http://www.cdreview.com/bookexcerpts~newsflashes ExcerptsThe Shamans' Dream HistoryFrom DREAM IN THE NEWS, Vol. 38By John Briggs
Flashes Imagine you're telling your psychotherapist about the images from a dream you just had.
In my dream porn stars are earning pocket money from sex-aid factories that are selling a line of casts of the stars' genitalia. Source: "Giving the customer what he wants," The Economist, Feb. 14, 1998, p.22.
I dream I'm a Japanese photojournalist writing a book about a place called "The Lucky Hole." I write that this place was "a series of cubicles separated by plywood partitions, with curtains substituting for doors at the entrances. 'Lucky Hole' referred to an opening that had been drilled in the plywood partition. The customer entered a cubicle, removed his trousers, grasped the handrail attached to the partition, and inserted the most precious part of his body... "On the other side of the partition was a woman (one assumes), who would massage the penis protruding from the hole." I write that "when I first heard about Lucky Hole, I was amazed at the ingenuity of the idea, thinking, 'This is what sex will be like in the future.'" Source: Akira Suei, Araki, Tokyo Lucky Hole (Köln: Taschen, 1997), p. 14.
I dream someone shows me a suicide machine called the "mercitron." The suicide lies with her arm strapped down so a needle can drip harmless saline into her vein. She hits a switch on the device, releasing a solution of thiopental that puts her to sleep. A minute later, her veins fill with a lethal solution of potassium chloride. Source: Lisa Belkin, "Doctor Tells of First Death Using His Suicide Device," The New York Times, June 6, 1990, p. 1.
I dream I'm watching a vast blue, orange, gold and red cloud-plant rising over my city. The stalk of this plant unfolds sideways, blossoming into higher, faster clouds that droop over. This scene is so beautiful I do not realize that the skin is falling off my body. Sources: http://iris.npr.org/plweb-cgi/fastweb:getdoc+npr+npr17222+4+wAAA+Hiroshima; Alexander H. Leighton, "That Day at Hiroshima, Atlantic, Oct. 1946, p. 87.
In my dream I learn that law officers are hunting the Polish capital of Warsaw for a deranged killer and that hundreds of people have telephoned the police to report suspecting their neighbors. Source: The Associated Press, June 18, 1993.
I dream I have just had a cyst removed from my ovary. The doctor tells me that mine had partially formed teeth in it. He says that cysts like this sometimes contain tangled masses of hair or sweat glands. Source: Paul. G. Donohue, M.D. "Dermoid with teeth," The Union News, June 6, 1997.
In my dream I hear terrible news about China. Little girls and girl babies are being eliminated "on a massive scale." One American who volunteered at an orphanage in Guangzhou says she witnessed the disposal of the bodies of abandoned girls who had died at the orphanage. She said they were carted out in wheelbarrows, tossed into a dumpster and ultimately taken away by municipal garbage collectors. Other reports tell of Chinese people using fetuses for food and health tonics and Chinese authorities shooting convicts and harvesting their organs for sale to wealthy Westerners needing transplants. A former member of China's Public Security Bureau says entrepreneurs are even prepared to "take the prisoner's skin." But China isn't alone. Women in India are selling their organs to the well to do, and laboratories around the world are fattening up baboons and other animals so their organs can be transferred into humans. Soon there may be a man with the heart of an ape, the kidneys of a pig and the eyes of a dead convict. Sources: Bob Herbert, "China's Missing Girls," The New York Times, Oct. 30, 1997, p. A31; Catherine S. Manegold, "Senate Told of China Convicts Shot for Organs," The New York Times, May 5, 1995 p. A 10; Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, First Session, May 4, 1995, U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 19; David J. Rothman, "The International Organ Traffic," The New York Review of Books, Mar. 26, 1998, p.14; "Regulating the Body Business," Scientific American, Mar. 1996, p. 12.
I dream I live in Argentina. One day my wife, Quintela, is expecting a baby. The next she is "disappeared" off a Buenos Aires street. Years later I learn that the military of my country abducted her to a camp. There a man named Bianco made her give birth to our son by Cesarean section. After the operation, Bianco ordered Quintela taken to an airport. Along with other women who had given birth, she was stripped naked and taken up in the plane over the Atlantic and thrown out the door. I'm sure my son, Pablo, is living with Bianco but the boy doesn't want to know anything about me or his mother. He says he's afraid to jeopardize the comfortable middle-class life he has enjoyed while living in Bianco's household.
Source: Marta Gurvich, "Argentina's Dapper State Terrorist," IF Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 1998, Vol 2, No. 5, p. 5; Calvin Sims, "Argentine Tells of Dumping 'Dirty War' Captives Into Sea, The New York Times, Mar. 13, 1995, p. A1.
In the first scene of my "embalming dream" I'm the son of a chemistry professor who turned the empty shell of the founder of the Soviet State, Vladimir Lenin, (vacated of his internal organs) into a rosy imitation of life. Although I long to be a research chemist, my father insists I join the team administering Lenin periodic chemical baths and making certain that he can be displayed under glass like an insect in its chrysalis. After 18 years, Lenin's successor, Stalin, decides to fire my father and me from the staff because we're Jews. In the second scene I'm a different scientist attempting to preserve the corpse of Mao Zedong, Communist leader of one billion Chinese. We make a mistake and inject too much formaldehyde. Mao's face becomes round as a ball, his neck the width of his head; his ears stick out at right angles and formaldehyde oozes from his pores. In third scene I'm another member of the new team attending Lenin's corpse. To make ends meet in the new capitalist economy we have begun plugging holes in the faces of millionaire Russian gangsters. Our charges for mummification range from a low of $1,500 US to $10,000 if a body has to be reassembled after a bomb. We also sell coffins. Customers may choose from a wooden model stamped with "Made in the USA" or a crystal Russian version. Source: www.villagevoice.com/issues/9943/kalfus.shtml. "Better Dead Than Read" by Ken Kalfus; Lincoln Kaye, "Leaders Under Glass," World Press Review, Dec. 1994, p. 30.;Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, Lenin's Embalmers London: Harvill Press, 1997.
