do you ever get a tune caught in your head, only to later realize that the associated lyrics are pertinent to your real-life situation?

Last night when a friend pointed out something to me I reacted like a dick (Oh f*ck off, I don't need this right now, ok? thx.) and half an hour later I found out the lyrics to that Fall track are:

I lost my temper with a friend
Mocked him and treated him with rudeness
And though I tried to make amends
Feel I miss him and walk a dark corridor

On "Blockbusters" once, the question was "What is the third line of "God Save the Queen" and I immediately answered "They made you a moron"" which got no points. Just as well I wasn't actually on the telly.

You're secretly Belgian? (today is Dynasty Day in Belgium)

most of us probably know a good deal more than 25,000 songs. (i somehow didn't believe this when i first typed it, but then i noted that i have at least 8,000 songs on my computer alone.)

i don't think this phenomenon is a matter of my drawing a connection between my life and the lyrics after the fact. that happens often enough. i think there is a definite precognitive activity happening here; the lyrics are in my memory, but it's the tune that surfaces first.

this suggests to me that in some ways music can function as a way of recalling information, roughly analogous to the way a visually arresting advertisement might help you to recall the information provided in the advertisement. the recollection of patterns (which is what music is, patterns upon patterns) provides a means of recollected meaning.

For instance, what about people who claim that they don't listen to the lyrics? Would they still have this experience? Do you have to give a certain amount of attention to the lyrics for this to happen, or would it happen anyway, even if you're not aware of listening to the lyrics? If you have an emotional reaction while listening to the lyrics, does it make it more likely that you will later recall them in this way?

What about people who are tone-deaf or have no sense of pitch? Would they still experience this phenomenon?

Is the association of melody with language deeply ingrained in the linguistic apparatus of the mind? Could this be why inflection can be such a crucial communicator of meaning, and why the same words can mean wholly different things depending on how they are spoken?

I'm no expert on Freud's theory of dreams and the unconscious, but I just thought the parallels were worth noting. Clearly the pre-cognitive process involved in creating a dream scenario (what Freud called the "dream work") is considerably more involved than the relatively simple process of recalling a tune.