Craig Sim Webb

Hello, hello, hello and welcome to Dream Power Radio. This is a place where we talk about dreams, both daytime and nighttime dreams, and how you can use them to make the internal shift to a life you love and rediscover the truth of who you really are. When I give talks about the importance of dreams, I often cite what I believe to be the well-known fact that Paul McCartney came up with the music for the song yesterday in a dream.

It's just one example of the creative work that originates in our dreams, but as you're going to find out now, it's far from the only one. Dreams are such a foundation in the world of music that my guest author Craig Sim Webb, has written a book. The Dreams Behind the Music reveals little known dreams that inspired tremendous success for over 100 famous artists and highlights, principles and techniques anyone can use to harvest their own dreams for significant breakthroughs.

Craig is also a dream analyst and researcher who has done pioneering work on Lucid Dreams at Stanford.  Welcome to Dream Power Radio, Craig. Oh, thanks a lot for the invite. It'd really good to, to meet you and to share with some of the amazing, I guess, audience who's joining us too.

Oh, well thank you for that, Craig. But Craig, I want to start with this. What inspired you to write this book? Well, I guess a number of factors, the dreams behind the music, sort of says two parts of me that weren't fully merged and probably still aren’t but dreaming my passion. I think the same one that you and many of the listeners have exploring, applying dreams in their lives, and then a whole artistic side, music kind of being the muse.

So I'm a multidisciplinary artist, but one of the big things that keeps recurring in my dreams, kind of like a knock on the door, you know, calling dreams. I call them,  if you wish, you can click on the link of this dream and after maybe a year or two or effort, you can have this beautiful future. Those come often with music and new instruments and song ideas and sort of like Paul McCartney in, in terms of career steps, not always music.

So I guess clicking on those things led to the merge and slow merge inside me like. Came out as an expression of the book here.  And personally, I sort of love stories. They sort of have neat, famous people in them and interesting principles. I tried to kind of isolate the principles or universal ideas, universal techniques that everybody can use.

So it's kind of about language of music, maybe celebrity, but really a mother, a doctor, a business person. I could use most of the principles and I guess that's why it's a fit for Dream Power Radio, right? Oh, absolutely. And we're going to get into your connection with music in a little while, but I do want to get back to the book itself, because I talked in the intro about Paul McCartney and Yesterday, but  if I'm correct, it's not the only Beatles song that was instigated by a dream.

Yeah, well, Paul's one of,  my favorite dreamers. I borrowed the phrase to say, rock and roll. Shaman.  Sting called himself sort of a, let's say, shaman, states of dreaming stings another big musical dreamer. And Sir McCartney dreamt,  I think mentioned Yesterday, which he shared, not that long ago, in public.

But for many years, not too many people knew about that. So thank you for bringing it out there. Show people examples that can really be practical in life. And then of course, Let It Be. That's another one he shared; I think only about a year ago on  Carpool Karaoke. I mean a little bit here and there before that, but in a mainstream way for the West.

 That was a big one. About a year ago, he shared some of the story of Let It Be where his. You know, the lyric, mother Mary came to me, of course, his mother's name is Mary, his physical mom, who passed when he was younger. And she came in a dream, and I think had a rough time when the Beatles were having a sort of a rocky part towards the end of their, their togetherness.

And she said, you know, son, just let it be. And he said,  I guess it touched me so deeply. Maybe it'll touch listeners, made a lyric, made the song, and you can sort of see the thread that comes. Some kind of inside info. I sort of call it, you know, shamanic, rock and roller. But really that's what shamans or let's say medicine people or anybody really tuned inward gets the inside data.

I say collecting the, the files and the data and the webpages off the inner net. It's kind of like internet. And then bringing it up. Internet. The Internet? Yeah. Why not? I mean, we have this big physical version of what's already inside of us. So I borrowed the phrase, I hope that's okay.

People, I'm allowed to joke a little about it because my family name is Webb. Right, exactly. So it's very interesting that you say that.  We know Paul McCartney came up with the music for Yesterday and his dream, but the lyrics for Let It Be came from, or the inspiration, the lyric came from his dream.

 And I'm not sure we can separate them entirely because he's a pretty sharp dreamer. This is a, a little hidden technique in there for any of you creatives, which I think is everybody. But he would often, or when he would get these kinds of musical inspirations, and there's a few more if you want, I can share, but he'll right away, you know, sort of, and I think  Jane Asher's apartment when he got Yesterday, crawled out of bed groggy, you know, maybe a cool morning there in.

