Dreamways

The usually playful and gaily colored comic-strip “Mutts” by Patrick McDonnell takes on a decidedly somber tone for this particular Sunday edition (04 Nov 07). There are eight panels, each showing a pit-bull-like dog’s head drawn in quick pen and ink strokes. Each panel has the canine’s thoughts in black above his head. “Yeh, they trained me to be a fighting dog,” the animal muses. “Fight to the death. No mercy, no reason. Just senseless, mindless violence … a monster. I didn’t ask for this. Grrrrr. Look at what I’ve become … Just like them.”
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Too many of my dreams these days are boring,
I expect to drop into the pillows
and see the kind of action night is for –
a psychic workout, romance, close escapes:
Not much gets accomplished in a still-life;
Nobody looks at asters as a way
to get a taste of life. I want to happen,
not to slightly rearrange my day
nightly in a recurring tablescape.
Dreams! However beautiful the apples,
fruit is low on drama, and I miss
passion, flying, falling, being chased,
crashing, panic – trauma – and I miss,  read more »

"Man Gets 20 Years for Killing Internet Love Rival.“ This deceptively bland headline does not give much of a sense of the disturbingly wacky waking dream described in a Denver Post article (28 Nov 07). "Buffalo, NY: A 48-year old man entangled in an Internet love triangle built largely on lies was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison for killing his rival for the affection of a woman he had never met.“ This, too, sounds like your run-of-the-mill love triangle, with the usual passle of deception and lies involved.

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"My dreams are so boring they usually put me to sleep. They bore other people, too – when I was young, my father had a rule that if I wanted to tell my family about my dreams, I had to (a) keep it short and (b) find another family.“ So begins a rather tongue-in-cheek essay, "The Man of Your Dreams Is Here,“ by W. Bruce Cameron (Rocky Mountain News, 27 Oct 07), where the world of sleep dreams is poked at with a wry humor stick.

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A middle-aged, middle-class, European-American husband and wife are packing a suitcase in this installment of the cartoon “Denver Square” by Ed Stein (The Rocky Mountain News, 17 Nov 07).
She: “The T.S.A. says it’s making changes to shorten the security wait at D.I.A.”
He: “Like what? Not making grandmothers in wheelchairs take off their shoes? Letting us keep our toothpaste in our suitcases?”
She: “Sam… This is the government we’re talking about.”
He, a wistful sardonic expression on his face: “I can dream, can’t I?”  read more »

The first thing we see is a simple drawing in shades of gray depicting a mélange of patriotic American images. The text reads: “America is a dream, a vision, a miracle based on one noble idea – the idea that people of every race and religions can live together in peace. That everyone is entitled to equal justice under the law and that government is responsible to the governed. But an Idea, despite its awesome power, can be dangerously vulnerable. It must be sheltered and guarded, nourished and protected. Few things are more tragic than the death of an idea.  read more »

In his article "Waking Up to Our Dreams“, author Robert Moss writes that recent sleep dream research suggests that "our dreams are not strange results of meaningless biological processes. Rather, they are produced by the part of the brain tied to motivation, goals and desires.“ (Parade Magazine, 29 Oct 07) In refuting the notion that sleep dreams are random and insignificant firings of the sleeping brain’s neurons, he accords even greater significance to sleep dreams. "Dreams may even be related to survival itself.  read more »

"Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.“ These challenging words appear in an article by Walter Kirn entitled "The Autumn of the Multitaskers“ (The Atlantic magazine, November 2007.) The dream of being able to do it all has become prevalent in our 21st century world: "Thanks to technology or some other magic, we’ve entered a new age when the laws of cause and effect (as propounded by Isaac Newton and Adam Smith) have yielded to the principle of of dream-and-make-it-happen (as manifested by St  read more »