Short stories can deal so effectively in dark matter. The best are like suitcase nuclear devices – small, disproportionately powerful, capable of demolishing normality and morality. But in addition to dosage and cultural diet, short stories provide us with something else that’s a tonic in these times: they glory in being read aloud.
From a hard-nosed neuroscientific perspective, the subjective dream is merely an incidental, meaningless side-effect of REM sleep. It’s just a dream. The phenomenological study of dreams, however, which dates back millennia, has yielded a vast and intriguing literature of psychological, cultural and mythological observations. What might an integration of the science and subjectivity of REM sleep and dreaming reveal?
I contemplated packing up my life once more and going to stay with my parents until this was all over, but an urgent inner voice told me I had things to do right where I was. After an entire young adult life marked by travel, I had to learn to stay still, and do so entirely alone. The hardest part was finding new ways to keep time. I no longer had big plans to set the rhythms of my life to, and had to rely on the kind of rote daily routine I had always avoided to keep myself sane. I not only embraced routine, I became it: reading and writing in the morning, working out and editing video in the afternoon, Zoom calls with friends and sleeplessly waiting for the next day each evening.
Early on, I knew I had to write every day. Not solely as a career or passion, but as self-preservation. Writing, to me, was home. I grew up in a family of Cuban exiles, mis abuelos on both sides, Pops too. Every Sunday, they told stories about Cuba, a place I couldn’t touch or hear or smell, but that I could, at least in my mind, see. At that time, there was a physical distance I could do nothing about. I remade my family’s home in my mind off their stories.
“Bedeviled” admirably insists on recording the plain history of science. It just so happens that the history of that most rational of human endeavors reads at times like a Gothic tale, one replete with evil geniuses, time travelers and uncanny intelligences lurking in reality’s obscure corners.
In 1772, aged twenty-nine, the English naturalist Joseph Banks gave up traveling abroad. He had sailed around the world with Captain James Cook on the