Dreams to Remember

For years, it was the roller coaster dream. As the coaster climbed the steep hill toward the first big drop, I realized I wasn’t strapped in tight (or at all). Then, it was the baseball dream. I couldn't throw the ball to the plate no matter how hard I tried. I’ve had a vast array of falling dreams and numerous dreams where my legs are paralyzed as I am being chased by some menacing figure. There are the classroom dreams — a test given that I hadn’t studied for or, as the teacher in the dream, a classroom of miscreants I couldn’t manage. And then there is the occasional dream where I’m walking around only partially clothed or completely naked.   

Not all my dreams are so dark (or embarrassing). Some mornings I awake elated; I dreamed I could breathe underwater and explore the vast majesty of the ocean’s depths. Or, better yet, I’ve figured out how to fly. More recently, I am lucky to have the image of my late father visit me in my dreams. He tells me he loves me, and we embrace and cry together.   

I imagine some of these dream scenarios ring familiar. We all dream. But why? Our biology has been finely tuned over millennia through the messy trial and error of evolution to give us the best possible chance of survival. Surely dreams must serve some important life function.

Theories abound on the purpose of dreams. Biologists and neuroscientists have proposed that dreams help us regulate and process complex emotions, that they function as a sorting mechanism, helping us file away and remember important (and sometimes seemingly unimportant) things from our day-to-day lives. Other theories suggest dreams are like exercise for our brains, keeping us neurologically fit by breaking the cycle of repetitive daily tasks. Award winning novelist Cormac McCarthy theorized in a recent article in the science magazine Nautilus that dreams are the primary pathway for unconscious thinking to become conscious. He argues that dreams are pre-lingual and meta-lingual and that they offer us life instruction given in the form of “picture-stories” we are meant to interpret. Dreams, he suggests, are the way our unconscious helps us solve practical and psychological problems.  

In his seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud wrote that dreams offer us a chance to realize our latent and unconscious desires. Dreams are a kind of wish fulfillment. Through analyzing our dreams, Freud proposed, we might untangle repressed desires and conflicts that manifest themselves symbolically in our dreams. Freud’s protégé, Carl Jung, took these theories a step further, suggesting that dreams offer us access to not only our own subconscious but also to a collective unconscious where the inherited and universal archetypes of all sentient life dwell. This collective unconscious, he theorized, is the common wellspring of all mythology and art.  

Which brings me to my main point. All acts of creation or discovery are a kind of joint mental effort. Your mind is working simultaneously at conscious and unconscious levels to help you make decisions and solve problems. Whether awake or asleep, aware or unaware, your mind is always humming away, using innate methods older than you could imagine to help you process and thrive in a world that is likewise more complex than you could imagine. Dreams have evolved to become the main conduit between ourselves as conscious agents and the unconscious workings of our minds. 

Not surprisingly, dreams have been the genesis of important discoveries in math and science and the seed of artistic creation. The basis for what we call the scientific method: René Descartes dreamed it. The discovery of the chemical structure of benzene: Friedrich August Kekulé dreamed it. The movement of electrons around a nucleus: Niels Bohr dreamed it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan: a dream (with a little help from opium, sure). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: a dream. William Blake’s and Salvador Dali’s paintings: you guessed it, dreams. Hell, James Cameron even dreamed up the image of the Terminator! 

There are great stories of musicians dreaming songs. Keith Richards wrote the guitar lick for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in his sleep. He recalls half waking up, hitting record on his Philips cassette player, and playing the riff he heard in his dream. Coming to the next morning, he “had no idea [he’d] written it,” he claimed in his autobiography Life. “The miracle,” he continued, “being that I looked at the cassette player that morning, and I knew I’d put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was the end.” The rest of the tape was him snoring away. Paul McCartney claims to have written “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” in his dreams. The melody to “Yesterday” seemed so familiar and quintessential that he thought he had simply dreamed the melody from an old standard he had bouncing around in the back of his head. And “Let It Be” came from a dream he had of his late mother. McCartney said that in the dream his mother told him, "It will be alright; just let it be." 

