
What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming - pjdorrell
https://whatismusic.info/blog/AUnifiedTheoryOfMusicAndDreaming.html
======
keiferski
It's a bit hard to understand without the background philosophical knowledge,
but Schopenhauer's aesthetic ideas on music are quite beautiful. A concise,
oversimplified version of his thought would be that lyric-less music brings us
closer to direct reality, since it doesn't replicate any forms in nature.

 _Unlike all of the other arts, which express or copy the Ideas (the essential
features of the phenomenal world), Schopenhauer affirmed that music expresses
or copies the will qua thing in itself, bypassing the Ideas altogether._

 _Schopenhauer holds that the experience of “absolute” music (music that does
not seek to imitate the phenomenal world and is unaccompanied by narrative or
text), occurs in time, but does not involve any of the other cognitive
conditions on experience. Thus, like the feeling of embodiment, Schopenhauer
believes the experience of music brings us epistemically closer to the essence
of the world as will—it is as direct an experience of the will qua thing in
itself as is possible for a human being to have_

Read this full article if you'd like to know more:
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-
aesthetics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics)

~~~
yters
The world seems to be a bunch of subatomic particles bumping into each other,
not 'will', wonder what Schopenhauer means?

~~~
keiferski
I don't think Schopenhauer's concept of the will and subatomic particles are
mutually exclusive. He's pretty clear on what "will" means, but you have to
study his philosophy to find out.

~~~
yters
Ah, you are right: "a mindless, aimless, non-rational impulse at the
foundation of our instinctual drives, and at the foundational being of
everything."

Very much like subatomic particles randomly bumping into each other.

But, also very much unlike music, at least the enjoyable kind of music. Does
sound similar to the music of Lovecraftian novels, though.

------
skolskoly
>Music, on the other hand, seems to be limited to the human species

I'm not sure how you're defining music, but I would consider a bird's song to
count. On one hand I don't believe music can be reduced to a mating display,
but I'm skeptical that music has a biological root in processing
memories/emotional response. Sure, it can stimulate memory/emotional
processing, but so do most other social activities. Moreover, I think
conversation, games, music, dance, etc. are much more similar to each other in
that regard than dreaming is to any of them.

In my experience, dreams are wild extrapolations/interpolations of various
waking experiences. When I'm awake, I would call this imagination, but the
unconscious mind appears to put the imagination into overdrive in a way that
is not possible while awake. It's almost as if the brain is trying to
generalize memories, possibly to optimize them for storage space. (or some
biological equivalent)

Interestingly, /u/undershirt mentions that it might be that you don't actually
experience the dream until you wake up. This would make sense, as this process
would be interrupted, leaving you with some bizarre false memories. The
unconscious then quickly cleans up it's mess and hands control over to the
conscious mind.

On the other hand, I think music is explained fairly satisfactorily as a
positive social activity, related to dancing, both of which were ubiquitous
and inseparable in ancient cultures. In a world where you have to make friends
and be wary of enemies, it's not hard to see how bonding activities that
signal friendliness are valuable for natural selection. Even birds sing,
humans just have a much more complex songs.

~~~
atoav
If I remember correctly whales have been observed to “sing” as well. Given
that sound is essentially vibration of a medium and given that noticing
vibration in said medium will play a crucial role in the survival of most
organisms moving in it, we can establish that some sort of “mediun-vibration-
sensing” should develope anywhere in the universe given the organisms move in
a medium that transmits sound waves.

This “hearing” will be connected with meaning by these organisms (e.g. loud
and low frequency = big, strong and dangerous, scratchy noise + potential
food). That means there is already (without music) a perceptual link between
sound and emotion.

On top of that the natural harmonic series should be universal, which means
that other intelligent life forms could derive joy from how sounds fit
together harmonically. A certain level of intelligence will inevitably lead
organisms to think a lot about the (potentially dangerous) sounds in their
environment and given a certain level of organization they might decide to
droen these unpleasant thoughts out with other louder sounds they make on
purpose. And if these louder sounds serve a societal role they will inevitably
use it to tell stories, emotions or make sense of their beeing in the world or
just try to forget the things that happened in their lifes. Music.

~~~
Gravityloss
And wolves howl. My childhood friend played the trumpet and their dog always
started howling with him.

------
undershirt
A weird hypothesis is that a dream might not even be a story until you wake
up—like a wave function collapse[1] of abstract brain activity. Freud wrote
about a man being jolted awake by his headboard falling on his neck the very
moment he had been guillotined in a dream, and I think most of us have
examples.

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse)

~~~
comsolo
I have experienced several instances where I dream that I am with some
friend/colleague/etc e.g. helping him/her solve some problem.

