Wikipedia
Somnium ( Latin for "The Dream") is a novel written in 1608, in Latin, by Johannes Kepler. The narrative would not be published until 1634 by Kepler's son, Ludwig Kepler. In the narrative, an Icelandic boy and his witch mother learn of an island named Levania (our Moon) from a daemon (demon). Somnium presents a detailed imaginative description of how the Earth might look when viewed from the Moon, and is considered the first serious scientific treatise on lunar astronomy. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov have referred to it as the first work of science fiction.
Somnium (2001) is an album by the American ambient musician Robert Rich. It is a seven-hour album on a DVD-video that was partly inspired by Rich's sleep concert series of the early 1980s and mid 1990s. Like those concerts, the music on this album was composed to influence the dreams and pre- REM hypnagogic visions of the listener. For this purpose it is suggested that the volume be kept down to the threshold of perceptibility, ideally with speakers surrounding the listener's bed. Rich also recommends this album for conventional listening.
For a brief period at the beginning of the album there is a slightly more active texture while the listener adjusts the volume and settles down to sleep. As the music progresses it slowly drifts through a variety of electronic drones as well as acoustic source material and nature recordings. The third and final track gradually fades into a morning atmosphere filled with bird songs.
In order to allow for the album's seven-hour length it was released on the DVD-video format instead of DVD-Audio. Rich also wanted to avoid the digital artifacts caused by compression. To achieve this the frames of video that a DVD player uses to navigate inside a chapter were not included. In spite of this, the second track had to be compressed using Dolby AC-3 encoding in order to maintain the album's length.
It has been estimated that this is the longest single piece of music ever committed to a commercially recorded format, until that record was broken by the release of the 24-hour-long " 7 Skies H3" by psychedelic rock group The Flaming Lips. However, "7 Skies H3" was not released commercially. Instead, Robert Rich himself released a follow-up on Blu-ray disc in 2014, Perpetual, including an 8-hour piece of the same name plus a re-issue of Somnium in full length.
Somnium was originally a Latin word meaning " dream", and may refer to:
- Somnium (novel), a scientific fantasy in Latin by Johannes Kepler
- Somnium, a brand name for the drug lorazepam
- Somnium (mattress) is the name of a US mattress manufacturer using patented innerspring technology
- Somnium (album) a 7-hour album by the ambient musician Robert Rich
- Somnium (the band) * Somnium - a band originating in Hong Kong, 1996. (Permanent band members: Jerome Bonnin & Domingo Maurellet; Other members have included Cyrille Fierens, Adrien Grob, Valerie Nguyen, and Ham Sap.)
- Somnium, an album by SIANspheric
- Teemu Raimoranta, nickname Somnium, a former guitarist from the bands Finntroll and Impaled Nazarene
- Somnium (video game), also known as NesRom, a downloadable video game for the Nintendo DSi's DSiWare service
- Somnium, a fictional card game from the Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword mod Fall From Heaven