | ||
"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.
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.
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) 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.