Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream. That is such a cool, zen-like approach to life, and it comes to us in the form of an English children’s nursery rhyme. The song is actually a round – a musical composition in which 2 or more voices sing exactly the same melody, each voice beginning at a different time. The different parts of the melody coincide and fit harmoniously together. It is one of the easiest forms of ‘part’ singing, as only one line of melody must be learned by all the singers, and it can be repeated over and over. This simple ditty has quite a history – Star Trek Five had Captain Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy singing it, another episode had a bunch of weird kids singing it, it’s featured in the films Dante’s Peak, the Red Danube and even Hackers. Maybe it’s a metaphor for our passage here on earth – we propel ourselves with humor and joy in natural waters which bring us to the simple comfort of the abstract world. But the key word here is dreams. What a wonderful and multi-faceted word, just chock full of contradictions. Dreams are something involuntary that happen to you while you’re sleeping, and can be pleasant or horrible. Shrinks, shamans, witch doctors, scientists, poets, priests, gurus, artists and fools all think they’ve got the inside track on figuring out the source and importance of our dreams. But we also call the wide-awake goals and achievements we actively pursue, our dreams. Someone may ‘dream’ of playing pro-ball, or getting into clown school, or playing with a symphony, or winning the surf contest. It’s a respectful kind of compliment to say “he’s got big dreams”, or “she had a dream and made it come true”. Yet in the same breath, dreamers are kind of looked down on as unrealistic losers. We disparage someone who “lives in a dream world”, or we diss some guy cause “he’s just a dreamer”. Remember that Everly Brothers song –“When I want you in my arms, When I want you and all your charms, Whenever I want you, all I have to do is dream. Dream, dream, dream. I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine, anytime night or day. Only trouble is – gee whiz, I’m dreaming my life away….”
John Lennon “Un sueño que sueñas solo, es solo un sueño. Un sueño que sueñas con alguien es una realidad.” “A dream you dream alone is only a dream, but a dream you dream together is reality.”
music that they never closely listened to before and were way unable to play. Dream experts say that music is the opposite of chaos, and that in dreams it represents harmony and the infinite potential of creative life. Dreams can also express the emotions that you are feeling at that moment in time – which is why I don’t really trust bad dreams. To me they sneak out from some dark and paranoid place that isn’t really valid and shouldn’t be allowed to influence us. I think bad dreams are kind of like what that late night stupid shot of tequila does to most of us. We turn off the positive attitude button and press the pity party switch. Bad music dreams – panicky dreams where you’re playing something in public you’ve never played before, or trying to sing and nothing comes out, or my favorite, playing during a rest when the entire orchestra is correctly silent – ‘ya can’t let them affect you. Paul McCartney woke up one morning and wrote down the song he had just dreamed – complete with melody, rhythm, chords, lyrics and orchestration. The lyrics were part gibberish, so he re-wrote those, but he didn’t trust the fact that everything was his own creativity. He was convinced for a while that he must have heard it somewhere before and was subconsciously plagiarizing someone else’s music. That song is the haunting hit “Yesterday”.
A lot of folks recollect their music dreams, but according to scientist types they happen twice as often to musicians, and their frequency seems to be related to when those musicians started playing. I’ve had music dreams with very clear and specific melody lines - where I knew exactly which fingers to use and how to articulate the piece. Sometimes I’ve got a whole band going on in my head, and sometimes I can actually see the piece of music I’m hearing. Maybe it’s a line I played earlier, or heard somewhere or something that I’ve been trying to learn or to write. Of course, like lots of dreams, just when it unfolds into total clarity it will suddenly vanish – like the bursting of a bubble. Many classical composers swear that their best compositions came to them in dreams. Ravel, Stravinsky, Handel, Mozart, Chopin and Brahms all insisted that they woke up with entire symphonies intact in their heads. Scientific studies conclude that nearly half of the musical pieces that Eare ‘dreamed’ are not standard or known pieces, but truly original music. After brain trauma or illness, many non-musicians have stories of dreaming
Mick Jagger “Pierde tus sueños y podrías perder la cordura.” “Lose your dreams, and you might lose your mind.” Dominical Days 37