Archive for the ‘Dream’ Category

Dreams of China Mieville

Dream | Posted by jmoore
Feb 22 2011

china_mieville1The Tain and The Tain

I inhabit a crossroads where speculative literature, the occult and experimental music intersect. The thoughts, ideas, and personalities which daily percolate through my brain are later distilled as dreams in the alembic of my soul as I sleep creating a wonderful feedback loop. It should be no surprise that some of the characters I dream of are caricatures of authors I admire, both living and dead. I document these encounters in my dream journal. One of the most important things I learned from reading Aleister Crowley is that the diary, or the magickal record as he often called it, is the primary tool of the magician.

A fragment from July 2010 initiated a series of episodes revolving around China Mieville and his work. In it I am reading what I take to be part of the Bas-Lag Trilogy, but it takes place between The Scar and Iron Council. Waking up from this experience, I was very excited and when I got the chance, looked up Mieville’s bibliography to see what, if anything he had written between two aforementioned books, and learned he had written a novella, called The Tain. This was very significant to me on many levels. Celtic motifs have been recurring elements in my dreams, and as part of my research into Celtic folklore I have begun making my first tentative steps into Irish mythology and the Ulster cycle, and the tales which culminate in The Tain Bo Culaigne. I read Mieville’s The Tain and enjoyed it thoroughly, though I couldn’t find a scrap or hint of anything which seemed to point in the direction of the Irish Tain epic.

Mieville’s Tain was in part, however a riff based on a tale by Jorge Luis Borges, and this provided me with other joys. The word tain can also mean “a tinfoil used for the backing of mirrors” and this is the sense that Borges and Mieville use it. The novella takes the familiar post-apocalyptic trope and spins it on its head. The setting is a London where the surviving humans get by on their own wits while the failing military tries to impose martial law. The people are under attack by otherworldly beings called imagos who have come into this world from the other side of mirrors, from the reflections in pools, metal, anything that reflects. The novella itself is a reflection on the injustices of our own society, but the approach is never heavy handed, he never has to belabor the point at the expense of the story. Told with two monologues, the voice of the imagos is heard alongside that of the human narrator, creating what is essentially a view on both sides of the mirror.

I also spent some of this time delving into the Tain Bo Culaigne but must admit I still haven’t gotten into the thick of it yet. I tried out several translations, and have finally settled on one by Randy Lee Eickhoff. Now it sits once again in the lower portion of a book pile, of which I have many.

Sharing a Taxi with China

Then in October of 2010 I shared a taxi with China (in a dream). I get into a taxi. China Mieville is in the front, but also a passenger. We are in Northern Kentucky, either Covington or Newport. We get to talking. I tell him that I’m also a writer, and that I have written one novella that year, and a few short stories. “I’m going to revise the novella soon,” I say to him, “but I thought I’d work on the short stories.

Then I start telling him what I have read by him, clearly geeking out in fan mode, saying, “And I’ve read a number of stories in your short story collection, including The Tain.” He seems to be slightly annoyed by mention of The Tain. He says, “Oh yeah, The Tain.” I ask him when the taxi slows to a halt, “Is this where you live?” Thinking I might come by sometime. He doesn’t answer but all manner of information starts passing between us telepathically: He wrote The Tain while he was experiencing a block, or blocking himself from writing a much longer work. Still there is a knowing smill in Mieville when he beams this information to me. Thoughts of Borges and Mirrors pass between us as well. HE is dressed in a loose punk rock style, with a chain going through a loop in his jacket on his shoulder. Then more information passes between us about his publishing history. His most recent book, which is [in the dream] his first book King Rat, was self-published and done up nicely. Mieville, now established is moving into self-publishing.

I cannot account for the veracity of my dream. In fact aspects of it seem to be pure invention. As King Rat is not China’s most recent book, but his first book. It seems to have been traditionally published. The point of the matter is I awoke from this dream in a creative frenzy with tons of energy to get words on the page. I also felt it would be good for me to go ahead and self-publish, which I have recently done, in the most basic way, by uploading my novelette Trepanning for Gold as a free PDF. I also do not claim this was the “real” China Mieville visiting me in a dream, but rather a form my dream producers latched onto, a person who inspires me, and whose likeness in a dream inspired me to continue doing the necessary work.

