Link Banana

Dallas Clayton — whose URL appears to have been eaten — made a fun picture book.

And from the MeFi post’s comments, one of the author’s poems, “Resolutions: Part I”:

-Attend hypnotism school
-Learn to hypnotize people
-Hypnotize teacher into giving me back the money I paid to learn to hypnotize
-Use hypnotism to trick people into thinking they are factory workers
-Buy factory (extra money left over from saving on hypnotism school + bad economy)
-Think of something to make
-Make it (Pick something easy)
-Use hypnotized factory workers to help with assembly, shipping, heavy lifting, etc.
-Chill

(via MeFi, where the early comments are uniformly bitter)

Psychology Today reports on the theory that dreams are primarily ways that people act out potentially dangerous situations that they’ll encounter or have encountered.

If the threat-simulation theory is correct, dreams should focus on the self, and when confronted with a threat, the dream self should react realistically to ensure its own survival and that of its loved ones. And so it is. We are the heroes of our own dreams. We don’t dream about other people’s adventures or about fictional superheroes battling monsters. We dream about ourselves.

If dreams evolved to simulate the threats in our environment, then being exposed to more dangers in real life should activate the nightmare function, overstuffing our dreams with threats. This is precisely what happens. Even a single exposure to a life-threatening situation can plunge a person into an inferno of post-traumatic nightmares, dreams in which the threatening event—the attack, the rape, the war—is repeated over and over in every possible variation.

(via donklephant)