Dreams

In dreams we think, try to figure things out, make decisions and act. The dreamer though, has set up the situation for one who finds him/herself in that situation. The dreaming subject, then, is double. We recognize the capacity for acting in a situation one finds oneself from waking life. Also, we have the capacity for conjuring up mentally a hypothetical scenario of a certain type and placing ourselves in it. We might do that when thinking about future or past events, or imagining someone else's experience, as when reading fiction or seeing a movie.

The unconscious is sloppy, not concerned with precision. So two people can fuse, or one separate into two.  Geographies are uncertain too. The acting subject tries to deal with the incoherence set forward by the scenario-projecting subject, who has set things up in a confusing way, simply because the unconscious mind doesn't care about precision in that way. The conscious dreamer can accept reality as it is presented in the scenario, or also question it. I think it's Kafka who best captures that particular incoherence: it's not that the dream is strange, but that we often go along with that strangeness, or our protests are ineffectual when we do question it.  We ought to have freedom to dream what we want, but instead our minds present diminished, less free versions of reality itself.  We are trapped by our own minds.

Dream of Music

My music teacher was going to come over to talk about electric wheelchairs for her father. I. was unclear about why, since I don't know anything about the subject. When she showed up she was a completely different person, a young blonde woman I was very drawn to. It eventually turned out she was not my piano teacher, but a voice teacher I had had before. (Though she didn't actually look like her, either.) She began talking to me about who I had studied voice with. The topic of wheelchairs didn't really come up, though I think my mom had one in the shed... We seemed to be in my house in Davis. I mentioned that my daughter had studied to be a professional musician, yet in the dream my daughter was still an infant.    

Dislike

There is a guy I don't like very much, former colleague.  His name is sacrosanct around here, and so I just assumed that I was in a minority. I don't really dislike him intensely, even, but I just never felt the level of praise he received was at all merited, and that there was something that rubbed me the wrong way, though I've never been able to define what it was either.  It's fine, since he's far away now and we don't have to see each other. I always tried to be nice to him and not let on at all about how I felt. I haven't bad-mouthed him to others either. He probably doesn't like me either, and he would be justified in that, though to his credit he's treated me cordially on the surface.    

I've discovered, though, that I am not the only one.  Today I finally mentioned to two other people that I never liked this guy, and they agreed with me completely. It comes as a relief. We are in a bit of a tumult here, with our chair resigning after some conflictive situations that have been going on for a year or so. We've had an HR study of our climate, an administrative "minder" looking over our shoulders, and an external review that we haven't seen yet.  I just had to get off my chest that this other guy is not as great as everyone thinks.    

Ex tempore

Why is improvisation seen as difficult in music but so easy in speaking?

Suppose we could only speak by reading off a script; we would be very limited in our means of expression. If, furthermore, we never wrote a script ourselves, but only followed scripts written by others. To what extent could we really be said to understand language in such circumstances?  

Yet that is how music is taught.

In vernacular traditions, at least, the player learns to play by ear, or to improvise right away. We know that improvisation used to be stronger in the classical tradition as well.

Improvisation

When I improvise, I hear the entire next phrase in my head before I play it, so that when I actually play it, even if it is fast phrase, it can feel slow and relaxed: after all I have just heard it in my head much faster than I play it. This doesn't always occur, of course. Sometimes my fingers play things I have not heard first in my head. Those phrases are much worse.

The best phrases will feel very definite, very intentional, not tentative in the least.

Since I am not a very great improviser, I find it remarkable that I can do it at all. Extrapolating to someone far better than I am, I can see that they are hearing things in their head very fast and playing in a relaxed and intentional way when they actually come to play the phrase. It never seems like they are rushed to think of what to play.

The trick is not making things up on the spot, then, but making those improvised ideas sound inevitable in context. To achieve that I improvise hours and hours over a few different chords changes. That would seem to be the way to move forward.

***

We can all improvise in conversational situations.  That's what conversation is, right?  You might have a script for an interview or a sale pitch, but once you have to answer and unexpected question improvisation comes in.  The sentence you are about to speak can also appear in your mind instantaneously before you speak it, so that the utterance itself comes out effortlessly.  Or you can start to speak and flounder a bit, lose your place. Everyone can converse; some are better than others, but it is not a rare skill to have.

Funereal

In this dream I was with my mother. We were to perform a funereal ritual called the ???? for my father. (The word was very clear in my mind, even after awakening, but I can't recall it now.) We went to one church in Sacramento, and were directed to another one. I wondered why we just couldn't have called to find out where it was supposed to be. At the second church, we went down into a basement area and found the room, after walking through a bath-like area, perhaps suggesting baptismal fonts.

Apparently this was a kind of second funeral, performed several years after the death. My father died in 2000, but in the dream the event seemed closer in time. I found a small slip of paper on which my mother had written of her hardships taking care of my father in his illness. She talked of not having enough protein and having to chew multivitamins to get enough nourishment.  I began to weep, and the rest of the dream was basically me weeping. I felt guilty at not having helped my mother. At some point someone tried to comfort me.

***

Now my mother helps to care for my sister, who has a rarer form of dementia that hits people in late middle age.  At the same time, she has my niece living there as well, with a caregiver who comes in, so the burden is not all on her. The emotion in the dream is very real to me, even though in real life my mother has dealt with tasks of caring for others quite well.  Between the time my father died and my sister was diagnosed with dementia, she voluntarily cared for several people not even related to her, as well as helping out her own parents.

Improvement

I try to improve one piece significantly for each piano lesson.  So taking it from sight-reading to being able to play it through fluently, or from that to memorization, or from that to working on the artistic interpretation. That way, with each lesson I improve something tangibly. The other pieces I happen to be working on will stand still, but that is preferable to working on four pieces at once and having no discernible improvement with any of them.

So far, I've learned several from the Mompou "Música callada." The Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and a Chopin Prelude in E minor. I have a few Schumann things I'm working through.  There have also been pieces I've begun but never finished learning well. I'm learning faster now, so there's that.