PART 1

Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak is a dream worker. To him dreams are an ecosystem of imaginings—powerful bodily experiences populated by characters with their own intelligences. When you encounter the images of your dreaming mind do you find one Self, or many? And, next week, a leading neuroscientist probing the possible link between memory and dreaming.

Robert Bosnak: While you're dreaming, you're in a real place. At the moment that you're in a dream you actually believe firmly that you're awake. And so as you are in that world everything around you is embodied. When I am in a dream where I'm sitting at a table and I knock on the table, the table will give me sound and it will give me the feeling of hardness. So in a dream the imagination presents itself as embodied.

Natasha Mitchell: We are channelling your dreaming mind and body on All in the Mind over the next two shows here on Radio National. A warm welcome to you, I'm Natasha Mitchell. Next week a leading neuroscientist probing the connection between memory and dreams and his work is conceptually staggering as you'll hear. But today, the therapeutic potential of dreams, my guest is well known Dutch psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak. After 25 years in the USA he now lives and works here in Australia. He also runs an internet dream network called Cyberdreamwork. In his most recent book, called Embodiment:Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, Robert explains a compelling idea that dreams are a sort of ecosystem of imaginings, powerful bodily experiences—and the body is key—that are populated by characters with their own intelligences, and that idea really forms the basis of his work.

Robert Bosnak thanks for joining me on All in the Mind this week.

Robert Bosnak: Thank you very much for having me again.

Natasha Mitchell: Look, some scientists think of dreams as having no real biological purpose, they are just our forebrains trying to make sense of what some people dub cerebral white noise that's generated by our brain stem when we sleep. It's a live debate isn't it?

Robert Bosnak: At least for the last few years it was mainly fought out between people that adhere to the notion that we dream mainly during REM sleep and the other people who say yes, we dream 95% during REM sleep, so during REM sleep when you wake a person up during rapid eye movements they will report a dream 95% of the time. But 70% of the awakenings for instance with sleep onset when there is not REM sleep also give you dreams. And therefore the brain is doing different things than we thought initially, because REM sleep comes from the brain stem and there are now people who say (and I agree with them), that the whole brain is involved, also the cortex. So that there is meaningful information coming that is not just noise out of which the forebrain, the cortex, makes information, but information that is inherently meaningful. That's the debate at the moment.

Natasha Mitchell: Still though many scientists see dreams as essentially devoid of meaning, that they are simply the neuronal flotsam from our waking lives. The jury is still very much out when it comes to neuroscience, less so for psychoanalysts like yourself.

Robert Bosnak: One of the interesting things of course about dreaming is that it will present the face that you look at it with, so if you think that dreams are utterly meaningless, then you will get dreams that are like a jumble of information. If you believe however that dreams are meaningful, that they contain intelligent information, then you get dreams that are more intelligent. It's very strange about dreams because for instance people that are in Jungian analysis after a while will report dreams that fit with Jungian theory; people in Freudian analysis will get more dreams that fit with Freudian theory. So it seems that the creative imagination of dreaming very much presents the face that you face it with.

Natasha Mitchell: Well that's human nature in a sense isn't it, we find meaning where we look for it and how we look for it?

Robert Bosnak: Absolutely.

Natasha Mitchell: Let's climb inside this idea of embodied imagination that you've been working with for some 30 years now. Before we unpack how you use it with clients, where did the idea stem from?

Robert Bosnak: The idea has been around for a long, long time, I would say thousands of years. In my life it comes from a scholar of the visionary tradition in Islam and his name was Henry Corbin. And Corbin said that these entities that we encounter are intelligent, they carry their own intelligence, and that creative imagination is inherently intelligent. And this was a way of looking at the imagination that was particularly strong up until about 800 years ago, and then slowly imagination became the opposite of reality. And that's where I started.

Natasha Mitchell: In a sense from the point of view of the dreaming mind at least you suggest that dreams are real events in real environments.

Robert Bosnak: Exactly, that's the point of view where I start, because I think that the moment you wake up you wake up into your particular culture. Now my interest has been to go to many different places in the world and see how people dream. They dream very similarly, but when they wake up, they wake up into their culture so if you wake up as someone who believes that dreams stem from the ancestors, then you've heard ancestors. If you're a psychologist and you believe that dreams relay parts of yourself, then you see dreams as part of yourself. If you believe the dreams are meaningless you will see them as meaningless. So I am trying to go back before the culture makes its judgments, I'm trying to go back to the dream as it was being dreamed.

Natasha Mitchell: Let's just go back to your inspiration from the French philosopher and professor of Islamic studies, of all things, Henry Corbin. You met him and he had a sense that the west had come to misconstrue the imagination.

Robert Bosnak: Yes, he always was talking about the great cataclysm that happened about 700, 800 years ago when we moved from a philosophy that was based on the fact that there were three realms of reality: the physical reality and the spiritual reality which now we would call the mental reality or the mathematical reality. There was a third reality in between and that was the reality of imagination. Then in about 700, 800 years ago that realm of the imagination as reality dropped out and it became just mind and matter. It moved from imagination being one form of reality into imagination being the opposite of reality—and that he found very tragic.

Natasha Mitchell: You know, Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung certainly conceived of dreams as sort of sub-personalities. In Freud's case I guess a whole bunch of repressed sub-personalities. Instead you describe dreams as forms of intelligence, and even alien intelligences, and I wonder if you're taking us into the realms of gnomes and flying saucers here.

Robert Bosnak: Absolutely not. They are alien to what I call the habitual self, what we habitually think about ourselves, so when I have certain feelings, certain responses, then I say that is my response. Now in dreaming you see that there is not only an intelligent I, the one that walks around, for instance, down the street, but when you see in dreams there are other people walking also on the street that display intelligence. And what I'm going from is, as Corbin did, from a radical form of phenomenology, I'm just trying to look at the phenomena. As I look at the phenomena the person who comes towards me in the street appears to be a carrier of a certain kind of consciousness. It's not the consciousness that I'm identified with, it's another kind of consciousness. And what I'm trying to do in my work is to see if we can partake of that consciousness and learn something about non-ego, non-habitual forms of consciousness.

Natasha Mitchell: Now this really challenges are core sense that we are a singular self, a single identity contained within a singular skin.

Robert Bosnak: Yes it does completely. Actually it is becoming more or less recognised within many sides and fields and schools of psychoanalysis that we are a very dissociable collection of states. This used to be seen as abnormal psychology but we begin to see more and more that that is more or less the norm. If it becomes extreme then you get people with what used to be called multiple-personality. So then the states are completely disassociated, they have no contact with each other. In the normal way the states are relatively independent and autonomous and there is contact between them, but it is not that I am a single self that over/during my life fractures. No, I am as far as I can see it, a multiplicity of states that is in a constant state of interaction.

Natasha Mitchell: Your suggestion is that if we rehearse the images we encounter in dreams: the characters, the images, the landscapes, that may help grow our bodies into new ways of being in the world, as you put it. I mean can you unpack that for us with an example?

Robert Bosnak: Yes, a man from Japan he had a dream in which he was sitting at a table in a restaurant and there were several other characters who were very different from him also sitting around the table. And as he began to identify with each of these characters and began to participate in their state, all these different intelligences at the table, he began to feel his body very different. His body was entirely different, he felt. He said, 'This body I don't recognise, it's like a rental body.' He was a very slim, thin kind of man and I said, 'Well keep on rehearsing this.' And as he was rehearsing this body, that was much bigger than his body was at the moment, he realised that he needed to expand his body and that he had to get into a bigger kind of body, and he started swimming. And a year afterwards his body was considerably larger because he had been swimming every day, and from a rental body, as he called it, it had become a permanent body.

Natasha Mitchell: You often work in groups, and I'm interested in where you start, how does it work?

Robert Bosnak: It begins with just regular conversation. And then somebody presents a dream or a memory—I now very frequently also work with memories—and we ask the person now tell us the dream as much from the moment that you were dreaming it as you can. So really get into the dream and when you're fully in the dream start talking, tell us what is happening to you. So for instance this Japanese man says, 'I am going into a restaurant and I see a table, and the table is round, and there are chairs.' And then we ask, 'What's the light like?' And he says, 'Well, it's very bright inside and there are other people sitting at the table.' I ask, 'Are there any smells?' He says, 'Yes, there are smells of fish.' And after a while he begins to feel emotionally what is going on with him in the restaurant, and then we go from the emotions to the physical sensations. He says, 'I feel very tense,' for instance, 'and I can feel the tension in my stomach.' So we focus on the stomach, really stay with that stomach until he can fully feel the whole mood of that place.

Then we move to the next moment, so on my left he says, 'There is sitting a man in a green suit and he's very strong and he can take initiative, he's very different from the way I am because the way I am is I cannot take any decision, I've graduated from my psychology masters four months ago and I have not been able to make any moves. This man has get up and go.' And so we begin to focus on how that looks.

And in the meantime everybody in the group is beginning to ask him questions that will focus him on this man in the green suit. Then he begins to feel into that man in the green suit and suddenly he feels. oh, this man has really strong in the legs, and so he begins to feel into the legs of the man and then that's how we move throughout the dream. Then in the end he will be able to hold a variety of states in the same time in his body and that creates a change.

Natasha Mitchell: Now the key here is that you're working with people in what you call a 'waking hypnagogic state'. They are not actually lucid dreaming, they are not in an actual dream, consciously narrating what's going on, they are not wide awake either, are they?

Robert Bosnak: They are in the state of consciousness that we pass through as we are falling asleep. What we are doing is we are artificially staying in that state between waking and sleeping which is called the hypnagogic state by the dream laboratory academics, and in this hypnagogic state there is waking consciousness present and also the image can once again be an environment. So the man can feel himself fully in the restaurant and at the same time he's fully aware that he's sitting in this room working on a dream. So that is what is called a dual consciousness, so we are in a dual consciousness in a hypnagogic state.

Natasha Mitchell: On Radio National Robert Bosnak is my guest. A Dutch Jungian psychotherapist now based in Australia, Robert helps people work with the emotional and physical content of their dreams in very physical ways as we're hearing.

In fact, Robert Bosnak, you've especially worked with a lot of people over the years who are very ill, or have a terminal illness, I mean this is a very different sort of bodily experience that you're negotiating here and you find some interesting universals in their dreams.

Robert Bosnak: An unusual amount of animals, I find. That just maybe my way of seeing it, and I don 't know if the people who study dream content have the same experience and when you then in the work begin to identify with those animals you get a very strongly different experience of body. I'll give you an example that also stems from my work in Japan: this is a man who has a tumour on his anus that is about as big as grapefruit and he cannot sit up anymore, he has to lie down, he's in constant pain, he has decided that he doesn't want to live anymore and doesn't want to communicate with anybody. He's very withdrawn and isolated. He has a dream about a cat and this I did with a colleague of mine, Dr Kishimoto in Shizuoka. We help him identify with that cat and begin to feel in his body the movement of the cat. And suddenly he's in a body that is much more supple than his body. After we work and we help him get into that supple body of the cat his relationships begin to change: his relationship with his family changes, his relationships with the nurses on the palliative care ward change, he now is no longer stiffly frightened of death only. I don't know if it made his life longer, he died about three months later, but he was much more elastic, much more supple.

Natasha Mitchell: I can imagine though you're dealing with people who could be quite resistant to suddenly trying to climb inside the bodies that populate their dreams when they are facing death.

Robert Bosnak: Yes, and I am not in any way suggesting that this should be done with everybody. I learned to do this work in the 1980s when my practice was flooded with people with AIDS, so I found that they were very receptive to feeling into all these different elements of the dream that was being presented. And they got a great deal of solace from it. It suddenly changed from being a totally meaningless attack, and a meaningless suffering and a sense of intense guilt and all those kind of things, into something that they could make contact with. Something that was not so foreign, not so alien, they are in their body differently.

