Repetitive Dream Quotes

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple. No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique. Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children? We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other. And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her.

I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.

The lonely, wistful revisionism of memories is as gratingly repetitive as snow and ice in Canada. I avoid them both at all costs - memories and Canada.

The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor — to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire — to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower — to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind — to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in — Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.

There is no shortcut for hard work that leads to effectiveness. You must stay disciplined because most of the work is behind the scenes.

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?

There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but fragments of phrases that signaled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.

When you really want something, you will give up a million times, but your heart keeps taking you back to the starting line.

Mr. L. did not get better all at once. He had first to experience cycles of separations, dreams, depressions, and insights—the repetition, or 'working through,' required for long-term neuroplastic change. New ways of relating had to be learned, wiring new neurons together, and old ways of responding had to be unlearned, weakening neuronal links. Because Mr. L. had linked the ideas of separation and death, they were wired together in his neuronal networks. Now that he was conscious of his association, he could unlearn it.

Repetition. Effort. Pain. Success. There really is no shortcut.

If you keep on saying a single thing to yourself, you are likely to attract it to yourself, dreaming it always, then in a twinkle of an eye, it comes to you.

...childhood boredom is a special kind of boredom. It is a boredom full of dreams, a sort of projection into another place, into another reality. In adulthood boredom is made of repetition, it is the continuation of something from which we are no longer expecting any surprise.

Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.

We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, in all these records of the past, philosophies and dreams, and efforts stained with tears, of great and tender souls who tried to pierce the mystery of life and death, to answer the eternal questions of the Whence and Whither, and vainly sought to make, with bits of shattered glass, a mirror that would, in very truth, reflect the face and form of Nature's perfect self. These myths were born of hopes, and fears, and tears, and smiles, and they were touched and colored by all there is of joy and grief between the rosy dawn of birth, and death's sad night. They clothed even the stars with passion, and gave to gods the faults and frailties of the sons of men. In them, the winds and waves were music, and all the lakes, and streams, and springs,—the mountains, woods and perfumed dells were haunted by a thousand fairy forms. They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire; made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of love; filled Autumns arms with sun-kissed grapes, and gathered sheaves; and pictured Winter as a weak old king who felt, like Lear upon his withered face, Cordelia's tears. These myths, though false, are beautiful, and have for many ages and in countless ways, enriched the heart and kindled thought. But if the world were taught that all these things are true and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, the sweetest myth of all the Fable World would lose its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful thing to every brave and thoughtful man.

Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happen arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle.

When people want success but visualize failure, they attract failure because they don’t know about the power of repetition/visualization.

I had not awakened from some nostalgic dream . . . Could time be all-dimensional - yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition?

When Pharoah restored the chief butler to his position as foretold by Joseph in his interpretation of the butler's dream, he forgot Joseph. "Yet the chief butler did not remember Joseph but forgot him." (Genesis 40:23). Why does the Bible use this repetitive language? It is obvious that if the butler forgot Joseph, he did not remember him. Yet both verbs are used, "not remembering" and "forgetting." The Bible, in using this language, is teaching us a very important lesson. There are events of such overbearing magnitude that one ought not to remember them all the time, but one must not forget them either. Such an event is the Holocaust.

Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while. I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial,--considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.

I admire you, and yet at times it seems to me as if you were deranged. Or is it not a sort of mental derangement that you subject to such a degree every passion, every emotion of the heart, every mood, to the cold discipline of reflection? Is it not mental derangement to be so normal, to be a mere idea, not a human being like the rest of us, pliant and yielding, capable of being lost and of losing ourselves? Is it not mental derangement to be always awake, always sure, never obscure and dreaming?

Education, or the repetition and internalization of set models and the childhood seen through the lens of this education are false. Not just the models taught in class, but all perceptual models made and turned absolute. For instance, when I was a child, I didn't actually know either St. Pierre or Burpface, yet I defined myself, predicated my identity on how they saw me and how I perceived how they saw me. The above dream has shown me that, since the identity I was taught was fake, childhood is a fake.

It's the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen. —Muhammad Ali

Or as Luther Burbank put it, “It is repetition, repetition, repetition that habituates the skill.

It is human nature to celebrate the astounding breakthrough rather than the repetitive, tedious work that leads to the breakthrough.

The bears, over the years, have developed a primitive but heartfelt Buddhist discipline. Beneath the cinnamon trees they practice the repetition of the Growling Sutra. The

Ah yes, there had been intention, there had been intention, Isabel said to herself; and she seemed to wake from a long pernicious dream.

There is power in repetition. Do not give up. Do not give up. Do not give up.

When you need to let it out, write. Get it out of you and onto paper. Just remember it may start small, but it could grow to be something big. When you reach times of overwhelmingness take a deep breath and allow it to slowly escape. It is a wonder how a repetitive action such as breathing can make you feel. These are the words I find myself being constantly reminded of.

We cannot recall our dreams, they cannot come back to us. If a dream comes – but what sort of coming is a dream's? Through what night does it make its way? If it comes to us, it does so only by way of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness which is not only censorship or simply repression. We dream without memory, in such a way that the dream of any particular night is no doubt a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying, barred by desire’s repetitiousness. There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake (nor, for that matter, are you able to be addressed thus, summoned). The dream is without end, waking is without beginning; neither one nor the other ever reaches itself. Only dialectical language relates them to each other in view of a truth.

On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, is the fertile ground of pure creativity and freedom. Uncertainty means stepping into the unknown in every moment of our existence. The unknown is the field of all possibilities, ever fresh, ever new, always open to the creation of new manifestations. Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just the stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday.

At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.

