Music of Sleep and Dreams

Gresham College

June 10

Sleep and music share a strange, elusive magic—both shape our lives profoundly yet slip beyond words. Lullabies soothe us into slumber, nocturnes and reveries evoke the twilight world between wakefulness and dreams. Some melodies even emerge from sleep itself—McCartney’s "Let It Be" and Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata came to their composers in dreams. Yet sleep has its own music: the phasing rhythms of wake and rest, the cadences of falling asleep, the waveforms of EEG data—an unheard music to which we may awaken.