Tuesday, April 16, 2019

It's So BORING To Talk About DREAMS

Uh oh.

This is true: I dream a lot.  I always have.  Sometimes my dreams have felt more real than my life, which says nasty things about my life, not my dreams.  I had a dream I fell in love with a girl I never met in a dream in high school, & almost convinced myself she was real.  It was only when I tried to figure out how someone could appear to you in your dreams - trying to work out the mechanism - that I realized it was only a dream.  Also, she looked a lot like a girl I was crushing on in school.

There's one recurring dream - it's not that the dream is recurring - there's an element of dreams that happens or has happened enough times that it's seemingly recurring.  It's this: I dream that I have written & maybe even performed a song.

It's usually just one song.  In the dream, I'm reflecting on how hard it was & sometimes I even think I don't like the song, but I say to myself, "Hey! At least I wrote a song!"

& it's not like I just wrote the words.  Nope, in the dreams what gives me satisfaction is that I not only did that, but I wrote the music & possibly even played some of the music.

It probably wouldn't surprise you that not only could I fail to carry a tune in a bucket but also I have no natural ability when it comes to music.  I can barely grasp the basics of music theory.  Oh hell yeah I can talk for hours about lyrics in a song & I can chat about some elements of the composition but ask me what key it's in?  Forget it.

The treacherous thing about these dreams is not just that I am somehow goofily proud & even a little smug that I wrote a song, but that often - like this morning - I wake up thinking, "Yeah, I'm glad I was able to write that song that one time, & then record it."

Of course, I've never done that.  & it dawns on me as the morning wears on & I start trying to think about the song.  When did I do all that writing & music playing?  Why?  Where is the song now?  Why am I not thinking about it all the time if I'm so durned proud about it at the moment?

Oh yeah.  There's no song.

Yes, I was in a "band" in high school where I shouted improvised lyrics into a recording device.  But my friend Russ went back & added all the music touches - all the instruments, really.  The song was barely mine & I of course wasn't singing & didn't have a sense of melody or anything.  The same thing happened in my living room fifteen years ago with friends from radio where they played their guitars & I sang along with them.  But those weren't my songs.

Still, I am not angry about these dreams.  They let have a feeling of accomplishment I don't normally feel in real life.  If only I could remember as I'm waking up that there's no song, no song of mine, anywhere but my dreams.  That sleepy realization is the worst part.

Hm, this wasn't entirely about dreams.  Still, it probably was pretty boring.

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