King Rat

The next dream I had about China took place the day after the winter solstice. I am in my neighbor’s house. There are a bunch of people there, and everybody is kind of punk rock. The guy tells me that China Mieville lives in the neighborhood, and when he shows up I am very excited because I think I’ll be able to show him my manuscripts. Everybody is smoking. There is a nervous energy. Things speed up. I leave. China walks with me, and I tell him, “Hey, I’ve read a few of your books and short stories.” He seems pleased that I have done so.

I then say “And I just got a copy of King Rat from Earthling Publications. It’s really nice.” Mieville seems very fond of the book. He says, “Oh yes. Henric. Ratty,” and something else related to one of the characters in the book. Then I am some type of factory. I squeeze beneath some oil tubing spigots to get to the next scene.

A few weeks after the dream I finally got around to reading the book, and I wrote a review of it for Brainwashed which is up this week. King Rat was an important book for me in a number of ways, but two stand out: 1) the way he incorporates his love of music into the story 2) the way he twists a traditional fairy tale or legend (in this case The Pied Piper of Hamelin) and uses it as a sinister plot device.

I wouldn’t presume that China has the time or inclination to take a look at my stories, but I do know that my dreams of him have spurred my writing onwards. Consciously or subconsciously everything we writers read has an influence on us. Utilizing the energy and inspiration from our dreams can help a writer work consciously with the influences that are best suited to a person at a given time. In our dreams we also have direct access to teachers and masters of whatever art it is we are given to pursue. Tapping into them can be a source of tremendous strength and power.

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Soul Noir: Dreaming with “The Dreamthief’s Daughter”

Dream, Writing as Magick | Posted by jmoore
Jan 29 2011

dreamthiefs_daughter_robert_gould

Sometimes the atmosphere of a book is so strong, reading even just a few pages of it is enough to catapult a person into strange dreams. This was the case for me after I had read the first chapter of Michael Moorcock’s The Dreamthief’s Daughter. I turned off the light on my night stand, just before 11PM. In the hypnagogic zone I saw an image of myself standing in a room with my TV-B-Gone device and turning off a bunch of TVs mounted on the walls, before falling into a deeper sleep. Then at around 1AM I woke up mesmerized by the following dream.

I am in a bar at the library. A person is there who wants me to buy some drugs. I don’t want to, but I feel compelled by him to do so, but still don’t. Either way we leave the library together and go outside. Then he is gone and I see a library security guard driving a huge semi-truck. There is a hill, with a trench dug in it where a pipe is, but the pipe has been broken. I then realize, as I go into a dark room, that there is an aspect of myself -a shade or doppelganger- who is also at large, running around. This part of my self is a thief. I hear a voice in the dream. It is an older voice. It says “I have become worthless at my Art.” This doppelganger thief steals whatever it can because stealing is its very nature. Everything has been stolen from it and so it steals. I hear the voice “I steal because it is my soul and it is my soul to steal.” I realize I’m in the world of Moorcock, a hyper multiverse as I start to wake up.

Laying there in the darkness, tears start to well up in my eyes as I write scratchy lines in the dark in my notebook. Though I know I will not forget, they are an aid to remembrance. I have the immediate thought/feeling that this state of thievery is a form of collective soul loss. Words of a cryptic poem started to flood my mind:

Entrapped by a vicious circle of wolves
ensnared at a table
of poisonous soul food
I dine among thieves.
I dress as a turncoat
because my own pockets
have been picked.
I’m saddled to this rocking chair
and ridden by greed.
I’ve taken a sack of bones, without meat
and use them to clean my teeth
wiggled loose
by a tongue who knows only lies.
I cannot see myself
for I have fused with the disguise.

The plight of the modern soul lay bare to me in that moment. I wrote “I must do something to protect the naked children.”

I went back to sleep and more scenes unfolded. The next day I continued to work with the dream and the sequences that followed, all the while delving deeper into the drama of Ulric von Bek, the central character in Moorcock’s drama. Riveted by the tale, I soon learned one of the central themes it explores is that of the doppelganger. Ulric is a double of Elric of Melnibone (and in a convoluted way also his progeny) the Eternal Champion whose heroic efforts and feats are aimed at maintaining balance between Law and Chaos. In the story the first person narrative shifts back and forth a few times from Ulric’s point of view to Elric’s with only the mildest confusion. It is like the type of dream where one suddenly finds oneself in a different body. I feel that reading this type of fiction can help a person prepare for the doppelganger experience.

