You can enter rem states as you're writing. That is, you write from inside the vision. Or you can wake from the rem state and write as you slosh in the shallows of the remembered dream/rem sea. What keeps you from completely surfacing when you rise out of rem is the silver-fish of a phrase or scene you use as a portal back to the dream. Scribbling down this silver-fish-phrase can keep the dream from sliding away into opaque depths. That's why I have my log next to my pillow and a pencil there too. A pencil writes at any angle so you can stay pretty asleep or in rem. This cactus piece was a rem vision I had from semi-waking. I wrote it down as if I were writing a letter to you. I find myself talking to a cactus. (Since I was a child talking to trees before I learned that one did not talk about talking to trees, 'talking to' meant 98% 'listening to' trees.) Or in this case, cactus. This was a proper desert with dramatic hilly ranges of lion-colored sand. I felt like la petite princesse -- well, ok, la princesse tres rondelette. If I looked thru the earth, I saw the bottoms of kangaroo feet nearer to my right and less far than at home so tal vez or perhaps this immense sand sea was In America del Sur?   more »

Astonished weren't you to notice how thoughtlessly and/or belligerently people drive? I still reel when I realize that hurtle-&-brake and jack-rabbit starting, & the full-monty of aggressive driving saves you, if at all, 75 seconds per ½ hour of nutville rage-ridden more dangerous driving.Let's get into some weeds here. The devil and the eco-driver (the smart hypermiler) is in the details. I am not an Xtreme Hypermiler. I don't draft off semis. Wayne Gerdis, the perhaps mad Ty Cobb of Xtreme Hypermilers drafts off the Big Trucks. Any momentum he has 'bought' with irreplaceable, precious dead-dinosaur fuel, he will fight to use rather than waste. Thus he takes freeway offramps at an horrific speed so as not to lose the gained-momentum from the straightaway. (I do the opposite because I'm so respectful of the car's underpinings.)   more »

Hurray. A daily chance to practice your best deft attention skills and come to the rescue of your beloved & beleaguered planet at the same time. What a deal.Hypermiling is smart eco-driving. As with most skills, it will take a day or a week and a lifetime to Get Good. Send Inner Perf to Fiji for mas grog The basic of Hypermiling is that you evolve form a leadfoot to a sugarfoot . With accomplished hypermiling, you'll be hypersmiling all the way to the Make the Planet Happier And Be Less of a Mindless Wasteful Boor Bank.   more »

As we study [other] dreams more assiduously, we can, will, & must speculate with intricate admiration, desire, rage even about how in all that absurd ebullience of starry profusion we take one step upon a planet, how there is one dragonfly, one piece of French toast? Or more achingly, how in the face of a million steps and a million dragonflys, we could have any moment of distress or depression or kill each other for striped cloths?   more »

“This is a subject so difficult to talk about that my throat constricts as the words rise into the air. I who have lived with this knowledge for 23 years can hardly breathe to speak. Yes, I have come to tell you that what is evil ain’t always bad.”

                 craig charles

Belle Z. Babe spoke at the Tribunal as the lidless eyes of the Judges bore their fear, distaste, and fury like crossbows into her heart.    more »

Next time you hear the phrase 'collateral damage,' I want you to leap up out of your chair and start screaming Too boat-rocking for you? Too impolite? People will question your sanity? Your urbanity? .. You get to scream. The dead are very quiet. Perfectly polite. Perfectly polite are the collaterally damaged. You get to scream the scream they can not. .. Doing what’s right ain’t comfortable, ain’t polite. Solidarity of the living. The civil right to remain unmaimed..

goldsworthy helbeck crags cumbria 

Well, if every damn one of us leapt up and started screaming any time we heard some obscene mealy-mouthed insane euphemism like collateral damage, may be we could make a dent in their denial systems that lead to mutilated children – not collateral damage – children mutilated.   more »

Sherlock Detail, Sherlock Holmes’ cousin thrice-removed, was sitting at the Caffè Museo on Third Street in San Francisco. Museums are always a jolt, a lightning bolt. Ms. Detail is a soul mate of Mr. Holmes as well as the great grandchild of Mr. Holmes’ cousin, Daphne Detail.

                         andy goldsworthy horse chestnut leaves

Pursuant to my request my pal Sherlock Detail sent me her notes, her mental graffiti, from how a great detective practices keen observation, deft attention even at lunch. Wake up, smell the roses, & notice/sketch the rest of your surroundings too, as ‘twere. Notice that as you might in Dream Notes, Sherlock Detail separates her lists with semicolons. 03.29. 08 Girl, strawberry italian soda backlit;    more »

Mr. Bin woke up on planet Earth after a long tho quick journey from the planet Utter, part of the planet flock shepherded by the sun Flut whose rays were song and whose creatures subsisted by songosynthesis, whose blood was ruled by songoglobin, hurray.