I dream I am the member of a group of 140 people following a man named Chen Heng-ming from our home in Japan to Garland, Texas. Chen has told us that on March 31, 1998, God will appear on Texas cable Channel 18 to announce the time of His arrival on earth. When God doesn't show, Chen says that he's concluded his prediction "can be considered nonsense." But then he urges everyone to "keep watching." Source: Ted Anthony, "Leader Scoffs at Own Prophecy After God Doesn't Show," The Associated Press, Albuquerque Journal, Mar. 26, 1998, p. A 5.
I dream that I'm a man living in an ice age. One day walking across the mountains I get caught in a snowstorm and die with my copper headed ax, my bow and arrows and my bag of grain beside me. Ten thousand years later I emerge from the glacier and someone finds me. I'm transferred from Switzerland to Italy in a refrigerated car at a constant temperature of 6 degrees below freezing and 98 percent humidity under heavy police escort because of threats against me by a terrorist group. Source: David Willie from Rome, BBC, Jan. 17, 1998.
I dream I'm about to give birth. The doctor arranged to have my husband's sperm fertilize my eggs in a test tube and then he implanted them in me. Now I discover someone else's eggs somehow got implanted as well. One of my newborn twins is black and the other white. After many months together, I know I love both my boys equally. But I realize the only solution is to give one of them to his genetic mother. Source: Jim Yardley, "After Embryo Mix-up, Couple Say They Will Give Up a Baby, New York Times, Mar. 30, 1999, p. B1.
I dream I log onto the internet looking for the unfertilized eggs of a beautiful models I heard are being auctioned off online. Do I have enough money to allow my sperm to mate with one of these eggs? At the website I see the egg-producers' faces and read: "This is the first society to truly comprehend how important beautiful genes are to our evolution. Just watch television and you will see that we are only interested in looking at beautiful people. From the network anchors, to supermodels that appear in most advertisements, our society is obsessed with youth and beauty." In my dream, the bids for the eggs start at $15,000-$150,000 US dollars. Source:http://ronsangels.com/auction.html
I dream I am a man freezing and unfreezing my pet dog, Franklin, in order to figure out how to have my own body frozen and revived in the future. A few years ago my mother had her head frozen, believing that one day scientists will be able to grow her a new body. Source: Alison Hawthorne Deming, "Return" in The Edges of the Civilized World, New York: Picador, 1988, pp. 170-171.
I dream that every day as I drink my morning coffee and drive to my office more than 50 species of animals and plants completely cease to exist. At the same time, two humans pop into being every second. Source: Wade Davis, Shadows in the Sun (Washington: Island Press, 1998), p. 113.
I dream the Russians have put a big mirror in the night sky so they can shine a spotlight down on cities and create an artificial day. Advertisers plan to launch billboards in space so they can sell products. Sources: Warren E. Leary, "Russian Space Mirror Bends Light of Sun into the Dark," New York Times, Feb. 5, 1993, p. A 6; Malcolm W. Browne, "City Lights and Space Ads May Blind Stargazers," New York Times, May 4, 1993, p. C 1.
I dream I am Merhan Karimi Nasseri who lives stranded in the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for 11 years because someone stole my passport. I subsists in the airline waiting areas on handouts, eat at the airport pizzeria, sleep on a bench, smokes my pipe and listen to the radio. I am happy. In 1999, when I finally receive immigration papers, I feels sick about leaving and have no idea where to go. Source: Suzanne Daley, "11 Years Canged in an Airport; Now He Fears to Fly," New York Times, Sept. 7, 1999, p. A 4.
I dream about Ivan, a 32-year old silverback gorilla who lives most his life caged in a Tacoma, Washington, shopping mall. At his retirement, he is flown by jet for his remaining years to an artificial rain forest in Atlanta, Georgia. Source: The Associated Press, Mar. 17, 1995.
I dream my name is Shingo Hagiwara and I am happy that I have fallen in love with a cartoon character in a computer video. Shiori Fujisaki is very beguiling, with big dreamy eyes and a shapely figure. Now she looks at me from the screen with her sweet, melancholy face. Though I know that face is made out of only a few digital lines, they're all that's needed. When I tell her I would like to date her again, she says, "I like it... My heart is throbbing." I'm overjoyed. Recently I bought CDs of Shiori's songs, "Teach Me, Mr. Sky" and "Let's Go With the Wind." She sings beautifully. I tell the world, "Everybody has one character for whom he could sacrifice his life." In my dream I know perfectly well Shiori is a cartoon, but she is the one I would die for. Source: Andrew Pollack, "Japan's Newest Young Heartthrobs Are Sexy, Talented and Virtual, "The New York Times, Nov. 25, 1996, p. D5.
The man in my dream is in bed asleep when his wife comes in and cuts off his penis. She throws it in the bushes. He finds it and has it sewed back on. This leads to a brief career modeling naked for women's magazines. Afterward he becomes ordained as a Las Vegas minister specializing in marriage ceremonies. He says this new career was suggested by his agent. Source: "From cutting edge to cleric," The Union News, Dec. 1 1996, p. 2.
I dream that more and more people are paying merchandisers for permission to dress up as manufactured food items. Some are becoming M&M candies; others cardboard boxes of McDonald's French fries. Source: Kathleen Schalch, "Marketing Halloween," http.://www.npr.org/programs/morning/archives/1998/981029.me.html. |