Waking World Research Articles

The Inter-Subjective Touch in On Body and Soul

Abstract This article examines the inter-subjective touch in Ildikó Enyedi's film On Body and Soul (2017), employing a phenomenological approach by analyzing the aspects of horror, pleasure, dreaming, and breath. This film recontextualizes horror and reaffirms pleasure through the inter-subjective touch. The binary setting between the dreaming world and the waking world, through the perception of touch, is used not to disdain the cruel reality but to arouse inter-subjectivity. The representation of breath illuminates another tactility regarding spatiality and inter-subjectivity. I argue that On Body and Soul constructs layers of tactility and inter-subjectivity between the film and the spectator; the two protagonists (Mária and Endre); human and non-human; dreaming and waking; and mind and body.

In Memoriam: Tribute to Rita K. Gollin (1928–2022)

In Memoriam: Tribute to Rita K. Gollin (1928–2022)

Vegetal Affect: Disruptive Unfeeling in the Face of Gender Oppression in Han Kang's The Vegetarian

Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian tells the story of a woman who has a nightmare so obscene, so violent, that it fundamentally changes how she lives in the waking world. In this disconcerting dream, the young female protagonist Yeong-hye Kim kills and eats someone—or something—with her bare hands. When she awakens, she immediately adopts a vegetarian diet but her demeanour and affective expression also change. Her face defaults to a vacant expression, she begins speaking less, and when forced to interact with others she shocks them by not only behaving in socially unacceptable ways, but also emoting (or not) in non-normative ways. In doing so, Yeong-hye reveals and disrupts hegemonic gender-based power relations, particularly those relating to affective gender expectations of women such as ‘a submissive wife, an obedient daughter, an amiable person’ that keep the patriarchy intact.

Śaṅkara’s philosophy of dreaming: Constructing an unreal world

ABSTRACT This article analyzes Śaṅkara’s use of dreaming in Advaita Vedānta. For Śaṅkara, dreaming functions philosophically as a direct phenomenal inquiry into mind and consciousness. Dreaming also functions as a syllogistic illustration. While dreaming, we experience unreal objects that do not exist apart from our minds. Dreaming thus illustrates the waking world’s nonrealism despite perceiving it as real, and that waking objects are consciousness alone. However, the dream illustration raises several questions: In what ways does illusory dream reality extend to waking objects? And does Śaṅkara view the objective waking world as the individual’s cognitive construction similar to the dream, or as īśvara’s cosmological construction? This article argues that for Śaṅkara, the individual’s waking cognitive construction is primarily epistemological rather than an external ontological power akin to a creator deity; however, distinctions between individual and īśvara are ultimately indeterminable and lose meaning from the standpoint of nondual brahman.

