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How can a song sound like a dream?

• “reality” seems:
  • stable
  • often predictable
  • routine
  • flawed
  • linear (esp. with resp. to time)
• for a song to sound like a dream, it can be “unrealistic.” e.g.:
  • unstable - no fixed rooms for reverb
  • changing spontaneously + dynamic in unusual ways
  • irregular in some other way
  • idealistic - you are the clear protagonist, everybody/everything is good, agreeing with you, supporting you, you and everybody/everything good are happy, your enemies are bad, punished, the clear antagonist
  • non-linear time, perception of time manipulated - e.g. changing tempos, abnormal/unexpected repetition of musical ideas/sounds (to simulate memory, a primary mechanism of dreaming)
• dream (song) clichés:
  • Something at the end signifying that it was just a dream (e.g. an alarm clock, mom telling you to wake up, etc.)
    If your song is dream-like enough, you shouldn’t have to say it was just a dream.
  • A floaty sound; a lot of reverb+delay with long tails, trying to detach the listener from fixed, linear time and make them feel like they’re floating
    A similar technique is a film cliché—cross-fading among a wealth of images, of which often many are masked (i.e. cut-outs) (sort of like vividly recollecting visual memories).