etselec has her dreams to help her figure out what’s going on in her subconscious. I don’t dream. Okay, for all of you pedants, I do dream – I just never remember my dreams. Instead I have music. I find that almost any time I ear worm myself with a song that I haven’t heard recently, it’s my subconscious trying to tell me something.
So what does it mean when you start thinking about a song where the protagonist is singing about her country turning into a war zone and being accidentally nuked by it’s ally, the U.S.? It probably means that I have reservations about forming a business relationship with a company that gets most a good chunk of its business from the DoD, DARPA and the Air Force.
Regardless of how that pans out, here’s my own version of the Daily Eighties:
I like your idea that earworms are actually messages from your subconscious – I hadn’t thought of that before. And I think you’re right. Which leaves me wondering why “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas” popped insistently into my head last week…
It’s certainly clear that listening to music will also put you into certain frames of mind, so I can see that music and psyche are closely linked. That’s one of the reasons I left the Goth scene, incidentally – I thought I was listening to this music and dancing to it to express and vent pent up emotions and anger, but I found that by listening to “that goth-head stuff” (as an ex-bf of mine called it), I was actually depressing and angering myself further than I had originally been. I started to listen to perky, cheerful stuff and found that it actually helped me lighten up a lot. Not that moody music doesn’t still have its place.
Anyways, I’ll pay more attention to earworms, now!
Comment by Celeste — April 25, 2007 @ 3:20 pm
Um, you’re on your own for “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas.” 🙂
You are right that music affects the psyche. The funny thing is that it seems to affect people differently. I know that, in theory, cheerful music might make me happier, but I have a very hard time listening to it. I just can’t listen to music that doesn’t match or at least complement my mood. I recently read that this is fairly common for INTPs. Oh well, I never claimed to be unique.
Comment by cec — April 25, 2007 @ 10:02 pm