At times, it seemed that the whole West was aflame. Later that summer, superheated air ignited the litter left by Minnesota loggers. It was a repetition of the firestorm that had enveloped Peshtigo twenty-three years earlier, when the Ingallses saw smoke from their little house in the Big Woods. This time, the Great Hinckley Fire consumed another entire town—burning more than 250,000 acres, killing between four hundred and eight hundred people, melting nails, and fusing the wheels of railcars to the tracks.

And from mayors to average citizens, we have heard expressed a shared belief in a direct causal relationship between the character of the physical environment and the social health of families and the community at large. For all of the household conveniences, cars, and shopping malls, life seems less satisfying to most Americans, particularly in the ubiquitous middle-class suburbs, where a sprawling, repetitive, and forgettable landscape has supplanted the original promise of suburban life with a hollow imitation.

Most of us do live like that; we live according to a preordained plan. We spend our youth being educated. Then we find a job, and meet someone, marry, and have children. We buy a house, try to make a success of our business, aim for dreams like a country house or a second car. We go away on holiday with our friends. We plan for retirement. The biggest dilemmas some of us ever have to face are where to take our next holiday or whom to invite at Christmas. Our lives are monotonous, petty, and repetitive, wasted in the pursuit of the trivial, because we seem to know of nothing better.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection), but still unique. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children? We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

The Thanksgiving special was titled Here Is Mariah Carey, and I was going to debut three new songs from Music Box: “Dreamlover,” “Anytime You Need a Friend,” and “Hero,” along with some of my known hits—“Emotions,” “Make It Happen,” and of course, “Vision of Love.” I had always written songs from an honest place, using my own lived experiences and dreams as a source. I also pushed my vocals to their extreme. I was also going to debut “Hero.” It’s always a risk to debut songs at a live show that people have not had the opportunity to connect with through radio repetition. Even though I wrote “Hero,” it wasn’t originally intended for me to perform.

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory... The American psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University has provided anecdotal but reasonably persuasive evidence that people who are engaged in intellectual activities during the day, especially unfamiliar intellectual activities, require more sleep at night, while, by and large, those engaged in mainly repetitive and intellectually unchallenging tasks are able to do with much less sleep.

Take one child, limitless dreams, unlimited potential, pure innocence and a sponge-like brain. Force them by law to spend at least ten years of their precious youth being force-fed the most useless information. Constantly reminding them that they’re only as good as their grades in a system that teaches useless mind-numbing subjects and claims to confirm our intellect with repetition and random memory tests. I didn’t give a flying fuck about the square route of the number nine or the speed of sound; I just so desperately wanted to know the basics. Happiness, love, the things that we need in our lives; the things that help us to find confidence in ourselves, our ability and our dreams.

When difficulties seem insurmountable, optimists react in a more constructive and creative way. They accept the facts with realism, know how to rapidly identify the positive in adversity, draw lessons from it, and come up with an alternative solution or turn to a new project. Pessimists would rather turn away from the problem or adopt escapist strategies — sleep, isolation, drug or alcohol abuse — that diminish their focus on the problem.9 Instead of confronting them with resolve, they prefer to brood over their misfortunes, nurture illusions, dream up “magic” solutions, and accuse the whole world of being against them. They have a hard time drawing lessons from the past, which often leads to the repetition of their problems. They are more fatalistic (“I told you it wouldn’t work. It’s always the same, no matter what I do”) and are quick to see themselves as “mere pawns in the game of life.

The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed, and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundredfold?

And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed, and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundredfold? Finally,

I created a sphere in this infinite space for myself: not too big, though possessing mass. My mental state didn’t improve, however. The sphere floated in the middle of “emptiness”—in infinite space, anywhere could be the middle. The universe had nothing that could act on it, and it could act on nothing. It hung there, never moving, never changing, like a perfect interpretation for death. I created a second sphere whose mass was equal to the first one’s. Both had perfectly reflective surfaces. They reflected each other’s images, displaying the only existence in the universe other than itself. But the situation didn’t improve much. If the spheres had no initial movement—that is, if I didn’t push them at first—they would be quickly pulled together by their own gravitational attraction. Then the two spheres would stay together and hang there without moving, a symbol for death. If they did have initial movement and didn’t collide, then they would revolve around each other under the influence of gravity. No matter what the initial conditions, the revolutions would eventually stabilize and become unchanging: the dance of death. I then introduced a third sphere, and to my astonishment, the situation changed completely. Like I said, any geometric figure turns into numbers in the depths of my mind. The sphereless, one-sphere, and two-sphere universes all showed up as a single equation or a few equations, like a few lonesome leaves in late fall. But this third sphere gave “emptiness” life. The three spheres, given initial movements, went through complex, seemingly never-repeating movements. The descriptive equations rained down in a thunderstorm without end. Just like that, I fell asleep. The three spheres continued to dance in my dream, a patternless, never-repeating dance. Yet, in the depths of my mind, the dance did possess a rhythm; it was just that its period of repetition was infinitely long. This mesmerized me. I wanted to describe the whole period, or at least a part of it. The

Once the writer was at the deathbed of a fellow writer. What interested his dying colleague more than anything else was what was being said in the cultural section of the newspapers. Did these battles of opinion take his mind off his illness by infuriating him or making him laugh? Did they put him in mind of an eternal repetition, preferable after all to what was in store for him? There was more to it than that. Even in his hopeless situation, far-removed as he was from the editorial offices, he was their prisoner; more than his nearest and dearest, the critics and editors were the object of his dreams; and in the intervals when he was free from pain, he would ask, since by then he was incapable of reading, what one publication or another had said about some new book. The intrigues, and the almost pleasurable fury they aroused in the sufferer - who saw through them - brought a kind of world, a certain permanence into the sickroom, and the man at his bedside understood his vituperating or silently nodding friend as well as if it had been his own self lying there. But later, when the end was near and the dying man still insisted on having opinions read out to him from the latest batch of newspapers, the witness vowed that he would never let things come to such a pass with him as they had with his image and likeness. Never again would he involve himself in this circuit of classifications and judgments, the substance of which was almost exclusively the playing off of one writer or school against another. Over the years since then, he had derived pride and satisfaction from staying on the outside and carrying on by his own strength rather than at the expense of rivals. The mere thought of returning to the circuit or to any of the persistently warring cliques made him feel physically ill. Of course, he would never get entirely away from them, for even today, so long after his vow, he suddenly caught sight of a word that he at first mistook for his name. But today at least he was glad - as he would not have been years ago - to have been mistaken. Lulled in security, he leafed through the local section and succeeded in giving his mind to every single news item.

