Exercise Extreme Mindfulness with These Calming Zen Rock Garden Videos

in Philosophy | September 10th, 2021

The Inter­net is a place where the ancient past and the mod­ern and trend-dri­ven can col­lide and pro­duce won­drous things. The con­cept of ASMR (autonomous sen­so­ry merid­i­an response) took off in 2007, describ­ing the plea­sur­able tin­gling response from var­i­ous stim­uli, such as whis­per­ing, or qui­et­ly being read a sto­ry, or lis­ten­ing to the close­ly mic’d sounds of paper. There are cur­rent­ly some 13 mil­lion ASMR video chan­nels on YouTube.

Mean­while, the idea of the Zen gar­den is about 800 years old, and at the cen­ter of its care and upkeep is a qui­et, mind­ful prac­tice that mir­rors med­i­ta­tion. Unlike clas­sic West­ern gar­dens that brought sym­me­try and math­e­mat­ics into their design, Japan­ese gar­dens recre­at­ed a sort of curat­ed chaos. A Zen gar­den takes this idea fur­ther, mak­ing its cen­ter­piece a rock gar­den that is raked into pat­terns to mim­ic water. They are also small and meant for indi­vid­ual con­tem­pla­tion.

Artist-Design­er Yuki Kawae com­bines the two with his series of videos on his YouTube chan­nel. In close frames, he takes his rakes and cre­ates pat­terns and frac­tals in sand around a series of stones. The sound of sand and rake and ring­ing bowl make for a very med­i­ta­tive expe­ri­ence. The con­fi­dence and beau­ty of his steady hand are mes­mer­iz­ing, but you could also just lis­ten to the audio.

Kawae is based in the Bay Area and told Colos­sal that the prac­tice came out of the anx­i­ety of life in 2019:

I was quite over­whelmed with day-to-day tasks and what are the ‘expect­ed’ next steps in life…One day, I real­ized all of those thoughts were com­plete­ly gone when I was gar­den­ing, prun­ing, water­ing, and re-pot­ting the soil. That process let me be clear-mind­ed some­how, and it was very calm­ing and refresh­ing.

You don’t have to be a Zen monk to real­ize the calm­ing effects of gardening—-ask any­body who tends to their gar­den week­ly. But there is some­thing spe­cial in the min­i­mal­ism of the sand and the rake and the rock. Kawae’s “gar­den” is only cof­fee table sized.

Sand is also a good mate­r­i­al in which to prac­tice muta­bil­i­ty, says Kawae: “All the zen gar­den pat­terns are not per­ma­nent, and they get erased to start a new one. It is tem­po­rary like many things in life. It taught me about what not to over­think as what I am stress­ing about may also be tem­po­rary.”

Mean­while on YouTube there are oth­ers work­ing on Zen gar­dens. The Kikiyaya For­est Dwelling and Zen Gar­den is actu­al­ly locat­ed in the Nether­lands and the own­er posts her rak­ing adven­tures on YouTube.

And for those who would like to hear from an actu­al Zen mas­ter and gar­den­er, this hour-long pre­sen­ta­tion from Shun­myo Masuno—one of Japan’s lead­ing land­scape archi­tects and an 18th-gen­er­a­tion Zen Bud­dhist priest—will fill in the philo­soph­i­cal details.

I’ll leave the last word to 13th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Zen mas­ter, writer, poet, and philoso­pher, Dogen Zen­ji: “Work­ing with plants, trees, fences, and walls, if they prac­tice sin­cere­ly they will attain enlight­en­ment.”

See you in the gar­den!

