Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
(To completely understand what the hell is going on here and all about waking up with songs in my head, have a gander at this playlist.)
Every morning, my brain boots up like a jukebox possessed by the ghost of a middle-management bureaucrat who died in 1973 while arguing about the correct order of songs on a mix tape. There’s no alarm clock involved in this phenomenon of waking up with songs in my head, no radio bleeding through the walls, no mystical bird singing “Sugar Magnolia.” Just me, consciousness, and whatever song has colonized my frontal lobe like an invasive species with excellent production values.
Sometimes it’s The Righteous Brothers making me feel feelings I’m not emotionally prepared for at 6:47 AM. Other times it’s “Dance Monkey” insisting I dance, which I’m convinced my subconscious plays to punish me for sins I committed in a previous life (probably that time in 1437 when I was a corrupt monastery accountant who embezzled all the sacramental wine money). These aren’t songs I’ve been listening to the night before. They just arrive. Unbidden. Fully formed. Often in the middle of the second verse, like showing up to someone’s house party already drunk and demanding to know where they keep the good cheese.
Why Songs Get Stuck in Your Head Every Morning
This is what it’s like to be me: a fifty-nine-year-old man on a Virginia farm, waking up each day to discover his brain has queued up a different song from the past six decades without consulting him first. It’s like living with a roommate who controls the stereo but never tells you what they’re going to play. Except the roommate is you. And the stereo is inside your head. And you can’t change the station because there are no hands in your brain, just neurons firing in patterns that apparently spell out song titles in electrical impulses.
The Science Behind Waking Up With Songs (According to Me, Not Scientists)
Somewhere in my hippocampus (and I’m using “hippocampus” the way most people use “quantum physics,” which is to say loosely and with no real understanding) there’s a structure I’ve decided to call the Subconscious Playlist Generator, or SPG.
Let me be clear: the SPG does not exist. No neuroscientist has discovered it. I made it up because I needed something to blame, and “the SPG” sounds more scientific than “the malevolent goblin who lives in my brain and subsists entirely on spite.”
But if it did exist, the SPG would be rifling through my lifetime catalog of musical memories like a bored teenager in their parent’s vinyl collection, looking for something that matches mysterious criteria known only to itself. Is it choosing based on emotional experiences? The phase of the moon? How many times I said “indeed” instead of “yes”?
Nobody knows. The SPG isn’t talking. Mostly because it doesn’t exist.
Writing Tip #1: Characters Need Internal Logic
My subconscious demonstrates this perfectly. There’s a method to this madness, even if I can’t decode it. When you’re creating a character who does seemingly inexplicable things, like a janitor who discovers government-enhanced otters and decides this is reasonable to investigate, there should be some logic operating under the hood. Readers will tolerate weird behavior if they sense underlying consistency.
My brain waking me up with “The Guns of Brixton” feels mysteriously unpredictable. Waking me up with a song that doesn’t exist would just be bad writing.
Cataloging the Songs I Wake Up To Every Day
So I started collecting them. The playlist now sits at 35 tracks, spanning from Grateful Dead to Icona Pop, from 1968 to 2019. There’s something deeply unsettling about the specificity. Not just “something by The Clash” but specifically “The Guns of Brixton.” Not Fleetwood Mac in general, but “The Chain.”
I’ve titled this collection “The Ones that I Awake To,” which is either poetic or sounds like a horror film about a sentient alarm clock.
Looking at the full list reveals:
- Three songs from The Band (my subconscious is apparently Canadian)
- Bobby McFerrin and Nick Cave in the same collection (spiritual whiplash)
- “My Dead Dog Rover” by Ian Whitcomb (I don’t know what to do with this)
- Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” (every Tuesday deserves a graduation ceremony)
An Interlude on “My Dead Dog Rover”
“My Dead Dog Rover” is a 1968 novelty song sung from the point of view of a dead dog narrating from dog heaven. Ian Whitcomb apparently woke up one day and thought, “You know what the world needs? A song about a deceased pet told from the perspective of said deceased pet, but make it cheerful, like really aggressively cheerful, the kind of cheerful that makes people uncomfortable at funerals.”
