Islam counts sleep as one of the signs of the greatness of Allah (God) and urges followers to investigate this important sign. Sleep and sleep manners are notable subjects in Islamic sources. The Qur’an and Hadith discuss different forms of sleep, the importance of sleep, and healthy sleep habits. The types of sleep described in the Qur’an resemble sleep stages recognized in current sleep medicine. The Qur’an stresses the significance of preserving a regular circadian pattern of light and darkness exposure. A mid-day nap (Qailulah) is an established tradition for Muslims, and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) advocated naps as helpful. Sleep practice and instructions by the Prophet (PBUH) resemble several sleep hygiene regulations described in modern medicine and behavioral therapy. The Prophet’s (PBUH) practices include sleeping on the right side rather than in the prone position, which is discouraged. We recommend that sleep researchers analyze Islamic literature to understand archaic society’s views, manners, and practices regarding sleep and sleep disorders.

Hamlet is thrown into a state of uncertainty about the eternal. Indeed, his famed “delay” is a response to the thought of eternity. He is given “pause” by imagining “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”. The eternal is the “rub”. The chapter tackles this obscure rub by turning to Soren Kierkegaard, who references Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in his Philosophical Fragments. Resurrection, for Kierkegaard, is a movement through non-being to being. Negativity here plays a critical role. To be “born again”, the learner must “become[] nothing and yet … not [be] annihilated”. Hamlet’s struggle with the eternal opens him to an expansive view of humanity that goes beyond Claudius’s will to power or Laertes’s customary honour. It brings him to a new political vision, outside the violent and reductive dynastic politics of Denmark. Hamlet seeks what would seem impossible within revenge tragedy: the incalculable. The “eternal” is here used in an inclusive sense to show how the obscure but liberating thought of the timeless or untimely allows ideas of justice, charity, equality, and forgiveness to enter the play. The eternal suggests an imaginary perspective that negates our current preoccupations and political economies.

‘Hannibal’s legacy’ is an influential 1965 book by a controversial historian, Arnold Toynbee. It set the agenda for the next half-century and more of scholarship by arguing that the ‘legacy’ consisted of lasting damage to the agricultural economy of Italy and the political stability of Rome. Its contemporary reception is presented and analysed. The (disputed) extent of Italy’s devastation, as divinely promised to Hannibal in an alleged dream while still in Iberia, is assessed, and manpower difficulties discussed. Hannibal’s legacy at defeated Carthage was more obviously damaging, though the city did not fall until 146. Hannibal’s literary legacy in Latin and Greek literature was systematically ambiguous: fear, horror, fascination, and even admiration. Scipio’s literary afterlife and perceived qualities are explored initially through the medium of the ‘Dream of Scipio’, a fictional work by Cicero in imitation of Plato: Scipio Africanus appears to his adoptive grandson Aemilianus in his sleep.

This article analyzes women’s access to divine dreams in the Jewish texts of the Greco-Roman era: the Jubilees, the Liber antiquitatum biblicarum, the Jewish War, Jewish Antiquities, and Against Apion. By evaluating women’s dreams in light of anthropological understanding of divine dreams, that is, dreams that somehow claim to have a divine origin, this chapter aims to offer a new model for understanding women’s dreams in ancient Jewish texts. It is argued that while the preserved literature includes only a few dreams experienced by women, these examples nonetheless provide essential evidence of women being recipients of divine information in ancient Jewish texts.

Indigenous perspective on aging is different from what we are used to seeing in our current culture. In native culture, it is not only important to be respectful of your elders but responsible for caring for them. You learn very quickly that elders are a part of your life because they teach you what you need to know. Elders are the architects of the culture. They instill the traditions. Now we have the great distractions of technology—distractions that take us away from what our generations begore us gave to us. In Native communities, elders and young people are held in high esteem. Young people are the purpose for it all. That’s why elders have an obligation. Everyone must understand their obligation to the next generation, especially as we grow older . You always have the gift of youth inside you. But it’s up to you to rekindle it and to bring it back. It is our duty as elders to live, not just for ourselves, but for the generations of young people coming after us and for the earth.

This chapter explores the transition of editorial control over the Swiss journal Jahrbuch from Switzerland to Vienna in an analysis of the last issue that Jung edited under the shadow of his official resignation and the first issue that Freud edited in his stead. If Jung, Eugen Bleuler, and Freud launched the Jahrbuch with the publication of Freud’s “Little Hans,” which contained the psychoanalytic solution to the riddle of antisemitism in a startling digression, for the purpose of announcing the successful partnership between the Jewish members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the Protestant members associated with the Burghölzi Hospital, I argue that Jung’s publication of Alphonse Maeder’s “Dream of the Blue Horse” sought to repudiate Freud’s debut article. Whereas Freud had theorized that the roots of antisemitism lay in concerns over the circumcised Jewish penis in the non-Jewish psyche, the “Dream of the Blue Horse” theorized that the notion of intrapsychic antisemitism was a paranoid constellation wrought by oversexualized Jewish minds.

Here we uncover the mysteries of the baby as it develops in the womb, discussing how fetal development is controlled. We give insights into aspects of pregnancy not widely known, from the fetus starting to breathe months before it is born, to the question of whether it sleeps – and dreams. We discuss the ways in which information about the mother’s life and her environment affect the baby’s development. Although birth may seem the first major milestone for a baby, we emphasise that many other milestones have been passed before that, inside the womb, out of sight but over which parents can have substantial influence. We give insights into new discoveries about how the organs of the fetal body develop in prediction of the world in which that individual ‘expects’ to live, and what happens when the prediction turns out to be wrong. The idea that the fetus is preparing for life after birth will get the reader thinking about the long-term consequences of the way a fetus develops. Each of us is unique as a result of our development – and nobody is perfect. Our unique development starts from the moment of conception, which introduces the next chapter on sex.