Upon waking up, I check my phone and then sure enough that same friend has in
fact contacted with the same or similar message as in my dream.

In several instances these are people I haven't heard from in a long time,
with some very hard to guess specific reason why they contacted me. (E.g. a
long time friend asking me to help his dad with something).

My memory is very clear that I had the dream and processed it (with some
reaction of 'huh strange, fancy dreaming about that guy) before I opened my
phone and found the text/email from that person. But is that memory being
rewritten somehow afterwards?

Or is there perhaps some kind of vaguely wavefunction/quantum/etc phenomena
that leads some information to be transmitted back in time by a few minutes?
Hard to say, but definitely food for thought

~~~
viklove
> Or is there perhaps some kind of vaguely wavefunction/quantum/etc phenomena
> that leads some information to be transmitted back in time by a few minutes?
> Hard to say, but definitely food for thought

Ha, much more likely is that in your dream the person was nonspecific, and
when you woke up your brain "altered" the memory to be about the person who
texted you.

There is well documented evidence that human memory is extremely suggestible,
and I think that is a far more likely explanation than... information time
travel.

~~~
comsolo
Possibly. But I remember very specifically thinking about the person in
question prior to receiving the message.

We really don't understand that much about consciousness (or many other
phenomena). It's not _that_ outlandish that there may be some strange
behaviour of time. Many physicists suggest its structured more like strings or
otherwise more "liquid" than a linear timeline

------
324908nh
"Music and dreams are similar, because they both involve, or can involve, the
processing of feelings in response to situations that are not real."

"This similarity between music and dreaming suggests that music and dreaming
may actually serve similar biological purposes."

This does _not_ follow at all. We don't know why we dream, or why we evolved
to make music. It's hasty to suggest the two are related based on the sole
observation that both produce feelings.

What's more, there's a big difference between feelings in dreams (which are
responses to imagined situations) and feelings in music (which may result from
formal qualities of harmony and melody, independent of any imagined
situation.) The author explains this away by 1. focusing on music with lyrical
and theatrical aspects, and 2. pretending that all listeners are supplementing
the music with their own memories and imagined situations. As if nobody ever
just heard a pretty tune and thought it sounded nice.

Then the author proceeds to make tenuous connections and meaningless
distinctions for the next several paragraphs, based on this flimsy assertion
that music and dreaming are alike because they produce feelings. All the
while, citing no research to make these connections.

This reads like one of those post-structuralist nonsense papers that people on
HN love to hate on. Why are we giving it the time of day?

------
nbulka
There's some bridge in consciousness between music and dreaming. They share
some extra-rational quality that eludes language. That's exactly why I named
my first album "Trampoline Dreams" That's not the point of the post, but if
anyone is interested here is a link on Spotify!

[https://open.spotify.com/album/6lQ9JWrD8tt8iP4hI6Q5eO?si=P5N...](https://open.spotify.com/album/6lQ9JWrD8tt8iP4hI6Q5eO?si=P5Ntbi5ZQjm9rg525nUXYQ)

------
shurcooL
From
[https://whatismusic.info/blog/HypothesisMusicLetsUsPracticeH...](https://whatismusic.info/blog/HypothesisMusicLetsUsPracticeHavingStrongEmotions.html):

    
    
      > Now let us suppose that the person enjoys listening to music.
      >
      > Music enables the person to feel very strong emotions that lie outside the range of their normal everyday emotions.
      >
      > Music lets a person feel these emotions, almost, but not quite, as if those emotions were real.
    

I’m quite puzzled by these statements. I enjoy listening to some genres of
music. But I don’t see at all how music is connected to experiencing emotions.
Isn’t music enjoyable because of completely different reasons? They are hard
to describe, but I don’t think they’re “emotions”, are they?

~~~
fg6hr
Music produces sophisticated colorful shapes that aren't visualizeable, yet
visible to our mind, so it sees the shapes, appreciates their complexity and
order and creates emotions. Classical compositions produce exceptionally
complex structures that can be appreciated only by a few.

