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Comment by Unai | Hacker News Reader

When I was young, I dreamt that I was playing guitar and made up a cool song. When I woke up I was so excited, that's something you would hear an old rockstar say about their best song, right? "Came to me in a dream". I jumped out of bed, grabbed the guitar, and started playing the song, every note still clear in my memory.

It was a completely random series of notes.

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Many years ago I had such a profound insight in one of my dreams that I woke up and wrote it down on an index card so I wouldn't forget.

Here's the pearl of wisdom I captured for posterity:

"Emotions — it's emotions that invented and fricasseed the invisible ravioli."

(I still have the card.)

At least you now have a title for your autobiography!

William James reported that a friend of his who was experimenting with nitrous oxide gas kept thinking he'd solved the riddle of the universe when high, but kept forgetting what he'd figured out when he woke up in the morning, so he kept a pen and paper next to him while high and rushed down the following morning to see that he'd written "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."

Love your pearl of wisdom. Don't know if this was the intent, but it made me laugh despite feeling a bit sad today.

Like Flaming Globes of Sigmund

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_Attack#Plot

"banana big but banana skin is bigger" - supposedly Orwell

Yea, I have composed song (music with lyrics) in my dream. But after waking up, didn't remember most of it.

I wonder if I did compose them, or did I just have a memory of having composed a great song?

What is experience, if not our very latest memory, right?

Giuseppe Tartini claimed his violin sonata "Il trillo del diavolo" (Devil's trill) was played to him by the devil itself during a dream. However, unlike you, Tartini declared that he had been able to capture only a small part of the music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Trill_Sonata

A fee years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a very cool sounding riff playing in my head for a song that I was thinking about at that time. I am not a musician and that would be my first, if I would recruit enough help.

I made noises with my mouth, and it still sounded cool. Instead of recording those noises into any recording on my phone, I went back to sleep and couldn’t remember it the next morning :(

That's why Keith Richards kept a tape recorder on his bedside table. He credits it with capturing the famous riff for "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," which came to him in a dream.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-ric...

Richard James did an album of these using synthesizers to record from memory and lucid dreaming to compose.

Selected Ambient Works!

the 2nd one only

“Richard James” ok dude do you live in his submarine? Just call him Aphex Twin

I often have the experience that I've discovered a really good idea in a dream. It happens often enough that I recognize it as a dream and I become curious about whether it will actually be a good idea when I wake up, because almost as often it is random and silly. I spend the rest of the dream intent on remembering it, and usually I do. Every once in a while I get a melody or an idea I want to run with, but it always makes me excited and ready to work.

Happens to songwriters too, sometimes it goes somewhere. I had a dream once, on the morning of a July 4th, that for some reason took a really common cliche jazz/blues riff and slowed it way down while I was dreaming of a bunch of Americana images. It became this song, the riff is at the beginning: https://music.apple.com/us/album/so-beautiful/899061469?i=89...

I wish it would happen more often, that's only happened for one other song of mine. Most of the rest are a lot of gritted teeth and frustration.

I have made poetry in some dreams which feels very profound and very rhyming (I have zero poeticness or interest in poetry) but I also remember that a few times when I did wake up with those words still in my head, it was a mish mash of words.

Supposedly that's how Keith Richards came up with Satisfaction.

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