I recently read that any face you “see” while dreaming is really a memory of a face you’ve seen while awake. What about hearing music in dreams? I am not a musician but last night I dreamed about hearing a tune or even playing it. When I woke up I thought, “That was a pretty cool tune”, but I didn’t recognize it. Is it possible for the brain to create original music even though the owner no formal training? Or was my brain just recalling some song that my conscious mind had forgotten? This may be more a matter of opinion but I posted here because I was hoping there was some widely accepted “factual” answer.
Todd Rundgren’s song Bang The Drum All Day came to him in a dream.
I’ve imagined music, but as I’m not a musician, I didn’t have any way of writing it down, and like most things from dreams, it evaporated in the morning light.
Supposedly the tune to “Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney this way.
The fact that you read it somewhere does not make it true. Did the writer have any compelling evidence or argument to suggest that this might be true? I doubt it.
I do not know about about the tune you dreamed about, but Keith Richards is said to have come up with the riff to Satisfaction in a dream. Paul McCartney claims to have awoken from a dream with the tune (not the lyrics) to Yesterday in his head. I dare say there are similar anecdotes from classical musicians. There are several stories about scientists coming up with scientific ideas in dreams. In general, it is widely believed that creative ideas often arise from dreams. (Although, by the nature of the issue, it is hard to provide more than anecdotal evidence.)
Of course, it helps a lot if you are immersed in the relevant subject matter in waking life. Musicians do not come up with new scientific concepts or ideas for experiments (for good ones anyway) in their dreams, and non-musicians are not likely to come up with good tunes, but I see no reason to think that you might not come up with some sort of original tune. On the other hand, of course, it certainly might be just a memory whose source you have forgotten.
I do this quite often, but only once did it amount to anything. The lyrics came to me in a dream. When I woke up, I set it to music. I forgot about it for about six months, then a friend and I started recording an album together. I showed him that song He added a 2nd verse, we recorded it, and it became our “big hit.”
The lyrics:
GET UP! Time to face the new day
GET UP! You’re sleeping your life away
GET UP! You lazy bum
GET UP! You’ve slept too long!
GET UP! You sleepy head
GET UP! Get out of bed
GET UP! You stupid jerk
GET UP! And go to work!
Up and at 'em!
Get the (bleep) out of bed!
For some reason I’m mentally picturing the image of a robin.
I do quite constantly, in the morning when i think about it, to my utter amazement (“if only I had written that down!”).
Always counterpoint–usually Bach-sound, or Mozart-sound. The thing is, I’m trained in various analytical techniques, and when I’m not blessing out in the dream I’m taking the music to the study desk.
I once thought I’d had come up with an awesome new piece of music in a dream and spent the better part of a day humming it to myself, fine-tuning it, until I realized it was the intro music to HBO’s Video Jukebox.
I hear or play unfamiliar music in my dreams now and then. It’s always early music, since that’s what I’ve played in real life (just an amateur). Some of it has been really gorgeous Renaissance stuff. I wish I had the memory and music training to be able to write it down.
We were much more garage band thrash.
Anecdote okay? I dreamed a fairly complex piece of music, and remembered enough of it to write it down. A friend who is a real musician listened to it and said it was “fairly good.” Hey, I’ll take it!
(The funny part is that the sounds came to me in my sleep from my own snoring. So, now, I know that I snore in 5:4 time!)
I am a classically trained (and active) musician, though I am not a composer. I’m pretty sure that my mind generates original music in my dreams, often brassy fanfares. This frequently takes the form of “diegetic” music – that is, music that is explainable within the dreamworld as coming from an in-dream source.
For instance, my dream-self will be watching a movie – a movie that does not exist in the real world – and it will contain a soundtrack. I’m pretty sure this music is original, but I suppose that my mind could be plagiarizing.
On at least two occasions, this in-dream movie was a (fake) Steven Spielberg flick with a soundtrack, naturally, by John Willliams. The main fanfare was pretty sweet, my dream-self thought, and when I woke up the theme stayed in my head long enough for me to decide that I wasn’t pinching it from the real world. I wasn’t even close the being able to capture the music on this or any other occasions. I joke that if I HAD been able to write-down the music from the Steven Spielberg movie, I would have given John Williams co-compositional credit.
The thing is, I realize that this music, if it had been original, probably sucked. My dream-self – and my groggy just-woke-up self – is probably a pretty bad judge of movie music.
Even people I know in real life get made-up faces in my dreams, fwiw.
Giuseppe Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” sonata allegedly came to him in a dream.
Well, if you can dream up original music, that’s pretty damn cool. After all, that means a melody is being written instantaneously, more or less. No tinkling around an a piano and seeing what works. It just is. I wish I could play or write music so that if it happened again I could write it down like some of the other posters.
It is very cool. But not all waking composition is tinkling around on a piano. Many times a melody will come to me and I’ll just write it down. I may or may not pick up my guitar in the process, but someone with a trained ear can go from imagination straight to paper pretty easily.
I once finished a tax return late at night, and dreamed about it. In the dream, I discovered an error I’d made. When I checked the return in the morning, the error I dreamed about was there and I was able to fix it before it caused any problems. Since the error was based on the proper apportioning of fixed assets between multiple activities, it wasn’t the kind of thing a casual review of the work would have shown and it was not a simple recall activity because calculations were required to catch the error. (On the other hand, I don’t ascribe anything psychic or magical to the dream. I had all the necessary information when going to sleep, it just needed to be recalled and reprocessed.)
If something that complex can happen during a dream, I have no doubt that music can be composed.
As for the claim about faces: I seriously doubt that. For starters, my dreams have included all kinds of nonhumans that don’t match anything you’d see in existing fiction/art. If I can imagine an alien face that I’ve never seen before, surely I can manage an original human face.
This is a little nitpicky, but, in addition to what tdn said, I have to wonder if dream material is really “instantaneous” or not. I have the sense that the imagery (and sounds, and other sensations) do a lot of bubbling and boiling and developing. In lots of cases, my dreams “recircle,” going over and over a particular motif, a whole lot of times, changing slightly each time. I think that the unconscious mind does a lot of “tinkling around on the piano,” with the additional complication of imagining the piano too!
If I’m not playing for a dance group or in a formal ensemble (which given the sticksville I moved to means it’s been years) most of my playing is improv. I have drumming dreams fairly often and a handful of ‘new’ rhythms have come out of them. That it’s composing on the fly is par for the course.
The problem with the OP’s concept is how to prove one way or another. Other than armchair speculation, there’s no way to prove that some face wasn’t lost in a crowd or that I’m pulling rhythms from a background song (or an amalgam of songs) I didn’t pay attention to.
Stravinsky said the idea and music for his Octet came to him in a dream.
And I’m a composer myself, and I can say that ideas for new pieces have been in my dreams as well from time to time. I think it’s not uncommon if you spend a lot of conscious time thinking about writing music.