~~~
mlang23
Are you a synaesthetist? I am, and your description pretty much sums up how I
experience music.

------
airesearcher
There are some interesting ideas in this. However music also might have
evolved as a form of communication - for example birdsong, whale songs, or the
songs various insects make. They might not necessarily be communicating
emotions - although maybe sometimes they are. It's a bit of a logical leap to
decide all music evolved for emotion processing purposes, rather than say,
language and communication purposes.

------
marcAKAmarc
This article was very enjoyable. The connection between dream state emotions
and musical emotions are undoubtable for me. I've always assumed that they
felt so similar because the brain was practicing finding meaning in chaos by
recognizing patterns in the chaos, then organizing and categorizing those
patterns until meaning can be associated (through previous experience maybe).

However, I do have to say that I did disagree with a few assumptions the
article made:

>However dreams are never about the strangeness or the alteration of reality.

Many nightmares that I have are actually about the strangeness of the dream
itself. I realize that something is not normal, and instead of determining
that I am experiencing a dream (and thus start entering a lucid dream state),
I start feeling like I must have lost my sanity. This can be a truly
terrifying experience when things really go off the rails.

------
ArtWomb
Some many masterpieces of classical music feel identical to dream states to
me. This is a rich area of inquiry ;)

Chopin's Nocturnes. Erik Satie's Gnossiennes. The Tales of Hoffmann which
influenced Shumann and Wagner

Franz Liszt - Liebestraum

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpOtuoHL45Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpOtuoHL45Y)

~~~
lenoach
Love Liebestraum :) If you can get past LL's emoting this is my favorite
rendition of it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FqugGjOkQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FqugGjOkQE)

------
blueboo
Sigh; evolutionary psychology is the worst sort of ascientific metaphysical
nonsense. Read it for poetry if you like.

~~~
SuoDuanDao
Do you object to the basic premise or the particulars of how it's practiced?

------
th0ma5
Paul McCartney said Yesterday came to him in a dream. I think about this a lot
in that there is something the unconscious mind seems to unlock.

~~~
seanhunter
Yes. Except in his dream the lyrics were

"Scrambled eggs, Oh my darling you've got lovely legs..."

Once I learned that my enjoyment of the original was greatly enhanced.

------
BasDirks
> However dreams are never about the strangeness or the > alteration of
> reality.

> If people with bad intentions are chasing you in a dream, > you don't start
> thinking about why your life changed so > much that now you have people
> wanting to kill you.

This is false. Such reasoning is very common in my dreams, with explanations a
hybrid of dreamed facts and reality.

------
WhompingWindows
I like to think music is just tickling peoples' eardrums. Musicians really are
just vibrating the air, creating sound waves, thus music is inherently
ephemeral. Written and recorded works utilize our memory and psychology to
take us on a journey through time, telling us a story, conveying message and
meaning through many moments of ear tickling.

~~~
tasty_freeze
Music is just tickling peoples' eardrums in the same way that looking at your
newborn baby is just indirect light illuminating your retina.

~~~
kalium_xyz
Tickling is surprisingly complex and specific, random noise like wind blowing
on skin will not tickle you, you cant tickle yourself, you clothes dont tickle
you, etc. How is it a bad metaphor for music? Id even go as far as calling
music a form of humanity pleasuring itself not as in the act of emulating sex
but emulating the most interesting parts of a language

------
irrational
Interesting. I don't dream and music has no emotional response for me. I
wonder if they are related?

~~~
DonaldFisk
How do you know you don't dream? Maybe you do but don't remember your dreams.

~~~
irrational
What's the difference between not dreaming and not remembering your dreams?
I'm nearly 50 and I have absolutely no recollection of ever dreaming. Not once
have I woken up and remembered anything happening between falling asleep and
waking up. So, to the best of my knowledge I have never dreamed.

~~~
tartoran
It appears you have musical anhedonia:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/please-
do...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/please-dont-stop-
the-music-or-do-stop-the-music-i-dont-really-mind/519099/)

Not sure how it relates to you not being able to have or remember dreams but
it’s a very intersting coincidence nonetheless

~~~
irrational
Yes, I do have musical anhedonia.

