Making dreams into music

Acoustic experience-The aesthetics of music and making dreams into music

Dr Suavrna Nalapat .BSc MBBS;MD(Pathology)

Visualisation of music in Music therapy is a dream-like aesthetic experience.How this can be achieved and how scientific is this method?What is the history of this procedure ? These are discussed in this chapter.

Most of the people are living among noise and hence have no time to rejoice in voice ,or they are denying the voice .The philosophy of music is the oldest branch of aesthetics in India.It starts from the Vedic literature(in written/oral traditions of saamveda)and then through Mathanga and Bharathamuni ,to AbhinavaGuptha and the Thanthric exponents of music.In the west it originated from Pythagorus (Akousmathic kori)and Plato ,Ptolemy,St Augustine,Plotinus,Boethius,and poets and philosophers of middle ages and is a comparatively recent tradition .In the west Kant and Hegel were two giants of aesthetics.Rebirth of aesthetics happened in 18th century with John Mattheson and Charles Batteux,after the Europeans became established in Asian colonies.. In India the tradition of classical music became very vibrant at the same time,because ,the Europeans who came to India were enthralled by the tradition they saw here,and wanted to recreate it in their way in their homeland.

Those who want to hear the voice ,imagine a room where in the silence a permanent voice is heard .(Om /or any other pleasing note /in your pleasing preferred voice).Or in silence listen to a soft Thambura,or to the wind,ocean or a bird’s call.With these one can also hear an inner voice which is far from the maddening crowd of everyday noises.
Sounds are either events or processes.How to distinguish them. ? Only processes are enduring.Events happen at a specific time.Processes last through a time.An event makes a change in the world.Process last unchangingly .Thus the beginning and end of a process is an event.Some sounds are events .Some are processes.Aristotle called them actions and passions.Our worldview is dependent on three applications on the concepts of identity.Sound as a pure event with a beginning and end.The soundspace when a sound saturate our hearing and draw out all its competitors.And the God’s earview of things we obtain from music. This is how I listens to my own inner voice,or to God’s presence through music.

Music makes use of a particular kind of sound .When we hear music we hear not only the sound but something which moves with a force of its own.This intentional object of musical perception is the tone.Exploring the relation between the sound and tone describes our musical experience.Because of this Leibniz called music as a kind of unconscious calculation .(The unconscious/superconscious nature of calculation is its only difference from astronomical calculations/or from the conscious efforts in yoga to make mind concentrate.).Music’s nature as an art of sound,a new way of understanding music which has character of aesthetic ,accords music the status of a narrative.
The representational nature of poetry is the medium of language by describing things according to pre-established semantic rules.If sounds of music is put to a linguistic use (literally to a musical language)this music is capable of representation.It would be poetry written in a language of absolute pitch.(a kind of superlative tonic language).Hence such poetry is nothing but sound itself.We find this in Muthuswami Deekshither krithis and other traditional music of India.Then it will be a single act of attention in which both music and its subject matter are heard and the description of the subject is unfolded through music ,just as in painting.When we hear a Annamacharya krithi or Tyagarajakrithi,it brings the music as well as the form of the deity they worship with all its attributes.Thus visualization of music as part and parcel of healing exercise in music therapy had been in use from time immemorial in all Bhakthysampradaaya..

The crucial difference between an acoustic and visual appearance is that in visual ,we cant see without attributing it to something.Whether it is a woman,a horse,nature ,deity a visual appearance present us with an identifying description of that object.Hence for visualization of music such a method is used by the ancient composers of India who were singers/composers/philosophers/yogins rolled in one.The expression and representation are thus different or distinct ,and the term expression means artistic meaning compared with our states of mind.Meaning of a work of art is available only through its particular expression in it.The expression of a Tyagarajakrithi takes us to the states of mind of Tyagaraja and if it fails to do so,with a particular performer,he has failed in expressing that state of mind.This is especially true in Bhakthy traditional music of India which has a special aesthetics of its own.Cadences are integral parts of tonality or an integral part of experience of structure and form.The bass voice persists in tonal music as an independent melodic line because harmonics rest on bass line.and are heard in relation to it.Triadic tonality forces bass into prominence matched only by the principal melodic voice and melodic constraints automatically apply to it.Just like earth which is the basis of everything,bass voice sustains ,establishes ,strenghthens the others.
Music is organized but not the same way as language is organized.Musical experience can be amended and deepened without loosing its distinctive intentionality .This happens with practice and experience.Probably this is what Jesudas means when he says music should evolve with time.Music is organized at three primary levels ,the rhythm,melody and harmony.
In any planned activity in business management we have a tree diagram of decision tree.
The successive decisions form a tree structure.(The aesthetics of music .Roger Seruton.He uses the terms in business and marketing ways.)