While my own dream had pointed out to me causes of personal soul loss, like the use of drugs, stealing the identity of another person because portions of my own soul had been taken from me, in an endless revolving door of thievery, from one person to the next, the book I was reading delved into the trauma of collective soul loss that was World War II. Another layer of resonance between dream and reading material was unveiling itself. I started speculating along unusual lines. The warfare of The Great War (WWI) had ripped a hole in reality itself, allowing for even more sinister beings to come through, motivating and taking possession of men like Hitler. Indeed a pre-existing collective soul loss seems to have been a precondition allowing for the atrocities the Nazis perpetrated. The hole was torn more widely open in WWII and the world is still not healed from the psychic shell shock inflicted on humanity then.

Moorcock himself writes, “The rise of fascism had shocked and exhausted her. Mussolini’s successes were an abomination to her, and Hitler was inconceivably shallow and vicious in his political rhetoric, his ambitions and claims. But as she said when I last saw her, Germany’s soul had been stolen already. Hitler was merely addressing the corpse of German democracy. He had killed nothing. He had grown out of the grave, she said. Grown out of that corpse like an epidemic which had rapidly infected the entire country. ‘And where is Germany’s soul?’ I asked. ‘Who stole it?’”

And again, “It was as if some demonic force had been attracted by the stink of the Boer War’s carnage, by Leopold’s Congo, by the Armenian genocide, by the Great War, by the millions of corpses which filled the ditches, gutters, and tranches of the world from Paris to Peking. Greedily feasting, the force grew strong enough to prey upon the living.”

All these thoughts have made me want to dip back into Wilhelm Reich’s excellent study The Mass Psychology of Fascism which I read about ten years ago.
Outside of all the seriousness within the story it is also a wonderful and magical adventure tale. It kept me up late for several nights as each scene unfolded, until I was finished. For the dreamer and the magically inclined it offers a great deal of speculation for study and active experimentation.

Not only do the characters tread the moonbeam roads of the multiverse, they spend a good deal of time in Mu Ooria, a type of Hollow Earth deep in the subterranean caverns of Earth, where dwell the Off Moo. The twin/double/doppelganger motif is repeated here, as the Off Moo frequently give birth to twins. Dreaming is also practiced as an art among the Off Moo. Healing was also a very refined magical art among the Off Moo. “Their bone setters and muscle soothers work mostly in the ponds…They have pools of river water, to which they have added certain other properties. No matter what the ailment, be it a broken bone, or a cancerous organ, it can be healed in the curing ponds with the application of certain other processes specific to your complaint. Music, for instance. And color. Consequently, timeless as this place is, we are even less aware of the familiar action of time as we know it on the surface.”

The mind bending complexity of the multiverse is another overarching theme, especially as it relates to time, a common trope in science fiction. Time seems to be different depending on what level of reality one is on in the multiverse. “I was having difficulties with Mittlemarch notions of time. It seemed as if we were all fated to live identical lives in billions of counterrealities, rarely able to change our stories, yet constantly striving to do so.”

As an Active Dreamer I believe we can change our story, and we can do so by tapping into the lives of our other selves taking place in different branches of the multiverse, or on different ‘branes of parallel realites that we can experience through dreams.

In Moorcock’s high concept literary fantasy the struggle taking place between overbearing Law and too lenient Chaos on Earth was mirrored on other orders of reality, by forces that had ever more awareness of the multiverse itself. In our struggles to create balance between Chaos and Order we can draw on the power of the Gods, Goddesses, and spirits who come to us in dreams.

In the last sequence of the dream I had on the night when I began the book I find myself standing across from a building where there are a group of workers who have climbed up several stories and smashed out the windows. I have a metal box on it with some buttons that make sounds in the building. I press the buttons. The workers don’t know where the music is coming from. I am frightened for them because they are being extremely careless for being up so high. I leave the scene and walk over to a door in a wall. As I step through the door, the whole wall smashes into pieces, I am in outer space and the debris from the wall is flying in every direction. I’m on to a new episode in the multiverse I realize, but then I wake up.

