Beyond Rivalry - dreams

A Day in the Life of Doris Lessing

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:48:00 -0400

I think I'd find a report of a typical or atypical day in anyone's life interesting, and Doris Lessing's, a mixture of 'what I do each day' with her reflections on health, life, and reading, is no exception:

"Luxury has never interested me, but I enjoyed staying at good hotels when I travelled. In Vienna, at the Hotel Sacher, I was in my room, marvelling at the rugs, eating sachertorte, thinking, 'This is perfection,' when a piece of chandelier fell on the floor. I laughed -- perfection is not so easily achieved."

"Last night I dreamt about a Jesus-type figure in Palestine in the old days -- which is not really my country at all. It was very convincing. This Jesus chap was worrying about what he was going to get for people to eat. Ordinary problems -- just like a housewife's. "

An Energy Collage

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:35:00 -0400

Don't miss Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, talking about her stroke at TED. She's dynamic and what she has to say is fascinating for anyone with a brain, literally.

I love her distinctions between the left and right hemispheres, which are quite different from and more succinct than anything I had read or heard before about their differences. She describes the left hemisphere of the brain as working like a serial port, linear and methodical, and the right side as working like a parallel port, experiencing everything as a sort of sensory energy collage. Then (here's where it gets interesting), she says that the right side is 'in the moment' all the time, and thus in the flow of what is happening now, in flow with all other energy on the planet, so that there are no boundaries, no separation between things, and everything is present tense, sensory, elemental, energy. The left side takes this energy collage it's presented with and immediately begins a process of categorising and organising the data, relating it to the experience of the past and the potential of the future.

She also says that the left brain is where the sense of "I" originates, the ego,…

BergmanFest!: Cries & Whispers

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:00:00 -0400

I've uploaded another PDF file for anyone to use, a backgrounder for Cries & Whispers (1972), the last in the BergmanFest! series I'm hosting now.

Conversation Topics

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:13:23 -0400

She must be kidding.

Gretchen at The Happiness Project lists the "Seven topics to avoid if you don't want to risk being a bore."

Among them:

A dream.
An excellent meal you once had at a restaurant.
The latest additions to your wine cellar.

Dreams and food are two of my favourite discussion topics. I can easily believe that I am thought a bore, but I also love to hear other people's dreams, the details of their favourite meals, the drinks they like and why.

Her reasoning is even more dubious: She says that when faced with these topics, "the listener has nothing to add. He or she must just hear you describe your experience."

The 'listener' is not much of a conversationalist, imo, if they can't interestingly discuss your dream or theirs (it's a lot like talking about art, generally considered a perfectly acceptable topic of conversation), the strange and unaccountable phenomenon of dreams in general, the practical and neurological nature of sleep; or hold up their end of a conversation about cuisine and potables, the subtle factors of restaurant ambiance, the pleasures of eating al fresco, alone, in a happy crowd, etc.

What would be boring is to hear…

Morning, Redux

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:59:25 -0400

From One Foot in the Grave, season 2, during an episode that takes place entirely in the Meldrews' bedroom, as we overhear their aimless conversation at 3 in the morning; this is curmudgeon Victor Meldrew musing:

"I get in bed each night feeling as right as rain. By the time I get up, I feel absolutely terrible.

Pure ritual.

It's like life, I suppose.

Where does it get you?"

That's how I felt this morning. When I went to bed I was tired but felt good, had some kind of energy, even if it was just borne of momentum. When I woke up this morning, I had been run over during the night by a relentless bulldozer.

I had so many dreams during the night and early morning.

One featured Martin Luther King Jr. as a 73-year-old speaker to a small group of people assembled in a room that was part indoors, part outdoors. It was a place I was working for two days per week (Thurs and Fri), doing part-time and as an assistant a job I used to do full-time, as a director. The location was different from my previous job, though. I was just starting to be introduced…

Resolved ...

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:25:00 -0500

I like this eclectic list of resolutions from TMN writers.

I haven't made New Year's resolutions in years, in the sense of things I think I should do -- and have been reading lately about the benefit of making New Year's commitments instead of resolutions, yadda yadda (Wikipedia sez resolutions are commitments), but the TMN list is inspiring for some reason, maybe for its off-handedness and detail. And I'm surprised how many of their (satirical?) resolutions are swimming around in my head, heart and body, too.

So a few of my semi-resolutions (that is, what I'll do unless I don't), some drawn from previous years' longings:

buy clothes (except underwear and socks) only at eBay or at Goodwill [80% there already]

subscribe to the Economist and don't renew subscription to the New Yorker [DONE! - thanks, Dad]

get the hell to NYC

practice meditation daily

show up and pay attention

learn the mushrooms

love and be in the garden more

do more art, collage, play, photography

subvert the dominant rivalrous paradigm, starting with my own actions and perceptions ... live eternally now

Dream Interpretation

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 16:15:00 -0500

During Bible study today we talked briefly about dreams. We were reading Matthew 2:12-23, in which Herod slaughters all male children under age 2 in Israel, hoping to kill the newborn Jesus, who "troubles" him as a threat to his power and the status quo. In that 12-verse passage, the magi (wise men from the East) and Jesus's dad Joseph are both warned in dreams to take particular actions. In fact, the magi are told by God in a dream (One magi's dream only? Or did they all three have the same dream?) to return from Bethlehem by a different route and not to report to Herod what they have seen, which "trickery" infuriates Herod and leads him take this horrific action. And earlier in Matthew, Joseph is told in a dream to take the pregnant Mary as his wife.

These verses and other Biblical passages about dreams confuse me. I dream vividly almost every night, and I wonder why it's not clear to me what action I am to take based on my dreams.

My 21st-century mind knows something of Freudian, Jungian, Buddhist, and scientific interpretation of dreams -- they're wish fulfillment, they're a means of releasing the effluvia of…

Making Friends with Death

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:33:31 -0500

I spent a couple of hours Friday night, all day on Saturday and most of the day on Sunday at a weekend programme called "Making Friends with Death" at a local Buddhist meditation center, led by acharya Judith Lief. (Acharya means senior teacher in Sanskrit.) Lief's teacher is Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

We had three or so meditation sessions per day on Saturday and Sunday. Friday evening was mostly spent watching and talking about a film titled Pioneers of Hospice: Changing the Face of Dying, about the inception of hospice in the UK, Canada, and the U.S., focusing on four movers & shakers: Cecily Saunders, Florence Wald, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and Balfour Mount. On Saturday and Sunday, we meditated on our breath for 20-30 mins on arriving each day. On Saturday, we participated in a guided meditation on death, and later in a taking-and-giving kindness meditation (called tong-len) with a partner; on Sunday, we did several simple silent meditations. [Pema Chödrön on tong-len; Unitarian perspective on tong-len.]

These periods of silence were balanced with periods when Judith Lief taught, as we sat in a circle or facing her, and with several periods of discussion in a large group, and, for 45 minutes on…

Dreams

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 14:16:41 -0500

I've started recording my dreams again. I won't bore you with them here. Enough to say that it takes me about a half-hour in the morning to "off-load" my dream material, by which time I feel sleepy again ...

Dream Illustration

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 21:55:00 -0400

From Metafilter: Artist Jesse Reklaw takes people's descriptions of their dreams and turns them into four-panel comic strips. Updated weekly. Submit your dream (or apply to illustrate one yourself).

I like "Supermarket Design" , "CSI: Sesame Street" , "the edible book" , "Hippocratic Oath" , and the angry armadillo in "Fishing for Armadillos."