Halfway to Dreamland : CHECK LIST ****<i> Great Balls of Fire</i> ***<i> Good Vibrations</i> **<i> Maybe Baby</i> *<i> Running on Empty</i>

** 1/2 PAT BENATAR. “Wide Awake in Dreamland.” Chrysalis. Benatar isn’t exactly a candidate for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but with her first album in three years, the toothy singer deserves some new respect--not because she’s come up with another ultra-earnest number about child abuse, but because she manages to get halfway through the album before wallowing in the overkill histrionics and lowest-common-denominator rock arrangements that have marked much of her previous work.

It’s not that Side 1 is a stream of killer songs, but through the first five tracks Benatar is in winningly direct, occasionally imaginative settings, ranging from the straight guitar rock of “All Fired Up” to the restrained, computer-driven “One Love” to the album’s high point, “Let’s Stay Together,” a metal-tinged Bo Diddley-like shaker. At every turn, it all seems ready to cave in to conventional bombast, but doesn’t until the album’s second half.

Then Benatar’s long-time production team of her guitarist/husband Neil Geraldo and Peter Coleman run out of ideas. The best they can come up with is the pseudo-Kate Bush atmosphere of “Cerebral Man,” a miscasting if there ever was one. And even the good intentions of the heartfelt mother’s prayer, “Suffer the Little Children,” don’t mask its redundancy and clumsiness.