Enter market
Import product Manufacture locally
Build manufacturing unit Acquire a unit/factory
Import staff Local staff
Train abroad locally
Bring instructors Local instructors


Same kind of decision tree in all rational actions whether it has an aesthetic goal or not.Music production also has the same rules when it comes to marketing and making music..I would have preferred a simili related to Educating the people about the aesthetics of music rather than entering a market as Roger Serton has done here.

To listen to music with understanding is to relate by a conscious route where the composer subconsciously derived it.The recuperation of it also is subconscious in listener and musical analysis makes it explicit.Hearing the structure is part of the phenomenology of musical perception,rather than a matter of influence or analysis.

Aesthetic interests are insatiable interests.Each time we listen to a musical piece we find something new in it.An experience to which we are repeatedly recalled is an experience of value .Aesthetic value is a form of intrinsic value.Because there is aesthetic experience only,there is an aesthetic value.If no experience no aesthetic value either.The science of sound does not say anything about the tonal space ,musical movement,language of tonality.Music is absent from the scientific theory of the world.Musical analysis occur in the following contexts.
1Psychology of musical perception .A branch of cognitive psychology
2.Musical analysis an attempt to describe music of aesthetic interest and to show how tonal surface is constructed.This is a controversial practice.the music should come from or emerge in the perception of listener.The structure is real only if lived by the listener.It is person-oriented.
3.Music criticism.The good and bad in it and just what it means.
4.Musical aesthetics which is a metastudy.It is a critical discipline .Describes the nature of and the limits of our thoughts about music.These four practices usually overlap.

Making and listening to music are social with religious/spiritual/ceremonial connotations.Silent listening is a primary musical experience .Public performance always keep the listeners silent.In private performance(recorded music)music is separated from the social context for the time being.Making music together is a social event ,a nonsemantic communication ,a mutual tuning in relationship.Barrier of I and U transcend to the realm of we.A human being is anassortment of raaga ,and when it is sung properly ,it gives pleasure.If sung improperly it creates problems in society.The story of Narada singing the raagaas improperly and the raaginis becoming lame is symbolic of it.If the people have proper music right from childhood,and in a definite orderly way,they will be happy and healthy is a message from that story.

