That leads me on this phenomenal occurrence to a somewhat complicated apprehension of stressed and pressured lives where the second thought may not have time and space to develop, emerge and be acted upon as right and true in many individual lives causing a collision of misconstrued actualities. "The electricity's off!" "I heard it's all over town!" "Someone said five power lines went down!" "It may be terrorists! They said they'll try to hit utilities!" "I heard we may be out for weeks!" "Better get to the grocery store before stuff's all gone!" At that point the first one is never going to say that s/he realized immediately subsequent that the dishwasher was running and toast had just popped out of the little oven.

Perhaps that's what started some gas lines hereabouts that stretched for nearly immoveable blocks late last fall while rumors raged that costs would top out at around $6 by the following month, if not sooner. A rushed commuter paid $3.29 a gallon, thought "But last week it was only $2.46," never had time to reflect that the latter price was actually from the last year instead but did have a cell phone handy and a pressing urge to use it while catching up also on the latest popular hits and swerving to miss that dawdling driver going ten below the limit in the passing lane while other sleepy workers also dodged it and made mental notes about their day's "to-do" lists as they answered the rings of their cell phones. "It's $4.90 I heard now at the Stop 'N' Quick but they're nearly out! So hurry!"

The Second Thought. It could become a populist kind of New Age-y social movement. Think about it.

".... [Dreaming] is a remnant of a universal connectivity that exists in all matter. Self/nonself differentiation is the mark of sentience. Thus, dreaming is a necessary first evolutionary step for sentience to appear. Without dreams, no distinction between sentient and nonsentient behavior is even possible.... [Lucid dreams] are quite different from ordinary dreams in content and experience. They are distinguished by the awareness that one is dreaming while the dream progresses and the vivid details one can remember after the dream.... The most striking difference is the awareness of being split into two conscious minds: the sleeping person at home in bed, and the person experiencing the dream and knowing all along that he or she is in bed at home.... dreaming is the process required to form the most basic distinction that exists in the universe: I and it, subject and object.... shamans alter consciousness in order to heal and transform matter.... Recent publications about [Wolfgang] Pauli, who died in 1958, indicate that he was working toward a theory of the overlap of quantum physics and psychology and that this overlap was revealed to him by dream images.... [The implications of quantum physics] imply that observation disturbs and alters matter.... not only do our brains operate holographically but.... so does the world of matter and energy.... what does it mean to take care of one's feminine needs if one is a man?... Now in mythic terms, the feminine side of a man's body is the left side.... The planet is going through a left-side healing at this very moment.... We now know that it is possible for people to be fully conscious while remaining asleep and dreaming at the same time.... Just as we utilize models of the world in discerning what is real from unreal in waking life, we attempt to do the same things when we are dreaming.... For most of us the ability to distinguish what is real from unreal is a major concern. Consciousness is in a sense an ongoing battle in which an attempt to model reality correctly fights against our penchant for creating illusions.... lucidity is the booty to be won in the battle for clarity, whether one is dreaming or awake. This prize is constantly being sought through the practice of meditation and conscious living: a greater sense of personal presence and awareness with little lapses into fantasy and daydreaming or wasteful thinking. Instead of seeking the outside for satisfaction, one is satisfied just in being regardless of what state that being happens to be in.... according to the parallel worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, a quantum system can exist in a superposition of states. For example, an electron can exist as if it had an infinite number of locations in the vicinity of an atomic nucleus. As another example, an electron can spin clockwise and counterclockwise. It can also spin in both directions simultaneously. Now suppose that your brain is a quantum physical system capable of existing in a superposition of many possible states.... In each world there will be a memory trace but it will be impossible for [the observer] to know just which world 'he' was in at the previous observation.... Even though consciousness is developing in alternative worlds, nothing seems out of the ordinary because of the causality development in the outside world. The sensory overload of external experiences by far overcomes any 'unusual' developments. But during dreams and during these imaginal-realm encounters, the brain, operating quantum physically, deals with experiences that are not following a causal material law. An unobserved evolution of the brain takes place during temporal-lobe electrical excitation that causes the brain to shift states.... Then periods of introspection take place just after each electrical disturbance.... In the imaginal realm there is no anchor in material reality, no laws of classical material physics governing the connection between flashes.... Corbin refers to the additional senses as 'psycho-spiritual.' In my book The Eagle's Quest, I wrote about the five imaginal additional senses of the imaginal realm that shamans all seem to possess but which sadly elude most of us.... perhaps early prehumans lived their waking lives in a state of consciousness akin to what we would call dreams [Carl Sagan].... early humans had no real consciousness.... They walked around in an automaton state of perhaps trance consciousness akin to some form of dream state [Julian Jaynes].... Consciousness evolved.... Does consciousness just take a quantum leap every so often and then rest after its ordeal?... [Terence McKenna] characterized the richer reality of the imaginal realm as a 'crackling, electronic, hyperdimensional, interstellar, extraterrestrial, saucerian landscape, filled with highly polished curved surfaces, machines undergoing geometric transformations into beings, and thoughts condensing as visible objects.'... [he believes] that the dream exists in a higher-order spatial dimension.... Arnold Mindell in The Year I ... suggests that the whole world can be thought of and experienced as a global information network.... the idea is that our planet is a living conscious entity.... Most likely that evidence has reached us through the eyes of the artist.... though the worlds of physics and art appear to be dealing with seemingly opposed points of view, they have run remarkably parallel courses of discovery and vision [Leonard Shalin]. Just at the time the abstract concepts of relativity and quantum physics were emerging into the consciousness of the proverbial 'everyman,' artists were evoking surrealism and relativistic distortions of space, time, and matter on their canvases.... Picasso always said that he was not painting the bizarre, but attempting to show what he saw.... [The oversoul, the universal mind] knows that it knows.... pure awareness, consciousness without an object of consciousness.... sleep is found in group awareness, in religious orders, in political systems, and is a root cause of all suffering for it tends to maintain the nightmarish quality of the dream, as if the dreamer were separated from all other sentient beings.... A revolution in a country is the big dreamer turning over in his sleep.... if one changed the way in which one observed oneself, the result could seemingly be miraculous."
-- The Dreaming Universe by Fred Alan Wolf M.D., published 1994

