Archive for the ‘Dreams’ Category

Tod und Verklärung on a human scale

September 25, 2026

Terrible things happen: the people we love most, and those that we especially admire, sicken and die; our highly competent bodies are overwhelmed by an avalanche of painful disabilities and disfigurements (I can no longer play the piano or assemble collages, among many other things).

But  it’s possible to cope with these disasters — not with the blaring of trumpets in resurrection, but in the more modest unfolding of loss, longing, and resolution: Tod und Verklärung on a human scale. In this posting, I’ll wander through several examples from my current life, starting with some things I see out of my big window here at Avant.

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Posted in Art, Collages, Death and dying, Dreams, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Moral worlds, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

More questions for anauralics

April 15, 2026

Following up on my 4/13 posting “A host of voices”, on

an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes

focusing on auralia, on hearing sounds in the mind, and on anauralia, its lack (in a small percentage of people), in various contexts:

in silent reading, in the voice of an internal adviser, in recollected speech or music, in auditory hallucinations, in speech or other sounds in dreams

I had my University of Arizona colleague Heidi Harley as an exemplary anauralic (while recognizing that each person has their own profile of mental-percept abilities); what she can tell us is important, beause it appeared then, and still does, that there’s not much research on mental sound (or mental imagery), in perceptually deficient subjects (anauralics, aphantastics) or even in perceiving (“normal”) subjects (auralics, phantastics), though it looks like there’s an enormous amount of variability.

Now: two further contexts to consider.

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Posted in Dreams, Memory, Music, My life, Perception, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Night life

March 6, 2026

About the night of  3/4-5, last night, different from all other nights in my experience, in its schedule and in the content of my dreams, suggesting that I spent the night in the grip of feel-good hormones rather than stress hormones. And awoke in calm delight.

First, some background, about earlier nights. Then about the schedule of last night’s sleep; about the content of last night’s dreams; and an appended note about feel-good hormones and stress hormones.

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Posted in Dreams, Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Sleep | Leave a Comment »

The Pythagorean Impromptu

June 18, 2025

A long (7:30 pm to 4:52 am) and pleasant (literally refreshing) sleep last night, after a long and difficult (2 am to 7:30 pm) day yesterday; I’ll put off a report on yesterday to the end of this posting, which is instead about how that sleep came to an end, in a half-waking reverie during which a sleep-final story dream morphed into the Pythagorean Impromptu, a dream in which Danny Kaye sang the Pythagorean Theorem, in the form

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides

(which is the version the actual Danny Kaye sang in the 1958 movie Merry Andrew, and, yes, I do remember this from 1958; I can also reproduce from memory Kaye’s

The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true

from The Court Jester of 1955, though I have trouble working the flagon with the dragon into Kaye’s final aide-memoire) — the Pythagorean Theorem, sung to the tune of Franz Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 142 No. 2, a piano piece that I happen to have played in concerts when I was a teenager, but which, more important, was actually playing (in a wonderfully warm performance by Mitsuko Uchida) on the Apple Music in my bedroom as I came out of that reverie into consciousness, when I had the sense to recognize that the words of “Pythagorean Theorem” fit reasonably well into Schubert’s melody for that Impromptu at the beginning, but that the marriage of this text and tune rapidly comes unglued, and then I was fully awake, cleaned myself up for the day, and discovered that my blood pressure had returned to excellent, after several days of anxiety-driven somewhat elevated bp, in a bounce-back that accorded with the delightful Pythagorean Impromptu dream .

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Posted in Dreams, Mathematics, Movies and tv, Music, My life | 3 Comments »

Ravel’s boletus

May 20, 2025

In my dream, the boletes begin, inconspicuously, at the north corner of my garden strip and then pop up more insistently, in larger stands, moving in time through the strip, until they explode in a spray of spores at the south end. Yes, it’s Ravel’s Bolero, done in fungi. (Here on YouTube, from the 2014 BBC Proms, the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim performs the piece. Which I have enjoyed unashamedly since I was a kid, 75 years ago.)

There is a reality behind the dream; as I posted on Facebook yesterday (in an expanded text):

— It’s suddenly warm and humid, so boletes — boletus mushrooms — have sprung up all over my garden. Fungi on the march! (Previously, they’d been a September / October phenomenon, but May seems to work for them too.)

They did appear first at the northern end, right where I can see them from my worktable.

There are, presumably, spores everywhere, spores all over the place, held in a suspended state for years, just waiting for the right conditions to sprout into fruiting fungal bodies.

(No, they don’t actually explode, just shrivel up and release their spores as they disappear from view.)

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Posted in Dreams, Fungi, Language and plants, Music, My life | 1 Comment »