How often do you dream about music?

[Punkity]

I had a dream last night about doing live sound. Actually it was a nightmare (more true to life, no?). I was doing sound for Saturday Night Live, and the group was some jazz outfit that doesn't exist (the sax player looked exactly like Michael Douglas...I don't know what that could possibly mean). Anyway, they were about to start and I was doing a quick check when I realized that all the mics and cables were unpluged and in a big tangled mess. OY! I was running around trying to plug in all these archaic mics with weird connectors and broken clips into what looked like 1/4 inch male phone plugs with weird, twisted pair cables. I had to tape everything down with this odd tape/twist-tie combination stuff. I was absolutely flipping out. One thing that really struck me is that while I was getting them to make sounds (they refused to do anything one at a time and the entire ensemble would play), they sounded absolutely beautiful. It is striking to me, later, how realistic it sounded in comparison to the unreal way things looked in the dream. It didn't sound like a recording but just like it would if I was standing in the middle of a jazz quartet. That and the fact that I couldn't upon waking place the tune at all.

Of course I really didn't have time to enjoy that part in the dream. The last part was some disembodied voice counting "We're on in 5...4...3.." That is when I sat up in bed like I had been struck by lightning. It was 6:15 and I couldn't get back to sleep. Well, at least I had time to eat a leisurely breakfast for once.

It seems like I have a dream like this (not nightmare necessarily) about entirely new music where I am interacting with it, hearing it, or making it about once a month or so. I used to keep a guitar beside the bed to try to remember the stuff or at least find out if the song already exists, but that never seemed to work out too well.

Does anyone else have these sorts of dreams? Are they stress oriented, or creative oriented, or what? (mine are all sorts). Do they happen often? Are they realistic or sort of canned sounding? Do you have dreams that are not music oriented but music is in them? (I don't remember any like this, my dreams tend to be sort of focused on one thing). Do you dream about new stuff?

Did you have breakfast this morning?

[awolski]

I had a dream about a year ago that one of the other guitarists/songwriters in my band and I were in the studio with Wilco laying down lead guitar tracks on some new album. I remember thinking everything sounded really great and being really, really happy. Which really doesn't sound like me, I'm not the biggest Wilco fan, but anyway...

Another time I was in the ol' basement studio with the band I'm in, listening to playback of some non-existent-in-reality song that had really great 3 and 4 part harmony vocals (not our hallmark in real life) and having almost a religious experience thinking how great it was. To this day I try to recall snippets of that song but I know if I ever did it wouldn't measure up to the dream.

And then the anxiety-based ones like you mention where I'm in this half-waking, half-sleeping funk where I'm frantically trying to push buttons and turn dials and am really nervous for some reason.

They don't happen often but seem to be related to times when I have been doing a lot of recording. Some part of my brain keeps thinking about the recording stuff and then combines it with whatever the unconscious is dishing up.

I had about 8 "Chips Deluxe" cookies this morning for breakfast and I'm still drinking my coffee.

[super skoda]

I wake up almost every morning with a song looping in my head. Some times it's a song that I've been listening to a lot. And some times it's a song I haven't heard for months or years. What makes it worse is that it's usually just the part of the song that I know like the main chorus. Over and over and over...

[Scodiddly]

Most/all of the dreams I've remembered (which is pretty rare) have been theatre or sound related - visual stuff, not audio.

I studied computer science in college while working live sound on the side. At some point in the first few months of my software career I had my one dream I can remember ever being in the office - it was the office I worked in, cubes and all, and for some reason I was setting up sound for a punk band. Mostly I was tracing mic cables behind the console while trying to do a soundcheck.

[trianglelines]

When I was a teen, I listened to U2's 'Wide Awake In America' at least twice daily. I loved that little EP. Too much.

Anyway, I was just a music fan, didn't play an instrument or use a studio or anything, and I had this dream where I could control all the different aspects of the song, and it was really cool and emotionally moving. Never forgot it, obviously.

Almost any time I dream of music it has that positive emotional rush, unless it is about the 'big make-or-break show for the band' type dream where, inevitably, nearly everything goes wrong (like Spinal Tap searching for the stage... that kind of stuff). Once in a blue moon though my band, in my dream, does something phenomenal like soaring multipart gospel harmonies and I wake up refreshed and motivated!

Yeah!

Dreaming is cool- I'm going to take a nap now!

-TimT