Natasha Mitchell: In all this, this is still our imagination that you're working with and you're guiding your clients' imagination with your own biases, your own training, your own templates, your own symbolism and even your own baggage, your own history. I guess is there a fine line here between cultivating a sort of true, fluid, imaginative process for someone and simply a sort of guided storytelling, an interpretive session.

Robert Bosnak: Yes, so what we are trying to do is we are trying not to suggest anything. So we are asking questions that as much as possible don't lead the witness. So when the Japanese man walks in to a restaurant we don't say what is that restaurant for you, what does that restaurant mean for you, we ask what is the light like? When you sit on the chair what does your butt feel like? So we strive to stay as close to the phenomena as we can without as much as possible not making any interpretation. And as you do that the phenomena begin to reveal themselves, and I don't think that that is a story that then we are making up. I think there is a significant difference between creative imagination and fabrication.

Natasha Mitchell: What is that difference, because I guess the brain, we have a tendency to always be searching for meaning, to always be trying to attach meaning to an observation that we're making, whether it be a dream or a real life scene, and people are selecting the dreams that they decide to share with you in the very first place.

Robert Bosnak: Yes, I'll give you an example. This is a dream of a man who is a therapist and is working in a hospital, he's in the nurses room and suddenly he is stumbling down the stairs and there is a huge bear that runs down the stairs, runs through the hall and out the door. We worked this dream in a group and somebody in the group, the person asked, what is the bear feeling. And the man says, 'Oh the bear is really curious, the bear is really curious to what is happening.'

Now at this moment I feel absolutely nothing in my body, so I begin to assume that he's talking very mentally, and that he is fabricating a story about the bear. So we stopped the work at that point, have him look at the bear again, look at what the front paws are like, begin to sense those front legs, and he begins to sense this enormous amount of power in the bear, this enormous amount of energy. And as he slowly begins to through a process of interior miming become like the bear, suddenly he's identified with the bear and he feels this enormous thrust in the hindlegs and is pushed through the hall and out the door and out, out, out, this bear just wants to get out. This bear is totally claustrophobic and you can feel it throughout the body. Now that is embodied imagination, very different from fabrication.

Natasha Mitchell: So what happens?

Robert Bosnak: What happens is that this man is in contact with the claustrophobia of the bear, and in a body that is much more powerful than actually it's allowed to be. The intelligence in this bear is an intense sense of claustrophobia and a need to get out, that is the meaning that is fully present in a visceral sense and he has now participated in that.

What it then—from there on, what that physical sense is like in his life, where in his life he feels that kind of claustrophobia—it may be in his marriage, it may be in his work, it may be in his studies. That we can then explore, because we have a visceral sense of what it is like to be so claustrophobic. And then from that moment on a whole lot of questions begin to arise that are questions of psychotherapy.

Natasha Mitchell: You work with clients who have all sorts of traumas in their lives, some very serious. And in effect dreams can sometimes rehearse those traumas. This is very delicate work, isn't it, encouraging people to relive, re-experience traumas as they manifest in their dreams? This is dangerous, in fact.

Robert Bosnak: You have to be really careful, because people are very easily re-traumatised. The way that I work with trauma is I don't go to the traumatic experience directly. Like, for instance, a woman who has been raped, I don't go to the memory of the rape directly, but maybe I might go to what the room was like in which it happened, or what the door was like that she entered through. So we don't get directly to the direct experience of it but we stay in the periphery of it and feel the images in the periphery of the event and that then can bring up a whole new series of awarenesses that are not re-traumatising. So the danger of working with trauma is re-traumatisation.

Natasha Mitchell: A big risk.

Robert Bosnak: There are always risks in working with trauma, but what I have seen is the outcomes of working with trauma and dreams is a very positive one, because we have found in the research that dreams themselves are constantly integrating trauma. That was research done by Ernest Hartmann about how dreams integrate for instance the great fire in San Francisco, that you first see dreams of the fire and then you see dreams of floods and then you see dreams maybe of car accidents, so it becomes increasingly personal and slowly gets integrated through the dreaming into the general system. So the idea is that dreaming already is part of an integrative process of trauma.

Natasha Mitchell: Well I must admit that over the last two weeks I've had a number of dreams involving fire and bushfires, given what's happening in Victoria.

Robert Bosnak: Absolutely, but I think that what you would find as you are aware of these dreams, that the content will become increasingly personal, because it moves out of this totally overwhelming collective event, it slowly becomes increasingly again a personal event.

Natasha Mitchell: They were undoubtedly personal, actually, but fire, bushfire was part of it.

Robert Bosnak: Yes, so Hartman would say that is a part already of the integration processes of this overwhelming experience that you've all gone through.

Natasha Mitchell: You talk about this idea of sense memories; it's interesting because other neuroscientists are investigating how dreams might in fact be a part of the brain's way of consolidating new memories formed during the day. And I wonder if we were to bridge science and your psychoanalytic thinking about dreams—is this getting closer to your thinking about how dreams work in the body?

Robert Bosnak: Much closer, they have done studies with rats in certain mazes that would run all day in the maze and then at night they find exactly the same thing happening in the brain ,so that the rat is integrating what they've learned from running through the maze at night. So there is some kind of a process of bringing something into the system of the embodied psychological system from the day, and I would say it also goes through a meaning process, especially for humans. And so you get a combination of learning the event that you've gone through and consolidating that, but there is a mixture of meaning because that event had a certain meaning to you. So yes, it becomes very similar to what we are talking about in psychoanalysis.

Natasha Mitchell: And in fact I've got that research on the program next week.

Robert Bosnak: Oh, interesting.

Natasha Mitchell: In a sense, even though you are a Jungian psychoanalyst, I do get the sense that you don't rely heavily on interpretive Jungian archetypes like the shadow, or the ego, in order to sort of interpret your client's dreams. You are much more fluid, in fact you've described the landscape that you are trying to get them to occupy as an ecology. Are you abandoning your Jungian heritage In some ways?

Robert Bosnak: Oh not at all, I'm trying to go back to the preconceptual Jung where Jung was a phenomenologist himself and he just looked at what he saw and what he experienced. Because, for instance, for me, it is crazy if a woman enters into my dream and in my dream she comes in the door and I say to her, 'You are my anima,' I hope she would slap me in the face, she's not an anima, she's a person that is entering the room. And so that is what I am trying to get back to, the visceral direct experience of the phenomenon. The difference in my work and Jung's work is that I slow down the process of being inside the image environment to the point that it goes so slow that it suddenly jumps into the body and becomes an embodied experience.
Natasha Mitchell: There are fracture lines, aren't there, between neuroscientific approaches to dreams and psychoanalytic approaches to dreams? I wonder if they're ever reconcilable.

Robert Bosnak: Oh yes, I think they are being reconciled as we speak. For instance we're finding in neuroscience that cognition and the neocortex is involved in dreaming and that therefore meaning can come from dreaming itself. I think that more of these connections are going to be found. You have to see that neuroscience is very, very young. MRIs started in 1993, so we've been doing MRIs for 16 years and the resolution on MRIs is about as good as photography in the 1820s, so it is just beginning. And I think neuroscience as it matures will find more and more connections between their field and ours.

Natasha Mitchell: Robert Bosnak, thank you for joining me on ABC Radio National.

Robert Bosnak: Thank you very much for having me.

PART 2
Dreams feel meaningful—drawn from a mishmash of content from our waking lives. But it's a hot debate among scientists, who are yet to confirm why we sleep, let alone dream. Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson's extraordinary experiments involve eavesdropping on the sleeping minds of rats. He proposes dreaming is central to how we remember and learn.

Natasha Mitchell: Dutch psychoanalyst Robert Bosnak, now based in Sydney. Details of his book called Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel on All in the Mind's website and we'd love your comments on my blog there too, which I must say was a hotbed of philosophical chatter after last week's show on intentions. That really sparked some interesting exchange, and you'll find a response from my guests to your responses there too.

Matthew Wilson: Memory is really much more than simply a record of experience, it is what really defines who we are and who we are going to be. We really have to rethink the term itself—memory.

Edwin Robertson: There has been an intuitive connection for literally thousands of years between sleep and memory. I mean even such simple phrases as, 'Oh, I'll need to sleep on it,' suggests that we have an intuitive notion that sleep is important for memory processing.

Natasha Mitchell: And welcome to All in the Mind on Radio National. I'm Natasha Mitchell and in this show, memory—is it the stuff that dreams are made of, literally? So sit back, start counting those sheep. Believe it or not, we're dreaming one neuron at a time.

Last week you might have caught my interview with dream worker and Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak and you can catch the audio on our website. On the question of whether a psychoanalyst's take on dreams can ever be reconciled with a neuroscientist's—here's what he says.

Robert Bosnak: Oh yes, I think they are being reconciled as we speak. For instance we're finding in neuroscience that cognition and the neocortex is involved in dreaming and that therefore meaning can come from dreaming itself. I think that more of these connections are going to be found. You have to see that neuroscience is very young: MRIs started in 1993 so we've been doing MRIs for 16 years and the resolution on MRIs is about as good as photography in the 1820s. So it is just beginning, and I think that neuroscience as it matures will find more and more connections between their field and ours.

Natasha Mitchell: So today we're considering a vexed question in neuroscience—do we dream in order to remember? One of the reasons this is tricky for science is that, surprisingly, we don't really know why it is we sleep, let alone dream.

Edwin Robertson: Yes, it is surprising that we spend so much of our time asleep but yet we still don't really have a clear understanding of why it is that we do sleep.

Natasha Mitchell: Edwin Robertson is assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Edwin Robertson: I think that part of the problem very often is that we imagine that all animals use sleep for the same purpose. The function of sleep in humans might be quite different from the function that a koala uses sleep for. So the koala most likely uses sleep for the regulation and conservation of energy and that's why it ends up sleeping for 20 hours a day, whereas our human need for sleep may be driven by other alternative factors.

Natasha Mitchell: Is sleep there to help our body recover metabolically, or is it actually fundamentally about allowing us to consolidate the stuff that goes through our brain during the day? What do you think?

Matthew Wilson: Well I think it's a combination of all of these things. Clearly there is a metabolic component to it. So this is something cells should do, that bodies should do. The question is whether that's all it does.

Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson is professor of neuroscience at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in Boston.

Matthew Wilson: The resting brain is not really resting at all, it's extremely active and that activity in many respects is indistinguishable from the activity that's engaged in during wakefulness. Can all of that be going on to no useful end? And I think that the answer to that is probably no. But to be fair to those critics that argue that nothing goes on during sleep, there is no processing of memory, there is no learning, it is something that has not yet been proven unequivocally but this is simply a matter of time.

Natasha Mitchell: As you'll hear, Matthew Wilson is leading the charge with some extraordinary experiments testing a theory that sleep is key to remembering and learning. And without the capacity to learn we wouldn't really be human would we? We'll come to where dreams fit in in a moment but let's start with why the machinations of our memory might need sleep. Each time we remember something a vast network of brain cells fire together corresponding to that memory, they chemically communicate with each other across the synapses or junctions between them. The more a memory is recalled, the stronger those synaptic connections are. Edwin Robertson.

Edwin Robertson: Sleep is often viewed as a special environment for memory processing. Some people might argue that this special environment is merely that it performs protective function, it's a protective cocoon, because when you're asleep you can't get any further experiences during that time and it prevents memories from being interfered with. Other theories would say no, that's incorrect, that there's actually profoundly important electrophysiological events that occur in the sleeping brain that are important for memory processing per se.

Natasha Mitchell: What's the other prevailing theory for why sleep is so crucial for memory?

