From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author comes a dazzling novel of family, love and love's disappointments Anna's aged mother is dying. Condemned by her children's pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her, others are similarly vanishing, yet no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into an eerily beautiful story of grief and possibility, of loss and love and orange-bellied parrots. Hailed on publication in Australia as Richard Flanagan's greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm illuminating what remains when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope.

A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate—either in the waking state or in a lucid dream—we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives.

Did you ever have a waking dream somewhere between awake and asleep, or maybe a dream or nightmare that was so real that you felt all that was in the dream or you were not really dreaming? You felt all the pain, stress, joy, sadnessall the human emotions that were part of that dream? Strange dreams that made no sense at all or some making some sense to you or to others you told? Did you consider that maybe you were given that dream so you could learn from it or didnt give it much thought? Have you ever thought that maybe your dreams, especially the more of a waking dream, the more detailed and vivid of your dreams, were maybe your past lives experiences intruding on this life or what you should do in the future in this life? Maybe there was a message in your dreams that you were to not only learn from but are also there to tell you to take or not take certain actions? These are the stories of the Dream Man, the last member of his Tibetan clan who like his relatives before him, hears the dreams of sentient beings and influences them to put the dreamers on their Karmas path.

Draws from mystical traditions, quantum physics, astrology, and Jungian psychology to examine the forgotten language of symbols

In a waking dream, we inhabit the dreamworld with an awareness of doing so-as sometimes happens upon waking from sleep when a dream continues to feel present alongside an awareness of lying in bed. Taking perspectives from transpersonal psychology, ecotherapy, complexity theory, and fractal geometry, this book develops new possibilities within waking dream practice (also known as "active imagination" and "guided imagery") to show: - how the in-between waking/dreaming experience allows us to become aware of not just what we imagine but also the process of how we imagine-a process that reveals the principles and skills of image-based transformation and healing. - how a broad understanding of imagination-as present in all perceptions, actions, and relationships (not just as pictures "inside the mind")-allows for an image-centric approach to psychotherapy and everyday life as an ongoing "eyes-wide-open" waking dream. The result is an experiential and theoretical appreciation of imagination, not just as a means to rational insight but as a creative ability at the heart of human potential. If you are interested in cultivating a richer, story-filled, and enchanted existence, or you are a therapist wanting to help others do so, this might be the book you have been waiting for.

Near-death experiences can be profound and life changing. Through hypnotically facilitated waking dreams Schenk shows clients how they can benefit from the life changing effects of a near-death experience without the life-threatening cardiovascular crisis.