Already a classic in its first year of publication, this landmark study of Western thought takes a fresh look at the writings of the great thinkers of classic philosophy and questions many pieces of conventional wisdom. The book invites comparison with Bertrand Russell's monumental History of Western Philosophy, "but Gottlieb's book is less idiosyncratic and based on more recent scholarship" (Colin McGinn, Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and a Times Literary (...) Supplement Best Book of 2001. (from the publisher). (shrink)

This book is a unique meditation on poetry, history, philosophy, religion, and politics from one of the most important poets of our time. It is the result of decades of deep thinking about the fate of poetry in human history as well as the nature of our shared human condition.

Big dreams are rare but highly memorable dream experiences that make a strong and lasting impact on the dreamer's waking awareness. Moving far beyond "I forgot to study and the finals are today" and other common scenarios, such dreams can include vivid imagery, intense emotions, fantastic characters, and an uncanny sense of being connected to forces beyond one's ordinary dreaming mind. In Big Dreams, Kelly Bulkeley provides the first full-scale cognitive scientific analysis of such dreams, putting (...) forth an original theory about their formation, function, and meaning.Big dreams have played significant roles in religious and cultural history, but because of their infrequent occurrence and fantastical features, they have rarely been studied in light of modern science. We know a great deal about the religious manifestations of big dreams throughout history and around the world, but until now that cross-cultural knowledge has never been integrated with scientific research on their psychological roots in the brain-mind system. In Big Dreams, Bulkeley puts a classic psychological thesis to the scientific test by clarifying and improving it with better data, sharper analysis, and a broader evolutionary framework. He brings evidence from multiple sources, shows patterns of similarity and difference, questions prior assumptions, and provides predictive models that can be applied to new sets of data. The notion of a connection between dreaming and religion has always been intuitively compelling; Big Dreams transforms it into a solid premise of religious studies and brain-mind science. Combining evidence from religious studies, psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, Big Dreams makes a compelling argument that big dreams are a primal wellspring of religious experience. They represent an innate, neurologically hard-wired capacity of our species that regularly provokes greater self-awareness, creativity, and insight into the existential challenges and spiritual potentials of human life. (shrink)

Reviews the book, The dream of reason: A history of philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb . Seldom in the history of histories—particularly histories of philosophy—have there been authors capable of producing accessible, entertaining, insightful, and accurate treatments of their subject matter. An unfailingly pleasant read, Gottlieb’s history shows how many of philosophy’s most revolutionary breakthroughs have consistently been co-opted by other branches of learning, leading to the unfortunate illusion that philosophers never make any progress. 2012 (...) APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Lucid dreams are dreams in which a person becomes aware that they are dreaming. They are different from ordinary dreams, not just because of the dreamer's awareness that they are dreaming, but because lucid dreams are often strikingly realistic and may be emotionally charged to the point of elation. Celia Green and Charles McCreery have written a unique introduction to lucid dreams that will appeal to the specialist and general reader alike. The authors explore the (...) experience of lucid dreaming, relate it to other experiences such as out-of-the-body experiences and apparitions, and look at how lucid dreams can be induced and controlled. They explore their use for therapeutic purposes such as counteracting nightmares. Their study is illustrated throughout with many case histories. (shrink)

Having fascinated some of the greatest philosophers from the earliest times, dreaming figures importantly in the history of philosophy, as in Plato’s Theaetetus, Augustine’s Confessions, and, perhaps most famously, Descartes’s Mediations. By far the greatest philosophical focus on dreaming has been epistemic: Socrates suggests to Theaetetus that since he cannot tell whether he is dreaming, he cannot trust his senses to know contingent facts about the world around him. And a similar worry drives Descartes’s radical doubt in the First Meditation. (...) We might think that dream skepticism is, among the radical Cartesian skeptical scenarios, a particularly worrying one, since dreams, unlike evil demons, are a commonplace of everyday life. (shrink)

