Dreamways

"Who's Minding the Mind? The subconscious brain is more active, independent and purposeful than once thought. Sometimes it takes charge.“ (Benedict Carey, The New York Times, 31 Jul 07)

Padlock & Chain of Love

"Love, in all its splendor and mess, found a fit expression on Rome’s oldest bridge last year. Inspired by a best-selling book, then the movie version, young couples wrote their names on a padlock. They chained their lock around lampposts on Ponte Milvio. Then they symbolically cut off escape by tossing the keys into the wine-dark Tiber below." So begins Ian Fisher's article "Love Rite on a Bridge, but Is the Romance Fading?" in The New York Times (06 Aug 07).
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In her article “The Tilted Earth at Its ‘Equal Night of Spring’” (The New York Times, 20 Mar 07), Natalie Angier writes about a dream-like waking vision that appears in Mexico on the day of Vernal Equinox, the first day of spring. "In the 1,500-year-old Mayan city of Chichen Itza, in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, the magnificent Kukulcan Pyramid practically slithers to life each spring equinox evening, as the waning sun casts a shadow along its steps of seven perfectly symmetrical isosceles triangles, a pattern suggesting the diamondback skin of a snake.  read more »

A front-page New York Times news article (19 Mar 07) begins with a sleep dream that came in the midst of a waking-life nightmare. „Sharp Increase in Vanishings Haunts Iraqis. He comes to her in dreams, dressed in the blue police uniform he wore the day he disappeared. ‚I’m alive,‘ he tells Intisar Rashid, his wife and the mother of their five children. ‚I’m alive. And so she keeps searching. Ever since the Thursday two months ago when her husband failed to come home, Ms. Rashid has tried to find the man she loves."
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"Swiss Troops ‘invade‘ neighbors,“ the Denver Post article from 03 Mar 07 proclaims. "What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.“ Soldiers aren’t supposed to get lost, are they?

"The 170 infantry soldiers from the neutral country wandered more than a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.“ Oops!
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"Flip Side of the Dream“ reads the headline for an article about young people in inner city Camden, NJ. Why are urban kids on the wrong side of a dream?

Canada: Inuit say U.S. Emissions Violate Rights. Inuit from Canada’s far north told the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that greenhouse gases from the United States were ruining their way of life and that the consequent warming had led to having to install air-conditioners. The delegations also told the commission, based in Washington, that the American contribution to emissions, the most in the world, should be considered a human rights violation. (The New York Times, 02 Mar 07, pg. A6)

The headline of the editorial by Verlyn Klinkenborg (The New York Times, 20 Jun 07) reads like the title of a Twilight Zone episode: "Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight.“ Indeed, what the essay talks about is something untoward, disturbing and out of the ordinary. However, what the essay’s subtitle, "A Story of Business as Usual and the Havoc It Wreaks,“ alludes to is the truly frightening aspect of the story.
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The following news snippet appeared in The New York Times, on 03 Jul 07:

"Texas: Young Victim of Hate Crime Kills Himself. A Texas teenager who survived a brutal beating labeled a hate crime and testified about it before Congress died after jumping from a cruise ship in the gulf of Mexico. The teenager, David Ritcheson, 18, a Mexican-American, was beaten unconscious and sodomized with a patio umbrella pole by two men shouting 'white power' at a drug-fueled party last year. He underwent more than 20 operations. Mr. Ritcheson, of Houston, testified about the attack during Congressional hearings on a hate-crimes bill earlier this year."

Whose dream is this, anyway? Whose nightmare?

Last autumn a newspaper article captured my attention: "Radio’s 'Dream Doctor‘ in a Nightmare Illness“ (Eric A. Taub, The New York Times, 02 Oct 06). The waking life story of someone who has worked so intensely with dreams is of great interest to me, a dream tender. I tore it out and forgot about it, only to come upon it recently, half a year later. It seems I’d been avoiding the nightmare that the article contained.
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