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I had what I think was a good line occur to me in my sleep last night.

I thought, 'I'll have to remember that and write it down tomorrow.'

This morning all I remembered is that there was a line about something there, for a minute, sometime in the night.

Sound familiar?

Oh, yes. I'll get lines before I sleep, or while I'm sleeping--sometimes it'll even wake me up. I will *not* write them down. I will try to make sure I remember them in the morning. Sometimes I do. If I don't remember it, I figure it just wasn't worth remembering.

It's good mnemonic training; when I finally have to perform something on stage, it's going to be without props, just me and the guitar. I *better* remember stuff.

Joe

When I was in high school, I toyed with the idea of becoming a stand-up comic. I kept a notebook next to my bed just in case something came to me in the night. For a long while, I didn't come up with anything, but then I had THE DREAM.

I was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and after a great set, I was invited over to the couch for for the interview. During the interview, I told Johnny (and the audience) the funniest story of all time. The audience laughed uproariously. Johnny cried from laughing so much and couldn't put a sentence together.

I then woke up and remembered my notepad. I quickly wrote down the joke and went back to sleep. When I woke up in the morning, I looked at the notebook and there was nothing but gibberish. It was completely incomprehensible. I have no idea what it said, but I know it was genius. Oh well, at least I still have the memory of being on the Tonight Show (sort of).

Kevin! I saw that Tonight Show!!! You were Fabulous!!!! But the trouble with The Joke, was that most of it got "bleeped" out by the censors, so only Johnny & the audience actually heard it.

Wish I could help, because it looked hilarious!

Midnite

Thank you, Midnight, for your very kind comments. I wonder why no one else I know saw that show.

When a line wakes me up, I get up and write it down.
I figure if it went to all that trouble...

Hey lee, it happens to me all the time. I don't actually dream lyrics and melodies, but hear them in my subconscious. What I mean is that they come to me in early sleep. I try to shut off my brain from everyday thoughts and let it go in any direction that it wants. Kind of like meditation. I'm guilty of being too lazy to get up and write it down. I even kept a cassette recorder next to my bed, but I'm still too lazy to use it. If I don't remember it, it's lost.

In the past few months, I've written four or five songs after waking up in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning. If inspiration is going to come, I am not going to shoo it away.

Kevin

So many times I thought I had a good tune in my head during the night time and I was convinced I'd remember it because it made a perfect sense to me yet never once I remembered any tune which I had in my mind in the night time. I did wake up once with the tune though and it became the main tune of one of my compositions later. I have to say that there were occasions when I felt really good about having something sounding good to my mind, I had a chance to write it down only to discover later that I didn't like it at all and I couldn't understand why I liked it at first. There are situations though when it's really important to act promptly when the inspiration comes. In case I don't like it later I know at least I've tried.
Nadia

Some of my best stuff is written in my dreams LOL

Seriously I often lie awake at night and an idea for a song or a tune or killer lyric will pop into my head. If I go to sleep before jotting it down it is gone forever. I keep a pad and pen handy just in case. I also have a tiny memory stick/MP3 player that has a built in mic handy.

I can't imagine the sleepy gibberish that would have come out of my recorder if I had used it. Write it down and erase immediately. Hope we're still friends Big Jim. Ben

In the 80's my Father got into all these mind control courses. One of them was all about keeping a pad and pen by the bed and writing down those thoughts.

One night he did it and thought he had written down the world's greatest business idea. He went back to sleep with thoughts of the untold millions it was going to bring in. He was already picking out his new Mercedes and couldn't wait to wake up to start making his new fortune.

When he woke up he excitedly grabbed his pad and read what he had written. It said:

"Reprocess dandruff to make Gold fish food."

He quit writing them down after that.

MAB

What a story, Marc! Thank you for sharing.
Nadia

Many of you are familiar with McCartney's story of dreaming the melody of "Yesterday." When he woke up he played it and, when his girlfriend's mother asked if anyone wanted scrambled eggs, he sang, "Scrambled eggs, All I want is some scrambled eggs." A year or two later, driving down the coast of Portugal, he wrote the "Yesterday" lyric. The 'eggs' line served as a melodic place holder, to enable him to remember that poignant melody which has been recorded by many, many other artists, and still has the hook-factor it had when I first heard it.

Capture your inspirations, whenever they come, wherever they come from. A poet once said she pulled her car over "...to receive the incoming poem."

When I'm not busy partying with rock stars or part of the C.S.I. crew in my dreams, occassionally I DO hear a complete original song...it's usually right before I wake up. I try to hum it enough to get it down on something before it goes away. Sometimes I can hold it for five minutes...sometimes it goes away in seconds!

Sometimes I'm a millionairess on a really cool cruise in the Carribean, and I'm like, 110 pounds! It's awesome!

Hi Lee:

It happens quite often with me. If I'm not feeling like a train wreck, I'll get up and stumble around trying to find pen and paper 'cause if I don't, I sure won't remember it next morning.
It is amazing how some seem to turn out well and others are quickly "buried" in my songwritng notebooks. I never throw a lyric away. Resurection is always possible at a later date.

I had a lyric bugging me all night the last time I stayed in a motel.
There wasn't a pencil or pen in the room and I hadn't brought one with me.
So I kept repeating it when I was awake and wrote it down in the morning with a pen I got from the desk clerk.
It wasn't as good at eight a.m. as it sounded at three.

A couple nights ago I dream two friends and I were playing on stage with Joni Mitchell. I don't know what we were playing. I awoke aware of the visual aspects, but not the audio. Too bad! I'll bet we were great!

All too familiar, Lee.

Luckily, though, lyric ideas or lines often come to me in that pre-sleep state when one is drifting off. Which means of course that I have to sit up and start writing straightaway, and I end up pulling an all-nighter or just managing a couple of hours' sleep. No wonder my body clock is so out of whack.

