'My dead friend is sending me postcards. It's like a voice from hell.' 'I saw Castro die. A week later the postcards started. One a month - Indonesian breaks, steep peaks over sharp coral. All signed: Castro.' Goog's best mate Castro vanished into the Southern Ocean, but his body was never found. So Goog flies north, chasing the ghost of his dead friend. He hooks up with Niagara - a young American hunting his own illusions - and together they set off on a wild, gritty surf odyssey. But are they actually at the mercy of an unseen puppet master, and what will the find in the surreal shadow-lands of Indonesia? From the author of Rhino Chasers, Indo Dreaming is a vivid and enigmatic novel for anyone who has the spirit of travel wedged in their soul. Grant's ear for speech is unerring Rhino Chasers is powerful and promising debut.' Australian Bookseller and Publisher

Surveys the complex history of Buddhist dream experience and analysis.

This book examines popular culture in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and the third largest democracy. It provides a full account of the key trends since the collapse of the authoritarian Suharto regime (1998), a time of great change in Indonesian society more generally. It explains how one of the most significant results of the deepening industrialization in Southeast Asia since the 1980s has been the expansion of consumption and new forms of media, and that Indonesia is a prime example of this development. It goes on to show that although the Asian economic crisis in 1997 had immediate and negative impacts on incumbent governments, as well as the socioeconomic life for most people in the region, at the same time popular cultures have been dramatically reinvigorated as never before. It includes analysis of important themes, including political activism and citizenship, gender, class, age and ethnicity. Throughout, it shows how the multilayered and contradictory processes of identity formation in Indonesia are inextricably linked to popular culture. This is one of the first books on Indonesia's media and popular culture in English. It is a significant addition to the literature on Asian popular culture, and will be of interest to anyone who is interested in new developments in media and popular culture in Indonesia and Asia.

A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate—either in the waking state or in a lucid dream—we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives.

The recent centennial of the original publication of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams has generated a new wave of critical reappraisals of this monumental work. Considered one of the most important books in Western history, scholars from an astonishing variety of academic fields continue to wrestle with Freud's intricate theories and insights. Dreams is a long overdue collection of writing on dreams from many of the top scholars in religious studies, anthropology, and psychology departments. The volume is organized into three thematic sections: traditions, individuals and methods. The twenty-three articles highlight the most important theories, the most contentious debates, and the most far-reaching implications of this growing field of study.

From the mid-sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese intellectuals attended more to dreams and dreaming—and in a wider array of genres—than in any other period of Chinese history. Taking the approach of cultural history, this ambitious yet accessible work aims both to describe the most salient aspects of this “dream arc” and to explain its trajectory in time through the writings, arts, and practices of well-known thinkers, religionists, litterateurs, memoirists, painters, doctors, and political figures of late Ming and early Qing times. The volume’s encompassing thesis asserts that certain associations of dreaming, grounded in the neurophysiology of the human brain at sleep—such as subjectivity, irrationality, the unbidden, lack of control, emotionality, spontaneity, the imaginal, and memory—when especially heightened by historical and cultural developments, are likely to pique interest in dreaming and generate florescences of dream-expression among intellectuals. The work thus makes a contribution to the history of how people have understood human consciousness in various times and cultures. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World is the most substantial work in any language on the historicity of Chinese dream culture. Within Chinese studies, it will appeal to those with backgrounds in literature, religion, philosophy, political history, and the visual arts. It will also be welcomed by readers interested in comparative dream cultures, the history of consciousness, and neurohistory.

SHORTLISTED: 2020 Prime Minister's Literary Award, Young Adult Fiction The sea is inside his blood. Cursed, or blessed, on both sides. When sixteen-year-old Rudra Solace dredges up a long-hidden secret in his father's trawl net, his life in the sleepy fishing village of Patonga shifts dramatically. It is not long before Rudra is leaving Australia behind, bound for India on a journey of discovery and danger. A wonderfully compelling tale of belonging and loss, of saltwater and mangroves, of migration and accepting change; a story of decisions that, once made, break through family histories like a cyclone swell.