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Is a Zen Koan? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to East­ern Philo­soph­i­cal Thought Exper­i­ments

Take a Break from Your Fran­tic Day & Let Alan Watts Intro­duce You to the Calm­ing Ways of Zen

The Zen of Bill Mur­ray: I Want to Be “Real­ly Here, Real­ly in It, Real­ly Alive in the Moment”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Paul McCartney vs. Brian Wilson: A Rivalry That Inspired Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, and Other Classic Albums

in History, Music | September 10th, 2021

One could argue that the album as we know it did­n’t exist before the mid-1960s. As a medi­um of record­ed music, the “long-play­ing” 33 1⁄3 rpm record was intro­duced in 1948, and the mar­ket proved quick to take it up. A great many musi­cians record­ed LPs over the fol­low­ing decade and a half, but these were pro­duced and con­sumed pri­mar­i­ly as bun­dles of indi­vid­ual songs. The hey­day of radio, which last­ed into the 1950s, imbued the sin­gle — espe­cial­ly the hit sin­gle — with enor­mous cul­tur­al pow­er. Through that zeit­geist rose the Liv­er­pudlian quar­tet known as the Bea­t­les, the very band who would go prompt­ly on to tran­scend it.

In this ver­sion of music his­to­ry, the first true album was the Bea­t­les’ Rub­ber Soul. When it came out in 1965, it intro­duced to a vast lis­ten­ing pub­lic the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the LP as a coher­ent art form in itself. At that point the Bea­t­les had already been mak­ing hit records for a few years, as, on the oth­er side of the pond, had a south­ern Cal­i­forn­ian singing group called the Beach Boys.

Giv­en each act’s ever-grow­ing promi­nence and the unprece­dent­ed inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of pop cul­ture then under­way, it was only a mat­ter of time before their musi­cal worlds would col­lide. Decades lat­er, Beach Boys mas­ter­mind Bri­an Wil­son would remem­ber his first lis­ten to Rub­ber Soul as fol­lows: “It just total­ly took my mind away” — a sen­sa­tion back then sought along many avenues, chem­i­cal as well as cul­tur­al.

Though Paul McCart­ney has cred­it­ed the effer­ves­cence of the 1960s to “drugs, basi­cal­ly,” the music he and fel­low Bea­t­les made was also enhanced by friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion with the Beach Boys, as detailed in the Jef­frey Still­well video essay above. To Rub­ber Soul the Beach Boys respond­ed with Pet Sounds. “Oh dear me, this is the album of all time,” McCart­ney lat­er recalled think­ing upon hear­ing it. “What the hell are we going to do?” Their return vol­ley took the form of Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Heart’s Club Band, which in turn sent Wil­son into an Icarus-like flight toward the ill-fat­ed Smile project. More than half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, some say we live in a post-album era. Even if so, the heights of ambi­tion to which the Bea­t­les and the Beach Boys put each oth­er inspire artists still today — and their fruits will be lis­tened to as long as record­ed music exists in any form at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

How the Beach Boys Cre­at­ed Their Pop Mas­ter­pieces: “Good Vibra­tions,” Pet Sounds, and More

The Beach Boys’ Bri­an Wil­son & Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er George Mar­tin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Great­est Song Ever Writ­ten”

How The Bea­t­les’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cov­er Design For­ev­er

The Mak­ing (and Remak­ing) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Great­est Rock Album of All Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Is the Famous Photo of Lee Harvey Oswald Posing with the Gun Used to Kill JFK a Fake?: 3D Forensic Analysis Reveals the Answer

in History, Photography | September 9th, 2021

As long as the 20th cen­tu­ry remains in liv­ing mem­o­ry, the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy will con­tin­ue to draw pub­lic inter­est. A great many Amer­i­cans feel they still haven’t heard the “whole sto­ry” behind what hap­pened on Novem­ber 22, 1963; a few have ded­i­cat­ed their lives to find­ing out, grow­ing less inclined to accept the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a lone gun­man the deep­er they get into the doc­u­ments. But that gun­man, Lee Har­vey Oswald, does fig­ure direct­ly into some of the mate­r­i­al held up as evi­dence of a con­spir­a­cy. Take the “back­yard pho­tos” that depict him pos­ing with what was ulti­mate­ly found to be the very gun used to kill JFK.

Such images would seem strong­ly to impli­cate Oswald in the assas­si­na­tion, and the War­ren Com­mis­sion seems to have regard­ed them in just that way. But for near­ly six decades now, some the­o­rists have argued that the back­yard pho­tos are fake — an idea that began with Oswald him­self, who before his own assas­si­na­tion insist­ed that he’d nev­er seen them in his life, and that some­one had “super­im­posed” his face onto anoth­er body.

