Guitar Dreams

[tinnitus]

Many of us here probably have dreams involving guitars. Playing for over 50 years, I certainly do! Without trying to interpret them too much, here's a few I've had - some on a regular basis over the decades.

- Setting up gear and getting ready to play a party or bar gig with a band (I've been in several), often with players I don't know. Never nervous about it in real life, or in the dreams, just giddy with excitement since playing live is such a huge pleasure. This one occurs at least weekly, and I'm always sad to wake up before we go on.

- Back in the 70s when I taught myself to play by ear, I sometimes dreamt the chords to rock cover material I wanted to learn from records or the radio. Not really complicated fare, just "campfire" and barre chords, but I actually woke up sometimes knowing how to hack my way further through the jungle of a new tune.

- Also a really old one. Young teen still living at home. Dad was at work and I heard my mom leave the house. Time to crank up the amp and wail! I'd been dreaming about an emerald green Gibson SG (which I didn't have). But the dream was still so vivid after I woke up that I decided to skip showering so I wouldn't soften the calluses on my fingertips. Even decided what tunes I'd start with. Then slowly drifted into reality and realized I'd just be playing my trusty red Supro.

- Another frequent one... Jamming with others or performing solo with a few people in the room, I try to show off and end up playing something super fast and tricky. Way over my head in real life - like John McLaughlin fast. No idea what I'm really doing, and I realize it even in the dream. So I tell myself I should commit this new technique to memory while I'm dreaming and try it when I'm awake. But, of course, that wakes me up.

[Brucebubs]

Consistent with the psychoanalytic perspective, Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams suggested that dreams represented unconscious desires, thoughts, and motivations. According to Freud's psychoanalytic view of personality, people are driven by aggressive and sexual instincts that are repressed from conscious awareness

[tinnitus]

+1

Or maybe sometimes a guitar is just a guitar.

[Jobe]

Last week I had a dream where I was supposed to play a song at some sort of gathering. In the dream I was thinking, "What should I do?' I decided to play 'Autumn Leaves" and felt good about it. Then I woke up before I had to play the song. I thought, that was a weird dream as I have never played Autumn Leaves in real life. I blame Eva Cassidy. She is haunting. A good kind of haunt. Wonder how I would have done if I had just kept dreaming through the song! Oh well.

[RustyAxe]

Never. I don’t have emotional ties to inanimate objects, so it’s unlikely I’d dream about them.

[Dru Edwards]

I sometimes dream about playing guitar. Many times I'm trying to solo on the electric and I'm doing it much poorer than I do when I'm awake.

Sometimes I write the most incredible song and then I wake up and it's gone.

[FrankHudson]

I don't consistently recall my dreams, but I do dream about playing guitar.

I've dreamt up chord progressions, melodic ideas and once in a awhile lyrics--but not in any way common enough to replace working on those things while awake.

It's not uncommon that "dream me" is playing in a manner that "normal, awake me" wouldn't think of. "Awake me" isn't able to match the "dream me" when I try to duplicate this later, but the idea that "dream me" presents can still spark something different.

Didn't Keith Richards dream up the riff to "Satisfaction?"

[Wengr]

I don't dream about guitars to my knowledge. But when speaking of my planned guitar acquisitions, my wife always says, "keep dreaming".

[PorkPieGuy]

I dream about trying to get my drums set up before a show. It's so frustrating because nothing is ever right no matter how hard I try. Either things aren't fitting together right, pieces are missing, and the show is about halfway over before I even start to get things halfway together. I have a dream like this several times a year.

[Andromeda]

I generally dream that I’m in a music store with exotic and strange looking guitars I can’t afford. I also have dreams where I’m playing an exotic looking guitar but the neck is either like rubber or oddly shaped.

[Silly Moustache]

I marvel at the complexity of my dreams - fully moulded characters of people I don't know. complex scenarios.
Never about guitars.

I do dream about flying - more like swimming in the air following Douglas Adam's advice "just jump and forget to fall down!"

I also compose short stories in my mind to help me sleep - sometimes they become my dreams.

I also have recurring dreams of standing on Parliament Hill and looking down on the City o London - sometimes it's during the blitz watching the German bombs exploding, and sometimes its back in medieval times with much smaller buildings and lots of farmland and woods.
Funny thing -I've only ever been to Hampstead Heath once or twice.
Yeah, I'm weird, I know.

[Daniel Grenier]

I wish I could only dream about guitars instead of all the weird stuff I do dream about.

[s2y]

On occasion. Mine are usually involving losing them to a house fire or flood. Rarely, I have dreams of an other worldly guitar that plays itself.

[tinnitus]

I often have turmoil in my dreams, problems to solve.

Jammed for a couple hours the other day with a new player I just met online. He's competent, but tends to rush through songs with heavy-handed power strumming where a more subtle approach would be far more pleasing... stuff like arpeggios, intervals, dynamic phrasing, and specific unique parts for two guitars.

So instead of dreaming about something pleasant last night, I ended up trying to teach him some of that stuff, and it just wasn't taking. Woke up frustrated, not very well rested, and not terribly anxious to jam with him again.

Grrrrrr...

[Le Chef]

Sure. My worst was being up on a ladder repairing a ceiling fan with a pair of needle nosed pliers. The pliers slipped from my hands and fell toward my open guitar case below. The guitar was in the case. I woke up before the pliers hit the guitar. Sweating.