Blog o’ Gnosis

In late October of this year, The New York Times published a series of articles on sleep and dreaming which are worth checking out. Below are links to each of the four articles, along with highlights, anecdotes, and some commentary. If anyone spots other articles on dreams in the news, I’d love to hear about them.

Last weekend I went to the conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams held at Sonoma State. I could only attend for one day, but fortunately it was the same day that Fariba Bogzaran presented a panel on “The Phenomenology of Light in Dreams.”

In her presentation she talked about different ways she has experienced light in dreams. She is a gifted lucid dreamer and artist, so she spoke of her attempts to translate her lucid experiences, which were filled with different qualities of light, into the medium of paint. It was a fascinating presentation, followed by three other speakers who each had something unique and personal to say about how they experienced light in dreams.

(With apologies to Roger Miller.) I have been enjoying myself out on the road this week. There’s been no boxcars or broom pushing involved, but thanks to the largesse of old friends and the interest in dreams and other workshops I give, I’ve been able to partake of early Spring in the Northwest, a rarefied [...]

Okay, well I guess I am now collecting poems having to do with dreams. I spent some time this evening browsing through a friend’s poetry collection, and came up with this beauty that I had to share. I don’t know whether Reya is doing her Poetry for Brigid blog this year, but here’s my first contribution anyway.

Back when Bowen and Lyra were about 5 and 3, I was a frustrated songwriter. I had several under my belt from years past, but not as many recent ones as I would have liked. There were two or three half-finished songs I was trying to pull together, and somehow I thought it was a failure on my part that I couldn’t find the time with two little kids to finish them. When I did take time from everything else to work on my songs I found I had nothing to say, or rather was too full of things I didn’t know how to say. Not understanding the cause or the cure, I called it writer’s block.

It happened again recently, that most rarefied of dreams: I am performing a beautiful new song spontaneously as I compose it. The dream wakes me up, and on waking I remember part of the haunting melody and lyrics, and am able to transcribe them.

This is the worst week of the year: the week when every radio announcer and third-rate journalist announces the arrival next week of “the first day of summer.” June 21 is the Summer Solstice, also known as Midsummer. As in mid-summer, or the mid-point of summer. In other words, the middle of summer. Not the first day, the middle day. How difficult is this?

I read a movie review of Million Dollar Baby in the newsletter of the UCSC Feminist Studies Department, my old alma mater, that reminded me what I hate about feminism — or should I say, what I hate about some feminisms (oh how pretentious those plurals sound!).

Last weekend I was down in Berkeley for the annual IASD (International Assoc. for the Study of Dreams) conference. This was a really inspiring conference, as usual, with lots of dreamworkers presenting on all sorts of topics. There was a panel of invited Muslim academics speaking on dreams and Islam; dream researchers reporting the results [...]