Tag Archives: dreams

Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2024

Man and His Symbols (1968) by Carl G. Jung

I have been wanting to read Jung for a while after hearing so much about his work second-hand through podcasts, blogs, and books. Jung has been highly influential on so many writers, thinkers, and artists I admire—and I can see why. His symbolic and mythological approach to psychology is sorely needed in our overly reductionist materialistic world. This book serves as a great introduction to Jung’s work. It features one chapter by Jung himself while the rest are written by his associates. The book also features lots of images to help illustrate the points about symbols because visual symbols are so powerful. Jung writes about the unconscious and the role of the artist:

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Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2023

1. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997) by David Foster Wallace

I have yet to read Infinite Jest (it is on my bucket list), but I enjoyed this collection of DFW’s long nonfiction essays, maybe even more than his short fiction. They are absolutely genius—not just in their content but in the craftsmanship of the prose on a sentence level. I read a couple of these essays several years ago but struggled with Wallace’s complicated syntax. Between the page-long sentences, invented words and acronyms, and multi-paged footnotes, you practically need a map to read a David Foster Wallace book. With my reading comprehension having expanded since then, I can now better understand and appreciate the complexity of his prose. Few writers could string words together better than DFW (RIP). The essays in this collection include:

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Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2022

1. Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious (2018) by Eric Wargo

This is a fascinating book about the type of precognition often experienced in dreams, built off the work of J.W. Dunne. Author Eric Wargo provides numerous famous examples of precognitive dreams, often about traumatic events such as plane crashes or the sinking of the Titanic. Wargo claims such cases of precognition are actually “prememory”: your unconscious mind remembering a future memory, not of the event itself, but of your emotional reaction to learning news of the event. Both the author and I are aware of how crazy and “woo” this all sounds, but Wargo’s research is scientifically rigorous, and he walks a fine line of being both skeptical about paranormal claims but also open-minded to their possibilities (something I wish more on both sides of the paranormal/skeptical debate were willing to do).

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A Memory…

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dream-memory
It was the sixth grade, and we were on the bus ride home from our class trip. I was sitting in the back with my best friend, Gary. The other kids were joking around, making fun of him in a cruel way. He was not taking it well. I felt bad, but as an extremely shy person, I was too afraid to speak up. The teasing got worse and worse, then, as the bus arrived at my apartment complex, Gary pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head. He died instantly.