Sublime

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of “nonconscious

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

Humbly, we humans have. Sleep, especially REM sleep and the act of dreaming, is a tenable, yet underappreciated, factor underlying many elements that form our unique human ingenuity and accomplishments, just as much as language or tool use (indeed, there is even evidence that sleep causally shapes both these latter traits as well).

The Wayward Mind by Guy Claxton.