But he just went right over to piano and tried to piece together the song.  And so he kind of gets up early right away. And I imagine the dreams in the music for Let It Be, were both mixed in. So, maybe he's just writing the lyrics of that moment, but then he starts humming the phrase and it kind of comes together, I guess a batch.

And there's a, a little bit of science, or let's say statistics behind my guess, because it turns out that actually anybody who wishes, it's pretty much anybody who wishes, in short of a smaller study I did. And then some other research I've seen since then. It looks like people who intend or, you know, just say, Hey, that's interesting.

Let me be open or try it. To have musical dreams or dream of new songs even, seem to get it very quickly, very easily. Like surprisingly, seven out of seven of my students got it within a week,  who never really dreamt music maybe once, three years before for one of them. But, you know, never really intended it, but it's almost like pressing a button.

Hey, soundtrack on please,  the mute button, but unmute in this case for dreams and  then all of a sudden music can come. So I imagine that the music and  the lyrics weren't too far apart. It's kind of from the inner source. We don't know, I don't want to put words in Sir McCartney's mouth, but there is a very, very interesting story, the sort of points to other aspects of such dreams by The Beatles, and this one's not known about yet, but thanks to Dream Power Radio and may, maybe some other helpers here.  This let's hear it there more, maybe a little bit of my book that,  Lennon and McCartney had just started working together. Obviously, an incredible partnership, but at the time they didn't really know.

They're just sort of two gens in, I guess, Liverpool,  just kind of having fun playing guitar, having a wish to be like that guy on TV called Elvis. And then,  a recurring dream that Sir McCartney had. He wasn't served at the time but was digging up an old tin can in his backyard. So he actually shared this, and I reference,  all, I think 750 references in my book point to the actual place where he shared it or it was shown, or some of them actual events that happened, like plane crashes, et cetera.

So I like to keep a little bit of credentials in there, and he, he actually shared this. He woke up that morning with the dream. He dug up the same tin can, or the same little can, I guess, as usual, from his backyard, except that it had gold coins. And he said, wow, that's interesting. You just happened to be chatting, I guess with his new songwriting mate, John, and said, oh, I had my, a recurring dream in whatever accident, Liverpool.

And  John said, well, that's really strange because just this morning I actually, had a dream also of digging up a tin of old coins. Clients were something pretty close to it, enough that it was extremely unusual. They both pretty much had the same dream that was tandem dreaming. He kind of like just says a little phrase at the end, I guess you could say it's sort of played out true.

Because, you know, he has I think now,  half a billion or, or more royalties in all his life. So he did pretty well with the gold coins for that partnership. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It also brings up the whole idea of tandem dreaming, which, right, not very many people do. But you get that connect. I'm mutual dreaming.

I'm not, I wouldn't be so surprised in this case it was sort of, let's say, new creative partners, band mates, and they turned out to be lifelong friends and colleagues and such,  with a little bit of waves in the mix, of course. But I would say any partners out there, you know, obviously wife, husband, but even let's say, Variations on a theme.

Children and parents, if they started to check a little more, I bet you they would notice a lot of what I call mutual seeming. Sort of like mutual dreaming. But it's not always in the language of life where I'm at this point of view, I see the TV, or I see the tree exactly like this. You're over there, you see the other side of the TV.

So it's not, that's more the physical language of our perception. In dreams, it might be, oh, I had this character appear, or the color of the room was. Or we were outside running, going on a river. But big more general things like a scene or a motif and if people check, I bet you it'd be very surprised that it happens all the time because  I check with clients and students and I myself notice it personally quite often.

Yeah. It's there if we look for it sometimes. It's very striking though. Exact same dream, right? Have you ever had that? I haven't, but again, I don't usually ask other people if they've dreamt the same thing that I have. And it's an interesting question to take up that.  I may do it in the future. All right.

Now a little home research effective science with dreams. We get to be first person, explorer and get our data each person. Absolutely. Well, in your book, it's not only about The Beatles who had songs come out of their dreams, but you also say Beyonce has a song that came from one of her dreams. So you can tell me a little bit about that.

 Yes. Well, Beyonce's  a visual artist, although people say what I thought she was a musician. Her album that which she says every song was at least inspired by her maybe direct from Dream download. The Visual Album, she says yes, because I actually see music, I see the images, I see the sort of dreams of it.

Some, she actually gets right on waking up, so she'll get that as her music. Which sort of bridges into a whole interesting chapter in the book that, I just labeled. Cause I started seeing sort of the meta data,  when I was gathering many stories, like 200 different artists. There were certain groupings that were kind of interesting that don't really show if we just know a story, or  I guess an anecdote here or there.

