Henry Fuseli (1741 - 1825) The Nightmare 1781 Detroit Institute of Arts
Henry Fuseli (1741 - 1825) The Nightmare 1781 Detroit Institute of Arts
The challenge with Dreams and Dreaming is the disorderly vastness of their importance in our lives. Even with as seemingly simple a Question as
there's so much to consider, explore, curate, and package for sharing... and once you start thinking about Dreams, you start to see them everywhere. Once you have a hammer, every protruberance looks like a nail. Once you start counting bats in an inkblot, they seem to proliferate. Once you see a face in a rock, there are rocky faces everywhere.
Maybe.
What this page takes on is sorting out of an omnium gatherum of aspects that might inform our search for things to say in the hour or so of Convivial discussion. The result (as of 2 October) is a kaleidoscope of perspectives: topical mirror arrays that present themselves for exploration and contemplation via successive metaphorical twists of the wrist.
I began (September 13) with the notions that Dreams and Dreaming are
Some of the BIG Questions, in each of which one can get lost/beguiled: What's the neurobiology of Dreams? The psychopathology? What are the contributions of the cultural components of Dreaming? (viz. do girls dream of Disney princesses? of Barbie?) To what degree do Dreams bubble up from the subconscious, or the unconscious? Can we [learn to] control or command (e.g., in lucid dreaming, and shamanic dreaming), or are we just the cave walls upon which shadows are projected?
This page has continued to accrete stuff as I figured out what to do with material encountered and collected on pages of the yellow pad, but the process isn't as orderly as I could wish. And the emerging Narrative bristles with digressions and distractions and tempting rabbit holes.
Wende's birthday gift of Rick Bass's The Lives of Rocks had this in the eponymous story:Despite the depth of her fatigue, she dreamed: as if the mind or spirit requires no energy, or, rather, feeds from some source other than the body, flowing almost continuously... there was something about the dream, some synchronized in-the-moment aspect to it, that made it seem extraordinarily real, vibrant, and refreshing. It was almost as if her spirit was trying to heal or repair itself, even where her body could not or had not yet... (pg 83)That started me thinking about the phenomenon of Dream Worlds (Swedenborg [1743-1744 Dream Diary], Strindberg [1901 A Dream Play] both sprang to mind). From the Introduction to Lars Bergquist's Swedenborg's Dream Diary:In dreams, commonplace matters and questions of vital importance run together in a continuous phantasmagoria that are at once both clear and obscure. For the modern reader of the Dream Book, it soon becomes obvious that the well-known thesis of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams —"dreams are absolutely egotistical"— to some extent applies here. Likewise applicable is Freud's basic view that dreams are expressions of "wish fulfillment" or that dream phenomena primarily "mean" just what they suggest to the dreamer... (pg 5)Swedenborg the scientist finds himself undergoing certain changes, a process he regards as part of his mission to report... he had already come to realize that dreams are a form of knowledge and that dream images are a reflection of higher truths. The same applies to visions or things seen in waking or half-waking states... (pg 10)
I knew the word semantics from when I was quite young, and had at least a basic understanding of its domain as including meaning and interpretation of words and signs. Semantics was at the core of what my mother was studying and writing about in the early 1950s, and I was a collector of fancy words (cybernetics was another that I absorbed early on, from the same source).The notion of lexicon as a mappable territory of relatable concepts was obvious and fundamental for me from when I started to read, but it wasn't until I participated in writing workshops at Bard in 1986-87 that the idea of mind-mapping came home to roost, when I re-encountered the work of my mother's colleague Ann Berthoff and realized that I had been /speaking prose/ all my life: that lexicology was a lifelong interest of mine.
If you write Dream at the center of a sheet of paper and then start to collect related terms and concepts, you are exploring a semantic domain. Such clouds of terminology quickly become very complex in their interrelationships and allusions, and many hares are started in a landscape of rabbit holes.