Leading All Our Voices to Thrum: Amanda Moore’s Requeening

Leading All Our Voices to Thrum: Amanda Moore’s Requeening Erin Redfern (bio) Requeening, by Amanda Moore (Ecco, 2021), 112 pp. In Requeening, the 2020 National Poetry Series winner selected by Ocean Vuong, Amanda Moore uses the metaphor of the hive to examine the work we each must do to build, and rebuild, a life. A domestic hive is its own entity, humming with hidden, internal energies, yet it requires keeping—a steady, attuned involvement in the smooth running of its affairs. Requeening is thus a timely and fascinating tutorial in seeking a right balance between freedom and care. In the melodic first sentence of “Afterswarm,” this balance is off: As for when my first bees knit themselves togetherin a single sovereign self and slunk over the fencein search of a truant queen, I couldn’t say—not with my own house to mind. The stakes of such distraction in the handling of a hive—or a life—are mortally high, and the poem’s speaker learns her lesson, vowing in the final stanza, “I will be alive this time / to what swells and roils the colony. . . . I will heed.” In poem after poem, this is what the speaker does. And while it does not frame every poem in the collection, the hive as both object and emblem allows Requeening to be both grounded in embodied experience and at the same time on the wing through ideas of labor and responsibility, resistance and relationship, making and grieving. Requeening moves fluidly through a variety of forms (predominantly free verse but including sonnets, haibun, lists, as well as a palinode, an elegy, an essay, and a postcard). Despite deft tonal shifts, the poems maintain focus, pointing to hives—and by extension to hearts, houses, bodies, relationships, and, of course, poems—as working containers. (It’s no coincidence that Moore is a careful reader of Philip Levine.) Moore’s speaker locates her “own begetting” in “the exhalations and plumes / of midwestern work.” Her daughter’s dreams are “work that can’t be done in the waking world.” Speaking both of spring and new grief in “Next Lines,” she firmly states, “it’s time / to help the season work its magic.” In “The Worker,” a splendid [End Page 144] poem, a bee portrays its toil in and for the hive in words that could describe a healthy poem: Each cell tidy and tight with brood,what’s mine nowis sunshine and breeze a gyre of pleasure and labor within. And while work in Requeening is fundamentally generative, it is not always pleasant or pretty. In “The Dead Thing” the speaker enjoins, “you house flies / and scavengers, you insects, mites, beetles, larva, / maggots and worms: do your work.” Above all, in Requeening it is our human bodies that do the work of experiencing and of surviving experience. “Don’t talk to me of a god: / it’s not what saved me,” we are instructed in the Whitmanesque “Gratitude,” “I thank nothing / but my body / for this life.” As hive-like containers of life and their own source of deep knowing, bodies get respect in Requeening. Typical in its sharp-witted treatment of a lowly topic, “Haibun with Norovirus” demonstrates that a body’s work can even be funny, gross, and admirable all at once: Just as I became accustomed to her new independence, the privacy, her one-word answers, the girl croaks “Mom!” early one morning from behind the bathroom door and I come to find her clinging to the lip of the toilet discharging a vomit so red and bright and brilliant it can’t have been made by the body, and I remembered the way, just before bed the night before and against my objections, she had upturned a bag of XXtra Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in her mouth. This vomiting is more than mere consequence, I can see, as her body works to purge itself entirely, throwing her head forward again and again. [End Page 145] At the end of “Calendula,” a gorgeous poem that visually links the orange flower, rings of fire, the sun, and her body during childbirth, the speaker remembers both matter-of-factly and in...

Dreams, Morality and the Waking World

AbstractIs it ever wrong to cheat in a dream? It has been argued that the conjunction of reasonable claims about dreams with Evaluational Internalism (the view that moral evaluation is determined by factors ‘internal’ to agency, such as intentions) entails a positive answer. This implausible result seemingly provides reason to favour an alternative theory of moral evaluation. I here argue that a wide range of Evaluational Externalist views (which base moral evaluation on factors ‘external’ to agency, such as harms produced) are similarly committed to morality in dreams. I end by identifying implications for theorising about dreams and morality.

The Evolution of Fear in Wakefulness and Dreams

Fear is a primitive emotion, which helps us to steer clear of any potential dangers. In ancient times, fear helped our ancestors to stay alive and survive. Due to the mammalian evolution, the defense mechanisms that help to cope with dangers that threaten disruption in the transport of genes in transportation are successfully developed. In the mammalian environment of the past, the danger would strike quickly without a). The primary dangers were hunting predators, and natural events such as floods, thunder, and lightning. The most common strategies that were used were escape and avoidance. To survive, humans had to evolve a perceptual system to identify potential threats and dangers and a reflexive wired motor system to move away from the perceived danger. With time, the sensory and motor systems were expanded due to the sophisticated nervous system. Dreams can teach us about waking, dreams reflect reality. Nothing ever happens in the waking world until it happens in the dream world. In the dream state an individual can act out their inner desires which they can’t in waking state. Carl Jung believed that dreams served us two purposes; firstly to compensate for the disparity in the individual’s psyche and secondly to provide probable images of the future, which permitted the individual to predict future events. The threat stimulation system would be emerged in a surrounding influenced by the existence of crucial physical threats and naive humans hence dream about realistic threat dreams that prepared their control of frightening physical surroundings. Since the time of evolution, humans rehearsed to respond to numerous threats with behavioral actions and this might explain why the reactions of the dreaming individual are mostly about running and fighting. In our contemporary society, most of the threats are emotional and psychological in nature. The threat that we face is very real but dissimilar to what was originally feared by early humans therefore the threat stimulation system gets activated but sometimes misses the mark.

