“I Was Trying to Get Down the Mountain with My Violin Strapped to My Back”: Performance Anxiety Dreams of Classical Music Performers
June 25, 2025 Mine Doğantan-Dack, László Stachó
Performance anxiety dreams are common among music performers but have not been systematically studied. Drawing on anecdotal evidence from autobiographies, blogs, retrospective self-reports via an online questionnaire, and narrative accounts from interviews with classical music performers, this chapter introduces the topic into music scholarship. The anxiety dreams often involve embarrassing or fearful situations, performance failures, and incomplete tasks. The authors discuss the dreams' occurrence, thematic content, modality, emotions, and agency, as well as how dreamers theorize, share, and relate them to waking experiences. This is the first methodical study of classical music performers' anxiety dreams and the meanings they attribute to the dream content.