You Must Have Been Dreaming begins with a sentence that could be reassurance, accusation or erasure. Something happened, but nobody else recognizes it. A room changed shape, a threat entered, a body reacted, and the only available explanation is that none of it was real. Frederikke Hoffmeier builds the album inside that unstable divide between experience and verification. Across eight pieces, voices emerge without establishing reliable narrators, physical sounds lose their sources, and rhythmic structures form only to be interrupted or abandoned. The result is not simply a record about dreams. It is a record about the damage caused when memory remains vivid but certainty disappears.
Released on April 10, 2022 as the first title on Hoffmeier’s Hypersomnia imprint, You Must Have Been Dreaming preceded its companion cassette Stuck by one day. The two albums belong together without forming a conventional double album. Stuck is the more compressed and claustrophobic object, trapping its sounds inside short pieces where repetition becomes a form of confinement. You Must Have Been Dreaming is broader, more narrative and more spatially unstable. Its eight tracks occupy a little over forty minutes, allowing voices, percussion, electroacoustic detail and long electronic environments to develop before their apparent meanings begin to dissolve.
“If No One Knows” opens with the album’s central problem. An experience unknown to others exists without social confirmation. It may remain true, but it cannot be proven through shared memory. Hoffmeier does not approach this as an abstract philosophical question. The music makes uncertainty physical. A low-frequency presence establishes depth while small sounds appear near the edge of recognition: breath, friction, distant movement, perhaps a voice caught too far inside the mix to be understood. The piece withholds the information needed to decide whether the listener is hearing a room, a recording of a room or an electronic construction imitating one.
This ambiguity has become one of Puce Mary’s most powerful techniques. Hoffmeier’s earlier work often established confrontation through distorted electronics, severe dynamics and the bodily force associated with power electronics. Those materials remain available, but You Must Have Been Dreaming rarely depends upon a direct frontal attack. Its pressure comes from unstable relationships between foreground and background. Something apparently insignificant can move close enough to become threatening. A large sound can retreat until it feels like memory. The album continually changes the apparent distance between the listener and the event.
“Faith Dealers” introduces language suggesting belief turned into a commodity. A faith dealer does not necessarily believe. The dealer recognizes a need, packages certainty and supplies it to people unable to tolerate doubt. Hoffmeier’s music offers no such service. The piece builds an environment in which ritual, manipulation and genuine longing become difficult to separate. Repeated tones and measured percussion suggest ceremony, but the structure never confirms what is being worshipped or who controls the proceedings.
This is where the album’s use of voice becomes especially important. Hoffmeier does not place speech above the music as an explanatory layer. Voices are processed, fragmented, buried or surrounded by enough space that their authority becomes questionable. Even when words remain understandable, they do not settle the meaning of the sounds around them. The human voice, usually treated as the clearest sign of intention, becomes another unstable object inside the composition.
That instability prevents You Must Have Been Dreaming from turning into a collection of spoken narratives accompanied by dark ambience. Hoffmeier understands that a voice can become less trustworthy the more intimate it sounds. Close recording exposes breath, mouth movement and physical vulnerability, but proximity does not guarantee honesty. A whisper can confess, manipulate, seduce or repeat something overheard. The album repeatedly places the listener close to speech while denying access to the person behind it.
“Gaba for Medea” combines biochemical regulation with one of mythology’s most destructive figures. GABA is the nervous system’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter, reducing neural activity and helping regulate fear, stress and excitation. Medea represents a form of emotional catastrophe that cannot be contained by ordinary social or moral systems. Placing the two names together suggests sedation offered to mythic rage, a chemical attempt to quiet an act whose causes exceed medical management.
Hoffmeier does not illustrate Medea’s story or reduce the title to a clever reference. The piece instead examines the sensation of force being restrained without disappearing. Low tones hold the structure down while sharper activity pushes against them. A pulse may create temporary order, but the order feels pharmacological rather than peaceful. The energy has not been resolved. It has been inhibited, slowed and made to continue beneath the surface.
This distinction runs throughout the album. Quiet is not the absence of violence. It may be violence under control, delayed until the conditions change. Hoffmeier’s softest passages often carry more dread than her loudest because they make the listener aware of withheld action. A faint electronic tone becomes the edge of something larger. A stretch of near-silence feels monitored rather than empty. The record teaches the ear to regard restraint as a potentially active threat.
“Uranian Swallow,” the longest piece on the first side, opens the album into a more expansive and difficult space. “Uranian” can point toward the planet Uranus, the sky, the celestial or older terminology surrounding sexuality and gender. “Swallow” can name a bird, an act of consumption or the forced acceptance of something that cannot be spoken. Hoffmeier leaves these meanings suspended together. The title behaves like the music: several possibilities occupy the same shape without one becoming final.
The piece develops slowly, allowing environmental detail and sustained electronics to merge. Its size does not produce freedom. The space feels vast but difficult to cross, like a dream landscape in which distance expands whenever movement begins. Sounds remain separated enough for the listener to imagine a physical setting, yet their relationships never obey ordinary perspective. Something far away may suddenly become enormous. A close sound may lose its body and flatten into atmosphere.
Dreams often preserve emotional logic after abandoning physical logic. A location feels dangerous before anything visible occurs. A stranger is recognized without possessing a familiar face. Two incompatible places occupy the same room. “Uranian Swallow” works through this kind of certainty without evidence. Hoffmeier’s composition does not need to explain why its sounds belong together because the environment insists that they do. The listener accepts the arrangement first and questions it only after waking from the piece.
