It is good to chase one’s dreams, but bad, as it mostly turns out, to be chased by them. —Franz Kafka
It is good to chase one’s dreams, but bad, as it mostly turns out, to be chased by them.
—Franz Kafka
Posts tagged dreams
The Unlimited Dream Company
“In an attempt to better understand their colonial subjects in those years, officials in the British empire undertook a curious and little-known research project: to collect dreams from the people of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The results were not what they expected.”
“Seligman struggled to impose meaning on his unusual archive. When he tried to establish universalities, exceptions and contradictions proliferated. And when he tried to draw sharp distinctions between the minds of Britons on the one hand, and colonial subjects on the other, commonalities asserted themselves. Even in a situation where researchers held all the power – with the authority of the imperial state behind them, and an elaborate theoretical structure setting the terms of the encounter – their subjects did not always follow the script.”
“Did colonial officials get what they wanted from these growing collections of Freudian data? Some results, to be sure, ended up in tendentious arguments portraying anticolonial politics as the product of mental illness. The language of ‘frustration-aggression’ reactions and ‘deculturation’ disorders allowed some British officials to suggest that calls for independence derived from inchoate expressions of anger and immaturity. Once again, however, a clear-cut vindication of empire through expert knowledge proved elusive. The same studies that furnished evidence of indigenous pathology could not avoid pointing to the damage inflicted by British rule: the crushing racial hierarchies, the lack of economic opportunities, the weirdly Anglocentric schooling. Some researchers even suggested that imperialism, not anticolonial nationalism, was the real mental disorder; they explained the behaviour of British colonialists in terms of status anxieties, sexual hang-ups, and feelings of insecurity.”
(via https://aeon.co/essays/britains-imperial-dream-catchers-and-the-truths-of-empire )
SLOWAVE – An Exploration on Sleep + Society
Our anxiety about sleep underscores some uncomfortable realities about the present. How is it that an essential biological function has had to fight so hard to be recognized as, well, essential? When we look back on our lives, the third we spend recharging registers as an opportunity cost, something to be overcome. But what if the on/off binary that we understand consciousness through was the wrong lens to use on sleep? Can we reject the awake/asleep binary, and plot sleeping and dreaming on an expanded spectrum of consciousness? Sleep isn’t death–it’s something else entirely. The future of sleep won’t be its absence, it will be a new class of people leveraging its creative potential. Slowave is the response to this realization
There are symbolic dreams—dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities—realities that symbolize a…
“There are symbolic dreams—dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities—realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.”
–Haruki Murakami, “A Wild Sheep Chase”
Lucid Dreaming Can Be Induced By Zapping Brains With Gamma Waves
By administering mild electric currents to the brain, neuroscientists from Frankfurt University have successfully induced self-awareness in sleeping volunteers. Amazingly, the technique could be used to help people take better control of their dreams. But it’s also a discovery that’s offering critical insights into the very nature of consciousness itself. Gamma waves have been linked to consciousness before — a process called gamma coherence — but this is the first time scientists have used it to coax self-awareness during the dream cycle.
http://io9.com/lucid-dreaming-can-be-induced-by-zapping-brains-with-ga–1576231640
Why the world’s most talented dreamers may hold the secret to a new state of consciousness
When sleep scientists turned to the study of dreams in the 1950s, few considered the notion of lucid dreaming to be more than a curiosity. It was the province of occultists and parapsychologists. Not until LaBerge produced the first evidence for lucid dreams, during graduate work at Stanford University in the 1970s, did the topic gain a modicum of scientific respectability.