A review of Malcolm Godwin’s book The Lucid Dreamer.

The first time I ever heard about lucid dreaming was an article in The National Enquirer (back when it was still fun to read) and you know how factual that can be. Fortunately, I recovered.

In a lucid dream, the sleeper is conscious of the fact that they are dreaming and furthermore can take steps and maneuver the dream any which way they wish. Godwin uses the dreaming state as an analogy for the state of existence, quoting from a number of “enlightened” people who have all declared at one time or another that the path to enlightenment begins when one realizes that existence is a dream.

There are some hokey spots, though:

“[Heisenberg] believed that this uncertainty arose because of the unavoidable disturbance of the object by the very process of measurement. Since those days, this idea has grown, and consequent experiments suggest that consciousness actually does appear to change the state of matter.”

Whoa. Was that a jump? You tell me. Nevertheless, this book is really terrific if you want to understand the nature of dreaming and particularly lucid dreaming better.

Safety note: One of the downsides I discovered while training myself to lucid-dream is that I got a little untethered as far as what was real and what was a dream. This is great if you are dreaming. This is not so great if you are driving.

A review of Walter M. Miller’s book A Canticle for Leibowitz.

High school students are supposed to read Canticle for many of their humanities classes, but they rarely do and those who have seemed to have been unaffected by it. Of course, maybe it’s the gas-pumpers I grew up with, I dunno’.

The book takes place in three stages.

The first stage is a bit after a planet-devastating nuclear war. Knowledge and writing have been forbidden in a vicious anti-intellectual pogrom (curious — do read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and try to convince me that Canticle isn’t a potential result of what’s described in Sagan’s book) the effects of which have just barely avoided small groups of monks engaged in the preservation of as much knowledge of the past as possible.

The second stage reveals a new culture of man, rising up from the wreckage of Earth with the knowledge that the monks, after a fashion, re-released. There are hints of the old jealousies and sins of Man, but there’s hope, too.

The third stage of Canticle reveals that no matter how much Man learns, the future only contains self-destruction and immolation. There is just a hint that something other than Man, that something purer than Man will now make its attempt on the Earth, but Man, as a race, is pretty much gone.

That a sequel to Canticle exists is, to me, most astonishing. Where do you go after the destruction of the entire human race? Ah well, I’ll just have to read the damn thing…

A review of Jan Harold Brunvald’s book The Big Book of Urban Legends.

Piranha Press publishes these Big Books pretty regularly, and somehow, this one is just perfect for the subject matter.

Hundreds of one-page stories, each one a different “Urban Legend”. In case you’re not familiar with the concept of an Urban Legend, just remember when you were a kid and the neighbor kid told you about a guy his brother knew who actually microwaved a poodle and it exploded! There’s your basic Urban Legend.

Lots of fun and invariably untrue (or at least not proved true). Each story is told in comic book format, by a different writer/artist team, so each one, in addition to being a story of singular perversity, possesses its own special flavor.

Very cool book, and it’ll stick in your brain.

I could tell you my favorites, but they’re all really great.

A review of Rick Geary’s The Borden Tragedy.

Rick Geary is probably my favorite comics artist and I can’t imagine anyone taking such a weird and horrific story of the Borden Tragedy and making it as whimsical and weird as he does.

The artwork is simply perfect for the story, as well as clean and crisp to read.

Geary examines carefully many of the facts surrounding the double murder, including leads that proved false and inconsistencies in nearly every person’s story.

I learned more from this book than I ever learned watching a made-for-TV version (not to denigrate all made-for-TV movies, just this one).

A review of Bernardo T. Arriaza’s book Beyond Death — The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile.

For thousands of years before the Egyptians mummified their dead, a small tribe of fishermen on the Arica coast of Chile mummified their corpses, using very elaborate methods.

Unlike the Egyptians, the Chinchorros mummified everybody — men, women, children, even fetuses in pregnant mothers who had died. It was an incredible amount of energy for a race which was just a few steps out of the Stone Age.

The book contains lots of unearthed details about the lives and deaths of the Chinchorros, as well as a few reflections on death rituals of other, neighboring peoples. It also contains lots of color photographs which will frighten people if they tend to look over your shoulder while you read on the bus. Just look at ’em grinning and say “Planning an early dinner tonight.” That’ll teach the nosy bastards.

I’m still wondering why they did it, though I have my own theories.