~~~
tartoran
I think you may have something that I don't have, as I believe in more or less
a zero sum game in terms of mental functions: e.g. a blind person develops
other senses better such as hearing or spatial orientation etc. I'm on the
opposite side of the spectrum, more like a music hedonist, though lately I
started to enjoy silence just as much. Do you feel that you have some sense
more developed than the norm?

~~~
irrational
Not that I've ever noticed. In fact my senses of smell and hearing are pretty
bad. Though I think that has more to do with getting older.

------
K0SM0S
This line of research is incredibly interesting to me. Thanks a lot for the
work and for sharing! I subscribe to a lot of your premises and hypotheses.

So I thought I'd return the favor, some humble food for thought. Disclaimer:
it's all personal research[1].

On to the meat. Forgive the imperative tone sometimes, it's all in good
spirits and for brievety.

> _The processing of feelings often includes thought processes_

That's possibly idiosyncratic imho.

Feeling and thought evolved, in this order, as general processing systems for
the bodymind (feelings originate simply as "the language of the body", neither
good nor bad in nature but mostly communication of internal states; thinking
is more correlated to sensory perception it seems — literally could have just
been selected initially to process signals e.g. visual or auditory, then
evolved from there).

They both now work in concert but there is no definite telling which dominates
"generally", it seems to differ a lot between individuals; e.g. men seem to
have a stronger awareness of their internal state ("thinking their emotions")
whereas women tend to require strong physical states to reach awareness, and
conversely report much more about "feeling their thoughts", their mental
state. This is just one statistical example among probably many variations of
that order.

Stephen Covey in the famous _7 Habits_ conveys this point: _“Between stimulus
and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our
response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”_ Great advice in
itself, it hints at the fact that untrained people tend to respond _without_
thinking, thereby promoting their emotions from "guidance system" to
"decision-making system".

I think that "letting go" and "being spontaneous" — what we do to dance _well_
, emotionally — are positive modes (or rather balancing acts, responses) that
strongly suggest a need to prefer emotions over thoughts at time. It's
certainly necessary on the way to survival (mating, hence dating, seduction;
but also politics from the house to the office, etc.).

So I humbly suggest:

\- everytime you framed analysis implying thought _after_ or _in response to_
emotions, it's worth investigating a "thoughtless" direct response (note: in
this context everything is a response, even in inaction we make a choice, e.g.
to "keep on listening").

\- De-correlate the two poles of thought and emotion, seen independently as
different types of parallel processing, different "kinds" of machines
(different I/O too).

\- Consider operating modes where "emotions ≥ thoughts" in the final output,
in full agreement with one's thoughts, to voluntarily "stop thinking".

> _To fully understand how this could be possible, we need to analyze all the
> differences between music and dreaming._

Actually I would look into testing physiological responses first (and notably
not neglect the long-term benefits, the lasting psychological qualia (or its
consequences, like soothing, or energizing) over hours, days, months even (as
possibly counter-evidenced by cases of severe deprivation of dreaming).

> _Dreaming is Much Older than Music_

I think it speaks to the evolution of brain structures indeed, it seems that
interpreting "music" is a rather advanced feature. It's also largely possible
that other species would hear "music" that sounds like random gibberish, noise
to us — and vice-versa. We know _almost for sure_ that other species don't
recognize human music, but there's little in the way of telling what _could_
actually be music to their ears.

> _Within dreams, the content and the emotions are provided as a single fixed
> package._

I'm not sure about that. The systems involved in making the images/story, and
those involved in their perception and the feelings thereof might be largely
distinct structures (assuming the brain keeps working generally the same
regardless of wake state).

What I mean is that in both dreams and music, to my perception, the content is
provided; whatever I _feel_ or _think_ about it comes after as an internal
response/state; finally I respond (whether suppressed or not by the body as
when dreaming). Note that this is all in parallel, new data has entered
perception by the time I respond to the last input.

I think it strengthens your case: the two processes are even more comparable
in this view.

A word about imagination, which as I see it always takes off in-between
"processing results" (from inputs) and "call for a response" (our final
output) — this even tiny moment of hesitation to _validate_ action before we
do, which in some cases is temporally absent from perception, especially in
heightened emotional states (e.g. adrenaline has a way of blurring/blinding
perception to the limbic low-level, the pains, the fears, etc.)

\- For these physiological reasons, music (and any emotion-inducing activity)
acts as a temporary 'limbic painkiller' of sorts. Sorta occupies the mind,
focus, perception.

\- Imagination is both a crude low-level "feeling" about "what _could_ " (be,
have been, happen, etc) and rises up to high-level full-fledged "thinking"
powerhouse specialized in creation. Again, this feeling-thinking dichotomy. In
this I think we may observe how "low-level emotions" are swamping dreams
