The new issue on travel launches late tonight or early tomorrow depending on where you are in the world. Look for it.

Molly Lidz is working on a draft article for the upcoming travel issue. She just sent me an amazing start. Last winter, she pursued a winter project on learning to lucid dream, translating dreams into a ceiling mural:

In the depths of January, dusk settles upon the muted mid-afternoon just hours after my mind’s lazy awakening. The fogged window shows nothing but a glowing, ethereal blue beyond the ashen ice and snow. The bedroom’s one lamp, situated awkwardly on a wall older than electricity, reveals the underbellies of things, like candlelight. The shadows are heavy, and I am restless. Winter days layer upon each other with nothing to define them but the long periods of unconsciousness they inspire.

Cloistered in my friend’s quiet, white bedroom, against what seems at times a vast nothingness, set with a promise of “art,” I look inward for my technicolor needs. Black nights, my sleeping soul crosses into the dream world and I am powerless, unaware even of my condition. I awake frantic, scramble for writing utensils and my journal. I grasp at the wispy remembrances of my lost inner landscape, blunderingly work them into forms that I might sculpt with an unskilled paintbrush, but they flutter away with every new attempt.

On the first morning of the Experiment, all I can remember is this, in gray letters on in space: “Trying to remember a dream is like trying to find a warm spot of soup in a cold bowl of soup.” Ramon and I stencil it ceremoniously in large black letters across his ceiling. As the mornings pile up, and my mental muscles tone, I find it easier to weave through the cluttered spaces in memory. I record pages and pages of messy dream plotlines; clumsily reformed, their twins stare back at me from the ceiling at night. The meaning of the feedback loop is lost behind my weighted
eyelids.

Ariana Karamallis writes, “This place is like a fun-house mirror,/distorted and frightening; familiar/shapes and colours peering through/swirled, dangerous lines.” Read more of her poem and return here to comment.

Aníse Meccouri writes, “At first, it’s confusing that some films would be shown depicting some really obnoxious bikers in the city doing just what we expect them to: be obnoxious. However, this series of films did actually represent the diversity in urban bicycle culture and thus, succeeded in being honest. Everyone is on a bike just as everyone is on the sidewalk. This window of perspective inspired me to be respectful and less judgmental of these daring, speedy bicyclists that share the streets. My sympathy was firmly established with the final, title-piece of the evening: The haunting, visually stunning ‘Messenger.’” Read more of his review of the Bicycle Film Festival and come back here to comment.