I, too, once thought the radio played
Let’s act like children while we sleep paralyzed

– “Scissor Lock” by Dredg (from the album “El Cielo”)

El Cielo is an album about lucid dreaming, dreamless sleep, and sleep paralysis. I love the fact that a rock band takes dreaming states of consciousness seriously enough to record an entire album dedicated to them. The line “I, too, once thought the radio played” reminded me of the times I’ve thought music was playing while I was experiencing a sleep paralysis.

Convincing auditory hallucinations do seem to be commonplace during such states, and ample anecdotal evidence supports this fact. The music experienced can either be (1) generated on the fly, (2) a faithful reproduction of a song one knows, (3) an altered version of a song one has heard and remembers, or even (4) a reproduction of a song one has heard but isn’t aware of at the time.

Examples of (1) and (2) are alluded to by this experience report found on the website DreamViews:

I love listening to music in sleep paralysis. The other day it was “I Love it Loud” by Kiss. The song that forms up is usually something fresh in my mind, maybe something listened to earlier. It’s like having headphones in, the sound quality is that good. What songs do you get?

– User J.D. in DreamViews (source)

And here is FlacidSteel from Reddit relating their experience:

That happens to me when I am in the right mindset to have a lucid dream. It normally comes as the sound of the radio next to my bed, or sometimes the TV. When I finally realize I didn’t leave the radio/TV on is when I realize I’m dreaming and gain control of my dream, almost like a reality check. One time I could have sworn the garbage men were outside and I woke up and it was hours before they came. Sleep paralysis hallucinations can be the most convincing and terrifying experienced.

– From the r/LucidDreaming post “Sleep Paralysis Involving Music” (source)

I’ve experienced (3) but I haven’t seen an explicit account online. There is at least one account for (4): the music might have been stored in auditory memory but not semantically.

Sleep paralysis for me comes about once a month, and lucid dreams about every two months. Like many, I’ve heard Bach Cello Suite No.1. and other classics. I once heard the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone movie soundtrack playing perfectly for what seemed like many tracks. I think that learning about japanoise changed what my mind thought of as acceptable mood-setting melodies. So when I first started contemplating the emotional character of arbitrary sounds and I fell into a sleep paralysis my mind played a concert that combined noise music and Bach. That time I had the ability to modulate the ratio of noise music to Bach music and see how the various proportions changed the mood I experienced. Noise blunted the quality and emotional depth of Bach. On the other hand, noise did not make me commit to any particular pattern.

Our minds can create pleasant music on the fly featuring synthesizer sounds, flutes, pianos, duck quacks, elephant trumpets, and so on. Sleep paralysis allows you to experience a broad range of deeply emotional sounds of uncharted varieties. If you are in search of a bang rather than a slow burn, I would point you to the very start of the hypnagogic state. Once a sleep paralysis has gotten going it will creep for a good 5 to 15 minutes depending on your ability to reconfigure it to a better state. Some people use their extremities to bootstrap a wave of wakefulness by energizing little pulsed ripples in one’s toes and fingers until you have yourself wiggling out of the state. The methods to deal with the aftermath of entering a sleep paralysis are myriad. But let’s talk about the point before getting into it. There isn’t a better place to arrest a sleep paralysis than at its very beginning. It’s like a loud sound in the distance is trying to set the mood and seduces you so that you agree to abide by its emotional parameters. When you fully let go for a moment, that’s the real onset of a hypnagogic state. One can hear bangs right there – one can experience sounds with climaxes! Kitchen pots colliding, balloons exploding, water splashing, 80s drums. If you want to interrupt a sleep paralysis you have to contend with the mood-setting forces of the initial hypnagogic bang. Be brave; apply the mental move of either “internalism of meaning” or semantic nihilism and prevent the loud sound from convincing the rest of your experiential world to settle in on this “new world”. If you are quick to detect the hypnagogic sleight of hand and you act decisively, a sleep paralysis can be cut right at the nub.

During sleep paralysis, hearing any kind of sound is possible, really. The generality of it is remarkable. But perhaps more relevant still is the fact that dream music is often experienced as being emotionally compelling. “Like music is supposed to be heard”- I once thought as a kid waking up from a dream with a soundtrack. It is almost like the music is a manifestation of the mood one is in. Deep down, one’s own felt-sense of aliveness provides the constraints for the type of music that will resonate with you on a given night. In turn, having slept well through the night helps you internalize a certain mood, to imagine worlds within certain affective constraints. Some people remark that dream phenomenology is emotion-driven rather than emotion-responsive. What one sees is a projection of one’s mood, the semantic congruence being imposed in often symbolic and round-about ways. It’s like when you’ve had a conversation with someone a thousand times, so you come at it with a certain attitude. “Whatever you say, no, because I’ve seen it all and I’ve always said no. Try me.” And so the dream generates images and scenes and it is somehow always implied that what happens is part of the plot. Contradictions are quickly incorporated rather than a source of questioning. Sleep paralysis has this quality, but it also has the wakeful emotion-responsive quality too. So you are in the weird position of experiencing this strange feedback effect that has a certain mood, and is trying to express its excess energy in whatever way is possible, and you have your ego who is more critical and expects certain behaviors from the world. In a way you can think of this situation as having two metallic blades spinning very fast right next to each other, and they are tied together with a complicated arrangement of pulleys and levers. If you do it right and manage to keep the balance right, no harm done. But if you mess up you can experience super strange dissonant couplings and bizarre vibrations, few of which are strictly pleasant, and most of which are sharp and rather uncomfortable.

