Music in Our Subconscious

As of late, I have been experiencing quite vivid dreams.

I can recall my dreams from the last three consecutive nights with great lucidity, which is not something that happens often for me. This recent onslaught of dreams was most likely due to stress. Over the last past week, I finished and submitted applications to seven universities, so I presume that lots of stress-related college thoughts probably arose from so.

 In fact, on the first of the three nights, I had a dream in which +Nicole  was admitted into Yale University (though she never applied there in real life). Earlier that day I submitted my application to Yale. My dreams have had a mix of happy and nightmare-y events. Nicole's admission was a positive, but also in my dream, I missed a timed writing in my AP English class. The same was with my other dreams. Last night I was lounging around on a Hawaiian beach  (what I consider a HUGE positive for me) with my entire immediate family as well as friends including +Marissa & +Annie, but I could not, for the life of me, find my cousin. And she was SUPPOSED to be there. Also, when nighttime fell, and we had to leave the beach, Annie and Marissa needed a ride; however, we did not have room in our rental car for of us to return to wherever we came from. The dream ended there.

Well enough of that personal stuff.


What I wanted to talk about in this post was hearing music in dreams. I do not ever remember hearing music in my dreams. I have heard voices from people speaking and other noises, like in my second dream. That dream was much too personal to reveal on the Internet, but I can clearly recall the sound of rain beating down everywhere, on the streets and rooftops as well as the sound of my rapid breathing (in my dream) caused by running away from something. But never any music. :(

 http://web.mit.edu/dmalt/Public/9.10/02sdarticle.pdf

I found this study titled "Music in Dreams" conducted by the University of Florence in Italy from MIT's website. In this study 35 non musicians (never received any formal instrumental or vocal training) and 35 musicians (instrumental and vocal performers of Western tonal music)  were gathered on a voluntary basis.

Beforehand they filled out a personal information survey that included for non musicians: # hours/days committed to listening to music over the past month and for musicians: age of commencement of musical instruction, years of practice, and the # of normal daily practice hours.

Each of them filled out a dream questionnaire for a consecutive thirty days.

At the end, this interesting data was found:

Musicians contained more than twice the recall of musical contents in their dreams than non-musicians.

After examining the p-values, there were no significant relationships found between musical dream recall and the years of musical practice, hours of daily practice, or hours/days committed to listening to music.

The most significant relationship was between musical recall and age of commencement of musical instruction. There was a negative moderately strong linear correlation. (r = -.41) The earlier the musicians began to receive musical instruction, the higher percentage their musical recall was. See Figure 1 below. 

Figure 1. Relationship between musical recall and age of commencement of musical instruction

Another interesting result they found (see Figure 2) was that the 45% of the musical content recorded by the dreamers was either unknown or strange variations of known pieces. Crazy. It could suggest that these musicians have the ability to create new combinations of musical memories to produce original musical structures in THEIR SLEEP. Wow.

Figure 2. Around 45% of dreamt music was "non-standard".

Very cool results, but now I feel sad. I commenced taking piano lessons starting at age 6 and cello lessons at age 8. Why can't I hear any music (...or should I not be asking that, fellow AP Stats students lol)? :( 

I'm interested to hear some of your comments. Have any you, readers out there, heard music in your dreams? If so, have you ever been formally trained and at what age did you commence your instrumental/vocal studies?