Edwin Robertson: There's an idea that essentially sleep allows a homeostatic readjustment of synapses during awake you're bombarded by experiences and that leads to multiple synapses being engaged and their weights being changed. And then what sleep allows—and specifically actually slow wave sleep—is a pruning back of those unimportant synapses. So it's kind of like I imagine in some senses the judicial pruning of your roses to get a nicer flower. So the idea is that the slow wave sleep is able to prune back synapses that are energetically wasteful but are also wasteful in an information processing account because they are adding noise. And that clearer crisper signal then translates into improved performance the next day.

Natasha Mitchell: So from the possible role of sleep to that of dreams. Is it simply a coincidence that we often dream about things we happen to remember, things that have happened to us or that we've learned from our waking lives? Some scientists think of dreams as epi-phenomena that is meaningless, random by-products of the real business of the thinking brain. Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson—controversially for some—disagrees.

Matthew Wilson: I think they are not meaningless. It's easier to see what the meaning, that potential meaning, might be when we study animals like rats, whose life experience is much simpler than ours. So when we study the dreams of rats we're studying animals that have only had months of experience and we've controlled all of that experience, and what we see reflects very closely their actual experience. Now a human, when we think about our own human dreams, we're thinking about dreams that now have access to decades of experience. They may seem complex and obscure because they are bringing together, combining and evaluating decades of memories and experience. But if we think about dreams not as a process of simply retrieving, of replaying memories, but of re-evaluating, reorganising something—akin to taking piles of paper that have accumulated and now one needs to organise it. As you go through this process picking up one piece of paper and another they may not seem related but as you organise them the end product is something that is actually more useful. So if we think about dreams and the seemingly chaotic structure and nature of dreams as reflecting this process of reorganisation, I think we get a better idea of what might be going on during sleep. Again, not simply taking memories, replaying them and transferring them to other parts of the brain, but really re-evaluating, reorganising.

Natasha Mitchell: So in a sense it's a filing process and some people think that sleep and dreams allow for memories to be organised into a sort of more efficient storage system.

Matthew Wilson: Correct. The most efficient again being the discovery of rules and relationships and condensing it into something that now captures all of the relationships that were present—the rule—and so discovering the rule may be precisely the kind of complex, difficult to understand processing that goes on during sleep and dreams.

Natasha Mitchell; It's so interesting, because our dreaming brain seems to want to try and make sense of all the elements that it's you know messing about with. I mean my dreams I've got to say are grand epic narratives every night on a scale of Gone with the Wind, I've got to tell you, it's exhausting. It certainly seems much more anarchic than the way we normally remember in our waking lives.

Matthew Wilson: I think if we think about this kind of process not simply about retrieving memories and storing them, but taking them and trying to imagine a future that could have come from them, synthesising rather than simply storing. Perhaps your epic narratives are in a way projecting where you would like to go, where your memories and your experience feel that you could go. You know you may never get there but the brain is trying to understand in a sense, pushed to its limits, where experience tells it it might go.

Natasha Mitchell: Memory is imagining the future not just storing the past—nice idea. Matthew Wilson comes to dreams from his first research love which is memory. And if you thought sleep was scientifically elusive, try memory. It's that complexity that AS Byatt reflects on in her recent collection, Memory and Anthology a compilation of literary and scientific musings on the many faces of memory.

[Reading]: I have a memory I think of as 'The Memory'. It is seen from the point of view of a small person seeing over the wall of a playground in East Hardwick Elementary School. The stone is hot, and is that kind that flakes into gold slivers. The sun is very bright. There's a tree overhead and leaves catch the light and are golden and in the shade they are blue/green.
Over the wall and across the road is a field full of daisies and buttercups and speedwell and shepherd's purse. On the horizon are trees with thick trunks and solid branches. The child thinks I am always going to remember this, then she thinks, what is remembering? This is the point where myself then and myself now confuse themselves into one.
I know I've added to this memory every time I have thought about it, or brought it out to look at it. It has acquired notes of Paradise Lost which I don't think it had when I was 5 or 6. It has got further away and brighter, more or less real.
I always associate it with one of my very few good memories of my maternal grandmother, a perpetually cross person who never smiled. The year she died she began to forget, and forgot to be irritated. She said to me sitting by the fire at Christmas, do you remember all the beautiful young men in the fields? And she smiled at me like a sensuous young girl. She may have been talking about the airmen who were billeted on her in the war, or she may have been remembering something from long before my mother was born. I shall never know. But I can see the young men in the fields.
Matthew Wilson: Memory is really more about learning, learning from the past rather than simply storing it. The challenge that the brain has is trying to form a model of the world; we are constantly trying to understand how the world works so that we can make predictions. Of course our biggest challenge is making good decisions in novel contexts or circumstances. Not simply repeating the past, often repeating the mistakes of the past, but rather trying to learn from that so that we can make decisions in unpredictable circumstances. And that's what really separates us, sensient organisms that are able to move forward in an unpredictable world, separates us from simple computing devices. And so my deeper interest is in this re-evaluation, revisitation—how memory is retrieved, restored and re-examined because this is memory put to use.

Natasha Mitchell: But take us inside your lab, you've developed some quite extraordinary experimental techniques to effectively eavesdrop on memories as they're formed in the brain cells of rats. What approach have you taken and what have you been able to measure?

Matthew Wilson: Well what we are measuring are the discharges of individual brain cells. Brain cells communicate through electrical signals, changes in voltages much like the pops and clicks that you might hear on the radio if you tune it to some place between stations on the dial. These little electrical discharges are driven by input from the outside world so there's a code that is created.

Now what we would like to be able to do is to listen in on these signals, and what that requires us to do is take very fine electrodes—electrodes are little wires about the size of a human hair, smaller than a human hair actually—we take these wires and we send them down into the brain where they can listen in to these signals. They are placed next to brain cells. We leave them there permanently so that we have little microphones distributed across the brain and as animals engage in normal behaviour: sitting, resting, sleeping, running, we can follow the activity of these brain cells. Not just individual brain cells but many of them because we implant many of these very fine electrodes.

So what we have are rodents, rats and mice, that have little badminton shaped hats, now it's these hats when we plug our electronics into them we're able to take the signals, the brain signals out, amplify them and record them on our computers, then follow the patterns as animals engage in normal daily experience.

Natasha Mitchell: Well as normal as the life of the rat in a lab can be, I guess.

The making of memory, ours and rats', involves a couple of key brain structures, our brain's ancient core which we share with reptiles called the limbic system and especially a structure in it called the hippocampus, and this communicates with the outer layer of our brains, the neocortex; newer in evolutionary terms, and busy with the processing of sensations, perceptions, thinking, planning, evaluating social behaviours etc. So back to that extraordinary rat rig-up we just heard about.

Matthew Wilson: One of the reasons we were interested in sleep is that during sleep the brain in a sense is cut off from the outside world. So that if we see patterns, or we see traces of past experience popping up once again, we know that it is in fact memory, because it's not being driven by anything the animal is currently experiencing. So we are using sleep as a way of looking for and examining the content and structure of memory. And what we found was that when animals would engage in very simple behaviours, running around in little mazes, and as the animals would run along these tracks in this part of the brain, the hippocampus, very unique patterns that allowed us to tell from moment to moment precisely where the animal was and what it was doing.

So very much like a video record of the animal's actual behaviour. Now we would look for these patterns as they changed over time, much like we would be watching a movie and then going back to see whether or not that movie was being replayed. And what we discovered was that during sleep, in fact small segments of these animals' experience running through the maze was replayed. But it was replayed in a form that was compressed: seconds or even minutes of experience would be re-expressed in just a fraction of a second. So little flashes of activity in the brain which would replay small segments of the animal's past experience. And this would go on over and over as the animal slept.

Natasha Mitchell: I wonder if that's a conscious process or an unconscious process?

Matthew Wilson: Well that's a great question, of course now we can't ask the rats whether or what it is that they're thinking about. We can only measure what it is that they are thinking about. So it is a bit of a stretch, I'm always a bit reluctant to refer to what we are looking at as a process of thought, but I have to say that if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck. And in this case I believe that these rats are thinking but we don't know how much of it is actually making its way to the level of consciousness that we might introspectively think we engage in.

Natasha Mitchell: How do you know that the patterns of neurons that you're measuring, firing in a sleeping rat who happens to be remembering an activity when they were awake, actually corresponds to those precise patterns that they also played out in their brain when they were doing the activity. I mean is the correlation that precise?

Matthew Wilson: It is that precise. Literally individual brain cells in this part of the brain, the hippocampus, they fire in a unique pattern, a unique sequence when individual animals engage in unique behaviour in a unique context. If we take an animal and we put it in one room and have it run back and forth for chocolate, we will see one pattern. If we have the animal do exactly the same thing but simply move it to another room, we see another unique pattern. If we bring the animal back to the original room, that original pattern returns. So it is as though an animal's experience in a given place at a given time is captured. So it's the fact that we can see the unique fingerprints during awake experience that then allows us to go back and interpret these unique fingerprints of brain activity during sleep. So it is the remarkable property of this part of the brain, the hippocampus.

Natasha Mitchell: Eavesdropping on the neuronal fireworks going on in the hippocampus of a sleeping rat—it's incredible, but at what point does dreaming come into this story?

Matthew Wilson: We follow that up by looking elsewhere in the brain and discovered that when this part of the brain, the old part of the brain, the hippocampus, was replaying these memories that the new part, the neocortex, the part that deals with perception and action, was also replaying the same information. So as the hippocampus replayed memory of what the animal was doing, the visual cortex would replay what the animal was seeing. Now you might think of that as being perhaps a description of what we would call a dream, events that seem to occur over time that carry with them the imagery of experience. And these rats seemed to be engaging in precisely that kind of behaviour during sleep—just as we introspectively feel that we do.

So it suggested that this part of sleep, slow wave sleep, is the kind of sleep that you enter into, it's a very primitive form of sleep, not what you typically associate with dream sleep but the slow wave sleep where you can see this memory replay going on. Now we realised that this kind of sleep like activity didn't simply go on during slow wave sleep, it also went on whenever animals were simply sitting quietly, resting. There was even more than simple replay going on. We found these events being replayed but in reverse time order, it was as though the animals were playing their memories backward, backward in time. Now that seemed curious, why would you want to play memories backward in time?

Natasha Mitchell: Why indeed?

Matthew Wilson: Well it turns out there had been a whole field of study in the area known as machine learning, trying to get computers to learn the way animals and humans do. And this strategy of playing things backward turned out to be important in learning for machines. It simply wasn't known, or perhaps even believed, that it could be done in biological systems, in animals or humans. And so here in a sense these rats were demonstrating that memory was being processed precisely in the way that it should if it were being used to drive learning. So it wasn't simply replaying it for the purpose of creating imagery, creating dreams, it was doing it in order to learn from it. So that when animals were sitting quietly they were pondering what they had done, perhaps planning what they were going to do for the purpose of learning, trying to figure things out, building models in order to try to anticipate future choices and decisions.

Natasha Mitchell: As convincing as the data from Matthew Wilson's lab rats sounds, linking learning and memory, there is a robust debate going on here and not everyone's convinced that memory and dreams are linked. Edwin Robertson.

Edwin Robertson: They've shown very nice work, showing that in the hippocampus during slow wave sleep or in the parietal cortex, in the motor cortex, in the prefrontal cortex, that during periods of sleep the patterns of neural activity that you see as an animal is moving around and navigating around a maze are re-instantiated, are replayed during periods of sleep.

The challenges that face the community in fully fleshing that idea out I think are several-fold. Firstly the replay that people see neurophysiologically is at a completely different time base than when the rat is finding its way around the maze neurons go a lot more slowly than when you see that replay occurring during sleep. So why is it time-compressed and can we really think that time compression as being really truly replayed?

