Unless They Are — I’ve been faithfully tracking my dreams for the past six years. By faithfully, I mean almost daily I write down one or more of my dreams in an app on my phone. I chronicle my dreams in the app as opposed to a notebook due to the convenience of the…

How We Fail to Understand Subtle Cues From Beyond — I am, and arguably have always been, obsessed with the concept of time travel. Like most of my generation, I previously believed time travel would require some sort of vehicle a la Back to the Future, or a highly sophisticated method of teleportation a la Quantum Leap. I suppose I…

How to Be Aware of Repeating Events, Dynamics, & Moods — The simplest way of defining cyclical time, especially for the purposes of this article, is the trackable repetition of the events of our lives and history. Most of us already are aware of some very basic examples of cyclical time: the moon phases, the female reproductive cycle, the beginning and…

What Dreams, Video Games, the Attention Economy, and the Metaverse Have in Common — It’s not entirely accurate to say this, but I spend a lot of time in dreams. It’s inaccurate because time is measured differently in dreams, if it can be measured at all. My dream research has led me to believe dreams are timeless, and spaceless, even if we experience something…

It’s Critical We Remember Dreams, So We Can Be Grateful We Forget Them — Last night, about an hour after falling asleep, I woke up very shaken. There was a dream, I think. It didn’t feel like a dream. It felt real. I was both witness and participant. My perspective wasn’t first-person, but the intensity with which I felt the despair of the situation…

A Flash Found Poem — October 23, 1999 was the 296th day of the year 1999 in the Gregorian calendar. There were 69 days remaining until the end of the year. The day of the week was Saturday. If you are trying to learn Japanese then this day of the week in Japanese is Doyōbi. …

But I might practice it with more intention — Lucid dreaming. It’s a currently popular practice (especially among young adults) — along with reality shifting, witchcraft, and erotic fan fiction — that I wish had been accepted and popularized when I was a teen. I’d have gleefully experimented with all those practices as a younger person. Life would have…

I. I’m sitting in a Starbucks in South Jersey reading Cavafy’s “Ithaka” and crying. This is because I am finally back home. I don’t remember The Odyssey well enough to know whether Ulysses cried upon his own return. This is the risk of feeding classic literature to teenagers — they…

An Inquiry — How do you know you’re “you” in your dreams? I’m really asking. How do you know? Do you see yourself in a mirror? Do the characters in your dreams call you by name? Do you recognize the room you are in? Does the person next to you look like your…