Sometimes too a line or hook/title will spring to mind just as I'm waking up. I've written a couple of lyrics on the basis of these hooks.

Big Jim, please tell me more about this USB stick with an inbuilt recorder...

A couple of times in dreams I've heard complete musical scores that were exquisite. But because I'm not a musician and don't (yet) play an instrument, there was nothing I could do with the music when I woke up. It was so frustrating. I could even hum the melody for several hours afterwards before it vanished.

Donna

Yep, on the stuff that comes in pre-sleep, sleep and early morning. IMO or Maybe in my case , that's when the best stuff comes. The conscious mind is more often than not, just "In the way".
As Hank Williams is reported to have said when they asked him how he wrote all those songs --"I" don't write 'em
. I just write 'em down"
I wanta know about that USB stick too, Big Jim
Wy

Hi guys and gals:

I don't want to steal Big Jim's thunder but there are any number of memory sticks (in various configurations) available on the market today... from the simple to the sublime. Naturally, the more memory the thing contains... the higher the price. If you want voice recording as well, be prepared to pay even more.

MP3 is a marvelous tool and memory sticks augment the transfer of files (including music) from PC to PC or from PC to gizmo/MP3 Player or other digitial devices. Don't get too hung up over name brand. Now, many devices come with built in USB ports and the transfer of songs created on sophisticated newer keyboards are fitted for this purpose. Most MP3 files take up 3 to 4K of memory (per song) and WAV files take about triple the space, so buy accordingly or you'll only be able to transfer one MP3 file at a time.

Hope this helps.

It has happened to me sometimes. The first time was in 1997: I dreamt of an Ecuadorian songwriter that I'd done a documentary on for college. He was a hero of mine. Anyways, I dreamt that in my dream he said "In the end, we all end up praying to ourselves" (in Spanish, "Al final, todos terminamos rezandonos a nosotros mismos.") I woke up, couldn't get the line out of my head. Some months later, I wrote "Rezándote a ti misma" ("Praying to Yourself"), a song about somebody who loses hope in everyone and the singer telling her to not give up and find something new to believe in.

Some years ago, I dreamt of a bass player I knew and I was looking over his shoulder as he was playing this really hooky bass line. I wrote "Do That Thing for Me" as a result of that dream.

In around 1999, I dreamt of the perfect woman! Thing is, I never actually saw her face in my dream. So, I woke up, frustrated to find out it was only a dream, and wrote "Me duermo a buscarla" ("I Go to Sleep to Find Her").

Last year, just before I woke up I was dreaming of a song I ended up writing in the next hour after I woke up. So came to life "All These Ticking Clocks".

Cheers!

I awoke one morning with the title "Mi Corazon", knowing I needed to write the song. One problem: I don't speak Spanish.

I researched it and found the literal meaning ("my heart"). I tend to avoid the subject of internal organs in my music, no matter how vital they may be. So I didn't go any farther.

Two weeks later, I happened to read an article in the New York Times about Calle Ocho, the center of Cuban-American life in Miami. Something clicked, and I was moved to look at "Mi Corazon" again. This time, I found the colloquial meaning ("my darling),and a song concept started forming. I had to practice the pronunciation of a lot of the words I used, but it turned out pretty well.

Sleep writing has never happened to me. I dreamed a plot for a fiction novel one time though. My children told me that they saw me direct a choir in my sleep.

Happens to me a lot! Only once, many years ago, did I manage to wake myself up while humming the tune, and actually write it down. It was when I was first writing songs so I was really pleased with myself. It's not a bad melody...but I need to write better words.

Quite often I'll hear an amazing melody in my sleep, but for the life of me I can't remember it when I wake up!

I'd love to hear "I Go To Sleep To Find Her."

I had one of those. A lovely girl, in a bathing suit, knocks on my door in a motel, and I'm expecting her. I wrote "Stay Before You Go."

Dreams begin about 10 minutes after you fall asleep and run in 90 minute cycles throughout the night. Since we spend about 1/3 of our lives doing that, it's a significant phenomenon we may not be paying enough attention to. By talking about dreams, or journaling about it, you'll begin to remember more about them. You can write about a paragraph, then a few days later, a half page, then a full page, and in a week or so you can remember pages of details. Trouble is, none of it makes a lot of sense. But you do become more attuned to your dreams.

We live lives in the 21st century where the alarm goes off and we jump up and start running from thing to thing and don't take time to remember our dreams. But they still happen.

All the time. A few times I have gotten up and written down the line or recorded a few lines into a small recorder. Sometimes in the morning I think - how in the world did I think that was any good? - a few times, it actually worked.

Tom

I too have always kept a small tape recorder and pad and pen by my bed side. My husband knows that if I jump out of bed in the middle to the night, its probably to record or write something down. I firmily believe that we are the conduits for music already written but sometimes our egos and conscious minds or just life itself get in the way. Some of my best melodies come to me during the night when my ego is out of the way. Its like the source of all inspiration is saying to me "How badly do you want it?". That alone will force me to get out of bed and get it on tape.

I got up three times last night to sing a few lines into my small recorder. Now to see if they really are the three best songs every written (as I was convinced at the time)....LOL

Tom

I don't usually come up with a line while I'm sleeping. Sometimes I'm probably half asleep or wake up for a few minutes and start thinking about this song I'm writing and how to make it better, etc. But I've gotten to where I definitely get up, go to the kitchen where I keep my laptop, and revise it right then. Otherwise, I'll never remember it in the morning. Wish I had a system to do the same thing for a melody change. I do that too sometimes when I'm about to go to sleep or even on the golf course! (Probably never should have started this song writing crap!...lol).........Tony