I think the second point, which is a far stronger and more problematic element, is that no one has yet demonstrated that that replay is then linked to the benefits or the behavioural manifestation of memory consolidation. So it's never been shown for example if you disrupt that replay that you prevent memory consolidation. Nor that the amount of replay is related to memory consolidation. So certainly does replay occur during sleep? Yes. Does it have anything to do with memory processing? Unfortunately we still don't know, it certainly as a neuro-physiological phenomenon it occurs, how that relates to my behaviour the next morning we still don't know unfortunately.

Natasha Mitchell: That said there is an effort to probe what happens to our capacity to learn and remember when we miss sleep—and don't we all—and it seems to be bad news for humans, and for cockroaches, as you might have heard on The Science Show last week. Matthew Wilson.

Matthew Wilson: Now one can also see that there are effects of sleep when you train an animal to perform a difficult task. One sees that the structure of their sleep changes, that the amount of this kind of processing that we see changes, that they use sleep to try to go back and study, replay, re-evaluate things that were important in solving tasks.

Natasha Mitchell: Well that's interesting, isn't it, because science is certainly starting to tangibly prove that if we miss sleep our ability to learn and remember is fundamentally affected.

Matthew Wilson: That's correct, there's a lot of evidence that points to that. Now again to be fair to the critics of the sleep, memory and learning hypothesis, that does not indicate that the memory processing during sleep is important; only that the sleep state itself is important—that when deprived of sleep it affects general things like attention, it affects stress; it's generally disruptive. Not specifically disruptive to memory; the sleep, memory and learning hypothesis really says that it is the information that the brain is actually processing, the things that you dream about, that lead to specific enhancements, specific learning when you wake up. And that's again something that requires more study. It is something that I firmly believe that we will answer.

Natasha Mitchell: We've heard about the rats replaying and reorganising memories, at least during slow wave sleep. We do dream in this phase but the dreams aren't as lively or as frequent as is the case for REM sleep. But some folk don't experience REM at all, and if memory and dreaming are linked according to Matthew Wilson's theory, does that mean they can't remember anything either? Matthew Wilson thinks REM sleep might in fact pay more of a value-adding role after slow wave sleep has done its work, a sort of mental testing ground for creativity and imagination, new ideas and possibilities. Higher order thinking—but is that something rats can do though?

Traditionally I guess we've possibly thought that animals can't possibly have as rich a dream life as us.

Matthew Wilson: Or a dream life at all.

Natasha Mitchell: Or a dream life at all.

Matthew Wilson: Absolutely, I think that the idea that animals live in the present, this is a very common, persistent and overwhelmingly dominant view: memory allows them to modify the brain, to change the way they act in the present, but they simply don't live in the past, they don't think into the future. I think that that is changing; what we're seeing is that they do both, and that the way in which they do it may not be entirely dissimilar from the way in which humans do that. So that all of cognition, not just human cognition, may possess this kind of rich tapestry of experience. And I think that that is something that, to me, is very reassuring, that we are not alone, we are not unique in the domain of animals and organisms, that the world is a much richer place for all of us.

Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson you are a neuroscientist and an engineer, you're a long way away from the realm of Dr Sigmund Freud, but he embraced dreams and memory with equal passion to yourself, and I wonder if there's an interesting potential for a convergence between the thinking of psychoanalysists like Jung and Freud and your own investigations of dreams and memory.

Matthew Wilson: Well I think to the extent that we start on common ground and that is the belief that there is meaning to dreams, that these are windows into a level of brain function that's not normally accessible during our awake life. Now trying to interpret the imagery, you know the content, that's where things become difficult, that that's probably where basic neuroscience diverges from the Freudian psychoanalytical perspective: we're not simply trying to interpret the patterns that we see, we're trying to understand how the patterns contribute to the process, the construction of models of the world that we use to guide decisions.

Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson from MIT, thanks for joining us on ABC Radio National, and sweet dreams.

Matthew Wilson: You're welcome, you too, Natasha.

good grief life is strange. imagine this. you are naked laying on a comfortable massage table having some sort of jelly like lubrication rubbed into your testicles by a series of very attractive young girls and getting paid $40 an hour for the privilege. such was captain missions luck this week. i was helping the medical school train people in ultra scanning technique. i've had my lungs scanned, my kidneys and my bladder but this time was somewhat different.
of course the hardest part of all this was trying not to have an erection, i mean i was laying down thinking about the most non sexy things possible while some beautiful australian asian girl started to chat to me about books and films and rub me with the probe, good grief this required so much discipline it was almost a martial art. i think she knew i was squirming. i made her laugh a bit but i never crossed the boundary, it crossed my mind but i was somewhat shy and embarrassed. i'm getting more and more nervous around girls as i get older, they mystify me with their complexity and curves and their seductive scent and the way they move but they make me nervous with their irrational demands and unpredictable ways.
oh well at least this way i'm assisting mankind by offering my body to their nice warm hands and scanning techniques.

other weird shit that occurred was some kinda violence at the airport where a biker gang killed some one, apparently biker violence is getting more frequent. some one should talk to them, tell them to calm down and chill out.

now here's something you won't see on the news. why? because the population of jews is vastly less than the population of muslims. the muslims have the oil and the western democracies in their grip, subverted from within. the UN knows this and knows it's only option rather than confront the situation is to appease the muslim world.
moderate islam is a non existent concept, ultimately islam is the worlds most powerful and unrelenting meme.

dan simmons book 'the terror' starts with two ships frozen in the ice after two years, the 1845 franklin expedition ended with all crew missing, no one knows what happened, simmons fills in the missing pieces and the result is staggering. this book is a litany of failure and not so subtly the failure of western civilization itself; however, there is a surprisingly redemptive streak running throughout. simmons is a tremendous author, capable of producing masterworks in any genre of his choosing and he is at the top of his powers in this work, which though ostensibly historical fiction owes a debt to mystery, biography, horror, and science-fiction with liberal doses of shakespeare, sociology and philosophy.

more than a retelling of the franklin expedition to find the northwest passage, "terror" is the story of captain francis crozier who commands hms terror. crozier has to overcome bad food, poor leadership, even poorer subordinates, mutinous sailors, cold, scurvy and a monster, in order to reconcile himself with the future that he has seen but fails to understand. strangely the journey through this dark and 750 plus page novel is ultimately reaffirming and as voiced by a character late in the novel, salvation was always waiting for crozier who just had to make his choice.

though ostensibly about failure, this book summarizes the triumph of man over adversity. though ostensibly about discovery, the book details the tragedy of men dying needlessly within reach of the very survival skills they refused to seek much less adopt. this duality of themes gives great weight to the story; indeed, simmons quotes liberally from hobbes, shakespeare, homer, poe and probably several others that i missed. and for fear of spoiling the read, suffice it to say that the author's erudition serves his purpose of rendering the tale disturbingly modern. it is a cautionary tale and in his wisdom, simmons leaves us to determine what we take from it.

tantalized.
the church are back with guitars, they ripped and rocked the stratospheres, the heavens asunder with soaring guitar, pummeling drums and bass lines your mother wouldn't like, a very satisfying set list, steve playing with heaps of energy and enthusiasm, you would have never thought he'd just come out of the hospital. for some one that had lost all their electric lights (electrolytes) from their body you would have thought he could power the city with the energy he gave out, amazing.
it was quite literally beyond words, one of the best gigs ever. no special light show, in fact there was an element of chaos and randomness about the gig which i just thought added to the overall quality. the church are the only band that matters.

time passes, it ebbs and flows, it freezes and shimmers, it twists and turns, it' s hard to pin down, hard to hold, it's a mystery as events are effected by intricate causality. i had a few restless nights, strange abrupt endings where i found myself alive in a captain mission body, trapped and confused, there were moments of clarity as i came back to familiar haunts and faces. i recalled some events...a birthday!
lets get this straight, i don't like going out to bars, clubs or anywhere where they have dress codes, bouncers, to many rules or regulations, fashion police or loud music blasting out. but my brother loves this kind of thing and he took me to 'the arthouse' a very nice four or five story bar in the city for birthday drinks, mine being a lemon lime and bitters. as we stood at the bar a young girl started buying paintings, she asked my advice.
'should i get the male nudes or the females?'
i don't know anything about art but i said, 'get the girls, they would be nicer to look at.'
later we were joined by this lady who intruded on our quite conversation, martin and i discussing relationships. it turns out this girl was on a date with a man who also joined us, she was not enjoying the date and wanted us around for safety i guess. being english gentlemen we did the honorable thing. our new friend bought a bottle of very expensive moet and we all seemed to be getting on very well. some girls on the next table started flirting with me, they were all being made redundant and out getting drunk. they seemed in good spirits. the guy on the date left and then suddenly the girl started to attack martin for not owning a car, then she attacked me for wanting to go home and keep pan (my dog) company. when i say attack, i mean attack, that is get very personal about stuff she had no right to. i had to put her in her place. i ended up going home with her. a lot of these girls need to be put in their place it appears, then suddenly they start thinking your the most attractive man in their life and throw themselves at you. i don't mind occasional mindless sex. happy birthday capt!

next event
smoking some very nice organic weed, mmm, i'm on holiday, broke and somewhat depressed about it but i have some high grade spliffs to get me through the next two months.

event 3
steve is in hospital, i'm very anxious and feel helpless. i dunno, after listening to his music for 30 years you can't help but feel attached to the guy and now i kinda know him a bit, jesus i want him healthy and able to create his 'thing' so i can appreciate something good in the world of men. it's selfish but i'd be lost without his art. there's so much shit out there, including my own that when some kind of authentic beauty and genius comes along you have to appreciate it and revere it as direct from god or some intelligence within the universe. steve has that, it comes down his line into the world. i'd probably dry up like an old vampyre exposed to the sun if that stopped. so my thoughts and healing energies were directed at steve and his family for most of the weekend.

event 4
i got an iphone. i recommend them. i have downloaded four applications so far:
1. the complete works of william shakespeare, yes i plan to read this on the bus.
2. a spacial synth, beautiful design and concept.
3. a wikipedia widget so i can check my facts.
4. shazzam, a tool that you can hold up to any tune heard on the radio or in a bar or wherever and it will identify the song for you.
so there you go, all free, hours of fun, stimulating and very addictive.

event 5
the church sunday night at the factory sydney. great venue despite the freaky line up wait outside. well it was packed, great crowd, saw all my friends, andrew was there with his cameras, latiticia, sue cee, kate with her cameras, rehan whom i lost in the crowd and need to catch up with, greg, we all managed to get down the front, it was a bit tight but when the band came onstage and just launched into tantalized, wow!

back from the strange experience of not having a computer, oh how i missed it, i'm addicted to various blogs and sites, i love googling various obscurities and conducting various researches, it's nice to be back on line.
i've been reading vast amounts of stuff, various books which i shall comment upon here:

'america alone' by mark styen is the book everyone needs to read if they are worried about the rise of islamic fascism in the world, it paints a very clear picture as to what's going on but alas it will be ignored due to the fact its politically incorrect and not very conducive to the left wing agenda. mark writes with humor as he rips through the reality everyone is in denial about.

'the devil we know' by robert baer is the polemic opposite of marks book, he recommends that america admit they have lost the war on terror and accept iran as the winners. he plays down the iran nuclear threat and says its all attention seeking and posturing. there's lots of pro iranian stuff in here painting a picture of a country that is willing to embrace some aspects of modernism as long as america treats it fairly.

