"Dreams play a powerful role in Indigenous culture, serving as warning, insight, guidance, solace, or hope. Bawaajigan - an Anishinaabemowin word for dream or vision - is a collection of powerful literary short fiction by Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. Stories about the connection between the spirit world and everyday life and the rest of the cosmos; urban-fantasy and high-fantasy worlds; alternative histories, and alternative realities; brushes with the supernatural, the prophetic, the hallucinatory, and the surreal. Among these themes we find stories ranging from the gritty, the gothic, the comedic, and the heart-wrenchingly tragic: a tale about the state of sleep-deprivation that conjures an uncertainty as to where dream ends and reality begins; the ominous tension of television static that conjures a certainty of something terrible about to happen; encounters with spirit guides, and spirit enemies; confrontations with ghosts haunting residential school hallways, and ghosts looking on from the afterlife; and with concepts based on Ouija boards, bead-dreamers, Haudenosaunee wizards, talking eagles, giant snakes, sacred white buffalo calves, spider's silk, a burnt and blood-stained diary, longings for what could-have-been, worm holes fallen through reality, poppy-induced deliriums, imaginary friends, and knowledge revealed. Unifying everything: these are stories about the strength and power of dreams."--

"In Jonathan Carroll's surreal masterpiece, Bathing the Lion, five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream. Some of these people know each other; some don't. When they wake the next day all of them know what has happened. All five were at one time "mechanics," a kind of cosmic repairman whose job is to keep order in the universe and clean up the messes made both by sentient beings and the utterly fearsome yet inevitable Chaos that periodically rolls through, wreaking mayhem wherever it touches down--a kind of infinitely powerful, merciless tornado. Because the job of a mechanic is grueling and exhausting, after a certain period all of them are retired and sent to different parts of the cosmos to live out their days as "civilians." Their memories are wiped clean and new identities are created for them that fit the places they go to live out their natural lives to the end. For the first time all retired mechanics are being brought back to duty: Chaos has a new plan, and it's not looking good for mankind.."--

Dreams have attracted the curiosity of humankind for millennia. Elliot R. Wolfson’s A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination grapples with the allusive and elusive place dreaming occupies in the panorama of human experience. Drawing on a variety of contemporary academic disciplines, Wolfson returns to and rethinks past explications of the dream: that the dream state and waking reality are on an equal phenomenal footing; that the sensory world is the dream from which one must awaken by waking to the dream in which one is merely dreaming that one is awake. By interpreting the dream within the dream, Wolfson articulates how a productive paradox emerges to reveal the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness. Wolfson utilizes psychoanalysis, phenomenology, literary theory, and neuroscience, to elucidate the oneiric phenomenon in a vast array of biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and kabbalistic texts. No one morphology of the dream phenomenon is either sufficient or comprehensive. Rather, Wolfson proposes a linguistic archaeology of the dream, a philosophically inflected excavation of a psychological phenomenon that celebrates the contingent and ambiguous as signifiers of truth conceived as proportionate to, but not prescribed by nature. As such, the dream is classified as the immanentizing transcendence under the sign of the imaginary. Through close readings, Wolfson interprets the mythologic of dreams. He discovers therein how and in what form dreams uniquely display the concurrence of purportedly contradictory and incongruent images. To heed the cadence of the dream is, therefore, to appropriate a calculus of the noncalculable, and to embrace the paradox of fictional truth whose authenticity can be gauged only from the standpoint of its artificiality. Through Wolfson’s artful, lucid, and erudite readings, the dream is shown to be an imaginal excessiveness, at once foreseeable but unprecedented, the semblance of the simulacrum wherein truth does not oppose deception, wherein the appearance of truthfulness is impossible to determine independently of the truthfulness of appearance. A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream will ultimately call forth a new way to think the effects and transformations of phenomenological experiences, affective, corporeal and cognitive.