Tag Archives: Freud

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Field of Dreams

Wanna Be an Oneironaut?
Now, There’s an App for That

The art of lucid dreaming resembles the booming business of death: more people are doing both than ever before. But while there’s hardly ever news coming from the Big Sleep, specially from those who went into it and despite faith arguments to the contrary, dreams are very much alive and vital and, chances are, you’ll have some new ones to talk about in just a few hours.
The other week we told you about a machine that, ideally, one day may be able to record and play back thoughts. It’s only logical to expect the same happening to those intriguing adventures most humans and animals find in the arms of Morpheus. Now, that the field of lucid dreaming no longer belongs exclusively to shamans and visionaries, you guessed it, there’s an app for that too.
Since ancient times, narratives describing mystical revelations have been recorded and transmitted through generations. Many of these fantastical tales are at the root of religions, faiths and cults, having been dreamed on by their founders. They have served as shared apprenticeship tools for conversion and initiation.
As ritualistic dogmas upon which would lay the foundations of a sect or group of ‘chosen ones,’ dreams have also always offered glimpses into deep recesses of our species’ psyche, as revealed mysteries endowing both individuals and the community at large of special powers and Continue reading →

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Vice Versus

When Butterflies
Feed on Piranhas

Sports metaphors are so lame that we decided to run one to the ground. So this isn’t about great rivalries such as Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier, or duels, like Rafael Nadal beating Roger Federer, or whether the World Series should actually involve world teams.
Instead, we’ll take a few disputes, dislikes and grievances for a spin, that may tell us more about the human folly and the world we live in than the punches exchanged by legendary brawlers.
It may be the only approach possible if we need to accommodate side by side, petty intrigues between academic disciplines, for example, such as psychiatry and psychology (who cares?), and the disgust writer Raymond Chandler felt about director Alfred Hitchcock (who knew?).
It could be a fitting device, for instance, to wonder about the baffling 1980s dominance of the VHS tape over superior format Beta, only to both be buried by the digital technology. Or whether Macs are better than PCs because they employ child labor. But we’re not getting into neither of that.
Instead, we’ll look at how Thomas Edison himself buried his Continue reading →