The Vox video above lays out the main ele­ments of one par­tic­u­lar pic­ture that have been called repeat­ed­ly into ques­tion: the angles of the shad­ows, the shape of Oswald’s chin, the length of the gun, and Oswald’s unusu­al pos­ture.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, foren­sic experts tried just about every­thing to test the authen­tic­i­ty of this pho­to,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor. They could­n’t find any evi­dence of fak­ery, but they did­n’t have the 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy at the com­mand of the UC Berke­ley School of Infor­ma­tion’s Hany Farid, a well-known spe­cial­ist in the analy­sis of dig­i­tal images. Farid and a team of researchers recon­struct­ed Oswald’s body and weapon­ry (though not the copies of The Mil­i­tant and The Work­er, two ide­o­log­i­cal­ly opposed news­pa­pers, he bran­dished in his oth­er hand) and found that every­thing added up, from the seem­ing­ly mis­aligned shad­ows cast by the sun to the sta­bil­i­ty of his odd stance. If there was indeed a con­spir­a­cy to kill JFK, then, it was­n’t a con­spir­a­cy of pro­to-Pho­to­shop­pers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

2,800 JFK Assas­si­na­tion Doc­u­ments Just Released by the Nation­al Archives

Novem­ber 22, 1963: Watch Errol Mor­ris’ Short Doc­u­men­tary About the Kennedy Assas­si­na­tion

The Exis­ten­tial­ism Files: How the FBI Tar­get­ed Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assas­si­na­tion

Noam Chom­sky on Com­mem­o­rat­ing the JFK Assas­si­na­tion: It “Would Impress Kim Il-Sung”

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry Too

Why the Sovi­ets Doc­tored Their Most Icon­ic World War II Vic­to­ry Pho­to, “Rais­ing a Flag Over the Reich­stag”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Tove Jansson, Beloved Creator of the Moomins, Illustrates The Hobbit

in Art, Books | September 9th, 2021

What is a Hob­bit? A few char­ac­ters in J.R.R Tolkien’s clas­sic work of children’s fan­ta­sy won­der them­selves about the diminu­tive title char­ac­ters who don’t get out much. Tolkien describes them thor­ough­ly, a hand­ful of well-known British and Amer­i­can actors immor­tal­ized them on screen, but the last word on what a Hob­bit looks like belongs to the read­er. Or — in an edi­tion as rich­ly illus­trat­ed as the Swedish and Finnish edi­tions of the book were in 1962 and 1973 — to the Swedish/Finnish artist, Tove Jans­son, most famous for her cre­ation of inter­na­tion­al­ly beloved children’s char­ac­ters, the Moomins.

Like Bil­bo Bag­gins him­self, The Hob­bit is full of sur­pris­es — while pre­sent­ing itself as a book for kids, it con­tains adult lessons one nev­er out­grows. So, too, was Jans­son, “an acer­bic and wit­ty anti-fas­cist car­toon­ist dur­ing the Sec­ond World War,” write James Williams at Apol­lo.

“She wrote a pic­ture book for chil­dren about the immi­nent end of the world and spare, ten­der fic­tion for adults about love and fam­i­ly.” Jans­son had exact­ly the sen­si­bil­i­ty to bridge Tolkien’s worlds of imag­i­na­tive fan­cy and adult dan­ger and moral ambi­gu­i­ty. But first, she want­ed to cast off all asso­ci­a­tions with her most famous cre­ation.

As Jans­son wrote to a friend when she end­ed the Moomins, “I nev­er spare them a thought now it’s over. I’ve com­plete­ly drawn a line under all that. Just as you wouldn’t want to think back on a time you had a toothache.” The Moomins were a cre­ative mill­stone, and she strug­gled to get their style from around her neck.

“This led to an attempt to change the way in which she drew,” notes Moomin.com. “Tove tried dif­fer­ent tech­niques and drew each fig­ure freely again and again 20–60 times until she was hap­py with the result. From the book vignette illus­tra­tions, it is impos­si­ble to notice how the indi­vid­ual fig­ures are past­ed togeth­er into ‘a patch­work’ that made up each vignette.”

