What are you humming?

“A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.”                        Author unknown.

Parapraxes or Freudian slips as they are commonly called are named after Sigmund Freud and are used to describe words or phrases that we say which we didn’t mean to, they are slips of the tongue that come out of our mouths often very similar sounding to the word we were meant to say.       The slip though is not an accident.       It is, according to Freud, an interference of a wish, hidden feeling or a particular thought all buried in that part of ourselves we do not have readily access to; the unconscious.      And once in a while these hidden ‘repressed’ parts of us slip out.    A Freudian slip however doesn’t just stop at speech; it includes memories, physical behaviour, misreading words and mishearing words.     The latter is very common I think, it’s that familiar scenario when having a conversation with a friend and they say a word which you mishear to be another word, the word you hear is not what they’ve said at all (although again similar sounding) but rather it is what’s on your mind and more importantly what it means to you i.e. the context in which the word has been misheard.     It’s a bit like that expression ‘we hear what we want to hear’.     And the same thing goes for misreading words so for example we may read a word in a newspaper which is not actually the word that's written there but it’s the word we read, because it’s what‘s within us in that moment and the context of the paper allows it to reveal itself.             

So is a Freudian slip a slip up?       It is after all showing us where we’re at so to speak and what we may be mulling over in our mind, it is a little spark that can bring to light how we’re really feeling, whether we’re aware of it or not.      And this brings me to the title of today’s blog post.    I have a theory about humming, I think that humming is another form of a Freudian slip in that it also reveals how we are and where (emotionally) we are in the present moment.      And the biggest clue is in the lyrics of the song itself.      Have you ever found yourself humming a song or a certain part of a song all throughout the day over and over?      Unless you’ve been listening to it recently or just heard it on the radio I would argue that you are humming that song for a precise reason.      What reason?      Only the person doing the humming can work that one out, as in the same way a dream is entirely unique to the dreamer.     It seems to me though that the hummed song is verbalising the experience of something related to the person humming it.    It is telling you simply, and others close enough to hear, what is on your mind.     Unlike a slip of the tongue, humming is a stretched out version and it doesn’t involve that shock of spurting out a word we didn’t mean to (although on some level we probably did).    

So what do we do about our humming, what is it good for?       In a similar way to a dream it is telling us information and like any other knowledge we gain we can choose what to do with it.     For example if we are humming a song about loneliness perhaps that is how we’re feeling and what we need is to be close with others.      The reverse is also true whereby we tend to listen to songs that echo the mood we’re in at that given moment, and the same can be said for films.      We are constantly communicating ourselves to the world and if we want the world to hear us we must acknowledge, to ourselves first, what it is we are trying to communicate.       This is where dreams, daydreams and I’d like to think humming can help us do that by showing us what is on the inside that wants to come out.        



Picture taken by Flavio Cruvinal Brandao 2008, Flickr.



I recently attended a friend’s wedding outside of London and all the way there I kept humming a song that I hadn’t heard in years.      I couldn’t understand why I was suddenly singing this song and why now?      And then I realised that this particular song is on a CD which I had bought years earlier whilst spending the day with a friend, the same friend in fact whose wedding I was going to and somewhere in my mind I was remembering (humming) that day we spent together.