Dreams

¡Hola! Everybody...
This is one of my favorite times of the year. Coming from an extended family, I have some great, great memories of the holidays. Memories of family get-togethers, eccentrics and their outlandish behavior, scandals, and yes, lot’s of love. But this time of the year is special for me in a very personal way because I celebrate an anniversary of sorts. It was 20 years ago I first began the process of liberation... but I will recount that story over at Subversify this Friday.

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-=[ Dreamtime ]=-

You see things as they are and ask, “Why.” I see things that never were and ask, “Why not.”

-- G.B. Shaw

People think I’m kidding around when I say I used to study in my sleep, but it’s true. I used to take heavy workloads in school. 20-24 credits per semester, plus being married and the primary caregiver to young child didn’t leave me much time, so even my sleep was put to use. According to a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, dreams are nothing more than hallucinations produced as the brain flushes out neuro-chemical waste. I couldn’t disagree more.

I’ve written before how one dream changed my life, and I’ll repost that some other time, but there many forceful arguments against the above assertion. Take the life of Harriet Tubman, for example. After escaping slavery in 1849, she went back (!!!) to organize the Underground Railroad and personally led 300 slaves to freedom. Talk about a power of example. Anyway, what few history books choose to document is the fact that Tubman often relied on her dreams to provide specific information about where to find safe houses, helpers, and passages through dangerous territory. Robert Moss tells the whole story in his book, dreaming True.

There are countless examples of dreams working to change our waking reality in deeply transformative ways. The chemist Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz solved his scientific mystery with the help of a dream. In 1865, after numerous unsuccessful attempts to find the precise structure of the benzene ring, he had a dream of a snake biting its own tail. With this vivid image in his when he awoke he finally guessed the solution that had eluded him. What if the six carbon atoms of benzene formed a closed ring – the shape formed by the snake – and not a mere chain, as he previously believed? The resulting research that came after this “Aha!” moment revolutionized organic chemistry.

The Russian chemist Dmitiri Mendelyev worked for years to discover a matrix for classifying the elements, but the turning point in his search came in a dream. It revealed to him the system which is now called the Periodic Table of Elements.

In the mid 1800s, Elias Howe dreamt of being chased by cannibals holding spears with holes in the top. This inspired him to design a sewing needle with the eye in its tip, which in turn led him to invent the sewing machine.

Otto Loewi struggled for 17 long years to prove his hunch that the transmission of nerve impulses traveled chemically and not electrically as was the prevailing theory of the time. In 1920 he had a dream that revealed how to design an experiment to determine whether his hypothesis was correct. The experiment succeeded resulting in his winning the Nobel Prize.

Dante Aligheri finished his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, before he died in 1321. But when his sons tried to assemble the manuscript for publication, they realized parts of it were missing. After many days of searching they had given up hope. Then the spirit of Dante appeared in one his son’s dream and showed him a hiding place in his old bedroom wall. Upon awakening, the son went to the place indicated in the dream and found the lost papers.

The great golfer, Jack Nicklaus, had more major tournament wins than any golfer in history. Of course, skill and practice were the keys to his success, but once he tapped into a different source. In 1973, he was mired in one of the worst slumps of his career. He was at a loss for an answer. Then one night he had a dream in which he experimented with a new grip. When he went to the golf course that morning, he tried the dream’s idea. It worked and his slump soon ended.

I once rocked myself to sleep in the throes of a deep and powerful heartbreak. Actually, I had spent a whole weekend so devastated that I could barely climb out of bed. All I wanted to do was 1) call my beloved, which I knew would be a huge mistake, and, 2) sleep.

Then one night during that weekend, I had a dream that would change my life completely. But that story is for another day.

Love,

Eddie

Ramblings of a Radical Progressive

¡Hola! Everybody...
What follows is just a ramble on things that have crossed my (warped) mind recently. It is estimated that we think about 100,000 thoughts a day (!!). Here are just a few I managed to grab...

