“When You Wish Upon a Star”

“When You Wish Upon a Star” is one of the songs Frances remembers from the music played through the guests’ headphones during their psychedelic session. Alongside other references to stars and the sky, it helps turn the session’s scattered images into a clue: the guests are meant to look up.

Appearance in the Session

Frances recalls the song while mentally retracing the music that accompanied her experience. She places it among “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Vincent,” and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”; she recognizes that each song relates to stars, the sky, or the moon. The song is therefore not an isolated musical detail but one element in a repeated pattern she reconstructs after the session.

From Memory to Clue

The recollection connects the songs to an earlier starlight meditation, when Frances imagined a sleigh ride across a starry sky with Gillian. She also remembers Masha saying that she had spent her life looking down and needed to look up. With the song’s title reinforcing the constellation of sky imagery, Frances concludes that they are meant to look up and rises to her feet. The song thus participates in a shift from private, vivid imagery toward a practical direction shared by the group.

Meaning and Ambiguity

The song’s significance comes from its place in a chain of remembered images rather than from any explanation of its lyrics. Frances has just recalled a drug-induced experience as an unusually vivid dream involving Gillian, her father, and her former husbands; the novel preserves her emotional sense of its reality without establishing that the visions were supernatural. In that context, the song functions as a memorable motif that helps her interpret the experience, while leaving open how much of its meaning comes from the session’s design and how much from Frances’s own associations.