                                                                 feitelson

Spice travel (space + time travel)was daily among earthers, but few were not merely at the mischievous mercy of the spice tides, and treated dreams as tangential not essential to their life travels and travails. Most kids, on, say, continent America could ride a bike, but few could surf the dreamsea (the spice sea to the cognoscenti) and fewer were asked at the breakfast table, “How was your night at school?”   more »

Here below is a real-life reverie vision as it transpired and as I transcribed it in my log in real reverie time.

                      andy goldsworthy

Who knew?[It is always a surprise when matters coalesce in a retrospectively obvious but druidically mischievous and profound way.] Having learned about waking the jewels ever luminous like constellations under our feet, not on the phones, not on the internets, the tvs, the telegraphs, the radios, but on the ley lines, I found myself lighting the sparkle in the deep earths of New Hampshire USA. Thru the earth (as whale song carries thru the seas from even one ocean to another), I felt the rustle of the tired feet of billions of women who do the labor of the world, who cook, who sweep, who endure. And the dancing feet of little girls whose dreams are not all ashes in the cooking fires yet.   more »

There is a shameful 15% Caucus Skew which cheats Hillary's voters of their rightful share of pledged delegates & popular votes.

                                                                janosh

Hundreds of thousands of older women for Hillary are disappeared in Caucus States because they have a dread of falling and dare not go out to caucus. "Just because I'm sick doesn't mean I can't think!" This is exactly the kind of grotesque anti-democratic injustice that the (non-lemming) superdelegates were designed to account for in their thinking.   more »

Now that we’ve established some tactics and practices and habits of keen and poignant observation and a more holographic engagement with the compelling and darling and daring language of our electric surround, we only need to add that deft attention to our reveries and, presto! we have woven lucid dreaming with our lucid waking.

                                       calder

Consider that the sunlight skills are forest skills and the starlight skills are underwater skills, like looking at stars reflected in a still pool. The medium is different. In your present earth-tethered guise, you may be more consciously accustomed to the dryland qualities of perception and memory, but using attention deftly and deliberately is universal.   more »

In 189,800 hours of our 569,400 hour life, one-third of our terrestrial span, we are dream toddlers. However august and accomplished we become in the solid, roughly sequential, daylight portion of our life adventure, we are untutored and gawky, if not helpless, in our dream experience. Dreaming happens to us. Our parents were ignorant of dream existence and its radical rules.

                                                  bush yam lorna fencer

Perhaps it was thought enough for the homo sapiens to master the obviously demanding rules and consequences of K1 day life. However, the haphazard approach to dream experience has had dread consequences. The next stage of the evolving creature, homoa jubilant, will need to learn at least the rudiments of dream will, dream action, dream manners, and especially dream humor, or we will not be admitted to the Wider Galactic Community.   more »

The first one who died, my father, I was numb. The second one who died, my first husband, I screamed. By the tenth big death before I was 29, I was pissed. Furious, not drunk. This Heaven-and-Hell folderol is a misleading way to talk about the Land of the Dead because though the Heaven-mongering Christians, who began as a simple religion of the powerless, have had the power, the press, and the propaganda for a lot of centuries, the AfterLife Truth is much more complex, and, luckily, a ton more fun.

                  andy goldsworthy nvm digital photo

I didn’t think when I was a child feeding the shiny newborn black-and-white Holstein calves their buckets of faintly pink milk that I would grow up to become an expert in death.    more »

Holoku, hulaku. Hulaku -- little dances, gestures of admiration for the way words play, effervesce, coalesce. A formal haiku of 5/7/5 syllables per line is a single drop of dew on a leaf.

                                                       miro

An holoku is less formal but no less earnest. It is not confined or refined by the number of syllables but by the dimensions of a notion, a small exploration. In your log or journal let an image or a notion drift into your mind like an exquisite small cloud. Listen to its story and write down the words. You’ll learn unexpected qualities or narratives about the object or notion. Lead Pb82 enjoys being moveable type and is imprisoned and tortured to be bullets. It never had occurred to me to listen to lead.    more »

Druids have always believed in an absolute democracy of knowledge – or more important of knowing. (Not so much the stuff, but the process.) The treasure, the golden, the untarnishable joy is knowing and sharing it with abandon and glee, with reverence, reverie, and revelry.

