From time to time I hear beautiful strains of music in my dreams. Not familiar music, but rather music I’ve never heard before. There are times when my dreaming mind thinks “Ah, what a beautiful melody. If only I could write this down, to enjoy when I am awake.”<\/p>\n
I remain skeptical that this music exists at all. Although it would be lovely to think that my sleeping mind is composing lovely lyrical airs on the fly, I suspect that it is more likely an illusion – that some part of my mind that responds to music is being triggered, without there really being such music.<\/p>\n
Of course it would be delightful to find out that the music is real – that my mind is not merely conjuring up a feeling, but the music itself. My skepticism arises from other situations in which my dream-self has been shown to be highly self-deluding.<\/p>\n
In particular, I have often woken up from a dream in a state of great excitement, having just invented some marvelous process or mechanism. This euphoria generally lasts around three seconds or so – the amount of time it takes my waking mind to process the great invention and to realize that there is nothing meaningful there – that my “discovery” was merely a row of rainbow colored paints, or an elevator that travels sideways.<\/p>\n
It could be that music is different on some fundamental level, that the mind is indeed capable of generating the real deal – lovely lilting strains of inspired music – in some somnambulistic state of fevered creation.<\/p>\n
Alas, my waking mind remains ruefully skeptical. Then again, perhaps it is my waking self that is missing something beautiful. As Chuang Tzu might have asked, am I a cynic who dreams he is a composer, or a composer who dreams he is a cynic?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From time to time I hear beautiful strains of music in my dreams. Not familiar music, but rather music I’ve never heard before. There are times when my dreaming mind thinks “Ah, what a beautiful melody. If only I could write this down, to enjoy when I am awake.” I remain skeptical that this music … Continue reading “Music in a dream”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":887,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions\/887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}