Thread: Hearing

I’ve noticed recently that I can selectively block, relay, or amplify external noises while asleep. Not a big deal, I’m just posting it because its new to me.

The reason I’ve noticed it now is I’ve started playing Buckethead music to mask external noise while sleeping. Sometimes the music is totally absent from my awareness while I’m dreaming or thinking while asleep. At other times I can hear it, just like I would while awake. Last night I had a dream in which the external music was much louder in my dream than while awake, as if amplified. Then in my dream I turned off the amplification and it went back to normal.

When transitioning from being able to hear the music to not being able to here it, there’s a sense that the external impression is being copied or duplicated in the context that I’m dreaming in. It sounds the same in the dream as it does when awake though.

I’m pretty sure I’m not remembering the music and recreating it from my memory, I think I’m hearing what is actually happening at that moment.

The experience of sound is of course constructed from vibrations in the ears, and projected to an imagined location based on the relative amplitude and possibly phase of the two signals. So the experience is always imagined in that sense, even though I lack the ability to fiddle with the volume while awake.

When I say ‘I’ do these things, I mean my subconscious. As is my habit, I do not try to consciously drive my dreams. I make suggestions to my subconscious, which handles those details, and the conscious part of my mind witnesses and thinks about the result. The tradeoff is that the conscious ‘I’ seems to be less in control, but I’m open to new experiences which I would not be able to come up with consciously. Possibly I’m more mediumistic as a result, which might be undesirable, but that’s going off topic.