Sweet Dreams

From Digital Trends

There is an old adage to “sleep on it” if you have a problem. It might seem like a useless suggestion but there is some validity to it. Although there is not much known about the mechanics of dreams or their specific function, it is widely accepted that dreams help you to organize your thoughts by sorting through recent events and memories.

A group of students who insisted on pseudonyms shared their experiences with dreams. “I wanted to go to Egypt over the winter break and I was trying to convince a friend of mine to come with me. Then I had a dream the pyramids were bombed. I was in a capsule under the pyramids while they were being bombed,” Yolanda said.

Historically dreams have been thought to be prophetic. The current situation in Cairo makes Yolanda’s dream particularly poignant, but a more scientific mind would argue that her dream was more about her friend than the pyramids. Maybe she was worried about their friendship at the time, or maybe she was concerned that if the trip didn’t happen soon it never would.

Dreams rely heavily on symbolism to convey their meaning. While there are many common symbols in dreams and common dreams, dream analysis is never the most accurate from another person. Only you know what you were thinking, even if the meaning is obscured.

Stress dreams are the most often remembered because your subconscious mind isn’t merely sifting through events, it is literally telling you to deal with a problem. For students, stress dreams happen (obviously) most frequently around exam time. Here are a few common dreams you might be having:

The Naked Dream: You’re out in public and everything’s fine. But wait, you forgot to get dressed this morning, how did that even happen? For a lot of people this is embarrassing and it can mean that you feel unprepared and vulnerable. For other people, there’s no feeling of shame – you’re naked and lovin’ it. Without the shame this isn’t a stress dream, it’s actually a reflection of how confidant you are. So the next time you show up for class naked, try to just go with it and see where the dream takes you (hopefully it is a dream).

The Falling Dream: First of all, it’s a myth that if you hit the ground before you wake up you die. The important aspect of this dream is control; if you’re falling you have no control over what happens next. This is can be directly linked to feelings of your waking life being out of control. Unfortunately there isn’t much you can do once you start falling, but you could try flying.

The Flying Dream: Everyone’s favourite. Flying can be exhilarating or frightening or both at once. When it comes to dream analysis flying is one of the most direct. For some people, flying too high is a problem or flying erratically. Just like falling, it can be about loss of control or, in the case of flying too high, can mean a fear of success. For others, difficulty taking off or staying air-born is a problem. This can again be about control but also a fear of unrealised potential. 

Flying is common in lucid dreams, which is a state of dreaming that occurs when the conscious mind becomes active during the dream. In a lucid dream it is possible to control your actions, including flight, but also the environment of the dream itself. Remember – everything that is happening is a result of your personal creation.

The Test Dream: It’s the last day of school and you’re going to party so hard tonight! But wait, you have an exam you forgot about, and it’s in a class you didn’t even know you were taking! Your GPA is so screwed. Better take the test anyway and hope somehow everything works out. But wait, you’re naked again, why does this keep happening?

“When your mind is totally occupied with getting exam studying done then it’s super likely you’ll wake up from a dream about studying. And it sucks, it’s so stressful,” Peeps said.

The test dream and the naked dream do often come as an awful package deal. Just like being naked, taking a test you know you’re going to fail comes from a fear of being unprepared. If you really are taking a test then there’s an easy way to avoid this dream – study more efficiently and don’t cram the night before. If you’re not taking a test then you might want to check your exam schedule just to make sure your roommate didn’t break into your account and register you for advanced Latin.

Dreams only occur during a period of sleep known as Rapid Eye Movement, or REM. REM sleep can be achieved three to four times a night, and although you may toss and turn, during a REM cycle your body lies motionless in a state of REM paralysis.

For many people remembering a dream can be difficult. There’s a scientific reason for that, during REM sleep the mind is active but lacks noradrenalin and serotonin. Noradrenalin and serotonin are needed to transmit thoughts into actions and by shutting them off the brain is preventing the body from doing what it is thinking mid dream. Unfortunately those chemicals are also needed to process short term memory into long term memory which is why most of your dreams are forgotten after waking up. Of course, it is not a perfect system – talking, walking and drooling in your sleep is a result of basic levels of noradrenalin and serotonin still active in your system while dreaming.

