Inspiration in Dreams

I had the following strange dream and experience. I was a young man living in Italy. The surroundings gave me the impression of it being during a period several hundred years ago. I was walking through the streets of a town. As I did so I was thinking about the liver disease I had and about my plans to move to another town where a learned doctor lives who specialised in liver complaints. I wanted to not only be his patient but also his student, to learn what he knew about liver illnesses.

As I walked I started to sing Ave Maria – I believe it is Gounod’s version. My singing was beautiful exhibiting wonderful voice control and expression of emotion. I am not sure of the sequence of this but there was a building I was looking at. People wanted to have the building restored but could not raise the money. So I had painted a huge mural on the building depicting scaffolding covering the house. This attracted public attention and interest in the house, and so money was raised. I realised that I was not just an artist but also an architect and musician.

It was on this thought, and with Ave Maria still sounding its lovely quality that I realised I was dreaming and became awake enough to observe and think about what was happening. I realised that as a musician I had very great ability as a composer, and decided to compose an ‘Ode to Mozart’. No sooner had I decided this than the music poured through my consciousness. So much so I heard it as if listening to an orchestra or record. The music soared and moved in a wonderful expression of human vision and transcendence. As this occurred I could observe the process of creativity or composition, which was spontaneous to an extraordinary degree. It appeared that by asking for or seeking the composition I had opened a window in my mind. Through it I could observe a huge and unlimited sea of mind or consciousness. In it was all that have ever existed, merged and yet distinct. Every human talent and thought was in it alive and vital. My ‘Ode to Mozart’ drew on this unfathomed depth of being. I knew as I observed this that the music itself, although precise and clear and Mozart’s own work, proclaimed the human ability to leap beyond boundaries into this immense and apparently limitless world of experience – to allow the mind to soar and fly, to move beyond its own conceptions and rejoice.

I wanted to test this amazing ability and asked the huge mind how I could compose ‘modern’ music. What followed was like being instructed. The experiences arose as if I were being told, that music was a reflection of basic life processes. If life had managed to express as a basic process, such as a simple celled creature or a crystal, this was like one note sounding over and over. After doing this over and over for infinite repetition, perhaps the process stumbles upon a slight change in itself. This would be like the playing of two different notes over and over. Then maybe another basic process has learned to play three different notes, and if these two meet they play a more complex music together.

To this meeting was added theme upon theme until an orchestral music was built up, and this was likened to our body, with its many different processes playing together, or society in which so many opposing ‘themes’ in the end form a whole.

This was an extraordinary experience for the dreamer and is a doorway that opened to him the realisation that while the dead are slowly absorbed into the whole, the individual person is there too, like a jewel.

Here is another example of inspiration in dreams.

Parkinson, a Bell Laboratory engineer, in 1940. He was attempting to develop an automatic level recorder to improve the ac-curacy of measurements in telephone transmission. In his dream, he was with an antiaircraft crew in a gun pit. One of the guns brought down an air plane with every shot. One of the crew members beckoned Parkinson to come closer to the gun and pointed to the exposed end. To Parkinson’s surprise, he saw that the control potentiometer of his level recorder was mounted there. From research based upon Parkinson’s dream, the first all-electric gun director evolved and became known as the M-9 electrical analogue computer. The M-9 was the precursor of guidance systems for later antiaircraft and antiballistic missiles.