Songfacts®:

• Stevie Nicks recorded In Your Dreams with producer Dave Stewart (along with Glen Ballard) at a house she owns in Los Angeles. This was one of several tracks that Nicks pulled out of her song vault for the record. She explained to The Ventura County Star: "We have a song I wrote when I was 17 that is the words to an Edgar Allan Poem called 'Annabel Lee.' It's just lived in my head since I was 17. I didn't record it about until 10 years ago. We found the demo and I'm not sure why I didn't put it in Trouble in Shangri-la, but I guess things got misplaced.
  
  Dave and Glen loved it, so we recorded it. It's all my song except they wrote this 30-second English minuet thing that goes in the middle that is very Annabel Lee-esque. It's fantastic. That was a good song without Dave, but with Dave and my musical director and lead guitarist Waddy Wachtel, between all of them they wrote this amazingly beautiful little piece of music. It just enhanced the song. I only know four chords so I could never write that. I took a month of guitar lessons when I was 15. I play with one note. I play well enough to write, but I don't play enough to really play."
• Nicks recalled to The Ventura County Star penning the song as a teenager: "I remember sitting on my bed, in my mom and dad's house, writing that song and being so overwhelmed with the romanticism of it."
• The song is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 poem of everlasting love beyond the grave. Other tracks inspired by the same work include Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's "Annabel Lee" and Alesana's "The Thespian."