Favorite Song No. 353: Secret Ties – Dancing in My Sleep

Secret Ties - Dancing in My Sleep

Song: Dancin’ in My Sleep
Artist: Secret Ties
Year: 1986
Album: All Through the Night
Genre: Disco
Style: Hi-NRG
Pictured: 12″ Single
Click Here to Play the Song

I went to boarding school for one year. What do you imagine that was like? Think for a moment, and envision a boarding school environment. Have you formulated a mental picture of boarding school? Great. Now please immediately dispel whatever images the words “boarding school” conjured up in your mind, for I promise you, the one I attended was nothing like what you are imagining.

We didn’t wear blazers and ties, attend classes in ivy-covered buildings, or feast nightly in a grand dining room. No, the boarding school I attended was a former seminary, run by Franciscan friars, in Santa Barbara, and the students were all from poor families. Most of us were Mexican. So yeah, this was not Hogwart’s or Phillips Exeter by any stretch. Most of our tuition, room, and board was covered by a bourse from the Franciscans, and our parents only had to pony up a small sum. It was a place that parents on a limited income could dump their kids and hope they received a better education, in a safer environment, than what we’d get in an inner-city public school. It was also a place where hip hop and hi-NRG music was in constant rotation on boomboxes and hi-fis, rather than the Brahms and Beethoven that I imagine the hoity toity jetset boarding school elite ask their school’s orchestra to play for them as they go about their daily endeavors in the classrooms and on the polo field.

I have many, many memories of my year at St. Anthony’s, some happy, some sad, and many musical. Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell album was released a few months before the start of the school year, and it was seemingly playing on loop for the duration of the fall semester. Gustavo, a junior, had an especially impressive sound system, and I’ll never forget the day I walked by the base of the tower that led to the upperclassmen’s study carrels and heard the opening strains of “Hit It Run” playing at an earsplitting volume, even though it was being played three floors up and down a hallway.

Even more so than anything by Run-D.M.C., or from the Beastie Boys, whose iconic Licensed to Ill came out just before Thanksgiving break, the song I associate most with my year in boarding school is Secret Ties’ “Dancin’ in My Sleep.” It may be because I was already a fan of rap music and Run-D.M.C. before arriving at St. Anthony’s, so I was playing those same songs on my Walkman, while I knew nothing of freestyle and Hi-NRG music before coming to Santa Barbara. I’d never heard this song, or anything like it, before someone popped a tape into the boombox in the sophomore bedroom/locker room (we all slept in one big room, which was also the locker room, showers, and bathrooms), on one of my first mornings at the school. That tape was played pretty much every morning, afternoon, and night, all year long, so every day I heard “Dancin’ in My Sleep at least once, and usually three or four times.

Did I get a bit tired of it at the time? Of course. But it also interested me. Freestyle and Hi-NRG music wasn’t being played on the radio at that time, and I was too young to get into nightclubs, so it was an entirely new style of music to me, just as rap had been a couple years previously. Like rap, there was no mainstream appreciation of Hi-NRG, so I had to dig in on my own. I didn’t immerse myself into it the way I did rap music, but I found a number of other songs in the same vein as “Dancin’ in My Sleep,” and as my DJ career began to unfold, I’d include artists like Shannon, The Cover Girls, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Freestyle, and others into my sets. Dancin’ in My Sleep” song wasn’t really much of a hit, though you wouldn’t have known it if you spent a week with the St. Anthony’s sophomores that year, so I seldom if ever snuck this track into public performances, but nonetheless it was, and remains, a hit to me, and a harbinger of memories of my year in Santa Barbara.

2 thoughts on “Favorite Song No. 353: Secret Ties – Dancing in My Sleep”

  1. Besides the song, one of the things I like about checking out your picks is the following rabbit hole that YouTube will take me down. I got to listen to The Cure and Talking Heads!

    I never knew you went to boarding school I have been to 3.

    1. I did, but just for a while. The school, which had been around since 1912, abrupt closed down during my first year there after losing their bourse.

      I did not know you went to a boarding school, much less three of them! Were they the posh kind with polo and caviar? Did you get booted out? Is that why you went to three of ’em?

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