In the book ,The way of the white clouds(A Buddhist pilgrim in Tibet ,Lama Anagarika Govinda .Shambala publications California 1971)Tibetan music is based not on melody but on rhythm and pure sound value.Man is in connection with a universal background and not in solitary existence.The sounds that come from the womb of the earth,depths of space like the rumbling of thunder etc are always with him.Manthra is a sound of nature.Music symbolize the vibration of universe.The effect of gradual swelling and ebbing of oceanic tides ,and the breeze of individual life creating and playing with the multitude of cosmic waves and wavelets and the sound of the all-encompassing OM,the prototype of all Manthra sounds is the basis of Indian and Tibetan music.(See Thanthric and Manthra texts and Upanishads)The human bass voice represent the primieval cosmic sound and experience of infinity of space.The drum ,the infinity of life and its movement.Or what we call the dharma eternal(sanathanadharma).Budha after his enlightenment uttered the word Amrithadundhubhi(The eternal drum of immortality )which he heard and he wanted to make it heard throughout the world.When Teravaada budhism of South considers music as just a sense pleasure,Tibetan Budhism considers it as the eternal cosmic truth.In Tibet the ways of contacting the deeper layers of mind are
1.Dream visions
2Meditation
3.Trance
4.oracles
5 natural and supernatural psychic portends
The vastness of space,the solitude,and the silence of nature around act as a concave mirror that enlarges and reflects our innermost feelings and thoughts and concentrates them in one focal point ,our consciousness and in such moments the best divine music is born within us as a inner voice of silence.
The first chapter of the book Dreams(Dreams –A reader on religious cultural and psychological dimensions on dreaming.Ed Kelly Bulkeley.ch 1.Budhist dream experiences by Serenity Young pp 15)speaks of women and female deities in men’s dreams.They bestow supernatural powers that lead to enlightenment.To complete the quest they have to depend upon a female guide ,win a goal or achieve enlightenment and wisdom(pragnaa).Pragna is feminine in Asian traditions and personified as a semidivine woman .Sankaracharyas soundaryalahary on seeing the devi and Kaalidaasas story are musically and visually aesthetic .
Women are good dreamers.The musical dreams of women are very beautiful and predictive too.The women have conception dreams like that of birth of Christ and Budha by their mothers .A paali text Saardoolakarnaapadhaanam is on dream interpretations.In Bible we find dream interpretation of pharaoh by Joseph. Kathasarithsaagaram deals with dream interpretations of the Hindu and Budhist lore,all before Freud and Jung .All tribal people had dream interpretations of their chieftains for safety of tribe.The dreams of women are being interpreted by men and this gender difference is the cause for fallacy according to Kelly Bulkeley.Ability to interpret dreams is a tremendous source of spiritual and temporal power and only very few people understand their own dreams.Dream is a passive nonheroic form of activity best performed by a female or a junior male.Budhist heroes dream internalizing this female power and at the same time maintain their male power as interpreters of the dream.In Lalithavisthra when Gopa (Yesodhara)wake up and tells her dream to Budha,it is Budha who interprets it,not Gopa herself.He was Vesanthara in last birth and Gopa was Maadi and Maadi had a prophetic dream .(Vesaantharajathaka).Women are powerful dreamers and have prophetic dreams.But powerless to fulfill them since they are not allowed to interpret it themselves.Padmasambhava discuss the dream of his wife Bhaasadhaara .In Milerepas biography Marpa discuss the dream of wife Dakmena and interprets it.The root of it is the dismissal of the male Budhists of real women from the monasties,and internalization of imaginery women .The incorporation of female imagery and female deities and distancing of actual women happen in Budhist thanthra.Women are sworn to secrecy as silent participants of their thanthra .The rarity of female biographies on yogic/thanthric experiences in spirituality is because of this gender difference.(pp 17 ibid)The dreams of Kannaki and of Devanthi in Chilappathikaara (sangham period Tamil epic)on the other hand are not interpreted by men but by themselves and no gender dominance seen in south .The dream speaks to the individual dreamer but also to all those who hear them.
Saamavidhaanabrahmana edited by A.C Burnell(London Trubner and co 1873 )recommends certain things to have a prophetic dream.
One among them is to put the deity Sankarevaasini(may be Parvathy)in a basket full of unhusked grain,incense,and flowers and putting it to the headend,lay down in a sacred pure place with head to east .Sing the hymn from saamaveda(imam uhuvu).Remain silent while falling asleep.One will see as if a film the phala or fruit of what is to happen(future prediction).The dream chathan(Sanskrit Sasthaan/saasthaa) made in the temple of devi (the present Ponnambalamedu)in chilappathikaara is almost the same procedure.This is the birth imagery of devi.Another is death imagery in which one puts a box with garagoulika a powerful poison in it and sings aayaahi susamaahitha ,the saama hymn.This is death imagery.The term swapnamaanavaka(the student of dreams)is seen in a 12th century Budhist text on constructing Mandalaas .The text is Vajraavaleenaamamandalapaayika by Abhayaakaaraguptha translated to Tibetan and it is a method of watching a dream and finding out whether its deities allow the mandalasthaana.In Mesopotamia and in Hebrew Bible and in Egypt stars and animal viscera constitutes the writing of Gods.The sacrifice of Ismail is done according to a dream. Prophet Mohammed receives information in dreams.He saw twice in dreams an angel covering Ayesha in a cloth and carrying her.This happened before he actually saw her and married her.One of God’s sign is the manaam or dream.in night and day.Right dream come from God and impure ones from devil.The analogy with death is seen in the words”Men are asleep.When they die they awake”.In ancient medical texts of India red women and blood in dream predicts death.In Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad (4.3.13:38 and 4.4)discussion on sleep and dream leads to discussion of death.
Dreams have memorizing power.The memorizing of texts(Koran ,Geetha etc)seeking help in making a choice /decision(Ishtikara)and transformative potential a dream has on dreamer are noteworthy.A visionary with heightened awareness get dreams of visions .Young girls and young women has this power without any previous preparation.Especially when a relative /a dear one dies.(says pp 97 of the book)which I absolutely agree since I had my first vision of Devi in a sparkling golden ocean ,in a mandala of light and music ,at the age of 8 when we had two deaths in the family.The power is more during menstruation and there is a period of latency between the dream and its actualization.The Lakota holy men compare the power to a medicinal plant .When all the lifeproducing stuff is over the wisdom is in the root if they work with the medicine in the right way.They call a woman who has this power a bluebird woman ,who can bring a voice to sing during her sleep.The blue bird of Krishna was awake in me when I lost my grandmother ,his best devotee and my granduncle ,a gnaanayogin.Artists ,medical people and spiritualists had this bluebirds power within in the ancient world ,partially or wholly.

