The Doorway to Dreams
Posted by Matt
During the last couple years, since I’ve had children swirling through the rooms of my house, I’ve found that the best place to mine for melodies and words is right near the edge of dreams. Of course, sleep itself is unimaginably precious, and I never want to leave. But when I wake up in the middle of the night, I try to be ready and listening. If I hear words or a melody, I repeat them in my mind. I’m trying to understand and gain clarity. But, above all, I’m trying to preserve the thing I’ve heard within my crumbling mentality until I can get to a phone or computer to record what I’ve found.
Now the cliché would be that in the morning I listen and sag in disappointment. A trite melody, a stupid phrase. But I swear that more often what I hear whispered into the phone is a clear bolt of thought that I might have dismissed in the daytime or never found at all. Sometimes when I listen to my midnight messages I hear a melody that I’m sure must be lifted from the radio. Something big and archetypal. Then months go by as I and the band build around it, and nobody tells me that they’ve heard this one before.
I don’t know what makes the minutes near dreams especially fertile with ideas, but I do know that they are always times when practical cares and little voices are far away. I feel like I’ve found my Faustian cheat, and even if it costs me the sleep I want, I try to be ready to document what I hear when the doorway to dreams opens just a little bit.
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