Dream Log: Don't Do It, Data!

"I dreamt I was walking with my father to his house and we got lost in a church basement that opened into a marsh.

"Bad Things Happen When the Birds Gather"

I began writing Our Gods Wear Spandex on September 11, 2001. For some reason I can only ascribe to my Holy Guardian Angel, I wasn't in the WTC PATH station around 9 AM that morning. 

Doctors, Doorways and Dimensions, Part One

One of the main tenets of my research is that our most resonant pop culture is a kind of lucid dreaming, in which the creator acts as a guide for a shared visionary experience with the audience. 99.9% of the crap out there is immune to this process and is produced for reasons that are entirely mundane or cynical. 

The Owls Are Not What They've Seen

During my Operation Trojan Horse re-read I kept seeing the year of my birth- 1966- recur throughout the text. 

Dream Log: Ghosts and Rockets

I wanted to keep the latest installment of Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins above the fold because the feedback it inspired was so fantastic I didn't want to stem the flow, but I needed to write an addenda while the information was still fresh.

Mindbomb: Eldritch Dimensions

Maurice Masse's passport to Magonia, July 1, 1965

This series -- which started as a look at comic book sorcerers and their real-world parallels and grew far beyond my expectations -- began with "The Possessed," a Doctor Strange story in which interdimensional alien walk-ins possess the citizens of a Bavarian hamlet. 

Brains, the Final Frontier

I've thought for years that conscious attention is only a tiny fraction of our consciousness. Turns out I may be right. 

Check out this article on the decision making process.

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought. 

Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice. "We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. 

"But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

My Favorite Nightmares

Self-portrait, 1985

I came to a stunning realization over the weekend; my most vivid memories are of nightmares that I had as a child. 

I'm Only Sleeping

So I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I was dying of a heart attack. Or at least that's what I told myself was happening. 

The Lucid Hallucinations of Trevor Von Eeden

You find wisdom in 

the strangest places

Well, it's that time of year again; Slave to the Gods mode. Plenty of hot coffee and too many sunrises peeking in through the window.

Entrainment Tonight: On to the Next One

When you sift through all of the strange symbolism manifesting itself in the culture you have to ask yourself two questions- what does it mean and who put it there? At this stage in the game, intentional symbolism in movies, videos, games, etc. isn't really very interesting to me, in and of itself.

Secret Sun Best of the Zeros: The Movies

The Zeros were a decade in which memes from the underground bubbled up into the mass media and took over the mainstream in a way I would never thought possible. Twenty years ago topics like secret societies and sacred symbolism were purely fringe stuff. Today, they're literally kids' stuff. 

TVOD: Fringe Pierces the Veil

At a point when lesser shows begin to bleed away their mojo, Fringe continues to conjure up the numinous counter-reality of a dream within a dream.

 

The Red Book: Jung-Mania hits Manhattan

 Hmm. Well, The Red Book is the big story in publishing this season, which on one hand is exciting because it seems such an opportune time for it to be revealed, and unbelievably depressing since it sets us up for yet another round of the commodification of Jung. 

Harryhausen the Magus

 

I've talked a lot about Jack Kirby on this blog, but haven't done much on Ray Harryhausen, who wasn't quite as ubiquitous in my life but had almost as much impact, if not more.

 

Lee Perry: Rest in Dub

There was a time in my life when I lived Dub morning, noon and night. I'm talking the old school Dub mainly, but also a lot of the work that people like Adrian Sherwood and Jack Dangers were putting out there as well. 

Back From The Edge of the World (2009 Edition)

Front row: Christopher Partridge, Jeff Kripal and Michael Murphy 

Second row: George Stephanopolous, Ed May, Dulce Murphy, Dean Radin, Victoria Nelson, Mason Gamble, Erik Davis. 

Third row: Doug Moench, Paul Selig, Mitch Horowitz, Larry Sutin, CK, Collin Eyre and Scott Jones.

Well, Time flies and Time crawls. But sometimes you enter a state in which Time flows in such a manner that it seems to expand and contract in an entirely different and yet totally satisfactory fashion. 

Inner Space Capsule

First of all, let me apologize for the extremely infrequent updates here. I've been working seven days a week, anywhere from 12 to 17 hours a day. Whatever downtime I've had has been spent with my family. 

Gone Fishin'

I set out at the beginning of the summer to figure out what this blog was going to be about and what it was meant to accomplish. 

Videodrome As Prophecy

I'll be at the New York Comic Con this weekend so I asked Joe Linsner to do a guest spot eleaborating on some interesting points he raised in an email. I think this piece is right up the Synchromystic alley, from the perspective of a guy with a lot of experience in the subconscious mind.