Despite her best efforts to escape her pre­vi­ous char­ac­ters, how­ev­er, “the major­i­ty of the full-page illus­tra­tions fol­low the char­ac­ter­is­tic style of Tove’s illus­tra­tions for the Moomin books.” Her own reser­va­tions aside, this is all to the good as Jansson’s Moomin books and com­ic strips were built from the same mix of sen­si­bil­i­ty — child­like won­der, grown-up ethics, and a respect for the deep ecol­o­gy of myth. Both Tolkien and Jans­son wrote dur­ing, after, and in response to Hitler’s rise to pow­er and drew on “a Nordic folk tra­di­tion of trolls and forests, light and dark,” writes Williams. But Jans­son brought her own artis­tic vision to The Hob­bit. See more of her illus­tra­tions at Lithub.

via LitHub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sub­lime Alice in Won­der­land Illus­tra­tions of Tove Jans­son, Cre­ator of the Glob­al­ly-Beloved Moomins (1966)

Before Cre­at­ing the Moomins, Tove Jans­son Drew Satir­i­cal Art Mock­ing Hitler & Stal­in

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

Illus­tra­tions Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit from the Sovi­et Union (1976)

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How Agnès Varda Explores Beauty in Cléo from 5 to 7: a Video Essay

in Film | September 9th, 2021

“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” That quote is usu­al­ly attrib­uted to Anaïs Nin, who counts among the most famous Parisi­ennes despite only hav­ing spent a rel­a­tive­ly short stretch of her life there. Cléo Vic­toire must also occu­py those same ranks, despite being a whol­ly fic­tion­al char­ac­ter. We know her as the pro­tag­o­nist of 1962’s Cléo from 5 to 7, the break­out fea­ture by French New Wave auteur Agnès Var­da — anoth­er of the great Parisi­ennes of our time, if one reluc­tant enough to have arrived for her edu­ca­tion at the Sor­bonne see­ing Paris as a “grey, inhu­mane, sad city.” Still, as Cléo’s per­am­bu­la­tions through and inter­ac­tions with Paris reveal, Var­da cer­tain­ly knew how to use the place.

As the film plays out in real time, “we fol­low Cléo through an after­noon as she jour­neys across real loca­tions in Paris, wait­ing for her dread­ed test results to be ready.” So says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his new video essay “Through Agnes Var­da’s Look­ing Glass.” A promis­ing singer, Cléo has under­gone a med­ical exam­i­na­tion to deter­mine whether or not she has can­cer, and not until the final scene will she have the answer.

In the mean­time, Var­da takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty to “paint a com­plex pic­ture of a com­plex woman on a stress­ful day in her life.” This stress prompts Cléo “to exam­ine and ulti­mate­ly con­front her self-image,” a jour­ney that takes her past, among oth­er things, more than a few mir­rors.

Begin­ning the film as a self-regard­ing char­ac­ter — in the most lit­er­al sense — Cléo nev­er pass­es up a chance to check her own reflec­tion, and thus con­firm her own exis­tence. “If she’s not a beau­ti­ful, healthy, up-and-com­ing singer,” as Puschak artic­u­lates the ques­tion that descends upon her, “who is she?” Com­posed only of out­side per­cep­tions, Cléo’s cen­ter can­not hold; even­tu­al­ly “she dis­cards the iden­ti­ty she’s made for oth­ers. She ceas­es to be an object, looked at even by her­self and becomes a sub­ject, the one who looks.” Her cri­sis forces her to “observe the world as it is, not as a reflec­tion of peo­ple’s expec­ta­tion of her.” Var­da’s cin­e­mat­ic vision of her trans­for­ma­tion shows what it is to see things not as we are, but as they are.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

How Michel Legrand (RIP) Gave the French New Wave a Sound: Revis­it the Influ­en­tial Music He Com­posed for Jean-Luc Godard & Jacques Demy’s Films

