From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author comes a dazzling novel of family, love and love's disappointments Anna's aged mother is dying. Condemned by her children's pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her, others are similarly vanishing, yet no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into an eerily beautiful story of grief and possibility, of loss and love and orange-bellied parrots. Hailed on publication in Australia as Richard Flanagan's greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm illuminating what remains when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope.

When he is assigned to capture demoness Luciana Rossetti, angel Brendan Clarkson, who hunts down the most dangerous criminals on Earth, meets his match in this beautiful killer who could either be his salvation or his downfall.

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.

In a waking dream, we inhabit the dreamworld with an awareness of doing so-as sometimes happens upon waking from sleep when a dream continues to feel present alongside an awareness of lying in bed. Taking perspectives from transpersonal psychology, ecotherapy, complexity theory, and fractal geometry, this book develops new possibilities within waking dream practice (also known as "active imagination" and "guided imagery") to show: - how the in-between waking/dreaming experience allows us to become aware of not just what we imagine but also the process of how we imagine-a process that reveals the principles and skills of image-based transformation and healing. - how a broad understanding of imagination-as present in all perceptions, actions, and relationships (not just as pictures "inside the mind")-allows for an image-centric approach to psychotherapy and everyday life as an ongoing "eyes-wide-open" waking dream. The result is an experiential and theoretical appreciation of imagination, not just as a means to rational insight but as a creative ability at the heart of human potential. If you are interested in cultivating a richer, story-filled, and enchanted existence, or you are a therapist wanting to help others do so, this might be the book you have been waiting for.

From the writer of Zenescope's smash hit Wonderland trilogy and Image Comics' The Gift comes Raven Gregory's newest tale of horror! In the big city, police detectives investigating routine murders discover that the victims of these crimes are coming back from the dead in search of those responsible for ending their lives. Now the detectives are in a race against time to find the source of the recent "wakings" before the victims deal out their own brand of bloody justice. Meanwhile, a father with an incredible ability must choose between avenging his daughter's death - or losing her forever!

In this anthology, Vincent Barletta, Mark L. Bajus, and Cici Malik treat the Iberian lyric in the late Middle Ages and early modernity as a deeply multilingual, transnational genre that needs to break away from the old essentialist ideas about language, geography, and identity in order to be understood properly. More and more, scholars and students are recognizing the limitations of single-language, nationalist, and period-bound canons and are looking for different ways to approach the study of literature. The Iberian Peninsula is an excellent site for this approach, where the history and politics of the region, along with its creative literature, need to be read and studied together with the way the works were composed by poets and eventually consumed by readers. With a generous selection of more than one hundred poems from thirty-three poets, Dreams of Waking is unique in its coverage of the three main languages—Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish—and lyrical styles employed by peninsular poets. It contains new translations of canonical poems but also translations of many poems that have never before been edited or translated. Brief headnotes provide essential details of the poets’ lives, and a general introduction by the volume editors shows how the poems and languages fruitfully intersect. With helpful annotations to the poetry, as well as a selected bibliography containing the most important editions and translations from all three of the main Iberian languages, this volume will be an indispensable tool for both specialists and students in comparative literature.