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"We create all the time a model of self in the world. It is continuously built up from and checked against sensory information and backed up by memory. The result is that we seem to be a person located inside a body, perceiving a stable external world."
-- Dr. Jayne Gackenbach

"The artist is the antennae of the race."
-- Ezra Pound

"To devote oneself to puzzling fictions does not mean to be an artist, but being an artist means enduring the wind from the worlds of art which are altogether unlike our world, but tremendously influencing it. In those worlds there are neither causes nor consequences, neither time nor space, neither the corporeal nor the incorporeal, and these worlds are innumerable."
-- Alexander Blok, Russian poet

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Many people say they don't remember dreaming, or their dreams, but there are very effective and well-tried and true techniques for reclaiming them and natural recall abilities. Numerous reliable hardcopy and on-line resources are available for exploring and developing that interesting exploration of consciousness and knowing. Dream events are the stuff of painting and poetry as sifted through waking understanding and interpretation. Two verses of mine, the recent "The Human Beings" and much earlier "The Nail Under Your Sandal's Strap," are examples of that reordering of dreamscape to verbal lucidity. A painting relevent to that, and not on-line, is one entitled "No Curtain Call," demonstrating, if nothing else, that art as well as science may derive in whole or part from that connective to universal and divine consciousness and direction. Holy texts including the Bible are replete with instances of God speaking to His people in what we call ordinary and lucid dream states. That record and experience also points out the travesty of human enslavement, forcing any of God's creation to go against those spiritual messages, insights and directions by material force against international and divine law, over-riding "free will," which is on some level God's will, and thereby bringing on the rippling effects of calamity, evil, horror and harm, and human and divine madness, anger. "Might is not right," which can be taken in several ways also. Reason is the antithesis of restriction, mental and physical, for those thinking and behaving truly lawfully. Unity in diversity means tolerant accommodation for all the facets and aspects and manifestations of holy Spirit as revealed through creation and as they really are without illusion, falseness or fraudulency. One cannot know others or God without knowing one's self honestly, nor is forcing a false identity on anyone else or voluntarily adopting one personally or as a group anything but a pathology that needs to be examined and corrected. Insisting upon misrepresentations and hypocrisies, in other words unacknowledged and unatoned sins, is not a good way to die. One cannot meet God as a lie in this world or any other one, or for that matter truly and really know another human being, adult or child, either.

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Graphic above: Caroline Ross (ACR Board Member and regular contributor front row left) as a child and her cousins all cheerily sitting together on a stoop

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For Sappho,
a stupid little pome
to the home
of spiritual poverty,
deafness and blindness.

Hell-O.
It's a place and people in daze
who've found
perversely innovative ways
to violate laws
of God and man,
creating new abominations
on the land,
including viruses and
mutations,
in and from what once was
a great and valued nation
now sunk
to the depths
of depravity and privation,
still rejecting
salvation
in the main
drag.
No one can be forced
to their knees really.
It has to be done
voluntarily.
Otherwise,
it's as meaningless
as those words and lives
to date.
It's never too late
for anyone still breathing
but compromised
to wake up,
fess up,
and give up
what isn't right
or real
or theirs
or justified.
So long, babies,
and goodbye.
I'll just say I never knew you,
and I know the reverse is true.
A lie can't do anything
in the end but die.
Only what's true is immutable
and immortal.