whereas "high-level thinking" of the kind we invoke to process imaginary
images upon music is much more controlled, indeed 'aware' of its virtuality —
it's almost as if thinking was a higher-level processing system able to
differentiate between reality and fiction, which emotions at a lower-level of
processing don't seem able to!

> _This difference may be directly relevant to explaining why music is human-
> specific – because actively thinking about long-term goals is (as far as we
> know) a specifically human endeavour._

I'm not entirely sure about this whole long/short-term dichotomy in this case;
I think it's more of a consequence of the above physiological systems that we
are more _immediately_ concerned with feelings in dreams and more _laid back_
about a non-threatening wake situation — you have to realize how dramatically
different both these moments are to the brain, below any form or degree
consciousness.

Bluntly put, when survival is at stake, we see the deepest/oldest structures
emerge back in full-force (unsurprisingly low-level layers tend to be
strongest at "overriding" general functioning).

> _Strangeness_

Really interesting take! I wonder if it's also a matter of system (low/high
level, or thinking vs feeling, or a fluke of perception that switches off in
dreams or is too complex to properly work at that level.

I've long identified "familiarity" as one of the big determinants (in humans
as in animals, it's one of those really low-level deeply refined mechanisms,
that just appears about as soon as memory is possible, even ROM from DNA that
produces unaware biological structures). Things just move "towards" the
familiar "good", and "away" from the "unfamiliar" or "familiarly bad".

Which, when you think about it, can also be expressed in terms of strangeness,
the reversed polarity of familiarity.

Regardless, your observations on strangeness do fit my current model/view
quite well[2]. I need to thank you again for the food for thought.

Great read, amazing approach!

____

[1]: My "goal" has always been a general model of the "bodymind" (like
"spacetime", I reject the fragmented theory of duality, and include animals in
the continuity). So I have a rather 10,000 ft bird's-eye approach, more
'structural' and less 'specific' I guess, however such research as OP's are
pure honey to me — they help me inform all the categories I wrestle with in my
research.

In all honesty and transparency, I'm not "university-qualified" in those
fields — there's too many of them anyway. But I do pride myself on 20+ years
of _strong transdisciplinarity_ , always trying to answer this question: _"
what makes us tick? why do we do what we do?"_

[2]: Briefly, the model is graph-inspired with geometric elements, and I have
so far identified ~7 nodes or "powers" as I call them (of which thought,
emotion and perception are 3). The "unconscious" is yet another (sits below
everything else as the proto-mind, the earliest processing system), and what I
call "will" or "wisdom" is about the highest-level, most developed (it roughly
corresponds to the prefrontal cortex, biologically, and "philosophy" in our
ontology). This is where long-term awareness happens, e.g. our ability to
delay gratification — a clear case of thoughts totally overriding emotions.

I've observed a sort of "tension" (I really mean both the common term, and the
math concept of tensors) between the unconscious and my node of "will/wisdom"
— it seems that both act as "impulse drivers", sources of volition and
willpower (which is notably in finite quantity for a day and tends to
replenish after sleep/dreaming, it also seems about the same for everyone but
with significant differences which apparently are rather hard to change,
train, de-train).

I'll end it there unless you want more, but in general terms it seems that
'wisdom' is the seat of our 'informed and valued knowledge', that is an
integration of emotions and thoughts in a way that "is right and feels right",
it's pretty much "system 3: aggregator" if you call the other two system 1 and
system 2 like Daniel Kahneman.

That might be an angle worth looking at to frame/model/explore some of your
questions.

Edits: typos and clarifications

------
fg6hr
Connection between music and dreams is a very deep rabbit hole from which
there is no return (in a good sense). This article does a good job at bringing
attention to the topic, although ideas presented there are naive.

------
sudosteph
To expand on a comment reply I made earlier elsewhere in this thread, I think
that the author is correct about there being a connection between music and
dreaming. However, I'd venture there is another fundamental reason that is not
mentioned in the content above.

I posit that both dreaming and music listening (including listening via
imagination, like a song stuck in your head) are both actually fundamentally
processes of pattern recognition and pattern generation happening together in
real-time. In a dream, our mind is generating visual, auditory and
mental/emotional stimuli based on the real stimuli we've experience in our
waking lives. It's not purely replays of real life jumbled up, because many of
us have experienced dreams where we've created passable imagery of imaginary
individuals we've never seen before and probably don't exist.

I think music is fundamentally the same thing. We hear a song once that
creates mental/auditory stimuli, and our brain is able to recognize the
general patterns and compress it into pieces of data we can replay at a later
time. We don't listen X different times to a song per X individual instruments
being played, but often if we hear a prominent part of an individual the song
out of the context we will immediately recognize it as part of another song.
For a well-known example, imagine the bass line from "under pressure"/"ice ice
