Limitless Creativity in Dreams

[Everything]

Imagine a magical hat some where on a table. You can pull anything you wish from this hat. Only at night. As soon as you reach day, the hat and the conjured items dissapear. It happens all the time so that you want to live at night and sleep at day, but then the hat only appears at day and no longer at night. Thats how fking frustrating the creative power of our dreams are. I noticed that during the day my creativity is limited by 1. my memory to recall my creative thoughts, images, sounds I imagined during the creative process 2. having to interupt the creative process all the time because it takes forever to translate the creativity into reality. In dreams everything manifests instantenously. It takes forever to compose a music, poem, painting, idea, book, whatever, in the waking hours, plus you tend to fail or give up while so caught up in the process of translating. The translating process in dreams becomes instant. You think about a story and it appears in your mind, the movie plays out in 3d and the background music is perfect all the time.

 

Sometimes I'm so frustrated about not being able to get lucid, I want to stop sleeping untill I can acces the creativity I have in my dreamworld while still remaining consciouss. Funny thing is, when I get sleepy, I loose consciousness. I actually stopped have faith that it is possible to lucid dream all the time. All the lucid dreaming teachers and so called authorities on the subject cannot even lucid dream themselves. It seems that all the succesful lucid dreamers have shifted into the 5th dimension. There's no one on earh that can teach me this, but me?. Unless you tell me otherwise! I tried allot of things, but never drugs. I really don't care for lucid dreaming though. I only care for the creativity I have during sleep! I've never been able to acces it while awake

Is a musician, actor or comedian, scriptwriter destined to use drugs? Like Charlie Sheen said, Yes I'm on drugs, but I'm still a winner. Then again, you do have those 100 year old people who finally became enlightened but their brains disintegrated so much that they coulden't teach others how to do it anymore.

 

I compose music in the waking world just as a hobby and I suck at it. The music fragments I've recalled and translated onto the keyboard are my best musical compositions even though they're like 3 seconds of length each, plus I did not recall it precisely. I can put some examples on youtube if you request it. Sometimes I feel I have great ideas and while trying to translate a part of these musical thoughts, it just floats away and its forgotten. Today I've had a lucid dream where I started improvising on the keyboard and recorded it to prove how good of a pianist I am to a projection of mine. This music was so incredible, I could retire a musician right now if I were able to acces such creaitivity I have in dreams all the time or atleast able to become lucid for just 40 minutes a night and remember what music I played or ideas I created. With all my intense effort for years, I've reached two weak lucid dreams of 10 seconds each a week. By the time I manifest a piano, organ the dream has already fades away. In my dreams I don't have to play piano well to improvise great. I just trance into my music consciousness like I always do and start translating. In the real world it takes 1 hour of intense focus and translating just for a small part. In the dream, I can press record and just play the piano without thinking about pressing the right key. The musical creativity is so strong, I composed 3 minutes for a piano piece instantaneously and played the recorded music. It was better then anything I heared from chopin. When I let the recorded music play, I actually remanifested what the music sounded like and made it perfect, just by thinking about it without even touching the keyboard! I became a real music god! When I woke up, I tried to recall something, but I've forgotten everything! My memory is real bad when I'm awake aswell. I've recalled allot of dream music fragments, never cared to record them since it was 6 notes at most. I did try to reconstruct from what I had recalled, but it took too long and I never been able to create music of quality similar to the dream music I just made up in few seconds. Besides, reconstructing from 6 notes? I might aswell start at 0 notes. So the dream music is real! Its not beyond the regular physical audio. Just waiting for another lucid dream to arrive is no longer acceptable. I will have to seriously train this in a structred way and be more persistent in trying out many practices.

 

As you can see, I can just stop my hobby and focus on becoming lucid in dreams and train dream recall. There is no more point in composing music while awake when in my dreams I do it 18374774738281991199283847 times faster and compose 2848575748829291903948488585748839292 times better music. No words can describe the creative power I have in my dreams. Ofcourse I probably woulden't arive there if I never created music while awake aswell, but still... Now that I have discovered this, doesn't that make dreaming one of the most important events of the day? I can't just be content with the creativity I have in the waking world when there is such power within me that I'm not yet able to acces. One dream is equal to 3 years of intense work. In the waking world I can process information at the speed of a donkey, in my dreams I process information faster then the speed of light. The focus has shifted toward the way of internal strength for me today. Perhaps it would be unwise to even waste such creative powers on music... Thats how freakin powerful it is! Either that, or I give music oo much importance to even mention it... Well, thats me!

