Writing songs in dreams?

[YanKleber]

I hummed it very croakilly into the dictaphone.

Man I need badly to buy one of those new digital dictaphones. Since I don't have a cellphone every now and then I have a very bad time to keep a record of my random musical ideas. Bummer. Several years ago I had a portable cassete tape recorder that I miss a lot.

 

[dainbramage]

I never wrote a song in my sleep, but.....

"It came to me in a dream. I was living in Tennessee with Guy and Susanna Clark, and I was asleep, and I had a notepad by my mattress - I had a mattress on the floor. I was dreaming that I was a folk singer, and this was the song I played, and I happened to wake up, write it down, and went right back to sleep. The next morning I woke up, went to the room with all the guitars, picked up a guitar and played it through. It never has changed."

- Townes Van Zandt about the song "If I Needed You"

-> -> ->

 

[altruistica]

I've often heard or watched a band playing a song in my dreams. Sometimes I'll remember part of it, sometimes all of it. I get out of bed if I think the idea is a strong one and go to the studio and jot it down, or record it on a simple stereo recorder.
I finished my first musical last year and the initial idea (the character and location)came to me just as I was waking one morning. I lay in bed until I had an idea of what the idea was about and then went to the studio and spent the next three hours just writing out the idea. It then took almost two years to craft it into a full musical which I'm hoping to put on this year.

Limbo new musical 2014

Al

 

[Stone Tones]

I routinely write down notes or keep a recorder (phone works if you don't have a handheld) handy at all times. You never know when something pops in your head or out of it. Most of my ideas come around the dream-phase. I'm hyper busy and live in NYC - only meaning there is a constant wave of over stimulation. Music for me has always come out easiest when the brain has had a chance to decompress.

Actually, the lyrics from a number of my songs have been thought of in dreams. Not forcing it down anyone here, but here's a link to one of those songs.

 

[CelesteMac]

Songs. Stories. Paintings. Things come just before sleep and while dreaming. It is my regular to habit upon waking to think about and focus on what I was just dreaming and remember as much as I can before allowing my mind to turn to the waking world. More often it's personal insights about life but sometimes good ideas come this way.

I used a recorder in the past but found it tedious to listen to the recordings. I prefer the notepad, and if the idea is complicated, I will grab the laptop or go to my desk.