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What these 8 common dreams mean

If you dream of being a rock star who forgets their words, or you're seeing tigers – it could mean you have some bottled up stress to deal with. Dreams are open to interpretation, but New Zealand experts suggest these eight could give you some insight in to simmering stress levels. 1. Falling This is the most common recurring stress dream, according to Margaret Bowater, president of the Dream Network Aotearoa New Zealand. She says it's a metaphor about falling short, possibly falling out of favour, or maybe not living up to the expectations of yourself or others. 2. Being unprepared for a test Finding yourself unexpectedly sitting an exam with no idea of what you're doing comes from feeling you're not coping or unable to take control of the situation. Dreams like taking a test, or having to perform on stage and forgetting the words, indicate you're under pressure, Bowater says. "I used to be a teacher, so my typical stress dream was about the whole classroom getting out of control. I would be feeling powerless or helpless to manage a situation." 3. House falling down A house can signify the family unit, and how it is being affected. Dr Rosie Gibson, Research Officer at Massey University Sleep/Wake Research Centre, conducts research related to sleep and people with dementia. "Depending on what their background is, we've had reports of having dreams of a house falling down around them and relate that to not being able to look after their family, and possibly relate that to financial changes, or changes in family roles... I think that is reflective of their awareness of their condition and how it's impacting on their waking life." 4. Teeth falling out "It's about words that have fallen out of your mouth that you wish you hadn't said," explains Bowater, who has been running dream workshops for 30 years. "Three people who have asked me about that dream have been radio or tv presenters... Some dreams, you might even be stuffing them back in your mouth again." It could also indicate not being able to find the right words to express yourself. 5. Missing the plane Is the dream version of you not going to make a flight or bus journey? You could be fearful of missing deadlines – especially if you have a job that revolves around them, Bowater says. Gibson adds you're more likely to be the type of person who catches planes reasonably regularly. 6. Tigers Gibson says children are more likely see animals in dreams, with a "token stress creature" represented as a tiger or other scary animal, possibly chasing them. "My own repetitive stress dream as a child would be of a wolf jumping down my next-door neighbour's stairs and I'd wake up with that rush of stress and anxiety," she says. 7. Driving Not being able to steer a car is a conceptional dream that means you don't feel in control, and one you are more likely to have as an adult, according to Gibson. Bowater says on one occasion a man on a very strict diet indulged in a "cheat day" at a restaurant with friends, and paid the price later that night. "He had a dream about trying to wrestle control of a car which was going too fast downhill... it was clear he'd let his appetite get away with him." Other common stress dreams with cars involve it rolling backwards, sometimes towards a cliff edge. 8. Feeling trapped or lost Again, this is a conceptual dream where the dreamer considers themselves trapped in real life. Bowater recalls a young woman she worked with who was considering separating from her husband. She would dream of being stuck crossing the road halfway by the traffic. "A dream is trying to show, or repeat, something back to you," she says. "It's usually using concrete imagery for something that is not necessarily a concrete thing to say. Like anxiety - how do you show anxiety? You have to show a situation that portrays it." For example, being alone the woods or on unfamiliar roads translates into feeling lost and don't know where to go next. Written by Janan Jay. Republished with permission of <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/" target="_blank">Stuff.co.nz</a>.

