This woman I am in love with and I are following our story in an illustrated weekly for children. Each week we buy a new installment and both in the little blocks of print and in the accompanying illustrations, we discover descriptions of everything we will be doing.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Across the research spectrum from predictive-dream skeptics to believers, there's little disagreement that dreaming is instinctive. "Primary process thinking"; not logical, not critical, barely literate; certainly not self-aware. The ego (with effort and lucid dreamwork) can learn some self-awareness, and shamanic training may even help one get useful messages about the future, but the dream generator is primal.

Or is it? Leiris's dream presents future-reading as routine, and does so explicitly. It's hard to avoid the impression the dream-creator is aware of itself--insisting "I know the future, not in fitful flashes, but regularly." Claiming isn't proof; but what impresses me is that a supposedly instinctual process challenges what's said of it. Read the future? Why, it's child's play.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Curiously, out of my own 39,857 dreams (as of early 2025), 1,558 (nearly 4%) appear to be psychic--predictive, clairvoyant or telepathic. On average I recall three dreams a night; so on average, one psychic dream every eight days. Not so different from Leiris's weekly magazine!

Whatever ESP is, it's routine.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris (1961; 1987 translation by Richard Sieburth) p. 96

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sh - Si-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites