Jimi Hendrix Music was inspired by his Dreams

Hendrix reflected on how songs like “Purple Haze” came to him in a 1967 interview with New Musical Express, according to the 2004 book Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends, and Curses. “I dreamt a lot and I put a lot of my dreams down as songs,” Hendrix said. “I wrote one called ‘First Look Around the Corner’ and another called ‘The Purple Haze,’ which was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea.” Hendrix was notably a fan of science fiction, and the idea for “Purple Haze” came to him from Philip José Farmer’s Night of Light. While “Purple Haze” became one of his calling cards, “First Look Around the Corner” never saw the light of day. Hendrix also lamented the fact that he had to cut down much of “Purple Haze”‘s lyrics. “You know the song we had named ‘Purple Haze’? [It] had about a thousand, thousand words … I had it all written out,” he said. “It was about going through, through this land. This mythical … because that’s what I like to do is write a lot of m