Mind

How the pandemic affected our approach to reading and interpretation of books

During the pandemic, reading took on new meaning. People turned to books for comfort. Some read to confront difficult issues, especially following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Others used reading as a way to care for their children in locked-down houses. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/25/book-sales-surge-self-isolating-readers-bucket-list-novels" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sales figures and lending data</a> showed a huge spike in people buying and borrowing books. We wanted to follow the stories of real readers and <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reading-novels-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-9780192857682?q=reading%20novels%20during%20the%20pandemic&lang=en&cc=dk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">our new book</a> uses a rare combination of literary analysis and qualitative interviewing to capture these dynamics of reception. While many commentators at the beginning of the pandemic <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/03/9581961/long-books-to-read-in-quarantine" target="_blank" rel="noopener">endorsed reading</a> as a straightforward way to relax, our readers showed that the practice morphed and took on new forms and meanings. Based on hundreds of survey responses and hours of reader interviews from Denmark and the UK, the study makes the interpretation of literature something dynamic and ongoing. And it suggests that readers themselves are agents of meaning, even in the case of novels that seem the most stable in our culture. Reading during the pandemic showed how books and their meanings change. Novels that we think of as settled in their significance acquire new meaning as they are read under unfolding conditions, exposed to the vagaries of history. In our research we show how Albert Camus’s The Plague became an unlikely hit in 2020, how the affordances of Sally Rooney’s romantic fiction seemed suddenly to apply to the lovers unable to meet, and how long novels that had intimidated pre-pandemic readers became lifelines in their heft. <h2>Tricky reading</h2> For many people, reading became more difficult during this time. Far from giving everyone uninterrupted time to attend to long novels by authors like Tolstoy, lockdown exacerbated the separations and challenges of everyday life. Take Jane Eyre, a novel that many readers picked up during lockdown because it was on their shelves. Suddenly, this classic seemed to be a novel about a woman locked in small rooms and living through a cholera epidemic. Many also took it up under conditions that overlapped directly with the book’s scenes of homeschooling. One respondent called Phoebe, for instance, deliberately avoided rereading Jane Eyre for these reasons. Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel of loneliness and love was, in 2020, “too creepy”. The story of Jane being locked up made her feel unsafe while she lived alone through lockdown in the confines of her own room. Another interviewee, Alexandra, was troubled by the idea of reading Hilary Mantel’s bestseller The Mirror and the Light, explaining: <blockquote> I knew that I would be saying goodbye to Sir Thomas Cromwell […] I looked at it and I thought, what if I die before I get to the end of this? It will be the most unsatisfactory experience. </blockquote> Rather than sizing up the third part of Mantel’s intimate portrayal of the life of Thomas Cromwell as offering the ideal opportunity for narrative immersion, Alexandra viewed the very thickness of the book as problematic. Her intense fear of death in the pandemic and expectation of Cromwell’s literary demise converge on the length of narrative, which stretches into a future that had become harder to face. <h2>Slipperiness of time</h2> For the reader caught up in a global pandemic, a novel like The Plague, Albert Camus’s famous story of a town suffering a deadly virus, reads differently than it usually would for, say, the school student of French literature. One interviewed reader, for instance, discussed the novel’s temporal slipperiness. Normally, of course, the very lack of measurable time would suggest the novel as an allegory – untied to a particular time, a warning of dark political forces turning up and spreading at any moment. But in 2020, when time <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-philosophical-idea-that-can-help-us-understand-why-time-is-moving-slowly-during-the-pandemic-151250" target="_blank" rel="noopener">felt like it was moving oddly</a> The Plague’s confused sense of time felt realistic, as if it were mimicking our lived experience of a pandemic. <figure></figure> Yet, it would be a mistake to assume all readers suddenly ditched allegory for realism or real-life correspondence. As Kirsten, a Danish woman in her 30s, explained: <blockquote> I ended up buying The Plague because I was more interested in the metaphorical portrait of the occupation (of France by the Nazis) than in what epidemics do to a society. </blockquote> By following real readers, our study provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history and shows the movement of readers between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. By exploring these varied experiences, we investigated the larger question of how the consumption of novels depends on and shapes people’s experience of non-work time, providing a specific lens through which to examine the experience of reading more generally. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates the dynamic process of reading and the ways in which books change depending on where and when they are read and by whom. This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-pandemic-affected-our-approach-to-reading-and-interpretation-of-books-195238" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>. Image: Shutterstock

Books

What makes some art so bad that it’s good?