baby" and how just imagining that bass line lets you conjure up totally
seperate parts from either of those two songs in your memory. You can now sing
back those different parts of those songs and people will easily recognize it,
even if you are technically singing in a different key, a slower tempo, and
you flub some words.

So in this hypothesis, even listening to music is not a passive action because
your brain is engaged with recognizing and real-time generating the next parts
of it (ie singing along). So when the author says:

> Nevertheless... music is often accompanied by a non-specific desire to
> engage in some level of active behaviour. Because this desire is very non-
> specific, and because musical feelings are more strongly bound to things
> that match the rhythm and/or melody of the music, the end result is that the
> desire to engage in such activity can be satified either by dancing or by
> joining in with the performance of the music.

It's clear that dancing and joining in make sense because listening and/or
imagining music itself is a generative process of imagination + memories (or
perhaps "delusional" to use the term in the article).

As an somewhat interesting aside: I mentioned that I have ADHD in the other
comment. One of the interesting, though very under-studied things I've
discovered about myself and some others with ADHD is that many of us end up
with songs playing in our head constantly (see:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/7tu8jz/music_is_const...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/7tu8jz/music_is_constantly_running_in_my_head/)
). Some studies talk about getting a particular song stuck in someone's head
as an OCD type thing, but this type of "head radio" as I call it, doesn't
necessarily stick to the same thing forever and really isn't very mentally
distressing. Sometimes even I'll get unique tunes stuck in my head that I end
up writing out later. Until high-school I assumed everyone had music playing
in the background of their heads at all times, but when I started taking
medication I noticed it became less frequent. So I'm of the opinion that the
"head radio" was mostly a form of mental fidgeting, part of the hyperactivity
component of ADHD.

------
FailMore
Quote:

Dreams can contain strange and altered realities. However dreams are never
about the strangeness or the alteration of reality.

If people with bad intentions are chasing you in a dream, you don't start
thinking about why your life changed so much that now you have people wanting
to kill you. All you think about is what you need to do to prevent those
people catching up with you and killing you, which might involve running, or
attacking your attackers, or perhaps calling out for help.

Given that dreams are often seem very strange when we wake up and remember
them, but don't "feel strange" when we are dreaming them, it is plausible to
suppose that our sense of "strangeness" is actively suppressed when we are
dreaming.

End quote.

This is correct. During REM dreaming the executive functions on the brain are
shut off. Why is this?

We can remember some of our dreams, and in our dreams we behave. This means we
get to examine our unconstrained behaviours and judge them for their
suitability to the situation.

The situations our brains construct during REM dreams are formed in incredibly
neurologically biased conditions. Norepinephrine levels, a stress related
neurotransmitter, are 85% below _base_ waking levels during REM dreaming
(Norepinephrine levels spike after a stressful event, but it's 85% below
resting levels!). And there is plenty of evidence to show, low Norepinephrine
levels mean a relaxed mind.

Think of the fantasies that the brain creates during moments of fear when
awake. Say you have a fear of flying, the fantasies all urge avoidance - 'the
plane will crash', 'the wheels will fall off before we land', etc... That is
how the brain builds fantasies when Norepinephrine levels are high. When they
are low fantasies urge the opposite of avoidance - they urge action. You are
being attacked -> you need to fight back. Someone is trying to steal your
things -> stop them. Someone has upset you -> tell them.

So we find ourselves in situations in our dreams which demand action, and we
get to see how we behave on a solely emotional level (because executive
functions are off). If we are not behaving in accordance to what the action-
demanding situation requires, then we have learnt something about a fear we
have. Something present at an emotional level which is stopping us from taking
useful action.

Correcting that is a matter of consciously breaking this pattern in your
waking life. Taking action when you were previously scared to and discovering
you are ok, and did not need to be scared.

From my experience working with dreams in therapy (mine and with others in
theirs), good dream analysis acts as an incredibly astute method to diagnose
unconscious anxieties.

I got very interested in dreams after their usefulness in my therapy, so wrote
a paper on the above with 13 examples of dreams in (5 are mine if I remember
correctly). The paper:
[https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz](https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz) HN discussion of it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590)

------
pandiatonicism
This post has it all wrong.

Music is the shadow of spoken language syntax, ornamented with mathematically
recursive patterns, enigmatic suggestions, and all of the other various
cerebral plumage humans are attractive to, all for one simple evolved purpose:
“you gotta get down with the get down.” ;)

Dreaming has much more to do with core memory processes which remain a deep
mystery. Nobody has put forward even a plausible explanation of how memory
actually works on a physical level.

