I don't think I've ever dreamed about a US President, until that President was Donald Trump. But then, Donald Trump has been a President unlike any other, unconstrained by the inhibitions on speech and behavior that used to be taken for granted in someone seeking or occupying high office. You … [Read more...]
“Lucrecia the Dreamer” and the Spanish Inquisition – Kelly Bulkeley’s New Book on Dreams (Part 2)
Kelly Bulkeley. Lucrecia the Dreamer: Prophecy, Cognitive Science, and the Spanish Inquisition. Stanford University Press, 2018. (Continued from my post of two weeks ago.) At the end of our last installment, we left Lucrecia de León in the prisons of the Spanish Inquisition with her newborn … [Read more...]
“Lucrecia the Dreamer” and the Spanish Inquisition – Kelly Bulkeley’s New Book on Dreams (Part 1)
Kelly Bulkeley. Lucrecia the Dreamer: Prophecy, Cognitive Science, and the Spanish Inquisition. Stanford University Press, 2018. Dreams. Animals have them. Humankind's oldest stories talk about them. In your dreams! we say, or, beyond my wildest dreams, validating with our speech habits … [Read more...]
Michael Gordin’s “The Pseudoscience Wars” – Immanuel Velikovsky and His Enemies
Michael D. Gordin. The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. "Like other scientists with an interest in UFOs, [J. Allen] Hynek was denied a voice in most of his profession's publications yet ridiculed … [Read more...]
“Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO” – Coming 2020 from Stanford University Press
We were going to call our book The Flying Saucer Mystery. This was 57 years ago, when I'd just turned 13, and my pal Bryan and I were fired up with the idea that two bright eighth-graders like us could write the definitive book on the "elusive disks," as one writer called them. Heck, we could … [Read more...]