Here's some of what I'd include in that semantic mapping: Imagination, Precognition, Fantasy, Visions, Vision Quest, Subconscious, Clairvoyance, Delirium, Superorganic, Hallucination, Portents, Augury, Oneiromancy... just a beginning.
see also 5 of Humanity's Best Ideas of What Dreams Actually Are By Drake Baer
...pragmatic prophecies ... tell you what to do ... communications from the unconscious mind ... data ... your memories in action ...
Dreams may be regarded as an activity of the soul... (pg 176)
...may be treated as omens, and there may be a recognized method of interpreting them. They may be considered as communications from the dead or other spirits. There may be cults in which special dreams are sought. (pg 187)
Gregory Bateson's remarkable Steps to an Ecology of Mind is essential.
For a recent Clifford Geertz-related perspective, see Dreams as Deep Play: Toward a Cultural Understanding of Dreaming Jeannette Mageo
And see Iban dreaming for some of what I used to think I knew about.
Of uncertain veracity/utility: Dreams and Ethnicity Portal International Association for the Study of Dreams
A lot of important background is to be found in Iain McGilchrist's vast The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, which is especially rich in up-to-date left brain/right brain background (see my Kindle Notebook), but also has a section specifically on dreaming:19. Intuition, imagination and the unveiling of the world
Page 1171
...REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the type of sleep which occurs several times a night, typically in 90-minute bursts, during which one dreams. 'Aha' moments commonly follow REM sleep. It has been suggested by Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard who specialises in the study of sleep and dreaming, that sleep has many functions. Sleep, just like waking, she says, is not just for one thing, but for everything. And she proposes that one function of REM sleep is problem-solving. Dreams help us see things anew, so as to see solutions that aren't apparent to our conscious minds. 51 During this phase of sleep, the logical mind retires—in particular, the control normally exerted by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is relinquished; the posterior visual cortex is hyperactive; the body and its emotions are engaged. Ideal conditions for trying out intuitive solutions to a problem, as she suggests. And one reason for believing she is likely to be right is something that has puzzled me since medical school: paralysis while dreaming. For this abdication of control by the frontal cortex, which is effectively what happens in dreaming, is all very well, provided the body—its own feelings, memory and intuition engaged—is not going to act on what it intuits immediately, while conscious inhibition is switched off. And, guess what? Nature has thought of that. During REM sleep you are paralysed (as are other mammals, and birds, the only other classes we know from EEG traces to have REM sleep—birds and mammals also happen to be nature's principal problem-solvers). There is also some evidence that the right hemisphere is dominant throughout sleep. From the onset of sleep, 'a clear reversal' of left hemisphere dominance can be observed, followed by 'a steady right hemisphere superiority' during both REM and non-REM sleep, as well as at the morning [hypnopompic] sleep-wake transition. Which may explain why so many good ideas come to us on waking.IMAGINATION
Just as the process by which insight comes about seems something of a mystery (as we saw, it seems to be drawn by a sense of beauty), so also there is a degree of mystery about where the imaginative capacity comes from.Page 1179
...From the left hemisphere's point of view, imagination, like metaphor and myth, is a species of lying: from the right hemisphere's point of view, it is, like metaphor and myth, necessary for access to truth. True human creativity is inseparable from the use of the imaginationIntuition, imagination and the unveiling of the world
Page 1179 ...imagination is inextricably bound up with reality, in a way that its bedfellow, fantasy, is not. Fantasy is projected, full-blown, from the workings of our mind. In imagination, rather, we experience intimations of matters that are glimpsed, but only partly seen; our conscious minds obscure them. They resist explicit formulation, because thereby they become something else. This tentative, but rapt, attraction toward something that is not cognised, but at some deep level re-cognised, is not the work of fantasy, but of imagination. Imagination is far from certain, of course; but the biggest mistake we could make would be never to trust it—never to believe in it—for fear of being mistaken. For truth requires imagination. It alone can put us in touch with aspects of reality to which our habits of thought have rendered us blind. It leads not to an escape from reality, but a sudden seeing into its depths, so that reality is for the first time truly present, with all its import, whether that occur in the context of what we call science or what we call art.Page 1185
...the distinction between Fancy and Imagination which Coleridge intuited to be so fundamental to the human condition. Fancy is passive; it sees objects, which are fixed, definite, known and 'dead'. Imagination, by contrast, is active, vital, and is already part of what it sees (there is no subject-object divide here). Fancy puts together things already known in a novel way; imagination recreates the known and familiar as something unique and new, by a process of inhabiting, or permeating from the inside—not by combination or addition from the outside. Fancy is subject to conscious choice. Primary Imagination (the mode whereby the world comes into being for us) is not;...from "Cerebral Hygiene" by Gavin Francis (London Review of Books Vol. 39 No. 13 29 June 2017)
Different phases of sleep seem to have different functions. In slow-wave sleep, the brain's EEG tracings show deep co-ordinated pulses in neural activity. Without adequate slow-wave sleep we may wake feeling unrefreshed. REM sleep, in which the majority of dreaming occurs, is important for memory consolidation, or perhaps the systematic forgetting of useless information. (REM stands for 'rapid eye movement'; though the body is paralysed the muscles around the eyes continue to move.) We experience REM every ninety minutes or so while asleep — most adults have four or five episodes of it each night.