~~~
1propionyl
I find your assessment of music to be (not personally, but conceptually)
insultingly reductive.

(Paraphrasing) "It's just math, linguistics and biology" is just about the
least convincing reductivist statement possible to make. The idea that music
simply exists to "get down" is frankly laughable.

To give an example, I think many people who listen to music a lot would agree
that it somehow interacts with memory in a subtle yet profound way.

I may not be able to remember the exact details of a certain experience
precisely, but if I happened to be listening to some music then, and I listen
to it again now, it often recalls a memory of emotion I wouldn't otherwise
have access to.

Further: the experience of listening to song you've listened to many times
over many years tends to accumulate and integrate associations, like a
perpetual stew. The experience of listening to a song you've known and
listened to for many years is about as close to the experience of dreaming as
I've found in waking life.

~~~
telesilla
Music isn't alone in triggering memory recall, all other senses do this as
well. I'm not sure I'd assign music special powers in this context, although
because it's time based music does seem to be a more profound effect.

~~~
1propionyl
Agreed. It's not that music is somehow special in of itself, but rather I
think it's a form we've constructed and implicitly optimized to trigger
certain forms of recall.

A lot of early chamber music (and music from way back when in antiquity) was
based on the idea of reproducing and augmenting voice, which very clearly
carries emotional content. It's evolved and mutated since.

Put more simply: I think music is a medium humans have optimized over time to
effectively trigger emotional and (less so) experiential recall.

In the process of doing so we've found that certain systems of harmony, tone,
timbre, rhythm, etc are effective in emphasizing recall of certain emotional
qualities.

I don't think anyone is born thinking the Beatles' Blackbird evokes a
particular emotion, but to those who have lived in the world long enough
there's a stunning commonality in what it affects in us.

Put even more simply: music is the "language" that best approximates
common/shared emotional recall (though obviously there are regional and
cultural variations).

------
ulisesrmzroche
What about war chants?

~~~
pjdorrell
The best way to understand about war chants is, firstly, to imagine what it
would be like to be a warrior in some prehistoric tribe that is about to go to
war. Imagine possible scenarios in your future - the beginning of the war,
where you and your fellow warriors carefully but deliberately proceed towards
the enemy (who might be a neighbouring tribe who don't yet realise they are
the enemy), the actual fighting, where you are in a constant state of "kill or
be killed", and, finally, the world as it will be after the war has finished.
If victorious, you will have greater status in your tribe, more possessions,
more territory, possibly more women. Even if your tribe does win the war,
probably some of your colleagues will have died, and it won't be the same
living without them. Whatever the result, life after the war will be
significantly different to life before the war.

Then, after thinking these thoughts, find a piece of music that strongly
intensifies the emotions which arise from thinking them. This music won't be
an actual prehistoric war chant, because most of us living in the modern world
have musical tastes that have been shaped by exposure to modern commercially
produced music. So you will be thinking about a prehistoric war scenario,
while listening to twentieth or twenty first century music.

Then, I think, you will understand, albeit subjectively, what it is that war
chants are about.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
You never heard of a rebel yell, have you?

