Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Eva Cassidy

The late Eva Cassidy was known for the emotional depth and honesty she brought to her music. Here, she performs the classic Autumn Leaves. I have to say, I've never heard this song sung like this, with such poignancy and tenderness. Ever since I found this video, I can't stop watching it.

Twilight Time

© Mark Rasmussen | Dreamstime.com

Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star.
~Lucy Maud Montgomery

I was hoping to write a lovely post this evening, all about twilight, that wonderful and mysterious transition from day to night. But I've fallen victim to the first virus of the fall, so I'm going to make this more about the images than the words.

I will note, however, that the fall equinox took place earlier this week. I think there's something about the lengthening shadows of autumn that make twilight more impressive. Often the light takes on a golden tone, which can be very beautiful.

© Aleksejs Kostins | Dreamstime.com

Photographers aren't the only ones who are enamoured by the fading light of day and the dawn of night. Painters have long used twilight to convey different moods.

Twilight (1820) Caspar David Friedrich

In the image above, a dark and brooding mood accompanies the coming of night, as captured by Dutch artist Caspar Friedrich.

Twilight (1875) George Innes

The twilight of American painter George Innes takes on a more pastoral feeling.

Twilight comes and goes quickly. Often we look outside and it's already dark, especially this time of year. Take some time and see if you can catch of glimpse of this every-day mystery, which beckons us to welcome the night as it comes.

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Jose Gonzalez

Singer-songwriter Jose Gonzalez provides the lullaby this week with his song Hints. His complex guitar work and low-key vocal style have earned him enough of a following that he has postponed pursuing his PhD in biochemistry to focus on his music. Seems like a good decision to me. Enjoy!

Diversions for Insomniacs - Samorost

Here's a curious game to help keep things interesting during any late-night, drowsy browsing you might be doing at your computer. Samorost 1 is essentially a puzzle game that gained popularity because of its unusual visuals and interesting music. Once you've mastered this game, try the sequel, Samorost 2. Good luck!

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Dead Can Dance

The changing seasons and the forces of nature are beautifully captured in this week's lullaby, which features images from the BBC's Planet Earth and the song Yulunga (Spirit Dance) from the group Dead Can Dance, whose distinctive style continues to occupy a unique place in contemporary music.

Dreamscapes - The Limits of our Dreams

© Leeloomultipass | Dreamstime.com

Our exploration of the dreamscape has come to an end, which is not to say that I won't revisit it at some time. After all these posts, it should be pretty obvious that I believe our dreams are a form of communication with our unconscious minds, which are willing to offer up information if we take the time to divine the meaning.

I used to regard this information as sacrosanct. Then, as sometimes happens, I came across something that challenged that idea. You might remember the Heaven's Gate cult - in 1997, a group of 39 people committed suicide over the course of three days, believing that they were ascending to "the level above human" and that their souls would be taken away in a spaceship. Director Sergio Myers made a film about this event, Heaven's Gate: The Day After. The entire film used to be up on YouTube; now, just the trailer is there. In the film, he interviews a surviving cult member, who says he was convinced to join the group because of a dream he had.

It's hard to think that someone's own unconscious mind would sell him out like that. How would he even know? Of course, this individual did survive the mass suicide, but still, if we can't trust information from our own dreams, where does that leave us?

I believe it leaves us in a place where we need to decide how much weight to give that deep part of ourselves. In a society where the influence of the unconscious is largely discounted, to discover that aspect of ourselves can be exciting and illuminating. But at the same time, those waves can be overwhelming, and it always comes back to finding the balance between the unconscious and conscious, contemplation and action, yin and yang.

Insufficient attention to the unconscious can keep us enslaved to old patterns we're not even aware of. Too much attention and we can find it hard to move forward. Our dreams may guide us, but in the end, our lives are ours to live.