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Describing Earth Artists to Aliens

Dream, Textuality | Posted by jmoore
Jan 16 2011

One of the many interesting dream games we play in Robert Moss’s interActive Dreamwork forums and ecourse hosted over at Spirituality & Health magazines website is the game of describing a person, place or thing to an alien. This is especially useful when celebrities or other figures turn up in our dreams. We may think we have a clear idea of who or what a person or object represents, but the practice of describing it to an alien helps to clarify essential information, often producing an “Aha!” experience along the way. Below I play the game describing some people who figured in a few dreams of mine in 2010.  spacealiens

Greetings to you my new found friends from Califrax-3. It is a pleasure to host you on our home world. As part of the orientation process I wanted to describe to you three figures who turned up in a recent dreamy of mine,  followed by a fourth who has visited me in a few dreams this year. But first lets here the dream:

Picasso Cartoon, Mapplethorpe Poetry, & Patti Smith’s Circle
December 14 2010 7:15 AM EST
I am watching an animated Pablo Picasso cartoon, drawn and animated by him. It takes place underneath the sea. Strange amoeba/birds flutter around like abstract paper cut-outs beneath the waves, dancing amidst a briny flora and fauna.

Then someone is talking to me about the film. He is a middle-aged man. He has some kind of conspiracy theory about Picasso. He then shows me some newspaper cartoon strips he has framed. The frames are huge, the size of tables. He has two other friends who have been tracking clues about Picasso and his clandestine involvements with him. Then the man is talking to me about poetry. I know we are in New York City now, and I’m suprised by his professed love for poetry. He tells me he liked the later poems of Robert Mapplethorpe the best.

Then I am observing Patti Smith and two other ladies, one of whom is pregnant. Like Patti Smith, the pregnant girl is also a poet, but she is new to poetry, and she seems more thrilled just to be part of Patti Smith’s circle. She rushes to open a door for Patti. Then I am looking at a picture of Patti Smith on a magazine cover.

Now for the Space Alien game:

picassoPablo Piccasso was the name of a man who was one of the most famous artistes of the twentieth century. He was a painter, a drawer, a sculptor, a provacateur and infamous womanizer. I know him most for his pictures of bulls, the adult male of the dos taurus species, a common flesh food source in the world, especially amongst the human bovines who live in North America. Highly sexualized, he was also highly prolific leaving an indelible stamp on the face of the modern art world, and the legacy of a large body of work. As far as working techniques go, he was known to exhaust an image, drawing it, painting, redrawing from different angles, painting in different schemes of color over and over again. What I would most like to learn from him is the habit of work and to see things with a painters eye.

robert-and-pattiRobert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith were soul mates, though there’s was a platonic love. He preferred the company of other men to those of women, and she didn’t mind having other lovers herself. Together they charged through the 1970s New York art scene rising to prominence, Robert as a photographer whose masterful portraits and still life photos are essays in the study of light. Patti Smith is a poet who performs against the back drop of a rock band. She became known as “The Godmother of Punk” a rebellious youth movement revolving around an aggressive style of music playing (mostly using three-chords). Her own patron saint was Arthur Rimbaud, and the punk rock movement in itself can be seen as a historical extension of the bohemians and decadents who proliferated in the metropolitan areas of 19th century Europe. Perhaps it is fitting then, that Patti was named Commander of the Ordre des Artes and Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2005.

In my own provenance of Cincinnati there was a huge controversy surrounding an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Contemporary Arts Center that caused resounding echoes throughout the art world at the time, as conservatives came into clashing conflict with more progressive minds. It also brought international attention to the Contemporary Arts Center. I was still a fledgling poet and artist at the time, counting off my days in the compulsory education system the bureaucrats of this planet still suffer our children through, and unfortunately did not attend the show. A trial ensued between those who wanted to censor the sadomasochistic pictures in question, and those who fought for freedom of expression. This was all posthumous following his death by a human immunodefficency virus, for which our planet desperately needs a cure. (Please help our scientists and healers in this regard.)