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less: How World War II Changed Cin­e­ma & Helped Cre­ate the French New Wave

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

What Andrei Tarkovsky’s Most Noto­ri­ous Scene Tells Us About Time Dur­ing the Pan­dem­ic: A Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Free Course from Columbia University

in Books | September 8th, 2021

As we approach the 700th anniver­sary of Dante Alighier­i’s death (Sep­tem­ber 14), we want­ed to fea­ture a time­ly resource: Teodolin­da Baroli­ni, a pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, has post­ed online a course for any­one who wish­es to read Dante’s Com­me­dia from begin­ning to end. It fea­tures 54 record­ed lec­tures, cov­er­ing Infer­no, Pur­ga­to­rio and Par­adiso, with each can­ti­ca being read in its entire­ty. Baroli­ni also over­sees a relat­ed web site, Dig­i­tal Dante, where you can find Dante’s text in the Petroc­chi edi­tion with Eng­lish trans­la­tions by Man­del­baum and Longfel­low. Plus the site fea­tures com­men­tary on Dan­te’s text.

Barolin­i’s Dante course will be added to our list of Free Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free Online Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Botticelli’s 92 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Alber­to Martini’s Haunt­ing Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1901–1944)

Hear Dante’s Infer­no Read Aloud by Influ­en­tial Poet & Trans­la­tor John Cia­r­di (1954)

Physics from Hell: How Dante’s Infer­no Inspired Galileo’s Physics

Watch L’Inferno (1911), Italy’s First Fea­ture Film and Per­haps the Finest Adap­ta­tion of Dante’s Clas­sic

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A Restored Vermeer Painting Reveals a Portrait of a Cupid Hidden for Over 350 Years

in Art | September 8th, 2021

Botched art restora­tions make good head­lines, but rarely are we asked to con­sid­er if a posthu­mous change to a great mas­ter’s work rep­re­sents an improve­ment. And yet, when images of a restored Girl Read­ing a Let­ter at an Open Win­dow by Jan Ver­meer cir­cu­lat­ed recent­ly, the world had the chance to com­pare the restored orig­i­nal paint­ing, at the left, with an unknown painter’s revi­sion, long thought to be Ver­meer’s work. (Click here to view the paint­ings side by side in a larg­er for­mat.) Sev­er­al peo­ple announced that they pre­ferred the doc­tored paint­ing on the right, first attrib­uted to Ver­meer in 1880 (and pre­vi­ous­ly attrib­uted to Dutch mas­ters Rem­brandt and Hals).

As con­ser­va­tors found at the con­clu­sion of a restora­tion project begun in 2017, it is the paint­ing on the left that Ver­meer intend­ed as his final state­ment on the sub­ject of a girl read­ing a let­ter at an open win­dow. That paint­ing puts the sub­ject in a very dif­fer­ent light. The naked Cupid behind the young woman — in place of an ambigu­ous­ly dour patch of beige — revis­es over a cen­tu­ry of art his­tor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion. “With the recov­ery of Cupid in the back­ground, the actu­al inten­tion of the Delft painter becomes rec­og­niz­able,” says Stephan Koja, direc­tor of the Old Mas­ters Pic­ture Gallery.

Art his­to­ri­ans and con­ser­va­tors had long known the oth­er paint­ing was under­neath, hav­ing dis­cov­ered it via X‑ray in 1979. But they assumed it was Ver­meer him­self who made the change. “As it was not uncom­mon for artists to paint over their work,” My Mod­ern Met writes, “schol­ars ini­tial­ly accept­ed that Ver­meer had sim­ply changed his mind and decid­ed to keep the wall bare.” Instead, thanks to the 2017 restora­tion project, “researchers were able to con­clude that the over­paint­ing was com­plet­ed over sev­er­al decades after the can­vas was fin­ished.”

