dreams

#514: Infinite Dreams

ESCHER

Do you ever have recurring dreams?

I sure do, like they’re going out of style – always have.  I used to, and still have, a number of the classic Freudian recurring dreams:  Teeth falling out, being unable to speak, or even see.  They were usually quite upsetting.  Freud believed that many of these recurring dreams are expressions of neurosis and compulsive behaviour and I think when it came to me, he was right!  Anxiety is suspected as a major cause of recurring dreams.  When I finally graduated school and had seen the last of essays, homework, exams and marks, I continued having anxious school dreams in a big way.  They would usually involve an exam that I had forgotten was occurring, or an essay due that day that I hadn’t started yet.  These dreams happened for years after graduation.

I thought I had “outgrown” recurring dreams, but they started again not long after quitting the Record Store.  Usually they would involve me starting there again, except as a part time employee without the responsibilities I had before.  In the dreams, I would show up at the store, except it wasn’t my old store.  In fact it wasn’t a store that existed in real life at all.  The most common dream featured a store in the mall, much larger than any I’d actually worked in.  I wouldn’t know any of the people I worked with in the dream, and they didn’t know me.

In some of the dreams, the Boss man would pop into the store, and in some, the office bully would show up, but be nice as pie, as if nothing ever happened.

If Freud was right and that all dreams are rooted in some kind of wish fulfillment, it’s clear that I missed working at the Record Store, but in an idealized way of not having responsibility or an office bully.  However, Freud also stated that in adults, dreams are self-censored and distorted and impossible to interpret alone.  Carl Jung believed that dreams were symbolic scenes and much more complex.

It’s interesting to look at these recurring dreams and try to remember the details, but ultimately it’s impossible to “figure them out” looking for some deep truth or hidden meaning.  Within these dreams, I had never forgotten how to do the job.  I jumped behind the dream-counter, helming the dream-computer and bought dream-CDs from dream-sellers.  It was exactly like the old days, with all the problems and excitement that happen when you buy used music from the public: the anticipation of seeing something so rare that the store just had to acquire it, and then the tension of buying it from the customer who wanted more for it.  It was all there, clearly remembered.

It is very interesting that these recurring dreams all but ceased after writing Record Store Tales.  Perhaps Freud’s wish fulfillment has something to do with this.  By re-living all the memories in print form, perhaps my unconscious mind realized that what my dream wishes were not at all what I wanted?

Never had a dream where I showed up at work wearing no pants, though!

#486: Dream Music

Welcome to another theme week at mikeladano.com. This week: Getting MORE Getting More Tale. Instead of reviews, we have lined up five days of music stories in the Getting More Tale series. Hope you enjoy.

 

dream music

Have you ever heard music in your dreams?

Steve Vai has.  When he was a young musician, he experimented with lucid dreaming.  When you’re in a lucid dream, you can control your own actions.  Vai’s lucid dreams were very sexual, and musical.  Eventually his album Passion & Warfare emerged from these experiences.  The opening track “Liberty” is directly inspired by one of his dreams where he was standing saluting a flag (“a different kind of flag,” said Steve).  His song “Liberty” was meant to approximate what he heard in the dream, but what he was able to write versus what he actually heard in his head were very different.  He was unable to capture the fullness and grandeur of his dream.

Terence Trent D’Arby too has heard music in his dreams.  In his case, Marvin Gaye approached him in a dream, and asked if he’d be interested in a song Gaye had written.  Perhaps as an expression of his own ego, D’Arby answered, “If I like it.”  He must have, because D’Arby recorded the song as “To Know Someone Deeply is to Know Someone Softly” on 1989’s Neither Fish Nor Flesh.  Much like Vai, D’Arby found it impossible to translate the beauty of his dream music accurately into the real world.

As for me?  I’m no musician; I wish I was.  Maybe if I was, I could do something with the music constantly cruising around in my unconscious LeBrain!*

I don’t know why it is, but music does exist in dreams, and vividly so.  Bringing that music into the auditory realm is so damn hard no matter how hard you try to remember.  I like to write songs – little riffs and melodies that fit together into ditties that I can hum, but not really perform on an instrument.  Some of the music I have heard in my dreams would have been the best songs in the world, had they been real!

It’s impossible to describe anything specifically, except to say the music I heard in my dreams was heavy, symphonic, grand and complex.  If I wanted to, I could focus in on any specific part.  I could dive into the strings and hear the individual parts.   I could even manipulate the music once immersed.  As if I was playing the guitar myself, I could make the guitar solo go any way I wanted it to.  I could control the music like I was a conductor.   The only thing I couldn’t do was remember it when I woke up.

I’d wake up, and even though I could remember dreaming of an amazing piece of music, I couldn’t get it out of my head and onto tape or paper.  I could hum a melody or two, but nothing more.  The grandness and power was all gone.  Who knows if the melody I was humming was even anything like what I heard.  Either way, the melodies I would hum after would be tiny snippets, special in no way at all.

It’s a rare, bizarre, beautiful, frustrating experience.  Has this ever happened to you?

 

 

*Thanks to Mr. Books for perfecting that sentence for me.