                                   neatorama .. franz88

I imagine it would be levitatingly fine to go to Paris, France. But not everyone gets to see the Seine. Yet they must not have lives of regret. The druid point is to be jolly and amazed wherever you are. Not some ‘positive thinking’ abstraction, but honed & honeyed perception. Besides, think of how well that’ll serve you if you get to Paris, France.    more »

I daresay we’ve illuminated enough more of our enchanting consciousness now to assay a foray druidesquely into a wider context, beyond the strictly personal. This may be a shock. After the unassailable trust we’ve been revealing & forging between you and the whole wide AllElse worlds, to, with that opened mind, leap d’artagnan-like into understanding our druid duty toward W.A.R. is a shock. Pero c’est la vie verdad. But that is actual life and its juggling. Why you’re learning to be an expert clown. Why we take so much Vitamin I.

                      after franz marc

What we have to figure out each of us is Meow MEOW, meow – meow is the mnemonic device for the Moral Equivalent Of War. An antidote to what A.Einstein in 1932 calls “the war menace”; “the dark places of human will and feeling”; to taking the “latent” hatred and destructive passion and raising it to “the power of a collective psychosis.”    more »

When you need a restorative spate of recreation, play with mnemonic(knee-mahn-ik)devices. A mnemonic device is some nifty trick so you can remember something. A lifetime later I still remember A Rat In Tom’s House Might Eat Tom’s Ice Cream as the mnemonic device whose first letters spell arithmetic. George Eaton’s Old Grandmother Rode A Pig Home Yesterday spells geography. Muy yum.

                                                     wayne thiebaud

The enduring quality of a mnemonic device speaks in miniature to the astonishing power of story to the human brain – we really prefer stories to crack or even chocolate.    more »

IF you're looking to give yourself or an other a darn nifty & handy present, consider the KitchenAid Immersion Blender KHB100. I was surfing and saw America's Test Kitchen rating immersion blenders and they said the $50 KitchenAid with the metal wand had it all compared to any at twice the price. (This is not the one with fifty attachments. This one immerses and blends. It doesn't whisk.) It has 9 speeds or somesuch tho.

    finch sock .. cardinalcorner

Then there's the finch sock!   more »

My dear friend Sherrard Grey now gallivanting in the FarStars was the one person I could go grokkingly in the woods with. Many folk are pleasant or even riveting to hang out with. But only Sherrard could walk two feet down the sylvan path and with me exclaim again, “Oh look at the scarlet hogwort leaf!”

                          euro parl eu

Most folk quail or dim at constant daffy “Oh, look!” Sherrard could take it. It was a giga-treat to have someone besides The Blue and one’s own Jolly Brain to share the stupendousness with. The stupendous shock and surprise.   more »

Art, fencing, and invention all shared a creative quality or posture that Max coaxed into your body's and psyche's muscle memory by merrily hollering or hissing "Au point" at you for an hour every instant your body and mind lost the perfect deft balance good fencing requires.

                                  warhol

Poised. Equally ready to pounce or to retreat. Not relaxed, but not tense. It is this deft state that Max cajoled and bullied his fencers into maintaining. Properly performed, it became nearly effortless.   more »

Fegg. F[aberge]egg. Fegg. Simple, splendid, extravagant, delicious, reverent, jeweled. Fegg. It is seeing and tasting that richness in the little world that is fegg. One of the Earth Decorator's most fegg is, of course, the hummingbird, an outrageous jeweled miniature envied on all planets of all stars. "Ah, Madame Deco," an offworld Designer would sigh, hardly concealing stark envy, "How did you do it!?"

                                         MoMA

Planet Designers are a good lot on the whole in spite of their universally being riddled with admiration twinned with envy. It's just that when you see something unbearably well done--the concept, the craft, the flash, the diligence, it haunts the heart with gratitude that it has been done--and envy that you didn't think of it first. Gratitude and applause minutely outweigh envy.    more »

Remind yourself to practice shapeshifting your attention. Pay attention to your attention. Truly ingest, imbibe, embrace, caress – grok! – what you do your pas de deux with in the along of your every day. Pas de leaves. Pas de cat. Pas de pieds. Leaf dance. Cat dance. Feet dance.

                                    faberge

Keenly recall that if you lived in a featureless vacuum or even drifted in the starstudded reaches of vasty space -- to be set down in the impossible Faberge Egg of our beloved planet would take your breath away in marveling. So practice marveling.   more »

Presently Terran Incarnates have no inherent rights under Galactik Law. Presently Terran Incarnates have no inherent rights under Galactik Law. Only recently have Incarnates developed sufficient consciousness to be considered Galactiks rather than merely humans, the galactik slang for clever pets.