bruce_sterlingAnother figure who has shown up in my dreams a number of times in our Solar Year is Science Fiction author Bruce Sterling. Sterling is credited as being one of the original founders of the cyberpunk movement, a subgenre within science fiction. While he is not my favorite prose stylist I admire him for being a “visionary in residence”. A Texan by birth, he currently lives in Turin, Italy with his Russian wife. (Russian femme fatales frequent his short writings.) He has written around 11 novels, and a slew of short-fiction, and has won many prestigious awards within the SF genre. One of the other things I admire about Sterling is his voice as an environmentalist. At first glance his work may appear to be consumed with admiration for all manner of techno-gadgetry. A closer reading reveals his deep concern with issues such as Global Warming and the effects this will have on human culture. These are highly developed in books like “Heavy Weather” which examines a hypothetical F6 tornado sweeping through the American southwest as it is tracked and traced by a group of renegade scientists and weather hackers. “The Caryatids” examines the prospects of rescuing earth from complete environmental collapse in the year 2065, through the combined tales of four sisters, who are the clones of a Balkan warlords widow. He has written a few non-fiction books as well, his most famous probably being “The Hacker Crackdown” which tells the story of those early explores of telephone and computer networks. He is deeply enamored of the various disciplines associated with “design” and is also credited with helping to kickstart the “Viridian Design Movement” -his attempt to create an ecologically sound, yet sleek and high-tech design movement.

I thank you for letting me to take the time to discuss a few of Earths luminaries with you. Through all this I see several clues to help me in my own projects: bringing more visual imagery into my poetry and writing, try and write poetry like a photographer, whilst getting back in touch with my (cyber)punk roots, whilst not forgetting to share an environmentalist message at times. The Alien Game is a fun one to play.

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On the Shelves of the Learned Ones of the Magick Library

Dream, Writing as Magick | Posted by jmoore
Oct 22 2010

Dreamers are readers. At least they will be, when they start tracking down clues and research leads our dreams often give us as homeWork assignments. Egyptian priests who specialized in dreaming were at one time called “The Learned Ones of the Magic Library” (thanks Robert). To gear up towards becoming a Learned One of dreams and of (winged) books, I’m posting this list of the dream books on my shelf. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive bibliography of the many books available on dreams, but just a list of those books that have helped me the most in my own practice of dreaming.

Foundational Materials:

Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. This is Robert’s first book on dreams and lays the ground work for the subsequent developments and breakthroughs in his approach. It is a synthesis of shamanism and contemporary dreamwork that he has termed Active Dreaming. This is a good place to start for learning basic practices like dream re-entry. I’d read other books about dreams and been keeping a dream diary on and off for several years, but this is the book that really opened up my understanding of my own dreams.

The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Cooincidence, and Imagination by Robert Moss. A basic manual for navigating the world by being attentive to dreams & synchronicity while using the power of imagination to become a Way Maker.

Dream Work: Techniques for Discovering the Creative Power in Dreams by Jeremy Taylor. Another “Aha” moment in this book, and a lot of good info for working with dreams in groups and using dreams for social change.

Going Deeper:

Soul Retrieval by Sandra Ingerman. After I had been journaling my dreams for a few years I started noticing a theme where I returned again and again to the sewers. Eventually I had the realization that a piece of myself had gone missing when I was in my teens. She writes that shaman’s “believed that whenever we suffer an emotional or physical trauma a part of our soul flees the body in order to survive the experience. The definition of soul that I am using is soul is our essence, life force, the part of our vitality that keeps us alive and thriving.” By keeping track of your dreams you will be given the opportunity to restore your vitality by reclaiming lost aspects of your soul. Some are even called to do this for others and the culture at large. This book is a vital bit of what Robert Moss calls “paleothic psychology”.

Singing the Soul Back Home: Shamanism In Daily Life by Caitlin Matthews. This is an excellent pan-traditional book exploring the world of shamanism. Well researched, the book is also filled with numerous practical exercises for “Walking Between the Worlds”. Magic is a practical art.

Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Fun adventures in the imaginal realms including trips to the House of Time and other collaborative astral locales.

The Dreamers Book of the Dead: A Soul Travelers Guide to Death, Dying, and the Other Side by Robert Moss. It’s inevitable. You might as well start preparing for the transition. Perhaps there are family members and loved ones you need to reconnect with, or who are showing up in your dreams. This book will help you work with these situations.

Dreaming True by Robert Moss. A thorough exploration of dream precognition. Valuable also for an account of how Harriett Tubman used her dreams to help escaped slaves make it from the south to the north on the underground railroad.