The five books of Artemidorus of Ephesus’ Oneirocritica (c. second century CE) constitute the largest collection of divinatory dream-interpretations to survive from Graeco-Roman antiquity. This article examines Artemidorus’ contribution to longstanding medico-philosophical debates over the ontological and epistemic character of such dreams. As with wider Mediterranean traditions concerning premonitory dreams, Greeks and Romans popularly understood them as phenomena with origins exterior to the dreamer (e.g. a visitation of a god). Presocratic and Hippocratic thinkers, however, initiated an effort to (...) bring at least some dream events within the body as interior processes of a physical soul, a bodily turn which ultimately engendered a split in thinking about the possibility and scope of prophetic and diagnostic dreams (e.g. Hippocrates Regimen 4, Aristotle On Prophecy in Dreams, Rufus of Ephesus, and Galen). Here, I examine the way that Artemidorus meant the Oneirocritica to address seriously questions about the origins of dreams and the powers of empirical science in two, related ways. We will see that his defense of oneirocriticism as a techne unfolds along two main axes. First, Artemidorus constructs a necessary veneer of scientific credibility by mobilizing the tropes and organizational strategies characteristic of contemporary technical literature. Secondly, he anchors that authority upon a materialist account of prophetic dreams as “semiotic movements of the soul.” As Price, S. 1986. “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus.” Past & Present 113: 3–36 and Harris-McCoy, D. 2012. Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press observed, this explicit commitment to an empirical method of dream-interpretation resembles that of the Hellenistic medical ‘sect’ known as ‘Empiricists,’ who eschewed interest in theoretical etiology in favor of observation, comparison, and compilation of symptoms and outcomes. Pushing beyond similarity, I argue that Artemidorus not only deployed this method to defend empirically grounded accounts of dream-divination (cf. Cicero De div. 1), but endeavored to show that such a scientific method can be used to stabilize and corral productively the potentially infinite number of interpretations any dream-sign might bear without recourse to an underlying, causal theory. (shrink)

This was the first cross-over book into the history of science written by an historian of economics. It shows how 'history of technology' can be integrated with the history of economic ideas. The analysis combines Cold War history with the history of postwar economics in America and later elsewhere, revealing that the Pax Americana had much to do with abstruse and formal doctrines such as linear programming and game theory. It links the literature on 'cyborg' to economics, an element missing (...) in literature to date. The treatment further calls into question the idea that economics has been immune to postmodern currents, arguing that neoclassical economics has participated in the deconstruction of the integral 'self'. Finally, it argues for an alliance of computational and institutional themes, and challenges the widespread impression that there is nothing else besides American neoclassical economic theory left standing after the demise of Marxism. (shrink)

"Dreaming with open eyes" is a tagline for Spinoza's critique of Descartes; the dreams in question are principally those of volition and the active imagination. In this article, I compare the Cartesian theory of imagination as an active, but not fully rational, power of the mind and the Cartesian account of the volitional self to Spinoza's views. Descartes's own dreams and theories of dreaming are the focus of the first part of the article. Thereafter I examine Spinoza's critique (...) of Descartes and his alternative account of imagination. Finally, I argue that there is a positive sense of dreaming with open eyes to be recuperated in Spinoza's thought. Construed positively, to dream with open eyes is to understand dreams and imagination as natural phenomena and so to be able to respond constructively to them in ethical and political, as well as epistemological, life. (shrink)

A history of western philosophy from Descartes to the French Revolution.