She stayed with buses after that, getting off only now and then to walk so she'd keep awake. What fragments of dreams came had to do with the post horn. Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed. At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo-any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours. The night was empty of all terror for them, they had inside their circle an imaginary fire, and needed nothing but their own unpenetrated sense of community. They knew about the post horn, but nothing of the chalked game Oedipa had seen on the sidewalk. You used only one image and it was a jump-rope game, a little girl explained: you stepped alternately in the loop, the bell, and the mute, while your girlfriend sang: Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, Turning taxi from across the sea… "Thurn and Taxis, you mean?" They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.

Desire is… " Desire is the glow of bathing lunatics. Starlight is the liquid used to power a whispering machine. Humming is the music of a forest moving in unison with your eyes. * A slip of the tongue and the hummingbird’s empty throne make the acquaintance of the word frenzy, which in turn adopts the phrase: “I am closest to you when we are furthest apart,” and together they follow the anxious doorway that leads far out of the city, where travelers always meet, alone and abandoned with only their mysteries to guide them… and when the sun bleeds out of the dampness of the earth, like pale limbs entwined and exhausted, they all pause in their own fashion to reflect not upon themselves but on the white wolves in the garden shivering like mist, in the mirror hiding your face. * The nature of movement is an image lost between the objects of an eclipse fervently scratched into the face of a sleeping woman when she approaches the liquid state of a circle, wandering aimlessly in search of lucidity and those moments of inarticulate suspicion… when the riddle is only half solved and the alphabet is still adding letters according to the human motors that have not yet arrived, as a species, scintillating in the grass, burning time. Not far from your name there is always a question mark, followed by silent paws… * It is not without the mask of the Enchanter’s dance of unreason, that joy follows the torment of seductive shapes, and sudden appearances in the whisper of long corridors. Tribal veils rising out of fingerprints on invisible entrances in the middle of the landscape, assume the form of her shoulders and the intimacy of her bones making dust, taking flight. * The axis of revolt and the nobility of a springtime stripped of its flowers, expertly balanced with a murmur of the heart on the anvil of chance. Your voice arcing between the two points of day and night, where the oracle of water spinning rapidly above, that is your city of numerology, mixes with the flux of a long voyage more stone-like and absurdly graceful then either milkweed or deadly nightshade, when it acclimatizes the elements of transparency in the host of purity. * The dream birds of a lost language are growing underground in the bed of sorcery. It is all revealed in the arms of your obsession, Arachne, (crawling to kiss) pale Ariadne, (kneeling to feed) in a pool of light that exceeds the dimensions of the loveliest crime. She turns into your evidence, gaining speed and recognition, becoming a brightness never solved, and a clarity that makes crystals. * The early morning hours share their nakedness with those who bare fruit and corset fireflies in long slender bath-like caresses. “Your serum, Sir Moor’s Head, follows the grand figures of the sea, ignites them, throws them like vessels out of fire, raising the sand upwards into oddly repetitive enchantments. Drown me in flight, daughter of wonder…

Though the mature dreamer seems to whisper to himself repetitively of pursuing a dream that appears to be out of his league, in all actuality, these repetitive sweet nothings, whispered to the universe, will materialize into the jackhammer that will eventually penetrate the concrete reality of the earth and give birth to new worlds.

No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.” His words were very enlightening to me. Later, after I thought about it a bit, I realized that it wasn’t Buddhist philosophy at all, but was more akin to some modern physics theories. The abbot also told me he wasn’t going to discuss Buddhism with me. His reason was the same as my high school teacher’s: With my sort, he’d just be wasting his time. That first night, I couldn’t sleep in the tiny room in the temple. I didn’t realize that this refuge from the world would be so uncomfortable. My blanket and sheet both became damp in the mountain fog, and the bed was so hard. In order to make myself sleep, I tried to follow the abbot’s advice and fill myself with “emptiness.” In my mind, the first “emptiness” I created was the infinity of space. There was nothing in it, not even light. But soon I knew that this empty universe could not make me feel peace. Instead, it filled me with a nameless anxiety, like a drowning man wanting to grab on to anything at hand. So I created a sphere in this infinite space for myself: not too big, though possessing mass. My mental state didn’t improve, however. The sphere floated in the middle of “emptiness”—in infinite space, anywhere could be the middle. The universe had nothing that could act on it, and it could act on nothing. It hung there, never moving, never changing, like a perfect interpretation for death. I created a second sphere whose mass was equal to the first one’s. Both had perfectly reflective surfaces. They reflected each other’s images, displaying the only existence in the universe other than itself. But the situation didn’t improve much. If the spheres had no initial movement—that is, if I didn’t push them at first—they would be quickly pulled together by their own gravitational attraction. Then the two spheres would stay together and hang there without moving, a symbol for death. If they did have initial movement and didn’t collide, then they would revolve around each other under the influence of gravity. No matter what the initial conditions, the revolutions would eventually stabilize and become unchanging: the dance of death. I then introduced a third sphere, and to my astonishment, the situation changed completely. Like I said, any geometric figure turns into numbers in the depths of my mind. The sphereless, one-sphere, and two-sphere universes all showed up as a single equation or a few equations, like a few lonesome leaves in late fall. But this third sphere gave “emptiness” life. The three spheres, given initial movements, went through complex, seemingly never-repeating movements. The descriptive equations rained down in a thunderstorm without end. Just like that, I fell asleep. The three spheres continued to dance in my dream, a patternless, never-repeating dance. Yet, in the depths of my mind, the dance did possess a rhythm; it was just that its period of repetition was infinitely long. This mesmerized me. I wanted to describe the whole period, or at least a part of it. The next day I kept on thinking about the three spheres dancing in “emptiness.” My attention had never been so completely engaged. It got to the point where one of the monks asked the abbot whether I was having mental health issues. The abbot laughed and said, “Don’t worry. He has found emptiness.” Yes, I had found emptiness. Now I could be at peace in a bustling city. Even in the midst of a noisy crowd, my heart would be completely tranquil.

