Work in progress… Well no progress really. I started this one before Covid-19 hit the US, and for a month now I haven’t managed to force myself to return to it. I finally realized that the poor thing reminded me so viscerally of normalcy that I just couldn’t handle working on it for now. […]
Category: Dreams
Anatomy of Melancholy, 159-160: Subsect. VII – Of the Inward Senses
In this section Burton discourses on common sense, phantasy (or imagination), and memory. On imagination he writes: In melancholy men this faculty is most powerful and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things, especially if it be stirred up by some terrible object, presented to it from common sense or memory. In […]
Pictures of Theories: The Boltzmann Brain Paradox
The Boltzmann brain paradox, physics: A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self-aware entity that arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos. The idea is named for the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who advanced an idea that the Universe is observed to be in a highly improbable non-equilibrium state because only when […]
Talking to magic
This morning, in the voice usually reserved for telling Very Important Secrets, my daughter said to me: “Mommy, last night I dreamed I was talking to MAGIC.”