Anemoia, a coinage from the writer John Koenig – author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – refers to a feeling of nostalgia for a time one didn’t live through. I previously wrote about why this feeling arises, namely, by connecting it to Daniel Laidler’s concept of hagioptasia: the tendency to project ‘specialness’ onto certain aspects…
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Jungian psychology is highly popular in New Age culture, and this is for several reasons, some perhaps quite obvious, and others less so. I would like to detail these connections between New Age spirituality and Jungian psychology mainly as an effort to show how particular models of reality and mind lead to an embrace of…
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The Brain in a Vat podcast, one of my favourite podcasts – hosted by Dr Jason Werbeloff and Mark Oppenheimer – had as a guest Brad Duchaine, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth. (Brain in a Vat is a philosophy podcast, but this particular episode – a rebroadcast – was more psychology-focused.) The…
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If Alfred Hitchcock is the ‘master of suspense’, then I think we can call filmmaker Brian Yuzna the ‘master of disgust’ (or at least, one of the masters in this subtype of horror). Born in 1949, the American director and producer is best known for his work in the science fiction and horror genres, most…
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In an earlier post on remembering dreams, I described recalling some adventurous and awe-inspiring dreams I had in the past, which got me thinking about how I often feel that these sorts of dreams are better than reality. Alongside this is the feeling of not wanting to wake up – to just continue the dream…
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