Visualize. Here’s a visualization practice my friend and mentor Pia taught me: Find a comfortable chair and sit upright. Take 10 deep breaths, relax your shoulders, and clear your mind. Visualize walking through a forest, or a field of cornstalks, or a lush garden. Visualize coming to an open beach. Hold that scene in your mind’s eye for as long as you can, and see what emerges. Objects or people that emerge from the left represent the past. Those from the right represent the future. Record the images in your journal. Writing helps to consolidate the experience. Do timed automatic writings to quiet your rational mind. See 13. Survive love and loss for directions. Record your dreams in a journal. Note patterns, repetitions, symbols, and archetypes, rather than literal events. Before sleep, invite your subconscious for revelation through dreams. Pay attention to your body’s signals: twinges, goosebumps, or nausea, for example. Intuitive signals tend to be fleeting, whereas signals that represent physical imbalances or disease tend to be longer-lasting. Enlist the gift of hindsight. This can help to correlate images and signs with actual happenings, and decipher between intuition and wishful or fearful thinking. Record these notes into your dream journal, which may be used for all intuition-related reflections. Be patient. Developing intuition is like learning a new language. It takes time, repetition, and practice. Practice humility and trust. Like analytical thinking, intuition isn’t 100 percent accurate 100 percent of the time.

A testable prediction emerged: if I could lower the levels of noradrenaline in the brains of PTSD patients during sleep, thereby reinstating the right chemical conditions for sleep to do its trauma therapy work, then I should be able to restore healthier quality REM sleep. With that restored REM-sleep quality should come an improvement in the clinical symptoms of PTSD, and further, a decrease in the frequency of painful repetitive nightmares. It was a scientific theory in search of clinical evidence. Then came the wonderful stroke of serendipity.

You spend a restless night, your sleep is an intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you like the repetition of one dream always the same. You fight with dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don't yet know in which direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.

There are no coincidences in life. Everything happens for a very personal reason. You always attract what you want the most, even when you are not seeing it. And you will never see it until you are prepared to accept it. But the potential to understand yourself and grow both spiritually and mentally, the possibility of finding the answers you have been seeking, the possibility of reaching for your dreams, is equivalent to the perception of another, as well as the emotions you assimilate within a dynamic you can't control. It would be naive to call it love, because real love is found only when paths cross each other, not from the angle of what is observed but rather the angle of desire. And in this situation, to give is to receive; to offer, is to gain; to lose, is to win. When you understand that the mystery of life unfolds itself through the emotions you attract to your life, you will also understand that any limitation, such as distance, location and time, are illusions that will only distract you from a dream that awaits for you in the eyes of someone else. People often fear such experiences, but only because of their past mistakes. The nature of the experience never changes, but fears do lead people to a repetition of cycles.

The push-pull of jouissance around signs of self-destruction represented a significant advance over Freud’s thinking about why traumatized people behave the way they do. Whereas Freud understood the traumatized person’s “compulsion to repeat” as a way of metabolizing or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts, Lacan saw that repetitive symptoms are really an adaptation to a new regime of enjoyment, how a person reorganizes his or her life in such a way as to continue to derive enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, may be despised and even (in its most extreme and pathological forms) possibly does harm. Lacan was no more interested in literal precognition or prophecy than Freud was, but his revision of the Freudian theory of symptoms and their relation to trauma is highly suggestive for an understanding of precognitive phenomena, and the ways trauma may sometimes become “displaced in time.” For instance, in many cases where disasters and deaths are precognized, even including deaths of loved ones or near-fatal perils in one’s own future, there is an implicit reward, if only in the very primitive—and hard-to-acknowledge—sense of “but I survived.” This can be a very repellant kind of reward, something appealing to a very base, “lizard-brain,” survival-oriented part of us that may be at odds with our conscious, moral, social desires and sense of self. The paradoxical connection between survival and death, which sparked Freud’s thinking but which he could never resolve successfully, in some sense boils down to a matter of semiotics: the fact that the one value (survival) takes on its meaning or value as a signal only contrastively, when paired with its opposite (death/destruction). According to structural linguistics, which was hugely influential on Lacan, all signifiers ultimately derive their meaning from their opposition to other signifiers. In life’s semiotic (or “sign language”), death or disaster befalling others is the foremost signifier of our own being-there, our da-sein. If you find yourself “traumatized” by witnessing something terrible, you have by definition survived. Dreams seem to give people dramatic and often distorted previews of those situations lurking in the foggy waters ahead.

Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood Lying by omission turns inevitably into positive lying. The implications of literature are that human beings are controlled, if not by reason, at least by comprehensible, well-organized, avowable sentiments. Whereas the facts are quite different. Sometimes the sentiments come in, sometimes they don’t. All for love, or the world well lost; but love may be the title of nobility given to an inordinate liking for a particular person’s smell or texture, a lunatic desire for the repetition of a sensation produced by some particular dexterity. Or consider those cases (seldom published, but how numerous, as anyone in a position to know can tell!), those cases of the eminent statesmen, churchmen, lawyers, captains of industry—seemingly so sane, demonstrably so intelligent, publicly so high-principled; but, in private, under irresistible compulsion towards brandy, towards young men, towards little girls in trains, towards exhibitionism, towards gambling or hoarding, towards bullying, towards being whipped, towards all the innumerable, crazy perversions of the lust for money and power and position on the one hand, for sexual pleasure on the other. Mere tics and tropisms, lunatic and unavowable cravings—these play as much part in human life as the organized and recognized sentiments. And imaginative literature suppresses the fact. Propagates an enormous lie about the nature of men and women.

This can’t be all. Once there was the profound mystery and essence of humanity, but he and they – the transformers – lost it all so completely and irrevocably in the IS3 transformation that now they can’t even make the imaginative leap to comprehend what they have lost. Yet they feel and they suspect, digesting hundreds of days in the mechanical repetition of work, as if they were really nothing but that which they are able to do, surrendering to energy cycles more rigidly immutable than the astronomical cycles of darkness and light, vacantly absorbing the after-images of artificial entertainment and winding these fictional lives around their minds. Standing for hours in a statue-like stupor, switched off like real robots, not doing anything, not living anything, no longer even bothering to perform the social rituals of the body or to carry out the pathetic charade of sexbot carnality. Their whole life is a robotic life: fix this, do that, build this. Their whole life is a hardware dream, and yet they feel, they really feel that THIS CANNOT BE ALL.

Her momma finds her stray hair still left in the bathroom sink. Where she combed out her ratty do for what seemed like forever. Staring at herself in the mirror and pulling and teasing and shaping all that her stingy god would give her and nothing ever more. She’d contemplate her face there. Her flat wide nose and dark eyes and the combinations. She’d test her looks to see how she looked when she kissed. She'd extend her tongue as far out of her mouth as she could to check out how long it was and if she had anything extra special to offer. And what she'd have to do to serve it up. Momma grabs a kleenex and cleans around the deep rust stains in the sink. Does she throw away the old dry hairs crumbled in her hand under the tissue or keep such sad memories. Does she store them in a drawer or is she just being silly. Should she cherish this precious angel manna or try and just fucking get over it. Not give into it. Could she even possibly throw them away into the garbage without bawling uncontrollably. Can she possibly change the urge over from utter despair. When she sees her child getting brutally raped and hammered into, her baby's baby fingers digging into the rocks and dirt she can pass by daily. A dilapidated pit that crumbles in the middle of all their continuing lives and remains standing out of sheer old bull-headed promise and well organized planning. The forefathers of this neighborhood didn't count on the incredibly heavy weight of the public’s filthy laziness. My poor baby. My poor baby. She has to seek help. This nameless faceless mother. She can’t deal with this all alone. She can’t quit these imaginings from her old yellowed eyes and ears and off her cleaning washing working fingertips and the very constant edges of her smaller brain. The sickness that slipped thick repetitive blobs of useless male sperm and thin streams of rust washed metal stripping toxins bleeding down her daughter’s black throat may or may not be only one in a great number of difficult dreams and attempts but she just can’t find a polite perspective anymore. She can’t live like this any longer. She should have offered her child more than a dirty smudged mirror in a peeling and running bathroom when she got home from a dirty hot school every damn day. Where were the cops? And the doctors who were supposed to save her? And the fucking psychiatrists who could have done some trepanning into that evil dog's motherfucking bursting crack head before he was let out on the streets with his glass dick and his screaming pussy hunting cock. Dogs don't need help. They need to be put down.

All of these old agreements which rule our dream of life are the result of repeating them over and over again. Therefore, to adopt The Four Agreements, you need to put repetition in action. Practicing the new agreements in your life is how your best becomes better. Repetition makes the master.

Dreams and aspirations are what make us human and separate us from animals. Animals live life doing the same things every day without any aim or meaning. Their life is a meaningless repetition. Sadly, most people do the exact same thing. In the rat race to make a living, they forget how to live. But the great thing about humans is that we have the power of conscious choice, in other words we can make a choice to do things differently should we really want to. It is likely that we only have one shot at life, why live with regret? Go after what you want to do, with no expectation of external results. At least this way even if you fail, you will never end up with one of the biggest life regrets of them all – The regret of failing because you never tried.

we are the game in the game of repetition of games, that has become the fabric of our beings, we are the unfaithful, we are the faithful, we are the ugly, we are the beautiful, we are the dream makers, we are the nightmare makers, we make plans we don’t keep, we are the voices in prayers coming from hill tops, mercy, mercy, mercy on us,

You can make as many NAPS as you like, but unless they have clean language in the narration then you could well be sabotaging your own dreams!

Running your own race means embracing your dreams and shifting towards them and not letting anyone discourage you from your goals or dreams. Create your NAPS with this in mind!

For many of us each day of our lives is simply just a repetition. We go to school, we go to work and we have little or no time for anything else. For those of us who don't own our own business we put our all into helping others achieving their dreams while we hope and hope that one day we will be able to do the same. If God forbid you were to die today, what would you be remembered for ? Would you have accomplished any of your life goals? There are so many people who are burdened down with the load of carrying the dreams of others that it eventually kills them. The joy that many of us dream of should be something we live each and everyday. There are relationships that eat at you every single day and instead of lifting you to higher heights it brings you lower and lower. There is no time in this already limited lifetime to be stuck in situations that eat at the little joy that you may have. The same can be said for friendships. There are friends who only come to you with bad news, they are never positive about anything and when you are in a good place they erase it and present sad situations. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be there for our friends, I'm saying that our friends should be striving for that source of happiness as well.

I am going to tell a story now, and though I've made a life out of writing words, this is the first time I have told a story. There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but the fragments of phrases that signalled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.

