Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Night dreaming about your piece

This early morning, I woke up out of my nightmare dream. As I started reading on this forum reluctantly whether i should try sleeping again, it crossed my mind ' why did I have a nightmare. ? Why not a musical dream ? A dream about a difficult piece. A dream about my work-in-progress piece... Actually, any musical dream will do'.

I am interested to know whether you have occasional musical dreams ? How does it feel like ? Can you engineer the topic of your dream ? M


Just curious.

Joseph

I've had math and programming dreams, but so far not a musical one (that i remember)... wait, actually, I have had shopping dreams about finding or failing to find sheet music. But none about actually playing the instrument.

Going from my standard dreams, a musical dream would probably be about a recital for which I had forgotten to practice... (or forgotten to get dressed in the morning )

How about a musical nightmare? You`re playing for people. And things won`t go right. You`re ploughing through mud . . . .getting nowhere . . .

It might be the tetris effect as well.

People who focus too heavily on something start thinking and dreaming of the thing they do too much of.

Gamers often wonder where the gun pointing out the bottom of their view is

I never really remember dreams (as most don't). It is my understanding, though, that:

So what does this mean for pianists?


Learning happens on two levels: the conscious and the subconscious. Conscious memory is temporary, however it is necessary as it's a gateway to subconscious memory. Now what does this mean for pianists? It tells us how much and how often we need to practice in order to obtain this subconscious memory (i.e. your fingers know where to go without you having to think). Our bodies are trying to tell us all kinds of things like this. We just aren't born knowing how to listen.

Occasional? Often.

8 or 16 bars of the melody, on repeat, for an hour or more.

Thanks all for your responses and sepcially Bobpickle for a very insightful response. I never before understood the working of the subconscious and omniscience memory for music learning.

Do subconscious and omniscience processes and memories degrade through aging ?

You're welcome.

I don't know; it could all depend on the severity of the degradation. Since the person from whom this information originated compared "omniscience" with bicycle riding, let me pose this question: can someone with severe Alzheimer's disease remember how to ride a bike (rhetorical question... sort of)?

Whenever I dream about music, it is always me playing something that in real life I can play just fine. But in the dream I can never make it happen. Then I wake up pissed off.

I have musical dreams all the time. Usually in my dream I'm improvising freely and beautifully, something I can't do in real life. Often I dream (accurately) about the score of whatever piece I'm hammering away at at the time. And sometimes I have a musical nightmare, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with music, I think my metaphor for frustration of all sorts is dreaming about trying to play a piano whose keys are changing places with each other as I play.

Now this is an interesting concept. A couple of years ago I sat down and attempted to play a Chopin waltz (one of the easier ones) that I hadn't touched since I was a teenager. This is a piece I knew very very well back then, if not so accurately. I played it a lot. Then came the great piano hiatus. Fast forward thirty some years and, I still could play it, mistakes and all. Once I got started I played it exactly as I'd played it when I was about seventeen even though I hadn't touched it in almost forty years. Now I can learn a piece and if I don't brush it up every couple of weeks I lose it.

I think the age at which you learn a thing may have something to do with it. I've never lost the little bit of Yiddish I was taught by our Latvian landlady (who made a pet of me) when I was a toddler. I remember my high school and college French pretty well, but barely remember the Russian I studied quite intensively for a time in my middle age.

-Frycek

It is awesome what you shared. It seems that music has permeated your subconscious. Good on you.

When I have been working very hard on a piece, in my dream I will somehow enter the music or the piano, to become part of it in a dreamlike way.

Frycek, I have similar experiences with memory. I learned the Gettysburg Address when I was 10 and can just let it sail right out. I am pleased to remember large passages of Shakespeare that I learned in my 20s, but I can't even keep a single quote in mind these days. Nevermind where I have set my keys or my glasses...

This sounds very much like my programming dreams. In them I am inhabiting the flow of control as it loops around through the code.


I also experience something very similar, and with regard to piano. Since restarting piano, whenever I wander off from playing for an extended period, I always regress to just about where my childhood lessons left off.