Naturalistisches Träumen und irreales Wachen

Artikelbeginn:[English title and abstract below] »Nun denkt der Traum hauptsächlich in Bildern« (Freud 2008, S. 51), stellt schon Sigmund Freud 1900 in seiner Traumdeutung fest. Träumen ist nach Freud eine visuelle Erfahrung, und als solche erscheint das Bilderbuch prädestiniert, Träume darzustellen. Was von dem Abgebildeten jedoch Traum ist und was nicht, lässt sich nicht immer eindeutig bestimmen. Naturalistic Dreaming and Unreal WakingAspects of Dreaminess in Blexbolex’s Textless Picturebook The Holidays This article examines narrative forms of dreaminess in Blexbolex’s textless picturebook The Holidays (2018; original title, Nos vacances, 2017; German edition, Unsere Ferien, 2018), which tells the story of a girl who, on a visit to her grandfather, encounters an anthropomorphised elephant – an encounter which is not harmonious. In two dream sequences, the desires and fears of the protagonist are revealed and put into perspective. In this article, these two sequences are examined within the contexts of the cultural history of dreams, and their narrative functions as analeptic reflections of daily events, on the one hand, and as proleptic epiphanies, on the other. Dream elements of the fictional waking world in the frame are also considered using Stefanie Kreuzer’s typology of narrative-structural characteristics and Christiane Solte-Gresser’s examination of the conventions pertaining to how dreams are presented in picturebooks. This article asks to what extent the alleged waking world itself can be categorised as a dream world. To answer this question, it focusses on the characters’ masking and identity confusion, the motif of the dream journey as well as the presentation of the elephant, whose naturalistic appearance in the dream sequences is in marked contrast to the unrealism with which the waking world is portrayed. The conclusion reflects on the particular suitability of textless picturebooks for presenting dreams.

Who is the dreamer

We find it self-explanatory that we perceive our waking world through the physical body, via the five senses whose relay centre is the brain. Yet it is not so simple to explain who the dreamer is in the physical body, as it sleeps. An exploration of this evinces that the traditional hypothesis of material reductionism drives us into a dead end street since its proposed creative process is based on the supposition that matter was created first from which it purportedly emanates consciousness. Once it is understood that consciousness comes before matter and that without it nothing can exist, it quickly becomes apparent that consciousness is not just light and intelligence, but also the matrix and indeed the ‘creatrix’ or mother of all there is. Under such circumstances the creative process is best seen as analogous to a prism revealing the inherent colours of white light, as it projects them into a dark room, which ultimately suggests that the brain is a kind of a projector. Both the waking and the dream world are seen as either internal or external projections. Certainly, the brain shows to be an adept projector when it comes to eidetic visions, for instance. An example of this phenomenon is provided from personal experience. Another support of the projecting phenomenon is the hypnotic projection, of which there is an example provided from yet another personal experience. Further evidence in favour of cerebral projection is the hypnagogic, as well as the hypnopompic vision. Karl Pribram’s findings that the world is a cerebral projection of holograms certainly underpin all the adduced examples. Ultimately they all affirm the view that the brain is a projector with multiple modes of operation. The two most common of these are, of course, waking and dreaming. In other words the brain, so it would appear, creates both the waking person and the dreamer, depending in which ‘gear’ it operates. However, when we examine the experiments with psilocybin, for instance, something puzzling eventuates: while the chemistry of the mushroom induces vastly expanded consciousness, or indeed mystical epiphanies, brain functions are considerably reduced. This is, of course, the precise opposite to what is to be expected while we presume that it is the brain that is responsible for both the generation of consciousness and the projection of waking life and dreams. There is only one event that can shed sufficient light on this conundrum: The NDE of Pam Reynolds. The operation on her aneurism required hypothermic arrest, thus rendering her body to a state of medical death. To everyone’s surprise Pam, like Lazarus, returned from the dead, reporting that the world can be seen in the brain dead state, moreover in a superior manner, thus leading us to the inference that we are not the physical body, but a subtle body within the body of flesh and blood, serving as a template for the latter. Pam’s report upon her return to her earthly body also confirms the ancient view that our etheric, or soul, ascends to an astral plain where in some cases at least, it sojourns as light being for a time, presumably reincarnating on earth once again in order to mature towards the ultimate at-one-ment with Absolute Consciousness, as experiments with psilocybin may lead us to infer. The same experiment also suggests an illustration of why we normally are unaware of the oceanic realm of Absolute Consciousness. It is because the brainwaves of ordinary waking experience project the imagery of the waking world into the ‘sea’ of Absolute Consciousness, so deflecting our attention from its very embrace.

