Late Night Reveries

The book is a compilation of short stories with no connection to one another. Though if you can find a connection be my guest. I'd say that's pretty much it.

Sleeper, Waking is a book of late night reveries in old age. A reverie is a half-conscious, half dream-like state in which all the stuff of the real world is no less real but loosed from the ties of time, freeing childhood woods, rivers, lakes, faces one has known, lives one has shared, cities visited or lived in, books read, music heard, past passions and lost lovers, even old fears and dreads to return: all of a life mingling in one moment. It is a kind of suspended place in-between the present world and some other before or after it, between now and then. It is, as one dwells in it, to discover how at eighty, as you lie half-awake at night, the past is relived for you or the world you knew dreamed back to sleep.

Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region. Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region.

Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region. Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region.

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, & Vox The father of virtual reality explains its dazzling possibilities by reflecting on his own lifelong relationship with technology Bridging the gap between tech mania and the experience of being inside the human body, Dawn of the New Everything is a look at what it means to be human at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility. Through a fascinating look back over his life in technology, Jaron Lanier, an interdisciplinary scientist and father of the term “virtual reality,” exposes VR’s ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species, and gives readers a new perspective on how the brain and body connect to the world. An inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, philosophy and advice, this book tells the wild story of his personal and professional life as a scientist, from his childhood in the UFO territory of New Mexico, to the loss of his mother, the founding of the first start-up, and finally becoming a world-renowned technological guru. Understanding virtual reality as being both a scientific and cultural adventure, Lanier demonstrates it to be a humanistic setting for technology. While his previous books offered a more critical view of social media and other manifestations of technology, in this book he argues that virtual reality can actually make our lives richer and fuller.

Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region. Atlanta magazine’s editorial mission is to engage our community through provocative writing, authoritative reporting, and superlative design that illuminate the people, the issues, the trends, and the events that define our city. The magazine informs, challenges, and entertains our readers each month while helping them make intelligent choices, not only about what they do and where they go, but what they think about matters of importance to the community and the region.

This collection of short stories includes many different genres. Whether the story line is a psychological effort, comedy, science fiction, fantasy or satire, the author has tried to render a diverse entertainment value to each. In this fast-paced, hectic, and TV-dominated culture, these stories were written to offer a half-hour to one-hour window of insightful entertainment, reminiscent of "The Twilight Zone" and "Hitchcock Presents." Many of these tales have an abrupt, unexpected twist and could easily be adapted as television screenplays. The sequence of these short stories will keep the reader guessing as to what motifs and messages will appear next, much like a baseball pitcher working his batter to keep him off balance. Many of these stories are like a quick jolt, providing instant gratification. Among the 20 very different and mind-bending story lines are the wizardry of Baron Chronosimos, the scientific genius of time traveler Frank Morrison, and the ghostly appearance of former Black Panther Fred Hampton. Says the author, "With some it may be history, others a comical farce. I have tried to incorporate many different themes that might encourage a broader understanding of the myriad thought processes to be gained through the printed word." So sit back and enjoy The Big Picture and Other Byte-sized Short Stories.

From a brilliant fantasy master comes a tale of astounding magic, unrelenting evil, and redemptive courage. Travis Wilder and Grace Beckett have returned to modern Earth to get medical help for Beltan, a knight from the otherworld of Eldh. But as Beltan lies unconscious in the ICU of a Denver hospital, a shadowy organization plots to kidnap him, and sinister forces of dark magic cross the boundary from Eldh in a murderous search for Travis and Grace. Meanwhile, in Eldh, a young baroness, her witch companion, and their mortal and immortal friends journey to a dying city, there to confront a nameless evil that has begun to annihilate the very gods. Somehow Travis and Grace must save Beltan and themselves, then make their way back to Eldh. For only there can they hope to defeat a demonic enemy that can shatter time, devour space, and turn existence into nothingness.

While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, Gananath Obeyesekere believes an even richer knowledge is possible through a bold confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, he fearlessly pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding. Throughout his career, Obeyesekere has combined psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. In this book, he begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, he witnesses hundreds of thousands of his past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. He then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space, considering the experience of a female Christian penitent, who stares devotedly at a tiny crucifix only to see the space around it expand to mirror Christ's suffering. Obeyesekere follows the unconscious motivations underlying rapture, the fantastical consumption of Christ's body and blood, and body mutilation and levitation, bridging medieval Catholicism and the movements of early modern thought as reflected in William Blake's artistic visions and poetic dreams. He develops the term "dream-ego" through a discussion of visionary journeys, Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's scientific dreaming, and the cosmic and erotic dream-visions of New Age virtuosos, and he defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. A career-culminating work, this volume translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.