A rational choice theory of midlife crises

This paper models the midlife crisis as a decision on whether and when to realize a life dream, incorporating the key components of three psychology theories of midlife crises. It explains why a crisis (dream realization) tends to occur in the midlife if it occurs at all. Other results include that one either realizes his dream fully or not at all, that a shorter life expectancy makes a midlife crisis more likely, and that “crazier†dreams tend to be postponed to a later time in life.midlife crisis, dream, aging, death

Spotlight on dream recall. The ages of dreams

Brain and sleep maturation covary across different stages of life. At the same time, dream generation and dream recall are intrinsically dependent on the development of neural systems. The aim of this paper is to review the existing studies about dreaming in infancy, adulthood, and the elderly stage of life, assessing whether dream mentation may reflect changes of the underlying cerebral activity and cognitive processes. It should be mentioned that some evidence from childhood investigations, albeit still weak and contrasting, revealed a certain correlation between cognitive skills and specific features of dream reports. In this respect, infantile amnesia, confabulatory reports, dream-reality discerning, and limitation in language production and emotional comprehension should be considered as important confounding factors. Differently, growing evidence in adults suggests that the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the encoding and retrieval of episodic memories may remain the same across different states of consciousness. More directly, some studies on adults point to shared neural mechanisms between waking cognition and corresponding dream features. A general decline in the dream recall frequency is commonly reported in the elderly, and it is explained in terms of a diminished interest in dreaming and in its emotional salience. Although empirical evidence is not yet available, an alternative hypothesis associates this reduction to an age-related cognitive decline. The state of the art of the existing knowledge is partially due to the variety of methods used to investigate dream experience. Very few studies in elderly and no investigations in childhood have been performed to understand whether dream recall is related to specific electrophysiological pattern at different ages. Most of all, the lack of longitudinal psychophysiological studies seems to be the main issue. As a main message, we suggest that future longitudinal studies should collect dream reports upon awakening from different sleep states and include neurobiological measures with cognitive performance

How Dreams And Memory May Be Related

I present a theory of dreams and long term memory structure that proposes that both entities are closely related. It is based on a variation of Freud's dream theory: (1) I re-label Freud's "Unconscious" the “Long Term Memory Structure” (LTMS), (2) I propose that dreams are ever present excitational responses to perturbations of perceptions and thought, during waking life as well as sleep, which only become conscious when the executive function of waking life ceases, and (3) I reinterpret Freud’s “Dream Work” as describing the pre-dream Storage Transformation of perceptions and thought into the LTMS. I make one further conjecture: Memories are stored in the LTMS according to what is already in the LTMS. The observables of Freud's theory remain the same. The new theory is also consistent with recent experimental findings and suggests a partial basis for personality: the selection process of the Storage Transformation

Dream Life

Dream Life, is a series of photographic work based on the contemporary Chinese phenomenon known as social media celebrity (SMC). In order to achieve an identical trendy “perfect” appearance, numerous young women undergo cosmetic surgery, apply on bold makeup, and use heavy Photoshop on their social media photos. I aim to criticize this practice and question how this distorted aesthetic standard for females is developed. By reconstructing the elements that the SMCs are showing, I want to show the absurdity of this “dream life”

Dream life matchmaker

Marriages are arranged by will of the Almighty and by His decisions in the heaven, but the result can only be fruitful if couple were able to meet real- life partner and establish a permanent relationship between them. Matchmaker system is the medium to help join two people through which both people will spend their life till their last breath. Matchmaker system is proposed to help individual search for their life partner by specifying a number of personality question so the system able to make recommendation of potential bride/groom. This project contains the detailed information of the person and his/her family and their expectations. This project can help number of people in finding their partners across the country

An Interview About a Dream

The respondent recalls a dream in which he spoke Chinese, which he found amusing because in his waking life did not speak Chinese.The fifty one audio and nine video files in this collection include: villages’ life stories, circle-dancing songs and performance, local history, folk tales, and interviews from Siyuewu Village, Puxi Township, Rangtang County, Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China.World Oral Literature Projec

[Review of] Gretchen M. Bataille and Albert L. McHenry. eds. Living the Dream in Arizona: The Legacy of Martin Luther King. Jr

Living the Dream in Arizona. edited by Gretchen M. Bataille and Albert L. McHenry, is at first glance a tidy, unpretentious little book. Subtitled The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., this work is, in effect, a series of testimonies by a multicultural chorus of Arizonans. Each voice speaks plainly about the meaning of the struggle for dignity, opportunity, and equality. As unpretentious as this work is, it is also informative; the words of the contributors are -- in the spirit of Dr. King\u27s life -- challenging and provocative. There is more than meets the eye in the one hundred and six pages of Living the Dream ..

being [t]here

When you awoke from the dream, in your early thirties, you knew, as you’ve never known anything else in all your seventy-plus years, that what you’d found was real. The dream began with you sitting in a church, head bowed in prayer. Your eyes opened slowly, and you noticed that you were wearing brilliantly colored, beaded moccasins. You stood abruptly, pushed open the mahogany gate that separated the pew from the center aisle of the church, and began to run. The dream then proposed a seemingly endless and entirely quotidian set of difficulties in The City, and led eventually to an arduous climb through a pathless woods, where you passed an unfinished house—framed out but not yet sided—and where (after how many false sightings of the summit?) you squeezed with great difficulty between two tall boulders, and suddenly emerged on the edge of a wondrous canyon. Below you flowed a wide, glistening river, and in the center of the river, partly submerged, sat a throne-like granite armchair. You awoke to the rest of your life with a gasp, exhilarated by the shimmering iridescence of the water in the dream and tantalized by the mystery of the chair. You have looked for that river ever since. [excerpt

The spectrum initiative : affirmative action in the library profession

In 1998, the American Library Association realized its long-awaited dream, a major diversity initiative, the Spectrum Scholarship, which would address the rapidly changing ethnic and cultural environment of the nation. The Scholarship means that affirmative action can produce significant positive changes over time, not just one life, but in the larger communities that touch all our lives

Unread Letters to My Mother

The poem Unread Letters to My Mother is a meditation on dream and memory and how PTSD brought on by childhood trauma has effected those things within the speaker\u27s life. Each of the seven sections are addressed to the speaker\u27s mother, but the reader knows these are things which are left unsaid, in the darkness, as the clarity and insight they provide into the speaker\u27s life is perhaps too overwhelming for the figure of the mother to process