Musicians who agonise over a tune all day in the studio can find that their unconscious suddenly produces a hit melody while they sleep. Why is that?
, the band’s co-chief songwriter, awoke to find he had set down a riff and the words “I can’t get no satisfaction” in the night.
The period between wakefulness and sleeping, hypnagogia—and the inverse, hynopompia—are states associated with unusual mental activity such as hallucination and sleep paralysis. Musicians including Beethoven saw these states as conducive to creativity and problem-solving. “I’m always floating in the passageway between semi-wakefulness and light sleep, and often get song ideas,” Bruce Hornsby, a Grammy-award-winning singer-songwriter, says.
There is some scientific exploration of this area, but not much. Studies of dreaming often emphasise that inspiration does not descend from a heavenly muse: deep inside the temporal lobe, the hippocampus creates connections and ideas from the things the individual already knows or has experienced recently. Researchers liken the process to the mind doing a clear-out at the end of a long day.
Mr Simon has made no such claim for “Seven Psalms”, a 33-minute piece of music with a sparkling, hymnlike delicacy. Its theme is an argument he has been having with himself for many years about belief. It is fitting that faith, never quite abandoned, should bother Mr Simon in his dreams. One of his lyrics runs: “The sacred harp that David played to make his songs of praise/we long to hear those strings that set his heart ablaze.” In his dreams, it seems, he can.
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