Dreaming of a stable world: vision and action in sleep

Our eyes, bodies, and perspectives are constantly shifting as we observe the world. Despite this, we are very good at distinguishing between self-caused visual changes and changes in the environment: the world appears mostly stable despite our visual field moving around. This, it seems, also occurs when we are dreaming. As we visually investigate the dream environment, we track moving objects with our dream eyes, examine objects, and shift focus. These movements, research suggests, are reflected in the rapid movements or saccades of our sleeping eyes. Do we really see the dream world in the same way that we see the real world? If we do, how could dreaming, usually assumed to be mind-generated hallucinations, replicate such an experience? This problem would be deflated if dreams are not hallucinations at all, but rather imagination, illusion or simply unrealistic. I argue that imagination and illusion views do not satisfactorily explain away the problem of vision and action in sleep. The imagination model is not a complete description of dreaming that is consistent with empirical research, and it is unlikely that the visual dream world is an illusion. Given that the dreaming visual experience is most likely active, hallucinatory, and at times a realistic world simulation, there are important implications for our understanding of visual perception and its relationship to movement. Evidence suggests that our dream eyes investigate the dream world as our waking eyes investigate the waking world. If changes to the unconsciously generated dream environment are perceived as external and unintentional while dream body movements are perceived as self-generated and intentional, current theory of visual perception may have to be expanded to account for how the dreaming mind generates a stable world in which we track and visually explore mind-generated objects.

How Bizarre: The Glitch of the Nineties as a Fantasy of New Authorship

How Bizarre: The Glitch of the Nineties as a Fantasy of New Authorship

The World Dream As Parable of Being

The bulk of the scientific fraternity still regards the world as ‘a thing as such’, a ‘reality’, in other words, that is independent of an active mind. Its proponents build their theories on facts they regard as something certain, steadfast and unalterable. The etymology of ‘fact’ reveals that its meaning has its roots in the Latin word ‘facere’, ‘to do’. Its present day meaning was established in the 17th century when it meant ‘something that has occurred’. An occurrence is based on observation, which does not enjoy universal consensus, but is an individual matter. Like a dream, which is an occurrence, waking occurrences need interpretation. In light of this a waking fact is no more certain, steadfast and unalterable than a dream fact. Neither of them is real, for the precondition of reality is something unchanging. What, however, is steadfast and unchanging is consciousness. It persists when someone is knocked unconscious and it persists even beyond the death of the body. NDEs provide evidence for this, and so does the ‘death’ of the mystic and yogi. In daily life consciousness may fluctuate, but it will never extinguish. Consciousness is the sine qua non of existence and thus its everlastingness imbues the sense of reality to dreams and waking experience. Absolute Consciousness contains all there is, was and will be. It reveals its unexpanded content by emanating it in form of dreams and waking life where it expands in an illusive show like Plato’s play of shadows or like the cinematic screening or the virtual reality headgear. Like a cinematic screening, existence, which means standing out from something, is a projection. The projector is the brain, which screens the dream world inside the skull and the waking world outside of it. Both projections are illusive. The circumstance that dreams can conjure up vast landscapes within the skull forces us to suspect that the same applies to the waking world. Radin’s innumerable Double Slit experiments that show that consciousness collapses wave functions instantly at enormous distances, together with QM entanglement, makes nonsense of the speed of light and thus of time and space. Consciousness gives up its inner reality in a manner that might be compared to white light of the sun revealing its innate rainbow colours as it passes through a crystal, which latter would be analogous to the brain. NDE subjects often ask if the light they encounter was God. The answer is always ‘no’. This is because that light is the first manifestation of God, or of absolute Consciousness, just as the rays of the sun are its first manifestation and not the sun itself. A reflection of that divine light is ever-present in all life forms. We experience it in NREM Delta sleep. Unfortunately we forget it by the time we wake up since we have passed through the commotion of the last dream.