In interviews, songwriters often admit that they don’t know where a song came from, that they don’t know how they wrote it, or that they wrote a song in a trance. You hear them talk about songs as gifts or as divinely inspired. Read Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting; nearly every artist describes part of the process as a mystery. I don’t think these folks are trying to be evasive or mystical. The universal experience is that a significant part of the creative process occurs beyond our conscious awareness. And when a musical idea makes its way from our unconscious mind to our conscious thinking, it feels like something that came from outside of ourselves. It feels like something that was sent to us. 

I don’t think any of this dream-creation is an accident, however. Most creative spirits have unwittingly (and probably out of desperation) trained their minds to dream about particular problems they are trying to solve. Because it’s all they are thinking about! Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of The Committee of Sleep, Deirdre Barrett, calls this skill “dream incubation.” You can train yourself to intentionally dream about a problem, increasing your chances of coming up with a solution.  

A similar method is proffered by Jeff Tweedy in his instructive and entertaining book How To Write One Song. Tweedy champions techniques that put you “consciously, in the path of your subconscious.” He adds: “We carry around a lot of stuff we don’t always know how to get to, but it’s there.” One way Tweedy has gained greater access to the magical “stuff” of the subconscious is by thinking about songs before he goes to bed and right when he wakes up. In his sleep he can “really untangle” the more challenging musical ideas he is working through during his daily writing sessions. He states plainly: “I truly think I do a lot of my best work while I’m asleep. I often wake up with the last musical puzzle I was contemplating completely resolved.” By writing as soon as he wakes up, Tweedy is able to “combine [his] semi-sleep state with the rhythms and melodies that have been danced to in [his] dreams all night long.” 

In my own music making, I’ve been trying to become more attuned to the ideas swimming around in my subconscious mind. I’m trying to develop skills, habits, and routines that keep that portal between my conscious thinking and unconscious thinking open and flowing. I’m working on a new batch of songs — something I hope will become a new record — and I am writing exclusively on electric guitar. I’m obviously going for a different feel and vibe, and I’ve been listening to a lot of late 90s and early 2000s alternative rock. Which is to say I’ve been listening to a lot of Oasis. I’m in awe of how simple yet anthemic and enchanting an Oasis song can be. For months I’ve been mulling over how to write that kind of song. Obsessively. It’s almost become my mantra: What Would Oasis Do? 

And then I dreamed a song. I woke up in the middle of the night with a melody in my head. It was so clear and present. I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and recorded what I heard to a Voice Memo and jotted down some seemingly random words in my Notes app. It was almost like I was taking dictation. Then I fell back asleep, still humming the tune as I drifted off.

I meditated on that melody and those lines for a few days before I sat down to work on the song, trying to bridge the motley perfection of my dream with the conscious act of actually writing a song: the chords, the structure, the words. In little time, I had written “Staying Alive,” a song I just recorded live at Deep End Studio. I don’t think I exactly got the catchy Oasis tune I’ve been wanting to write, but I do think I captured pretty well the chorus I heard in my dream. That I dreamed a song in and of itself is proof enough that I’ve got a capable co-writer in my unconscious mind.   

I am a firm believer that the ritual of art-making requires open pathways between our conscious experience and unconscious mind. We need help. Often, we don’t know what we’re doing or, perhaps more importantly, why we are doing it. The good news is that we have a creative guru in our subconscious. (One that seems to prefer surrealist imagery, I’ll admit). Dreams are a portal to a very old, universal, and fundamental part of the brain, to a way of thinking evolved to help us process and understand the world and ourselves beyond language or reason. Dreams help us reckon with failure, inadequacy, uncertainty, and fear. They fulfill our desires and set us free from the restraints of day-to-day life. And, occasionally, they help us tap into the majesty of song.

Whatever you need, you’ll probably find it in your dreams.