The Composer's Dream

A fascinating and original book by a musician who is also a psychotherapist, exploring the links between creativity, music, dreaming and healing. The first section discusses an opera the children were problem-solving while falling asleep is a key theme, which is fascinating considering our recent conference on the nature of dreaming. This allows the author to tease out further themes with real-life examples, for instance relating to development or the future. There is a section on the musical development of Rossini and reflections on Bach's Air on a G String, which the author himself plays and which he sees as an intersection between heaven and earth, between sacred and secular. Towards the end, there is a fascinating discussion about dreams, music and quantum physics. Music seems to unfold from silence as a kind of generative and implicate order, and thought about music - whether composing or playing - has to be in advance of the performance. As the author puts it, 'to understand music one must go forward, and tune attention on the still silent intricate, hidden musical thought.' This is a subtle process analogous to dreams, which also emerge from an implicate or virtual aspect of reality – composers 'turn the enfolded material into the unfolded, the unexpressed into expressed, the virtual into actual, and the future into a new, different present.' This brings one back to the title of the composer's dream.