What`s a hypnogeographer anyway?

Chuang Tzu`s famous dream of the butterfly said it all over 2500 years ago.

"Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. The transition is called metempsychosis."
http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/butter.htm

After I titled this blog I discovered one Robert Kelly had coined the term in 1988 for his project to collate an archive of dreams about his home state of Kansas
http://inside.bard.edu/academic/division/langlit/robertkelly/kansas.html
that would reveal its `true` nature and shape. Some of the project is available in a .pdf at http://lawrenceartscenter.com/ImaginationPlace/Cottonwood/c.wood.59.pdf

The word `hypnogeography` is brought to us by the gods. (Personified agencies of the inexplicable)
Geography;1542, from Fr., from L., from Gk. geographia "description of the earth's surface," from ge "earth" + -graphia "description," from graphein "write."
Hypnos ; the Greek god of sleep, who sent servitors bringing true and false dreams. Gaia the earth mother was the oldest of the Goddesses.
The term hypnosis was coined in the 19th century by Dr James Braid, at a time when it was believed that the hypnotic state was a type of `nervous sleep`. The modern science of hypnosis has moved on. The research into altered states of consciousness shows that the brain is always in a trance, always in a particular state of focused attention. The brain never stops creating and maintaining `reality`, which creates beliefs, and belief is what people base their perception of the world upon.

This means that sleep or wake, the mind creates the world.

As a hypnotherapist I try to help people solve their problems by connecting them with the way their unconscious mind creates a personal `reality`. That reality certainly includes the kind of dreams experienced when asleep, but here I`m interested mainly in the things we experience in that deceptive state known as wakefulness.
So in my definition of hypnogeography I include the strange fantasy of waking life that is so convincing we call it reality. It is a healthy thing to continually question that reality and shake it up, strip the nouns off it, rename it, redefine it, deconstruct it, undescribe it.
Someone else will certainly do it for you otherwise.

"Those who dream of a banquet may wake to lamentation and sorrow. Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow may wake to join a hunt. While they dream, they do not know that they dream. Some will even experience a dream within a dream; and only when they awake do they realize they dreamed of a dream. By and by comes the great awakening, and then we may find out that this life is really an extended dream. Fools think they are awake now, and flatter themselves they know if they are really princes or peasants. Confucius and you are both dreams; and I who say you are dreams—I am but a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may come forward to explain it; but that tomorrow will not be until ten thousand generations have gone by." Chuang Tzu

The Death Bikes of Lughnasadh

Castle Wood Eltham, where motorbikes and scooters come to die in ritual acts of self-immolation. Here a moped has sacrificed itself to Lugh at Lammas-tide, and a poignant libation of Colonel Sanders Reverence drink has been poured in its honour.

"Oh no... oh god! oh Jesus Christ!"

Bermondsey, land of contrasts

Bermondsey ain`t Woolwich, although people still get shot here. People in Bermondsey ask if you need directions and if you reply politely they tell you what you need to know. People also ask you for directions.
There are abandoned pubs and railway arches with disturbing murals, and soot highlighted with tufts of quivering pigeon down. The black hole darkness under these arches is a kind of original thick slow murder gloom that still can`t make its escape from Victorian crime scenes.
St James church of 1829 has a peal of 10 bells (that chime the hour 2 minutes early) cast from Napoleon`s cannon at Waterloo, and a spire bootlegged from Wren`s St Stephen`s Walbrook. It has the best golden dragon weathervane you will see anywhere. When this was craned onto the spire the famous clown Joey Grimaldi rode it to the top. This story, however, might be an Ackroydism. Tell me if I`m wrong.
On Jamaica road you can spend loads at the charity shop or get a haircut next door. There are real pubs, like the St James` tavern, and not so real pubs like The Gregorian. Bermondsey is not Woolwich, and that`s fine by me.

Frog worship

Life forms seem to worship large inanimate versions of themselves. Here a small live frog worships a large non-live frog in the fountain pot by my back door.

All`s Blair in fun n` war

As one of the therapists to a survivor of the Tavistock square bus bomb, I had the opportunity to press the flesh of Tone n` wife at the Regent`s Park 7/7 memorial. In keeping with the solemnity of the occasion no-one mentioned the war, or opened inappropriate discussions about the ecological causality of war-making. No-one said that oil creates fanatics nor that their victims become the subject for services of commemoration. In the circumstances I avoided the handshake of doom like the plague.

Cup Capped

A rare sight in Woolwich, a baseball cap abandoned at the height of its IQ reducing glory. Somewhere a weeping fan absorbs too much heatwave sunlight, but cares nothing as a terrible beauty has been snuffed before it can be born. Another four years of pain dawns over a grieving motherland.

Child Catapult

Bexleyheath broadway has one piece of public art, unless you count the steel fountain. Abuse in bronze. Parents dragging a child around the shops. All it needs is the usual soundtrack of screaming and threats.