Not Even In Your Dreams
Posted on April 25, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 24 Comments
I had this dream last night that I was playing a guitar and singing a song, and everyone around me started singing along with me. And when the song was done, I said, “wow, you must have really liked the song,” and someone said “no, we were all singing to drown out your guitar playing.”
Here’s the song, done by people who both sing and play guitar, respectively, rather better than I do.
Dear Mr. Scalzi,
As an avid dream monger, I took the liberty of trying my hand at your dream by looking the two conspicuous parts up on the internet. For fun, I usually add the shown parts in a dream together to construct a reasonable explanation or story. THey are below.
Singing
To sing in your dream, represents happiness, harmony and joy. You are uplifting others with your positive attitude and cheerful disposition. Singing is a way to celebrate, communicate and express your feelings.
Guitar
To dream that you have or play a guitar, represents passion and emotion. It also has relates to sexual connotations. To see an unstrung or broken guitar, signifies disappointments in love.
What do you think of them? Would you say they make sense to you?
(if you say you do) I’d like you to know that I would never want your guitar playing to be drowned out, because I really love your singing. You are one of my favorite singers, in fact, currently, my fav singer.
I’ll stop now, before I sound too much of a psycho babbler.
Teri:
I think the dream mostly reflects that I play guitar badly, actually. I own a couple of them and I’m good enough to do basic chords but not any soloing. My actual instrument is drums. Also, Krissy and Athena are currently taking guitar lessons, so there’s a lot of guitaring going on in the Scalzi household recently.
But dream analysis is always fun. I think I do tend to skew any dream analysis because I am a lucid dreamer, and can edit my dreams pretty much at will. This is one reason I’ve never actually had a nightmare.
You have got me thinking. I don’t remember ever having a dream that included music. Thats odd because I am an avid music fan, I own about 600 cd’s. very strange. Nice song to have in your dream. I love Cold Play, and Yellow is one of my favorite songs.
Scalzi said:
“… [I] can edit my dreams pretty much at will. …”
Except when it comes to the reaction to your guitar playing.
I have very strange dreams many include my death in strange ways.
One memorable dream included the giant rock monster from Neverending Story as a giant robot rollerblading down a road(I was riding on its shoulder) that snakes down a grassy hill ending in an Indiana Jones type trap that opened a trapdoor in the road.
Dream weirdness:
* I haven’t (recalled that I have) dreamed in black and white in decades. My sons claim never to have done so. Did people dream in black and white before the advent of photography?
* Sound is uncommon in my dreams (touch, smell and taste even rarer, in that order). I’m a visual-spatial kinda guy anyway, but this is extreme. People seldom speak, there’s only the knowledge that the speaking has happened.
* Has anyone here ever dreamed in animation? It’s rare, but it’s happened to me (once with puppets, but that was in early childhood and may have been influenced by too much TV)
* Editing/Lucidity is rare, usually amounts to no more than being able to stop the film, with effects not dissimilar to burning a frame in the projector: it’s messy and disturbing
JS,
At least your dreams have sequiturs . . . mine never seem to. Therefore my dream recitations sound more like “You must have really liked the song.” Them: “No, the elephants are on a diet.” Which always seems like a perfectly valid response in dreamville . . .
Scalzi plays guitar as well? What don’t you do?? :)
Being a avid guitarist myself and owning a small collection of some real beautiful instruments, I must ask…what kind of guitars do you own?
As for the dreaming part, sounds like a good topic for Whateveresque!
Time to start a new thread.
Ray – Note he didn’t say he plays guitar well.
I can play guitar too. I assume. Never tried, but give me a guitar and a pick, I’m sure I can make noise.
There’s the classic line attributed to Abraham Lincoln who told Mary Todd “I want to dance with you in the worst way” .. and then proceeded to do so.
My strangest dream was a whole movie, the sort of thing they show on Hallmark channel. It had a theme song at the end (something about clouds) and both beginning and ending credits in bright yellow sans-serif print. The title was The Elastic Boarding House.
Or maybe it was the one that was in C++. Really. It would be very difficult to explain, but it made sense in itself.
So, Teri @ 1, what do those mean?