An English translation of, and commentary on, German writer Karoline von Günderrode's poem "Muhammad's Dream in the Desert," in Issue 2 of Synkrētic: The Journal of Indo-Pacific Philosophy (reprinted with modifications from an earlier entry on my blog Trail of Crumbs) This journal is open-access and full of run reads.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 234-236 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey. By Jan Willis. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. 321 pp. This book invites comparison with Diana Eck's Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Both are by prominent women scholars, both have "spiritual journey" in the subtitle, (...) and both are about Christians who come to terms with a non-Christian religion—Hinduism in Eck's case, Buddhism in Willis's case. But as soon as one gets past the titles, it is the differences that strike one. Where Eck maintains an Olympian poise, hobnobbing with Hindus but remaining a Christian and an objective scholar, interpreting and analyzing as she goes, Willis plunges into Buddhism without rejecting her family's Baptist tradition, becoming a fully participant observer so as to ask how her own history and the history of her fellow African Americans can be healed by an intensely personal internal dialogue. Eck gives us theology. Willis gives us herself. Recognized as "one of the first American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism" (294), her students ask her if she practices meditation as well as teaching it. She gives a carefully crafted answer that unifies the practice of Buddhism with the practice of academic teaching as an authentically human activity within the Humanities.The book has the form of a Hindu epic, incidents from Willis's life interrupting the frame story, the dreaming of the title. This dream (whether actual or metaphorical, we are not told) moves with considerable dramatic power from the terror of being pursued by lions to the dreamer's transformation into a lioness who roars the Dharma like Queen Shrimala. Its five parts are called Birth, Odyssey, Choices, Becoming, and Return, taking us from her childhood as a Baptist in Docena, Alabama, to Cornell University, to India and Nepal, and back to Docena, as a self-described Baptist-Buddhist (310).Willis's journey is intimately bound up with her search for self-acceptance as a "white gal"—a noticeably light-complexioned black woman in the Jim Crow South —and for the nobility of African Americans as fully human beings. Her early experiences [End Page 234] were not encouraging. Blacks were not only physically segregated in Docena, they were electronically expunged from television shows by spurious technical difficulties ("trouble along the cable"), and she endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan on her family's home. The customary but thoroughly illegal suffrage examination administered to her father included such questions as "How many words are there in the U.S. Constitution?" (58, italics in original). He had been specially prepared for such absurdities, and he passed. Midway in her pilgrimage Willis searches for her roots (or "kin," as she says, using the Southern word) in county and federal records, and her initial excitement turns to humiliation as the white historian tells her, with disdainful triumph, that her intelligence must have come from the white slave owner who "everybody says" was her "granddaddy's daddy" (251). A black woman was presumed to be lacking in native intelligence, and Willis's intellectual powers suffered insult not only from whites but from her own mother, who, perhaps having internalized the white folks' contempt, regarded being smart as somehow evil (25). As a student at Cornell, Willis discovered black power and participated in Black Student Alliance (BSA) demonstrations, sometimes involving guns, but she came to believe that direct political action was not for her. She was, she decided, a teacher at heart, and after much soul searching she opted for the "peaceful transformation" (129) that she hoped would come from the study and practice of Buddhism.Although her skin color was a puzzlement to some Indians, who wondered about her caste, her Tibetan teachers in Nepal accepted her as a student who was at least the equal of the white students, and even, perhaps, superior to them. A spot of blonde in her hair was interpreted as the... (shrink)

In the early seventeenth century Galileo broke free from the hold of ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. He drastically changed the framework through which we view the natural world when he asserted that we should base our theory of reality on what we can observe rather than pure thought. In the process, he invented what we would come to call science. This set the stage for all the breakthroughs that followed--from Kepler to Newton to Einstein. But in the early twentieth (...) century when quantum physics, with its deeply complex mathematics, entered into the picture, something began to change. Many physicists began looking to the equations first and physical reality second. As we investigate realms further and further from what we can see and what we can test, we must look to elegant, aesthetically pleasing equations to develop our conception of what reality is. As a result, much of theoretical physics today is something more akin to the philosophy of Plato than the science to which the physicists are heirs. In The Dream Universe, Lindley asks what is science when it becomes completely untethered from measurable phenomena? (shrink)

Full-Blooded religion is not acceptable in mainstream bioethics. This article excavates the cultural history that led to the suppression of religion in bioethics. Bioethicists typically fall into one of the following camps. 1) The irreligious, who advocate for suppressing religion, as do Timothy F. Murphy, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. This irreligious camp assumes American Fundamentalist Protestantism is the real substance of all religions. 2) Religious bioethicists, who defend religion by emphasizing its functions and diminishing its metaphysical commitments. Religious defenders (...) empty religion of its theology to present its feel-good functions in a way that is acceptable to the irreligious. However, religion reduced to its functions dissolves into a counter-culture that may counteract materialism but lacks the power to motivate much more. This article criticizes both camps, as both presume Enlightenment myths and consequently neuter religion. Both irreligious and religious bioethicists commonly presume Enlightenment myths about secularity and religion. Secularity is presumed neutral and rational. Religion is presumed divisive and irrational. This myth provides built-in value-judgements; we have already judged secularity as good and religion as bad. Much of the debate over religion in bioethics is arguing over false stereotypes of religion. Consequently, mainstream bioethics neuters religion, while the irreligious are gifted political power to define the field. (shrink)

