Musical Inspiration From Dreams

To me, the best songs are the ones that come to you in dreams. I wake up, put it down on a cassette next to the bed, turn over and go back to sleep. I wrote “Satisfaction” that way.
(Keith Richards Interview by Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema -22 January 1995)

I think I’ve dreamed all the songs I’ve written. I don’t dream regular dreams. I dream stories. When people tell me they had a strange dream last night, they were riding down a street, and blah, blah, blah, I don’t relate to that. I dream in abstractions, in colors. I dream music and shapes and paintings and sculptures. I have awakened at four-thirty in the morning with a whole symphony in my head. I say to myself, “This is so good I don’t even have to get up now. I’ll remember it when I wake up later.” And then later when I wake up, it’s gone. And then weeks, maybe months, maybe years later it reoccurs to me that the song I have just written is from some old dream. -Billy Joel

One night Johnny had a dream that he turned into the signature song on one of his most lauded later albums.  Later, he described it to talk-show host Larry King:

“I dreamed I saw Queen Elizabeth, that I went into Buckingham Palace and there she sat on the floor.  And she looked up at me and said, “Johnny Cash, you’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.” And I woke up, of course.  What could a dream like this mean—thorn tree in a whirlwind?  Well…for two or three years…it kept haunting me.  This dream, kept thinkin’ about it.  How vivid it was.  And then I thought that maybe it’s biblical, so I found it.  Somethin’ about whirlwinds and thorn trees in the Bible.  So, from that, my song started.”

It became his song “And the man comes round.”  How Dreams Saved Johnny Cash By Kym Chaffin

Paul McCartney, Shawn Colvin, Sting, Rory Block, Billy Joel, Johnny Cash – these are musicians who have written songs inspired by their dreams –