The Sleep Concert

Robert wrote this for an Italian magazine in Late 1996, after the 1996 Sleep Concert Tour.


The Sleep Concert - an introduction
by Robert Rich

(the following is an adaptation of my brief talk at the beginning of a live Sleep Concert, intended to help the audience get more out of the experience.)

The term "Sleep Concert" can be a bit misleading, as it implies that this music is intended to help you sleep deeply. On the contrary, the music and the concert environment should combine to create a more activated sleep. You may find that your sleep tonight may actually be quite interrupted. The idea is to let the music incorporate itself into your perceptual framework during the night, to create an environment for activated consciousness, a ritual surround. The music is aimed at the nebulous territory that exists in your mind when you are hovering between awake and asleep, when you are still aware of your environment, yet detached, when your half-sleeping mind wanders into the realm of hypnogogic images and dreamlike non linearity. You should find that this music can act as a trigger for these nonlinear states of thought, and the activation of the environment around you can help you to skate around the edges of sleep, with one foot in the dream world and one foot in the room where you are now.

In an environment like this, you should find that your mind and your body are in a state of heightened arousal. Several factors contribute to this activation. Some are very mundane, some are purely physiological, some involve the music itself. It's important to remember that these activating factors contribute to make this experience more intense. They will make it easier for you to stay in a lighter stage of sleep and stay more aware of your experiences.

Certain things happen when many people sleep in a room together. In general, people sleep less deeply. One of the more mundane reasons for this is snoring. An estimated 10% of the population snores, which means that in a room with 50-100 people, there will be a few people who snore. For those of you who do, don't be embarrassed - it's not your fault. But you should be aware that it will affect both your own sleep and the people around you. Since the music is generally very quiet, there may be times when someone's snoring will be quite invasive. If you happen to be sleeping next to a person who is snoring, please feel free to wake that person up and ask them to turn over onto their side. If you are one of the people snoring, please forgive those around you when they interrupt your sleep. It will improve everyone's experience.

Besides snoring, we are bound to get other interruptions. Among these may be traffic sounds, car alarms, sirens, or people walking around in the room when they get up to use the bathroom. You also may notice my presence in the room, shuffling tapes, getting up for breaks, dropping things, tripping over cables in the dark, stuff like that. The simple noises of other presences in the room can make it harder to get deep sleep.

Interestingly, people become more physiologically activated merely by being in the proximity of other people. This is one of the interesting features that distinguish a live sleep concert from one that occurs on the radio. In the act of bringing a group of people together in the same room, we create an energized environment, which can contribute to the intensity of your personal experiences. But for these factors to contribute to an interesting experience, you must combine them with an increase in your attention to internal states of mind. This internal focus is where the music itself plays a role.

I've structured the musical environment so that it can provide a sort of lens to sharpen the internal focus, a stimulus to help you generate internal realities. Some of the sounds are abstract, blurry, hard to separate from the background noise. Other sounds may evoke natural environments, open spaces, insects and animal calls, wind or rain. The overall effect is to sonically remove the walls of the room, to replace them with a shifting virtual soundscape. You'll notice that the sound system consists of numerous small speakers, placed along the walls and in the corners of the room. The sound will come from all around you, although at times it may be so quiet that you'll hardly notice it's there.

To get the most out of the Sleep Concert, I recommend that you focus on several aspects of the sleeping experience. The most interesting experiences will occur in the transitions between sleeping and waking, and later when you are dreaming. The transitional stage of sleep, when you are still partly conscious of your environment, is called Stage 1, Non-REM sleep. This distinguishes it from Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM ), when you have full-blown dreams.

During the transitions into Stage 1 sleep, you might have dreamlike thoughts and visions called hypnogogic images. Hypnogogic images are often less organized than true dreams, and often come blended with a semi-awareness of your environment. If you pass from this stage into a deeper sleep, you will not remember these images and thoughts. But if you can hover at the edge, slipping in and out of stage 1 sleep, you can ride along the edge of your own awareness. You can use the music as a focal point to hold yourself right at the brink of sleep, to help you maintain this hypnogogic state like a surfer uses gravity to stay on the leading edge of a wave. During these hypnogogic experiences, you might find that the sonic environment triggers hallucinations, evoking fragile new mental landscapes.

You might also find that you will remember more dreams tonight, and they will be more vivid and intense. The reasons for this again relate to the activated environment. In order to remember a dream, you must wake up from it. The more you pay attention upon awakening, the more you will remember and the more vivid the memories will be. I recommend that you pay attention to your dreams tonight, and think about what was happening in your mind whenever you wake up.

Dreams tend to be more vivid and intense when you are more physiologically aroused. Please be aware that for some people, more intense dreams can become unpleasant. Part of this comes from negative mental expectations. When you dream, your mind is trying to interpret current physiological and environmental conditions, and these interpretations can become incorporated into dream content. If your brain interprets your arousal as fear, your dreams might develop some darker overtones. However, this arousal can just as easily be interpreted as mystical ecstasy or even sexual arousal. All of these feelings are closely related in the body, and they relate closely to your past experiences, expectations and environmental cues.

The dream journey resembles a shaman's journey, in that shamans know that they carry with them their own expectations when they enter their spirit world. Likewise, your past and your preconceptions will influence your dreams, along with your current environment. During the Sleep Concert, the music gets quite deep, it explores the shadows. The music is also quite gentle, as I respect the beauty hiding within deep places. I recommend that you open yourself up to the possibility of intense experience, and explore your mental states with an open mind. Even the shadows contain useful information. The more you pay attention, the more you might find.

One of the more interesting dream experiences you might encounter is lucid dreaming - when you become aware that you are dreaming while still in the dream. Once you become aware that you are dreaming, you can affect the action within your dream, letting you explore the dream world actively rather than as a passive observer. Lucid dreaming becomes possible when you pay attention to the signs that you are dreaming, when you attend to your conscious processes. You may find that the activating nature of the Sleep Concert environment can help you to pay closer attention to your mental states, and may even help you have a lucid dream.

As for my part, I'll be doing my best to guide the music into territories that feel appropriate to the atmosphere of the room and to the mood of the night. For the first hour or so, I'll be playing slightly more active music, but then I'll dive down into an increasingly slow and deep texture. Don't be surprised if you wake up in the middle of the night and I'm not here behind the mixer. I often get up to take breaks, stretch or get more coffee. During the middle of the night, my role gets more passive, mixing drones in and out or crossfading between tapes. I'll start bringing the sound back up into an active realm in the last hour, gradually getting louder until it awakens you. It should be pretty obvious when things are over, but there is often a short period afterwards where you'll want to be a bit quiet, since you'll probably feel rather sensitized to your sound environment. Loud sounds can be pretty jarring under those circumstances.

Thanks for coming, and I hope you enjoy it.