Dream analysis is a distinctive and foundational part of analytical psychology, the school of psychology founded by C. G. Jung and his successors. This volume collects Jung's most insightful contributions to the study of dreams and their meaning. The essays in this volume, written by Jung between 1909 and 1945, reveal Jung's most essential views about dreaming--especially regarding the relationship between language and dream. Through these studies, Jung grew to understand that dreams are themselves a language, a language (...) through which the soul communicates with the body. The essays included are "The Analysis of Dreams," "On the Significance of Number Dreams," "General Aspects of Dream Psychology," "On the Nature of Dreams," "The Practical Use of Dream Analysis," and "Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy". New to this edition is a foreword by Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Professor of Jung History at University College London. (shrink)

The dream related by Ennius in the first book of his Annales, in which the ghost of Homer appeared to him, has been the subject of much discussion. There are various pieces of evidence about it from which inferences can be drawn; sometimes, I think, too much has been inferred, sometimes too little. My chief object in this paper is to consider what exactly was the view held or expounded by Ennius regarding the nature of the soul and the conditions (...) under which a ghost appears. But I propose in the first place to review the evidence and to contemplate the dream as a poetic product, a thing which has its place in the history of poetry and its affinities with similar passages in other authors. (shrink)

The dream related by Ennius in the first book of his Annales, in which the ghost of Homer appeared to him, has been the subject of much discussion. There are various pieces of evidence about it from which inferences can be drawn; sometimes, I think, too much has been inferred, sometimes too little. My chief object in this paper is to consider what exactly was the view held or expounded by Ennius regarding the nature of the soul and the conditions (...) under which a ghost appears. But I propose in the first place to review the evidence and to contemplate the dream as a poetic product, a thing which has its place in the history of poetry and its affinities with similar passages in other authors. (shrink)

In her book "descartes", Margaret wilson proposes a new interpretation of the dreaming argument. According to this interpretation, Descartes does not reach his conclusion via a subconclusion that I cannot be certain that I am not dreaming (as was claimed by more traditional authors such as moore, Malcolm, Frankfurt, And walsh), But rather directly, By pointing out that I cannot be certain that waking experience is veridical. The present article examines the arguments supporting wilson's interpretation, And finds them to be (...) faulty. Thus the article's conclusions clearly favor the traditional interpretations mentioned above. (shrink)

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us”, and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black (...) life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty. (shrink)

This paper attempts an historical analysis of a dream of the physicist George Gamow recorded shortly before his death in 1968. The dream is contextualized through Gamow's extended scientific work and popular scientific efforts, and in light of enduring preoccupations with the notion of a complete science. The analysis extends to an examination of the relationship of the dream to dreaming practices and deliberations apart from Gamow’s, as evident in the relationship and collaboration between the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and C. (...) G. Jung. (shrink)

This article explores the dream of the universal library in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Theodicy, Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. This is a story that, though often mentioned, is underexplored in both literary and intellectual histories. Scholars have overlooked the dream of the total library perhaps because this theme appears in works that transcend literary, aesthetic, and philosophical genres. I argue that the dream of the total library morphs from Leibniz’s assured hierarchy of (...) knowledge in which God is at the apex to Borges’s and Wenders’s more anxious post-enlightened epistemic regimes in which knowledge, decentered and leveled, becomes data, or worse, noise. The fantasies of textual omniscience can change our understanding of our European genealogies of knowledge and information theory more broadly. Taken together, their dreams of a total library constitute a central episode in the great romance of the pursuit of encyclopedic knowledge. In a world awash in a superabundance of signs and symbols and systems, they ask: How does the human mind orient itself? What Ariadne’s thread can it grasp? What possibilities of free will lie therein its imaginary infinite stacks? (shrink)

Descartes argues that since there are no certain marks to distinguish waking experiences from dreams, we need to justify our belief that waking experiences are veridical experiences of physical objects while dreams are illusions. He resolves this problem by arguing that the absence of marks distinguishing dreams from waking experiences notwithstanding, we are justified in ascribing different cognitive values to waking experiences and dreams. For, our belief in God rules out any other explanation of the agreement (...) of all our faculties in supporting the instinctive belief that waking experiences are caused by physical objects. (shrink)