I've actually been experiencing this just now, as I've spent the last year and a half struggling with extremely frequently recurring migraines (apparently not an uncommon issue in late perimenopause). I've gotten it bits of practice here and there between the migraines, but while my piano interest has been as strong, if not stronger than ever, the amount of time I can tolerate piano sounds has been severely curtailed. It's been remarkably frustrating watching my skills deteriorate!

Yes

I play much better in my dreams. Effordless, smooth flowing. But I think I'm getting close in real life now :p

And I also visit concert sites quite often. Usually it's a small setting like a quartet in a huge hall.

My first lessons were on violin. In the dreams that I had as a beginner, something was always broken. The bow hair would unravel, or the bow became a bending snake. My teacher would be disappearing around the corner just as I arrived. When I joined my first choir, one of the members stressed that my music should be properly contained in the black binder. So I dreamed of our performance, where my children had made cutout dolls of my music, and the pieces fell all over the floor, with me piecing together the bits off the floor to everyone's disapproving look.

Strangely enough, before I took lessons in anything, I had a dream of a choir having a problem, and their conductor stopped them and had them chant the rhythm of their music as "ta ta daddle da" or similar, and it turns out that this is actually done. In another, there was a singer with a lecture going on, with a see-through demonstration of her breathing mechanism as she sang. I wish I could remember it. I don't dream about music, but when I wake up I see the passages that I seem to have been "working on" in my sleep.

Ya'll just need to cut down on the energy drinks and sugar.
Dreams mean nothing. They're gibberish.
But don't cut down on Ben and Jerry's finest before bedtime.

Many years ago I was working a very, very, very boring job in quality control of small electronics. The job was so hypnotic that one pregnant lady got literally hypnotized on her microscope, examining and re-examining the same set of parts for hours after she was supposed to go home.

I never got that hypnotized, but I did find that while testing my gazillions of little parts, I would get memory flashes of all my dreams from the night before, and sometimes even dreams from weeks, months, or years before. I started keeping scratch paper beside my work station, so I could jot down enough of these dream fragments to write all my dreams out when I got home. I explored different schools of dream interpretation, including some stuff on lucid dreaming, which is where you know that you are dreaming and can, to some degree, direct what happens in the dream.

So during this period, I got really good at lucid dreaming, and to this day, I often know that I'm dreaming when i dream... though attempts to direct the dreams don't always go as planned.

A while back, my dreaming self figured out that my non-dreaming self didn't know how to fly, and decided that this was a great detriment to my waking life. So then, whenever my dream became lucid, my dreaming self would practice flying around, particularly the lift-off, so I would be able to remember just how to do it when awake.

Unfortunately, the skill failed to transfer. There was a step in which you flip your center of gravity upside-down that I could never quite master in waking life!

But meanwhile, I started having an issue in my dream life, in which I'd be flying around but lose my ability to come back to the ground. I would dream about parties where I'd be stuck to the ceiling like a lost balloon, which did inconvenient things to my ability to carry on conversations with all the people who were down on the floor where they belonged.

So my dream self decided that the flying thing had perhaps been overdone, and the quest to teach my waking self to fly ended.

Now the lucid dreaming translates into a weird dream deja-vu, in which there is one of me who is the author of the dream, and another me who is trying to direct a second, cinematic view of the dream. However, as is often the case, the cinematic version of the dream diverges from the authors vision, and often not for the best.

Dontcha wish you'd never asked?

I've had this too. For me it is like the "I love to laugh" scene in Mary Poppins.

Tangleweeds, that job must have been so very very boring, what a joy music must be to you! wish I could make my fingers fly for a chopin etude or two, now that's dreaming......

Tangleweeds,your experience with lucid dreaming is an interesting...I am not clear whether the awareness of the non-dreaming self to direct the dreams occured at conscious level and in which case it becomes 'a mental play' that continued in your imagination at conscious level. I assume awareness is a conscious phenomenon.