Dreamways

The photo image of Martin Luther King’s face takes up most of the visual field of the black and white ad that covers the bottom half of this Martin Luther King Day (21 Jan 08) Denver Post page. His hands are held together, fingers interlocked, at the level of his chin. He is facing us, his eyes looking into the distance somewhere to his right. His gaze is relaxed, focused and pensive.  read more »

Animals often figure prominently in sleep dreams, as well as in sleep nightmares. They can play significant roles in our waking lives, too, as in this news article, featuring a certain animal playing a sadly disturbing role in a waking nightmare. The news article, "Sturdy Sea Lion Under Growing threat from Acidic Algae“ by Henry Fountain (The New York Times, 27 Nov 07) describes a true nightmare. "The California sea lion is a robust species, but in the past decade marine biologists have recognized domoic acid poisoning as a growing threat to its health.  read more »

"Women looking for a movie date and film-makers looking to increase box-office receipts both know that many men have little interest in melodramatic tearjerkers. New research, however, suggests that producers of emotional films can increase their male audience by emphasizing the films‘ disconnection from reality.“ So begins Ian Austen‘s article, "High Empathy (Mostly Women), Low Empathy (Mostly Men) and the Movies“ (The New York Times, 26 Nov 07).

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"What Are You Doing Here?" reads the headline. "'I thought I was dreaming,‘ a Warsaw [Poland] man told the newspaper Super Express after he visited a brothel and saw his wife among the establishment’s employees. The paper said she had told her husband that she worked at a store in a nearby town. The couple, married 14 years, are divorcing. (The New York Times, 10 Jan 08)

This slight snippet of waking life news is as dense with various types of dream made manifest as – well, as a dream!

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In his insightful and entertaining essay "The Autumn of the Multitaskers“ (The Atlantic magazine, November 2007), Walter Kirn takes a fascinating look at the monster called Multi-Tasking. "'Where do you want to go today?‘ asked Microsoft in the mid-1990s ad campaign. The suggestion was that there were endless destinations – some geographic, some social, some intellectual – that you could reach in milliseconds by loading the right devices with the right software.  read more »

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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"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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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 »