Descartes argues that since there are no certain marks to distinguish waking experiences from dreams, we need to justify our belief that waking experiences are veridical experiences of physical objects while dreams are illusions. He resolves this problem by arguing that the absence of marks distinguishing dreams from waking experiences notwithstanding, we are justified in ascribing different cognitive values to waking experiences and dreams. For, our belief in God rules out any other explanation of the agreement (...) of all our faculties in supporting the instinctive belief that waking experiences are caused by physical objects. (shrink)

Scientists and historians have often presumed that the divide between biochemistry and molecular biology is fundamentally epistemological.100 The historiography of molecular biology as promulgated by Max Delbrück's phage disciples similarly emphasizes inherent differences between the archaic tradition of biochemistry and the approach of phage geneticists, the ur molecular biologists. A historical analysis of the development of both disciplines at Berkeley mitigates against accepting predestined differences, and underscores the similarities between the postwar development of biochemistry and the emergence of molecular biology (...) as a university discipline. Stanley's image of postwar biochemistry, with its focus on viruses as key experimental systems, and its preference for following macromolecular structure over metabolism pathways, traced the outline of molecular biology in 1950.Changes in the postwar political economy of research universities enabled the proliferation of disciplines such as microbiology, biochemistry, biophysics, immunology, and molecular biology in universities rather than in medical schools and agricultural colleges. These disciplines were predominantly concerned with investigating life at the subcellular level-research that during the 1930s had often entailed collaboration with physicists and chemists. The interdisciplinary efforts of the 1930s (many fostered by the Rockefeller Foundation) yielded a host of new tools and reagents that were standardized and mass-produced for laboratories after World War II. This commercial infrastructure enabled “basic” researchers in biochemistry and molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s to become more independent from physics and chemistry (although they were practicing a physicochemical biology), as well as from the agricultural and medical schools that had previously housed or sponsored such research. In turn, the disciplines increasingly required their practitioners to have specialized graduate training, rather than admitting interlopers from the physical sciences.These general transitions toward greater autonomy for biochemistry and allied disciplines should not mask the important particularities of these developments on each campus. At the University of Caliornia at Berkeley, agriculture had provided, with medicine, significant sponsorship for biochemistry. The proximity of Lawrence and his cyclotrons supported the early development of Berkeley as a center for the biological uses of radioisotopes, particularly in studies of metabolism and photosynthesis. Stanley arrived to establish his department and virus institute before large-scale federal funding of biomedical research was in place, and he courted the state of California for substantial backing by promising both national prominence in the life sciences and virus research pertinent to agriculture and public health. Stanley's venture benefited significantly from the expansion of California's economy after World War II, and his mobilization against viral diseases resonated with the concerns of the Cold War, which fueled the state's rapid growth. The scientific prominence of contemporary developments at Caltech and Stanford invites the historical examination of the significance of postwar biochemistry and molecular biology within the political and cultural economy of the Golden State.In 1950, Stanley presented a persuasive picture of the power of biochemistry to refurbish life science at Berkeley while answering fundamental questions about life and infection. In the words of one Rockefeller Foundation officer,There seems little doubt in [my] mind that as a personality Stanley will be well able to dominate the other personalities on the Berkeley campus and will be able to drive his dream through to completion, which, incidentally, leaves Dr. Hubert [sic] Evans and the whole ineffective Life Sciences building in the somewhat peculiar position of being by-passed by much of the truly modern biochemistry and biophysics research that will be carried out at Berkeley. Furthermore, it seems likely that Dr. S's show will throw Dr. John Lawrence's Biophysics Department strongly in the shade both figuratively and literally, but should make the University of California pre-eminent not only in physics but in biochemistry as well.101Stanley, Sproul, Weaver, and this officer (William Loomis) all testified to a perceptible postwar opportunity to capitalize on public support for biological research that relied on the technologies from physics and chemistry without being captive to them, and that addressed issues of medicine and agriculture without being institutionally subservient. What is striking, given the expectation by many that Stanley would ‘be able to drive his dream through to completion,” was that in fact he did not. Biochemists who had succeeded in making their expertise valued in specialized niches were resistant to giving up their affiliations to joint Stanley's “liberated” organization. Stanley's failure was not simply due to institutional factors: researchers as well as Rockefeller Foundation officers faulted him for his lack of scientific imagination, which made it difficult for him to gain credibility in leading the field. Moreover, many biochemists did not share Stanley's commitment to viruses as the key material for the “new biochemistry.”In the end, Stanley's free-standing department did become a first-rate department of biochemistry, but only after freeing itself from Stanley's leadership and his single-minded devotion to viruses. Nonetheless, the falling-out with the Berkeley biochemists was rapidly followed by the establishment of a Department of Molecular Biology, attesting to the unabating economic and institutional possibilities for an authoritative “general biology” (or two, for that matter) to take hold. In each case, following Stanley's dream sheds light on how the possible and the real shaped the (re)formation of biochemistry and molecular biology as postwar life sciences. (shrink)