Colors in dreams and the introduction of color TV in Germany: An online study

Visual elements are important ingredients of dreams, so dream objects should be – based on the continuity hypothesis of dreaming – as colorful as the waking world. However, the percentages of recalled colored versus black and white dreams as estimated by the participants varied considerably across studies. In the present online study, 2701 persons completed a question about recalling colors in their dreams with three options: percentage of black and white dreams, percentage of colored dreams, and percentage of dreams with no memory of colors. The older participants who most likely had watched black and white TV reported higher recall of black and white dreams than younger persons while the younger group with access to colored TV estimated that their dreams include more often colors compared to the older group. Since the attitude towards dreams and dream recall frequency were positively associated with the reporting of colored dreams, one might hypothesize that dreamers may attribute colors to a dream even if they are do not remember the colors of their actual dreams. In order to validate the present findings, future studies should include the amount of media consumption (TV, cinema etc.) over the life span of the individual and elicit possible confounding factors like age-related memory changes, attention to colors in waking life, and emotional valence of colored dream elements.

Vita Somnium Breve: Is life but a dream?

In view of my finding that dreams are the precursors of waking life, its blueprint in fact, dreaming and waking must be seen as an interdependent unit. Both are equivalent occurrences with the dream being the primary aspect. This interdependent relationship can best be compared with Einstein’s famous formula of E=mc 2 where E stands for the dream and mc 2 for waking life. For mystics, both states are solipsistic projections . The world is not an objective reality. To argue that it is a permanent and shared experience is based on a double premise . We can’t have the sleeper’s point of view and that of the waking individual at one and the same time. In other words, just as dreams come and go, the waking world disappears as we go to sleep and resurfaces as we wake. Clearly, the world, like our dreams is a cerebral projection . Karl Pribram agrees when he sees the brain as a holographic machine that projects the universe as we wake , in the same way as a holographic plate projects its images in 3D outwards when a laser light strikes it. He states: “ The rules of quantum mechanics apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what’s going on in the nervous system – then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences”. The precursor of the holographic plate ‘containing the world’ may be found in a poem by the mystic Shabistari who writes: “Know that the world is a mirror from head to foot, in every atom are a hundred blazing suns”… And as in quantum mechanics, this projection is characterised by ‘omnipresence’ much as it is described in Hindu mysticism: “In the Heaven of Indra, there is said to be a network of pearls so arranged that if you look at one, you see all others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself, but involves every other object, and in fact, is every other object”. All this is only possible because we are ‘suspended’ in an all-pervasive medium: CONSCIOUSNESS. Indeed consciousness is the sine qua non of existence. It is therefore the prime factor in any theory of existence. It is in fact that which lends reality to all there is. This is in perfect agreement with quantum mechanics, which states that ‘energy’, typified by an interactive dualism, only ‘coalesces’ to matter as we focus on it. In short, the world cannot exist as such, but only unfolds in a living medium, the mind - in consciousness . In turn, the necessity of a living matrix for the ‘creation’ of the universe underpins the argument that the world only exists while we are awake. It also demonstrates how right Chuang Tzu was when he said: “I and the universe are one”, and such oneness is not just a theoretical unit, but a living whole . In a theory where the world is an objective reality, consciousness emerges from complex computations among neurons. (Hameroff) But the medically induced NDE of Pam Reynolds that was observed by twenty staff assigned to Dr. Spetzler’s operation on Pam and is recorded in detail, demonstrates in incontrovertible terms that consciousness exists outside the brain , and is in fact the fundament of existence . It also demonstrates that consciousness is non-intermittent and hence the only entity that can claim reality status. In fact as E, the creative energy that in quantum mechanics is typified by an interactive dualism, where photons and particles are an ‘hermaphroditic emulsion’ of potentialities, where unitive E is better described as ‘not two’ than as ‘one’, we understand at once that mc 2 , the material expression of E, is never pure matter, but also energy, and ultimately a form of consciousness. Such toppling of our antiquated western perceptions is rocking the foundations of our science. Clearly, a massive paradigm shift is under foot. East and West are moving closer together, paving the way for a new worldview and a new kind of spirituality. In that climate the dream and its function as a messenger will gradually be saved from confusion and underestimation. Indeed, like Hermes, it will eventually be recognised as the messenger of life’s most fundamental information. Instead of being dismissed as Prospero’s vacuous wisps of smoke, it will be recognised, once again, as the DNA of life on earth.

