Fascination and concern about experiences in dreams is one of humanity’s oldest and most universal cultural traits, tracing back unrecorded millennia into deep time. Psychologists Frederick L. Collidge and Thomas Wynn, authors of How to Think Like a Neanderthal, writing in Psychology Today, argued that more meat in the diet of Australopithecines, allowed for larger brain development. This made Australopithecines more perceptive, and that allowed them to better assess risks, and led to them feeling safe enough to sleep on the ground, instead of in trees. This resulted in better more restful sleep and dreaming, which changes in turn led to the emergence of the genus Homo.1
As far back as we have records, one of the most important things culturally about dreams is that they have always been recognized as a distinct state of consciousness, and that some but not all of the information that came from them had a source outside of spacetime. What today we would call the nonlocal domain.
Oneiromancy is the term science uses to include all the various rituals, read protocols because that is what rituals are, that humanity has come up with to seek insight into the future through […]
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Stephan: There are many ways to awaken to the primacy of consciousness, lucid dreaming is one of them, as this story describes.
“The farther away I go,” Alex wrote, “the closer I’ll be to you.”
A week later, she lay dead on the floor of a middle school bathroom in Thailand. That was three years after she had shown up late for dinner with a black eye from her first seizure. It was eight years after our first date climbing trees in Central Park.
“That breeze, that tickled your ear?” she wrote once, when there was just an ocean between us. “That was me.”
Her final letter ended with a question. “How long until we see each other again?”
It was the night of her funeral when it happened. She was there, waiting on the far bank of a raging river, radiant with red hair flying. I began to wade across, but the black current swept me away before I could reach her. She came again another night, as I slept, trapped behind thick glass we pressed our palms against. Then, another dream—this time of Alex in a hospital waiting room. “It isn’t her,” the nurse insisted, summoning security. Unable to contemplate nothingness, the mind can […]
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A new genetic study of ancient individuals in the Americas and their contemporary descendants finds that two populations that diverged from one another 18,000 to 15,000 years ago remained apart for millennia before mixing again. This historic “re-convergence” occurred before or during their expansion to the southern continent.
