Bandwagon Effects in High Technology Industries

Dreams have attracted the curiosity of humankind for millennia. In A DreamInterpreted Within a Dream, Elliot Wolfson guides the reader through contemporary philosophical andscientific models to the archaic wisdom that the dream state and waking reality are on an equalphenomenal footing--that the phenomenal world is the dream from which one must awaken by waking tothe dream that one is merely dreaming that one is awake. By interpreting the dream within the dream,one ascertains the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness.Assuming that the manner in which the act of dreaming is interpreted may illuminate the way theinterpreter comprehends human nature more generally, Wolfson draws on psychoanalysis, phenomenology,and neuroscience to elucidate the phenomenon of dreaming in a vast array of biblical, rabbinic,philosophical, and kabbalistic texts. To understand the dream, Wolfson writes, it is necessary toembrace the paradox of the fictional truth--a truth whose authenticity can be gauged only from thestandpoint of its artificiality. The dream, on this score, may be considered the semblance of thesimulacrum, wherein truth is not opposed to deception because the appearance of truthfulness cannotbe determined independently of the truthfulness of appearance.

Elliot R. Wolfson is Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism, Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings From Zoharic Literature, and other books.