Dreaming about music
Musicians dream about music substantially more than non-musicians, which is one of the cleanest continuity findings in dream research. For everybody else, music in a dream is rare and worth a note.
Also searched as: hearing music, a song in a dream, a tune, music in a dream
The frequency difference is the headline. People who play report musical dreams at markedly higher rates, and report them in more detail.
For others, the commonest report is a fragment: a few bars, or a song that was playing, usually one the dreamer knows.
New music is reported occasionally and is the more interesting case. Composers have described taking material from dreams, and while the anecdotes are famous the phenomenon is not well studied.
A song that will not stop, or that plays over an unrelated dream, is a distinct and mildly maddening report.
Common associations
- Practice, which predicts who has these dreams.
- Fragments rather than pieces.
- New material, in the rarer and more interesting reports.
- Sound at all, which dreams produce sparingly.
Positive readings
These are among the more valued dreams people report, and musicians in particular describe them warmly.
Where new material appears, writing it down immediately is worth doing, because the recall decays as fast as any dream content.
Difficult readings
Very little. The looping-song version is irritating rather than distressing.
Psychological perspectives
Auditory content is reported less frequently than visual, which makes music unusual before anything else is said about it.
The musician finding is a clean demonstration of continuity: dream content follows waking practice, and the effect is large enough to be measured rather than inferred.
The new-music question is genuinely open. The famous anecdotes are anecdotes, and this database is not going to present them as evidence.
Cultural and historical
Music received in dreams appears in accounts from a number of traditions, sometimes as a gift and sometimes as a teaching, and in several it is a recognised category.
The famous modern cases, of songs said to have arrived in dreams, are widely repeated and worth treating as reports rather than as demonstrations.
What the sleep science says
Well supported: musicians report musical dreams substantially more often than non-musicians.
Well documented: auditory content is less frequent in dreams than visual content.
Not established: any claim about creative material originating in dreams, which rests on anecdote.
Your own context
- Do you play anything?
- Was it a piece you know?
- Was it new?
- Did you write it down?
If this recurs
If you are a musician, log these deliberately. The frequency finding suggests you will get more of them than most people, and new material is worth capturing on waking.
Emotions often reported
- wonder
- joy
- calm
- melancholy
- fascination
- longing
Specific music dreams
Each of these is written separately, not generated from this page.
Questions for reflection
These are for your journal, not for us. Nothing you write is shared.
- Do I play music awake?
- Did I know the piece?
- Could I still hear it on waking?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
4 references. What these labels mean
- 1.Gender Differences in Dream Recall: A Meta-AnalysisPeer-reviewed research
Michael Schredl and Iris Reinhard (2008) · Journal of Sleep Research
Cited for: Dream-recall frequency as a measurable, individually stable trait, and the factors that move it.
- 2.The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and Content AnalysisAcademic book
G. William Domhoff (2003) · American Psychological Association
Cited for: The continuity hypothesis (that dream content largely reflects waking concerns) and a sustained critique of symbolic dream interpretation as an evidential method.
- 3.Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical ResearchAcademic book
Jennifer M. Windt (2015) · MIT Press
Cited for: A modern philosophical treatment of what dreams are, including the immersive-spatiotemporal-hallucination account and the status of dream reports as evidence.
- 4.The Content Analysis of DreamsAcademic book
Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle (1966) · Appleton-Century-Crofts
Cited for: The standard coding system for dream content, and the normative frequencies that later studies are compared against. The reason claims like "aggression is more common in dreams than friendliness" can be stated numerically at all.
Dreamers’ accounts
How dreams of music have gone for other people, in their own words. Nothing here is an interpretation of anyone else's dream. It is a record of what happened and what it was like.
Nothing here yet. Be the first to say how this has gone for you.
Related records
- ActionDancingDancing is reported rarely and almost always positively, which makes it unusual in a database where most entries exist because something went wrong. Where it goes wrong, it is the music that fails rather than the dancing.
- SymbolVoicesA voice with no speaker is one of the more common auditory reports, and where it happens at the edge of sleep it has a specific and well-documented explanation that has nothing to do with meaning.
- SymbolSilenceMost dreams are quieter than dreamers realise, so silence is usually only noticed when it is doing something: a scene that should have sound and does not, which produces a specific and hard-to-name unease.
- SymbolMoneyMoney dreams are extremely common and track waking financial concern more reliably than they track anything symbolic. Finding it and losing it are reported about equally, and both usually arrive during periods when money is already on the dreamer's mind.
- SymbolPregnancyPregnancy dreams are extremely common during actual pregnancy and are reported by people who are not and cannot be pregnant. The two populations need separating before anything useful can be said, and most sites do not separate them.
- SymbolRingAlmost every reported ring dream is a losing dream. The ring is noticed because it is gone, and dreamers report checking the hand, which is one of the more specific physical actions in the whole database.