Cathedral without a city: Using sound to create imagined spaces in Kurt Fitzpatrick’s Cathedral City

Abstract A one-person show which tours the fringe festival circuit presents a special set of challenges for delineating and concretizing the places described in its narrative. The dimensions, layout and other characteristics of the spaces where such a show is performed can vary markedly. As is common practice with one-person fringe shows, Kurt Fitzpatrick’s Cathedral City has only one visible staging element – a chair borrowed at the performance site. However, Cathedral City’s action often travels to places which are too numinous to be brought to life through onstage dialogue and gestures alone. Not only that, but these places straddle the border between real life and fiction, where the orderly logic of the waking world intermingles with the chaotic sensory mosaic of dreams. In place of scenic design, sound was used to conjure up the ever-changing worlds of Cathedral City. The show’s sound designer describes the ways that he employed soundscapes, music, and individual sonic effects to give the audience as clear an idea as possible of where Kurt’s stream of consciousness had taken them to, while still keeping them guessing about where it would take them next.

“O perle”: Apostrophe in Pearl

This article addresses the Pearl-poet's use of apostrophe in his elegiac dream vision. Drawing on classical and medieval discussions of this rhetorical device, as well as contemporary poetic criticism, it argues that the trajectory of apostrophe in the poem traces the development of the Mourner-Dreamer as he gains insight from the Pearl-maiden's lesson and moves toward consolation. The Mourner's calls to his lost pearl in the proem demonstrate the unproductive cycle of his sorrow. His apostrophes to the Maiden in the early part of his dream similarly threaten to undo the solace he gains in the earthly paradise. By contrast, the Maiden's three short apostrophes serve an exemplary function and show the Dreamer how to deploy apostrophe without getting caught up in the diversionary aspects of the device. In the closing frame of the poem, the now-awakened Dreamer uses apostrophe in a controlled manner that permits him to turn away from the isolation of grief. ********** THE Middle English dream vision Pearl a poem about loss. It also a poem about language. Throughout the poem, the sorrowful Jeweller struggles to articulate his grief. The use of apostrophe the first and perhaps the best example of the Mourner-Dreamer's difficulties with language. The device opens the poem and returns at intervals in the proem, in the dream that follows, and twice more in the final scene after the Dreamer wakes. While few critics have overlooked the importance of the opening line--Perle, plesaunte to prynce? paye (1)--no one, to my knowledge, has offered an extended analysis of the poet's use of apostrophe. (1) This essay investigates the poet's use of apostrophe as a means of exploring the challenges that both the Pearl-mourner and the elegist face. I contend that apostrophe stands at the crux between the successful elegy and the depressing failure of the incomplete work of mourning. (2) In the funereal garden before his dream, the Mourner's apostrophes bring him no consolation; indeed, they only redouble his sorrow. In his dream, apostrophe threatens to undo the solace he manages to gain from the salutary landscape and the encounter with the Pearl-maiden. As I will argue below, the Maiden's apostrophes stand in contrast to the Dreamer's wayward speech. Whereas his calls to the lost pearl are predicated on intense feeling and indicate a forfeiture of emotional control, her brief apostrophes are reserved and carefully meted. These exemplary utterances demonstrate for the Pearl-mourner the appropriate measure of apostrophic expression. The Mourner bears this lesson back to the waking world. When he rises from the mound where he slept, he deploys the device with care and solemnity. Apostrophe can thus be read as a gauge for the Dreamer's progress through and beyond his grief. APOSTROPHE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Apostrophe particularly important to the elegist. The core principle behind the apostrophe, to give voice to and converse with an otherwise silent (and possibly absent) entity, remarkably similar to one of the idealized goals of the elegy, to conjure the deceased, to have her turn back from the grave and toward the speaker. Both apostrophe and elegy depend on an element of invocation--a hope, if not a belief, that the poet can do things with words. [T]o apostrophize, writes Jonathan Culler, is to will a state of affairs, to attempt to call it into being by asking inanimate objects to bend themselves to your desire. (3) The apostrophizing poet reaches out to the object of the address, and the elegizing poet aims to overcome the distance between the quick and the dead. It should be no surprise, then, that so many elegies make frequent use of the device. (4) The definition of apostrophe deceptively simple. In its broadest sense, the term refers to any poetic address, but generally understood to mean a direct address to unhearing and unresponsive entities-insentient objects, natural forces, animals, abstract emotions or concepts, or absent persons. …