Katwe has no street signs. No addresses. It is a maze of rutted alleys and dilapidated shacks. It is a place where time is measured by where your shadow hits the ground. There are no clocks. No calendars. Because it lies just a few degrees from the equator, Katwe has no seasons, which adds to the repetitive, almost listless, nature of daily life. Every day is just like the next. Survival in Katwe depends on courage and determination as well as guile and luck.

Besides revealing the difficulty of describing mental imagery, all the mathematicians reported that they did not use computers in their work. This characteristic of the pure mathematician's work is echoed in Poincaré's (1948) use of the “choice” metaphor and Ervynck's (1991) use of the term “nonalgorithmic decision making.” The doubts expressed by the mathematicians about the incapability of machines to do their work brings to mind the reported words of Garrett Birkhoff, one of the great applied mathematicians of our time. In his retirement presidential address to the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Birkhoff (1969) addressed the role of machines in human creative endeavors. In particular, part of this address was devoted to discussing the psychology of the mathematicians (and hence of mathematics). Birkhoff (1969) said: The remarkable recent achievements of computers have partially fulfilled an old dream. These achievements have led some people to speculate that tomorrow's computers will be even more "intelligent" than humans, especially in their powers of mathematical reasoning...the ability of good mathematicians to sense the significant and to avoid undue repetition seems, however, hard to computerize; without it, the computer has to pursue millions of fruitless paths avoided by experienced human mathematicians. (pp. 430-438)

Childhood boredom is a special kind of boredom. It is a boredom full of dreams, a sort of projection into another place, into another reality. In adulthood boredom is made of repetition, it is the continuation of something from which we are no longer expecting any surprise. Would that I had time to get bored today! What I do have is the fear of repeating myself in my literary work. This is the reason that every time I must come up with a new challenge to face. I must find something to do that will look like a novelty, something a little beyond my capabilities.

The three spheres continued to dance in my dream, a patternless, never-repeating dance. Yet, in the depths of my mind, the dance did possess a rhythm; it was just that its period of repetition was infinitely long.

You don’t become a good writer overnight. It takes persistence and repetition to gain mastery.

Self-discipline is a learned habit that should be developed and continuously worked on through regular application, practice, and repetition.

This is why I say you need to have the passion if you're going to take the risk. Because when there are hard times and there will be hard times and you're scared and worried and wondering if you should have taken such a risky leap, you'll stick it out as long as you're doing something that fuels you. Enterpreneurship is glorified constantly - who doesn't want to go on vacation whenever she wants and get her nails done during the workday and make her own schedule? Bt I primise you, 90 % of the enterprenurship life is not glamorous, it is repetitive and gruelling and maybe a little bit boring - not the kind of thing that makes for good social content. If you're gonna do it, you have to really want it.

Mason, hands in the dough, watch'd his father openly, feeling the pain in his arms, the pale mass seething with live resistance,— hungry peoples' invention to fill in for times of no Meat, and presently a Succedaneum for Our Lord's own Flesh...The baker's trade terrified the young man. He learn'd as much of it as would keep him going,— but when he began to see into it,— the smells, the unaccountable swelling of the dough, the oven door like a door before a Sacrament,— the daily repetitions of smell and ferment and some hidden Drama, as in the Mass,— was he fleeing to the repetitions of the Sky, believing them safer, not as saturated in life and death? If Christ's Body could enter Bread, then what else might?— might it not be as easily haunted by ghosts less welcome? Alone in the early empty mornings even for a few seconds with the mute white rows, he was overwhelmed by the ghostliness of Bread. In fact, young Mason nods all the time, more than once with a risen raw Loaf for a pillow, his ear flow'd into intimately by the living network of cells, which seems, just before he wakes,— he insists he wasn't dreaming,— to contrive in some wise, directly in his ear canal, to speak to him. It says, "Remember us to your Father.

Mason, hands in the dough, watch'd his father openly, feeling the pain in his arms, the pale mass seething with live resistance,— hungry peoples' invention to fill in for times of no Meat, and presently a Succedaneum for Our Lord's own Flesh...The baker's trade terrified the young man. He learn'd as much of it as would keep him going,— but when he began to see into it,— the smells, the unaccountable swelling of the dough, the oven door like a door before a Sacrament,— the daily repetitions of smell and ferment and some hidden Drama, as in the Mass,— was he fleeing to the repetitions of the Sky, believing them safer, not as saturated in life and death? If Christ's Body could enter Bread, then what else might?— might it not be as easily haunted by ghosts less welcome? Alone in the early empty mornings even for a few seconds with the mute white rows, he was overwhelmed by the ghostliness of Bread. In fact, young Mason nods all the time, more than once with a risen raw Load for a pillow, his ear flow'd into intimately by the living network of cells, which seems, just before he wakes,— he insists he wasn't dreaming,— to contrive in some wise, directly in his ear canal, to speak to him. It says, "Remember us to your Father.

That sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she had spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration. So his mutual commitment to Takver, their relationship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four years’ separation. They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had not occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment. For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Takver’s sleep, it was joy they were both after – the completeness of being. If you evade the suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home. Takver sighed softly in her sleep, as if agreeing with him, and turned over, pursuing some quiet dream. Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

Most compelling to me, however, were the repetitive nightmares reported in PTSD patients—a symptom so reliable that it forms part of the list of features required for a diagnosis of the condition. If the brain cannot divorce the emotion from memory across the first night following a trauma experience, the theory suggests that a repeat attempt of emotional memory stripping will occur on the second night, as the strength of the “emotional tag” associated with the memory remains too high. If the process fails a second time, the same attempt will continue to repeat the next night, and the next night, like a broken record. This was precisely what appeared to be happening with the recurring nightmares of the trauma experience in PTSD patients.