“Txice” is a brief rupture whose title looks corrupted, encrypted or partially erased. At just over a minute, it functions less like a full environment than a flash of material between longer dreams. Its brevity gives every event unusual weight. A sound appears, changes the pressure and vanishes before the ear can establish its source. The track resembles one of those isolated images retained after the narrative of a dream has disappeared: an object, face or movement remembered without context.
Hoffmeier uses these shorter pieces as cuts rather than transitions. They do not gently guide the listener between larger compositions. They interrupt the possibility that the album has established one continuous world. You Must Have Been Dreaming keeps waking into different rooms, but traces of the previous room remain attached. A frequency, vocal quality or emotional pressure may return without proving that the original event actually occurred.
“The Alphabet” brings language itself under examination. An alphabet is a system of basic units capable of producing an enormous range of meanings, yet the units possess little meaning alone. Hoffmeier treats sound similarly. Breath, impact, tone, scrape and syllable function as an elemental vocabulary. Their arrangement suggests communication, but the message remains unstable because the rules governing the sequence are hidden.
The piece can be heard as language before language, or language after it has been damaged. Voices and sound fragments appear to search for a structure capable of holding them. Repetition begins to establish a grammar, then another event alters the apparent relationship between everything already heard. Hoffmeier makes communication feel less like the transfer of information than the construction of a temporary system between speaker and listener.
This connects You Must Have Been Dreaming to the long history of voice in industrial and electroacoustic music, but Hoffmeier avoids the familiar roles of command, confession and documentary evidence. Her voices do not simply dominate the listener or testify on behalf of a stable identity. They occupy uncertain positions within the sound field. At times the voice appears to control the electronics; elsewhere it seems subjected to them. The body becomes both author and material.
“Ezra” introduces another proper name without explaining the person attached to it. Like Edward on a private cassette or a name written beneath an old photograph, Ezra creates intimacy through specificity while increasing the listener’s exclusion. This person matters, but the record does not reveal why. The title establishes a relationship whose history remains inaccessible.
The piece’s extended duration allows that missing relationship to become emotional space. Hoffmeier builds through accumulation rather than conventional development. Layers enter gradually, altering the temperature without announcing a new section. The track may feel mournful, watchful or protective depending upon which element receives attention. No single reading survives the entire piece.
“Ezra” demonstrates Hoffmeier’s ability to compose with implication. She does not need to provide a detailed story because the absence of a story becomes active. The listener begins constructing possibilities around the name, filling the empty space with imagined histories. The music then disturbs those histories by changing its tone. Tenderness becomes apprehension; distance becomes loss; a stable drone acquires a harsher edge and makes the entire relationship feel newly uncertain.
The closing “Anthem of Gratitude” is nearly ten minutes long, giving the album its most expansive and ceremonially charged ending. Gratitude is usually treated as an uncomplicated virtue, a recognition of what has been given and a movement toward emotional resolution. Hoffmeier makes it stranger. Gratitude can also create obligation. To receive something is to become tied to the giver, especially when the gift cannot be repaid or when survival itself has become the object of thanks.
Calling the piece an anthem suggests collective expression, but the music does not resolve into a shared chorus. Instead, it moves through broad layers of sound whose scale approaches the sacred without identifying a religion. Electronics swell, voices hover at the limits of intelligibility, and repeated elements create a ceremonial pace. The piece becomes enormous, yet the human presence inside it remains exposed.
The contrast with Stuck’s “Anthem of Grief” is revealing. Grief and gratitude are not presented as simple darkness and light. Both are forms of attachment to what has occurred. Grief remains bound to absence; gratitude remains bound to receipt. Neither guarantees freedom. Hoffmeier’s anthems enlarge private emotion until it becomes architectural, but they do not offer a crowd in which the individual can disappear.
“Anthem of Gratitude” also refuses the expected dramatic ending. The album has accumulated enough emotional and sonic pressure to justify an overwhelming release, yet Hoffmeier remains interested in suspension. The final piece expands rather than explodes. It allows multiple layers to coexist without forcing them into one conclusion. Gratitude does not solve the earlier uncertainty. It becomes another state through which uncertainty can be experienced.
The cassette format strengthens the album’s dream structure. Its two sides create a physical interruption, requiring the listener to stop, turn the object and begin again. That action resembles waking briefly and returning to sleep. The second side continues the atmosphere of the first without preserving a seamless narrative. The gap belongs to the album even though it contains no recorded sound.
You Must Have Been Dreaming also marks Hoffmeier’s shift from artist within an established noise infrastructure toward a more self-contained compositional practice. The Hypersomnia imprint gives the work a frame controlled by the artist, while the paired release with Stuck turns publishing itself into part of the concept. Hypersomnia means excessive sleep, but these recordings contain little genuine rest. Sleep becomes another environment where control is incomplete, identity becomes permeable and the mind continues producing experiences the waking world may refuse to recognize.
The album’s achievement lies in making ambiguity feel physical rather than decorative. Nothing is vague because the compositions lack detail. They are intensely detailed, but the details support several incompatible realities at once. A voice is close but unknowable. A rhythm organizes the body while threatening to stop. A room appears enormous but cannot be escaped. Memory is vivid but unsupported.
By the end, the title no longer sounds like a harmless explanation. You Must Have Been Dreaming becomes a sentence used to close an inquiry, to replace disturbing experience with an acceptable account. Hoffmeier refuses that closure. Her album preserves the sensation after the explanation has been offered but before it has been believed. The dream may have ended, yet its machinery continues operating in the body. No one else knows, the alphabet has failed to secure meaning, and gratitude rises inside a world whose reality remains unresolved.
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