Much about the detail and the mechanisms of sleep remains mysterious. Newborn babies spend about half their sleep time in REM sleep, and adults about a quarter. The deepest phases of slow-wave sleep diminish as we age — some elderly people don't engage in slow-wave sleep at all. REM is triggered by a tiny bunch of neurons with roots deep in the brainstem, which flow into a region at the core of the brain called the thalamus. Only mammals and birds have REM; if you wake someone during it, 90 per cent of the time they'll say they were having a dream.
From the 1950s until the 1990s it was widely assumed that to be in REM sleep was to be dreaming, but more recently that's been shown to be wrong. If you wake someone during slow-wave sleep, there's a 10 per cent chance they will report a dream, though the dreams tend to be more conceptual and less vivid than dreams reported during REM. If you're prevented from drifting into deep sleep (through exposure to sounds in a sleep lab for instance) your chances of reporting a dream when awoken from non-REM sleep rise above 70 per cent. No one can agree on the purpose or meaning of dreaming, but it looks as if Freud's theory — that dreams are the guardians of sleep — is at least partly right: they convert external stimuli such as lights or sounds into dreams rather than waking awareness. If you suffer brain damage that prevents REM sleep you will still dream, but if you sustain damage to an area called the ventromesial quadrants you will retain the capacity for REM sleep, but it will be dreamless....
When Brains Dream Kindle NotebookDreamed Up Reality: Diving into the Mind to Uncover the Astonishing Hidden Tale of Nature Bernardo Kastrup
the hypothesis I am postulating here is the following: consciousness is a non-local field phenomenon not caused by, nor reducible to, the brain, but simply associated in some manner with the brain. All understanding and knowledge ever registered by a conscious entity survives ad infinitum in the field of consciousness as permanent experiences, or qualia. Therefore, all universal knowledge is, in principle, accessible by any conscious entity. It is the local attention filters of the nervous system, evolved as a consequence of earlier survival advantages, which prevent us from accessing this universal repository of knowledge. But through perturbations of ordinary brain operation, which partially and temporarily disable or bypass some of these filters, one can gain awareness of it.......As I finally begun to reconstitute my ego and regain some composure, I crash-landed onto the memories of the less desirable elements of my life. Indeed, I learned that, while recovering one's ego provides welcome relief from the disorientation of the return, along with one's ego come one's ghosts. Have you ever had the experience of waking up immediately after a blissful, light, carefree dream, just to remember the bummers of your life? In those initial moments of wakefulness, when your defenses are still down and you have grown accustomed to the lightness of your dream, the bummers of your life jump out at you with a vengeance; until you finally manage to file them back into the mental drawers that keep them in check. The specifics of my experience re-encountering my private bummers are philosophically irrelevant, so I will spare you the details. All that is worth mentioning is that it was hard. Yet, in a way, it was a learning experience too. Through it, I became a lot more aware of the fears, frustrations, and machinations lurking in obfuscated layers of my own mind...
