Let me guess, you played Link’s Awakening when you were a kid? 
I’m still playing 
1 Like
Yes could be, living my life trying to be aware of that, but trying within itself is limited too, mindblowing 
1 Like
This is an incredibly dope thread premise and while visualization and daydreaming are very much married to my creative process the reason I’m posting is because this song immediately popped into my head after reading the op’s post.
Not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea but the imagery feels spot on…
1 Like
Thanks for this wonderful thread. Inspiring and honest.
Many years ago, I rented an AirBnB on top of a boathouse at Marblehead harbor. I couldn’t sleep one night and lie on a couch looking out at the harbor light going on and off through a light fog. It felt so lonely, just the way I was feeling at that time. It stuck with me for several years. I ended up composing a musical piece that imagined the lighthouse communicating with a whale, having a long, drawn-out conversation. I used various layered samples of whale calls, lighthouse foghorns, waves, wind, brown noise, woodwinds, synth pads, and ethereally placed random nature sounds. The piece is called “Lighthouse calls.”
I composed another piece called “PrairieLand” about a time in my life when I used to drive hundreds of miles alone in my car through the prairies of the midwest for my job, through all the seasons of the year. I composed a musical piece that seemed to capture the mood. Then, while listening to that piece in my car during one of those drives, I let my thoughts flow. When I arrived at my destination, I composed a poem to capture the thoughts I’d been having listening to the music.
In the midst of a relationship in trouble, I imagined my partner and I lost in the forest, trying to find each other without losing ourselves. I used melodies at higher frequencies to imagine her feelings and communications, and lower frequencies to imagine mine, until there is this tangle of melodies that coalesce. I called this, “Differentiation.”
I have often thought of my musical pieces, and more importantly, what I do with musical exploration, as part meditation, part curiosity, part journal writing, but with music rather than words (mostly). This is why I am content to not know much about musical playing, technique, theory, and instead focus on sound design, creation, layering, and exploration, even if it rarely results in something I record and keep or build.
I’ve been watching the Apple TV series “See” for the past week. There’s a scene in which one of the characters is remembering a lost love, and she is remembering their intimacy, narrating over it, and she says, “we spoke to each other without words.” Beautiful. This, to me, is what I search for in music, the music I create and most of the music I listen to (I rarely listen to music these days with any lyrics at all).
3 Likes
As a kid I had this recurring dream of not exactly flying but more like walking in thin air or being able to levitate or slowly swim through the air. I had completely forgotten about that until I read through this thread. At the same age I also used to experience these weird feverish feelings of being able to hear everything very very clearly/loudly. The smallest sounds would feel like huge gargantuan noises, but not in any way unpleasant. It was more like a feeling of super hearing.
Back then we also had a summer cabin which was 20 kilometres from our home. We would drive home from the cabin at late night and I remember this one time very vividly. I was looking out of the car window in to the dark fields outside and saw this glowing, floating creature closing in on us. At that time it looked a lot like Animal from Muppet Show but if I had had more experience I probably could’ve described it otherways. It might have been a state of being half asleep and awake at the same time. Or it could’ve also been the dashboard lights mirrored on the window etc. But the experience has stayed with me ever since.
As a grown up, I’ve experienced something truly unexplainable only once. I was living on the top floor of a student housing building with windows facing the university and one night I saw these balls of light in the sky above the university. They moved quite fast but made sharp 90 degree turns with ease. I can’t explain it how much I try. I’m not a cuckoo person and I’m more inclined towards skepticism than believing in the supernatural but I know what I saw and there is no sensible way to explain it.
5 Likes
A very very good topic!
I loved the new Blade Runner primarily from a world-building angle. I don’t mean the characters and the like, I mean the literal, physical elements. It felt so tangible and the atmosphere was so perfect that I sat in the cinema like it was some kind of hot tub for the mind. I remember not wanting to leave.
To go back to the original post - land whales reminded me of the huge moles in China Mieville’s ‘Railsea’ which are effectively “whaled” by humans in a typically steampunk-y way.
I had a very vivid lucid dream once but I’ve never managed to repeat the experience. I was in a kind of mundane yet horrifying dream where my wife had sent me to pick up some children in a minibus and bring them to a huge caravan with a network of awnings surrounding it that seemed like a sprawling one storey building inside. Once I got there to meet her and my kids I realised that she had somehow adopted all these children, but instead of going with it in the usual dream style I somehow understood that it wouldn’t have been possible for her to do that without my consent, plus I knew enough about the adoption process to realise that I would have been interviewed, home visits would have taken place etc. It gradually dawned on me that I must be dreaming. It occurred to me that I could test the theory by making somebody random appear in the caravan-awning-building kitchen I was standing in - and they did! I turned around and they were there (I sadly don’t recall who it was). Flushed with this amazing success… I immediately became embroiled in some crazy dream shit and I was back under, in zero control once more, but for a second I was some kind of dream author!
3 Likes
I still can’t hear a single thing you are all saying.
The moon on a collision course with Earth, slowly rotating and getting larger and redder over the horizon as a giant fire spreads across the surface and people run from it in horror. I had at least 2 of these dreams.
I also had variations on both the evil-still-road (mine bent upwards 90 degrees) and anti-gravity-walking (invisible infinite wobbly staircase) dreams.
The one time I almost got lucid, I was in a basement. I realized what was happening, got too excited and immediately flew out of a window onto a sidewalk just outside. Upon waking I developed an instant appreciation for this Autechre track, which I’d strongly disliked prior:
1 Like
Before I became a parent I dreamt alot. Vivid dreams, dreams within dreams. Colorful, lively, sometimes scary. But a lot of dreams every night I fell asleep.
Now I haven’t had a dream for 9 years and when that realization came to me a cpl of months ago it felt like I had lost a piece of me… it genuinely saddens me.
2 Likes
You probably still dream but you just don’t remember them when you wake up. There are a lot of ways to train yourself to remember dreams if you’re interested.
2 Likes
Take some flaxseed before going to bed…
1 Like
Actually in line with this thread here’s a short guide to understanding and teaching yourself lucid dreaming. Part of having lucid dreams is to remember you had them. Not everybody is good at it (I’m not), but you have to put the work in I guess. For me it’s more effort than it’s worth TBH.
I stopped dreaming for quite a few years as well, turned out it was untreated sleep apnoea.
Also, Magnesium deficiency has been related to not being able to remember dreams.
Magnesium Bisglycinate is a well tolerated and absorbable form.
You could pop 200 mg before bed and see what happens.
For me, my dream life really ramped up when I started taking supplemental collagen before bed (I take it for dietary reasons, but the pleasant sleep and dreams were a welcome side effect).
More recently I’ve been trying out medicinal mushrooms (not of the magic variety) for general health and wellbeing. I found that when I take Reishi close to bedtime it adds some colour and vividness to my dream life.
Of course, everyone is different, but there might be something in it.
1 Like