But I noticed a lot of artists, especially the dream ones who kind of tune inward and bring it out quite consciously. Like, let's say the applied dreamers, I would mention them.  They have synesthesia, in other words, their senses, different senses. Bridge a little bit into each other.  Pharrell will go, you know, the, the artist, Pharrell, what is this?

I'm going to be happy. Clap along. I can't say too many lyrics here for copyright, but I don't think he'd mind that. Farrell actually sees music when he meditates in the studio,  or kind of sits quiet maybe with eyes closed and sees like colors dancing around a bit. Like I believe Beyonce does. So there's this kind of crossover where that visual and the feelings that comes with them translates into a musical song or working arrangement or whatever they're, they're working on in that moment.

And then there's some other interesting variations. I have a strange, a bit of a strange one actually sort of here touch, which is a pretty small percentage. Do you have any synesthesia? There's some where you can sort of like remember numbers really perfectly. And there there's a few strange ones but bridging of senses like hearing colors or seeing sound or anything like that. Sometimes. I mean, it doesn't happen very often, but yeah, yes, I do. I do. Well it could be a sign of some creative genius. So a friendly little seed or suggestion for you and any listener if it starts coming a little bit, maybe, at least be open, maybe nurture, bit because it sounds like it can bring some interesting success.

Yeah.  I wanted to ask you in your research, because you either have dreams spontaneously where you just dream, you go to bed, you have the dream and it's there. Or you can make a dream declaration or do dream incubation and meditate on what you want to dream about before you have the dream.

 Which is it with these artists is a little bit of both. Yeah, there's a few. I have a whole chapter on what I think everybody here probably is aware of how Lucid Dreamers,  and even lucid isn't quite an on or off thing, and obviously some people use the word differently. But let's say generally people who intend dreams.

In my definition of lucidity, which has expanded quite a bit since I was involved with the research at Stanford, that kind of brought it to the west.  Even if we intend a topic to dream about, or maybe not so consciously, you know, we watch a scary movie going to bed, or we're just thinking about something or worrying or whatever, but our mental focus is on a certain topic.

Our emotions are probably following that, and we fall. We go to a deeper state, maybe even meditation, but if we fall asleep with anything like that, yeah, we're going to probably dream on it. I think anybody here say that? Yeah, I slept on a problem before. Same idea. So it can be intentional or unintentional, but it starts to guide dreams.

So that's kind of my, my little,  movement of the rpm needle of lucidity. Maybe not fully into the green yet but starting to intend dreams before they happen. And then maybe more official lucidity is during the. That can start to happen and there's quite a few.  One interesting one is a colleague I worked with, Robert Rich, it turns out a number of the electronic music musicians who do sort of soundscapes and different sounds.

It's not quite as much as like songs, I guess, or quite rock and roll radio songs anyway, but more soundscapes and Brian Eno. They actually sort of seemed to intentionally dream quite a bit, so Robert Rich did too. He said he had a really powerful dream where he kind of merged into a painting in the dream, kind of became aware and then dove into a painting. He ended up flying over the hills of Santa Cruz, which is close to where he lived in California, and then hearing the most rapturous, incredible. I guess at first actually seeing this sort of sound formation in the air and then I think hearing and feeling and waking up with it. And that became one of the songs on the album, I think Luminous or one of the albums he was working on at the time.

So there's certainly people who quite intentionally go into the dream music studio. On one of them and we'll sort of work on songs or ask for inspiration or somehow just let it come. But I can still say even as a fairly proficient boost dreamer, many times the melody just comes,  if I want it, I know that I can kind of turn on or off the mute button for the music pretty much any day I can sort of have that.

It's just a question of which ones am I going to work on and log. And it does take some physical time, so I kind of let them come a little more naturally. But sometimes if I'm working on a song, an album, or maybe something even like producing somebody else's work, sometimes just editing audio interviews.  I might intentionally ask for guidance or in the dream say, hey, is there a better way to mix this or arrange it, or is a certain instrument? I sort of got the melody, but...

Example here, we'll, we'll kind of go back to some of the famous folks. Rolling Stones, got no satisfaction at least. Keith Richards, the guitarist got this dream where he said he kind of pulled out a tape recorder in the middle of the night and just strummed, I guess this little riff on his guitar.

And he didn't even remember in the morning, but he saw that a bunch of tape had run. He went and listened to it. He said, oh, wow, cool.  But he wasn't as into it. And he played it for, I guess Mick Jagger, his band mate. They were just beginning at the time, and Mick said, hey, I like it. I like it because he wasn't sure he wanted to really record it.

