Maria Somerville Dreaming (2019)
A lot of different influences are at play when it comes to the music of Irish artist Maria Somerville: There’s pop, of course, but there’s also folk, traditional Irish motifs and post-punk elements present in her discography. For each track, she knits these layers together into illustrative soundscapes, and so, “Dreaming” really does sound like a dream: Hazy, pulsing and vibrant all at once, the song succeeds at creating a fully immersive sound that also seems to perpetually remain just out of the listener’s grasp.
Well, except that unlike with a real dream, with Somerville’s music, you have the opportunity to just hit “replay.” So, perhaps, a lucid dream would be a more fitting comparison, especially since scientific research suggests that lucid dreams may continue to affect us long after they end (definitely also true for Somerville’s music!).
Specifically, research has shown that actions carried out in lucid dreams seem to be influencing the dreamer’s motor skills in their waking state: There was, for example, a 2017 study showing that participants improved at throwing darts after they practiced doing so in a lucid dream, or another in 2010 that found that participants were better at tossing coins into a cup after some dream practice.
The method is solid enough that some professional athletes already use the method to practice, but a research team at the University of Bern in Switzerland argues that improving one’s motor skills while dreaming could potentially also benefit other groups in the future, such as patients recovering from a stroke or people experiencing difficulties with their motor skills due to an anxiety disorder.
Until all of that becomes reality, a whole lot more research is necessary, of course, but if dream researchers aren’t allowed to dream, who is?
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