Fantastic!
Brownies And Downies: A Brilliant Idea !
Published February 13, 2016 by Nan MykelFantastic!
A mixed bag
All posts in the A mixed bag category
Privilege
Published February 11, 2016 by Nan Mykel
carriage arrived
on a busy day
everyone waited patiently
except time
Dream On
Published February 10, 2016 by Nan Mykelcriticaldispatches.com
Obviously, perhaps, this is a kind of tag-along page. I did want to tell you, however, that my most favorite book on dreams is one on content analysis of dreams: The Individual and His Dreams, by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, c.1972. I do wish they’d bring out a newer edition because the type is so small, but I was able to get 3 copies from Amazon. The appeal of this book is that the authors have studied over 50,000 dreams and analyzed them for content. “To analyze means to break down a verbal report into its constituent elements and count the number of times that each element occurs.” (For instance, success and failure, good fortune and misfortune, aggressive vs. friendly interactons between the sexes, animals, the sex of stranger dream figures, body parts, the importance of dream series and much much more, thus enabling one to compare his/her own dreams with a sampling of the population of dreamers.)
How to Remember Your Dreams
- Accept and value each dream, no matter how foolish or fragmentary it may seem.
- Before retiring, plan to remember whatever dreams come to you,. Place a pad and pencil within easy reach of your sleeping spot.
- If you have trouble recalling your dreams, plan a time when you can spontaneouslyawaken and be unhurried.
- When you waken, lie still and allow the dream images to flow back into your mind. If no images come, free associate or allow image to come. Be aware of thoughts upon awakening.
- When dream recall is complete in one body position, move gently into other sleeping positions to see if that triggers additional recxall. Record your dreams immediately6, whenever they come to you.
- Regardless of the method used to collect your dreams–by writing or taping–make the first record with your eyes closed.
- Make your records in the order that you recall your dreams. Exception: Make note of unique verbal expressions, poems, names, unusual phrases first, regardless of order,
- Select titles for your dream stores to help recall them later and toidentify their unique aspects.
- Share your dreams with a friend or others.
- Reading earlier dreams you have recorded is another excellent dream stimulator. (Adapted from Patricia Garfield’s Creative Dreaming.
Possible Functions of Dreams
- Wish fulfillment (dreaming of food when you’re on a diet).
- Subliminal message (finding missing wallet under car seat when was in a hurry).
- Portrayal of inner conflict (Can’t unlock door to girlfriend’s house)
- Anniversary reminder (dream of a death a year later)
- Prospective (likely results of proceeding on path of action)-Probable future results
- Picture-Thinking (ideas, problem-solving in symbolic form)
- Traumatic replay of horrific events-not yet fully understood
- Compensatory (what is needed for wholeness; another side of personality)
- Reflects ego state (roof falling in)
- Making dreamer aware of emotions not fully experienced
- Vehicle for unexplainable phenomenon
Part One
According to Henri Bergson, “Stored memories aspire to the light, but do not even try to rise to it…they know that I, as a living and acting being, have something else to do…but suppose that I am asleep. Then these memories…have raised the trap door which has kept them beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from the depths; they rise, they move, they perform in the night of unconsciousness a great danse macabre. They rush together to the door which has been left ajar.”
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
criticaldispatches.com
Eisley Quote
Published February 3, 2016 by Nan Mykel
Altho the subject matter may be sobering, the writing is so beautiful that I love it, from The Invisible Pyramid:
“Beginning on some winter night the snow will fall steadily for a thousand years and hush in its falling the spore cities whose seed has flown. The delicate traceries of the frost will slowly dim the glass in observatories and all will be as it had been before the virus wakened. The long trail of Halley’s comet, once more returning will pass like a ghostly matchflame over the unwatched grave of the cities. This has always been their end, whether in the snow or in the sand.”
Dialoging with Myself: Blogs
Published February 1, 2016 by Nan Mykel
Why Blog?
Originally it was to publicize my books.
How is that going?
December’s profits were $3.18.
Wow, you won’t have to worry about income tax.
I’m spread too thin.
Did you really think people were going to read about Downs?
I guess at the time they need it they dont think of blogs.
And Incest?
At least I had my say. Repeating what’s in my book is dumb.
So, you can abandon two of your pages?
Yeah, and the “My Books” page. I mention them in the profile.
So after all that work you’re going to euthanize 3 pages?
No, just let them hibernate for a decade or two.
Ahem. How old did you say you are?
Eighty…Why?
Our Shadow Selves and Guns
Published January 18, 2016 by Nan MykelCarl Jung’s “shadow” concept –the part of us we reject, deny and project onto others–would appear to contain in addition to traits we are ashamed of, also traits and beliefs that are unconscious, leading to mistakenly motivated beliefs and actions. . I know that’s a mouthful, but for example, evolution’s kinship selection seems to underly prejudice which we deny and are unaware of.
Strongly held drives and unconscious emotional beliefs can can result in illogical decisions. One such effect is associated with gun champions. According to Shankar Vedantam, who painstakingly researched and published The Hidden Brain, uivocally is no. “The issue is whether people who live in homes with guns are safer as a result of owning a gun, and the answer is unequivocally no.” (p 235). The combined risk of “accidents, suicide and domestic violence dwarfs the risk of homicide at the hands of a stranger.” (p 236).
“We certainly feel more control when we have a gun in our posession, and it is easy to confuse the feeling of control with safety. Indeed, this is an unconscious bias in the hidden brain….” p 237
Blame It on Chekhov
Published January 18, 2016 by Nan MykelFor years now, whenever I have cautioned someone not to teach their grandmother to suck eggs they have been stymied, never having heard that phrase before. Even I never knew where it came from, but
tonight I found it, in Anton Chekhov’s “Selected Stories,” newly translated by Ann Dunnigan, p 43, in the short short story “Surgery.” The dentist says, “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs! Oh Lord the ignorance of the people!” Anton Chekhov ———>
A Show-Off’s Dream
Published January 11, 2016 by Nan MykelThis is about me, of course. A slightly different dream, so I thought I’d share.
I am in front of a room full of people I know and I am reading a poem I have written. While I am still reading they start talking and go on and on so that I lie down. When I waken I realize the voices going on and on are from CNN, which I had left on.
ME, DISSOCIATE?
Published January 10, 2016 by Nan MykelI learned a lot while writing FALLOUT: A Survivor Talks to Incest Offenders. I have two points to make in this post.
First, I did an incredible amount of research and am left with a big box full of articles which I Xeroxed. I hate to just throw them away. If anyone thinks they may write on the subject some day or is just curious, please let me know and I’ll send them to you, USA, post-paid.
Second, I learned that I have a slight tendency to dissociate, at least according to John Brier’s definition of dissociation. He and Runtz (1988) questioned sexually abused and non-abused college women and found that the subjects could be discriminated one from the other group by whether they met Briere’s broad criteria for dissociation, which included “reduced responsiveness,” “spacing out,” “derealization” (experiencing things as unreal), “out-of-body experiences” and “lost time.”
Briere describes spacing-out behavior and disengagement as “withdrawal into a state of affective neutrality, where thoughts and awareness of external events are, in a sense, placed on hold.” These periods usually last from seconds to several minutes. The depth of dissociation in these cases is usually shallow. (Briere, 1992, 37-38, Child Abuse Trauma.
I can remember “going inside” myself but never thought of it as dissociation, which perhaps it was.
At the other end of the continuum, of course, are the much more serious examples of DID, or what used to be called “multiple personality disorder.”
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