Unexpected Things That Influence Your Dreams

There's a little-known payoff to all those years of elementary school band. The younger people were when they started taking music lessons, the more often the sound of music permeated their dreams. Researchers at the University of Florence's Sleep Lab who discovered this also found that starting formal training at an early age, when the brain was developing rapidly, had more influence on how often people experienced musical dreams than the total number of years they had lessons, or even how many hours a day they played or listened to music. Bonus finding: 28 percent of these dreams featured music the dreamers had never heard before, suggesting that we really can create original art in our sleep.