Music in dreams: Characteristics in musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

Musical dreams are those in which music is listened to, spoken about or interpreted. Although such dreams have inspired famous compositions, their characteristics are not clear. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of musical dreams, explore some phenomenological characteristics and establish their relationship with musical habits among professional musicians (PMs), empirical musicians (EMs) and nonmusicians. A 15-item survey was conducted to evaluate the frequency of music in dreams, familiarity of the sounds, speed of music and type of sounds that made up individuals’ musical dreams. PMs and EMs were also assessed on type of instrument, years of experience and weekly practice time on an instrument. For the qualitative variables, absolute frequencies and percentages were obtained. For age, the median and IQR were presented according to the distribution defined by the Shapiro-Wilk test, and their influence on the experience of musical dreams was evaluated by means of the Mann-Whitney U test. The chi-square test was used to evaluate differences between qualitative variables. A total of 496 responses were obtained. A total of 90.7% of PMs had dreamed of music at some point in their lives, while 83% of EMs and 72.5% of the nonmusicians had done so (p <0.001). Those who had musical experience between 5 and 10 years reported a prevalence of 90.5% of musical dreams, while those who had been playing for less than 5 years reported a prevalence of 75% (p = 0.037) A total of 41.9% of the PMs reported dreams with unknown music, while 7.5% of the nonmusicians reported this type of dream (p <0.001). PMs have a higher prevalence of musical dreams than other groups. Those with more than 5 years of musical training are more likely to dream of music. Practicing an instrument more than 8 hours per week was related to more musical dreams. The presence of novel musical sounds in dreams was significantly higher for PMs, suggesting a relationship between dream creativity and its possible influence on waking musical compositions.