Posted by Tony P on February 23, 2003, at 1:17:29
In reply to Re: Mind noise » BarbaraCat, posted by bozeman on February 22, 2003, at 19:43:06
I've occasionally had grand cathedral music on the waking tail of a dream, as you say. I know a lot of my dreams have "background music".
My first waking experience with the phenomenon was when I was working as a grad student at nights in a laboratory with a lot of equipment that created a white noise background. I was pretty hyper (got on Librium, which was quite new at the time, but that's another story).
So working there alone at night, I would keep hearing this radio playing in one of the other rooms, which was perfectly possible since several of us had radios or tape players. I'd walk around looking for the radio, and never finding it. Oh, and the building was supposed to be haunted, too!
I was getting quite freaked, but finally something clicked, and I tried predicting the next song that the distant radio would play - and it did! I could change the tune at will from then on -- pretty handy, as this was before Walkmans.
Most people (even normies) can get a similar effect by tuning an FM radio to the noise between stations and listening with headphones. Most start to hear words emerging from the noise within a minute or so. Some times the words even seem to form a coherent message. Might lead to a whole new branch of psychoanalysis!
Tony P
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> > I've experienced mind music for many years, not all the time and not even during any discernable blip in my mental state. Does it feel like you're wearning especially great stereo headphones and the music is very clear? Sometimes I wake up with it, almost on the tail end of a dream but can't remember it because it's so complex and layered. It's always very beautiful music of orchestral grandeur, soaring ecstatic choral passages with unpredictable and delightful musical turns of phrase. I feel like I'm totally present and marvelling at this rapturous enthralling music which is more real than anything in my surrounding. And then it fades away. I love having these private concerts and for a long time when I was young I believed the angels were joyfully singing among themselves and wondered I was able to hear their music. I didn't think it at all odd that no one else could hear it, only odd that I could. No matter what I'm emotionally feeling, this transcendant music can lift me and illuminate me and I wish it visited me more frequently. When it's gone, it visits and then vanishes like a deja-vu, and only an echo of a memory is left. I've come to be much more cynical and suspect that it's probably only a spiking auditory neuron. But what a lovely form for a dissident neural blip to take.
poster:Tony P
thread:9730
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030219/msgs/202994.html