“I Was Trying to Get Down the Mountain with My Violin Strapped to My Back”: Performance Anxiety Dreams of Classical Music Performers

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Even though anecdotal evidence reveals them as ubiquitous phenomena, the performance anxiety dreams of music performers have not been studied systematically to date in scholarly research. This is all the more surprising given the large research literature on music performance anxiety as a wakeful experience, and the widely accepted “continuity hypothesis” in dream research that asserts meaningful connections between waking and dream experiences in terms of content. Our aim in this chapter is to introduce the topic of performance anxiety dreams of music performers as lived experiences into music scholarship. Anxiety dreams often involve embarrassing and/or fearful situations, performance failures, and incomplete tasks, and in addition to music performance contexts, they have been reported in the context of sports, the workplace, and school exams. Based on existing anecdotal evidence as published in autobiographies and blogs, as well as retrospective self-reports that we gathered from classical music performers through an online questionnaire and free narrative accounts from interviews conducted with them, we discuss the occurrence of performance anxiety dreams, their thematic content and modality, the experience of emotions and agency in them, as well as how the dreamers theorise and share them, and how they relate them to their waking lived experiences. This is the first methodical study on classical music performers’ anxiety dreams and the meanings they attribute to the dream content. anxiety dreams; dream consciousness; dream content; music performance anxiety; interview analysis; online questionnaire