Creativity, an apex of consciousness, contains the altered states of a creative trance that are treasured across cultures and time. Ranging from the creativity of everyday life to the reveries that inspire works of science and art to the fast-moving action of sports that shape and reshape personal goals, the creative trance can also be a transcendent experience, an ecstasy using the body’s own pharmacology. There are multiple depths of a creative trance, from light enjoyable flow states to deep experiences obliterating all external stimuli. The degree of depth can correlate with the psychological capacity for absorption. The creative trance relates to the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Openness, Big-C and little-c creativity, Wallas’ four-stage creative process, and Barron’s concept of a habitually creative person. The creative trance can be a pivot to personal transformation, creating new work and a new view of the world, and may also bring the capacity for transcendence.

In those moments, or seconds, or hours, when focus on our creative work overrides input from the outside world, we are in the altered state of a creative trance. Shaped by individual experiences, social circumstances, and cultural traditions, the creative trance is multifaceted and psychologically significant. Taking numerous forms throughout the sciences, arts, sports, and self-transformation, it can change the world. At age sixteen, Albert Einstein’s visualization of riding on a light beam became a basis for his theory of special relativity. It can also be the inner deliberations of both Mozart and Shostakovich, who composed finished music in their minds. Cross-culturally, meditation and sleep are central to a creative trance. The Native North American Chippewa weave dream images into their beadwork and banners. In addition to the trance of creation, there is an audience creative trance of reception that ranges from pleasant enjoyment to the overwhelming response of the Stendhal syndrome.

Overview of the main issues in Galen's scientific epistemology , the state of the art, and the contents of this volume.

This chapter examines the change in the fortunes of Galen that began to occur at the time when Aristotle was beginning to be recognised as the supreme ancient authority in the Arabic world, eventually eclipsing the reputation of Galen, at least as a philosopher. It shows how Galen’s pre-eminence as a philosophical authority was gradually undermined by a sequence of commentators on his great work of scientific method, On Demonstration. Its main focus is on al-Rāzī’s Doubts about Galen composed in order to bolster Galen’s reputation when it was beginning to be challenged, notably by al-Fārābī. Central to al-Rāzī’s (partial) defence is an endorsement of Galen’s strong, Aristotelian notion of a demonstrative empirical science, as well as of his rejection of mere induction and argument from example as appropriate means of arriving at the requisite axiomatic principles. However, al-Rāzī takes Galen to task for failing to observe his own distinctions, and for taking insufficient care to ground his own fundamental assumptions. Al-Rāzī then applies his modified Galenian method to theological arguments, notably design-arguments, and in order to reject supposedly fallacious materialists’ arguments against creation. The article then turns to al-Fārābī, who in contrast directly attacks Galen’s inferential methods to support contrary, Aristotelian, positions.

Dreams provided Bishop with a creative resource, a motif, a model, and a literary device in her work, exceeding the contexts of surrealism, psychoanalysis and autobiography in which they have been discussed. While the word “dream” and its variants turn up repeatedly in Bishop’s work, her usage and attitude vary. I argue that dreams in Bishop might best be understood within a literary/aesthetic or cognitive/phenomenological lens. Furthermore, symbolist practices are as pertinent to Bishop’s dream poetry as surrealist practices. This essay explores the nature of “dreaming” in Bishop as a poetic resource, a phenomenal experience and paradigm of imaginative activity. And, quite differently, I acknowledge Bishop’s ambivalence about dreams as a literary device and, more broadly, as a general pursuit of illusions with often precarious personal and social implications.

Although best known as a clear-eyed, realist poet of vivid, precise description, Elizabeth Bishop was powerfully drawn to surrealism, the avant-garde movement devoted to the unconscious, the irrational, and the power of dreams. This apparent contradiction is just one of the many paradoxes that make Bishop’s work and life so fascinating, but it is also one of the most significant and generative. This chapter argues that Bishop’s interest in surrealism is not merely a youthful enthusiasm that she definitively leaves behind. Surrealism struck a deep chord within her and remained a significant element of her poetic toolkit from beginning to end. Bishop’s poems are also not just influenced by surrealism, but in some ways are about it, thematically. She carries on a lifelong debate with surrealism and its implications, composing poems that probe fraught tensions between the unconscious and the conscious mind, between dream and waking, freedom and control.

This chapter examines the emergence of a dream aesthetic in the orbit of Surrealism. While André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) and Louis Aragon’s “Wave of Dreams” (1924) point to the dream as a catalyst for a new kind of imaginative freedom, free of moral or aesthetic judgement, it was in Communicating Vessels (1932) that Breton brought the dream into direct correspondence with urban wandering and objective chance. In the process, Breton identified how the manifest content of his dreams drives an affective and sensorial attunement to people and places in the urban street, revealing the cathectic forces driving our aleatory engagement with the material world, and thereby assigning the dream a more critical, indeed, political cast. The second part of the chapter turns to the striking affinities between the dream and film uncovered by Surrealism, via the symbolic mapping of the Freudian dream in Buñuel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929) and the melodramatic tension between symbolic objects and unconscious bodily movement in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).