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Dion McGregor is most likely the greatest sleeptalker in recorded history.
Yes boss, in another age, the brilliance of his slumbered monologues would have seen him branded as a spiritual medium, sorcerer, possessed by the devil, or simply insane. But in this slightly more enlightened era, there is a fine line between insanity and genius. This makes sleeptalking as sparkling as Dion McGregor's simply worth celebrating.
So what's so special??
Well, Dion McGregor actually dreams out loud, verbalizing fully-realized miniature dramas of the subconscious. His clear articulation is underscored by the noises of the New York City street traffic below his open second-story window. The somniloquies of Dion McGregor are among the most unusual sounds you'll ever hear.
Dion McGregor was born in 1922 and began sleeptalking as a young boy. He was raised in New York City by his Lesbian mother and her lover, but it wasn't until his late 30s, that his talent began to take form.
As a young man, Dion got a small supporting part in a Claude Raines film. A diehard movie buff and struggling actor and song lyricist habitually without a home of his own,
McGregor was shuttling between the couches and guest beds of several apartments of a nondescript five-storey walkup at 961 First Avenue, on the east side of midtown Manhattan, when his various roommates began to notice the rare clarity and duration of his sleeptalking sessions.
It was Peter de Rome, a British writer and filmmaker (later a prominent director of gay erotic films), who in 1960 or thereabouts first tried to make something of the somniloquies. According to the introductory notes McGregor wrote to a 1964 book of transcriptions of his dreams, de Rome "tried taking the dreams down in longhand, but the words came faster than he could write. I had a good laugh about it and then forgot it." But when de Rome told Mike Barr, another resident of the building and a songwriting partner of McGregor's, about the sleeptalking, Barr immediately recognized that he had stumbled onto something special.
Barr, a budding composer whose hobby was tape-recording the audio portions of movie musicals off late-night TV, was eager to turn his microphone on McGregor's dreams. McGregor, on the other hand, was not quite so eager to have his dreams turned upon, but for the historical record -- as well as for a permanent address of his own -- he would endure.
All that he hoped to directly gain from having his dreams recorded were ideas for potential song lyrics. McGregor moved to the spare twin bed in Barr's living room, where his exceptional talent would be voluminously documented over the course of the next seven years.
Barr's fascination with tape-recording McGregor's dreams quickly grew to an obsession. The somniloquies would typically arrive just prior to McGregor's awakening, not every morning like clockwork but rather, as if to keep Barr on his toes, four or five days per week. To compensate for their inconstancy, he would sometimes emit more than one dream in a day, amounting to as many as seven separate somniloquies in a single session. By Barr's estimate, he eventually recorded over 500 of his roommate's somniloquies.
McGregor complained (lightheartedly, one assumes) in the book's introduction about "the miles of tape that have taken over the apartment." In reality, the 7" reels were stored neatly in their boxes, the boxes stacked in bookshelves along the walls of the living room -- but there were a lot of boxes. As the collection of tape reels grew, Barr began playing them for some of their friends in New York's theatrical whirl. They eventually reached the ears of producer and talent agent Jules Green, a co-creator of The Tonight Show and manager of Steve Allen, still a hot property at the time.
At that point, things quickly moved into high gear. Green was struck by the alien notion of a man who dreams out loud, and by the compounded strangeness of being able to eavesdrop on those dreams.
Green approached Milt Gabler, A&R director of Decca Records, to suggest that Decca release an audio verité album of the best of the somniloquy tapes. Gabler was a savvy industry insider with an ear for unique material. He had been the founder of Commodore Records, the world's first independent jazz label, and had produced groundbreaking records as disparate as Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" in 1939 and Bill Haley & The Comets' "Rock Around The Clock" in 1954.
Gabler was that rare record executive with the soul of an artist, who decided to release The Dream World Of Dion McGregor (He Talks In His Sleep) "because I was a nut!" Gabler had no expectation nor even reasonable hope that such a strange album might do any significant business. "I knew it wouldn't be a gigantic seller," he says today, "but I thought I should do it just to show that some people talk in their sleep. This guy told complete stories and that's what I wanted to prove." Gabler adds, as if the point weren't inherently clear, "I did it because it was different."
The album of ten dream-tapes was released in January of 1964. Green also played the tapes for Bernard Geis, a respected book publisher whose imprint was distributed by Random House. Unlike Gabler, Geis was looking for sales. "I thought it might catch on as a novelty," he remembers. "I thought it was quite an unusual book and took a flyer on it."
On May 27, 1964, Bernard Geis Associates published The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, a collection of transcriptions of 70 of McGregor's somniloquies. To render the gorgeous three-color (red, black and a near-golden yellow) cover illustration and the 30 black-and-white line drawings inside, Geis hired Edward Gorey, a high school classmate of his wife's who was just beginning his rise to fame as an illustrator of the whimsical and the macabre.
The album cover is nearly identical to that of the book, but their differing proportions dictated that each be drawn from scratch. The additional space on the album version allowed for the subtitle.
The album and the book both stiffed. Geis recalls, "I don't think we sold more than six, seven thousand copies," out of an initial press run of ten thousand. The remains were remaindered. Gabler (who really does speak in exclamation points) doesn't recall any numbers on the record, but it still stands out in his memory as "one of the biggest flops I ever put out!" He seemed more proud of the fact than distressed by it.
With McGregor's cooperation and Green's supervision, Barr had pulled off a most subversive stunt: he had taken a set of utterly anti-commercial tape recordings and had snookered two major publishing firms into releasing versions of them.
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 | Currently listening : Dion McGregor Dreams Again By Dion McGregor Release date: By 16 February, 1999  |
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