...dreams can perhaps take on increasing levels of properties normally associated with reality—namely, concreteness, endurance, autonomy, etc.; and second, that reality can perhaps take on increasing levels of properties normally associated with dreams—namely, malleability, acquiescence to intent, etc. In other words, the subjective data suggests that dreams and reality may simply be different points on a single, continuous spectrum of the same underlying "stuff;" much like red and blue are simply different points on the electromagnetic spectrum of light....
Hypnagogia and Hypnopompia (Wikipedia) are respectively 'drifting off' and 'waking up', both non-ordinary waking reality. I have enjoyed many pompias
Wikipedia:The Dreaming, also referred to as Dreamtime, is a term devised by early anthropologists to refer to a religio-cultural worldview attributed to Australian Aboriginal beliefs. It was originally used by Francis Gillen, quickly adopted by his colleague Baldwin Spencer and thereafter popularised by A. P. Elkin, who, however, later revised his views.The Dreaming is used to represent Aboriginal concepts of Everywhen, during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. These figures were often distinct from gods, as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped but only revered. The concept of the Dreamtime has subsequently become widely adopted beyond its original Australian context and is now part of global popular culture.
from Emma Gattey in London Review of Books 2022:
Songlines, also known as Tjukurpa, Dreaming tracks, creation law, are the sung pathways of First Australian ancestors. These invisible tracks were created by the totems, or ancestral beings, of Aboriginal creation myths as they wandered across the continent naming everything they saw and leaving a trail of words and musical notes in their wake. Songlines chart critical sites and resources, linking stories to landscape: they are both map and compass. They provide practical signposts such as the location of rivers and caves — survival knowledge essential to desert life — but also describe the origins of the universe as well as moral codes and their consequences. For generations, the songs allowed First Australians to re-enact ancestral exploits on the sites where they occurred — not in a place called Australia but 'Country', a term that encompasses the spiritual connections of specific peoples to land, water, memory, custom and law, and which links hundreds of ancient languages. As access to these sites has diminished, painting, along with other artforms, has become an important means of preserving the Indigenous knowledge bound up in songlines....and see alsoKnowledge of the songs and stories that constitute this collective worldview (known as 'the Dreaming') is a birthright — it can't be acquired or appropriated — and access is restricted according to gender, kinship and place. This means that the artists on show at Songlines, the National Museum of Australia's exhibition of First Australian art, have story rights only to the sections that traverse their bit of Country. (The exhibition is on display at the Box in Plymouth until 27 February before travelling to Paris and Berlin.) A songline might begin in land belonging to one Indigenous group and move through another and another: there are more than four hundred distinct groups and languages. The many collaborative works in the exhibition therefore required 'everyone to know what they can and can't tell ... a precise knowledge of how ... kinship, Country and story fit together'. The proper communication of knowledge is central to them all, regardless of medium or style. The paintings of Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates — massive canvases of acrylic, hectic with colour and code — are accompanied by a note that tells us 'iconographic details [have been left] intentionally elusive, except for those with the seniority to read them.' This isn't a gesture of hostility or exclusion, but self-determination. Despite the artists' desire to create works that travel between cultures, these paintings have not been made for us. The viewer is a guest; any pretence of disclosure or easy understanding would prevent us from experiencing the vertigo of Country.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World Tyson Yunkaporta
I use many other terms that I don't particularly like, such as "Dreaming" (which is a mistranslation and misinterpretation), because a lot of the old people I respect, and who have passed knowledge on to me, use these words. It's not my place to disrespect them by rejecting their vocabulary choices. I know and they know what they mean, so we might as well just use those labels. In any case, it is almost impossible to speak in English without them, unless you want to say, "suprarational interdimensional ontology endogenous to custodial ritual complexes" every five minutes. So "Dreaming" it is. (pg19)A lot of rocks are benevolent and enjoy being used and traded, but you have to follow the guidance of the old people to know which ones you can use. Rocks are to be respected. (pg 36)
Another instance of appropriation can be found in the Carlos Castaneda Saga of his [supposed] instruction in the Yaqui Way of Knowledge by don Juan Matus, enormously popular in the 1970s, and now generally considered a bogus fabrication (despite the UCLA PhD in Anthropology). Castaneda's 1993 The Art of Dreaming may be tailored from the same cloth:
The Art of Dreaming describes the steps needed to master the control and consciousness of dreams. The Toltecs of Don Juan Matus' lineage believed that there are seven barriers to awareness, which they termed The Seven Gates of Dreaming. In The Art of Dreaming Castaneda describes extensively how a state called Total Awareness can be achieved by means of dreaming.There's a vast literature dealing with Lucid Dreaming, and Dreamwork is another popular rubric (see Ethics in Dreamwork). The New Age-y whiff is hard to miss...According to Castaneda there are 7 Gates of Dreaming, or obstacles to awareness, which when overcome yield total awareness. Four of the Gates of Dreaming are discussed in The Art of Dreaming. What follows is not so much a technique in achieving lucidity, but rather the practical application of lucid dreaming. By acting a certain way while dreaming, one can cause psychosomatic changes in one's being, including an alternate way of dying.
