I've had two musical dreams so far. In the first one, I was practising my scales.
Now, most people think of a "scale" as one octave up and down. However, remember I was in training to be a concert pianist in another lifetime. For me, doing one key is an hour or longer.
For starters, all the scales are 4 octaves in length, and yes, they were all 4 octaves in my dream. I believe I was working in the key of A Flat.
I meticulously dreamt my way through 4 octaves, hands together, of the major, harmonic minor, and melodic minors of the key. I did them in thirds (where the left hand starts on the first note of the scale but the right hand starts on the third), tenths (the left hand again is on the first note but the right hand is on the third note, only an octave higher, so it's actually ten notes away from the left hand), and sixths (the right hand begins on the first note but the left hand starts on the third note). Four octaves, major, harmonic minor and melodic minor.
Then there were chromatics, where you play each white and black note, 4 octaves, and also in thirds, sixths and tenths.
Then there's contrary motion, where you start both hands on the same note near the middle of the keyboard and go two octave in opposite directions. These are done in major and harmonic minor only.
And then there are the arpeggios. These are done in the "normal" position, where the hands are an octave apart, but then you start on different notes. Those are called inversions.
Needless to say, it was a very long dream! The beauty of the key of A Flat is all the different fingering patterns you have to use because of all those flats. My brain would slow me down to a crawl while it watched my fingering very carefully, as if in slow motion. And I think I did everything two or three times in the dream, which would have taken two or three hours in waking life, back in the day when I could do scales nice and fast. Today I don't know how long it would take - next time I find an available piano I'm going to have a go at it, just to see!
Today's musical dream was of a piece I used to play, the Prelude in C from J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavichord. It's a simply, easy and lovely piece to play. I went through it easily about five or six times in the dream, in close-up, seeing the music right in front of my face, and then in different scenarios. As a teenager, on my grandparents' piano in their living room, as a child in a house with two other children who happened to be my Stepchildren, as an adult with the two Stepchildren but with my grandparents in their bedroom listening to me practise.
And a few days ago I had a "work" dream, where I was printing large-scale posters and mounting them on foamcor for a display. The pictures were of the royal family - not the current one, but the one in The Tudors - Henry VIII, Katherine Howard and Anne of Cleaves, specifically. But the fear was that the king wouldn't like them, because they weren't strict portraits, they were artsy-fartsy, done in a modern style, as if Picasso had painted them. But the toughest part was getting them mounted on foamcor - all I had were strips, and I had to glue and weave the foam strips together to make a solid backing for the posters.
And then there was the slightly scary dream, where I'm in my grandparents house. It's winter and it's nighttime, and the snow is piled into huge drifts, half burying the cars. Their old Buick is in the carport, the streets have snow-clearing machinery grinding away, but there are hoodlums pestering me, a gang of teenagers who are trying to break into the house or break into the car, and I keep running from door to window looking for them, trying to scare them away while checking to see if the locks are secure. But the most powerful image is of the blowing snow and the lights swaying in the wind.
The scales dream and the dream of the posters are both about structure. The underlying structure of my life, my real life, has been removed, shattered, and I'm dreaming about structure as my unconscious attempts to put the pieces of my life into a new order, trying to make sense out of the strange situation in which I find myself.
The Prelude in C is about me trying to figure out my relationship to my family, whether I'm a child or an adult, and who the family is that lives in that house.
And the winter nightmare is my unconscious warning me my borders have been breached, so to speak! My unconscious letting me know I'm having a breakdown of sorts.
Fun, eh? The only drawback is that I seem to be limited to one significant dream per night. The current insomnia pattern has me waking up at 4 a.m. every day, unable to get back to sleep. Which is too bad, as the dreams are very entertaining in an otherwise quite dull life.
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