joel/is/blogging/now

John and Olle,

It is 5:02 am.

I just woke up.

I was composing in my sleep. This is unusual, but it does happen from time to time... a sign of creative energy flowing.

In my dream, there was a song that you guys said needed a bridge.

I came up with a poignant addition to the song that I was pretty sure would impress you.

There were four lines of lyrics, with perfect meter. I remember I even had an idea for the visual scenes that would go along with those words if we ever made a video for the song. It had to do with being trapped underground, like in a cave, and water coming into the cave. As the water level rose, there was a protagonist who had to be quick and resourceful to find a way to save his girl and himself.

In my dream I was writing the lyrics out on paper with a pen.

Then I woke up, and found that I had been dreaming. Then I realized that meant that the lyrics I had just composed were therefore not actually written down.

I thought, now that I was awake, I'd better go over the lyrics in my conscious mind, so I could remember them and write them down just to evaluate them with my waking mind.

I thought I should start by retrieving the rhyming parts of the stanza I had composed.

I recalled that I had rhymed "urgency" (or possibly "urgently") with "emergency."

I started to feel that these lyrics were going to turn out not to be as good as they'd sounded in my sleep.

And then the Foreigner song, "Urgent," came into my mind, from 1981. I must have heard that song at least 400 times in my life, despite never actually *wanting* to hear it.

That song displaced and dispelled my own lyrics, and they are lost.

One day in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell into a sleeplike trance while under the influence of opium. He claimed that he composed somewhere between 200 and 300 lines of a poem in his trance. When he awoke, he remembered the entire poem clearly, and intended to write it down. But unfortunately, just then a friend came to his door to discuss some business, and they talked for about an hour. When he later returned to the task of writing down the poem, he realized that he could recall only a fragment from the beginning. The remaining fragment is his famous poem "Kubla Khan."

When I compose in my sleep, the process often moves with amazing fluidity and speed that I wish I could recapture when I'm awake. But then if I do remember any of it long enough to write it down, it turns out to be garbage more often than not.

Sometimes I can do a bit of work just after awakening, in the quiet of the morning when I still have some of that dreamlike fluidity, but I also have some of my critical faculties available so I can tell between the decent ideas and the nonsense.

A large section of one of the songs we're working on, "Find Your Way," was started just upon awakening.

I went straight to my piano, and worked out at least half of the lyrics for the song really quickly. Then my friend Shaun rang my doorbell, and I talked to him for about two minutes. When I came back to my piano, I'd forgotten most of what I'd composed. I think it took me at least a week to reconstruct the lost sections that had come to me in just a few minutes. Fortunately in that instance I felt like the reconstructed parts were as good as the parts I'd forgotten.

The first lines of the song:

I woke up this morning
With the rain coming down
And a pain in my head
From the sorrows I drowned

I bought myself some time
On the rail last night
Now my troubles reappear
In this grey morning light

I realized subsequently that the first 2 lines might sound a little cliched, but all those lines were 100% true. It was morning, it was raining (in the middle of the summer) and therefore somewhat grey, and I was feeling washed out from going out the night before and drinking over my troubles.

Joel

// posted by Joel @ 6:55 AM