 

WHY ON EARTH IS THERE NO ONE WHO USES DREAM CREATIVITY AS THERE MAIN SOURCE FOR IDEAS?!? Or are they just not telling anyone about it? Fcking egotistical bastards, you know I love ya'll right? Tell me how to do it! xD

 

If everyone could freely use their dreams to do what they wished, and later recall exactly what they did, we would have atleast 5 milion Johannes Bach's walking around on this planet. How many are there currently? 0... Still good composers alive, but I imagine them to be 50 times better if they did acces their dream creativity. I must either arrogantly conclude that my lucid dream self is the reincarnation of a musical god. Either that or the whole world needs to fcking wake up to way of internal power! If I could just recall one complete musical piece of my lucid dreams I could proove this, damnit. If a musical failure like me can do that, how many creative technological inventions would be created in one day if all scientists had acces to their ineternal creative powers? Whats going on here? Am I the only one who have experience this internal creative power?

Edited November 5, 2011 by Everything

[Protector]

[Cat Pillar]

My opinion: you're trying too hard.

 

I'm a musician myself, although guitar is my main instrument, not keyboard.

 

When it comes to writing, I find I write my best music when I'm not really trying. For me, it's more about feeling the song out than consciously trying to write something. If there's an emotion or feel I'm going for, I might set that as an intent; but writing for me usually consists of playing with the sounds until something sticks - a lick or progression will catch my ear, and I'll jam on that for awhile until the rest starts unfolding.

 

Writing music in my opinion is best done when you remove yourself from the process. The music can write itself if you let it. I might have an easier time with this kind of writing because I never learned much music theory. I'm not Eric Clapton or Joe Satriani, but I enjoy the music I write, and most of the people I play for seem to enjoy it too.

 

Don't take it so seriously! Play around a bit. Beef up your technical skills if you want to open new avenues of exploration, but don't let the theory trip up your creativity.

 

I've tried translating music from dreams into waking life, and it's never worked out well for me. Something that sounded absolutely awesome in my dream made absolutely zero sense musically in waking reality. Take that dreamtime creativity with a grain of salt - the rules are completely different over there, and the symbolic nature of events shouldn't be taken lightly either.

 

Yes, I believe dreams can be a VERY powerful source of creativity. Perhaps learning lucid dreaming techniques would really help out your songwriting! But stressing about it is only going to get in your way, regardless of what you decide to do. And I think learning to develop the creative process in waking life will serve you much better as a musician than pining for the limitless power found in dreamtime.

 

Just my two cents.

 

Well, maybe five. It's a long post.

[de_paradise]

I've been doing similar, but not during dreams, but deep meditation on the cusp of dream. Therefore you do not have to be dreaming or lucid dreaming to be able to do creative writing. Its just hard to reach that sweet spot of deep subconciousness where the verses pop up instanteously and easily. Too much intent or desire will spoil the broth, too little and you will not get anything done. I think the trick is to be composing during waking hours so the intent is there, and not having to be consciously wanting it to happen (because that will spoil the broth) when you are deep in meditation, and it will bubble up naturally. Its not easy to be able to meditate down that deeply either, it takes loads of directionless relaxing practise. Another thing is that you have to very familiar with the instruments or language you are going to compose with, a mastery. I can do songwriting verse, but cannot translate the instuments because I am not an expert at translating music to componant parts, only get the basic sounds and rhythm. Amazing enough, not Mozart by by a mile though.

[manitou]

I'm so left brained on the natch that lucid dreaming is nearly impossible for me - I've tried over and over for years, since I first started Castaneda maybe 8 years ago.

 

First of all, I've discovered that I'm just not capable of doing it right before I go to sleep. I've tried and tried, I've looked for my hands in my dreams, just like Castaneda. I've not been able to get it.

 

Except recently, I've discovered that it also happens in the morning! I've recently been able to catch myself before opening my eyes in the morning, and I catch myself and make myself stay right there. I find that if I crack open my eyes just a tiny bit, just to let a tiny bit of light in, that the lucid dreams will start! I'm thrilled to have discovered this.

 

I have to tell you what I lucid dreamed this morning, only for a few seconds. It's like my face was looking down at the ground, about 2 feet away from it. The ground, as you can imagine, was as real as can be, since this was a lucid dream. I was moving along the ground, almost floating, when suddenly I went over a cliff which appeared to be about 1000 feet down. It was like in a cartoon for a moment, I stayed up in the air just like the Roadrunner before he looks down.

 

Then it became like a slow motion bungee jump down to the trees and rocks below, which I could see getting closer and closer. Then I 'willed' myself to come back up on the bungee cord. The funny thing is, there wasn't a drop of fear attached to the huge bungee jump.