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Los Kjarkas

From time to time, I like to include world music in the lullaby line-up. But I recently realized that I had neglected the entire continent of South America. So here is a wonderful video of Los Kjarkas, a Bolivian band, featuring their song Maria Amanecer. Los Kjarkas has been making music for more than 30 years, toured worldwide, founded two music schools and sold more records than any other band in South America. It's easy to understand the success - this is complex and beautiful music. Enjoy!

(About the quote at the end of the video - I don't speak Spanish, so I tried running it through a few online translation programs. There's a reason people make fun of these - it came out a garbled mess. I'm afraid you're on your own.)

Dreamscapes - Bridge

© Kris Vandereycken | Dreamstime.com
Image processed in Adobe Photoshop

Building bridges, burning bridges, crossing bridges - bridges provide not just a common metaphor for life, but for dreams as well. Bridges can hold positive connotations, such as uniting people and places, but they also have darker aspects, including gephyrophobia, or the fear of traveling over a bridge.

In dreams, a bridge will often represent some transition for the dreamer. How secure the dream bridge appears may indicate whether the path the dreamer is taking seems safe or fraught with peril. A dream bridge over water might mean the dreamer is dealing with emotions or the unconscious.

I've had more bridge dreams than I can count. They are all similar - I'm driving a car that is going up a very steep bridge, the kind you see near harbors that are built as high arches to allow ships to pass under them. The apex of the arch is so high, there are clouds at the top. In a related dream, I'm on a raised highway and need to take a ramp onto another highway, but the ramp is impossibly high, suspended in midair by nothing.

All of these dreams were scary, although I wouldn't call them nightmares. What was going on for so long in my waking life that I kept dreaming of driving into the clouds? The answer came when, after years of fairly heavy-duty spiritual questing, I walked away from my spiritual practice. I had concluded that it simply wasn't helping me. Shortly after, I had a dream that I drove down off a high bridge, back to solid ground. I ended up in a construction zone, but the feeling in the dream was one of relief. Time to come back to earth. Some type of work still needed to be done, but it wasn't going to happen up on the bridge to the sky.

I retain an interest in the spiritual, but no longer feel the need to beat myself up with ill-advised spiritual techniques. It's not very often that a construction zone looks so good.

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Madeleine Peyroux

We're in the middle of the last unofficial weekend of summer; it's still warm, but the days are growing noticeably shorter. It's time to say goodbye to the summer of 2008, and what better way than the song Summer Wind, performed here by jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux. The images are paintings by Winslow Homer and Maurice Prendergast; they call to mind summers from a bygone era. Stay cool and enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend!

Summer Nights, Flecks of Light

Summer nights are vanishing, even as I type. Before they're completely gone, I wanted to give a nod to fireflies, whose lovely show each year never fails to mesmerize.

This year it seemed like we had more fireflies than usual. In the picture above, I was able to capture several of the buggers while they were still in the lawn at twilight, before they started flying around.

Here's a much better image from someone who knows how to take this kind of picture:

I actually found this image on the website for the city of Kitakyushu,
Japan, which is using its firefly population as an indicator of environmental health. It hopes to become the "World's Best Firefly City."

However, it faces stiff competition from Malaysia, where tropical fireflies congregate on trees along a river and then, amazingly, synchronize their flashes:

You can take a boat tour to see this natural wonder, which is used as a navigation aid by local residents boating along the river.

As beautiful as fireflies are, there's something you need to know. Some (not all) species of firefly engage in deception. Males of one species will imitate the mating signal of males from another species to attract females of that species. Why? Because they're hungry. That's right. The unwitting female ends up as a meal. And female fireflies are not above this behavior either. I think that's a little more cleverness than I like in my insects.

One final insect-related phenomenon, which I like to call, "Turn off the porch light!" It's about all those poor nocturnal insects attracted to our electric lights, thinking they're the moon. There's not a lot we can do, except dash in and out of our houses to avoid them.

But here's a more positive take on the porch light issue, featuring a really lovely green luna moth. If you're especially squeamish about insects, you may want to skip this video and take comfort in the fact that they'll all be dead soon, at least in northern climates.