Making dreams in to music

Contemporary song writers carry on this ageold dreaming tradition with them.(Nancy Grace).Billy Joel at Berkelee college of music in Boston said “All songs come from my dreams”Paul Mcartneys album Lazarus heart,colvins poleroids from his album fat city,confessions of a blue singer by Rory Rock all came from dreams.So,when I say that my poetry came from my dreams and my music also I visualized from childhood dreams,there is nothing unusual or supernatural about it.It is just a natural phenomenon within me.Just as a flower comes out of a plant ,they came out of me in right seasons,right times.That is my interpretation of my dreams.
Jane white Lewis reflects on the Jungian analytic practices of dreams in chapter 10 of the book and says dream is finding the truth within and dream work as a spiritual discipline .It is a spiritual alchemy ,an instinctive response to deep pain and injustice and viraha in a lover’s quarrel.A highly emotional stage of a lover’s viraha and a yearning for the lover/God happen and only then a person’s spiritual perspective reaches the darkest and the most distressing phase and transformation into truly authentic and reliable spiritual perspective emerge as pure gold.The dreams of scholarship are very interesting because many discoveries and inventions and abstract truths have been discovered /revealed in dreams,like that of Ramanujan,Kekule,Jung and Poincare.The creativity is not only mystical and artistic but also scientific in dreams.And creating a new thing is actually practical dreaming ,making a waking dream as in the thanthric twilight practices.We create in dreams whether asleep or awake.Sometimes metaphor structures a dream .In love a bridge dream means Love is a journey .In a flying dream it means a sense of freedom experienced by the dreamer.
In his book ,Implications for psychoanalysis ,The new neuropsychology of sleep,J.Allen Hobson says that dream emotions like anxiety ,fear ,anger,elation are primary shapers of dream ,not reaction to them.The classic anxiety dreams are feeling lost,not haing proper credentials,or adequate equipments,suitable clothing,or missing a train etc.
There are functional deficits (physiological)as loss of noradrenergic and serotonergic modulations in REM sleep.These neuromodulators are essential for learning,memory,perception,attention via their direct CNS effects and indirect peripheral mechanisms.In NREM sleep these are not decreased .In REM neuropsychology what we get is certain hyperassociative quality and instability of the timespace ,place and the person –a qualitative feature of the REM dream.The dream characters are thus a chimera ,some features of the dreamers self and some of another.Even the sexual identity of dream characters is fluid.A person gives longer more vivid more motorically animated more bizarre accounts of the REM than the NREM.There is some degree of dream amnesia and the narrative need not be complete.The cognitive and scientific dreams of the dreamer must be then coming out of the NREM phase and the narrative we get are only very few and only from exceptionaly scholarly minds and probably that is why the tribals considered only their chieftains dreams worth reading and analyzing.

In narrating a dream there is a selfreflectiveness (SR)defined as examination of ones own thoughts,feelings,behaviour .SR involves duel levels of awareness alluded to as experiencing the self immersed in its own pattern of awareness and the secondary level of awareness examining the experiencing self.(pp 333 ibid Tracey L.Kahan quoting Rossi 1972:139).She approaches dream as a metacognition.Metacognition is awareness of ones own cognitive processes and a deliberate direction of ones thought processes.Thus both selfreflection and intentionality of self regulation are in it.One part of our mind tells the other parts where to go (intentionality) and observes its progress(selfreflection or monitoring)and corrects its deviations (regulation)if any .Usually when we think in dreams such metacognition is absent .But metacognition is present in sleep and in lucid dreaming.(Godwin 1994;Green McCreeny 1994;Laberge 1985;Van eaden 1913)and high order of cognitive skills do occur even in nonlucid dreams (Cartwright 1981;Cicogna 1991 q pp 341 -342 Tracy L.Kahan ch 22 Ibid ).To have a dialogue with the skeptics she gives a spectrum of perspectives on dreams and dreaming as below.
Theological spiritual Paranormal Scientific
Dream instructions and prophecies from Gods as in the Prophets Higher meanings encoded by a higher power/deeper self The facts transmitted at a distance through dreams by unknown means As functional activity.Consistent with known laws of nature .

