Thread: Lucid song-writing experiment

Carlos Castaneda, wrote serveral books from dreaming (suppossedly).

I had a lucid dream one night where i was sitting in front of a mirror, shredding like i never have.
What i heard was out of this world! I'm definately up for this!

Originally Posted by ranma187

Laughing Out Loud in Lucid Land
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I love that title.

Hi folks, I am a newb, but I am a musician and while not lucid I had dreams where I played music. Sometimes I sang, sometimes I played the bass or the guitar (all things I do in real life, too).

All three occurrences were non-lucid but very distinct as a memory and I managed to play the melodies when awake (I immediately ran into the living room and played it in order to not forget it)

But I never kept those splinters. After all, it's not like I had some sort of breakthroughs with those melodies, but they were not senseless doodles, neither.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I started practising LD and last night I had my first short WILD. I will try to remember this experiment and as I know i have been able to memorize dream melodies before chances are I might someday post a link to an mp3...

sounds like just the experiment for me... :yumdumdoodledum:

As a songwriter I dream my melodies and lyrics all the time. I wake myself up within the dream as my conscious mind becomes excited over the new opportunity. The most recent happened a few nights ago. I woke up singing, "I've got the cure for cancer". Maybe I do. Maybe, for me, it's music. I do believe that sonics can produce incredible healing results. We all vibrate.
Another recent song that I dreamt in it's entirety was "Conscience City". I dreamt a fully produced version and once again woke myself up inside the dream to write it down. Once I finally woke up proper I spent the rest of the day writing and recording it.
Sometimes even just dreaming can produce wonderfully creative states for me. One of my songs "Devil Gear" came from a period of reading H.P. Lovecraft. I love his stories and a lot of coincidences in my life came from my connection to those stories. You can listen to "Devil Gear" at www.myspace.com/pennynixon.
My unconscious mind spewed that one forth from the dream state.
It's really exciting. But I do think that the more that you do something in waking life, the more it develops in dreams.
It used to amaze me that famous songwriters and scientists could dream their ideas, but as I've developed my dreaming over the years, and my creativity, it no longer seems the stuff of fantasy. In fact it seems so normal, but still so wonderful.
It's like playing the guitar;the more you practice, the better you get.
We can dream anything we want. Hopefully someone will dream the cure for cancer. Maybe they already have.

This is a great experiment!

I have often heard music in my dreams, but I do kinda struggle to translate it to actual notes and phrases in waking life (I mess around with keyboards and analog junk in my home studio in my spare time).

Where I do find dreaming to be an enormous source of inspiration is for atmospheres. The emotional landscape or "vibe" of a particular dream can be so unique and interesting that it can stay with me for years. These dream-inspired atmospheres will often be far beyond anything I could consciously create, in terms of texture and complexity.

Personally, I've found that regular dreams (as opposed to LDs) are a better source for this, because in a regular dreams I'm (presumably) mining ideas straight from lizard brain. Cool!

I will maybe try find some incomplete bits of sound design where I've tried to describe a dream atmosphere and post them here.

Or rather, I will if you will. Heh heh.

Lucid song-writing (or more like music writing) is one of my ultimate Lucid goals, so count me in on attempting to do this, but I have not done this yet, so I can't contribute right now, but if I do this, I will report back.

i tried this a while ago and it turned out to be like a lame disney song meets country bad idea!!!

in my last dream i was at a juke box selecting music. anyway the song i selected started playing in my head when i woke up.

soo try this: in an LD go to a jukebox and select a song that you want to write. and say "this will be playing in my head when i wake up." should work

I seem to be more creative ind dreams, Iv'e written some pretty good stories but never full remember them

I was going to start this thread before i saw this one.

I'm new to lucid dreaming. Only had 2 in my life, but in one of them i decided to freestyle. (rapping without having anything written, making it up as you go along).
Don't remember what I said, but i remember thinking in my dream that it was as good if not better than when i freestlye in waking life.

posts here have so far been about melodies. what about lyrics?
If you have a lucid dream and write a few bars of lyrics, you'd remember them upon waking right?

I'm definitely going to try this when I LD, but like i said, im new to lucid dreaming. theyre rare for me. so if others wanted to try writing lyrics in an LD, let me/us know how it went.

keep this thread going! its interesting..

I had a dream that I was shredding too! I remember it sounding good.

I've written down a few things from dreams, both lyrics and music. Sometimes I remember a musical concept, but not the actual notes. I have a few very brief examples in my dream journal, one where I wrote out a melody.

Most of the stuff in my dreams is just too complex to write down, though, but I try to retain the feel for a real song later.

I had a dream about a girl at my college last year, who i never even spoke with, but she had a guitar and she was playing a gig at a church. I listened to the song, her fingers were doing things that were impossible to do in real life on a guitar, but the song was incredible, I woke up and tried to reproduce it, but it was impossible, i couldn't play the sound on the guitar, it was purely something foreign.

Originally Posted by gameover

..maybe you're right, and it's completely useless. Thats the purpose of this experiment.

Don't give up on it gameover. You just have to incubate the idea, and sooner or later it will manifest in an LD..

..but maybe your approach could be different:

You want to write a song in an LD, right? And you imagine that to be you sitting down somewhere in an LD with the instrument of your choice, composing.. right?

Well.. let me tell you a quick story..

I'm a guitarist who used to be in the music business, playing in bands and recording and writing. The Holy Grail for me was to write a hit single that would make me some money. I had been learning to LD for some years when I had the following LD:

I find myself in a desertscape, in a crowd of mannish blond women interspersed with two or three tall ancient egyptian living statues (for want of a better description). Something tells me to look at my hands, and my lucidity suddenly kicks in. The crowd is slowly moving in the same direction, and I decide to go with the flow and follow the crowd. I'm keeping my head well down because I feel very conspicuous, being the only male in the whole crowd. I realise that I have approached a stage, on which is placed a band of four of the mannish women, complete with instruments. Music starts to play, and it is the most strikingly-catchy pop song that I have ever heard.. pure gold. I listen for about 3 minutes or so, and something makes me say out loud "What is this?", and a disembodied voice replies: "This is your new hit single.." The import of what the voice has said hits me in the gut, and I wake up bolt upright in bed.

Now.. I'd love to say that I wrote down the song, recorded it, and had a big hit with it, but that just didn't happen. As often happens in my LDs, I could not remember one note of the song! But don't be dissuaded.. it is possible to remember such things with practice..

So.. maybe you should go looking for a "dream band" in LDing??