Enjoy what little is left of summer, try to be tolerant of our insect friends and have a great holiday weekend!

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Ulrich Schnauss

This week's lullaby features ambient music from German artist Ulrich Schnauss, paired with the "Cloudscapes" sequence from the film Koyaanisqatsi. The song is Nothing Happens in June. I have to say, I think this is some of the best electronica I've come across - bright and fresh, yet smooth and mellow, and fitting the images perfectly.

Diversions for Insomniacs

A sleepless night seems like the perfect time to survey the wonders of the internet, particularly the flotsam and jetsam that drifts by as we surf the web.

So here are some utterly pointless websites, presented for your amusement:

- Feeling sleepy? You couldn't ask for anything more.

- Kirby dances for you! Kirby just needs some music to go with the dancing.

- Golems of Light are on the move. Thanks to Cliff Pickover for this one, whose main website, Reality Carnival, has been the source for more than one Diversions for Insomniacs.

- Dancing Parabolas. Finally, an animation with music worthy of the dancing.

- Zombo.com. (Absolutely turn your speakers on for this one.) Zombo.com represents the pinnacle of useless websites, and is possibly the oldest such site, having been created in 1999.

Remember, for each of these sites, someone is paying for server space to keep it going.

To discover more websites like these, visit PointlessSites.com.

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Zero 7

Time for some cool music for a hot summer's night. The song is Destiny, by Zero 7, featuring Sia Furler and Sophie Baker on vocals. So smooth, so gorgeous - it's music that washes over you, leaving you relaxed and refreshed.

Dreamscapes - Lucid Dreaming

© Leeloomultipass Dreamstime.com

As a child, I had a series of dreams in which I worked in a shop. I can't remember now what was being sold, but whatever the merchandise was, it was displayed in glass cases. My job was to keep the cases clean.

The boss, unfortunately, was a mean man. I didn't want to work in the shop anymore. Then a solution presented itself. There was a lantern, and if I held it up, I would awaken from the dream. Somehow I knew I was dreaming, and I knew what to do to come out of the dream.

Lucid dreaming, or the awareness that one is dreaming and can even control the dream, is pretty much the exact opposite of a nightmare. In fact, a 2006 study showed that people who suffer from nightmares benefit from lucid dreaming techniques.

Which implies, of course, that lucid dreaming can be learned. That sounds pretty cool, until you start to look at some of the methods. One procedure is to go to sleep normally, wake up six hours later, think very hard about lucid dreaming for an hour, then going back to sleep. It seems like a lot of work if you just want to experiment. Those with nightmares may find it worth their while, though.

Also interesting is the idea of reality testing. What if you think you might be dreaming, but aren't sure? According to the Wikipedia article on lucid dreaming, you could:

• Pinch your nose and see if you can breath without using your mouth.
• Stick your finger through the palm of your hand.
• Flip on a light switch (the light level shouldn't be affected).
• Look in a mirror. "(In) dreams, reflections from a mirror often appear to be blurred, distorted, incorrect or frightening."
  

Well, if the reality test is scary, what good is that? I've had dreams where I looked in a mirror; the results were mixed. In one, my eyes changed color (nice!). In another, my one eye appeared to be corroding away (not so nice).

But of course, if that last dream had been lucid, I suppose I could have done something about my health issue. It does seem that, for whatever ability we have to control our dreams, even lucid dreaming has its strange aspects. It may yield more vivid imagery and a feeling of giddiness, but it's still part of the noctural dreamscape, a strange reality that will always contain mysterious aspects.

Lullaby for Grown-Ups - Moving Fractals

After that trip to Winkie's Diner last week, I managed to find what I think is an especially mellow, relaxing lullaby. Videographer David B. Davis created this lovely film, Moving Fractals, and also composed the music. Fractals are geometric shapes with parts that are similar to the whole. They make for beautiful art - in this case, wispy, ethereal colors that dance against the darkness.