There are ways to help you remember your dreams and even lucid dream more often. First of all, discussing your dreams with your friends can help you better understand the dream you had, but it also makes the dream more present in your conscious mind. Keeping a dream journal can be very helpful – when you first start one it will be hard to remember many details, but as long as you’re writing about your dreams they will become easier to remember and decipher. Lastly, if you want to have dreams specific to a certain topic (like zombies) concentrate on that topic while you’re falling asleep, chances are it will still be present in your mind once you start dreaming.

“[Dreaming] is my favourite thing ever,” Glenda said, “I just hate it when you wake up and they trickle away.”

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Turcot Interchange

The Turcot Interchange is crumbling, but rebuilding it would mean displacing 130 of the nearby St. Rémi street residents. This is a major concern for many active groups in the community, including Centre Communautaire des Femmes Actives.

“They’re talking about demolishing houses... people have lived there for thirty – forty years. And it’s going to take ten or fifteen years to finish the job – that’s an entire life time for a child. For a child growing up in around here he’s going to spend his life inhaling all the dust and whatever from the construction,” Alice Robertson said.

It’s not just a question of environmental concerns during the project. Vehicle volume is expected to increase from 290,000 to 300,000[i] cars per day; destroying Quebec’s plan to decrease carbon emissions by 20% by the year 2020.

The decision hasn’t been finalized but residents are up in arms. The city wants a brand new interchange, but isn’t willing to spend more money on the dislocated citizens than the allotted $3 billion for construction.[ii]

“The people living on St Rémi are fighting this because they aren’t being paid to move. They aren’t getting anything – the city is throwing in the towel and saying we can find you an apartment, but that’s it,” Caroline Duplessis said. 

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[i] Walking Turcot Yards - http://neath.wordpress.com/

[ii] Global Montreal - http://www.globalmontreal.com/story.html?id=3801312

A Brief History of Tabloid News

Journalism has evolved along two separate schools of thought. The first is reporting with dignity and scrupulous attention to fact and detail; the other caters to more basic human instincts and “livens up the news.”[i] The latter is tabloid journalism.

It was discovered early on that news is more financially successful when it plays off of the reader’s emotions.

In the 1830’s the New York Sun and Herald started selling papers at one cent a copy (from the usual six cents). The writing was also changed to appeal to a lower class, less literate audience.[ii]

About fifty years later, Joseph Pulitzer made the next step in sensationalism with Yellow Journalism. He presented news in a more exciting and provocative manner.[iii]

In competition for readers with Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst caused the United States to go to war with Spain, with shock value stories of Spanish atrocities. He is famously quoted saying, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”[iv]

Tabloids first appeared in London in the 1890’s. It was an innovation to make reading a newspaper easier for commuters by cutting the page length in half. The Daily Mirror, created by Alfred C. Harmsworth surfaced as the first successful tabloid.[v]

Tabloids had been tried and proved unpopular in North America; but during World War One, Harmsworth met Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson and convinced him that New York needed a tabloid. Patterson took the idea to his partner at the Tribune, Col. Robert R. McCormick and published the Illustrated Daily News.[vi]  It became the first popular tabloid in North America.

In 1922 Bernarr MacFadden started to experiment with sensationalism with a new magazine called Midnight. It featured images of almost naked women and verged on obscenity. It was also completely fictional, but extremely popular.

Midnight didn’t last long. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice arrived with a summons to MacFadden and his staff, but agreed to serve it as long as Midnight shut down immediately.[vii]

Two years later MacFadden returned with the New York Evening Graphic. A newspaper that sensationalized, dramatized and fictionalized the news. It was not popular, advertisers avoided it and New Yorkers called it the Porno-graphic”[viii] It was too low brow even for tabloid fanatics.

