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This Week in the War on Women
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The first step of freedom is not just to change reality to fit your dreams; it’s to change the way you dream. And again this hurts because all satisfactions we have come from our dreams.
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American Dream(s) below the fold
Many decades ago, I wrote about how the creative process is much like being reflective upon a waking dream or hypnopompia. This meditation upon deliberate induction of such a state of consciousness could be constructive and destructive, depending on how attained since it could include both natural and artificial means to create lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.
REM sleep and dreams
And decades before that, I had attended during college a dream research conference as a field trip assigned in my psych class. While there, I was riding with my professor in an elevator at lunch time when he encountered someone with whom he had gone to graduate school and as small talk in response to the question "what's new?" my professor stated that he had engaged in some "aberrant behavior" and gotten married. I stifled a small chuckle, but it was still memorable that a behaviorist would refer to it as such.
Our everyday actions especially the less routine ones where we try to act on desire transcend behavior not only by intention or will, but by the world on which we act, and whether what we see in our minds can possibly fit. Often that can be a fool's errand in a world of institutional inequity.
During most dreams, the person dreaming is not aware that they are dreaming, no matter how absurd or eccentric the dream is. The reason for this may be that the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for logic and planning, exhibits decreased activity during dreams. This allows the dreamer to more actively interact with the dream without thinking about what might happen, since things that would normally stand out in reality blend in with the dream scenery https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Placing logic and planning in context is pretty important in terms of translating dreaming into reality and the scale of those dreams has been aided by modern media. But like the anachronistic drive-in movie theater, the scale and obligation of participation has changed our relation to our actions and is continually evolving.
The first step of freedom is not just to change reality to fit your dreams; it’s to change the way you dream. And again this hurts because all satisfactions we have come from our dreams. "The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology,”
The other advantage to Fiennes’ approach is that it makes Zizek’s spiel more subtly playful. It’s hard to bristle too much at any movie that uses as its first example the reality-revealing sunglasses in John Carpenter’s cult classic They Live, and as one of its final examples the mass orgy in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (which to Zizek is a symbol of how revolutions become hegemonic). Taken in the right spirit, The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology is a lot of fun, like watching a movie with a friend, then going out for drinks and talking late into the night. Just don’t expect to get a word in edgewise.
Slavoj Zizek http://www.critical-theory.com/...
Which brings me to polka music. Beyond the time signature, I actually like when it participates in a mash-up of genres, I like that some polka groups (
Brave Combo) and chamber music groups (
Kronos Quartet) both do covers of Jimi Hendrix. Picnic music.
This level of thinking while pretty accessible to most, operates on more than a reptile level and make some able to imagine different futures as well as bringing the past into different perspectives. Often more conservative folks are quite afraid of such recombination.
Right Wingers and the Reptile Brain
In 1954, the limbic cortex was described by neuroanatomists. Since that time, the limbic system of the brain has been implicated as the seat of emotion, addiction, mood, and lots of other mental and emotional processes. It is the part of the brain that is phylogenetic ally very primitive. Many people call it “The Lizard Brain” because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing-up, and fornication. https://www.psychologytoday.com/...
What's life without a little risk, RWNJs are so afraid of the left for so many unimaginable reasons, rife with illogical premises, poisoned by relatively simplistic views of the world, or at least a dream or worldview that is neither realistic nor historically operative (see: nuclear family), much less viable in a complex world. The RWNJ grifters' cynicism perhaps is the worst, manipulating large groups into producing the thing they fear the most, a libertarian nightmare.
Red Dawn (2012)
What are we all so afraid of?
When you are afraid, your mind takes crazy long jumps to the worst scenario.
Nebulous fear curls around me like smoke: fear of misunderstanding my tax form and incurring a ruinous fine; the postman tripping on our path and suing; opening the NHS letter that has sat on my desk for weeks; my children hitting their heads on concrete; my husband dying in a car accident; me saying something breathtakingly stupid at a party...
You need to wallow in the sting of failure, the misery and shameful feel of it, understand what you were frightened of – like attending an arachnophobia course at the zoo and holding a tarantula.
Forensically examining the substance of your terror can be a priceless experience. An educational psychologist told me, a week before Andy Murray won Wimbledon, that he would triumph, because he’d accepted losing, confronted his worst fear – and could now overcome it.
We fear because we understand the complexities of reaching a goal, but that’s necessary to succeed. It’s only when you don’t learn from failure that you become angry, exist in a frozen state of agitation.
You can’t immerse yourself in life, jump in; you hover fearfully at the edge...
Courage is to fear but try regardless, to blunder on, speak up, embrace the red face, feel foolish, squash it. So what if fear lies beneath? Fear is part of a full life, as is loss and risk.
If we love, we will grieve – we suffer, regardless of feeling fear or not. "Would you have preferred to have loved him less?" said a friend to a widowed relative. By loving, by living, we make ourselves vulnerable and that is terrifying.
Boldness is an asset that doesn’t have to show; just know, in your heart, that you’d be indignant, if someone judged you as sternly as you judge yourself, and challenge your hesitance. You are afraid of the risk?
Why, you take a risk simply by living: the next heartbeat is not guaranteed. As your anxieties accumulate your world diminishes, so shrug them off.
So that's why some of us travel in the Summer. I won't and haven't except as rationalizaling small bits of leisure while on business trips.
But are you traveling this Summer? Perhaps you're looking in at DK while on the road, so where are you now? Above all, be safe.
http://www.alternet.org/...
2015's Best States for Summer Road Trips
Oregon
Nevada
Minnesota
Washington
Ohio
Utah
Wyoming
Colorado
North Carolina
Idaho
2015's Worst States for Summer Road Trips
Connecticut
North Dakota
Delaware
Mississippi
South Dakota
Oklahoma
Arkansas
Rhode Island
Michigan
New Jersey