"People Get Ready" is an experience beyond hearing music in a club or viewing a dance; it is a moving meditation that suggests dreams — each song is a miniperformance — that then dissipate.
Ribbons of words snake among the parts, suggesting dream narratives as unpredictable as machines are reliable.
Studies suggest dream recall may be linked to patterns of activity in the brain.
Some investigators have been surprised by repeated findings that suggest dreams may be less fantastic or bizarre than generally supposed.
"We thought she must be from a wealthy Sunni family," Husna Khokhar suggested, dreaming of a large reward, until Aleesha began beating her chest and reciting what sounded like a Shia prayer, too.
While Descartes' dream argument suggests that dreams simply replicate the phenomenology of selfhood that characterizes standard wake states (for a similar view, see Revonsuo 2005), the emerging picture is that the phenomenology of selfhood is in fact more variable in dreams than commonly assumed.
Importantly, the same was true in lucid dreams; the subjects found it difficult to make themselves laugh, which suggests their dream self has a high degree of awareness of their bodily actions and sensations, and minimises the response.
But, without a freer media, the sophisticated and civilised country unveiled in the opening ceremony will remain as its title suggests: a dream.
The current generation of smartphones does not have the sensitivities yet to participate in such a programme, but the performance being promised by tech companies for future accelerometers suggests the dream may soon be fulfilled.
But if that is symptomatic, a different link suggests that dreams can lead to creative insights, not to mention the kind of dreams that make us feel elated.