 

In my particular left brain case, this is real progress! Castaneda's chore was to learn to control and investigate these dreams at will, taking off from one lucid dream-bubble to another, to another; and then coming back on the same path. I would love to do the same.

Edited November 6, 2011 by manitou

[thelerner]

First of all, I've discovered that I'm just not capable of doing it right before I go to sleep. I've tried and tried, I've looked for my hands in my dreams, just like Castaneda. I've not been able to get it.

 

Except recently, I've discovered that it also happens in the morning! I've recently been able to catch myself before opening my eyes in the morning, and I catch myself and make myself stay right there. I find that if I crack open my eyes just a tiny bit, just to let a tiny bit of light in, that the lucid dreams will start! I'm thrilled to have discovered this.

 

I have to tell you what I lucid dreamed this morning, only for a few seconds.

 

In my particular left brain case, this is real progress! Castaneda's chore was to learn to control and investigate these dreams at will, taking off from one lucid dream-bubble to another, to another; and then coming back on the same path. I would love to do the same.

 

What you write really resonates with me. I've been working on dream recall with the idea of becoming increasingly lucid. As I get better w/ recall I find I can't sleep! I get better and then my regular life starts to suffer as I'm over tired. I've gotten to the point where I remember 3 dreams, but I'm dead tired.

 

In my case I may be doing 2 things wrong. First I'm messing with REM sleep, waking up in the middle of dreams in order to have clearer recall. Second, my pre sleep programming is causing anxiety that keeps me from sleep.

 

I think the answer is to give up on early dream recall and lucidity during the first few 90 minute REM cycles and concentrate on the magic hour, the last 90 minutes of the sleep cycle. Wake up early preferably through self command or quiet alarm. Get up focused, back to sleep. Hopefully I've already gotten 5 or 6 hours. This is focused practice. Maybe done in another location, sleeping in a different slightly uncomfortable position.

 

Special care taken on waking, to write up my dreams. One method of remembering my dreams has been instead of groping to remember on waking to retell myself the story from a different point of view, like a third person was telling me the dream. I call it Restory to Remember with the idea that I'm pulling it out of short term memory into long term.

 

I've gotten a few good nights of sleep. I think my new strategy will be to do less work and preparation at night. Have my ipod nano near my pillow and softly awaken me 90 minutes before I'd usually get up, 5:30ish. Go downstairs, focus, tell myself what I want to accomplish, have the dream journal nearby. Get back to sleep.

[Harmonious Emptiness]

Hey Everything,

 

I can relate to this. I've had some pretty cool experiences with sponanteous composition in dreams. The music was still only as good as what I put behind it, but the chord structures were good foundations nontheless.

 

Do you improvise? I've noticed that a lot of piano players are not comfortable improvising as they were classically trained. This might be essential to being able to wake up and continue on in the same groove, figure out the chord foundations, and get the feel of it. Recording is generally better than writing for this, imo, but recording can also disturb the flow sometimes, so just record the basic and then put more feeling into it when you jam it out so to speak.

 

Again, the melodies are usually phrases that you would naturally put over certain chord structures, so if you can figure out the underlying transitions then the melodies might be revealed and then some.

 

However, doing this consistently is something else entirely if you want to get into that. When I was playing a lot I would dream more like this.

 

One simple practice to have a sort of dream dialogue is to hold an unresolved feeling almost as a question to your subconscious as you're about to fall asleep. Sometimes dreams will turn it into images and scenarios which illuminate the issue and hopefully provide some solutions upon analysis of them.

 

If you have a feeling, and you've been playing a lot, you might dream up a melody..

 

My dream interpretation skills are usually not too bad, so feel free to PM me if you want a second or third opinion.

 

Also, the deeper the sleep the more memorable the dreams usually. There is a tea by Algonquin Tea called Lucid Dreaming which has sweet-gale, used by Native Americans for lucid dreaming. I suspect it gives a deeper sleep, at least that's what I seemed to notice.

 

http://www.algonquintea.com/content/teas/lucid-dream-tea.shtml

[manitou]

 

Do you improvise? I've noticed that a lot of piano players are not comfortable improvising as they were classically trained. This might be essential to being able to wake up and continue on in the same groove, figure out the chord foundations, and get the feel of it.

 

 

 

This seems to be the incredible awakening of many of us who are musicians, classically trained. When I became kundalini active about 8 years ago, I suddenly discovered that I was able to improvise on the spot, if I knew the melody. (Compose, no...). But great improv, yes! I had gone through my first 56 years thinking I could only play sheet music. Now I would feel comfortable getting up in front of any venue, including the Hollywood Bowl, and improvising any melody that came to mind.