Hearst, meanwhile, was bankrolling the New York Enquirer. And used it to test new ideas – popular ones made it into his other papers, unpopular ideas did not. During the 1930’s the Enquirer favoured a German-American unity until World War Two broke out. It disappeared for awhile and then reappeared as a sports paper.[ix]

The Enquirer was bought in 1952 by Generoso Pope Jr. He turned it into America’s first national tabloid, The National Enquirer.[x]

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[i] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 17

[ii] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 18

[iii] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 19

[iv] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 23

[v] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 23

[vi] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 25

[vii] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 26

[viii] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 27

[ix] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 28

[x] Spicing Up the News, The Evolution of Sensationalism – P. 28

The Future of Journalism

In Response to The New Journalist by Paul Benedetti, Tim Currie and Kim Kierans.

Clay Shirky’s online blog post went viral in 2009 because of the controversial issues he brought up. What Shirky called the Unthinkable Scenario[i] was already happening to every major news media outlet: plans to safeguard content sharing on the internet weren’t working – meaning that media companies are no longer surviving on the open market.

According to Shirky, the internet broke the model for newspapers, and as of yet there is nothing to replace it. His criticism is that people aren’t willing to accept a revolution and are demanding to be told that there is a solution to this Unthinkable Scenario.

Many people didn’t agree with Shirky and responded to his blog post. Charlie Beckett wrote in response that there are many ways forward from this point. Beckett called Shirky’s post a, “fatalist approach,”[ii] and wrote that what is needed is greater public participation.

News as a capitalist venture participates in two markets: the audience and the advertiser.[iii] One solution to the Unthinkable Scenario is to combine news content to advertisement and sell both as a package deal to the audience. Like most magazines which have content and ads pertaining to the same subject; for instance fashion magazines.

The problem that arises from news being a commodity is that nowadays news is only one facet of a larger media corporation. The negative effects of this are obvious with companies like Canwest and Quebecor which use news as a means to advertising and cross-promotion[iv] of their other products, like Quebecor’s Videotron. What happens when the watchdog’s owner also owns public industry? Share holders might want to think about the information they’re getting on their stocks.

What’s even worse is that Quebecor and Canwest are the only two major daily newspaper owners in most Canadian cities. This lack of diversity leads to the same self satisfied interests – with no other competitors, big media is left on its own to decide what makes it into the newspaper, what doesn’t, and most importantly, how that information is presented.

The internet has evened the playing field on a global scale for big media. Now that CBC is as accessible as the New York Times, every big media corporation has entered into an Attention Economy.[v] The challenge is to grab the attention of the audience and turn that into profit. It hasn’t gone too far yet, but Attention Economy brings to mind the era of Yellow Journalism, when newspapers would write anything to gain readers.

In response to Shirky’s blog post, Beckett called for more public participation. This is one of the models of online journalism that has proved popular – allowing readers to comment and discuss articles posted on news media websites in real time.

“More outsourcing and sharing within the industry,”[vi] is what Donna Logan and Darryl Korell suggest. Media expert Martin Langeveld thinks that newspapers should produce one to two weekly papers and focus on quality and detail.[vii] There will always be free breaking news covered on the internet.

The idea is niche marketing news, or a hybrid of big media and independent media. Independent media can report on the hyper local and sell those stories to big news media corporations. Already there are companies doing this, like propublica.org.[viii]

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[i] Page 52 Shirky’s Blog Post – The New Journalist

[ii] Page 58 Charlie Beckett’s response – The New Journalist

[iii] Page 64 The Business of Journalism – The New Journalist

[iv] Page 68 Concentrated Capital – The New Journalist

[v] Page 70-71 A New News Media – The New Journalist

[vi] Page 82 Media Market Changes Slower in Canada than in the United States – The New Journalist

[vii] Page 87 Premium / News Digest Models – The New Journalist

[viii] Page 92 What we Know for Sure – The New Journalist