This previous Sunday morning, I got up with my wife to help her and our daughter get out the door for a day of skiing on the slopes. After they left, I decided to lay back down in bed while waiting for my youngest daughter to wake. The evening before, I had begun composing my latest piece of music, which by the time I went to bed, had a rudimentary bass line and hints of a melody. Now when I compose, I quite often liken it to opening Pandora’s box, because it occupies a portion of my mental processing as I begin to compose in my head (remember, I only get a few hours in the evening to actually sit at the keyboard) and then the box is not closed until the composition is done. Well, as I lay there in my bed slowing falling to sleep, I know that I composed 3 different variations of the piece and as I was doing it, I was thinking to myself, should I wake up and go jot something down or hum it into my recorder, but no, those compositions are so simple that I will surely remember remember it later. Well, you have probably already guessed it, but when I did wake up, I couldn’t remember a thing. Who knows, maybe the compositions themselves were complete nonsense in my dream, but I really don’t think so.

Coincidentally, later that morning, I was browsing my news feed and came across this article from Scientific American. In this article, it talks about how they did experiments that seem to validate Salvador Dali’s method of using the early stage of sleep as a creativity tool. I then thought back to how my dream composing happened just in those earliest moments as I began to fall asleep.

One thing that I did take away from it all was add the accordion. I couldn’t explain it exactly, but as I working on the piece again later that morning, I inserted an accordion channel into the composition, not even using it, but more setting it as a marker of try this out once you get the melody down and that is what I did that evening and it worked out great. So I cannot say for certain if my dream composition had an accordion in it, but I would like to think so, at least to offer me an explanation of why I told myself to use an instrument sound that I never use.

Note to self: keep my recorder handy next time I go to sleep. I may need it.