Resigned that I wasn’t going back to sleep, I rolled up and got out of bed once another glance at my phone confirmed it was seven thirty and instantly peeked out the window. There was a dull, repetitive sound coming from out there. It was Mr. Rhodes. Chopping wood. Shirtless. And I mean shirtless. I’d expected something nice beneath his clothes from the way he filled them out, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of… him. Reality. If I wasn’t already pretty sure that there was dry drool on my face, there would have been five minutes after seeing all…. That through the window. A pile of foot-long logs were tossed around his feet, with another small pile that he’d obviously already chopped, just to the side. But it was the rest of him that really drew my attention. Dark chest hair was sprinkled high over his pectorals. The body hair did nothing to take away from the hard slabs of abdominal muscles he’d been hiding; he was broad up top, narrow at the waist, and covering all that was firm, beautiful skin. His biceps were big and supple. Shoulders rounded. His forearms were incredible. And even though his shorts grazed his knees, I could tell the rest of his downtown area was nice and muscular. He was the DILF to end all DILFs. My ex had been fit. He’d worked out several times a week at our home gym with a trainer. Being attractive had been part of his job. Kaden’s physique had nothing on Mr. Rhodes though. My mouth watered a little more. I whistled. And I must have done it a lot louder than I’d thought because his head instantly went up and his gaze landed on me through the window almost immediately. Busted. I waved. And inside… inside, I died. He lifted his chin. I backed away, trying to play it off. Maybe he wouldn’t think anything of it. Maybe he’d think I’d whistled… to say hi. Sure, yeah. A girl could dream. I backed up some more and felt my soul shriveling as I made my breakfast, making sure to stay away from the window the rest of the time. I tried to focus on other stuff. You know, so I wouldn’t want to have to move out from shame. Was I tired? Absolutely. But there were things I wanted to do. Needed to do. Including but not limited to getting away from Mr. Rhodes so my soul could come back to life. So an hour later, with a plan in mind, a sandwich, a couple bottles of water, and my whistle in my backpack, I headed down the stairs, hoping and praying that Mr. Rhodes was back in his house. I wasn’t that lucky. He had a shirt on, but that was the only difference. Darn.

For example, here’s an excerpt from my article, “How Do Some People Succeed So Quickly? They Approach Life Like This.” Every single moment, of every single day, you are “practicing” something. If you don’t floss in the morning, you’re practicing not-flossing. If you choose to eat quinoa and veggies instead of Frosted Flakes, you’re practicing eating for fuel instead of eating for enjoyment. If you yell at your significant other, you’re practicing a lack of self-control. If you watch TV instead of working on your book, you’re practicing postponing your dream of becoming a novelist. The moment you start to see the world this way, you start to realize that every single moment, of every single day, you are practicing something. And how aware you are of whatever it is you’re practicing dictates how consciously (or unconsciously) you move toward or away from where it is you actually want to be: whether that’s a destination, a physical place, or an emotional state. Here, I am combining the 1/1/1/1 structure with repetition to give a reader plenty of actionable examples without forcing them to read through paragraphs of prose. I’m only giving them what they absolutely need—and then once I’ve given them a handful of examples, I follow up with a longer, more descriptive paragraph (alternating rhythms).

If life were a discourse death could wait, but dreams break down, there is repetition

Dreams, by their nature, are difficult to hold on to. They often lack any kind of cohesion or narrative structure, and a chaotic series of images will always be harder to reconstruct than a tidy story (just as it’s harder to remember a string of random letters than a word). Memories tend to be encoded through repetition, but each dream is unique.

Life often functions in dull repetition, but humanity does not operate in patterns. Experiences are random to the point of them never happening again. People are different and they shift throughout space over time. Nothing may repeat. There is no one in a million. There is one in one. It was why no summer was the same. It was why some lips in history never got to test if they were good kissers. It was why Ali lost to Frazier but Frazier lost to Foreman. It is why film does not get another Marlon Brando and no music, however similar, can be compared to Debussy. To resurrect these greats is like trying to re-enter a lost dream. The shore motions toward the feet and never meets them exactly again.

it’s the black, brainless repetition; all these forests, and over all an ancient horror of unconsciousness. It’s like the dream of an atheist. Pine-trees and more pine-trees and millions more pine-trees —

TV is a problem only if you’ve forgotten how to look and listen…My students and I discuss this all the time. They’re beginning to feel they ought to turn against the medium, exactly as an earlier generation turned against their parents and their country. I tell them they have to learn to look as children again. Root out content. Find the codes and messages... … [They say] television is just another name for junk mail. But tell them I can't accept that. I tell them I’ve been sitting this room for more than two months, watching TV into the early hours, listening carefully, taking notes. A great and humbling experience, let me tell you. Close to the mystical. … I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dream-like and preconscious way. I’m very enthused. … You have to learn how to look. You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. There is light, there is sound. I ask my students 'What more do you want?' Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. 'Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.’ The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness and disgust. (50-51)

After years of repetitive work, you will often need to dig hard to find your passions, redefine your dreams, and revive hobbies that you let atrophy to near extinction. The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he had done so--at least that some one had done so--he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and the august prophetic procession of tales. For scores and hundreds of centuries,

D: To work for yourself. NR: To have others work for you. D: To work when you want to. NR: To prevent work for work’s sake, and to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect (“minimum effective load”). D: To retire early or young. NR: To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is. D: To buy all the things you want to have. NR: To do all the things you want to do, and be all the things you want to be. If this includes some tools and gadgets, so be it, but they are either means to an end or bonuses, not the focus. D: To be the boss instead of the employee; to be in charge. NR: To be neither the boss nor the employee, but the owner. To own the trains and have someone else ensure they run on time. D: To make a ton of money. NR: To make a ton of money with specific reasons and defined dreams to chase, timelines and steps included. What are you working for? D: To have more. NR: To have more quality and less clutter. To have huge financial reserves but recognize that most material wants are justifications for spending time on the things that don’t really matter, including buying things and preparing to buy things. You spent two weeks negotiating your new Infiniti with the dealership and got $10,000 off? That’s great. Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends? D: To reach the big pay-off, whether IPO, acquisition, retirement, or other pot of gold. NR: To think big but ensure payday comes every day: cash flow first, big payday second. D: To have freedom from doing that which you dislike. NR: To have freedom from doing that which you dislike, but also the freedom and resolve to pursue your dreams without reverting to work for work’s sake (W4W). After years of repetitive work, you will often need to dig hard to find your passions, redefine your dreams, and revive hobbies that you let atrophy to near extinction. The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.

