Happier news about Jorie

We're feeling a little less frantic about the whole food/anemia thing. I think the key is going to be timing feedings so that we give her solids when she's actually hungry. It worked a little at dinner today. I'd thought we were coming along all right; it's just that the checkup gave extra urgency to the issue. (My mother-in-law wonders why they didn't do the blood count at 9 months, which is a good question.)

Anyway, while all this is going on, Jorie has been learning words at an astounding rate. She's started on colors (not surprising, I suppose, given that she has about half a dozen books on the subject) and can identify blue and yellow with fair correctness; she's got a couple more letters of the alphabet too. Today she became fond of the word "happy" (which I didn't even know she knew) and started exclaiming "Happy! Happy! Happy!" in idle moments. I tried teaching her "sad" by making sad faces but I think it brought the mood down a little.

She also made a few spontaneous attempts to let go of support and remain standing (sometimes in a half-squat), and remained balanced for three or four seconds at a time.

Dreams

This comment by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little in a fascinating Making Light thread on bad sources led me to this paper by G. William Domhoff on "Senoi Dream Theory" which is a great read: it's about how romantic pseudo-anthropology mutated the shamanistic dream practices of a preindustrial culture in Malaysia into a supposedly miraculous therapy for all mental and social ills, and sparked a fad in the human potential movement.

I find the story interesting in part because it's just slightly before my time. I heard about the whole business of dream journals, dream control and so forth in the 1980s, shortly after most of the bogus Senoi associations had been dropped or deemphasized and it was all about lucid dreaming. I was fascinated by lucid dreaming because, as a teenager, I'd had several of what could probably be characterized as lucid dreaming experiences (that is, dreams in which you realize you're dreaming and possess a certain amount of rationality without waking up; the lore is that you can then control the dream). A couple of these had actually turned into cool flying dreams. Domhoff, though, doesn't seem to think that the kind of reliable control of the dream experience promised by some lucid-dreaming advocates is really consistently possible for most people. It certainly wasn't like that for me; it seemed like I could give the direction of the story a nudge, but it was very hit or miss. I also don't think there was anything particularly therapeutic about it; it was just a fun thing to play with. I still get flashes of lucidity occasionally, but it's usually immediately before waking up when I'm maybe already in more of a hypnopompic state than actually asleep.


( more about dreams )