In my dream analysis I combine the spiritual and scientific approach predominantly and sometimes even feel that there is something unknown transmitted in it from a higher power which may be called unknown,just as our deeper self which also is only partially known.That cannot be named since it is unknown or partially known .

How scientific is a dream consolidation?

When in jagrad or waking state the sensory inputs are fed to association areas in cortex and hippocampus.Acetylcholine is high during waking state.It prevents the feedback of signals from hippocampus to cortex ,so the information is kept separated or not merged with other incoming stimuli .The advantage is that there is no distortion of information.The disadvantage is that there is no integration or synthesis of knowledge.But this is overcome by the linking together of input information by encoding .(See the previous issue of memory and amnesia for the figure of Visual cortex.The same happen with auditory cortex).
In sushupthy or dreamless sleep,acetyl choline levels falls,and the EEG become more in a mediatative state,and the newly encoded memory in hippocampus is allowed to be fed to association cortex.There is no new input at this stage .(page 129 .Beat memory loss.Rita Carter.Cassell illustrated.Octopus publishing group.2005)Sleep is a sensory blockade or chithavrithinirodha as in meditation/Samadhi.The feedback from hippocampus retriggers neural patterns activated during previous waking .Thus the heard,seen and experienced are consolidated with its meanings .The new linkage forges a new connection between the concepts .So when it is wellconnected ,it become synthesizes as a whole.When one of them is triggered all others are also triggered.Thus heard music,the visualized sight,the experience of emotion,and the meaning 0f it become integrated.This consolidation is what is happening in sushupthy .This is a normal ,not a supernatural thing to happen.But for me to have an interlinking of music,philosophy,astronomy,medicine and language and literature I should have an interest and sradha in them in my waking state is a mandatory thing.The question of how I got the experience while I was only 8 years still is an enigma which comes next .The vaasana of a previous janma in a cyclical universe was thus reasoned by ancient brains .

The new scientist (28th May 2005)reported a few things for betterment of brain conditions and memory power .
REMEMBER FORGET
Glucose Fatty foods
Music Excess alcohol
Word associations Sleep deprivation
Exercises Poor hearing
Chewing gums Bad eyesight

I am happy to understand that I have all the best things needed for remembrance /memory power (except chewing gums)and do not have the things which make me forget and hence my brain is in a fairly good state of memory and cognition and probably that is why I remember my own dreams so well and can interpret them and analyse and do selfreflection as a metascience of my own consciousness.And what is after all spirituality than selfreflection and knowing the self? Hence making my dreams into music and music therapy was written in my brain and in my dreams and in my life’s plan itself by God,is what I would think.As a person who believe in the rhythmic orderly nature of cosmos and its laws I don’t find any supernaturality in what I do or think.It was predestined harmony as Leibniz says.Or in better terms,a God-given gift of Saraswatham ..





1 The aesthetics of music .Roger Seruton

2 A Buddhist pilgrim in Tibet ,Lama Anagarika Govinda .Shambala publications California 1971

3 Dreams –A reader on religious cultural and psychological dimensions on dreaming.Ed Kelly Bulkeley.ch 1.Budhist dream experiences by Serenity Young pp 15

4. Saamavidhaanabrahmana edited by A.C Burnell(London Trubner and co 1873

5. Brihadaaranyaka Upanishad (4.3.13:38and 4.4)

6 Jane white Lewis Reflects on the Jungian analytic practices of dreams in chapter 10

7 Implications for psychoanalysis ,The new neuropsychology of sleep,J.Allen Hobson

8.Tracey L.Kahan quoting Rossi 1972:139

9. Godwin 1994;Green McCreeny 1994;Laberge 1985;Van eaden 1913)and high order of cognitive skills do occur even in nonlucid dreams (Cartwright 1981;Cicogna 1991 q pp
341 -342 Tracy L.Kahan ch 22 Ibid

10. page 129 .Beat memory loss.Rita Carter.Cassell illustrated.Octopus publishing group.2005

11 The new scientist (28th May 2005)