Dion McGregor gets weird in his sleep again
by Paul Carnevale
Listening to a man announce an obscure laundry list of scavenger hunt items, consisting of one of the swans in Swan Lake and a dirty napkin used by Garbo might be amusing to some. No? How about his ponderings of the mating of a unicorn and a werewolf? In the early 1960s, Dion McGregor — songwriter and professional couch surfer — recited hours of vivid conversations, wild stories, and brilliant songs in his sleep. The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor is the second in a series of dreams that captures the latest twenty-five enticing sketches.
While most middle-of-the-night mumbles would put you into a deep hibernation, McGregor’s theatrical read casts him as the lead in his own nighttime drama. For over two years, McGregor’s songwriting partner and roommate, Michael Barr, placed a microphone next to the head of our favorite sleep talker, and there now exists over 500 eloquent tales recorded on tape. McGregor’s inflections, accents and tone variations bring to life the joyful singing of a nursery rhyme about Little Willie who “shat right where he sat,” and the boisterous ranting of a lunatic claiming that it’s raining pitchforks.
There are pauses of dead air in the one-sided conversations, which add multiple levels of mystery to his dialogue. Since most of the recordings were made in the early morning hours just before McGregor awoke in the New York City apartment, the daily street sounds of truck traffic and car horns are sprinkled throughout the cinematic dreamscapes, showing up in the most serious of acts. His saga almost always ends in a horrific shriek just before waking, but before the tape ends. McGregor’s violent conclusions often end with him wildly swinging and knocking around unknown objects. At one point, he has obviously scared himself and calls out to his roommate, “Mike!”
McGregor’s numerous question and answer conversations are one consistency to these recordings. “Mom, Dad, I’d like you to meet Ed Laftus. Mom, Dad? Well, of course they’re my real Mother and Father. What do you mean? What do you mean, does it happen? Certainly, it happens all the time. Mom, Dad? You’ve hurt their feelings. Mom! Dad?!” He continually places us in the middle of his story but rarely gives us the details necessary to completely understand what we’re hearing.
In “All Over Evelyn,” McGregor furthers a relationship with his main female actor. “Oh, look at that … your neighbors are looking at you. Close it now, Mrs. Dangerfield, close your wrapper … I don’t want to see your ass Mrs. Dangerfield. Oh, everybody’s seeing everything, Mrs. Dangerfield. Call you … call you Evelyn? Alright Evelyn, alright, alright.” The two break from their formal relationship and continue on a first name basis. Later McGregor blushes as Evelyn takes his “soft and downy” hand, but things quickly return to their formality when the butler gets involved.
I’ve never questioned the authenticity of these recordings, but one could ponder if our friend is taking us for a spin. It’s been made clear by Barr and the record company that this is no hoax and that others have witnessed our sleep talker, including a psychiatrist and close friends of Barr.
The subject must have been brought up enough to include such writing in the liner notes: “If McGregor is acting, it’s an uncanny deception—he’s doing as good a job of it as Spencer Tracy or Jimmy Stewart ever could, combined with the writing skills necessary to devise such impossibly imaginative scripts.”
Believable? Yes. Miraculous? Definitely. This has to be heard to be believed.
