We start with the kind of courage that’s inherited: Corey Hart’s “Never Surrender,” written from an ethic his mother gave him — never quitting on yourself or your dreams, “no matter how challenging or daunting.” He also drew inspiration from Winston Churchill, and the phrase “Never Surrender” in the dark days of Nazi attacks — a line meant to keep people going when fear would be easier.

So that’s where we begin: the dream not as fantasy, but as discipline. A vow you make when you don’t yet know what you’ll have to endure to keep it.

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“Never Surrender” is the rallying cry — the part where you stand up straight and say: I’m not quitting.

But once you’ve made that vow, another question creeps in: what exactly are you trying to get to? What is the dream made of?

Dave Grohl described Foo Fighters’ “Ain’t It the Life” as a kind of accidental blueprint: “Without realising what I was doing, I was kind of making this wish list of all the things in life I wish I had.”

And that’s a gorgeous shift. Hart gives us resolve. Grohl gives us desire — not grand ideology, just a list of wants that quietly reveals a life you haven’t reached yet.

Because dreams aren’t only “never give up.” They’re also the small, human inventory of what you’re missing — and what you hope the future might finally hand you.

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A wish list is private. But once you start wanting things, you start noticing what blocks them — and that’s when longing turns outward.

Johnny Marr’s “Upstarts” is defiance, but with a twist: he called it “tongue in cheek,” a “youthful protest song,” inspired by riots in Manchester. And he made a deliberate artistic choice: protest songs usually arrive “angry or gloomy and folky,” but he tried to write a pop protest song — “a protest song for a school kid really.”

So the dream gets a new voice. It’s no longer just “I wish I had…” It becomes: why don’t we have it? Who decided? And crucially, it becomes a sound young people can actually carry — not a sermon, but something you can sing.

The pursuit of dreams often starts in the bedroom. Then it walks out onto the street.

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Marr gives us the kid’s protest — energy, defiance, a pop song with its fists up.

But protest always has a target. And often, the target is something uglier than policy: it’s prejudice.

Harry Nilsson’s “Me and My Arrow” sounds whimsical — but he said it’s “really about a dog, or your alter ego, whatever it is.” And then he drops the key: “Straighter than narrow.” By that he meant narrow-minded — because the people in the story are prejudiced.

So the episode pivots. The dream isn’t only about what you want or what you defy. It’s also about who gets to dream safely. Who gets to walk through the world without being reduced by someone else’s small-mindedness.

If “Upstarts” is a school kid’s protest, “Me and My Arrow” is the companion you keep close — the loyal part of yourself that helps you stay straight while other people try to make your world narrow.

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Nilsson gives you a companion — a dog, an alter ego — the thing that keeps you steady when the world is prejudiced.

And then Stephen Malkmus takes that idea and twists it into something wonderfully sideways: the dream as a hallucination of greatness.

In “1% of One,” he says the lyrics are “kind of stupid” — they’re about a soundman “listening to this band playing, and he’s getting blown away. Maybe he’s stoned. He trips out, and the song goes off into a dream world.” And then the punchline: “The band is us, of course — who else could it be?”

It’s funny, but it’s also revealing. Dreams have ego in them. They have fantasy. They have that moment where you picture someone watching you and thinking: this is it. This is the thing.

Sometimes the dream isn’t “what I wish I had.” It’s “what I wish you’d see in me.”

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Malkmus gives us the dream-world detour — the intoxicating feeling that the story is bending in your favour.

Then Jason Freeman brings the vow back — but darker, tougher, and more binding.

He describes “Hex and Hell” as akin to the Southern phrase “come hell or high water”: nothing is going to stop you — “even if the devil walks in here.” And he calls it “a twisted love song,” saying: we’re always going to be together, “even beyond death and the grave; love is that powerful.”

So the dream shifts again. It’s not ambition now; it’s commitment. The kind of commitment that talks like a curse and a promise at the same time. You hear the extreme language and you realise: some dreams aren’t about success at all. They’re about staying. Refusing to be separated. Refusing to let the world be the thing that decides.

It’s determination with teeth.

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After Jason Freeman’s “Hex and Hell,” you might expect the triumphant ending — the vow fulfilled, the dream rewarded. Instead, Corey Hart gives us the moment every dream eventually meets: rejection.

He said “It Ain’t Enough” wasn’t written for a girl at all — it was written for the record labels that kept turning him down. He’d been “passed on,” felt “rebuffed,” couldn’t understand “why they didn’t like me,” and turned that frustration into the language of unrequited love — “never quite matching up to their expectations. Never being good enough.”

That’s the punchline of the dream: sometimes it’s not your talent that fails — it’s the door that won’t open. And the only thing you can do is convert the bruise into a song. That’s what Corey Hart did with “It Ain’t Enough.”

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