'the cairo diary' is a novel set in two time periods, the older scenes set in cairo are great reading but the modern ones were awful. not highly recommended.

currently im halfway through dan simmons 'the terror' which i have to say is fantastic, dan always writes brilliant stories, i recently read his first novel, 'song of kali' which is fantastic and a really classic horror story.

okay lets talk global crisis now, it's great that such an event has occurred, the whole system revealed to be an sham, what i find absolutely incredible is the way govts. are throwing more money into a black hole. i'm amazed and shocked at the political impotence, after all now would be a great time to unite the globe and start again. let industry fail, let banks collapse, use the money to invest in renewable and sustainable energies and resources. let the old industry die and the new be born, new jobs, new skills, a generation given a new start. but no we have to steal their future as well. james lovelocks new book, 'the vanishing face of gaia' spells out disaster as we approach tipping point. i don't agree with all of lovelocks ideas but it is obvious that the earth is a living system off which we are part off, the aboriginally know this, the native americans and the south american indians know this and through my intuition and my experiences with ayahuscia i know this.

i've convinced the drug company clowns in white lab coats to dim their lights and play some music suitable to the experience, i plead with the head honcho saying it will help me relax and also prolong the experience. so with side two of meddle playing, echos, i descend into the strange fractal world of dmt, my dose is huge, enough for an elephant to stay out for at least a day,
the flood of fear as i loose my self, fade away as i find my new self immediately in mechanical elf body, looking into the strange reptilian eyes of the mate i have on this side of reality, she, it, is happy to see me and we exchange warm signals. she strokes my head, he three fingers seem to emit strong and pleasant electrical impulses. messages flood my head.
'we are happy'
'why are they playing meddle, i wanted dark side'
welcome home'
i engage with them, it's like a conference call. i am a mechanical elf being, not human, i was sent into the human realm as an undercover agent. my mission was to bring back information about the human exploration into the dmt universe, the elf beings are afraid premature human contact will pollute the elf universe. apparently there are hundreds of operatives undercover, they are in deep, thinking they are human but in reality they are machine elves who during ther human existence will be drawn to seek out dmt experiences and thus return to the dmt universe. apparently alex grey, steve kilbey and various other creative are all undercover mechanical elf beings delving into home when the opportunity arises.
i'm not surprised. i seem to know this, and loosing my human identity comes as a release.
the dmt world is composed of information, it operates on a completely different geometry to the human one. it truly is a different dimension and human language is not capable of describing or defining it, mathematics is needed or art. words can't wrap around the conceptual paradigm but i will attempt to do this.
we are in a war room, there are various screens, on which indicate the portals into the human dimension, plus various others. it is the human one the dmt beings fear most. at some point contact will be inevitable and the dimensions will merge, causing a great schematic shift in the cosmos, this will be a great time for existence, a golden age. this will occur when love is accepted by humanity as the supreme energy, unfortunately humanity is not ready yet and a premature entry would result in chaos for the elves. i look at the strassman team, i can see the subjects and know they have been given great insights and access to privileged information, some of which they have shared in a cryptic manner but just enough to reside on the fringe. they have all returned to the human realm to prepare for the day when the dimensions are reconciled. they send messages of love into the human realm knowing that there is much more than petty politics, religions and ideology, this is my mission, it's the great work, bodhisatta. i know that during my human incarnation i will only be able to access the dmt through my own short personal experiences, the drug companies cannot be allowed to know about this or continue to experiment in this area until they are doing this without an agenda and without expectation. the idea being when humanity learns humility we can evolve at a rapid rate to another level completely. until then we are in tis dimension, forced to confront ourselves as one another.
i spend a few hours with my wife, although it could be a life time, because time operates differently in this dimension, then i prepare for return.

'so far we have several almost contacts, would you say that's correct mission?'
the chemist and his research team were repeating themselves, hoping for a variation on my answer.
'look, i think we should double the dose, given the data, that should considerably lengthen the time i'm there, whereever that is, and intensify the experience. i feel certain that these 'elves' want me there, their intentions seem benevolent so far and i have this incredible sense that they have something for you they want me to give you.'
'a message?'
'i don't know, it's speculation based on my feelings.'
they turned and went into a private huddle, i was left on the bench, eyes staring at the horrible neon lamps above me. they refused my objections to turning the lights down as well as to have some music playing along, they insisted that the lab maintain a research facility ambiance not a bed-sit.
i could see the cameras on the ceiling and feel the wires they had attached to my head and chest. i let out a long breathe and closed my eyes, contemplating the experience.
i had fallen through the vortex into their world of fractal information, then i had seen their faces appear from the swirling purple kaleidoscope, they seemed happy to receive me, beckoning me towards them, into a chamber where they seemed to be surrounded by some sort of machinery, it was as if i were in a lab again only there was nothing here that i could recognize. the faces appeared, half alien and half insectoid, they made high pitched sounds, not speech but clicking and i picked up some telepathic information. they were very happy that i had arrived, they implied i was expected and then they seemed to greet me in some strange way i cannot recognize. the elves pushed something into my brain, they opened me up without anesthetic and seemed to weld some kind of electronic pulsing device inside there. i felt no pain but a little concern about the intrusive operation. they seemed very interested in making me feel comfortable and they started to give me a sequence of instructions about returning.
that was the information i shared with the team, i stated that i then was pulled back to their lab and the dose must have been absorbed by my body but there was more to my experience. i had omitted the drugs they injected into my head.
after the electrical device had been inserted i was taken to another area and sat in a chair. a helmet device was placed over my head and a needle on a robotic telescopic arm seemed to extend itself towards me. i looked at my legs and could see they were different, same with my hands. it was like theirs, my body appeared to be the same as theirs. then the needle was attached to the helmet and slowly the syringe emptied its contents into my head, my brain. i could almost understand the strange clicking, i could make out some of the statements.
'next time bring us back some music, the church or pink floyd's early stuff.'
'sometime anywhere or meddle' another being seemed to request.
'don't stay so long this time.'
'i love you baby.' this last communication came from one of the smaller machine elves, she, or he, it was standing further away and looking sad and worried, i picked out the affection within the sequence of clicks. i could feel a strong connection to this particular creature, i wanted to reach out to it and hold it.
i didn't want to leave but very quickly i discovered myself back in this reality.
here.
the only way back, to the machine elf that i seemed connected to was another massive dose of dmt, i needed to play these human research chumps, it would be a fine line, a delicate diplomacy, especially with these government jerks.
they kept their stash under tight lock and key, there would be no way i could access it without sanction. i had to play them, i had no choice. i needed to return.

in a lab 15 people undergo americas second academic and scientific study into the effects of the substance known as dmt. the doctor leading the research team is strassman, a middle aged hippy idealist who lost his radical roots as he passed through his rite of passage the wrong way into adulthood. he passed his degree with honours and went on to be funded by the current administration to administer varying dosages to his subjects and then record the results for the governments study group. the results were so shocking to the panel and were sealed in a vault. strassman being a middle class jewish (my people) academic had embraced buddhism but not quite lost the idea of contradicted illusion, therefore his understanding of the results were limited by his experience whereas the administration saw dangerous mind expanding drugs that must be locked away to save joe public lest they expand their minds and realise they don't need an administration.
at the same time a private drug multinational were conducting their own experiments. the results were the same but experimentation continued and the board of directors decided to up the dosage. the guinea pig they used was a guy named captain mission. the doses they were using was injected and 100 times the average tat strassman used.
mission was laying down in a dimly lit room, soft lighting, easy on the eyes although the environment was far from optimal mission had learnt to not allow the setting to effect his experience, he just used visualizations and his imagination to block out the antiseptic areas and replace them with something a bit more cozy. he had fasted for 8 hours and was preparing himself for the dose. he had smoked a bit of dmt in the past and been involved in a number of experiments with the drug company before, igobaine, ayahuscia, no pharmaceuticals though. that was the rule. mission hated them with a vengeance.
the evil drug company was probably going to synthesise the dmt anyway and find something to cure with it, or maybe invent some new condition to treat. mission was only there as it was the only way he could obtain large amounts of these substances and ingest them without getting busted while getting paid. he often lied to the scientists when giving feedback, saying that he could see pretty patterns and abstract information, he could just make out strange insectoid faces and hear chatter but then the drug wore off. they would always up the dose. the reality was far stranger than this fiction.

fire has ravaged the state of victoria.
apparently some one started these bush fires.
300 people dead so far
that makes it the biggest mass murder in australia

in the late 1993 my brother and i were in the sydney bush fires. we watched the column of smoke and flame move down the mona vale road from the newport arms pub, for about a week people attempted to put it out but it got closer and closer cutting of the peninsular where we live. once i drove up the road to see the devastating display of flame but obviously the road had been blocked, however my car went from white to black. it was an eerie time for the population on the peninsular, we knew tat if the fire reached the main road we would be cut off, the only escape would be by water and everyone knew some one with a boat.
one afternoon while i was driving towards avalon, down newport hill we passed what appeared to be a spot fire, it had just started setting a small bush area aflame. i puled over grabbed some blankets from the car and together with my brother started to beat the flames out, however the land being so dry these fires just grew faster than they should. soon a small team of people, drivers who had pulled over had formed a chain and passing buckets, the flames were wild, reaching high up to the over head electrical cables, in a matter of seconds the cables started sparking and snapped apart sending sparks everywhere. the flames now were at least two stories high and the fire was uncontrollable for our small group, fortunately the fire truck arrived and dealt with the situation.
to this day that small group of 'passerby's' stop one another in the street to shake hands and acknowledge our own efforts and comrade. total strangers share that dunkirk spirit.
well i guess what i'm trying to say here is in victoria people have lost a lot more than i can even imagine, it's a terrible loss, an awfully helpless situation, some of the bodies are unrecognizable, families torn apart, homes destroyed and trauma unfurled upon many innocents. yet there are small stories of humanity pulling together, over coming the odds and the kindness of strangers. perhaps in tragedy we can all learn something at this terrible price.

from seed magazine, a science magazine i delve into occasionally.

The Prophetic Brain
It's a commonly held belief that information from the outside world impinges upon our brains through our senses to cause perception, then action. But this reasonable assumption now appears to be false.

by KARL FRISTON
Over the past decade, neuroscience has revealed that rather than acting as a filter that simply maps sensation onto action, the brain behaves like an "inference machine" that tries to discover patterns within data by refining a model of how those patterns are likely to be generated. For instance, depending on whether the context is a crowded concert hall or a deserted forest, a sound can be perceived as either a human voice or the wind whistling through trees. The pioneering German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz articulated this idea as early as 1860, when he wrote of visual perception that "objects are always imagined as being present in the field of vision as would have to be there in order to produce the same impression on the nervous mechanism." Now a unified understanding of how the brain makes and optimizes its inferences about the outside world is emerging from even earlier work — that of the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes.

Bayes developed a statistical method to evaluate the probability of any given hypothesis being true under changing conditions. The concept is straightforward: The probability of two things happening together is the probability of the first given the second, times the probability of the second. This allows the certainty of a single inference to be weighed according to how much additional evidence exists at any particular time. The "Bayesian" approach has emerged in many guises over the past century and has proved very useful in computer science applications like machine learning.

Since at least the 1980s, neuroscientists have speculated that the brain may use Bayesian inference to make predictions about the outside world. In this view, the brain estimates the most likely cause of an observation (that is, sensory input) by computing the probability that a particular series of events generated what was observed — not unlike a scientist who constructs a model to fit his or her data. This probability is a mathematical quantity we call the "evidence." But evaluating the evidence for most realistic models requires calculations so intricate and lengthy they become impractical. This would be particularly problematic for the brain, which must constantly make split-second decisions. Fortunately, there is an easier way. In 1972 the American physicist Richard Feynman devised an elegant shortcut to calculate the evidence using something called a "free-energy bound." Freeenergy is a concept from statistical thermodynamics —  it is essentially the energy that can be used for work within a system once that system's entropy, or useless energy, has been subtracted.

