Harry Nilsson / The Point! / 1970
Are You Sleeping?
wistful, tender, quietly melancholic
A gentle, lullaby-like meditation on a fading or already-lost relationship, framed as a bedside address to a sleeping (or unreachable) partner. The song's soft repetitions and nursery-rhyme cadence work against its undercurrent of uncertainty and quiet grief, part of the narration linking it to Nilsson's fable-album about difference and belonging.
love's impermanence uncertainty and doubt tenderness amid loss memory versus present reality childlike innocence colliding with adult heartbreak
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a partner directly, questioning whether they are even perceived or heard; the address doubles as a lullaby, making the listener/child audience of The Point! also implicated as an overhearer.
What happens
The song opens with the speaker wondering whether their presence registers at all with someone sleeping or drifting away, then moves into a scene of morning parting and evening uncertainty about whether the relationship will survive the day. A repeated, incantatory middle section mourns a past intimacy in the past tense, before returning to ordinary domestic uncertainty—going out or staying in—that mirrors the emotional unpredictability of the relationship. The final return to the opening questions suggests no resolution, only a repeated gesture of reaching toward someone who may not be listening.
How it's built
The song uses a simple, cyclical verse-chorus shape built almost entirely on repeated phrases, mimicking a lullaby or nursery round. The middle section abandons narrative content almost entirely, becoming a chant-like refrain built on minimal variation, which functions as the emotional core rather than a bridge. The return of the opening verse at the end closes the loop without resolving the tension, reinforcing the sense of stasis.
Section by section
Opening verse
“Do you know if I am by your side”
The speaker's opening questions establish the song's central ambiguity: presence and perception may not align. Being physically near someone doesn't guarantee being known or felt, and this doubt frames everything that follows.
Morning/evening verse
The daily cycle of morning and evening becomes a structure for anticipating loss—waking to possible abandonment, and evening carrying the threat of a definitive breakup. The speaker's use of filler syllables here softens language that would otherwise sound more anxious or accusatory.
'There was a time' refrain
This section drops narrative altogether in favor of pure repetition, using past tense insistently to mark the relationship as already over in feeling if not in fact. The chant-like quality suggests a mind stuck in a loop, unable to move past what has been lost.
Evening/domestic verse
“you never know”
The trivial domestic choice between going out or staying home becomes a stand-in for a larger unpredictability, with the repeated phrase used here turning simple uncertainty about plans into a broader statement about the relationship's precariousness.
Closing return
The return to the opening questions, unresolved, suggests the speaker remains in the same emotional position as at the start, still uncertain whether they are heard or seen, closing the song on stasis rather than resolution.
Craft
- repetition/anaphora
- Phrases built on 'there was a time' and 'we had a time' pile up almost ritualistically, turning grief into something closer to chant, and mimicking how memory loops rather than progresses.
- apostrophe
- The speaker addresses an absent or unconscious listener directly, which heightens the poignancy since the audience is uncertain whether any reply is possible.
- nursery rhyme cadence
- The sing-song rhythm and la-la filler syllables evoke a child's lullaby, contrasting with the adult content of romantic uncertainty and possible breakup.
- rhetorical questioning
- The song is structured around unanswered questions, reinforcing the theme of uncertainty about whether connection is even occurring.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of a relationship sustained more by ritual and repetition than by actual connection, with the sleeping/waking device serving as a metaphor for emotional unavailability rather than literal sleep. An alternative reading, given the song's origin in a children's fable film, is that it functions as a genuine lullaby within the story's world, with the romantic ambiguity being incidental to its narrative function of soothing a child to sleep; the adult melancholy would then be more textural than thematic.
Context
This song appears on Nilsson's soundtrack to his animated television special The Point!, a fable about a boy in a world of pointed heads who has none. The album blends children's storytelling with more adult emotional undercurrents, and this track's ambiguous romantic content sits somewhat apart from the film's central narrative, suggesting Nilsson used the special partly as a vehicle for songs that function independently of the plot.
Listen for
- the lullaby-like vocal delivery and how it softens more anxious lyrical content
- the shift from questioning present-tense uncertainty to chant-like past-tense repetition in the middle section
- the use of wordless la-la syllables as emotional filler where language seems to fail
- the way the song's structure loops back to its opening without resolving the central question
- the contrast between the song's gentle melody and its underlying theme of disconnection
About Harry Nilsson
Harold "Harry" Edward Nilsson III, sometimes credited as Nilsson, was an American singer and songwriter known for his versatile tenor range, pioneering use of vocal overdubbing, explorations of the Great American Songbook, and Caribbean fusion sounds. He was one of the few major pop-rock artists to achieve significant commercial success without touring or performing large-scale public concerts.
1941 - 1994 / United States
Full biography and catalogue