So Mick, I think that day or shortly thereafter, wrote some lyrics that seemed to fit pretty well, and they pieced it together and you said, well, I want to make it more rock. So they had this really grunge. In this case, I don't think he necessarily did ask his dreams to consciously get that guidance, but it's certainly quite possible.

Phish, I'm not sure if you're aware of that artist. He's more of a performance artist. Oh, you know, you know, oh yes. The group.  One of the main songwriters there, actually one of the performers on stage, Mike Gordon, goes in dreams and quite actively gets a feeling of sound or music.  There are other artists who do that too.

Craig, this is fascinating, but we do have to take a little break. Here we are speaking all about music and artists and dreams with author Craig Sim Webb, and we'll be right back.

Yes. Welcome back to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Debbie Spector Weisman, and we're talking about music and dreams with author Craig Sim Webb. Oh, Craig, you said  you're also a performer and you've come up with music from your dreams. So we're actually going to play a couple of clips from your music, and I'd like you to elaborate a little bit about, what it means to you, maybe where it came from.

So this first clip,  I want to talk about is the one that you call Bass Riff. A short clip. 

Base Riff’s an interesting one. Like, I think maybe about eight or nine that I included in,  my dream inspired video. We can talk about that.

There's a little sort of what I call seeds. I don't necessarily dream minutes or hours of music, but nobody does. Some people actually get, I think, longer strings, and I know Mozart saw visually his entire composition as like, almost like this kind of crystal formation that he later translated.

But he saw it all at once. Complete the whole symphony or whatever. So I don't quite get that. I get these, what I call sort of maybe a seed for what could be a song, maybe the main theme or a low riff or a hook or whatever you want to call it. In this case, the Bass Riff was probably something like that.

I included about eight of these in the video, Treasure in a Bottle. People can check it out on my YouTube channel. They’re just sort of seeds that I hadn't really put together, but I was describing the dreaming music process and connecting it with a very interesting photographic technique that came from a dream also of sort of bending spectrum rainbow life in  a neat way, which is kind of a connection for the rainbow there behind me.

So maybe there's a little link, little sync of the sound, but there's nothing too deep. But I noticed after that that same sound is pretty close to the Seinfeld sort of scene transition. Not to say melody exactly, but  the bass kind of playing twangy like that. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Maybe that's my comedic side, kind of tuning into dreams.  

It's very interesting that you say that. You call them little seeds. I often have what I refer to as dream snippets where , I'm not a musician. I can't carry a tune. I don't play any instruments, but I do write, and I will come up with sentences  or themes that I want to write about  in a dream.

But it's usually not the whole full-blown thing. 

You're right. Fiction, uh, no, no. Non-fiction. Yeah. Kind of type things. I was wondering if you dreamt your characters because some authors have dreamt characters too. Oh, there's, there's a laundry list of authors who have had their books come out of dreams. Mark Twain was big dreamer, just for an example, Stephen King,  quite a number.

Stephen King and so many people. But I want to get back to you and let's get back to your music.   That one was an instrumental, just a little clip of an instrumental. Yeah. But this one's a song with music and lyrics called Lucid Never Felt as Good. And I'll play a little bit of that song now.

Alright, well that one,  is sort of a slash title. Lucid is the main title, but people don't always get it because it's just at the end of the song. So the chorus, I guess repeating part, the reframe says never felt as good as when I'm with you. That's an interesting one to sort of show some principles that I think might be interesting for listeners and like also something that I learned in my life.

So hopefully that can be. But like most of these melodies, they come to me as sort of a hook. In this case, I think I used it as a hook. Anyways, whenever I've been in my life, I've never felt as good as when on with, you can't quite get the bass note today. But anyway, something close to that when I woke up, went.

Interesting and little technique tape here. Had my voice recorder and so recorded right away as I woke up. So I got it as clear as I can with the key and maybe the timing, the speed, the tempo too. And then I sort of sat around because I did get a number of little melodies for a while. I thought, okay, that's an interesting one.

Maybe I'll work on it.  Then I started deciding what could the lyrics be about because I got the lyrics and the music together, right? And that one. And I thought, okay. Never felt as good as when I'm with you. Maybe use my dream side here and I'll say maybe it's the inner self, my deep dream wisdom coming and speaking to the physical self.

But I'll sort of make it like,  it could be a romantic relationship too, sort of,  not super clear what it is, but some of the lyrics start to say closer that, yeah, we're talking about an inner partnership or a relationship with a deep inner friend. And in that case, the woman, my inner subconscious, the anima perhaps said, yeah, I never felt as good as when I with you.