                                     nasa jpl

The raging Question that divides the Galactik Council is where the line is drawn for full sentience privileges. Terrans have been considered spiritual chattel, and few of these Earthers are given more than minimal attention by their occasionally resident Ethereal or Noncarnate. Among the Sentient Rights Party, those rare earnest Ethereals who do bother to honor and tend their Terrans, there is an outcry against Incarnate abuse -- abuse of the human creature    more »

Gleek and Rat Tooth glanced at each other with that fierce wry which was the psychic wampum between them. Dr. Sal Iva was outlining the Milk Team’s upcoming billion year K1 Project. From the galactikally gigantic sweet home sea of hula-sloshing and mesmerizing holorealitys which formed and transformed with the lyric of thought, the Milk Team was damned determined to sculpt a K1 stable dimension. A place, the first place really, where things were not air in weather, did not mogrify at whim.

                                           hiawatha belt wampum

That this notion strained galactik credulity, was scoffed at and reviled is part of the Chronicle. Sea people greet the idea of a ‘solid’ sturdy, stable. K or Kinesthetic with the derision that sleek and gliding sea-bound fish later greeted the clunky and dread-fomenting idea of horribly and cruelly lurching around in thin air on dry land. How truly awful. What kind of loonland weirdoes would want to do that?   more »

A tidbit from my good-works starving lawyer friend of 43 years. There's a part of the CA code called 5150 which refers to a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold for people who are "a danger to others ... including hearing voices telling them to kill other people."

                        harliban

Gods know Sicker Dick hears voices telling him to shock & awe 2000 bombsites in Iran. Sicker Dick is indisputably a danger to so many others.    more »

If we see consciousness vertically, a ladder to be climbed, we are falsely forced to see ourselves on the lower rungs staring up at the compassionate rump of the priest, guru, monk, shaman who precedes us to the heights.

                                                                            andy goldsworthy

"If, on the other hand, we rotate the axis of consciousness to be sideways, we can more correctly and coherently see the spectrum of our consciousness as including all the densities with no greater value implied. Just as in light, ultraviolet is not better than infrared, our less-dense experience is not better that our solid K1 experience, only different.    more »

Intra-realms study can strand you in twilight elfin grottos if you aren’t alert and grounded and re-grounded in K1. Just like the slippery delusion of Romance, the archetypal worlds can be damned seductive and dangerous.

                       flat earth woodcut unknown artist

Cleave to common sense and Keep your discernment. Then you can be enriched and enlivened. Huge quaffs of Irony-laced Humortinis are required. It is my belief and experience that conscious travel in Otro, in other realms, from Fantasy to Dream to Poesie is healthier and heartier than sly or slimy forays half-known. If you find yourself feeling off-balance or your physical vision blurring (a sign of too much trance work), back out into as much fascination with K1 AllElse as you can imbibe. There are reasons these matters have been kept occult for centuries. They aren’t without considerable danger. I am convinced that in the long run people are healthier dealing out loud with whispered matters and can take the elixirs of honey and of venom if trusted to Keep their darn feet – and head! -- on the ground. If, however, you go lurching off into LoonLand, you’ll just get all the nambypambys tuttutting and breathing fire about pagans and witches. Which is piffle of course, but stay smart as we begin our travels further afield.   more »

The Ords (who had shortened their name from Ordure) were odd ducks. Well, they weren’t really ducks, but they were damned peculiar. They worked for Lord Ord who was the Cosmic Keeper of the Odd, the Angels Too Fat To Dance on the Point of A Pin.

                                                 guillaume dargaud

His emblem was, proudly, a turkey buzzard in pink, rampant on a magenta field -- the colors of entrails as the Lesser Ords scoffed cheerfully. Vultures liked guts and gluck; rot was ripe to them. Suppuration was succulent. The more stinking the ooze, the more toothsome.   more »

"You mean you're finally going to tell us what it's like to be a ShapeShifter? Before we burn you at the stake? Now while the orange flames lick high waiting to eat you alive?"

                          terry pyles

"Yes," she said, "I will tell you now. ShapeShifters, seem, of course, monsters to the flat-minded. Being a ShapeShifter is like being a photographic negative, as if your skin, your flesh, were some magic emulsion upon which experience imprints, engraves itself. As if you were a soft, warm wax in which events impressed themselves like a seal. You are like some spy's 'multi-sense bug' which overhears oversmells, versees, overfeels, overtastes holds, records, keeps the vibrations of people's souls, of sentients' souls. And all is sentient. ShapeShifting is why you seem to know their deepest secrets. You do. Because to a rare degree, you *are* them.    more »

It is disconcerting to begin to accept least of all explore our gateau nature, our layer cake of multi-D and multi-T experiences. Multi-dimensional & multi-temporal. Most of us prefer the less vertigo of amnesia or what the Greeks call Lethe, the river of oblivion, of forgetfulness; or a half-live lethargy.

                                                wayne thiebaud

It is essential to always honor K1, our shared kinesthetically persistent layer of reality, and be able to move among suitable awarenesses with care and discernment (which is why drugs are so ugh for serious study. I don’t mean serious as in grim but as in concentrated/distilled.)   more »