“<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3521126/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Disaster Artist</a>” – which earned James Franco a Golden Globe for his portrayal of director Tommy Wiseau – tells the story of the making of “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Room</a>,” a film that’s been <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/books/review/the-disaster-artist-by-greg-sestero-and-tom-bissell.html">dubbed</a>“the Citizen Kane” of bad movies. Not everyone likes “The Room.” (Critics certainly don’t – it has a <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_room_1998/">26 percent rating</a> on Rotten Tomatoes.) But lots of folks love it. It plays at midnight showings at theaters across North America, and it’s a testament to a movie’s awfulness (and popularity) that, years later, it became the subject of a different movie. We usually hate art when it seems like it’s been poorly executed, and we appreciate great art, which is supposed to represent the pinnacle of human ingenuity. So, this raises a deeper question: What’s the appeal of art that’s so bad it’s good? (We could call this kind of art “good-bad art.”) Why do so many people grow to love good-bad art like “The Room” in the first place? <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10790-016-9569-2">In a new paper</a> for an academic journal of philosophy, my colleague Matt Johnson and I explored these questions. <h2>The artist’s intention is key</h2> A Hollywood outsider named Tommy Wiseau produced, directed and starred in “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/">The Room</a>,” which was released in 2003. The film is full of failures. It jumps between different genres; there are absurd non-sequiturs; storylines are introduced, only to never be developed; and there are three sex scenes in the first 20 minutes. Wiseau poured substantial cash into the film – <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/the-room-10th-anniversary-history.html">it cost</a>around US$6 million to make – so there’s some degree of professional veneer. But this only accentuates its failure. Good-bad art doesn’t just happen at the movies. On TV, there was “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Shadows">Dark Shadows</a>,” a low-budget vampire soap opera from the 1970s. In Somerville, Massachusetts, you can visit MOBA – <a href="http://www.museumofbadart.org/">the Museum of Bad Art</a> – dedicated to paintings that are so bad they’re good. The poet <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/12/01/the-poetaster/">Julia Moore</a> (1847-1920) was ironically known as “The Sweet Singer of Michigan” for her <a href="http://homepages.wmich.edu/%7Ecooneys/txt/Moore/Chicago.Fire.html">deliciously terrible poetry</a>. And the recent film “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4136084/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Florence Foster Jenkins</a>” tells the true story of an opera singer with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcs9yJjVecs">tone-deaf voice</a> so beloved that she sold out Carnegie Hall. In good-bad art, it seems that the very features that make something bad – a horrible voice, cheesy verses or an absurd storyline – are what end up drawing people in. So we need to look at what’s “bad” about good-bad art in the first place. We equated artistic “badness” with artistic failure, which comes from failed intentions. It occurs when the creator didn’t realize their vision, or their vision wasn’t good in the first place. (MoBA, for instance, requires that its art comes from genuine attempts.) You might think a movie’s bad when it’s very silly, whether it’s “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417148/">Snakes on a Plane</a>” or “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2724064/">Sharknado</a>.” You might think that “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocky_Horror_Picture_Show">The Rocky Horror Picture Show</a>” is bad because it looks schlocky. But these films aren’t failures. “Snakes on a Plane” is supposed to be silly; “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is supposed to look schlocky. So we can’t categorize these works as so bad they’re good. They’re successful in the sense that the writers and directors executed their visions. Our love for good-bad art, on the other hand, is based upon failure. <h2>How not to appreciate bad art</h2> So how could artistic failure ever be the basis for goodness? A pretty natural answer here is that we like good-bad art because we take a general pleasure in the failure of others. Our pleasure, say, at MoBA, is a particular kind of schadenfreude – the German word for taking joy in another’s misfortune. This view doesn’t have an official name, but we could call this “the massive failure view.” (The great Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Humor-humanity-introduction-study-humor/dp/B00085RDMU">held this view</a>, arguing that singer Julia Moore’s earnest ineptitude made her work funnier.) If this view were right, our enjoyment of “The Room” would be morally suspect; it’s not healthy to get our kicks from the misfortune of others. Fortunately for lovers of good-bad art, we believe this “massive failure theory” of good-bad art is false, for two reasons. First, it doesn’t feel like we are enjoying pure failure in works like “The Room.” Our enjoyment seems to go much deeper. We laugh, but our enjoyment also comes from a kind of bewilderment: How could anyone think that this was a good idea? On his podcast, comedian Marc Maron recently <a href="http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-870-james-franco">interviewed Franco</a> about “The Disaster Artist.” Maron was a little uneasy about the film; to him, it seemed as if Franco were taking a gleeful delight in Wiseau’s failure. But Franco resisted this: “The Room” isn’t just great because it fails, he explained; it’s great because it fails in such a confounding way. Somehow, through its many failures, the film totally captivates its viewers. You find yourself unable to look away; its failure is gorgeously, majestically, bewildering. Second, if we were just enjoying massive failure, then any really bad movie would be good-bad art; movies would simply have to fail. But that’s not how good-bad art works. In good-bad art, movies have to fail in the right ways – in interesting or especially absurd ways. Some bad art is too bad – it’s just boring, or self-indulgent or overwrought. Even big failures aren’t enough to make something so bad it’s good. <h2>The right way to appreciate bad art</h2> We argue that good-bad artworks offer a brand of bizarreness that leads to a distinct form of appreciation. Many works – not just good-bad artworks – are good because they are bizarre. Take David Lynch’s films: Their storylines can possess a strange, dreamy logic. But good-bad art offers a unique kind of bizarreness. As with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lynch_filmography">films of David Lynch</a>, we’re bewildered when we watch “The Room.” But in Lynch’s movies, you know that the director at least intentionally included the bizarre elements, so there’s some sense of an underlying order to the story. In good-bad art like “The Room,” that underlying order falls out from beneath you, since the bizarreness is not intended. This is why fans of good-bad art strongly insist that their love for it is genuine, not ironic. They love it as a gorgeous freak accident of nature, something that turned out beautifully – not despite, but because of the failure of its creators. Maybe, then, when we delight in good-bad art, we are taking some comfort: Our projects might fail, too. But even beauty can blossom out of failure. Image credits: Getty Images This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-makes-some-art-so-bad-that-its-good-89737" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>.

