There exists a world much like our own, one parallel to the spirit world. People much like ourselves fight every day to keep both worlds from plummeting into darkness. They are called defenders. The spirit realm is divided into many smaller worlds, like shards of a once-complete painting. They follow their own paths and are vastly different from one another. But time reveals that these worlds have a limited existence, one which appears to be running out. The mission of getting to the bottom of these lands is for a defender. Ryoku Dragontalen has only a matter of days to complete his goal. After a harrying encounter with the fearsome emperor of Orden, Ryoku must recuperate and gather his strength for a second and final showdown with the young emperor, Lars Ordenstraum, an encounter the entire spirit realm has been waiting for. Follow Ryoku Dragontalen once more on his mission to meet a looming deadline as he journeys through new worlds, meeting friends old and new, as he gathers his strength to face what the very gods fear.

There exists a world much like our own. One parallel to the Spirit World. People much like ourselves fight everyday to keep both worlds from plummeting into darkness. They are called Defenders. The Spirit World is divided into many smaller worlds, each which follows its own path and are vastly different from one another. When these worlds start straying from their predetermined path, what chaos could unfold? It is a Defender's job to stop it. Ryoku Dragontalen, one such boy, is thrown into an adventure to save both worlds. What began as one small task, to save his friend, quickly escalates into something much more. Where the laws are simply not laws anymore, he journeys alongside gods and many significant people, all seemingly with intricate involvement in his foggy past, to find much more than what they initially set out for. Follow Ryoku and his newfound friends on a journey through the Spirit World, packed with mystery, action, romance, adventure, and the sense of something untold as the very gods step forward.

What, if anything, do dreams tell us about ourselves? What is the relationship between types of sleep and types of dreams? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Or are dreams simply meaningless mental noise--"unmusical fingers wandering over the piano keys"? With expertise in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Owen Flanagan is uniquely qualified to answer these questions. And in Dreaming Souls he provides both an accessible survey of the latest research on sleep and dreams and a compelling new theory about the nature and function of dreaming. Flanagan argues that while sleep has a clear biological function and adaptive value, dreams are merely side effects, "free riders," irrelevant from an evolutionary point of view. But dreams are hardly unimportant. Indeed, Flanagan argues that dreams are self-expressive, the result of our need to find or to create meaning, even when we're sleeping. Rejecting Freud's theory of manifest and latent content--of repressed wishes appearing in disguised form--Flanagan shows how brainstem activity during sleep generates a jumbled profusion of memories, images, thoughts, emotions, and desires, which the cerebral cortex then attempts to shape into a more or less coherent story. Such dream-narratives range from the relatively mundane worries of non REM sleep to the fantastic confabulations of deep REM that resemble psychotic episodes in their strangeness. But however bizarre these narratives may be, they can shed light on our mental life, our well being, and our sense of self. Written with clarity, lively wit, and remarkable insight, Dreaming Souls offers a fascinating new way of apprehending one of the oldest mysteries of mental life.

This now-classic work challenges what Ryle calls philosophy's "official theory, " the Cartesian "myth" of the separation of mind and matter. Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problams as dissolving them into the mere consequences of misguided language. His plain language and essentially simple purpose put him in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Mill, and Russell - philisophers whose best work, like Ryle's, has become a part of our general literature.