The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. An excellent treatise exploring history through the lens of dreams. How dreams have shaped history. An expansion of the Harriet Tubman material is provided, along with detailed accounts of the role of dreams in the lives of hero and tree-seer Joan of Arc, writer Mark Twain, physicist Wolfgang Pauli (and his deep friendship with Carl Jung), adventurer Winston Churchill and many others.

Dreaming in the Worlds Religions: A Comparative History by Kelly Buckley

The Practice of Dream Healing: bringing ancient Greek mysteries into modern medicine. Join author Edward Tick on a very Aesclepian journey.

Beatnik Dreams

My Education: A Book of Dreams by William S. Burroughs and Book of Dreams by Jack Kerouac are collected dream journals of these two icons and illuminators. In Burroughs case this was his last book to be published before he died. In it are many riveting accounts of his travels to the Land of the Dead (see also The Western Lands) meeting up with friends and colleagues who had passed on before him. Much of Burroughs fiction was also directly inspired by his dreams.

True Fiction:

Winged Pharaoh by Joan Grant. This book is loaded with a plethora of dream teachings from the perspective of an ancient Egyptian priestess. Written by one who had been there.

Dreams Underfoot by Charles De Lint. Many worthwhile themes to explore here, as well as in other Newford books and stories.

The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft. Like many other fiction writers Lovecraft got a lot of his material directly from his dreams. If you like weird fiction his tales will definitely please. This story is instructive in modes of dream travel, of sequential or serial dreams and waking up inside the dream to become an active dreamer as Randolph Carter attempts again and again to reach the city he dreams of before he is snatched away by waking up. This is the longest of stories in his Dream Cycle, but be sure to check out the rest.

Crow and Weasel by Barry Lopez. ’ “Remember only this one thing,” said Badger. “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away when they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.”‘ Many of our best stories come from dreams. When we practice writing down or telling our dreams we grow our talent as writers and storytellers.

There are many more. A list like this is always incomplete and reflects my own tastes. My reading list is also incomplete and grows every day, but please add your favorite dream books to the list in the comments section.

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Music from Sirius: The Dreams of Karlheinz Stockhausen

Dream, Musick | Posted by jmoore
Sep 27 2010

stockhausenI’ve been working on a long article about Stockhausen’s dreams, and the compositions that were inspired by them, for quite awhile. Now it is finally finished and has found a home on Brainwashed. I learned so much while listening, researching and writing the material mined in the essay. On October 21st, I will be doing a special edition of “On the Way to the Peak of Normal” bringing this material to radio.  More on that in the coming weeks. Happy fall!

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Heavy Weather & Cephalapod Neoteny

Dream, Textuality | Posted by jmoore
Sep 20 2010

heavy_weather

 At it’s core Heavy Weather is a story of brotherhood and sisterhood, of estranged siblings who overcome their differences and reconnect at a higher level. Where Sterling’s book Schismatrix dazzled with it’s brillant portrayal of genetically altered and cybernetically augmented humanity aloft among the stars, in Heavy Weather I feel I get to know Bruce on  more personally.   

I’ve had three dreams about Bruce Sterling this year. One involved taxes. In another my dream version of Bruce told me I needed to start podcasting my fiction, something I fully intend on doing. In the third I met him on a suburban street in Austin, went to a college stadium, and then went trash picking together. (I got a cool turntable made out of stone and some weird phones.) By the third dream I knew I needed to read some more of his fiction, though I’d been following his blog “Beyond the Beyond” for awhile.

I’d started Heavy Weather once before, but put it down. It wasn’t the right time for me to read it and I got distracted by something else. This time was the right time to read it and I flew through it like an F6 down Tornado Alley.