When is dreaming waking? Continuity, lucidity and transcendence in modern contexts of dreaming

The continuity hypothesis suggests that dreaming is not fully independent of our waking lives. Several factors common to waking have been demonstrated to manifest in the dream-state. Yet, unusual instances of being awake in dreaming may represent autochthonous forms of consciousness that are not necessarily correlated with the parameters of the waking world. This juxtaposition of continuity/discontinuity parallels the natural attitude in the waking world and challenges to it in reenchantment. Addressing the correspondencce between debates on continuity/discontinuity and contextual changes may provide an alternative perspective for redefining the boundaries between waking and dreaming.

The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia have a History?

With the arrival of the twenty-first century, historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and sociologists awakened to the importance of sleep. The past fifteen years have occasioned a remarkable outpouring of monographs, articles and dissertations devoted to human slumber and its discontents. Topics have ranged from medieval somnambulism, sleep deprivation in Byzantium and Thoreau’s bed to the Japanese custom of public napping ( inemuri ). 1 Since 2013, an academic website, ‘Sleep Cultures’, has featured an updated bibliography of scholarship and a forum for fresh research. In light of posts touting lectures, art exhibitions and conferences, an especially promising portent lies in the growing number of graduate students drawn to ‘sleep studies’. 2 Academic interest in sleep, aside from the study of dreams, has been overdue. As early as 1753 Samuel Johnson wondered why ‘so liberal and impartial a benefactor’ should ‘meet with so few historians’. 3 Scholars appear to have concluded, much like the nineteenth-century Scottish cleric Robert Wodrow, that ‘sleep can scarce be justly reconed part of our life’. 4 However banal it might seem to modern sensibilities, the liberal arts can no longer disregard such a vital dimension of human behaviour. Rather than representing an uneventful interlude between episodes of consciousness, sleep has played a multifaceted role in the lives of diverse populations. Far from being ignored, the subject has routinely absorbed the thoughts of the waking world. Painstaking steps to ensure the safety and tranquillity of nocturnal repose testify powerfully to its past importance, as does the attention that many traditional cultures have accorded dreams, not least as sources of divine instruction and personal insight. More than that, notwithstanding popular conceptions of sleep as a biological constant, impervious to changes in time and space, the structure, length and ecology of this universal necessity have, in the past, varied enormously — as they still do today.

