Thread: what is listening to music like in LDs?

I'm very newly a lucid dreamer and already have 1,000 questions.

One that came to mind tonight on my drive home was, "If I turned on the radio in a lucid dream, what would my subconscious play?" If it played a hit I was really into at the time, how accurate would it be? Would the song be just familiar enough to pass as realistic to me? Does the subconscious remember lyrics better than my conscious brain does, would it be able to fill in the lyrics more accurately than I could when put on the spot in the same way consciously? I know it might have a lot to do with expectation.

What are your experiences with this, if any? I'm so curious

in my experiences it has always been perfect, but i am sure other people have had it fail. usually it seems to pick a song i really enjoy, or i pick a song i enjoy.

I am a piano player, and sometimes I hear fantastic compositions in my dreams, both lucid and non-lucid. They are always really beautiful and I have not heard them before. On a very few select occassions, I've managed to more or less recreate the song on the piano. Music otherwise is always epic, and if you are lucid it will not disappoint you Like the many other amazing details your mind creates in lucid dreams, music is no exception.

I almost always have "background music" playing in my dreams. Usually it's real songs that I've heard when awake and then when I do wake up they're stuck in my head for awhile. I too have heard fantastic compositions of fictitious music in dreams, songs I know would be profound if I could recreate them when awake. When I play the piano in a dream, it's always perfect, even though I know I'm obviously doing something wrong. In dreams I'm also able to play other musical instruments that I've never played before with exquisite perfection.

i also often listen to audiobooks while sleeping, and those will be playing in my dreams. it is kind of weird when you are in a dream with headphones on and you take them off, but the book keeps going, especially when one ear has fallen out. haha.

just in my dream last night i started playing some music and kanye west was the first artist to come on. song sounded almost exactly the same as it does in real life.

hella realistic mann.

Originally Posted by Dexter33

I am a piano player, and sometimes I hear fantastic compositions in my dreams, both lucid and non-lucid. They are always really beautiful and I have not heard them before. On a very few select occassions, I've managed to more or less recreate the song on the piano. Music otherwise is always epic, and if you are lucid it will not disappoint you Like the many other amazing details your mind creates in lucid dreams, music is no exception.

I happen to study music as well (singer) and whenever I hear music, it's usually composed by my subconscious during very emotionally heavy dreams. However when I play music I've memorized, the quality is identical to real life however it often jumps and skips bars.

When I wake up and recal the compositions, it's usually a very simple melody that sounded much better because of the intense emotions I felt while hearing it.

One of the things I like the best is turning the volume up as much as possible because unlike the real world, there is no limit to how loud you can hear because you never actually "hear" it.

Originally Posted by Him

When I wake up and recal the compositions, it's usually a very simple melody that sounded much better because of the intense emotions I felt while hearing it.

This really fits with my experience as well. Nearly every time I hear music in a dream (lucid or otherwise), there are very strong emotions associated with it. Sometimes the music itself is certainly not complex or even very interesting in retrospect, but at the time, it's auditory euphoria.

My dreams tend to have soundtracks which reflect the emotional content of the dream itself - or rather, the music and the dream together create an emotional experience. This also includes horror-based dreams about monsters, being trapped somewhere etc; the music tends to go with the scenario, and it's not always a pleasant scenario!

2 nights ago I was outside in a lucid dream and nice music could be heard in the background. I decided to try running super fast. As I did the music faded and almost went away completely. Afraid I was waking up, I stopped running, and the music came back. That was intetesting to me. Another time I was outside on a boardwalk at night, and was eager to fly. I started hearing the old Peter Pan song "You can fly!", and I was singing along. It was right on note and lyric...but then, I know the song pretty well.

It varies for me. Often in LDs I've gotten familiar songs to play, and they have generally seemed pretty realistic (as far as I could tell). Many other times I've heard interesting variations of tunes and even neat tunes I've never heard before, especially in nonlucid dreams. It's amazing because I can hardly invent any kind of original, interesting melody in my head when awake.

I've been impressed at the kinds of transformations I've experienced of songs in dreams. Years ago, I had heard an Internet clip of a song that I liked a lot, but the clip was of very low sound quality, and I had never yet heard the full-quality version at the time. I then had an LD where I heard a noise-free and improved-sounding version created entirely by my mind, which was pretty awesome. The voice-over narration in the clip was even flawlessly removed.

Another amazing lucid (or semilucid at least) I seem to recall was hearing a song and consciously influencing its melody and course as it played. It's hard to remember exactly how this worked. I don't really know much about music in waking life and hardly know anything about composing a song. In the dream it just felt like I had a vague conscious idea of what I wanted the song to do, and my dreaming mind took care of the rest.

Experimenting with music in LDs in definitely something worth doing.