"Dreamtime" by Daryl Hall

1986 / #5

Rate Your Music score: 3.18 out of 5!

"You're living in dreamtime, baby...You wanna run away...It's time to wake up..."

I had Kermit the Frog for my 8th grade science teacher.

Seriously, my 8th grade science teacher looked just like Jim Henson did circa 1967. And his voice sounded exactly like Kermit the Frog!

And he had a temper! He was a good teacher, but man, did he have a temper! I apparently missed one of his best tantrums though, which reportedly took place when I was out of the room to deliver a note to the office. On the other hand, people shouldn't have been trying to get a rise out of him either.

His classroom was right next to the supply room where I poured nickel sulfide in the drain.

Anyway, this teacher once reportedly delivered an angry lecture in which he borrowed a line from this big solo hit by Daryl Hall. According to this legend, a student was dozing off in class, so the instructor became angry and declared, "You're living in dreamtime! It's time to wake up!"

I don't know if that actually was a real quote from my science teacher, or if it was just someone doing an impression of him. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing he would have said though. This is like how a line from a Duran Duran song was attributed to my high school principal.

"Dreamtime" became a lost hit pretty much right when it fell of the chart. I was amazed by the fact that you never heard it anymore. For peaking way up at #5, it sure did disappear from radio quickly. As local radio was entering its own doldrums around the time this tune became lost, my interest in lost hits heightened, and my frustration grew at the narrowing of playlists. I think this is when the 15-second mind became the norm.

Many years later, something funny appeared on YouTube. A high school class somewhere posted a video they made for a school project. The video was a humorous exposé about kids getting in trouble for chewing gum at school. I'm pretty sure the school was in the United States, but the closing music of the video was "Dreamtime" that someone had recorded in a different language. I couldn't understand the words, but the song was very clearly "Dreamtime."

It's time to wake up!