Currently Reading and Recently Read Books

The Complete Book of Dreams by Pamela Ball
- A practical guide to interpretation and dreaming creatively

I've been actively intrigued by dreams since childhood when, as I recall, I dreamed of a burning city and the following day drew, with crayons, a colourful picture of a scene I saw. With my school friends I was into digging in the mud and a following day at school we unearthed some charred remains beside the school playground - I was convinced this and my dream had been related.

While the internet is a useful resource for looking up particular dream symbolism, it's certainly handy to have a book instead, and now I have one with this book that I picked up at a thrift shop. A lightly thumbed paperback it weighs in at 500 pages, and as other reviews on Amazon have pointed out, the font size is very small. This means there is a lot of information packed in, but also that you need quite good eyesight!

As is commonplace with such books, the second half forms an A-Z, whereas the first half covers the following:

- Introduction
- Sleeping and Dreaming
- Dream Interpretation
- Managing Your Dreams
- Creating Your Own Reality
- Enhancing Your Dreams
- Dream Dictionary: Common Images

The final pages cover:
- Living With Creative Dreams
- Tips And Techniques

The introduction curiously states (p.9): "It has been discovered that at certain stages in the development of control over creative dreaming some very bizarre distortions take place." What bizarre distortions I wonder.

The Gamma Mindset by Chris Walton
- Create the Peak Brain State and Eliminate Subconscious Limiting Beliefs, Anxiety, Fear and Doubt in 90 Seconds!...

Bold claims from the title... I'm not that much of a fast reader!

Great True Stories of The Islands by Claude Williamson

This book contains 40+ short stories, written by a variety of authors, about various islands around the world. I have been gradually working my way through the book and often record me reading the tales, of which I upload as audio books - you can find out more in the Audio section.

Astronomy for GCSE by Patrick Moore

I'm slowly working my way through this book, researching further things of interest. You can find out more in my Astronomy section which is dedicated to this pursuit.

MetaWars (4) by Jeff Norton

The forth and final instalment of this series. I have enjoyed all; it's an imaginative tale with lots of plot-twists and surprise moments along the way. Seemingly aimed at young adults although there is a fair amount of violence in it.

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution by Michael J. Behe

As others have explained, there appears to be a lack of time during the development of either the Earth itself, or even the universe as a whole for intelligent life to have evolved. Behe also explains that complex systems, from individual cells, how blood clots, to the marvel that is the human eye, could not have developed step by step through a chain of evolution; they reveal a design.

Who or what this designer was, and even when, is all up for debate and interpretation. Why does science as a whole keep eerily quiet about these things?

The Secret Teachings of all ages by Manly P. Hall

I kind of ended up reading this twice as I had it on my Kindle and I was taking so long, reading only a short amount at a time, and at one point I seemingly put it down all together and then when I picked it up again forgot I'd already started it... it was only when I was discovering my previous 'bookmarks' that I realised...

A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900 by Charles Singer

"A short history"... yet it took me a few months to slowly churn through this book, although I found it pretty interesting and made many pages of notes...

MetaWars (2) by Jeff Norton
- The dead are rising

This is the second book in the series. It has a strange amount of "filling the reader in on what happened in the first book". This would be useful for someone who had read the first book upon its release and then had to wait for the second, rather than reading the books back-to-back. It also has the effect of making the books read like a movie or TV series (which I could quite imagine, and that the author writes as if he dreams this could happen). There is also a filler side-story in the middle that takes up a few chapters that so far doesn't seem to add anything to the overall story, but I'm hopeful that those characters might make a reappearance in the third book.

That this book is written for youngsters is quite apparent through the use of quirky animal avatars, especially when I battle/fight breaks out. Having said that, there is quite an amount of violence in this book, including a gun fight and death.

The Children's Encyclopedia Volume 10 by Arthur Mee

It is strange to think that it was 10 years ago that I decided to read my 10-volume set of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia that has been in my possession since childhood. But I did, and I have. I set myself the task to read one volume each year, which meant being in the routine of reading a segment each morning (well, most mornings, every now and then), and ensuring I completed 1/12th of the volume each month to stay on track.

The Secrets of Solomon's Temple by Kevin L. Gest
- Exploding the Myths Surrounding a Biblical King

Gest mimics Robert Lomas' style here (see Turning the Hiram Key below) as another Mason seeking explanations. Indeed, he acknowledges him in the Acknowledgements.

From the get-go Gest raises the suggestion that 'Solomon' (perhaps like 'Christ') is a title, not necessarily only a name, and I found this intriguing.

The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm

This book is hilarious. The adventures are written in in a witty manner, and it's this that makes them possible; like chapter one's trip through time in the Professor's contraption. It's a combination of H. G. Wells' Time Machine, Cat in the Hat, Around the World in 80 Days, and Inspector Gadget. The second tale involves a spilled elixir of life.

The Book of Ceremonial Magic by Arthur Edward Waite
- The secret tradition in Goetia, including the rites and mysteries of Geoetic Theurgy, sorcery and infernal necromancy

Adapted from Wikipedia:
The book was first published in 1898 as an attempt to document various 'grimoires', explain the history behind them (refute many of the legends surrounding them), and discuss the theology contained therein.

Waite was a poet and scholarly mystic who wrote extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and was the co-creator of the Rider-Waite tarot deck.

Turning the Hiram Key by Robert Lomas
- Making Darkness Visible

The first section of this book is an account of Lomas' experiences in becoming a Mason. It makes for dry and boring reading and I actually put the book down before realising he would move on from this and instead talk more about the magic of ritual and memes.

The second-to-last chapter becomes dull again as he goes off into the topic of the Kirkwall Scroll. This is perhaps an interesting topic in and of itself and I was somewhat confused how and why he was trying to tie it in here when it seemed to me that it would make for a better book on its own, or perhaps there's not enough for him to add on the subject to warrant its own title.

The final chapter is Lomas' plea and plug for Freemasonry. Actually, I thought the first section was perhaps ruining the experience of joining the Craft for anyone reading that might want to join, since the journey would be more special and impact if one hadn't already read an account of what to expect and how to behave and respond.

High Magick by Damien Echols

Damien developed his techniques whilst on death row and in solitary confinement, an experience which he recounts in Life After Death which I read last year.

It became curious to me that since I was reading the book above by Lomas, I was considering the practices Damien was describing in relation to rituals' effects on the brain; whatever you repeatedly do becomes your reality - that may be binge-watching Netflix,, scrolling through Facebook, or it might be practicing the 'Magick' in this book. Keep doing these things enough and they become engrained and make you see the world around you in a certain way and set you on a path for certain things, just as Lomas found when he delved into Freemasonry.

Beyond this, Damien's topic of Magick shares ideas with the power of positive thinking and Intention. For example, he says "If we worry too much about catching the flu - visualizing how miserable we'd be lying in bed, aching, fevered and just feeling awful [or fearing dying of it...] - we're putting a lot of energy in one particular direction, and we probably shouldn't be surprised if we end up getting sick [at least with worry]."

Because some of my reviews on books have increasingly included vast notes and quotations, I would like to point out that I do recognise that these books are protected by the Copyright act. I put my views online to share with other internet browsers in the hope that little snippets of information may be useful and my views interesting. I have always included links to the online retailer Amazon and encourage anyone that finds any title particularly interesting (thanks to what I have to say) to either buy a copy or borrow one from their local library.

Date Published	Title	Author(s)	Date Read
2005	Cracking the Symbol Code	Tim Wallace- Murphy	2013
2007	The Secrets of Solomon's Temple	Kevin L. Gest	-
2010	The Hiram Key Revisited	Christopher Knight and Alan Butler	2011