Lucid Dreaming Music
I'm really not sure what to do with the 'shamanic dreaming' world, so for now will just offer links to some unexplored territory, and leave this avenue for others to explore:
Shamanic Dreaming corrosion-doctors.orgShamanic Dream Perspectives compassdreamwork.com
pdf: A Core Shamanic Theory of Dreams Michael Harner
Lucid Dreaming as Shamanic Technology dreamstudies.org
book: The Secret History of Dreaming Robert Moss
book: Shamanic Dreaming: Connecting with Your Inner Visionary Day and Ingerman
It's hard to know where to begin, and where to end under this rubric.Oneiromancy (Wikipedia)
A Comparison of Keywords in the Dynamic Psychology of Jung, Swedenborg and Freud (Leon James)
There is visible overlap between all three writers in the intensity of focus on certain key concepts. The overlap is greater between Jung and Swedenborg than between Freud and the other two. An interpretation of this finding is presented in terms of the attitude of each author regarding the existence of a psychic "world" that is distinct from the physical world. Freud's individual unconscious is contrasted with Jung's collective unconscious and Swedenborg's collective conscious......Although Freud and Jung collaborated together in the early phases of the development of psychoanalysis, it is known that Freud broke off the relationship when Jung began writing and lecturing about the "collective unconscious" as a supernatural realm distinct from the physical world. Freud was a passionate reductionist who vigorously denied that "psychic" and "mental" are immaterial entities existing separate from the physics and chemistry of the brain and its neural action. Freud held himself up as a materialist scientist who treated psychic activity in human beings as brain activity.
Jung on the other hand was intensely focused on the inner process of individuation that was happening to him. This experience included visions and discussions with people from the psychic realm who themselves were once people on earth. Gradually over his long writing career Jung was able to present a coherent psychological theory of how mental health and disorder operate simultaneously in two distinct realms or worlds in which every patient lives. The ordinary everyday consciousness by which people do their work and maintain a social life, is a materialistic consciousness, such as Freud promoted throughout his life and career as a mental health practitioner. The work of Jung and Swedenborg develop the thesis that mental health disorders and dysfunctions plaguing people's materialistic consciousness cannot be permanently eradicated using materialistic methods alone, as Freud was doing. The cause of the dysfunction is in the psychic world, and so is the solution...
...Using his dual consciousness, both natural in this world, and supernatural in the psychic world of the afterlife, Swedenborg was able to confirm by direct and repeated observations that our individual consciousness is indeed sourced in the collective unconscious of humanity....
...Jung was intensely interested in characterizing the movement of objects in the non-spatial psychic world that could be accessed by spiritual consciousness only, which many have referred to as "visions and voices".6 Jung discovered that traveling in the psychic world called the collective unconscious is distinctly different from ordinary thinking and memory. Jung formulated the concept of synchronicity in order to study the connection between the material ideas of natural consciousness in ordinary thinking, and the immaterial ideas of spiritual consciousness in supernatural thinking.