Feynman's basic idea was simple: Instead of trying to compute the evidence explicitly, just start with a quantitative guess about the causes, which we will call a "representation," and then adjust the representation until it minimizes the free-energy of the data. Feynman exploited the fact that the freeenergy is, by construction, always greater than the negative logarithm of the evidence, a mathematical quantity we will call "surprise." In other words, the free-energy is an upper boundary upon surprise (remember this — we'll come back to it later). So by changing the representation to minimize freeenergy, the representation becomes the most likely cause of whatever sensory inputs make up an observation, and the free-energy becomes the evidence itself. The machine-learning community has used this approach with great success, leading many researchers to wonder: If minimizing free-energy is so effective in allowing statistical machines to perceive and "learn" about their surroundings, could the brain be taking similar shortcuts?

In this formulation, a "representation" is simply a quantitative guess about the likely cause of a sensory observation. To understand representation in the brain, imagine you are in a bar having a conversation. The sounds you hear have no meaning beyond being the product of someone speaking. Your brain must first represent the deeper cause of the sounds (in this case, the concepts and words that make up the speech) via its internal variables like the activity of neurons and the strengths of connections between them. Only then can you infer any meaning. What would this process look like?

The emerging picture is that the brain makes its inferences by minimizing the free-energy of messages passing between hierarchical brain regions. Imagine the brain as an onion, where meaningful exchanges with the outside world take place on its surface (the outer sensory layer). Information from these exchanges passes on to "higher" levels (those responsible for cognitive functions) through "bottom up" connections. The higher levels respond with "top down" messages to the lower levels. This reciprocal exchange repeats itself hierarchically, back and forth, layer by layer, until the highest level (at the center of the onion, or front of the brain) becomes engaged. Only then will you consciously register a perception. In this scheme, the free-energy is essentially the collective prediction error over all levels of the hierarchy: Top-down cognitive messages provide predictions based on representations from above, and lower sensory levels reciprocate with bottom-up prediction errors. These "error messages" drive encoded representations (such as neuronal activity) to improve the predictions for lower levels (that is, to reduce free-energy).

For example, in your hypothetical bar conversation, no matter how ambiguous the acoustics, you are more likely to hear "credit crunch" as opposed to "credit brunch." Here the high-level conceptual representation "credit crunch" provides contextual constraints on the words, which restrict the sounds predicted or heard, namely "c," not "b." If the bar is very noisy, you may find yourself watching your friend's mouth closely. This is because the cause (speaking) allows you to make both acoustic and visual predictions. Hierarchical optimization allows sounds to help you see and sights to guide hearing — binding different sensations into a coherent perceptual framework. This recurrent messagepassing leads to the self-organized brain dynamics that support perception and recognition.

The perspective afforded by this hierarchical Bayesian formulation is especially important for neuroscience, because hierarchy is a key architectural principle of brain anatomy — our brains are organized in successive layers, and we can measure the neural activity encoding prediction errors and representations. But this is not the end of the story. What follows is a new theory that considers what would happen if the free-energy principle applied not just to perception but to action as well.

Let's begin with the notion of an ensemble density — a probability distribution of the states you or I can occupy. Imagine I had 100 million copies of you, at different times in your daily life. If I could measure all your sensory states, I could construct a sample density or histogram that reflected the probability of your being in any particular state. Critically, for you to exist, the number of states you occupy must be small in relation to all possible states. For example, your temperature will always be in a certain range. Mathematically, this means your ensemble density has low entropy. Here, we meet a characteristic of adaptive biological agents (like you and I) in that they seem to resist the second law of thermodynamics (a universal tendency to disorder) by minimizing the entropy of their ensemble densities. What does minimizing entropy mean? It simply means that you will, on average, avoid surprising or improbable states (i.e., you will not find yourself at the bottom of the ocean or suddenly engulfed in flames). Though arcane, this implies something quite fundamental: To exist, you must avoid surprising states.

Adaptive agents like us are open systems that exchange with their environment. The environment acts on us, which produces sensory impressions, and we act on the environment to change its states: If you see an apple on a table, you can reach out to pick the apple up. If we can change the environment that causes sensory input, then, in principle, we can act to suppress surprising input. But there is a problem: How do we compute surprise? In fact, we do not need to compute surprise at all. Returning to Feynman's elegant methodology, all we need to do is to minimize free-energy, because free-energy is an upper boundary on surprise. This means that free-energy can be used not only to optimize perception, but also to prescribe action. This is the basis of the freeenergy principle, which states that all quantities associated with an agent will change to minimize free-energy. This line of reasoning prescribes an intimate relationship between perception and action, where both work in concert to suppress free-energy (that is, to minimize prediction errors or surprise) in our sensory experiences. In other words, we will actively sample sensory data so that it conforms to our expectations; we will constantly alter our relationship with our environment so that our expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. A simple example of this is turning one's head to get a better view of what seems to be a familiar face in peripheral vision, but this principle may encompass our entire navigation of the world to avoid the unexpected.

In terms of neuroscience, the key issue is not so much the information theoretic principles above, but how the brain realizes them. Multiple predictions follow from these ideas. For example, brain systems should be deployed hierarchically and connected reciprocally. Forward connections should be largely linear in their influences, whereas backward connections should embody the nonlinearities inherent in the causal structure of the world. We would expect that predictable stimuli evoke smaller responses, and unexpected stimuli larger ones. Scientists are now starting to confirm these conjectures with brain mapping, by comparing brain responses with stimuli that are coherent or incoherent, predictable or unpredictable. This principle also has implications beyond neuroscience, in the sense that it applies to all biological agents. Could single-cell organisms use the concentration of metabolites and kinetic rate-constants (as opposed to neuronal activity and connection strengths) to encode their implicit representations? In this speculative case as well as with the brain, the great challenge is to find the mapping between the internal states of a phenotype and representations that this theory mandates.

Returning to statistical machines, from which much of this work emerged, the theory suggests a profound revision of current approaches to reinforcement learning and optimal control in engineering artificial neural networks. It should be possible to teach automata (such as robots) complex adaptive behaviors by simply exposing them to a controlled environment (like a classroom), then returning them to their normal surroundings to seek out the new states they have learned to expect. The limitations of this approach are difficult to predict, but further synergy between theoretical neurobiology and machine learning, between a deeper understanding of our own minds and those we wish to create, appears inevitable.

sunday down in bondi, the beach packed with bronzed bodies the water empty save for my brother and i as we surf in almost freezing temperatures. strange contrast. my lips are turning blue, out there as i wait for waves, i'm in shock. where s the iceberg, has it melted around the corner at bronte, why is it so freaking cold. later at the markets i meet the beautiful israeli girl ruth selling her trinkets and jewels, i buy my brother a necklace with some cabalistic jargon, i wander through dazed from the chill factor despite the soaring temperatures. we pass through the beautiful people, two non descript wanderers, i smile at the girls wave at the boys and fall into bookshops and cafes thinking about ruth and how beautiful she is.

monday tuesday i'm home organizing a pa, driving jake here and there, having lunch, drinking coffee, talking with gravy about the gig, i'm filthy and smell awful, it's time for me to get organized and start training and rehearsing and clean myself up. i sit down and write the music for my song, i think about sending ruth a valentines card, stupid commercial bullshit but what am i going to do? i can't let them all slip away. i have to try at least. i'll try in my own passive kinda way, what the hell. i'm lost before i even run but at least im going to run. it's been so long since i put any effort into having a date, i'm certain i'll be rejected in the nicest way, for all i know she's married. i didn't see a ring but then these days that doesn't mean anything. ah ruth i could easily love you but that's all i really know how to do, i'm pretty crap at the rest of it.

the first notes arrive on the back of the previous track, the haunting song 'fly home' which i will talk about later, those final notes fade into the sonic cyclic drone of tone, the harmony that steve and marty attain is perfection, the wonderful picture, no make that a landscape painted with words, and dreamy choral echo of those guitars in loop. there's a beautiful little bit where the instruments just fade out and we are left with that lovely acoustic ring, then slowly as your mind accepts that it's the end, the song slips back in full regalia, it shimmers and shines like a precious jewel. and then the most unexpected 'whoosh' it soars above the clouds, i'd love to know how they came up with that bit, and before the surprise can register this wonderful hawkwind like harvey bainbridge synth takes the song into the stratosphere. it's just bliss.
towards the end a female voice starts to talk deep in the mix, my ears struggle to make out her message, what does she talk about, who is she and what is her message to the dead man? i struggle to decipher its meaning but i never have despite repeated listening and internet searching.
there's something narcotic about this track, it's the dead mans dream, slipping from consciousness to something else, the book of the dead charts the souls journey, the dead man's dream sees him in memory clinging to earthly things, between things of myth and magick, between a time of wizards and witches and machines and technology. it's a journey to another realm that once your sucked into its vortex, that moment of surrender you begin to think dying dreams are just like the living ones, for in life don't we all dream of magic and unicorns and the wonder of innocence.
i love this song and think the album it comes from is an underrated master piece.
i'd like you dear reader to give it a listen again, light up that jazz cigarette and dim the lights low, kick back with your girl and enter the realm of sometime anywhere.

it's early and i'm wandering along the beach at avalon, my feet burning on hot sand, the scorched earth, i look at the waves breaking below me, crystal clear, i'm wandering down into the ocean. my feet recoil at the freezing temperature. and then i'm in.
days like this are slow, the burnt land knows no sanctuary except the sea and today the sea is a staggered cathedral to reality, waves soar up above and then in the flash point of time freeze momentarily before the tremendous crash as they burst over me like liquid war. my body does what it needs, it dives under and through and finds the surface when it needs, my lungs grasp at air when it comes, and let it go when necessary. im thinking about sharks, my fin is a weapon, i can see the sharks eye, that eye scares me more than the sharks teeth, and reason takes hold, as i understand there is no shark but the one eating my mind.
i surf, catch waves and feel the hot sun incinerate my back.
later i meet Jake for lunch, he's looking like a wasted model from the 60's, trashed after a huge night clubbing and now recharging his batteries at the beach. we grab a 50 50 lunch. people stop us in the streets to talk, but we are hot, anti social and somewhat tired. words don't come easy, the chit chat, the small talk, the empty sentences, the hollow vowels and lazy consonants, it's an undead conversation. i go home. listen to shriek, loud, sleep in my hammock, it's mercurial and menacing in parts. whatever landscapes it takes me to i would dwell there momentarily before moving on, this cityscape is a strange cross dickens cross china melville place. steam punk engines and strings, mad people wander the streets but they are not different from the sane, there's a haunting hallucination like quality here, dead people in the land of the living. i'm gonna read the book.

fucking hell man it's so hot i'm sliding through my dreams, tossing and turning like a greasy chip in a deep frying machine, flipping and turning as i travel through dreamscapes and illusions, playing strange games with myself and myself. i awake already disorientated and stumble up to the bathroom where i piss for what seems like ages, standing there watching a yellow stream listening to that reassuring noise and wondering if this is the longest one ever, it seems to go on and on and i have to prop myself up against the sink. then when it's finally over i wander into the lounge room where the first thing i see is a huge giant mutant wasp. now i kid you not, this beasty is the size of my fist, it resembles an alien bug crossed with wasp dna, i can see it's intelligent but somewhat dazed as it hovers around the window looking for an exit.
i pick up some of it's transmissions
'this is killer wasp one (KW1) to base, i'm trapped in the subjects home, he's standing before me like a oaf, i'm attempting to exit before he exhibits human like fight responses'
'this is wasp command, try attacking first, preemptive strike, stingers on full power.'
we engage in some strange maneuvers, i'm still half asleep and know my reactions are slow, i attempt to help the wasp by opening the window wide.
the wasp flies out immediately.
it's now to hot to breath. sydney is melting, my vision is blurred, i'm covered in slime, sweat and my eyes water. i head for the shower and thus begins my day.

attempting to create a my space page for the deep fix is driving me nuts, i hate all the layouts and have no idea how to change them, i don't like all the adverts and it took forever to load two songs on there, anyway i'm flicking through a whole bunch of images and found a nice series of lips, which i think i will use as a theme.

apart from having an awful infection of some sort, a genetically engineered virus at work in my system feels like my body is burning up and freezing at the same time, even when i'm sleeping at night the lights are far to bright and there's that awful exhaustion that permutes all muscle and flesh, there's also the terrible pain from my latest blow to the head, where i banged it last week. i think it took a few days for the bruise to show up. anyway i'm in the wars but not complaining, after all the weathers good, there's plenty of interesting things keeping me distracted like sleeping. for some strange reason i feel like sleeping all the time, it's very strange, my sleep is so deep and dreamless it's like being in a huge void of nothing, the same as being in a float tank. you know the type?
the type that just kicks in, zomp! from awareness to void.
anyways that sleep is seductive, it's calling me, beckoning like a siren, i know it's not really healthy to sleep so much but i can't help it. this virus doesn't help.

