So its late, but I wanted to get this down as I didn't have time to write it anywhere earlir today. While I was playing guitar, I had a fantastic self-realization. Unfortunately these only happen to me once every few years. So I was playing a five bar phrase over a four bar phrase (I have a sampler) and during the playing I remembered a dream from long long ago. I had this dream in late high school, early college maybe, where I was on a family trip in the van with my family. We stop at a place that had christmas all year right on the highway. While in the store, which was full of candy canes and christmas knick-knackery of every kind, I was still listening to my walkman. And the Christmas music and the walkman music at one point, would go in and out of sync. While I could play odd time signature phrases, I couldn't play to diffrent time signatures (one odd, one even) with each other. It just sounded wrong. But after this dream I was able to somehow grasp and deal with the complexity of mixed time signatures. What astonished me was that years (15 or so) I put these two together. And what does it say about the mind that the imagery of something so uncomfortable and out of place as a family vacation and a Christmas store on the interstate was able to facilitate or reflect the mental change in being able to follow two different beats as once.
The unconcious mind is weird.
Somehow to me I think it makes a weird sort of sense. Then again maybe it wasn't a dream, maybe it's a memory. I did spend a great deal of my teen years going back and forth between modes of alienation and angsty critique. It wouldn't surprise me if I've repressed vast parts of the family vacations I enjoyed/suffered. Cheers!
P.S. Do these kind of realiztions happen to any else out there?