So the interesting part is here I did start writing and recording and what's super interesting, this is a principle I saw in many of the artists, and maybe you've seen this too, but the moment they sort of acted on it, And the moment I acted and, and started actually putting a little work and, I sort of make the analogy, I went from a couple dates into going steady with this song, and started recording arranging a little bit.

Then a next dream came pretty soon after that commitment. I forget the exact timing, but days at most week or something and it gave a whole different sound because I'm more of like a folk guitar. I like acoustic sometimes even just like acapella and things up till then. And it was like this rock and roll driving distortion beat.

 It brought the bridge. Which people can hear in that song if they check it out, but it's a pretty hard electric guitar  with distortion, I think. Whoa, you know, grunge, I'm not quite the grunge guy, but I thought, well, maybe that's a good character development for me to get my, my hard rocker self growing a little bit here.

But I also took it as a pretty specific guidance and I added in distortion guitar and it changed the feel of the song quite a bit, and  I did really enjoy it. So the principle there that, and maybe everybody can check out, is once we kind of commit to it, act a little bit towards it, it seems like the subconscious says, oh, cool, you know, he's showing up or she's showing up, and the next step  is given.

Okay. I have a very practical question to ask you. So you dream music. How do you remember it? Do you get out, take out your guitar and record it, or do you just sing it into record? How do you do that? Yeah. Well,  I have to be honest here, maybe I'm dating myself officially.  I did record originally on a tape recorder. So that was, I just kept a little tape recorded by my bed.  The days of tape recorders have passed here, so I keep an MP3 recorder. But what I find most efficient now,  so that I act on it quickly. Because it's not obvious if we just gather all kinds of stuff on a voice's recorder or maybe our cell phone. I put it right into the cell. 

A little tip here. I keep  the airplane function on, so the cellular waves off at night, so I don't get blasted with  the radiation. And then right away, as soon as I've recorded it, I email it to myself,  and that day I'll have the little melody there and I'll choose if I'm going to work on it, or at least I'll record it with as much as I can remember of the dream and, and maybe a few other.

And most of the artists to many artists seem to agree that when it was fresh, like the morning of, or at least that week, and they worked on it, they got a lot more and it seemed more connected with that intuitive source spring of the song. Otherwise, you know, some of the artists have their talents. But they didn't get quite as much.

One interesting one is Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan who said he remembered sort of having music, but he couldn't really remember any of the melody, but he just sort of had the feeling, you know, I think this might actually be the first ever recorded dream music and might even be the first ever recorded music because it was right around the time of being able to record things.  And so he called that song The Lost Chord, which I guess was sort of the forgotten dream. But I think he included the feeling in vibe and other artists who sort of wake up,  sleep on the keyboard. One of the soundtrack composers for games, I forget his name, but a Japanese fellow, he says he sleeps on his keyboard,  with maybe a little pillow or something so that he can get as fresh as he can and get it right in and even start working on it right away. And many others. Lenny Kravitz says he decided, he goes right into the studio at night, et cetera, et cetera. So the fresher the better. 

Oh, wow. That is so fascinating to me. And I've got a million more questions to you, but we're running out of time, so I just have time for this one final one, Craig, which is, how can people find out more about you and your book and your work?

Oh, well thanks for that, Debbie. If it resonates with you today, or if you want to learn more, you can certainly  follow different trainings, or I guess private coaching that I offer. Craig webb.ca. If you want to learn about tele classes, you can check out applied dreaming.com with two ds Applied Dreaming.

And then,  if you want to check out the book, it's on Amazon, you can just go Dreams Behind the Music or you can actually read a little more about it at the website, dreamsbehindthemusic.com. You can also reach to me;  I encourage you to make sure to subscribe for Debbie's show here because she brings on lots of great content.

So part of what we're offering is a huge gift from Debbie and I appreciate it. Thanks Debbie. Oh Craig, thank you so much for being on Dream Power Radio. My pleasure. My pleasure. And,  if they want to check out a chapter in the back of the book or some of my writings that they'll find through my webpage, I'll wish everybody Happy Nightmares. That means you probably went lucid and made it into something better. 

Oh, yes. I always say nightmares are the best thing that can happen to you, so I like that. We've been speaking about dreams and creativity with Author and Dream Analyst Craig Sim Webb. I hope you've enjoyed today's program. If so, please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future episodes.

Until next time, this is Debbie Spector Weisman saying Sweet Dreams everybody.