And then he did that. And then the record company said, “Yes, this is fine, people will want to purchase this with money.” And then my brain, some fifty-plus years later, decided this was appropriate morning listening material.
The fact that my brain remembered this and deployed it one random morning in 2025 is testament to the fact that human consciousness is deeply weird and we’re nowhere close to understanding it.
Writing Tip #2: Juxtaposition Creates Interest
Bobby McFerrin’s relentless optimism followed by Nick Cave’s gothic romanticism is like serving cotton candy and black coffee at the same meal; technically possible, but it raises questions about your judgment.
But juxtaposition only works if there’s some underlying connection, even if it’s buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa. Random isn’t interesting. Random is a toddler with a synthesizer. But seemingly random that reveals deeper patterns? That’s the good stuff.
In my case, every track is designed to hijack your neural pathways and set up permanent residence, paying no rent and throwing loud parties at 3 AM.
The Failed Search for Patterns
I’ve tried everything to find patterns. Spreadsheets, charts, color-coding by decade, genre, emotional tone. I looked for temporal clustering (nope), emotional through-lines (how do you connect “Sugar Magnolia” to “Big Shot”?), musical genres (classic rock to punk to whatever “My Dead Dog Rover” is).
Nothing. The only common thread is that they’re all great songs that refuse to leave. Which isn’t much of a pattern… that’s like saying “all these things are things.”
Theories About Waking Up With Songs in My Head
Since the universe has declined to provide an instruction manual, here are my working theories:
Theory 1: The Emotional Weather Report My subconscious selects songs reflecting my emotional state. Waking up to “The Chain” might mean I’m worried about something breaking apart. “Too Much Time On My Hands” says I need to do something productive.
Problems: Doesn’t explain “My Dead Dog Rover.” Nothing explains that.
Theory 2: The Memory Inventory Maybe my brain is just checking that neural pathways still function—like defragging a hard drive, but with significantly more Billy Joel.
Problems: Why these specific songs? Why Thunderclap Newman instead of “Bohemian Rhapsody”?
Theory 3: Random Chaos and Possibly Poor Programming Maybe there’s no pattern. Maybe consciousness is fundamentally random and we’re just pattern-recognition machines seeing faces in toast. Or maybe we’re in a poorly coded simulation and somewhere a programmer is frantically debugging while drinking too much coffee.
Problems: Boring. Depressing. I refuse to accept this.
Theory 4: The Ghost DJ (The Only Theory That Actually Makes Sense)
There’s a ghost following me around. This ghost has incredibly eclectic taste in music, questionable boundaries, and apparently a lot of free time in the afterlife. Every morning, Ghost DJ queues up a different track from its ethereal playlist.
I live on a farm in Virginia, both ghost magnets, all of them. Every building more than fifty years old is contractually obligated to have at least one spectral inhabitant, usually a former resident who died under mysterious circumstances and/or is very upset about property taxes. This particular ghost just happens to have spent its mortal life building an impressive vinyl collection and is now sharing it with me whether I like it or not.
I’ve decided to call him Gerald. He feels like a Gerald, specifically a British Gerald who died sometime in the 1980s wearing a cardigan that was fashionable in 1987 and is still upset about it. Gerald is definitely opinionated about which pressing of “The Chain” is the superior version (it’s the 1977 original, and I’m not going to argue with a ghost about audio engineering because that seems like a fight I can’t win).
“Really, Gerald?” I say when it’s Tones and I demanding movement I’m not qualified to perform without professional supervision. “This is the hill you’re dying on? You’re already dead. You died on a hill. This is your eternal hill. You could pick any hill and you picked this one?”
Gerald doesn’t respond. Ghosts never do. That’s the problem with ghosts—no customer service department, no complaint hotline, no manager you can escalate to when the service is unsatisfactory. They just keep doing what they’re doing, making the same mysterious noises, haunting the same locations, playing the same songs in your head at ungodly hours.
