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Interpretations:Am I Awake?

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The song is soon to be featured as theme music for the upcoming TLC documentary series "Resident Life", which focuses on medical interns.

Medical interns often face long periods of forced wakefulness, 12, 16, even 24-hour workdays with minimal sleep between. The sleep-deprivation, mental confusion, and minor memory loss from sleep patterns are reflected plainly in the Lyrics.


Great Linnell song with all his fave themes - disorientation, dislocation and paranoia. Brilliant techno production that one suspects was record sans Flans. Amazingly cast aside on an EP when dross like "It's kickin' in" was allowed on the Spine. Linnell at his best.

(Mr Tuck)

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I actually believe that this song is wider-reaching than that- I think it's a fairly accurate description of the effects of work in general, of the unseen toll a decent, well-paying office job takes on one's psyche. When one spends the majority of their life in a cubicle, the line between awake and asleep becomes drastically blurred.

"Am I awake? What time is it?" Like a listless sleep, bursts of consciousness thought come only intermittently during the day, at random intervals. One has to look at the clock to get any hint of how much time has passed.

"When I get through this day Can someone tell me how And how much longer now Am I awake?" Sitting at the same desk, doing the same mundane tasks day in and day out eventually numb a person, to the point where, as far as personal experience is concerned, consciousness and sleep are interchangeable.

"The coffee's cold, did I forget to drink it yet Did I forget? My clothes are wet I don't remember drinking it." You think you might have got that cup of coffee today, but you actually brought it to your desk two days ago. The way they're being spent, there's no way to tell the one day from another.

"Is it that time again? Wasn't it already then? So does it have to be The time it was again." "Quitting time" is a lousy phrase. You're only leaving work so you can sleep to prepare for work again. Like running on a hamster wheel, the only accomplishment for reaching the end of the day is to start all over again.

"When I get through this day Can someone tell me how And how much longer now Am I awake?" How the narrator survives this nonlife is a mystery to him. He might be able to figure it out, if he had any reasonable chance to do so. But before he can even get started, he's dragged back into his mindless task.

Not bad for a first entry, I hope. particlejt@yahoo.com

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I think that the man singing this is going through the same day over and over again. You know, like in "Groundhog day". "When I get through this day will the next one be the same?" As well, something along the lines of "the clothes i wear when I went to sleep aren't the same when I wake up." In the movie, Phil would always awaken in his bed with his pajamas on, no matter what he was wearing when he went to sleep.

-Anonymous

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I think this guy all of a sudden could see time. He can actually look into space and see his movements from yesterday and tommorow. When he tries to drink his coffee, he picks up the one from a couple of hours ago. When he moves, time is shifted in spontanious ways so that there is no way to tell the actual time. His body and clothes are also shifted throughout time, so his face and pajamas are different when he gets out of bed. -bigblargh


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I hate to say it, but I think this is yet another experiential song. TMBG has a talent for considering a small slice of time or a small bit of experience and describing in such a way as to evoke it for the listener. It is not a lesson or a verbal message, like James K Polk, it is working to get you to experience something the artist experienced and wants to tell you about. Think E. A. Poe and his use of words to get you to experience his creeping horrors, only the artists in this instance want you to remember what it feels like to really need some sleep.

"Am I Awake" describes verbally the weird feelings you get when you're sleep-deprived. You slip in and out of a partial dream state, you have strange bodily sensations, you probably drink coffee, short term memory fails to consolidate, and if you are purposely staying awake, you spend lots of time wondering when the heck this is gonna be over.

The music re-creates that altered brain wave state - the creepiness, the hypnotic feeling of the vocals that are low and repetitive, the sound that pulses and moves back and forth between the channels, as sound does in that state - things sound muffled, far away, then they pulse back into the fore. The "ee" "ah" "ee" "oh" "ah" sounds remind me of a yawn.

There might be some grand metaphor here, but I think it's about the sensation itself. Christina Miller, April 2005

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This song reminds me of how you are supposed to invoke lucid dreaming. If you get into the habit of checking the time and determining if you are awake, and if normal things are going on, you will be able to know your dreaming in a dream. This is supposed to allow you to control your dream, because you know its a dream! Look up Lucid Dreaming on google.

-M Stuefen

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This all reminds me of a quote from the fantastic film "Waking Life", revolving around the theme of lucid dreams, as mentioned above. The quote:

I had a friend once who told me that the worst mistake that you can make is to think you are alive, when you're really asleep in life's waiting room. The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. 'Cause if you can do that you can do anything. Did you ever have a job that you hated? Worked really hard at? A long, hard day at work, finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes, and immediately you wake up and realize that the whole day at work had been a dream? It's bad enough that you sell your waking life for … for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.

I always like to think this song is about somebody who is a werewolf. - jordan c.

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Actually, this song has always reminded me of the general idea of Slaughterhouse 5, and someone who has become "Unstuck in time," but especially in his dreams. The narrator is getting flashes of his future in his dreams, and then is confused during his waking time if he's dreaming of the future, or living in the present. 

- alanturing@gmail.com

_________________________________________________________ I agree with Christina up there, about this being a way to get the listener to know what it feels like to be severely sleep-deprived. It's definitely how I feel when I've lost a lot of sleep. Short-term memory loss, confusion, inability to concentrate, no sense of time...describes it to a T, I'd say. Plus it's really cool to listen to when you're only running on 3 or 4 hours. Spiraling Shape 22:56, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Based on the life of a typical coffee-fueled American. It's that simple. --Dunklekuh81

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