It’s no wonder some people get traumatized from experiencing sleep paralysis. I assume very few families have a parent-child vocabulary so well developed as to be able to carefully explain sleep paralysis phenomenology in a way that will work at pointing to the thing when it finally happens for the first time. Indeed, what is so stunning about the state is perhaps precisely that which people have the hardest time verbalizing. Namely, the fact that the phenomenal character of this state is almost entirely having to do with its ambiance rather than the intentional objects present. People come out of the state saying “there was a man on top of me” or “I felt like my arms were tied to the bed” which although true, completely misses the essential character of the state, the fact that it had this peculiar dreamy subtlety that embedded a mood into everything it touched. The often Halloweenesque scenic mist that comes with a sleep paralysis is rather paranormal-themed. On a bad night, the ambiance of a sleep paralysis can feel quite inviting to zombies, demons, and vultures as thought-forms. Likewise, the thought-forms can take the shape of angry sounds and dissonant percussions. It is incredible just how powerful of a filter hedonic tone exerts on reality. For that exact same reason, it does happen to be the case that some sleep paralyses are filled with extraordinary beauty and delight. The negative hedonic tone is not intrinsic to the state, although it may seem so at the time. For whatever reason, most humans’ experience with sleep paralysis is of the negative variety, but for most sufferers every once in a while the experience comes with pleasant qualities. Indeed, there is no reason to think that devoid of evolutionary selection pressures, exotic states of alertness should come with a pre-defined hedonic tone. On the contrary, I would expect them to be fully programmable.

Anyhow, some people, myself included, have experienced sleep paralysis in which the sounds heard were of extraordinary beauty. Most people will be skeptical that the music our brains can compose on the fly in a good mood sleep paralysis is genuinely good. I’ve gone through several stages on this matter. At first I treated it as self-evidently true that the music was beautiful. Then I questioned my memory and convinced myself that my brain was fabricating the music after the fact and that I was under the illusion that it was beautiful to begin with. Then I finally memorized a little melody I heard and it was nice but too small to say much about when I woke up, so I suspected again that my brain could compose great music if I just let it do it on that state. But finally I realized that the melody is in fact quite irrelevant. What matters is the mood, and the state itself, the good mood sleep paralysis itself is in a way expressing its positive valence via sounds, but if you were to listen to them in a normal state, they wouldn’t resonate in the same way. They wouldn’t produce the same peculiar echoing along one’s subjective arrow of time (cf. The Pseudo-Time Arrow).

Naïvely one may think: let us put musicians in good mood sleep paralysis and produce great music very easily. The problem is not that you will not get melodies and rhythms out. It’s that they will not create the same emotional impression they did in the person in the state in which they were generated.

Rather, what we ought to do is figure out in what ways good mood sleep paralysis states enable a wider range of emotional contrast for phenomenal music. That’s the real question. How can we import the (good) emotional depth of sleep paralysis into the wakeful state? Deep down I suspect this comes down to disabling the boredom mechanism. It is not so much that good mood sleep paralysis is great at composing music, and more that it can create a dreamy “enjoyment body” for the music. The thought-forms there can be entranced with harmonic patterns much more easily than those present while awake.

In the general case I suspect that the music produced is entirely new… it’s the emotional character that convinces you that it is so profound, not its resemblance to a previously heard soundtrack. To reword: the precise melody of the music one experiences on dream states is almost irrelevant to understanding that world of experience. It’s the resonant echoey quality of the state that gives such a remarkable emotional depth to those imagined/experienced sounds.

Perhaps the fact that dream music can be profoundly emotionally compelling is a special case of the more general feature of such states: that the brain is in some ways more resonant than usual. Music might be just one manifestation of this general effect, others being unlocking rarely-felt emotions, body vibrations, or even things like feeling that you are being electrocuted. If resonance is the key, we could predict that a sufficiently trained lucid dreamer will be able to generate musical experiences that are surprisingly simple in their complexity and yet stunningly deep in their emotional character. What is the CDNS of a dream state? This story doesn’t end here.