My strangest dream has to have been the one where I was watching a SciFi Channel Original Motion Picture, MANtis. I wrote up the plot as I remembered it when I woke up, and, you know, it’s probably better than most of their OMPs.
I have recurring nightmares about people being in my house.
I’ve dreamed in song before. Most recently I asked the cast if they would wait while I wrote down the blue lyrics and I was told that wasn’t how it works. Then they all left me, going to another room to continue singing.
Most recently I dreamed a cello solo. Never played the instrument, but I love it.
I almost always forget my dreams when I wake up, but when I do, they’re weird.
I once dreamt that someone I played D&D with seduced me, only we rolled dice about it, like will-save, bluff-check and sense-motive.
I also once dreamt that I was talking to a cat who knew what I needed to do different to make everything turn out all right, but just as the cat was about to tell me, the alarm clock rang.
I’ve dreamt in languages that I study, but don’t have even the remotest speaking fluency. When I worked at a comic shop, I would dream in panels. That was fun, but weird.
Hmm. I wonder if I’ll ever dream in lisp or C++? That’s better than my random pondering of yesterday, right Nathan and Kate?
Spooky.
Last night I dreamt I was performing some of my nerdcore peices and I had one about Old Man’s War, and in my dream I knew that I had a drum-break that also sampled some voice clip of you saying “Old Man’s War”, and then I looked to my left and there YOU were, actually saying the sample loops on stage, which surprised the hell out of me.
I was so surprised when I woke up, I forgot to write down the lyrics and kept thinking, “John Scalzi was beatboxing?”
Tania, you’re starting to scare me.
2-second hijack…Tania’s on Jeopardy on Monday.
::Nathan takes his Scalzi beat-down like a man::
I just came out of retirement and started playing music again. Last week my trio played as part of the Thunder Over Louisville Fireworks show.
The night before the show, I had a dream where all my fears were realized–the PA didn’t work–my voice cracked on the high notes. People ridiculed me. No matter which way I turned there was failure.
Admittedly, it’s been a while. The last few years, I would show up and play a few songs for various good causes and was treated as one of the village elders–given beer and lots of attaboys.
I guess the the thought of actually working two shows by myself was a lot scarier than I had considered. Nothing bad happened at the show, but I’m glad to see my fear of complete failure is alive and well.
Thats not as weird as my dream of lesbian zombies.
I occasionally have dreams with original music in them. I’ve gotten two and a half songs out of that, actually— one was the foundation of the mass I wrote for our wedding.
The other was a heavy-metal soundtrack set to fighting ninjas in front of Jesus’ tomb.
I love how dreams are just so very strange…
I’ve gone “This is my dream and I don’t like the way this is going so I’ll just change it now.” To some extent, I’ve been able to get my daughter to do something similar. Typically my dreams are rather mundane, or so my husband tells me. I can usually recognize that it’s an attempt to deal with some problem or stress that I’m having in waking life. My husband’s dreams have aliens and guns that shoot when he says ‘bang’ and he can sometimes fly. So yeah, compared to that, my dreams are mundane.
I remain fascinated by many people’s ability to talk very precisely about what their dreams consist of. I, for instance, have no idea whether I dream in black-and-white or color. Should the assumption, since I don’t have any distinct memory of which it is, be color?
I do know that my dreams (or at least the ones I have vague memories of) have long, convoluted plotlines, connected together by things that aren’t quite non sequiturs, but are close.
But I mainly just wanted to encourage John for his recent practice of adding a song to the occasional entry. It’s nice.
I once had a dream with a soundtrack advertisement at teh end. It was a double CD soundtrack, but there was only one song in the dream. Lucky Man by ELP
Robert Hutchinson: I think your ability to remember your dreams has a lot to do with how you sleep. I’m a pretty shallow sleeper for the most part— last night I woke up because our cat was making a very subtle hurking sound (missed the timing anyway and stepped in cat puke)— so I’m close to awake when I have the dreams. Somebody like Evil Rob, who has to be dragged out of sleep to a howling alarm, doesn’t remember dreams nearly so well or so frequently.
When I sing, my piano playing is no longer the weak point of the song.