Art

Machine learning gives us a dog’s-eye view, showing us how the brains of our best friends interpret the world

Dog’s minds are being read! Sort of. Researchers have used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans of dogs’ brains and a machine learning tool to reconstruct what the pooch is seeing. The results suggest that dogs are more interested in what is happening than who or what is involved. The results of the experiment conducted at Emory University in Georgia in the US are <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.3791/64442" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published</a> in the Journal of Visualized Experiments. Two unrestrained dogs were shown three 30-minute videos. The fMRI neural data was recorded, and a machine-learning algorithm employed to analyse the patterns in the scans. “We showed that we can monitor the activity in a dog’s brain while it is watching a video and, to at least a limited degree, reconstruct what it is looking at,” says Gregory Berns, professor of psychology at Emory. “The fact that we are able to do that is remarkable.” Using fMRIs to study perception has recently been developed in humans and only a few other species including some primates. “While our work is based on just two dogs it offers proof of concept that these methods work on canines,” says lead author Erin Phillips, from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews who conducted the research as a specialist in Berns’s Canine Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. “I hope this paper helps pave the way for other researchers to apply these methods on dogs, as well as on other species, so we can get more data and bigger insights into how the minds of different animals work.” Machine learning, interestingly enough, is technology which aims to mimic the neural networks in our own brains by recognising patterns and analysing huge amounts of data. The technology “reads minds” by detecting patterns within the brain data which can be associated with what is playing in the video. Attaching a video recorder selfie stick placed at dog eye level, the researchers filmed relatable scenes for the canine audience. <div class="newsletter-box"> <div id="wpcf7-f6-p214466-o1" class="wpcf7" dir="ltr" lang="en-US" role="form"> </div> </div> Recorded activities included dogs being petted by and receiving treats from people. Scenes with dogs showed them sniffing, playing, eating or walking. Other objects and animals included in the scenes included cars, bikes, scooters, cats and deer, as well as people sitting, hugging, kissing, offering a toy to the camera and eating. <iframe src="https://players.brightcove.net/5483960636001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6312584526112" width="960" height="540" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe> Time stamps on the videos helped classify them into objects (such as dog, car, human, cat) and actions (like sniffing, eating, walking). Only two dogs exhibited the patience to sit through the feature-length film. For comparison, two humans also underwent the same experiment. Both species, presumably, were coaxed with treats and belly pats. Machine-learning algorithm Ivis was applied to the data. Ivis was first trained on the human subjects and the model was 99% accurate in mapping the brain data onto both the object and action classifiers. In the case of the dogs, however, the model did not work for the object-based classifiers. It was, however, between 75 and 88% accurate in decoding the action classifiers in the dog fMRI scans. “We humans are very object oriented,” says Berns. “There are 10 times as many nouns as there are verbs in the English language because we have a particular obsession with naming objects. Dogs appear to be less concerned with who or what they are seeing and more concerned with the action itself.” Dogs see only in shades of blue and yellow but have a slightly higher density of vision receptors designed for detecting motion. “It makes perfect sense that dogs’ brains are going to be highly attuned to actions first and foremost,” Berns adds. “Animals have to be very concerned with things happening in their environment to avoid being eaten or to monitor animals they might want to hunt. Action and movement are paramount.” Philips believes understanding how animals perceive the world is important in her own research into how predator reintroduction in Mozambique may impact ecosystems. “Historically, there hasn’t been much overlap in computer science and ecology,” she says. “But machine learning is a growing field that is starting to find broader applications, including in ecology.” <img id="cosmos-post-tracker" style="opacity: 0; height: 1px!important; width: 1px!important; border: 0!important; position: absolute!important; z-index: -1!important;" src="https://syndication.cosmosmagazine.com/?id=214466&title=Machine+learning+gives+us+a+dog%E2%80%99s-eye+view%2C+showing+us+how+the+brains+of+our+best+friends+interpret+the+world" width="1" height="1" /> <div id="contributors"> <a href="https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/machine-learning-dog-see/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">This article</a> was originally published on <a href="https://cosmosmagazine.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cosmos Magazine</a> and was written by <a href="https://cosmosmagazine.com/contributor/evrim-yazgin" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Evrim Yazgin</a>. Evrim Yazgin has a Bachelor of Science majoring in mathematical physics and a Master of Science in physics, both from the University of Melbourne. Image: Emory Canine Cognitive Neuroscience Lab </div>

