Need to write music? -

Paul McCartney famously woke up one night with the tune for Yesterday in his head, and didn’t realise for a while that it was something he had written. I regularly wake up with tunes and songs in my head – they sometimes appear almost fully formed as I’m drifting off to sleep: melody, instruments, everything. If I don’t get up and capture something of them straight away, they’re gone forever. I can try to visualise the tune, the notation, repeat it over and over but it never works. Maybe that means that they weren’t very good, but I’ll never know! I don’t remember ever managing to capture lyrics I’ve woken up with though – and I have a slight suspicion that they might have been gibberish - but it shows that my brain is still playing with musical ideas even when I’m not thinking about it. So if this ever happens to you, you might want to keep a recorder of some sort by your bed so that you can capture that Yesterday moment for yourself.

There’s also a strange period between wakefulness and sleep called the hypnogogic state (the equivalent as you wake up is called the hypnopomic state). All sorts of changes are happening in your brain as you’re slipping into sleep, and you might have noticed that your thoughts become more disjointed and random as sleep approaches. But it can be an incredibly productive time. The inventor Thomas Edison hated sleeping, but used the hypnogogic state to problem-solve and be creative. He would first ‘prime’ his mind by considering in detail some sort of problem or idea, and then he would settle in an arm chair, with a ball in each hand – and his hands dangling off the ends of the chair arms. As he fell asleep, his grip would relax, and the balls would fall onto trays he’d positioned on the floor. The sound would wake him up, at which point he could capture whatever thoughts were in his mind in a notepad. He often found that his mind had worked at the problem without his realising it, and had found a solution. You could try the same thing, again, with a recorder nearby. When I’ve tried this, my preference is to lie on my bed with an arm bent at the elbow, so that my hand is sticking up in the air. As I fall asleep, my arm drops, waking me up.

A development of this idea – for the more adventurous - is to learn how to have lucid dreams. This is the wonderful moment during a dream when you become aware that you’re dreaming. At that moment, with practice, you can control every aspect of your dream. I tried for a while to regularly dream lucidly, and while I do occasionally have dreams where I’m in control, I never managed to do it regularly or when I wanted to. I ran out of the time and energy to regularly practice – but if you wanted to give this a go, you can do it using the ‘arm in the air’ trick mentioned above. The idea is that if you do it often enough you can preserve your consciousness deeper and deeper into sleep – so that sooner or later your arm will drop while you’re dreaming, waking you up just enough to realise that you’re dreaming. I can imagine that lucid dreaming could be incredibly productive way to play with musical ideas. You could use whatever instruments you want, actually hear them, try different arrangements. Anything!

One drawback to lucid dreaming is that people often talk about only being able to control some aspects of their dream. For example, if you become lucid whilst dreaming that you’re on a bus, you might realise that you could go anywhere - but it might not occur to you that you don’t actually have to be sitting on a bus! The physicist Richard Feynman played with lucid dreaming for a while and found this out for himself – in his case, he regularly became lucid in his dreams but realised (in his dream) that he could only stay lucid by pressing a soft patch he had found at the back of his skull. He gave up after that!

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