Good morning cool kids,

I'm back! Thank you Kerry for the BELTING guest editing for the last fortnight, I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.

I learned on holiday about the Iban women, native to Borneo, who use their dreams and visions to inspire designs for their beautiful intricate weaving. This took me down a rabbit hole so I hope you're looking forward to a Fem Fri about women and dreams. Let's start with this long, good and lavishly illustrated article about  Iban women and the pua they weave:

Weaving pua was therefore a spiritually charged endeavor, carried out only by women. For a weaver to reach the highest level of her craft, she had to possess the ability to communicate with the spirits, who would in turn inspire her powerful designs through dreams. Anak Embol is one of Sarawak’s last “dream weavers.” […] In the very first dream she had, a spirit told her to wash the yarn in the river and gave her specific instructions on how to treat the yarn before weaving. Anak Embol knew then that she had to fulfill that dream, and when she did, she found that the ritual released her emotions and cleansed her mind. Thus liberated from all negative distractions, she felt ready to receive the new designs that came to her. She called these inspirations her “dream designs.”

https://explorepartsunknown.com/borneo/where-dreams-are-woven/

Dreams and visions are not something that modern/secular societies pay a lot of attention to, but that doesn't mean that we understand what dreams are or how they work; we still basically don't. There are women who are working to change that, though – Cristina Marzano and her team recently enjoyed a huge breakthrough in understanding why we remember dreams. This is fascinating. It looks like they are brand new memories:

This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-behind-dreaming/

Finally, here's a dream memory that a woman used for creativity and profit; were you aware that the idea for Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley from a dream? Because I wasn't until this week! Enjoy this article about the dream (and the miserable summer) that inspired the indisputably best gothic novel yet written by a teenager:

That night, or during a night soon after, Mary Godwin had a dream. The dream was a morbid one about the creation of a new man by a scientist with the hubris to assume the role of god. History is quiet on whether or not Mary Godwin (soon to become Mrs. Shelley) won the competition at the villa with the tale that “haunted her midnight pillow,” but her story became more than a fireside bit of entertainment. Properly developed, it became a successful novel in 1818, one of the firsts in a new genre of fiction that would eventually be branded “science fiction.” In time, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would make a cultural impact that still reverberates even now, almost two hundred years later.

https://www.biography.com/news/mary-shelley-frankenstein-i-frankenstein-movie

Have a great Friday, everyone, it's really nice to be back! Hey and be sure to tune in next week because I will have genuinely huge news about a personal project I've been working on.

Alex xx.