#chuck klosterman

For most of human history, the act of dreaming was considered deeply important, almost like a spiritual interaction with a higher power. Three thousand years ago (assuming Fomenko was wrong), Tibetan monks would teach themselves to lucid dream in order to pursue enlightenment through a process called Dream Yoga. Around 1619, philosopher René Descartes forwarded his take on the so-called Dream Argument, the quintessential distillation of the “Maybe this isn’t really happening” dorm room conversation. The zenith of dream seriousness occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, defined by the work of Sigmund Freud (who thought dreams were everything) and his adversarial protégé Carl Jung (who thought dreams were more than everything— they were glimpses into a collective unconscious, shared by everyone who’s ever lived). But soon after World War I, this mode of thinking slowly started to crumble. The ability to map the brain’s electrical activity started in 1924—and from that point forward, dreams increasingly mattered less. The last wide-scale attempt at cataloging a database of human dreams dissipated in the sixties. In 1976, two Harvard psychiatrists proposed the possibility that dreams were just the by-product of the brain stem firing chaotically during sleep. Since then, the conventional scientific sentiment has become that—while we don’t totally understand why dreaming happens—the dreams themselves are meaningless.

Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

"There was no one else like them, except for everybody."

"Art and love are the same thing. It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."

Art and love are the same thing: it’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.