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.
14 Comments
“Hi Matt…this is Matt. Write a song about fruit salad and how yummy yummy it is. See you in the morning.”
Posted by drneau
Example of that: Secret Smile. I remember Dan telling me that he ran downstairs to figure out how to play it and then shambled back upstairs to bed.
Do you ever have the experience of the song manifesting itself as something playing on the radio or performed by a band? I do. I’ll be like, “I love that song!” though I’ve never heard it before.
Another dreamy type experience that you can have when you’re awake is to hear your own music and not realize that it’s you and think, “wow, that’s cool!” It’s sort of like seeing yourself in a mirror and thinking, “nice outfit.” Or “what a dork.”
I think one of my great failings as an artist is the number of times I roll-over and go back to sleep when a song comes knocking thinking: I’ll remember it in the morning. I never do though!
Posted by John
At the edge of sleep our subconscious is fighting for control and all the “learned” behaviors and ideas are pushed aside for the deep down reality of ourselves. Um… and then the Mountain Dew kicks in. I have always kept a notebook by the bed… although for me it is more for recording visual ideas.
Posted by Chuk
I’ve always been able to fall asleep very quickly and don’t typically linger on the edge very long…probably less than 30 seconds…it seems I’m ready for sleep and then I’m asleep….there must be nothing on the edge of my subconscious that needs to reveal itself….
Posted by Kara
It’s true - our subconscious (inner self, true self) knows the answers if we just make the effort to listen…
Posted by Kris
Matt,
Thanks for sharing. I like the liner notes shift from discussing content to discussing process. It’s an interesting new angle. Your thoughts inspired some free associative reverie in me for a moment. I first thought of songs about dreams and the subconscious. “Astral Weeks”—to me, a masterpiece, one of the most gripping entries into an album:
“If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?”
And then I thought of what I consider to be a contemporary answer to “Astral Weeks”—a song John knows well—“No Cars Go” that seems to plumb the depths of a whole populations’ dreams:
“Between the click of the light
and the start of the dream”
cont’d
Posted by psh
But then I couldn’t help but consider “Deep All the Way Down” which must be your most direct musical examination of the creative process and self-doubt. I find that song’s mirror to be Sufjan Stevens’s epic about the World’s Fair in Chicago, “The World’s Columbian Exposition/ Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream.” In it, he discusses visitations from muses as he sleeps:
“I cried myself to sleep last night
And the ghost of Carl, he approached my window
I was hypnotized, I was asked
To improvise
On the attitude, the regret
Of a thousand centuries of death”
And, in the chorus, such as it is, he repeats sentiments very similar to your own:
I am riding all alone
I am writing all alone
...
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?
cont’d
Posted by psh
Maybe these similarities are coincidence, or maybe the music I most love would naturally cover similar ground and be created by similar personalities. But still I wonder: is your writing largely inspired by unconscious, unshaped stimuli, or do you react to thoughts and sounds you come across in music you are listening to, books you are reading, and conversations you are having at the time? How much of your writing process depends upon conscious craft, and how much do you attribute to felicitous inspiration? Do you ever write songs with other songs specifically in mind?
-psh
Posted by psh
This seems exactly like a liner note for some song with the notable caveat that the name of the song was omitted.
Posted by floyderdog
I had the same feeling floyderdog. Nice try Matt, but my guess is this is at least part of the LN for the yet to be released song “Soundwaves”. Pretty tricky sneaking this in now, while we’re all bedazzled with the glorious 10 of SN. Go ahead, try to deny it, you’ll only seal your gulit. Better yet, ignore this truth and concede that I have foiled your ploy.
Posted by Spike
As far as seeing visions in the darkest hours, I seem to come up with the most intriguing melodies very late, when playing past when I ought, or playing right after waking. Not actually from dreams, but in, well, the twilight hours I guess. That’s when I seem able to be the most original or creative. I used to convince myself these swirls of beauty were so unique and compelling I’d remember them later, but having lost many, I now make quick recordings. These are nice to return to, and I can fall right back into the feel when heard again.
Posted by Spike
...another wonderful long and insightful post by psh…wow..I’m so impressed with everyone’s musical knowledge
Posted by Kara
...yours too, Spike!
Posted by Kara
Once I heard a ethereal melody, faint, fleeting and haunting, and I hummed it into a cassette recorder before drifting off to sleep. I then set sad, deeply personal lyrics to the tune.
After recording the song on my first album, I proudly played it acoustically for a friend, and we realized together that I had pilfered the exact changes from Skynyrd’s “The Ballad of Curtis Lowe.”
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter; therefore, ye Twilight Hours, play on.” (Keats)
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