The future portrayed by Sterling is unfortunately all too plausible. We are already seeing the Heavy Weather he wrote of – freak hurricanes, tornadoes, etc, all fed by global warming. The hopeful aspect of the book is the band of hackers who are researching the weather. They can’t stop it, but they can do a lot to understand it better and that might do much to assuage the difficulties when it hits. Personal dramas unfold amidst. 

not_a_gadget

Jaron Lanier’s book “You Are Not A Gadget” has also been a recent fascination for my eyes. He gives everyone who reads the book a lot to chew on, especially those who’ve been force fed the idea that we should inherently trust computer algorithms and that mobs are “smart”. I definitely agree with his idea that physical objects should be brought back into music distribution. I listen to mp3s, but don’t love them. I do however cherish my vinyl records. …And I think that is why collectable vinyl has been on the upswing since filesharing has become so easy, with bands releasing exclusive and limited pressings of albums or alternate versions, etc. I especially like the last section of the book where he explains the concept of Neoteny, which the oxford english dictionary defines as “the retention of juvenile characteristics in a (sexually) mature individual”. He notes that the lag time between birth and when we consider ourselves “adult” is growing. Our childhood is extending. He equates Bachelardian Neoteny with a sense of wonder, as opposed to Goldingesque Neoteny (aka  William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” ) where cruelty and conormity dominate.  You’ll have to read the book yourself to get the full scope and scoop. The book ends with a nice meditation on cephalopods, and his equation “Cephalopods + Childhood = Humans + Virtual Reality” and his ideas on Postsymbolic Communication.

Like Rudy Rucker he dreams of a computer that is not based on current programing protocols. He says, “The point of the project is to find a way of making software that rejects the idea of the protocol. Instead, each software module must use emergent generic pattern-recognition techniques…to connect with other modules. Phenotropic computing could  potentially result in a kind of software that is less tangled and unpredictable, since there wouldn’t be protocol errors if there weren’t any protocols. It would also suggest a path to escaping the prison of predefined, locked in ontologies like MIDI in human affairs.”

I sure hope he makes a breakthrough in this regard.

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Three “Rules” for Creative Living

Dream | Posted by jmoore
Sep 13 2010

1. Listen to Jazz – This phrase came to me in a dream one night as I sought some practical knowledge for buying a car. I took it to mean, “be open to spontaneous improvisation”. It’s one I still live by. And I do love jazz. It’s especially good  in the background while writing.

2. Make Soup -  Heart warming and satisfying, soup breathes new life into old vegetables. Also good for leftovers.

3. Make Compost = Related to the second commandment. Scraps and bits can be thrown into the mix. If the stuff in the creative veg bin is too far gone it can still be composted and turned into fertile soil for the next growing season.

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Skateboard Riff

Dream | Posted by jmoore
Aug 28 2010

I was a teenage skateboarder… I skateboarded a lot for quite awhile, on into my early twenties. It got to be too hard on me knees when I tried to pick it back up again a few years ago, but I’ll still occassionally ride one, without doing a lot of the jumping tricks.

Often I have dreams where my mode of transportation is by skateboard. In these there is always a feeling of fun and excitement (perhaps because I feel comfortable on one).

A few of my own skater associations: it’s a renegade sport. While snowboarding has made it into the olympics, skateboarding has yet too. There is a certain anti-authoritarian streak in skateboarders because we often get kicked out of places where we like to skate. It is a Do-It-Yourself activity, and fiercely independent. The exhiliration of skateboarding comes from mastering the manuveurs yourself. While there may be competitiveness among skaters, to me it was always about the thrill of riding over pavement and concrete on a board, and being able to manipulate that board at high speeds to make it do what you want, popping ollies and grinding curbs, flipping the board while you float through the air and landing back on it to keep riding.

When I fall, I get up, shake myself off, and keep going. Most of the skaters I know have sustained massive injuries -broken legs & arms, painful bruises, gouges as gravel digs into the skin, and yet when they heal they get back out and do it again.  I still think like a skater and dream like one too.

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Dreaming Better Cities

Dream, Writing as Magick | Posted by jmoore
Jul 28 2010

stun city rudy ruckerThe best part of the movie “Inception” was also the shortest.  It was the scene when Ariadne, the architect, takes Dom Cobb through the city she has created, when she bends the streets so that the city folds in on itself. The concept of an archictect designing dream cities holds a lot of potential. Unfortunately the dream cities of “Inception” were far less mysterious, fantastical, and imaginative as those I travel in my own dreams, or in the fiction I read.

