Dreaming Sally

Prize-winning author James FitzGerald explores how the death of an eighteen-year-old girl in the summer of 1968 forever changed his life and the life of the other man who loved her. Dreaming Sally is a deeply moving exploration of the weight of a life cut short. Sally will die in Europe this summer. George Orr dreamed that his girlfriend, Sally Wodehouse, would die on the trip she wanted to take, and he begged her not to go. But Sally did not take him seriously--how could she? She left for Europe in July 1968 with twenty-five other private-school kids, on "The Odyssey," a Sixties version of the Grand Tour. In August 1968, only hours after becoming engaged to George via telegram, she died as he had dreamed she would, in a freak accident. Sally was George's first love, but she was also James FitzGerald's. James first met Sally at a family cottage; he was drawn to her energy and warmth, a stunning contrast to the chilly emotional life of his own family. At seventeen, not exactly a hit with the girls, James was delighted when he realized that he'd be spending the summer with his old friend. And soon, even though he knew that Sally had a serious boyfriend back home, they became inseparable, touring the glories of Western culture by day, dancing and drinking the nights away--giddily unshackled from the expectations and requirements of their class and upbringing. To George and James, both sons of parents who knew how to make demands of their children but not how to love them, Sally represented all the optimism and promised freedom of the '60s. Her death has haunted both men for fifty years--arresting their development, miring them in grief and unreasoning guilt. Dreaming Sally is a profound and evocative exploration of the long shadow left by an eighteen-year-old girl, an uncanny story of first love, sudden death and the complexity of trauma and mourning.

Dreaming the Land: Theologies of Resistance and Hope is a theme that testifies to the contextual nature of practical theology. This present volume contains a collection of essays with international contributions to practical theology. In their original form, these essays were presented at the seventh biennial conference of the International Academy of Practical Theology (IAPT) held at Brisbane/Australia in June 2005. The dreaming and the land are both concepts central to the thinking of the aboriginal peoples of Australia. The dreaming encompasses the creative and life giving forces which govern and express the lifeworld of these same people, while the land is sacred space where the spirits of the ancestors of all human, plant and animal life are represented. The theme is the common thread in the first part of the book. Here, the search for Theologies of Resistance and Hope is related to experiences in the southern hemisphere, to issues of the land as a concept for practical theology and to questions of human rights.

First published in 1985. This book summarizes the findings of empirical dream psychology and interprets them from a cognitive-psychological perspective.

A collection of short fiction; each tale is 700 words or fewer.

“Dazzling. . . The most revolutionary reimagining of Jefferson’s life ever.” –Ron Charles, Washington Post Winner of the Crook’s Corner Book Prize Longlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A debut novel about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, in whose story the conflict between the American ideal of equality and the realities of slavery and racism played out in the most tragic of terms. Novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks are a part of a long tradition of American fiction that plumbs the moral and human costs of history in ways that nonfiction simply can't. Now Stephen O’Connor joins this company with a profoundly original exploration of the many ways that the institution of slavery warped the human soul, as seen through the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. O’Connor’s protagonists are rendered via scrupulously researched scenes of their lives in Paris and at Monticello that alternate with a harrowing memoir written by Hemings after Jefferson’s death, as well as with dreamlike sequences in which Jefferson watches a movie about his life, Hemings fabricates an "invention" that becomes the whole world, and they run into each other "after an unimaginable length of time" on the New York City subway. O'Connor is unsparing in his rendition of the hypocrisy of the Founding Father and slaveholder who wrote "all men are created equal,” while enabling Hemings to tell her story in a way history has not allowed her to. His important and beautifully written novel is a deep moral reckoning, a story about the search for justice, freedom and an ideal world—and about the survival of hope even in the midst of catastrophe.

In the late nineteenth century, dreams became the subject of scientific study for the first time, after thousands of years of being considered a primarily spiritual phenomenon. Before Freud and the rise of psychoanalytic interpretation as the dominant mode of studying dreams, an international group of physicians, physiologists, and psychiatrists pioneered scientific models of dreaming. Collecting data from interviews, structured observation, surveys, and their own dream diaries, these scholars produced a large body of early research on the sleeping brain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book uncovers an array of case studies from this overlooked period of dream scholarship. With contributors working across the disciplines of psychology, history, literature, and cultural studies, it highlights continuities and ruptures in the history of scientific inquiry into dreams.

In this book J. Allan Hobson sets out a compelling—and controversial—theory of consciousness. Our brain-mind, as he calls it, is not a fixed identity but a dynamic balancing act between the chemical systems that regulate waking and dreaming. With a new foreword by the author. In this book, J. Allan Hobson sets out a compelling—and controversial—theory of consciousness. Our brain-mind, as he calls it, is not a fixed identity but a dynamic balancing act between the chemical systems that regulate waking and dreaming. Drawing on his work both as a sleep researcher and as a psychiatrist, Hobson looks in particular at the strikingly similar chemical characteristics of the states of dreaming and psychosis. His underlying theme is that the form of our thoughts, emotions, dreams, and memories derive from specific nerve cells and electrochemical impulses described by neuroscientists. Among the questions Hobson explores are: What are dreams? Do they have any hidden meaning, or are they simply emotionally salient images whose peculiar narrative structure refects the unique neurophysiology of sleep? And what is the relationship between the delirium of our dream life and psychosis? Originally published by Little, Brown under the title The Chemistry of Conscious States.

The sixteen original essays by scholars from around the world examine concerns common to writers who experience marginalization based upon their inescapable identification with two or more cultures. From Australian aboriginal and Maori, to Irish, Maghrebian, and South African, and on to the rich ethnic mix in North America, the book considers fiction, poetry, autobiography, and anthropological reportage to raise questions as determinative as one's choice of language, one's presentation of self in society, one's "recovery" of a history. This collection serves as a bridge between recent Eurocentric postmodern discourse dealing with the breakdown of the modernist stability in art, architecture, and electronic media, and those recent studies that problematize the issue of racial identity and literary practice. Cross-Addressing discusses site-specific strategies of resistance to the imposition of identity in the terms imposed or implied by colonizers and their descendants: narrative empowerment, gender reconstruction, racial decategorization, an intersection of marginalities, and a cross-cultural Third World solidarity. The movement is from the individual to the collective, from the particular to the global. The theoretical approach is eclectic, echoing the current split in cultural studies between discussions of the cultural production of meaning, and an involvement in policy debates. The book contends that the heightened consciousness resulting from marginalization not only judges our world, but offers it a window onto its future possibilities. Contributors include Lyn McCredden, Suzette Henke, Trevor James, Mary O'Connor, S.M., Nejd Yaziji, Rosemary Jolly, Bernice Zamora, Gayle Wald, Arturo Aldama, Manuel M. Martín-Rodríquez, Barbara Frey Waxman, Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Lien Chao, Karin Quimby, and Roger Bromley.