Inventions for Radio were a series of four radio broadcasts that first aired on BBC's Third Programme in 1964 and 1965. The broadcasts, titled The Dreams, Amor Dei, The After-Life and The Evenings of Certain Lives, were created by Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Barry Bermange. Each of the individual broadcasts consists of a sound collage of electronic music and effects combined with spliced and remixed dialogue from interviews with everyday people. Each "invention" addressed an individual theme—dreams, the nature and existence of God, life after death, and ageing.

The soundscapes created by Derbyshire for Inventions for Radio have been described as "unsettling, dreamlike, and mesmerizing." Despite her role in composing the soundscapes, mixing, and editing the work, Derbyshire's contributions to Inventions for Radio were rarely acknowledged, instead being credited to Bermange and the Radiophonic Workshop.

Playwright Barry Bermange created a couple of radio programmes for the BBC in the early 1960s. He had experience conducting interviews through a programme about street entertainers, Living on a Rainbow and had previously interviewed people from the Hornsey Old People's Welfare Council for the 1962 programme Freedom Hours. Sound engineer Delia Derbyshire was hired by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1962. In the summer of 1963, she was selected as the sound designer for the project. The first Invention for Radio was described as a "programme of actuality speech and electronic sound" and was tentatively titled Mid-Century Attitudes: Dreaming. The structure of the programme was envisioned as pairing spoken dialogue with musical phrases, using moments of silence for framing, in a piece that would become "more fragmented and contrapuntal towards the climax".

Bermange conducted the interviews recorded for the Inventions for Radio, primarily through the Hornsey Old People's Welfare Council. The interviewees were everyday people who came from various socio-economic backgrounds. Bermange used a Fi-Cord tape recorder and instructed the interviewees to provide narratives in the first person.

Delia Derbyshire produced the electronic soundscape for the works. She used techniques from musique concrète and oscillator-generated sounds in the compositions. In addition to mixing and editing dialogue from the interviews, Derbyshire composed the musical interludes and shaped the compositions into a cohesive whole. The compositions she devised were a juxtaposition of oscillator-generated sounds, creating chords that were both dissonant and disturbing, with an effect described as "unsettling, dreamlike, and mesmerizing."

The first three inventions were produced by David Thomson. While Bermange had control over the direction of the projects, he would only give Derbyshire loose instructions as to how to construct the musical elements.

The first invention, The Dreams, was broadcast on 5 January 1964 at 7:15 pm on the Third Programme. The snippets of dialogue taken from interviews concern the state of dreaming. They were divided into five movements, "Running", "Falling", "Land", "Sea", and "Colour".

The Dreams was re-aired on 15 January and was mostly well received in the newspapers, with a review in The Guardian stating: