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Do you know what an earworm is? It’s a song that keeps playing repeatedly in your head, even when you don’t want it to.
Lately I find that when I wake up in the morning, my mind has already started in on some song, and it stays with me as I wash my face, brush my teeth, and head down to breakfast.
My sister, Harriet, and I have been documenting some of our recent earworms and learning more about them. For me, they often start in my sleep. For example, here’s part of an email I recently sent Harriet: So this morning at about 5:00 I got out of bed to use the toilet, and as I was still in bed and waking up, the song “Don’t Fence Me In” was running through my mind; it had already started when I was asleep. It continued in my head as I went to the bathroom. Then I got back into bed and slept a couple of hours, and when I woke up at 7:30, it was still there and kept repeating itself as I went downstairs to get breakfast.
My sister noted this: …there are certain words or phrases that spark an earworm. Some are apparent, but some are not. For example, I have many recurring earworms that frequently pop up in the mornings, and I don’t know what sparks them. One of them is “From Here to Eternity.” This is a very common earworm for me in the morning. I don’t know what sets it off. It will be in my head as I’m putting on my makeup in the bathroom, and then it will be there again as I’m in the kitchen preparing breakfast.
What’s startling in my case is that many of the songs coursing through my mind when I wake up are from my childhood, and I haven’t heard them for 50 years or more. For instance, the last time I heard the theme song for WABC’s Cousin Brucie’s show (see list below) was in 1968, as that year my family moved from suburban New York to Mexico City, Mexico.
So what’s going on?
Harriet found this explanation in The Harvard Gazette:
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Some surveys have found that 90 percent of people experience this phenomenon, and for about a third of them, it’s annoying. It’s known as an earworm, and it comes from the German Ohrwurm, meaning a musical itch. It was coined in 1979 by the psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert, and basically, it’s a looped segment of music that’s usually about 20 seconds long and automatically comes into your awareness and keeps playing on repeat. There are certain musical characteristics that make songs more likely to become earworms, such as if the piece is repetitive, if there is a longer duration of certain notes, if intervals between the notes are smaller. Also, songs that trigger some kind of emotional charge, either consciously or not, or songs associated with a particular memory, can often be the ones that get stuck in your head.
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Here’s a partial list of my recent earworms:
- Bugs Bunny Theme Song (“Overture, curtain, lights / This is it, the night of nights…”)
- “Look Out for Mr. Stork” from Dumbo (“Look out for Mr. Stork / That persevering chap / He’ll come along and drop / A bundle in your lap…”)
- “Don’t Fence Me In” (“Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above / Don’t fence me in / Let me ride through the wild open country that I love / Don’t fence me in”)
- Romper Room’s “Posture Basket Song” (“See me walk so straight and tall / I won’t let my basket fall…”)
- New York radio station WABC’s theme song from the 1960’s Cousin Brucie show (“Come on let’s go, go, go / What a groovy show / Come on and go, go, go / With Cousin Brucie…”)
- Buffalo Springfield’s “Sit Down, I Think I Love You” (“Sit down I think I love you / Anyway, I’d like to try…”)
- Tom Jones’ “Delilah” (“I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window….”)
- “The Stepsisters’ Lament” from the 1957 version of “Cinderella” with Kaye Ballard on the right (“Why would a fellow want a girl like her, a frail and fluffy beauty…”)
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Sometimes I can figure out why I dreamt about a specific song. For example, the Bugs Bunny theme song begins with the word “overture.” I had recently tried to explain to my husband what “overture” meant, as we had been watching a clip from Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures.” But I got all mangled up in the two primary meanings of the word (not to mention the multiple meanings for “pacific”). I felt frustrated and that I needed to work on it more. Hence, it appeared in my dream.
Now, what’s up with the photo at the top of this post? Well, I woke up with an earworm that was not a song but a poem. Specifically, a poem that I wrote when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea, from 1975-1978. The poem was sparked when I was travelling in Southeast Asia on vacation. At an outdoor public market, I saw a big bucket of live frogs, one on top of another, with no water. (The photo above shows the same situation, although the frogs aren’t in a bucket.) I snapped a photo of them all, and recalled that most species of frogs need to keep their skin wet, because they breathe through their skin. (According to the American Museum of Natural History, “Frogs don’t just wear their skin, they drink and breathe through it, too! Many frogs even have a special drink patch on the underside of the body. Like a giant lung, the thin, moist skin allows gases to pass through, helping the frog to breathe. To keep the skin working well, frogs must stay clean and moist.”)
However, these frogs in the photo didn’t have long to live; people bought them to cook for dinner.
So here’s my poem, a parody of Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice.” (Note: “route” here rhymes with “about“.)
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Speaking Frog to Frog
Some say the world will end in drought.
Some say soup.
And though I know what drought’s about,
I’d take it to that other route
Yet if I went a second bout
And once more had to play the dupe,
I’d opt for Cookie’s heavy clout
And wouldn’t pout
Or give a poop.
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And what brought this on a few days ago when I was sleeping? Gout. I just discovered I have a mild case of gout on my big toe. I never had gout before, and I was obsessing about it in my sleep. Traditionally, gout was associated with rich people, because of their diet, which to me is a mark against it, along with the pain. Even the sound of the word “gout” distressed me. I hadn’t seen or thought about my frog poem since I left the Peace Corps, yet there it was in my brain as I grappled in my sleep with the word “gout.” A poem that rhymed with “gout.”
And all morning the poem kept running through my mind.
