What Screams May Come

Soundtrack To Nightmares I Remember

My Mixtape’s A Masterpiece is a weekly feature in which a guest compiles a 11-song playlist around some theme. This week, Keevin Miller assembles a soundtrack to those few unsettling nightmares that still haunt him in his waking hours and will hopefully find their way into your dreams. Read Keevin’s thoughts on each track and listen along to the Spotify and YouTube playlists below.

Of all the options available today, dreams remain my favorite storytelling medium.  Every night brings new stages and original stories unbound to mundane waking logic. There I can be cast as both actor and audience member in tales directed by something omnipresent that I suspect wears my face and knows me intimately. Each time my eyes close, the curtains rise on a new vision crafted for me by my dream director.

Sometimes what I am shown is meant to scare me in those strangely specific ways that only my dream director knows. To honor those specific scary stories that have stayed with me after the curtains fell and my eyes opened, I have selected music to pair with them.

Submitted for the approval of the Mixtape is a Masterpiece society I present…“What Screams May Come.”

1. “Norupo” by Heilung

Beaches have always looked like graveyards to me. It comes from standing barefoot on the shells of once living sea creatures. In one memorable nightmare, I was walking on the beach only to notice that the shells and sand beneath my feet were replaced with dunes made of human teeth. There was never an obvious reason for them to be there, but I worried about the creeping waves that reached for me after spitting out fresh layers of teeth on the beach. This song makes me think of what waits just behind the waves.

2. “The Bottomless Hole” by The Handsome Family

There are few things stranger to me than obsession in dreams. When, for inexplicable reasons, I am compelled to some action that I would never do in the waking world.

I once dreamt that I had to eat four hot dogs in under a minute. Ask an addict and they will tell you that the need becomes the terror.

3. “Run” by AWOLNATION

I dreamt I was walking in a field when suddenly a nuclear blast went off behind me. The only instinct that surfaced amidst the staticky animal panic of my fear was to run. I knew that I couldn’t outrun the fire but even in dreams I was compelled to at least try. The real terror lay in those moments where I was trying to outrun the inferno, the tiny sliver of hope compounding the dread.

4. “I Wonder” by Danshin & Arooj Aftab

The fear of being controlled is a common motif in my dreams. The idea of puppeteers making me step to their design is scarier to me than Thanksgiving dinner with the Sawyer Family. I once had a dream where I knew that everyone close to me was setting me up for a well-orchestrated fall. This song reminds me of how lonely that kind of paranoia can feel.

5. “Escape From Midwich Valley” by Carpenter Brut

Atmosphere is everything to me when it comes to terror. A slight shift in perspective and interpretation can turn innocent moments into something eerie. I have spent time walking through towns constructed in my dreams where the awareness of something being different hounded me through mundane moments.

6. “Kids See Ghosts” by Kids See Ghosts

My mother raised me with the belief that dreams have power. She also told me never to talk to dead people. I am not sure, but I suspect that she assumes ghosts have ill intent for the living. My dreams once took me to Korea where my Aunt's deceased mother-in-law wanted to tell me something. She leaned out of an attic window and did all that she could to convince me to climb up and join her. But some lessons remain solely remembered in dreams and I walked away without finding out what awaited at the top of the stairs.

7. “Diamond Dogs” by David Bowie

I sometimes wish that I could enter the middle of a movie or a tv show with a perfect understanding of who everyone was and what mattered. In dreams I enter knowing all that I need to know to make the narrative interesting. The story that David Bowie tells reminds me of waking up in my own hellscapes and knowing that it is the season of the bitch and my own Diamond Dogs are hunting me.

8. “Black Car” by Beach House

My dreams are rarely coherent from a narrative point of view. The connections between scenes and plot points are reminiscent of skipping rocks. My mind, like the rock, peeks through the surface of the narrative before being pulled away to the next moment.

9. “Silent Hill Theme” by Akira Yamaoka

There isn’t a game that scared me more growing up than the first Silent Hill. The setting itself felt dreamlike and always seemed to be hiding some menace just beyond what I could see. It was the first game that scared me more with what I couldn’t see than what I could. My nightmare production crew took notes and the truly scary things that populate my dreams are always just outside the light.

10. “Hell Of A Night” by Schoolboy Q

In waking life I love to dance. It is something that makes me feel connected with myself and the moment. So it isn’t a surprise that I find myself dancing in dreams. Though to my subconscious directors’ credit, I don’t think I have ever associated dancing with fear. When I have danced in my dreams, I remember it being otherworldly and fun; just like this song.

11. “Enter Sandman” by Metallica

This one kind of seemed like an obvious submission for songs about scary dreams.

12. “Dream On” by Aerosmith

It seems appropriate to ask Steven Tyler to take us home. Whatever the stories we find ourselves dreaming, they are our stories. So in that spirit—dream on, fellow dreamers.