Charles de Lint is one of my favorite writers. Recently I’ve been delving into the short stories contained in his collection “Tapping the Dream Tree”. All of these take place in his fictional North American city of Newford. Although not specified, I always imagine it to be somewhere in the North West, in Canada. Newford is a great place to hang out. It is a city where you are liable to stumble across a voodon ritual, meet up with the Crow girls to help retrieve someones lost soul, sip a pint of ale in one of the many magical music venues, go to an opening where you might meet someone who has Fairie blood, and encounter Pixies who’ve slipped out from the computer screen at a bookstore.  The girl with Fairie blood is Sophie, one of the recurring characters who appears throughout de Lint’s Newford books. Every night when she goes to sleep she enters the dream city of Mabon. It is a city she dreamed up herself, and yet it has taken on a life of its own. She has a whole other life going on in her dream city. It’s even where her boyfriend lives. Here we have the fictional city of Newford, and within it a dream city of Mabon. Dreams within dreams, and cities within cities. I love it.

Another excellent book featuring imaginative dream cities is “Palimpsest” by Catherynne M. Valente. It is a story of a sexually transmitted city. The city is reached in dreams, but only after the characters have sex with someone who has been there before. Those who have been there are marked forever by a tattoo of the city. This is how the city is transmitted.Don’t forget “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino either, as if you could.

It’s time to start mapping our own  internal cities, and bringing the energy from them into waking life. The better cities we will build on earth all have their origin in the imagination. Grown from seeds, they can be woven into the fabric of reality.

Image is “Stun City” by polymath Science Fiction writer Rudy Rucker.

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A Dreamers Thoughts on “INCEPTION”

Dream | Posted by jmoore
Jul 26 2010

inceptionI didn’t have high hopes for the movie “Inception” but I wanted to see it anyway for its take on shared dreaming, levels of dreaming, dream mazes and other nifty concepts. Taken further these bits of dream gnarl could have made quite a film. As it was, they floundered. I had no problem with the acting in the movie, but the action sequences in it were overblown and nearly pointless.

The central premise of the film was that of Extraction and Inception. Corporate espionage has moved to the dream world, and skilled groups of dreamers are employed to illicitly enter other peoples dreams to steal their secrets.  The idea of placing a thought inside a dreamer -Inception- hadn’t been done very much before (in the world of the film) and some in the group thought it impossible. This would be done to give a person an idea that they would then take up and act on in waking life. This was played out in the movie as a way to control and modify the behavior of an heir to a corporate fortune.  

The two main problems I have with this movie are that it glorifies several ”dark side” or “black magick” practices: psychic intrusion,  soul theft and the placing of intrusive energies or “thoughts” inside the mind of another sovereign being. While it may seem like I am stretching a bit to reach these conclusions, they are really not far from the mark, and I believe they need to be addressed.

Soul loss is the major epidemic facing humans on this planet. It is comparable to the psychological concept of dissociation, and can be caused by many things: loss of a loved one, break up of a relationship, injury and physical trauma, and substance abuse to name a few. Soul loss could also occur when other people habitually misappropriate another persons power. This is what the concept of “Extraction” from the movie caused me to think of: the stealing of someone elses vital energy and secrets.

A preventive measure we can all take against psychic intrusion is the establishment of healthy boundaries.  How is this done? There is plenty of literature on this subject, but learning “where you end and another begins” is an essential first step. Modifying someone elses behavior through psychic intrusion to me is totally unacceptable. If you have a viewpoint you’d like others to share, I think it is best to engage in a rational discussion, or seduce via the power of art.  

If someone has a foreign object in their (energy) body, a shaman or skilled dreamer can be called in to “extract” that object. This would happen in a proper setting where mutual trust is a rule.   

Overall the movie was a disappointment. Instead of affirming the transformative potential dreams can have in our lives, instead of exploring the possible uses of shared dreaming for true adventure, they were used for purely selfish means. Ancient methods of dream travel were hijacked by CEOs in a race towards the bottom line.

Another aspect of the movie I disliked was its reductionist bent. Everyone in the dream sequences of the movies was a “projection” of the dreamers unconscious. While I understand projections from Jungian point of view, I also realize that some of the beings and people we encounter in dreams have an objective reality all their own. In this case, the way they treated the main characters deceased wife (as merely a projection) was a letdown. In my own experience I have had objective contact with the spirits of loved ones who have passed on in my dreams. This has been a source of healing for me as I’ve moved through the grieving process, as well as a source of timely information, and validation of the afterlife.

Hollywood could do so much better, but they seem to be struck with an unfavorable malady: poverty of imagination.

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