Music

[VD-7]

Ok... I gave up Lucid Dreaming a while ago, since I just couldn´t be bothered always doing RT checks and waking up in the middle of the night to write down my dreams. I only had 1 lucid dream which was extremely short so i quit practising. But since i tried to write down my dreams for one month, i remember most of my dreams for a day. But anyway ive noticed that in most of my dreams there is music in the background, just like in the movies, but i don´t notice this before the dream is over. The music is pretty beautiful, something i dont understand because i've never played any instruments or learned anything about music my whole life. And ive never heard the music in my dreams when im awake, so my how could my underconsciousness possibly have composed such beautiful music? Is this normal?

[pj]

I think it is. There is always music in my dreams, but I'm a life-long musician and may be influenced by that. That being said, we all really are musicians of sorts. We all speak a language, though we are not necessarily experts in writing or communications - but we know enough to understand and communicate at some level. It is thus with music, too - music appreciation is to at least SOME degree a socialized thing. (For evidence of this, consider the tonal differences between "western" and "eastern" music... though there is much evidence of certain musical frequency differences - intervals such as major and minor - directly influencing our brains.) So you really ARE a musician in a way. If you can recognize music, find its beat, understand the emotional content, you are interpreting music using developed skills. I am always trying to capture the music in my dreams. It seems almost impossible. One of my LD goals right now is to deliberately compose something in a dream and carry it back into real life.

[Ardent Lost]

I wouldn't discount the idea that the music you hear in dreams is infact music you have heard before, even if you haven't listened to it intently. It may indeed be music from a movie that you don't really retain on a conscious level, but that you've heard anyway, and your subconscious applies to your dreams. I mean, a lot of people barely even seem to pay attention to the score in movies while they're watching it, yet i'll bet on some level they're retaining it. But music is a big part of life for some people, and as pj said, if you can understand the basic principles of "popular" music (time, melody) it wouldn't be that difficult for your mind to construct some sort of soundscape based on what you've heard and whatever you know about music. I don't usually have music in my dreams, although when i do it's always music i've heard somewhere before, and i always notice (once i wake up) how perfectly accurate it is. All the little details are filled in, even if they're not details i pay that much attention to. If i've picked up on them at all in real life, they're there in the dream.

[pj]

Another parallel here to consider... We aren't all artists - yet in our dreams, we "construct" seemingly flawless 3D images of people, places and things. If we can construct physical things in such detail without having developed the skills of the artist, why not music as well? One of the coolest things about dreaming is the recognition of how very much our minds and brains are really capable of. It isn't some nebulous theory... we DO these things every night. We experience them ourselves, first-hand... we're not taking somebody else's word for it. Our capabilities are real, and astonishing by waking standards. It makes me wonder just how "awake" we really are.