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-=[ Ramblin’ Man]=-

I don’t mean to poke fun at such a serious topic, and I should add that I once seriously considered the same route, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that a NYC man yesterday jumped off his high rise building, plunged 40 stories, landed in the backseat area of a Dodge Charger after crashing through the windshield... and survived. Broken legs, critical condition.

When I made the commitment to jump, a strong wind from an early November Nor’easter knocked me on my skinny, seriously malnourished, drug addicted ass as I attempted to scale the Brooklyn Bridge’s pedestrian walkway (yes, a drama queen to the end, no regular rooftop for yours truly. I was going out in style, muthafuckas!). Some would say that the wind was a blessing or a gift from some God (who apparently had nothing better to do that day), but my state of mind was such that I considered the event the worst of insults: I was such a loser; I couldn’t even commit suicide successfully. I became convinced that with my luck, my suicide attempts would only manage to leave me crippled, so I stopped all thoughts of taking the short cut. I did try to get other people to do it for me, but that’s another story.

So today, as I reflect on this man's actions as well as my own, I have to wonder about his thoughts, his state of mind, and I have to wonder if he's regretting having survived his actions... I wish him some measure of serenity and clarity

Oh yeah, President Obama... his speech last night is now being eviscerated for not being celebratory enough by the same chickenhawk pundits and politicians who cooked the evidence in creating that led to the Mess in Mesopotamia in the first place. I’ll be honest and admit that I didn’t watch the speech, but I getting some chuckles from people like Chuckles the Clown (Charles Krauthammer), and that Wolfowitz twit (the latter stating that we should stay in Iraq, like, forever).

Well, people? How the fuck do we celebrate the cluster fuck now known as the Iraq War? It was a mistake from the get-go; incompetent men who had never fought a war bungled it from the beginning. Moreover, let’s not forget that we shouldn’t have been there to begin with. And you know what? This ain’t over yet, you bloodthirsty imbeciles. Rachel Maddow does a great job of listing the lies that took us there:

There will be more American and Iraqi lives needlessly sacrificed for a long time to come.

Speaking of evisceration and lies, Vanity Fair just published a must-read on Sarah Palin. “Erratic behavior and a pattern of lying matter little: ‘Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship.’” No surprise there (Duh!), but the article is worthwhile in that it documents beyond a shadow of a doubt that Palin and the Right are just a bunch of crazy muthafuckas with an deeply embedded aversion to reality testing.

While I’m on the reality-challenged brigade, let me mention that Beck’s Whitestock hate fest, taking place on the anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The folks of this mostly Caucasian pity party rolling on state-sponsored scooters attempted to "take back" the words and philosophy of Martin Luther King. specifically one line from one speech: “... one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” As Tim Wise points out in his excellent Op Ed, this is the line conservatives reference when attacking affirmative action. If King believed in character over color, they submit, he would have opposed such programs in employment or college admissions. Of course, if more conservative white people (and their black and brown enablers) actually read MLK’s works and the rest of his “I have a Dream Speech,” they would know that he also said:

“Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race 300 years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.”

DANG! Additionally, the same people who call me a “race-baiter,” “race hustler,” and “plantation overseer,” would say the same about MLK. In fact, conservatives at the height of the civil rights movement, called MLK and other civil rights leaders, guess what? Socialists and commies!!! LOL! Which lends credence to the notion that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I would add (in paraphrase) that while it is true that history does repeat itself, it does first as tragedy and then as farce.

Finally, I won’t get into it as deeply as I should (perhaps at a later date), but they’re coming after social security -- again. Social Security, people, is a manufactured crisis. There is no death knell tolling for Social Security and with minor tweaks, it could go on perpetuity. Watch out for the Goobers coming after Social Security and for their bleats around the deficit. But those thoughts are for another day.

Well, that’s it. I probably had more thoughts to share, but in the process of thinking more thoughts, I forgot the ones I wanted to post here...

BTW, don’t think so much, it makes my dick itch.

Love,

Eddie