Technology

How the edge of space became up for interpretation

As the billionaire space race continues between Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, many are asking questions about how far into space they actually went. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight on 12 July rocketed up to 86 km off the ground, while Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin flight recently reached just over 107 km. However, these figures have experts wondering if either of them truly left the planet’s atmosphere. Jonti Horner, an astronomer at the University of Southern Queensland, says the age-old questions of where the atmosphere ends and where space begins can be open to interpretation. “It’s one of those questions that’s a bit like saying, ‘When are you old enough to drink?’ or ‘When are you old enough to drive?’ Every country has their own version of an answer.” “Where space starts and the atmosphere ends is a little bit like that, in that the atmosphere doesn’t just suddenly stop,” Horner told <a href="https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/where-is-the-edge-of-space/">Cosmos Magazine</a> in a recent interview. “The higher up you go, the thinner the atmosphere gets, and it keeps getting thinner and thinner and thinner, until eventually you can’t tell that it’s there anymore.” The official final point is approximately 10,000km above the surface, leaving no surprise why some want the line drawn a little closer to the Earth’s surface. The US military, the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA all define the edge of space as 80 km off the ground, towards the upper part of the mesosphere. This definition is very different to The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), an international record-keeping body for aeronautics, who have adopted their own definition in the 1960s. Called the “Kármán line”, it marks the beginning of space at 100 km above Earth’s mean sea level. Despite all these varying measurements, Horner says they are equally as good and as bad as each other. “Now that we are in this era of commercial space tourism, suddenly people want to know where [the boundary] is because they want to know that what they did was really good enough.” Image credit: Shutterstock

Technology

4 grandmothers try to interpret slang words

Do you ever hear people say things and as hard as you try to rack your brains you just think “What on earth does that mean?” These four hilarious grandmothers know exactly how that feels, especially when it comes to words born from the “millennial” generation. In this video, they try to interpret slang words like “bae” and “fleek”. We think they did quite well. Did you understand the meaning of any of these kooky phrases? You’re doing better than us. Let us know in the comments below. Related links: <a href="/news/news/2016/05/100-year-old-best-friends-unimpressed-with-todays-pop-culture/">100-year-old best friends unimpressed with today’s pop culture</a> <a href="/lifestyle/retirement-life/2016/05/91-year-old-shares-advice-for-staying-young-at-heart/">91-year-old shares advice for staying young at heart</a> <a href="/lifestyle/retirement-life/2016/05/105-year-old-volunteer-teacher/">105-year-old proves volunteering has no age limit</a>

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