 

And it's great stuff! Just placing the hand on the keyboard (even just a fifth) and allowing it to rest there while the energy moves up the arm is the way that it seems to work in my case. the creation, the beat, the style of the piece changes from time to time.

 

I just don't think any of this would be happening with me if I hadn't finally been able to break through to the right brain. Prior to that, everything for me was an exercise in left brain critical analysis. No room for intuition at all.

 

There seems to be a great synchronicity between the opening up of the artistic channels and the journey to the inner Self. After all, it is the creator we find.

[Harmonious Emptiness]

..

Edited November 7, 2011 by Harmonious Emptiness

[Harmonious Emptiness]

This seems to be the incredible awakening of many of us who are musicians, classically trained.

 

I'm sure the classical training paves many roads for the improvisation too, so knowing the one side while keeping the other is enviable. Some do complain of being worse off after studying jazz as they might loose some of the unconscious flow. I think studying percussion and emulating sitar is a good antidote for that. An interesting thing with Sitar (which I can only emulate) is that they gradually build up the scale, discovering each interval before moving on to the next, bending the note every which way, sort of like activating the 1st chakra fully before moving up and the same for each. They will play the other intervals in this process, but return to the interval focused in their sort of dragon dance up and down the scales.

 

There are also 7 notes to classical scales, 7 chakras, some draw correllations. The is seen with singing bowls, where the larger ones activate lower parts of the body and smaller, higher, ones resonate higher up, so there's some possibilities to play around with there too if you and or your listener(s) are tuned in.

AAUUUMMMMM.

[manitou]

I'm sure the classical training paves many roads for the improvisation too, so knowing the one side while keeping the other is enviable. Some do complain of being worse off after studying jazz as they might loose some of the unconscious flow. I think studying percussion and emulating sitar is a good antidote for that. An interesting thing with Sitar (which I can only emulate) is that they gradually build up the scale, discovering each interval before moving on to the next, bending the note every which way, sort of like activating the 1st chakra fully before moving up and the same for each. They will play the other intervals in this process, but return to the interval focused in their sort of dragon dance up and down the scales.

 

There are also 7 notes to classical scales, 7 chakras, some draw correllations. The is seen with singing bowls, where the larger ones activate lower parts of the body and smaller, higher, ones resonate higher up, so there's some possibilities to play around with there too if you and or your listener(s) are tuned in.

AAUUUMMMMM.

 

 

Well, at some point, some believe that it all comes down to word. Aauuummmm. Before even light. How could what you say not be so? If I recall, there's a creation chapter in the Nag Hammadi gospels that refers to the original sound as well.

 

Vibrations.

[Sloppy Zhang]

Everything- chill out.

 

Don't put so much pressure on yourself to perform. You're giving yourself performance anxiety, and are messing yourself up. Then you're messing yourself up for messing yourself up, and causing a downward spiral.

 

Chill out.

 

Ever hear that story about the student who asked the teacher how long it'd take for him to be enlightened if he meditated for an hour a day, and the master said "ten years", then the student says what if I meditate for two hours every day, and the teacher goes "twenty years", and the student goes "three hours?" and the teacher says "thirty years"?

 

It's like that.

 

The more you freak yourself out about it, the further away it's going to get. The more you try and tighten your fist around it, the more it's going to escape. It's dreams for fuck's sake, they're ephemeral Try to ham fist your way through it and you'll never get anywhere.

 

 

thelerner-

 

I know what you mean about the tiredness and stuff. I think it's nerves, really.

 

B.K. Frantzis talks about nerve stress in his book "The Great Stillness". He talks about it in terms of sex, where back in the day even farmers working 12 hours a day could still have sex all night, but in the modern world of 9 to 5 people have ED or can't go on for as long because even though they are working less, everything combined has literally fried their nerves.

 

Same thing happens with sleep. If you fry your nerves through the day, and then on top of that stress yourself out over dream recall, you aren't going to get your rest, and the rest of the next day you'll be tired, even if you objectively got 6 or 8 or 10 hours of sleep.

 

So take it easy. Don't freak out too much about dream recall.

 

 

To all involved, enjoy the experience Dreams are fun. They're natural. Enjoy it. Play with it. If it happens, great. If not, whatever. Move on.

 

There's a lot of pressure to perform, because if you fail one night, that night is gone, so you really want to make each night count. But when you do that, you set yourself up for failure.