“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is both a song Lars sings without realizing how long he has been singing and a musical cue Frances later uses to connect a present moment to an earlier experience. Its recurrence links the guests’ altered behavior with Frances’s remembered night of starlight meditation and the songs she heard through headphones.

Lars’s Singing

During a period when the guests’ moods begin to fluctuate unpredictably, Lars sings continuously. His deep, melodic voice shifts from song to song as though he were searching for a radio station; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is among the songs he sings. Tony eventually interrupts him sharply, and Lars stops in the middle of the song, startled, apparently unaware that he has been singing for so long.

Frances’s Recollection

Later, while sitting beside Tony in companionable silence, Frances hears someone humming “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The tune recalls the night of the starlight meditation and her sleigh ride across a starry sky with Gillian. Lars had earlier sung “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Frances remembers, and that was the song playing when she first lay down on the stretcher. She then begins mentally listing other songs that had played through the headphones, including “Vincent.”

Recurrence and Significance

The song’s return is structural rather than a new performance: Lars’s singing supplies the present-tense sound, while Frances’s recollection makes it a marker of an earlier, personally significant experience. That association turns a passing refrain into part of her private map of the meditation and its music. The evidence links the song to both Lars’s unselfconscious singing and Frances’s memory, without establishing that the song itself explains either experience.