When we dig in the soil and plant a seed, we enter into a cycle of restoration that produces wholeness in us. Our bodies are restored by the tilling and the harvesting, our minds are restored by the space such repetitive works opens up within us, the earth is restored by the nutrients provided through the plants, and our spirits are revived as we become better stewards of what we have been given.

The search for security is an illusion. In ancient wisdom traditions, the solution to this whole dilemma lies in the wisdom of insecurity, or the wisdom of uncertainty. This means that the search for security and certainty is actually an attachment to the known. And what’s the known? The known is our past. The known is nothing other than the prison of past conditioning. There’s no evolution in that — absolutely none at all. And when there is no evolution, there is stagnation, entropy, disorder, and decay. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is the fertile ground of pure creativity and freedom. Uncertainty means stepping into the unknown in every moment of our existence. The unknown is the field of all possibilities, ever fresh, ever new, always open to the creation of new manifestations. Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just the stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday. Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities. In your willingness to step into the unknown, you will have the wisdom of uncertainty factored in. This means that in every moment of your life, you will have excitement, adventure, mystery. You will experience the fun of life — the magic, the celebration, the exhilaration, and the exultation of your own spirit. Every day you can look for the excitement of what may occur in the field of all possibilities. When you experience uncertainty, you are on the right path — so don’t give it up. You don’t need to have a complete and rigid idea of what you’ll be doing next week or next year, because if you have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen and you get rigidly attached to it, then you shut out a whole range of possibilities.

The drama and the development of the play’s ideas arise from a triangular tension implied in the above structure. The fundamental conflict of the play, even more important than the conflicts among the characters, is among the three organizational paradigms at work in the play’s structure. The first paradigm is the reversed chronology of the plot or the play’s basic, backward-moving narrative structure. The second is directly opposed to the first: the implied, ineluctable forward movement of time. The third overlays the other two: a cyclical structure based in the play’s method of repetition and variation. The backward-moving narrative structure emphasizes two ideas we have already seen elsewhere. The first is a more elaborate development of the life-is-a-journey metaphor that Ben Stone employed in “The Road You Didn’t Take.” The second is the idea of a life’s meaning being governed by the anticipated completion of a goal, the point of narrative closure that makes a complete, meaning-providing structure for a life story. Both ideas are established in the opening number, “Merrily We Roll Along,” which is reprised throughout the show as a means of segueing from scene to scene and year to year. The song introduces the image of the dream as the goal one’s life is aiming for, the end of the journey and, more than that, the thing that gives the journey its purpose and meaning. The ensemble sings: Dreams don’t die, So keep an eye on your dream [….] Time goes by And hopes go dry, But you still can try For your dream. (F 383) Like Ben, the ensemble has conflicting feelings about life’s journey. In a counterpoint section, one half of the ensemble sings “Plenty of roads to try,” while the other

Richie Norton December 31, 2019 MY PREDICTIONS FOR THIS NEW DECADE 20 years ago tonight I was in Brazil waiting to see if the world would end at midnight. #y2k I’m glad the computers figured out how to write the year 2000. Would’ve been hard to imagine 20 years ago all that has happened in my personal life, family life and the world at large. 1. For example, people could still walk onto airplanes — TSA didn’t even exist, Facebook wasn’t even a thought on Zucky’s mind. No Twitter. No youtube. No ig. No li. 2. 20 years ago was a different time. I predict the next 10 years will bring as much change or more than the last 10 years brought. 3. I mean - TikTok taking over the world...a straight up Chinese company dominating American socials? Amazing. We will see more of this. It will happen in pockets where kids want to buck the boomers, the x men and the millennials. Then it will spread. 4. Universities will try to become relevant again by not focusing on the diploma as much because companies don’t require them anymore (unless doctor or lawyer type). You’ll see people focusing back on skills, results and a mega double down on personal brand. 5. Digital entrepreneurs will start making more money with physical products because people want “real.” YouTubers in large will leave because monetizing will become complicated with more adpocalypse. 6. Basics will come into play with direct selling, conglomerates will break themselves down intentionally into micro-enterprises to stay nimble. 7. Managers will be forced to become entrepreneurs and directly responsible for above the line branding and below the line profits... or they will be fired. 8. Solopreneurs will rise because freelancers will become commodities to utilize. 9. AI will take over every job that could be done by a robot. Making work more human. 10. Humans will stop acting like robots (cashiers) vs self-checkout and work will be strategic and anything arhat doesn’t require repetition. Ironically, humans will become less robotic (industrial revolution turned us into robots) and we will become more artful, thoughtful and creative...because we have to...bots will do all else. 11. To stay ahead, you must constantly learn and apply. It’s the dream. My new community and podcast will help you thrive! Comment if you would like access. Love you! Happy new year!

Pietro doesn't dream. He has a rare night of deep and solid unthinking sleep. His breaths and heartbeats are smooth and few, his face unresolved of its creases, his body a well of atom-self, an unworried sum of parts, as if he knows that outside the earth falls away in perpetual invention and leaves nothing more for him to do. Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he's about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.