Debbie Foster

Although stories have always had morals and underlying purposes (as in fairy tales and fables), the explicit requirement of codebreaking is very much a post-Freudian, modern phenomenon. We are being asked to read novels in a novel way.

The unsafe person is in a state of situationally induced paranoia; they are put in a position of terrible alertness', as Sedgwick observes in her essay on paranoia. … The threatened individual can only ensure their safety by feeling unsafe, by maintaining a constant state of anticipatory vigilance. This is the emotional logic of the threatened

When I dream, I exist for myself, although without any insight into my condition, as the "self" is muted during dreaming. When transitioning into a deep, dreamless sleep, I cross the Great Divide of Being. My consciousness ceases to exist. Likewise when I become comatose following a stroke or accident. I am still alive, albeit on life support, but

In groups of people, particularly of family, my mind can sometimes feel like a garden wilting in relentless sun. I need solitude, or movement, or ideally both to restore my thoughts to their unshriveled state.

[Samuel] Delany prefers the term "given world" to "real world," since in his view it better explains the construction and fictionalization of reality: this is just the world we have been given to believe in as real.

The actors would repeat the sentence over and over again until it took on weight and, released from its obligation to deliver meaning, entered the realm of music. As I was showered with these fragments of language, I could take my time putting them together and slowly forming my own images. What began to materialize was not "meaning" in the usual

Anxiety, depression, addiction and exhaustion are the new normal.

Our language-based theories of how our minds work don't often succeed in explaining how our minds actually work, for so many layers of the mind's operations occur prior to the stories and explanations we offer with language. Neuroscience is helpful in capturing more subconscious processes.

"The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring." ~ Carl Sandburg