Transcript from interview with David Mitchell

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ramona Koval: David Mitchell's first book Ghostwritten was described by AS Byatt as 'the best novel I have ever read'. His second Number 9 Dream was shortlisted for the Booker and the James Tait Black Memorial prizes, and his third Cloud Atlas was hailed as spectacular by both critics and general readers alike, another Booker nominated work.

His latest novel is Black Swan Green, the story of 13 months in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the year his parents split up. A lot happens to him that year; he survives another year in the schoolyard, and a boy with a stammer doesn't have it easy, and he emerges as a young poet, although he publishes under an assumed name. That description is really very one-dimensional and as usual this David Mitchell book is very much multi-dimensional.

At our session in Wellington at Writers and Readers Week last week David began by reading from Cloud Atlas, and those who have read the book will know that the text has a very interesting structure, with the first half of the book being the first half of a series of stories (like ABCDE), and the second half completing them in a Russian doll-like stack (EDCBA), and with each of the chapters written in a different kind of English, from the language of an 18th century shipboard journal to a projected future language. So when he sat down to talk after his reading I asked him how we went about working out what these languages might sound like, what's his system?

David Mitchell: It depends if we're in the past, the present or the future.

Ramona Koval: Take your pick.

David Mitchell: In the past, if you've got an American narrator in the 19th century then Melville is a good place to start, so I read Moby Dick and cribbed down all the things that I wouldn't say myself, antiquated terms of phrase and items of vocabulary, and just worked them into the narrative as I wrote it. We speak 21st century English, so the present is not problem, and the future is the easiest of all because you can make it up and you won't get any angry letters from Tunbridge Wells to say 'I'm disgusted by Mr Mitchell's misuse of English.' So in the far future part, English sort of gets crushes and melded. I was teaching English in Japan at that time, so I based a lot of the English that might be spoken 600 years from now on my Japanese students' mistakes of English. So I used the way...their mistakes with irregular English verbs, for example.

Ramona Koval: But is that because you think English is going to be the global language probably? Or maybe Chinese will be, but anyway at the moment it looks like it's English, so English will accommodate itself to all the mistakes that everybody who is not an English speaker will make.

David Mitchell: It will, it does, and that's a fabulous thing. It's great how language evolves. It inches forwards by mistakes. I'm into very controversial linguistic areas here, I suppose, but it does seem that something like 'long time no see', which would once have been a native Chinese-speaker's misappropriation of 'I haven't seen you for a long time', that sort of gets adopted first with a sense of irony, and then even the irony evaporates and it becomes standard English. Isn't it fantastic? We're all a part of it, a great linguistic democracy. Great. Love it. Next question.

Ramona Koval: I'm just enjoying the pleasure you have in language, and obviously why wouldn't you have pleasure in language? But not every writer has that sort of pleasure.

David Mitchell: Maybe they do, they just don't whitter on about it so incessantly. But we're so lucky. Perhaps people in all language groups have a sneaking suspicion that however egalitarian they may wish to present themselves, really their own language has...it reaches the parts that other languages cannot reach. But English is this great central reservoir. We've got words like 'circumambulation' that I can't even pronounce without thinking. There in the depths we can kind of scoop up...but we've got more recent great American contributions coming into the language, and even from New Zealand as well. So I consider myself fortunate having English as my birthright, as a writer.

Ramona Koval: And you are interested in the building blocks of sentences as well as sentences, and I'm thinking now of the structures of your book and the engineering that goes into something like Cloud Atlas and the Dream book. So I wanted to talk to you about whether you perhaps wanted to be an engineer or an architect when you were a young man, because they seem so architectural. You can walk through these books and you can actually visualise the whole structure of them and you can actually climb on the scaffolding and look down.

David Mitchell: Thanks for the nice things you said about my writing there, Ramona. I did want to be an inventor, that was my very first thing, which is a pretty fair description of a novelist.

Ramona Koval: What did you invent?

David Mitchell: I invented spaceships. I made very elaborate cardboard spaceships and space station with UHU glue, who are not a sponsor of this festival. That smell of it...you shouldn't smell it too much, kids! But yes, I used to invent very elaborate space stations. Then I wanted to program computer games, and I did for a while on my Sinclair 48K ZX Spectrum, which was the future for a while. They no longer exist, so they haven't sponsored me, obviously. You can see the adult vocation in childhood forms of play, and I bet when you were a kid you were one of these kids who were always asking questions and wanted to interview people.

Ramona Koval: It's true, though it's not about me today, it's about you. Black Swan Green of course is a much more conventional book, although there are hidden worlds within the story, the world of Jason Taylor who has a hidden identity as a poet and even an assumed name. Tell me about the structure of this book, because actually there are worlds in this book too. It's small on the outside and big on the inside, if you know what I mean.

David Mitchell: Like Dr Who's spaceship, the TARDIS.

Ramona Koval: I was going to say TARDIS. Because sometimes you take us off the page into a magical space, not really magic realism in a way, but a kind of thrillingly invented language world that he finds himself when he's by himself.

David Mitchell: There's a few questions in there. It is a more conventional book, but for me after the first three, that was unconventional, if that makes sense.

Ramona Koval: So this is unconventional.

David Mitchell: It was for me, even though it looks like a conventional book from the outside at least, as you say. Perhaps to my satisfaction then I had exhausted the possibilities of novels with monkeyed-about-with structures, and so in a sense a more ordinary book was a more revolutionary next step for me. His language...it's tough when you're writing a novel narrated by a kid because unless you kind of cheat by making him a genius you're stuck between writing plausible 13-year-old but using his language and giving him a sufficiently interesting voice to retain an adult reader. Certainly when I was 13 the things I said weren't that interesting, and the idea of 300 pages of it would have sent me to sleep, certainly. However, what kids do do (and this was my way out of this fix really) is accidental poetry.

Kids of a certain age, hopefully 13, are on the cusp of acquiring an adult vocabulary but they'll still assemble and conjugate words that adults don't or that we could censor ourselves and prevent ourselves from saying. If a kid steps on a piece of crusty several-day-old snow that hasn't melted and it goes crunch, and it's very much like stepping on a Cadbury's Crunchie (who are also not sponsoring me) and we might not say that unless we are writers or eccentric or have some disorder, but a 13-year-old would; 'Wow, it's like stepping on a Crunchie.' So even though things Jason says aren't that coherent or articulate, in his own mind he's a poet, but most kids are, I think. I haven't been inside the heads of other kids, I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that that goes on.

Ramona Koval: He works at expressing himself in poetry, but he has difficulty in expressing himself aloud in the language that he loves.

David Mitchell: Yes, like me he has a stammer and I very much wanted to write about it, that was one of my motivations for the book. It's not talked about very much and well-meaning friends don't want to ask about it for fear of hurting my feelings, but this means I think it's probably much easier to find really good accounts of what it's like to be blind or deaf than it is to actually be fine but not be able to speak without an arsenal of techniques and evasions that people who stammer need to use. So I wanted to write about it and, perhaps in this area more than others, send...we're into Dr Who area again, but send a message to my 13-year-old self just containing all the things I wish someone had told me then. I think the science of speech therapy has advanced a lot since those days, and I think kids these days get a lot more useful help. But back in my day, not so great.

Ramona Koval: I was struck then by your description, equating it to blindness or deafness. Do you feel as if it is as big a disadvantage to you?

David Mitchell: No, of course not. I can see and I can hear and this allows me to interface with the world much more directly. Perhaps it isn't as major an inability as deafness or blindness, and this is why it has slipped under the radar of help and of knowledge for a long time. My book is one modest way to rectify that.

Ramona Koval: So you just talked then about strategies that you employ to get a sentence out, and if we had a tickertape of your brain going up behind us here...

David Mitchell: I'd be arrested.

Ramona Koval: ...apart from those lines, we would probably see a whole lot of instructions to yourself about the sentence that's coming up and how to negotiate it, a kind of map of what you want to say.

David Mitchell: Yes, you would.

Ramona Koval: Can you tell us a little bit about that map?

David Mitchell: It's complex. The relationship of a stammer with spoken language is very complex and it's largely beyond my understanding. Of course I have a greater understanding that a non-stammerer would, but why I can speak in front of a few hundred people and not be afflicted...dunno, I don't really know. I can draw up a general list of rules and these include...when it's really important that I don't stammer, like now, I don't. This is one rule. Rules can be broken, and they're listed in a book folks, but in terms of your question, what does happen is...I do this less now, I've come to a more useful working accommodation with my stammer and it tends not to sort of mug me as much, but what I used to do more was to examine the sentence ahead and if necessary engineer it so that I would be avoiding a word that I thought I might stammer on.

Really severe cases, if someone is asking you if you would like water or milk and you know that you tend to stammer on words beginning with 'M'...there's always one or two key consonants at any one time, and interestingly these consonants alter through life. So at the moment, say, I would have a hard time with 'Ks', hard 'Cs' and 'Ss', whereas years ago I remember being unable to say words beginning with 'Y'. I dreaded being 12 years old because then I couldn't say words beginning with 'T', say. But now I can do these fine. How come? I don't know. But water or milk, can't say words beginning with 'M', the worst thing, even if you want milk you'd ask for water because you can't say 'milk'. You live with it and you devise coping strategies. Compared to what a lot of people live with happily, it's a lucky break really.

Ramona Koval: I'm just thinking now about how it might have influenced the way you've written, the idea of...the breaking down of things, the geography of the sentences that you're about to speak, the geographies of these words that you create.

David Mitchell: Linguistically it doesn't change how I write because of course I'm totally free on the page...

Ramona Koval: No, but it changes how you think though, surely?

David Mitchell: As a kid it gives you a whacking vocabulary really early. You do need other ways to get around words. It gives you a sensitivity for language register, by which I mean if you don't think you can say 'pointless' because you're stammering on words beginning with 'P' at that point, and it's more likely you will know substitute words like 'futile', however this brings you up against the other problem whereby if you use the word 'futile' amongst 13-year-old they'll do yer bleedin' 'ead in because a 13-year-old has no right to be using a word of a higher register like 'futile'. So this is useful stuff for a writer and it's stuff that I still use now. All writers do but I was aware of it from a much earlier age, which does show what we think of as our handicaps and our inabilities can actually be teachers, they can actually have very useful functions. Would I wish my stammer away? I'd like to wish it away but I certainly wouldn't want to pay for that wish by losing what I'd learnt about language through it.

Ramona Koval: Jason develops this idea of his stammer as 'hangman' because the stammer is so pervasive that it has an ego and it has a kind of presence.

David Mitchell: It does rather feel like that. When you're a kid especially you personify abstracts in order to understand them better and in order to feel as though you're doing business with them and interacting with them. So it made sense for Jason to do that.

Ramona Koval: This is a cousin to all the books that you've written before because we have characters that reappear from the other books. They're a different age and they're referred to. This Madame...now I'm going to mispronounce... Crommelynck...

