Finding Your Music? Pre-Composing Rituals?

Same as jujumifu

Playing music helps me start composing. I pull out my viola and just mess around - sight-read some stuff, improvise a bit - never play any repetoire that you are currently working on, that messes me up. Playing piano also helps me get in the mood for composing. The other things that work for me are listening to music or studying the score of a piece that I really like.

Originally Posted by healey.cj

Someone mentioned right before sleep - I often have music start playing through my head just as I'm about to fall asleep. I don't recognise it most of the time and it changes each time. I feel like an observer in these occasions which is really weird seeing it is my own brain making it up. The problem is that if I try and 'grasp it' I loose it.

Same thing happens to me too. Usually when I'm lying in bed I'm controlling the music in my head, just as I am about to sleep the music suddenly goes on auto-pilot and creates something I would struggle to realise. It's like a sudden brief glimmer of something completely new.
Btw the proof of the power of the subconscious came to me in the middle of the night when I was dreaming about 2 years ago. I've long been aware that you can wake up and still see things (that probably explains most of the alien abductions) but it is also possible to still hear things.
I was having a dream about writing a piece of music in the style of Elgar (!) when all of a sudden it went bad... and when I say bad I mean scary beyond even Penderecki's Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima! The worst thing of all, it carried on while I was awake for about 6 seconds! I honestly thought I was dying or that the world was ending!
The oddest thing of all, was that when this happened to me, I had never heard any music that remotely resembled what I heard when I awoke. To this day, the closest music is the Pendercki Piece I mentioned, except this was fully orchestrated and much worse!