The morning after I wake up with Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” I tell Gerald he’s being pretentious. “We get it,” I say to the ceiling. “You have sophisticated taste. You don’t have to prove anything. You’re literally dead. The approval of the living can’t possibly matter to you anymore.”
Silence. Gerald is unbothered by my criticism. This is perhaps the most ghost thing about him.
When it’s “My Dead Dog Rover,” I don’t even try to understand. I just accept that Gerald has a sense of humor that transcends death and possibly also good taste. He’s fucking with me. This is what he does now. This is his eternal purpose. I’ve made peace with it.
Problems with this theory: None. This theory is flawless. I will not be taking questions.
Writing Tip #3: Give Characters Wrong Theories
Characters become real when they’re actively trying to understand their world, even if they’re completely wrong. A protagonist who just passively experiences weird shit is boring. One who builds elaborate theories, complete with names and backstories for the ghost DJ haunting them? That’s entertainment.
Readers will follow someone confidently wrong much further than someone just confused and inactive. I’m choosing to believe I’m haunted by Ghost DJ Gerald because that’s more interesting than “brains do weird things.” Both might be true, but only one makes a good story. Only one gives me someone to talk to besides my pig.
What Waking Up With Songs Teaches Writers
- The human brain is gloriously unpredictable. We’re passengers in a vehicle driven by an idiot playing “My Dead Dog Rover” on repeat.
- Documentation matters. By documenting these songs, I’ve turned ephemeral experiences into something analyzable. This is writing: making the invisible visible.
- Patterns emerge from chaos, even invented ones. By collecting and obsessing over these songs, I’m creating connections, building narrative where none existed. This is the writer’s fundamental task.
- The specific beats the general. “I wake up with songs” is boring. “I woke up with ‘My Dead Dog Rover’ and need you to understand how unsettling this is” – now we’re talking.
- Your subconscious knows things you don’t. Trust that instinct. Your subconscious is doing heavy lifting while your conscious mind figures out where you left your coffee.
The Ongoing Experiment
The playlist sits at 35 songs now. Maybe Gerald will move on to haunt someone else, someone with better taste in breakfast foods or a more impressive record collection. Maybe I’ll wake to silence. But probably not.
I’ll keep adding them as they arrive, these uninvited guests. Maybe I’ll spot the pattern. Or maybe the point isn’t to figure it out.
Maybe the point is just to wake up and think, “Oh, today it’s Paul McCartney and Wings. Thanks, Gerald,” and then get on with feeding the pig, writing the novel, and accepting that consciousness is fundamentally weird and sometimes involves spectral roommates with questionable judgment.
Tomorrow’s Song Will Be Stuck Too
Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up with a new song. I’ll recognize it immediately (they’re always songs I know). I’ll reach for my phone, half-asleep, and add it to the playlist. I’ll wonder why this song and not another. Why “My Dead Dog Rover” and not literally any other song in history.
Then I’ll forget about it until I write another essay about why Gerald the Ghost DJ has such questionable taste and also no sense of boundaries.
And somewhere in the ether, in the neural pathways of my nonexistent Subconscious Playlist Generator, in the cardigan-wearing consciousness of Ghost DJ Gerald, he’ll be queuing up tomorrow’s track, laughing at whatever cosmic joke I’m too conscious to understand, too awake to perceive, too human to decode.
The ones that I awake to. All 35 of them. Soon to be 36.
Gerald insists.
And honestly? I’m starting to respect his commitment.
Key Takeaways
- Waking up with songs in my head feels random and unbidden, as if my subconscious is a DJ curating a playlist I never requested.
- Theories about why songs emerge in the morning include emotional reflections, memory checks, or random chaos, leading to humorous contemplation.
- The collection titled ‘The Ones that I Awake To’ highlights specific tracks that reveal the peculiar nature of human consciousness.
- Writing requires creating internal logic for characters; readers appreciate purposeful actions even in absurd scenarios.
- Ultimately, the act of recording these experiences transforms them into insightful reflections on the unpredictable nature of the mind.
