If My Dreams Had a Soundtrack

If My Dreams Had a Soundtrack

When I wake, silence greets me first. It’s never complete silence, of course—the faint hum of the fan, the distant thud of a neighbor closing a door, my own breath rising and falling. But compared to the night world I just left, it feels empty, like the orchestra has suddenly walked out of the pit. My dreams always carry music, though I can’t say if it’s something I invent or something borrowed. If my dreams had a soundtrack, I think it would be stitched together from all the half-forgotten songs of my life, reassembled into something that knows me better than I know myself.

The score begins long before I recognize it. Sometimes, as I drift, I hear a faint lullaby—my mother’s voice, out of tune but steady, rocking me with words she didn’t remember learning. I don’t know the name of the song, only that it wraps itself around the earliest dreamscapes, those that smell of milk and warmth. Even now, in adulthood, when I dream of childhood streets or my grandmother’s old kitchen, that same hum floats in the background, a reminder that music is a thread binding the earliest pages of memory.

Other nights, the music swells into something grander. Dreams of motion—running, falling, flying—always carry rhythm. I remember once dreaming I was sprinting across a field of tall grass, chasing a horizon that kept slipping away. The sound that carried me wasn’t grass brushing my legs but the beat of drums, steady and insistent, urging me onward. It felt like my heart had split itself into two: one part racing in my chest, the other pounding in the earth below me. I awoke breathless, with the echo of percussion still in my bones, as though the dream had borrowed the pulse of life itself.

Not all soundtracks are triumphant. Some are heavy, slow, filled with cello notes that drag through the air like a burden. These accompany the darker dreams—the ones where I walk alone in fog, or try to speak but find no words. In these dreams, music becomes the voice I cannot use, weeping for me when I cannot weep, confessing my fears when I remain silent. The cello tells truths I am not ready to admit in daylight: that I am afraid of endings, that I mourn things I never had, that loneliness can be louder than any orchestra.

Yet there are also the shimmering pieces, delicate and light. These come when I dream of people I love, especially those I’ve lost. My grandfather often appears in my dreams—not as he was when sickness claimed him, but as the man who whistled while fixing radios in his workshop. In those dreams, his whistle becomes a melody that fills every corner, turning even the most ordinary settings into cathedrals. I wake from those dreams with tears and gratitude, as if the soundtrack has given me one more chance to sit beside him, one more verse of a song cut short.

I sometimes wonder if my waking life is simply another act in the same performance. Music seeps into everything I do: the pop songs on bus rides that turn city streets into film reels, the quiet piano pieces that make late-night studying feel less lonely, even the static of the radio that once played during a heartbreak. My dreams recycle these fragments, reshaping them into landscapes that make sense only in sleep. If you pressed your ear against my mind at night, you might hear a jumble of church hymns, playground chants, movie scores, and the buzzing neon hum of a diner jukebox—all layered, stitched, and rewoven.

The strangest part is how the music follows me when I wake. Sometimes I spend the whole morning humming a tune that doesn’t exist, a melody that was born in a dream and died with dawn. It feels like holding a seashell to my ear and hearing the memory of an ocean I can’t return to. Other times, a real-world song suddenly unlocks a dream I had forgotten. I’ll be walking through a grocery store when a familiar guitar riff comes over the speakers, and suddenly I remember flying through a violet sky, the sound of strings propelling me upward. It’s as if the dream and the waking world share a hidden record collection, one I’m only allowed to glimpse in fragments.

I don’t know if everyone dreams this way. Maybe my mind is simply wired for music, or maybe every dream in the world hums with sound and most people forget it by morning. What I do know is this: music makes my dreams feel less like illusions and more like messages. Each song is a language, one I don’t always translate but always feel.

If my dreams had a soundtrack, I think it would be unfinished. A living, breathing score that grows as I grow, changing its chords as I change my skin. Some parts would be rough demos, messy and experimental. Others would be polished symphonies, clear enough to break your heart. And at the very end, when I close my eyes for the last time, I hope the music doesn’t stop. I hope it swells, as the best scores do, carrying me into whatever comes next.

Until then, I will keep listening—to the lullabies, the drums, the cellos, the whistles. To the songs I know and the ones I never will. My dreams are never silent, and perhaps that is the greatest gift: to live each night in concert, to wake each morning with echoes, to remember that somewhere deep inside me, music is always playing.