David Mitchell: Unless we have any Belgians in the audience, it's Madame de Crommelynck, and if we do then they're very welcome to come up and correct me afterwards.

Ramona Koval: She's a character from that, and she's just fantastic. In one of these magical moments he goes in to see this woman who is this Belgian countess, I suppose, she's been everywhere, she knows everything...

David Mitchell: She's like you, Ramona.

Ramona Koval: She's like me, thank you. I thought she was probably about 40 years older than me.

David Mitchell: Okay, she's like how you will be in 40 years time.

Ramona Koval: We're all a bit demented in our own ways. She was very wise and she was prefect for a young poet, wasn't she, she knew what he should read and what he should listen to. She was talking straight to him. She was a gift.

David Mitchell: She was. Well, he deserves a gift after everything else I put him through. I wanted an opportunity to talk about art in the book and there wasn't one, and wasn't really one when I was a kid either. But I advertised this vacancy amongst the cast of people I'd already written, and she applied for it and she passed the interview unanimously. So bring her in and hopefully she brings with her the ontological certainty. If you read this book and believe it's real, then in theory someone from this book who then appears in this will bring that realness with them and make Black Swan Green a more real place as well. So there's a technical reason for doing it as well, but it's also just kind of fun.

Ramona Koval: But you do want everything to connect, don't you.

David Mitchell: I stand accused. Yes, I'm guilty, I suppose. Yes. Nothing more profound really. Isn't it great when things do? Doesn't it remind you to be happy that you're alive when things like this happen, when something from a long time ago that you thought would never re-enter your life, it does, hopefully not in a negative way. When you see an old friend that you haven't seen for 15 years who you never expected to see, they just pop up. Isn't that wonderful? Maybe I do a little bit...

Ramona Koval: How important is music to you for that, old songs?

David Mitchell: As everybody knows (which is a Leonard Cohen song of course), songs bring things back instantly, in as undiluted a way as smell. Songs are companions in life as well. We might have a song that we knew when we were 13 years old and if it's art it evolves as we do and we can listen to it when we're 80 and it's a touchstone, all the way back. I couldn't...I would live without music of course but I'm very glad I don't have to.

Ramona Koval: So this young poet, Jason...you wrote poetry too when you were this age. You published under the name of James Bolivar.

David Mitchell: How do you know that?

Ramona Koval: I know stuff, I'm so old now, I know stuff, it's not hard. What happened to the poetry with you?

David Mitchell: Realistic assessment of my own gifts happened...

Ramona Koval: By you or others?

David Mitchell: By me. Of course when I was 15 I thought I was absolutely wonderful, and then luckily for me and posterity I read some real poets and met one or two, and realised that it is a higher art that I can't really attain. It's not where my vocation is and it's not...what gifts I may have, poetry isn't what these equip me for best. You can't make a single mistake in poetry, every last word and inflection has to be perfect. Short stories are higher than novels for this reason. Short stories are somewhere between the novel and poem.

Ramona Koval: Because the novel is more forgiving?

David Mitchell: Yes, novel comes with getaway cars. You can write a duff scene or a half-duff scene and if the next one is brilliant then the half-duff scene can still earn its keep. But a half-duff scene in a short story and the short story is dead. I've written a few, I know.

Ramona Koval: Is originality more important to you than telling a story or creating characters?

David Mitchell: What's important is a really simple question; is it good or not? Is it any good or not? If you are true to yourself then originality happens by default because every single person in the world has original a personality as their iris. It seems that it's not original when we...I haven't had this thought before and it might be a load of nonsense, so I apologise in advance if it is...but it seems that we are like other people and one book is like another book if we allow our true selves to be overly doctored or influenced by the 'other' or rather the 'others'. But I think if you (I hideously mix my metaphors)...if you mine yourself deep enough then the metals you will find will be precious and original. So originality isn't a thing, it's the absence of other things, which is great news.

Ramona Koval: It's not really a young person's book, is it?

David Mitchell: Yes, a few schools from around where I grew up have adopted it. So certainly a few hundred schoolkids in Worcestershire are reading it this year and perhaps hating me because I'm...

Ramona Koval: Have you had any communications from them?

David Mitchell: A few, yes. Luckily people who take the time to write you a letter about a book usually do it because they love it rather than they hate it. I haven't had any hate mail, no, not yet.

Ramona Koval: You've spoken before about going to live in Japan in 1994 as the beginning of your life as a proper writer. You were a foreigner with little Japanese and you say it afforded you the luxury of having no social belonging and probably no real responsibilities, I guess, and also you didn't have to talk, I suppose. What did that...so they think about your stammer, or that was a way of presenting yourself without a problem?

David Mitchell: My evasive strategies were sufficiently developed by then for that to not really be a factor.

Ramona Koval: Did that feel like you were a different person?

David Mitchell: I went there because of wanderlust more than anything else really. I feel like a different person every few years actually, I guess we all do, we become a dad or get married or get unmarried or change your job or have a near death experience, this sort of nudges you along the great journey.

Ramona Koval: But also it probably provided you with a kind of writer's retreat, like in a bubble. You were always in a writer's retreat because you didn't have to communicate with people, you couldn't read anything, you couldn't watch television. Was that something that stimulated you towards the page, because what else were you going to do?

David Mitchell: Yes, I think so, I'm sure it helped. I've been looking for a good way to articulate this for years and you've just supplied it. Japan was my writer's retreat. That's great. Is it okay if I use that in the future?

Ramona Koval: Of course, feel free. What about in Ireland? You live in Ireland now.

David Mitchell: I'm a dad, as I've said about three times already. I've got some photos to show you later.

Ramona Koval: They're very beautiful children, I've seen them before.

David Mitchell: And of course when you become a dad everything becomes very simple; what's best for the kids? We went back to Japan last year just for a year so that our daughter could learn the language, which she did in about three weeks. I've been doing it for nine years and it's still very ugly. Then we realised that, for who we are, West Cork is the place, so we went back to Ireland.

Ramona Koval: So do you feel like an outsider there?

David Mitchell: It's good with an international marriage to live in a third country because then it's no one's fault when things go wrong, and things in Ireland do go wrong. It's not a systems society, it's a leisurely...which is a great Irish word...if you don't have much on this afternoon you say, 'I'm quite leisurely this afternoon,' and there's something very Irish about that...which does mean that if you want an electrician this afternoon, forget it. You'll get one next month maybe. But it also means that people are less stressed, I think, and it's a good place for children.

Ramona Koval: And what about a good place for writers? Because we have this idea that it's a place full of writers and they don't pay tax and everyone's a poet. Is that true?

David Mitchell: It's a place for writers...anywhere is a place for a writer. Humanity is so fascinating and our work is to put that fascinating-ness into the book. Yes, it's true that there are generous tax breaks and it's disingenuous of me to not mention that when people say, 'So why do you live in Ireland?' 'Well, the environment is great, a good place for kids,' and they're waiting for me to mention this. But it is being reduced, which is fine as well. The midwife who helped deliver my son...I don't know if I mentioned I'm a dad, by the way...but she is of more value to Irish society than I am, and if anyone deserves a tax break it's her and not me. But my principles are not that strong that I will insist on making voluntary donations to the state, I haven't gone there yet. Have I answered your question?

Ramona Koval: Yes, you have. I've got a question about the work you're working on now, and I believe we're going to Japan and we're going back in time, and we're going to a place where language is very important again.

David Mitchell: We are. It's the Napoleonic era in Europe, and while Japan was closed to the outside world for 248 years or so there was one exception that no one outside Holland really knows about which was an artificial island, very small, perhaps about the size of this theatre, in Nagasaki Harbour called Deshima, and on this for the whole of those two and a half centuries the Dutch East Indies company was permitted to trade with the Japanese, and it was staffed by about 10 or 15 Dutch guys a long way from home.

The ships would come once a year from Batavia, which is now Jakarta, and they weren't allowed off the island, and the only three categories of people who were allowed on were the merchants who did business with them, the prostitutes who also did business with them, and the interpreters who belonged to a hereditary caste, it was passed on from father to son. The Dutch officially weren't allowed to learn Japanese, although they tend to be such gifted linguists that they did, but officially they weren't allowed to. And no Japanese other then the interpreters and a few academics towards the end of the period as well were allowed to learn Dutch. So language is power, and the interpreters had it.

Ramona Koval: But then how are you going to translate that into English with all of those different kinds of languages and the importance of which language you speak?

David Mitchell: With difficulty. The other thing about originality that I didn't say earlier, the more...to use an adjective I've just borrowed from Christian Bok the poet who's also at this festival, he talks about Sisyphean constraints, and the more Sisyphean the constraints, provided you can...just to turn Houdini into a verb...as long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

Ramona Koval: That was a triple somersault with pike, wasn't it!

i'm listening to the church soundtrack of shriek, so far it's awesome, space rock boogie with ambient tonal drifts and some exceptional words by the author jeff vandermeer.

heat strong enough to melt clocks these last few days and nights, i get myself into the ocean and catch waves, cooling my body and mind, i can't really move just slip into hammocks and chairs and sleep languidly like a chubby lizard. i've discovered 'acaci' a substance from the amazon that you eat frozen, just like ice cream without the cream but it's fantastic, tasty and nutritious. i'm gonna live on acaici all summer.

i meet my comrades from left as in sinister, a very nice crew of musicians, val explains things to us, apparently i'm gonna have a t- shirt although i'd prefer lingerie. vals a genius, his mind works on millions of things at once, you can see his mental process is always in hyper-drive.

in the surf i catch another wave, suddenly i feel my solar plexus charka explode. this is awakening for me, this is exactly what i require.

i'm reading john birminghams book ''without warning' it's ot something i would normally read but it's my first australian sci fi and it reads like an airport thriller, trashy and clique as if he's writing for the movie. i'm curious to see how it ends but i'm kinda already bored.

i finish reading micheal pollens book, the omnivores dilemma, a great read for anyone interested in food. how it grows where it comes from, if it's good and i have to say the book was a revelation. he basically asks, 'what should we eat for dinner?' following the food chain he observes and participates in the process that sustains us, from industrial foods to organic. i'm particularly amused and fascinated by the trend in america where the farmers basically say they farm grass. grass is essential to the food chain, and the animals that eat it are basically turning sunlight into energy for us via their grass consumption. in the end we are all stars. or at least part of the sun.
i also just finished 'song of kali' by the tremendous writer dan simmons who captures calcutta in this modern horror novel that leaves you feeling some what haunted. the idea of kali is amazing. the goddess of time and change although in the book she is the goddess of death and destruction.
Kali's most common four armed iconographic image shows each hand carrying variously a sword, a trishul (trident), a severed head and a bowl or skull-cup (kapala) catching the blood of the severed head.
Two of these hands (usually the left) are holding a sword and a severed head. The Sword signifies Divine Knowledge and the Human Head signifies human Ego which must be slain by Divine Knowledge in order to attain Moksha. The other two hands (usually the right) are in the abhaya and varada mudras or blessings, which means her initiated devotees (or anyone worshiping her with a true heart) will be saved as she will guide them here and in the hereafter.
She has a garland consisting of human heads, variously enumerated at 108 (an auspicious number in Hinduism and the number of countable beads on a Japa Mala or rosary for repetition of Mantras) or 51, which represents Varnamala or the Garland of letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, Devanagari. Hindus believe Sanskrit is a language of dynamism, and each of these letters represents a form of energy, or a form of Kali. Therefore she is generally seen as the mother of language, and all mantras.
She is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti. She is shown as very dark as she is brahman in its supreme unmanifest state. She has no permanent qualities — she will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to her — she is the pure, un-manifested energy, the Adi-shakti.

There's a deep similarity to kabalistic concepts here, i wonder if much research has been done on this.

The other book i just enjoyed was a book on the HGA which gave some interesting steps on the process.