Playing guitar in your sleep

[mrcee]

When the music is memorable enough to stick in my head upon rising, I grab a guitar and a pad of paper and sketch it out quickly. That helps cement it in the ole noggin, for me.

That's good. It reminds me of a joke about a Hollywood screen writer who always got good plot ideas in dreams but would forget them when he woke up so he put a pad of paper and a pencil next to his bed so he could write them down. One night he had a dream and woke up and wrote it down. The next morning he woke up and looked at it. It said "boy meets girl."

[Thumpalumpacus]

Yeah, I like to flesh it out a little more than that.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

As close as I get...

[jasaco]

Yeah, I fell asleep in the middle of playing a line and apparently continued while briefly asleep and was still playing when I woke up. It continued to happen until I figured that it was time for bed. It's the first time that's ever happened. Similar to sleep walking I guess.

Verry interesting... Two questions:
(a) I wonder whether you kept good time right through the sleep phase (or perhaps better time?)?

(b) I wonder whether you continued playing the same line while asleep, straight through, or, perhaps instead slipped unconsciously into "Louie, Louie"...

[mrcee]

Verry interesting... Two questions:
(a) I wonder whether you kept good time right through the sleep phase (or perhaps better time?)?

(b) I wonder whether you continued playing the same line while asleep, straight through, or, perhaps instead slipped unconsciously into "Louie, Louie"...

Good question. When I was dozing off I was sitting in a chair of course and my head was bent down so when I woke up I was looking down at my guitar and I was playing in the same time and tempo as before I went to sleep and it sounded like a continuation of the same lines I was playing when awake. More or less straight eighths at about 140 bpm.

[SwingSwangSwung]

I was playing at a Hispanic marriage conference providing background music on a nylon string guitar with a piano player while the preacher did his thing. It was late night - I was sleepy - the teaching was in Spanish of which I could pick up very little - we were cycling thru the same chord progression over and over and ... suddenly I wake up and I'm still playing.

This happened twice that night. After it was all over I asked the piano player if he noticed I'd fallen a sleep twice during our playing and he had not. He said I just kept playing those chords...

Now if I could just get myself to run arpeggios and scales all night while I sleep, I could get in 6 hours of practice every night!

[jasaco]

One of the things about being asleep is that one loses track of time. It's entirely possible that you fell asleep but, in fact, for only 1 second or less. We commonly have the experience of waking up after dreaming and not really knowing how long it took us to dream a particular dream; could have run in real-time, or might have all been compressed into a flash of a second or two.

By the way, do you play finger-style, or did you hang onto your plectrum the whole time you were asleep? I would expect the muscles to relax and the plectrum to drop...

[mrcee]

One of the things about being asleep is that one loses track of time. It's entirely possible that you fell asleep but, in fact, for only 1 second or less. We commonly have the experience of waking up after dreaming and not really knowing how long it took us to dream a particular dream; could have run in real-time, or might have all been compressed into a flash of a second or two.

By the way, do you play finger-style, or did you hang onto your plectrum the whole time you were asleep? I would expect the muscles to relax and the plectrum to drop...

It's very possible that I was only asleep for a few seconds or less although my feeling is that it was a bit longer. If I'm at a late night social gathering and I'm bored I'll often just start nodding off for a second and immediately wake up. I have the unfortunate habit of doing it when someone really boring is prattling away, talking to me. But this felt different and seemed like I was pretty much sound asleep whatever that really means. Hard to say and you're right about loosing track of time. But I did notice that I was a few frets higher when I awoke. I was improvising, in time, over some sort of changes and not just randomly noodling. And, yes, I was holding a flat pick which I didn't drop. It kept happening over a ten minute period or so until I called it quits.

[mrcee]

I was playing at a Hispanic marriage conference providing background music on a nylon string guitar with a piano player while the preacher did his thing. It was late night - I was sleepy - the teaching was in Spanish of which I could pick up very little - we were cycling thru the same chord progression over and over and ... suddenly I wake up and I'm still playing.

This happened twice that night. After it was all over I asked the piano player if he noticed I'd fallen a sleep twice during our playing and he had not. He said I just kept playing those chords...

Now if I could just get myself to run arpeggios and scales all night while I sleep, I could get in 6 hours of practice every night!

I would think that it's not that uncommon. Just another form of muscle memory.

There's stories of Charlie Parker when he was on Billy Eckstine's band being sound asleep and someone would tap him on the shoulder a bar or so before his solo and he'd spring to life and play brilliantly. He may not have really been asleep though and his apparent somnambulist state was actually a result of his "issues" and that he was in fact listening and aware of the music.

[ragman1]

Anyone here got divorced due to their addiction to jazz guitar????? :-)

[mrcee]

Anyone here got divorced due to their addiction to jazz guitar????? :-)

No, but I did break up with one girlfriend because of it.

[christianm77]

This thread is fascinating. I love the idea of the unconscious mind taking over in improvisation.

TBH I think a lot of what I try to do in performance is a achieve a state like day dreaming when I improvise

[ragman1]

I love the idea of the unconscious mind taking over in improvisation.

But everything we do is already 'in there' otherwise we'd be lost. Not just in music, in life. The brain can't do something it doesn't know.

[jordanklemons]

I had a dream once where I was at a club and some "unknown" jazz group was performing Giant Steps in a way that I had never heard before. I was completely captivated by their arrangement and fell so deeply in love with it. Obviously, I didn't know I was dreaming at the time, so it felt no different from going to a club and hearing some group I'd never heard of before just destroying a new version of a tune I knew so well... but with a brand new take on it that I'd never considered before.

I awoke from the dream, realized it was a dream I'd just had, and could still remember the arrangement. It was the middle of the night. I jumped out of bed, ran over to my desk, and as quickly as I could I wrote out the arrangement so I wouldn't forget it. Then I dozed back off. One day, I plan to record an album of reinterpreted standards... and that will most definitely be on the recording.

[mrcee]

But everything we do is already 'in there' otherwise we'd be lost. Not just in music, in life. The brain can't do something it doesn't know.

Pat Martino. Right?

[ragman1]

Pat Martino. Right?

All of us.

Martino was an extreme example because he had to start again. But we're all the sum total of our knowledge, which isn't much.

[beetle_rist]

This has actually happened to me once or twice before, I come up with song-writing ideas in my head during sleep. Good Ideas.

[henryrobinett]

Never in my life have I fallen asleep while playing. I'm always too awake. I'm always too excited and interested.


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[jasaco]

Never in my life have I fallen asleep while playing. I'm always too awake. I'm always too excited and interested.

You never stayed up too late practicing and nodded off in your chair? I do it all the time...

[henryrobinett]

You never stayed up too late practicing and nodded off in your chair? I do it all the time...

I absolutely have stayed up late playing. Very late. But I've never fallen asleep playing. I've always been wide awake. Excited. As I said earlier, I play in my sleep all the time, but I'm in bed with the guitar in its case in another room.


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