Dead Dreams

Eighteen-year-old Brie O’Mara has so much going for her: a loving family in the sidelines, an heiress for a roommate, and dreams that might just come true. Big dreams--of going to acting school, finishing college and making a name for herself. She is about to be the envy of everyone she knew. What more could she hope for? Except her dreams are about to lead her down the road to nightmares. Nightmares that could turn into a deadly reality. Dead Dreams, Book 1, a young contemporary adult psychological thriller and mystery. This book ends with a powerful cliff hanger and the story continues into Book 2.

Jeff and Tracey Corbett decide to move out into a suburban home from their posh apartment in Boston after their son was held hostage by a fleeing cat burglar—but they are wrong. Finally finding a home in Eastford, they find themselves in jeopardy in the hands of their house’s previous owners, the Gosses, who have an unfinished business: to retrieve a notebook that would incriminate them to decade-old unsolved art crimes. The Gosses, desperate to keep their secret buried, will try their best to recover it. With it lies the preservation of the family of Paul Gosse, an electrical engineer with a PhD and a protective father and husband to his two strange sons and deranged wife. Trespassing, intimidation, and murder—instead of safety—await the Corbetts in the Gosse’s house of dead dreams.

The Valley of Dead Dreams is an inspired revelation of a world where dreams go when they are unfulfilled in the real world. This powerful story is told with captivating and riveting imagery, visionary detail and narrated in first person. Enter into a world of dreams, fascinating landscapes, and realms within realms. See the battle of life unfold before your very eyes; the valley of dead dreams will expose the truth of the spiritual realm and showcase a reality where our actions and inaction meet the truth of consequence.

Fiction. At the heart of MYSTERIOUS DREAMS OF THE DEAD is the spiritual search for a father who died in a plane crash north of Lake Superior when his son was fifteen. Mike Shintani decides in his early thirties to address the curious circumstances surrounding his father's death; the senior Shintani's body was never found, and wolves circled the crash site as if guarding the area. The impetus for Mike's search for truth is a diary he found in the basement of his home. It was obviously his father's, but it was written in Japanese. Mike never knew his father could write Japanese. He himself could neither read nor write the language. He was fortunate enough to enlist the help of Naoko Ito, a Japanese grad student at the University of Toronto. It turned out, the book was a dream diary, filled with poetry, descriptions of the surreal, and the story of a love affair with a woman named Chiemi. Chiemi is at the centre of the elder Shintani's dreams, and Naoko, after some time, seemingly disappears into thin air. Both appear as ghosts in dreams. Another great mystery of Mike's life is the behaviour of one of his best friends, Boku Sugiura, who decides one day to rob a bank, in the name of his grandfather and redress for Japanese Canadians. The two strains of the novel come together in Moose Jaw. Mike discovers the truth about his father's life and Boku's uncle (Daniel Sugiura from Terry's previous novel, THE THREE PLEASURES), a protestor in the Moose Jaw stand-off. Through elements of the Japanese ghost story (kwaidan), magic realism, and Buddhist myth, secrets are revealed and explored. MYSTERIOUS DREAMS OF THE DEAD is an imaginative examination of the effects of exile, internment, and dispersal on the third-generation of Japanese Canadians (the Sansei).

Nina O'Reilly collaborates with a grave exhumation expert and triggers a cat-and-mouse game between her former investigator Paul van Wagoner and a brilliant killer.

Dreams and Dead Ends provides a compelling history of the twentieth-century American gangster film. Beginning with Little Caesar (1930) and ending with Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead (1995), Jack Shadoian adroitly analyzes twenty notable examples of the crime film genre. Moving chronologically through nearly seven decades, this volume offers illuminating readings of a select group of the classic films--including The Public Enemy, D.O.A., Bonnie and Clyde, and The Godfather--that best define and represent each period in the development of the American crime film. Richly illustrated with more than seventy film stills, Dreams and Dead Ends details the evolution of the genre through insightful and precise considerations of cinematography, characterization, and narrative style. This updated edition includes new readings of three additional movies--Once Upon a Time in America, Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead, and Criss Cross--and brings this clear and lively discussion of the history of the gangster film to the end of the twentieth century.

Death, Ritual and Belief, now in its third edition, explores many important issues related to death and dying, from a religious studies perspective, including anthropology and sociology. Using the motif of 'words against death' it depicts human responses to grief by surveying the many ways in which people have not let death have the last word, not simply in terms of funeral rites but also in memorials, graves, and in ideas of ancestors, souls, gods, reincarnation and resurrection, whether in the great religious traditions of the world or in more local customs. He also examines bereavement and grief, experiences of the presence of dead, near-death experiences, pet-death and the symbolic death played out in religious rites. Updated chapters have taken into account new research and include additional topics in this new edition, notably assisted dying, terrorism, green burial, material culture, death online, and the emergence of Death Studies as a distinctive field. Case studies range from Anders Breivik in Norway, to the Princess of Wales, and to the Rapture in the USA. A new perspective is also brought to his account of grief theories. Providing an introduction to key authors and authorities on death beliefs, bereavement, grief and ritual-symbolism, Death, Ritual and Belief is an authoritative guide to the perspectives of major religious and secular worldviews.

Describing a variety of funeral ritual, from major world religions and from local traditions, this book shows how cultures cope not only with corpses but also create an added value for living through the growth of afterlife beliefs. The key theme of the book is the rhetoric of death -- the way cultures use the most potent weapon of words to bring new power to life. Human identity and its transformation through mortuary rites is explored through the mummies of Chile and Egypt; African sacrificial deaths; Indian cremations; immigrant cemeteries in the USA; ancestor rites in Eastern religions and Mormonism; and the freezing of the dead in cryonics. Research findings are presented on cremation and afterlife beliefs, especially reincarnation, sensing the presence of the dead, and the death of pets in Britain, to show how mortuary rituals are constantly changing in response to death as a major feature of the human environment.