...Jung like Swedenborg clearly saw the superiority of collective consciousness based in non-material ideas over individual consciousness based on material ideas. This is the fundamental reason that Jung and Swedenborg are important to the continued development of depth psychology. They both held that what lies in the depth of the human psyche is objective and collective, and far more sophisticated and psychologically powerful than what lies on the surface of socialized personality structures, which involve material ideas and limits.
...Swedenborg's idea was that the experience of consciousness is always collective. Individual consciousness is merely an illusion of the private world of self. If the psychic interconnection between people were broken no individual would be able to think anything or be aware of anything in the surrounds or in memory.
...Swedenborg proposed that all consciousness and meaning reside in the cognitive organs of the psychic-body, and none of it in the organs of the physical-body. He specifically rejects the usual psychological explanation that the incoming sensorimotor stimulus, such as the sight of a tree, flows into the cognitive system and produces there the consciousness of that tree. This would be impossible since what a physical stimulus belongs to the physical world, while a mental or cognitive operation belongs to the psychic world of the collective unconscious and conscious. Swedenborg's psychological explanation is that the physical-body and the psychic-body are functionally interconnected by the laws of correspondence that synchronize the physical and psychic worlds. Cognitive activity in the psychic-body is activated by correspondence when the electro-chemical operations are active in the eyes and brain of the physical-body. When our physical sight detects a tree there is produced a particular neuro-chemical operation in the brain that becomes the synchronous occasion for the activation of a corresponding cognitive operation in the psychic-body. This dualist relationship between sensory input and cognitive activity defines all consciousness and the meanings that it is based on.
The Lost Dream Journal of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (Benjamin Ehrlich)
30 Causes of Dreams and Nightmares (According to World Mythology) (Rose MacDowell)
Gilgamesh Dream tablet The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest recognised epic poem... The Dream tablet recounts a part of the epic in which the hero describes his dreams to his mother,
who interprets them as announcing the arrival of a new friend, who will become his companion... (ca. 3600 years ago)A Babylonian Dream Tablet on the Interpretation of Dreams by Stephen Langdon
Interpretation Of Dreams In The Babylonian Epic Of Gilgamesh
Babylonian Dream Beliefs (Tony Crisp)
Agnes, the daughter of the Vedic god Indra, assumes a human form and descends to Earth to investigate the human experience. On her quest for knowledge, Agnes meets nearly 40 characters, each giving her a better understanding of humanity. She experiences poverty, cruelty, and family life, gaining a better understanding of the suffering that plagues humanity. Agnes decides that humans are meant to be pitied and tries to find a solution to all of the suffering she sees on Earth. A Dream Play by August Strindberg is considered to be an important play in the Expressionism and Surrealism movements in theatre. This show provides a great opportunity to feature a large cast, or to have actors double up on many roles. Ideal for community and professional theatre companies alike, A Dream Play is an excellent addition to any theatre season.
Strindberg's Reminder:
the author has tried to imitate the disconnected but seemingly logical form of the dream. Anything may happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On an insignificant background of reality, imagination designs and embroiders novel patterns: a medley of memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities and improvisations.The characters split, double, multiply, vanish, solidify, blur, clarify. But one consciousness reigns above them all—that of the dreamer; and before it there are no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no laws. There is neither judgment nor exoneration, but merely narration. And as the dream is mostly painful, rarely pleasant, a note of melancholy and of pity with all living things runs right through the wabbly tale. Sleep, the liberator, plays often a dismal part, but when the pain is at its worst, the awakening comes and reconciles the sufferer with reality, which, however distressing it may be, nevertheless seems happy in comparison with the torments of the dream.
Ingmar Bergman's Ett drömspel
(play by August Strindberg, 1899)
(1:53 is the length)
[click CC for subtitles]
In My Dreams (Jorma Kaukonen)
Stampfel & Weber version
Last Forever version
Let's go! Let's dance the Ténébreuse...
