The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Dreams”
Trauma Displaced in Time: Premonition, Synchronicity, and Enjoyment
On the morning of September 11, 2001, my alarm awoke me around 6:30AM and I did what I always try to do before dragging myself from bed: I rolled over, grabbed my notebook and pen, and jotted notes on whatever dream images I could recall from the night before. That morning I noted dreaming about […]
The Solaris Mind: Hypnagogia, Meditation, and Insight
A classic motif in science fiction is that humanity ventures to the farthest reaches of space only to find, impossibly, something of our own that we had forgotten. Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, about a planet covered by a viscous ocean that manufactures simulacra from its observers’ unconscious, is probably the purest expression of this […]
When Is It Hyperfootball Season?—Rethinking Eternalism
There are rumblings from the Internet that graphic novelist and magus Alan Moore is soon to drop a million-word novel on the world, called Jerusalem. It shows great courage and faith, in a world that no longer reads books, that Moore has stretched out his text as much as possible instead of compressing his ideas […]
Mutants, Mystics, and Scientologists (Thoughts on Jeffrey Kripal, Gnosticism, and Sci-Fi Spirituality)
Call me a slow learner, but it took me until my early forties to realize that some of the best and most inspiring things in life, besides girls, are the things I was obsessed with as a 10-year-old boy (i.e., just before I discovered girls). At 10, I was a typical nerdy 1970s kid, curled […]
UFOs and the Midlife Crisis
I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about UFOs in the last couple months—duh—so out of a sense of blogging duty I thought I should get out my DVD of Close Encounters and watch it again, and perhaps comment on it. It has been a couple years. I totally disagree with Spielberg’s overt premise—that ETs are […]
What Dreams Really Are
[edit 1/10/09 — The original post is now clarified and expanded in my article “Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness“] Every few months a psychologist—or now, more often, it is a neuroscientist—aggressively promotes their new theory of why we dream, and it gets picked up in the press as […]
Star Wars is a remake of Ordinary People
Some films get sort of obscured, in hindsight, not only by their own famousness or popularity, but also by standard interpretations. Rashomon is one example: The handy notion that Kurosawa’s classic is about relativism, different people having multiple points of view, has essentially controlled our viewing of that film since it was released. Yet the […]
The black monolith
Well, there are many kinds of films. Most of them, nowadays, don’t demand much thinking. That makes me very, very upset. It makes me upset that they think the audiences have grown unused to thinking and that they only want things spelled out for them, in a platter. That’s bullshit, and a big one. People […]