Visions in Verse: Writing the Visual in Romantic Dream Visions

Visions in Verse:Writing the Visual in Romantic Dream Visions Anita O’Connell (bio) In Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology the criterion for distinguishing dreams from reality is rational communication (Schlutz 113). Quoting Heraclitus’s dictum, “when we are awake we have a world in common, but when we are asleep each has his own world,” Kant argues that the faculty of fantasy blurs this distinction (Kant, Anthropology 63; see Schlutz 113). Inspiration and original genius are the “involuntary and hence dream-like products of fantasy” (Schlutz 115, see Kant 50–51). Inspired poetry and art sit uneasily, for Kant, between sleep and waking as they rise up out of the world of dreams to communicate their visions within the waking world. For Romantic poets, it follows that art and poetry could also act as an essential bridge between the two worlds, as a means of communicating the dreams and visions of the creative mind with the outside world. They were a representation for the outside world of what lies inside that otherwise exclusive state of the dreaming mind. Some of the best-known Romantic dream visions, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” John Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, as discussed here, attempt to take up this challenge and seek to communicate the inspired visions that lie at the heart of the original creative idea. In The Fall of Hyperion, Keats embraces this role for the poet, claiming “poesy alone can tell her dreams” (8). However, like many Romantic dream visions that reflect on their own creation, the poem is keenly aware of one crucial problem inherent in this process: language. Before the twentieth century, ideas, thoughts, and inspired moments were all thought to be visual, not linguistic. To take creative ideas from the imaginative mind and communicate them with the world through poetry involved a transformation from the visual to the linguistic, from visions into verse. In the Romantic period the creative vision in the mind could refer to the inner experience of any of a range of imaginative states, from thoughts and ideas to the vision that is imagined when reading, composing poetry, daydreaming, in reverie, madness, or sleeping dreams. This is what Alan Richardson refers to in “Reimagining the Romantic Imagination,” borrowing neuroscience’s current terminology, as “the default mode.” [End Page 35] For Richardson, memory, prospective “future thinking,” daydreaming, nocturnal dreaming, and theory of mind or mind reading are linked in Romantic brain science as what scientists might now call defaulting, but which was understood in the Romantic period as various ways of imagining (389). When Romantic poets explore these states of mind, they understand them as a spectrum of liminal imaginative states. Shelley and Coleridge both argue that the imaginative states in this spectrum differ only in degree, not in kind.1 In Speculations on Metaphysics, Shelley claims that: Thoughts, or ideas, or notions … differ from each other, not in kind, but in force. It has commonly been supposed that those distinct thoughts … which are called real … are totally different in kind from those … such as hallucinations, dreams and the ideas of madness. No essential distinction between any one of these ideas, or any class of them, is founded on a correct observation of the nature of things. (59–60) Shelley here claims a similar cognitive process for dreams and hallucinations as for thoughts or ideas, varying only in the degree to which the waking reason has control over the imaginative state. Though they differ in degree or force, they are similar in kind because in each the mind imagines a mental image. A vision in the mind was at the heart of all of these states because the imagination was, in essence, the image-making faculty. From the time of Aristotle one of the primary roles of the imagination was to create and store images within the mind. As Alexander Schlutz explains in Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism, for Aristotle the role of the “phantasia” (which would later become the imagination) was to allow a mediation between aesthesis (sense-perception) and dianoia (discursive thought). As the ability to...

Nightmares by Jason Segel (review)

Reviewed by: Nightmares by Jason Segel Karen Coats Segel, Jason Nightmares!; written by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller; illus. by Karl Kwasny. Delacorte, 2014 355 p Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-99157-8 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-385-74425-6 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-385-38403-2 $10.99 R Gr. 4–7 Charlie Laird can’t sleep. Ever since his mother died and his father remarried and moved him and his little brother into the house of his stepmother, Charlotte, he’s been plagued by nightmares. His fear is enough to open a portal to the Netherworld in the tower room of Charlotte’s house. The open portal allows the sinister President Fear to freely come and go between the Netherworld and the Waking World, and he’s planning to overthrow the Waking World unless Charlie can face his fears. Braced by his three worthy friends and aided by some unexpected helpers in the Netherworld, Charlie braves its terrors and proves, once and for all, that facing your fears is a far better plan than running from them. While the plot has some unexpectedly deep symbolic resonances regarding the source of fear and the loss of faith in contemporary culture, this book also has all the classic elements of a benignly scary fantasy for middle-graders: a sympathetic protagonist, a dastardly villain, trusty friends, comical horror figures, a misunderstood benefactor, chase scenes, mild grossness, and explicit psychology. The deployment of these tropes is fresh, ranging from engagingly sad to funny; there are just enough imaginative hooks to induce some shivers, but the genre predictability of a happy outcome keeps things from being too scary, and spot art adds to the comic tone. Readers who shy away from celebrity authors will be pleasantly surprised by this solid entry from How I Met Your Mother’s Segel. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois