Do you Hear Music When you Dream?
Dreams mean different things for different people, some people dream a lot, while others don’t dream at all. Certain fields of psychology study dreams and try to uncover hidden meanings within. Regardless of your take on dreams, and whether or not they hold any special meaning, perhaps we can agree on one thing, and that is more often than not they reflect elements from our actual lives. In the same way, a person who was born blind might not be able to “see” in their dreams, so too would it be difficult for us to dream about things with which we have no experience with. What we see in our dreams may be a melding together of different aspects of our lives that we may not easily recognize, but in some fashion, we have been exposed to it.
Many of us have dreams while we asleep, but do you know that compared to musicians, non-musician actually tends to not have music present in their dreams? In fact, while musicians have music present in their dreams roughly 40% of the time their non-musician counterparts only have music in their dreams about 18% of the time.
The question is why is the presence of music in one’s dreams seemingly dependent upon whether or not one plays music? The answer probably lies in the brain. The brain of a musician and a non-musical are in fact different. With a musician, certain regions of the brain are more active (this happens when skills are developed and honed – the parts of your brain needed to perform that skill essentially get a work out). Daniel J. Levitin had a very interesting take on the role music has on the brain when he said: “Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.”