Composing brilliant music in a dream?

white_falcon

Im big into music composition and iv had a couple of crazy dreams where I am playing the most amazing music I have ever heard, and its all my original work - Iv never heard any of it in real life.

Kinda crazy - once I was just in a stairwell, playing an organ and it was just the most angelic and uplifting music I had ever heard, but it all made sense to me. Another time, I was playing the piano on the beach and it was great music again.

Anyone else had any similar experiences?

mike65

Yep but then the girls are always gorgeous too. I think dreams to reflect creative talents, I had one based around photography yesterday (used to do quite a lot).

Mike.

Black Swan

American inventor Thomas Edison used to keep a pad and pen next to his bedside to ensure that he would not lose creative thoughts the moment he awoke.

Kolodny

I've had similar dreams. It's been years since I made any music of my own (used to mess around with electronic stuff) , but occasionally I'll dream about making a track sounds better than anything I've ever done before and I can hear it so vividly, but it's gone almost as soon as I wake up. Other times I've realised after waking that the music I heard in my dream wasn't original, it was something I know well but I felt I had created it in my dream (would love to know what that means!).

Once after one of these dreams I (stupidly) thought I'd try to remember the music I'd 'composed' by humming the basic melody into the voice recorder on my mobile when I woke up in the night but when I listened to it later in the day it made no sense to me at all, none of the different parts of the track were there - no percussion, no bassline, and I couldn't piece it together just from that (probably should have tried human-beatboxing the drums too but it was the middle of the night! ) I also sometimes dream about acquiring a very valuble object or someting I have wanted for a long time and find it frustrating when I initially wake up and realise I don't own it at all. I wonder do all these dreams represent the same sort of thing.

Doomspell

white_falcon wrote:

Anyone else had any similar experiences?

I get them sometimes but it's with choreography(dance) instead of composing music. It's normally before a show and the dance in the dream is so much better than what I've come up with. I can sometimes manage to remember some of the steps but not all of it.

A friend of mine had a dream that she was playing music (her own aswell) and she was playing it back to herself in the morning and according to her it was the worst thing she had ever heard!!

MagnumForce

I once dreamt i was performing an incredible song which was called Beer For Breakfast, it had the catchiest riff and great lyrics, but now all I can remember is the title, which some googling reveals is the title of a song by a band ive never heard of in my life called The Replacements. When I woke up i tried to write down the main riff, but when i went to try and play it later it it made no sense and sounded awful.

gerg55

i have had maybe 8 wierd dreams that were music based like this. the first ones it was just like some awesome music was playing and then I noticed i could change it and kinda influence its direction. I am not a musician at all . Ever since the second one they are completely auditory as if i were blind. A few times i have been able to have alot more control where it felt almost like i was completely improvising the whole multi instrument composition only without any effort. The best one was so amazing it was all i could think about for most of the day. It was like a crazy symphony, I wasn't as in control as some of the others it was just like i was in control of the direction or the mood. it was just incredibly bad ass.

nyarlothothep

yep, I've had many a music dream, I remember some of them and turn them into songs. Whether they're better than what I write in a conscious state is something which is variable. I can dream of a song but it will require some rewriting and then it will sound really good to my ears. In certain dreams the most important thing is the sound of the instruments.

DublinWriter

I get those quite a lot, and it's hard to tell if it's delusion or inspiration.

For example, I dreamt recently that I was taking a tourist bus trip around some generic European city and they were playing a recently discovered piece of music by Mozart. In the dream I was swept away with the originality and delicious complexity of the music, something beyond anything I could have ever come up with.

Then again, last night I dreamt I was playing electric guitar and was playing lots of ingenious little riffs that I could never actually perform myself.

I think Paul McCarthy wrote 'Yesterday' as the result of a dream, he always kept a pencil and pad by his bed and transcribed the tune immediately after waking up having dreamt the tune.