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Dreaming as practice?

#21
I often visualize the fretboard and outline various scales and chords in various keys while awake in middle of night. Better than counting sheep. As far as dreaming goes, I tend to dream-work more than anything, still doing projects from my past. Haven't gotten a "dream paycheck" yet, so this sort of sucks?
 
#25
Sometimes in a dream, but more often in pre-sleep, or if awakened during the night then trying to get back to sleep, I’ll imagine the fingerboard and bass lines.


Once, a solution to a very vexing problem at work, how to remove a very specific but large part of the mouse genome and put the remaining parts back together again so that I could eventually grow a mouse with that deletion and no others, came to me in a dream. This was early in the days of “knockout” technology, long before the advent of Crisper-cas9 gene editing, and before the entire mouse genome had been sequenced. The dreamt solution worked. “Fortune favors the prepared mind” Louis Pasteur.
 
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#26
JohnnyChatter said:
I thought it was a common thing… I always have an imaginary fretboard in my head that I play along with music to. It often is in my dreams also. What’s strange to me now that I think about it is that my brains fretboard is rosewood like my bass growing up but all my basses now have maple fretboards… I guess my brain didn’t get the memo.
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Which one has better tone?
 
#29
brianrost said:
I have a gig coming up tomorrow where I had three days to learn a set to play on DB. A couple are tricky funk tunes, the others are simpler and I just need to keep the arrangements in my head.

Anyway, last night while going in and out of sleep I found myself dreaming about them, seeing the fingerboard while hearing the bass part. Definitely a first for me.

Anybody else do this sort of practicing, whether sleeping or while awake?
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I once fixed a USAF Autotrack ground radar system in my sleep. I flew into my new duty assignment, was told I was assigned to fix a system that no one else had been able to do for over a year, so they gave me a nice cot and said “have at it”. That night I mentally solved the rather complex issue ailing the beast in my sleep. I fixed it the next day and from then on my sheet didn’t stink
 
#32
I sometimes dream that I’m playing a gig and my amp quits, or my cable shorts out, or I forgot my instrument, or any number of calamities. Which is odd, because I carry a bag full of cords, tuners, picks, strings, etc.
 
#33
Sleep is incredibly important for our learning process. Our brain processes and reprocesses things we are actively learning while we sleep.

They've done experiments where they have someone spend a few hours learning some skill and then do a skill test. Then they have the participants do that same skill test the next day with zero preparation or practice. People routinely do better coming in to the task cold the next day after sleeping than they do immediately after learning and practicing the first day.
 
#34
I once solved a video game level by dreaming the solution. I woke up, somehow did not forget what I just dreamt, ran to the computer and it worked.

Could this work with music? Only if I could command my brain to dream about what I want it to dream about, instead of the crazy crap it usually does, and then to figure out how to not forget everything I just dreamt 5 seconds after I open my eyes.

So the short answer is no.
 
#35
biobass said:
Sometimes in a dream, but more often in pre-sleep, or if awakened during the night then trying to get back to sleep, I’ll imagine the fingerboard and bass lines.


Once, a solution to a very vexing problem at work, how to remove a very specific but large part of the mouse genome and put the remaining parts back together again so that I could eventually grow a mouse with that deletion and no others, came to me in a dream. This was early in the days of “knockout” technology, long before the advent of Crisper-cas9 gene editing, and before the entire mouse genome had been sequenced. The dreamt solution worked. “Fortune favors the prepared mind” Louis Pasteur.
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So you are responsible for the mouse in "Pinky and the Brain?"
 
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#38
Pdaddy1978 said:
Pretty sure "Satisfaction " did too..
Keef said he woke up..found the riff on a little recorder he kept next to his bed, and didn't remember recording it.
At least he was conscientious enough to have a recorder at the ready. Macca had to run down to his girlfriends family piano!
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The story I heard on NPR, the riff was rather sort and followed by 40 minutes of his snoring.
The recorder sound was distorted and when they went to the studio they needed to use it to get the guitar sound the way it did.
 
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#40
brianrost said:
I have a gig coming up tomorrow where I had three days to learn a set to play on DB. A couple are tricky funk tunes, the others are simpler and I just need to keep the arrangements in my head.

Anyway, last night while going in and out of sleep I found myself dreaming about them, seeing the fingerboard while hearing the bass part. Definitely a first for me.

Anybody else do this sort of practicing, whether sleeping or while awake?
Click to expand...

Not while asleep but definitely while awake. Sort of a mental rehearsal aka audiation. It really does have an impact.

Generally when i am playing an instrument in a dream, little is grounded in reality, hah.
 

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