(Max Ernst, from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil)
(Max Ernst, from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil)
This Place is a Dream and Wakeful Dreaming and Two Worlds (Andy Ilachinski)
and finally to
and
...is a world of Dreaming that I've explored avidly, including the TV series (Netflix). Where do we even begin? There's a Sandman Wiki, a Beginner's Guide, a fine Audible reading, an interesting Guardian interview, and many many books and articles and image collections.Neil Gaiman himself:
First-coffee questions (Not questions to which I'm expecting answers, more wonderings that have arisen)
- Are dreams always IMAGES? [no] Do some people have SOUND dreams? [yes] The default form seems to be a projection onto an (imagined) screen, but is that because we have the EXPERIENCE of movie narratives? Or does it go back much further, to the experience of dramas enacted on stages, or to storytelling settings? To what degree are dreams primed by images seen or imagined? And what are the dreams of the blind? (see Do blind people dream in visual images? and Do congenitally blind people have visual dreams?)
And adventuring with google brings us:
- Kekulé's Dream: MIT summary
- Albert Hofmann and the "synthesized dreams" of LSD:
- LSD My Problem Child pdf (Albert Hofmann 1980)
- The Accidental Discovery of LSD: The Story of Bicycle Day (American Chemical Society)
- See also Dreams and Psychedelics: Neurophenomenological Comparison and Therapeutic Implications
- Tripping on LSD Really Is Like Lucid Dreaming
- Dreamlike effects of LSD on waking imagery in humans depend on serotonin 2A receptor activation
- The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness (J Allan Hobson, 2002)
- G. William Domhoff: Dream Research at UCSC and Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming (12 page pdf) and The Relationship Between Dreaming and Autonoetic Consciousness
Default Mode Network (Wikipedia)
Dreaming as mind wandering: evidence from functional neuroimaging and first-person content reports Kieran C. R. Fox et al.
Isolated reports have long suggested a similarity in content and thought processes across mind wandering (MW) during waking, and dream mentation during sleep. This overlap has encouraged speculation that both "daydreaming" and dreaming may engage similar brain mechanisms.... in both states, content is largely audiovisual and emotional, follows loose narratives tinged with fantasy, is strongly related to current concerns, draws on long-term memory, and simulates social interactions. Both states are also characterized by a relative lack of meta-awareness...Dreaming and the default network: A review, synthesis, and counterintuitive research proposal Domhoff and Fox 2015
This article argues that the default network, augmented by secondary visual and sensorimotor cortices, is the likely neural correlate of dreaming...The Emergence of Dreaming: Mind-Wandering, Embodied Simulation, and the Default Network Domhoff 2017
Dream Journal is a free service with over 15,000 users, that allows you to create and customize your very own online dream journal. We have over 200,000 dreams recorded to date. You may update your dream journal as often as you'd like. Your journal may be kept private for your own viewing, or be made public.
Dreamcatcher (Wikipedia)Why We Dream
(52 minutes)What The Fuck Did I Dream Last Night: Dream Journal
(Notebook And Diary For Recording Dream Interpretations: Compact Bedside Table Size, 100+ Lined Pages)
...and at that point COVID intervened, and Convivium was put off for another weeeeek.... I'm still trying to put pieces back together
Satan smites Job with sore boils (William Blake)
**********
below this line, seriously under construction and only semi-coherent
the line will move downward as material is organized/tamed
Hymn to Time: Ursula K. Le Guin's Ode to the Most Mysterious Dimension of Being (Maria Popova)
We are beings of time and in time — something Jorge Luis Borges spoke to beautifully in his classic 1946 meditation on time: "Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."...And I just HAVE to quote Ursula Le Guin, from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, on the lexicography of Fantasy via her dialog with the OED, relevant in so many ways to how to think about Dreams:
"Auntie! please tell me about fantasy, because I want to talk about a Book of Fantasy, but I am not sure what I am talking about.""Fantasy or Phantasy," Auntie replies, clearing her throat, "is from the Greek phantasia, lit. 'a making visible', or in late Greek, 'to imagine, have visions', and phanein, 'to show'. " And she summarizes the earliest meanings of the word fantasy in English:
an appearance, a phantom, the mental process of sensuous perception, the faculty of imagination, a false notion, a caprice, a whim (39)...and then the word, doubling back on its tracks like a hare, came to mean the imagination itself, "the process, the faculty, or the result of forming mental representations of things not actually present. (39)