The dream argument and its role in Cartesian doubt continue to engage commentators. As recent scholarship shows, a consensus has yet to be attained. In what follows I attempt to resolve the current debate by offering an account of the dream doubt which captures Descartes’s rhetorical strategy in Meditation I. A faithful reading of the text, I propose to show, reveals that the dream doubt is not entertained seriously nor is it proposed merely for the sake of methodological skepticism. It (...) is rather an integral part of a dogmatic intrusion of Cartesian science at a pivotal point in the critique of prescientific experience. After presenting the proposed interpretation, I examine the accounts offered in the current scholarship. (shrink)

Throughout, there are many case histories to illustrate the text.

In spite of the difficulty of most American avant-garde films, one can read volumes and find almost no mention of how to view these films. Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order addresses precisely this question: how--and to what extent--can viewers make sense of American avant-garde films? It is a controversial book that examines the implicit assumptions of traditional scholarship, advocates on alternative to dominant approaches to the avant-garde cinema, and questions some long-standing clichés about the history of the avant-garde.

Introduction: conversing with traditions : ancients and moderns in nineteenth-century practical science -- Aristotle on the constitution of social justice and classical democracy -- Aristotle and classical social theory : social justice and moral economy in Marx, Weber, and Durkheim -- Kant on the critique of reason and science -- Kant and classical social theory : epistemology, logic, and methods in Marx, Weber, and Durkheim -- Conclusion: dreams of classical reason : historical science between existentialism and antiquity.

"The main spine of this book stems from a comprehensive series of interviews with subjects recalling their experiences of 1930s cinemagoing. Your feel the breath of life in these spectators, a rarity in film studies, thanks to the painstaking work contracting the interview subjects and recording and tabulating their testimony."- JUMPCUT In the 1930s, Britain had the highest annual per capita cinema attendance in the world, far surpassing ballroom dancing as the nation's favorite pastime. It was, as historian A.J.P. Taylor (...) said, the "essential social habit of the age." And yet, although we know something about the demographics of British cinemagoers, we know almost nothing of their experience of film, how film affected them, how it fit into their daily lives, what role cinema played in the larger culture of the time, and in what ways cinemagoing shaped the generation that came of age in the 1930s. In Dreaming of Fred and Ginger , Annette Kuhn draws upon contemporary publications, extensive interviews with cinemagoers themselves, and readings of selected film, to produce a provocative and perspective-altering ethno-historical study. Taking cinemagoers' accounts of their own experiences as both "the engine and product of investigation," Kuhn enters imaginatively into the world of 1930s cinema culture and analyzes its place in popular memory. Among the topics she examines are the physical space of the cinemas; the role film played in growing up; the experience of being a member of a cinema audience; film-inspired fantasies of American life; the importance of cinema to adolescence in offering role models, ideals of romance, as well as practical opportunities for courtship; and the sheer pleasure of watching such film stars as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Nelson Eddy, Ronald Colman, and many others. Engagingly written and painstakingly researched, with contributions to film history, cultural studies, and social history, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger offers an illuminating account of a key moment in British cultural memory. (shrink)

The AIM model proposed by Hobson et al. is interesting: We know the neurophysiological aspects of the activation process (A) and the external input (I), but very little about the internal input and neurocognitive process (M). Internal input could be an expression of unconscious experiences memorised by the subject containing his emotional and cognitive history. Therefore internal input could not be chaotic but might have an emotional and affective sense bound to the unconscious. The fact that dreams are present (...) in the absence of REM sleep means that they may originate from other structures besides the pons. These structures may represent the archives of dreamer's affective history. [Hobson et al.; Solms]. (shrink)