“Ver­meer often incor­po­rat­ed emp­ty back­grounds in his genre paint­ings,” a fea­ture that has become some­thing of a hall­mark thanks to the fame of paint­ings like The Milk­maid. This is one rea­son the Cupid went under­cov­er for so long, despite an unbal­anced com­po­si­tion with­out it. But Ver­meer also incor­po­rat­ed back­grounds filled with art, includ­ing the same Cupid paint­ing, which appears in his less­er known A Young Woman Stand­ing at a Vir­ginal and may have been a paint­ing he him­self owned. “There has been much spec­u­la­tion,” the Nation­al Gallery notes, that this paint­ing (and anoth­er, sim­i­lar­ly titled work) rep­re­sent “fideli­ty” and “a venal, mer­ce­nary approach to love.” What approach might be sug­gest­ed by the new­ly restored Girl Read­ing a Let­ter at an Open Win­dow?

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

See the Com­plete Works of Ver­meer in Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty: Google Makes Them Avail­able on Your Smart­phone

A 10 Bil­lion Pix­el Scan of Vermeer’s Mas­ter­piece Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring: Explore It Online

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why Do We Dream?: An Animated Lesson

in Neuroscience, Psychology | September 8th, 2021

Why do we dream? It’s a ques­tion sci­ence still can’t answer, says the TED-Ed les­son above by Amy Adkins. Many neu­ro­sci­en­tists cur­rent­ly make sense of dream­ing as a way for the brain to con­sol­i­date mem­o­ry at night. “This may include reor­ga­niz­ing and recod­ing mem­o­ries in rela­tion to emo­tion­al dri­ves,” writes com­pu­ta­tion­al neu­ro­sci­en­tist Paul King, “as well as trans­fer­ring mem­o­ries between brain regions.” You might imag­ine a defrag­ging hard dri­ve, the sort­ing and fil­ing process hap­pen­ing while a com­put­er sleeps.

But the brain is not a com­put­er. Impor­tant ques­tions remain. Why do dreams have such a pow­er­ful hold on us, not only indi­vid­u­al­ly, but — as a recent project col­lect­ing COVID dreams explores — col­lec­tive­ly? Are dreams no more than gib­ber­ish, the men­tal detri­tus of the day, or do they con­vey impor­tant mes­sages to our con­scious minds? Sev­er­al mil­len­nia before Freud’s The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams, “Mesopotami­an kings record­ed and inter­pret­ed their dreams on wax tablets.” A thou­sand years lat­er, Egyp­tians cat­a­logued one hun­dred of the most com­mon dreams and their mean­ings in a dream book.

The ancients were con­vinced their dreams car­ried mes­sages from beyond their con­scious­ness. Many mod­ern the­o­rists begin­ning with Freud have seen dreams as pure­ly self-ref­er­en­tial, and neu­rot­ic. “We dream,” the les­son notes, “to ful­fill our wish­es.” Instead of mes­sages from the gods, dreams are sym­bol­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion from uncon­scious repressed dri­ves. Or, “we dream to remem­ber,” as some con­tem­po­rary neu­ro­sci­en­tists claim, or “we dream to for­get” as a neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal the­o­ry called “reverse learn­ing” argued in 1983. Dreams are exer­cis­es for the brain, rehearsals, night­time prob­lem solv­ing … the les­son touch­es briefly on each of these the­o­ries in turn.

But what­ev­er answers sci­ence pro­vides will hard­ly sat­is­fy human curios­i­ty about the con­tent of our dreams. For this, per­haps, we should look else­where. We might turn, for exam­ple, to the Muse­um of Dreams, “a hub for explor­ing the social and polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of dream-life.” Philo­soph­i­cal and sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries of dream­ing are all spec­u­la­tive. “Rather than seek a defin­i­tive expla­na­tion, the Museum’s goal is to explore the gen­er­a­tive and per­for­ma­tive nature of dream-life — all the remark­able ways peo­ple have put their dreams to work.” Before we share and, yes, inter­pret our dreams with oth­ers, they remain, in Toni Morrison’s words, “unspeak­able things unspo­ken.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Do Our Dreams Pre­dict the Future? Vladimir Nabokov Spent Three Months Test­ing That The­o­ry in 1964

Do Octopi Dream? An Aston­ish­ing Nature Doc­u­men­tary Sug­gests They Do

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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