Dreamworking differs from classical dream interpretation in that the aim of dreamwork is to explore the various images and emotions that a dream presents and evokes, while not attempting to come up with a single, unique dream meaning. In this way the dream remains “alive” whereas if it has been assigned a specific meaning, it is “finished”. Dreamworkers take the position that a dream may have a variety of meanings, depending on the levels that are being explored.

A tenet of dreamwork is that each person has his or her own dream language. Any given place, person, object or symbol can differ in its meaning from dreamer to dreamer and also from time to time in the dreamer’s ongoing life situation. Thus someone helping a dreamer get closer to her or his dream through dreamwork adopts an attitude of “not knowing” as far as possible.

When doing dreamwork it is best to wait until all the questions have been asked and the answers carefully listened to before the dreamworker (or dreamworkers if it is done in a group setting) offers any suggestions about what the dream might mean. In fact, it is best if a dreamworker prefaces any interpretation by saying, “if this were my dream, it might mean …”

In this way, dreamers are not obliged to agree with what is said and may use their own judgment in deciding which comments appear valid or provide insight. If the dreamwork is done in a group, there may well be several things that are said by participants that seem valid to the dreamer but it can also happen that nothing does. Appreciation of the validity or insightfulness of a comment from a dreamwork session can come later, sometimes days after the end of the session.

A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances. Whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Generally, whistled languages emulate the tones or vowel formants of a natural spoken language, as well as aspects of its intonation and prosody, so that trained listeners who speak that language can understand the encoded message.

Whistled languages are normally found in locations with difficult mountainous terrain, slow or difficult communication, low population density and/or scattered settlements, and other isolating features such as shepherding and cultivation of hillsides. Thery have been more recently found in dense forests like the Amazon where they may replace spoken dialogues in the villages, while hunting or fishing to overcome the pressure of the acoustic environment.

The main advantage of whistling speech is that it allows the speaker to cover much larger distances than ordinary speech, without the strain (and lesser range) of shouting. The long range of whistling is enhanced by the mountainous terrain found in areas where whistled languages are used. Many areas with such languages work hard to preserve their ancient traditions, in the face of rapidly advancing telecommunications systems in many areas.

Whistled speech may be very central and highly valued in a culture. Shouting is very rare in Sochiapam, Oaxaca. Men in that culture are subject to being fined if they do not handle whistle-speech well enough to perform certain town jobs. They may whistle for fun in situations where spoken speech could easily be heard.

In Sochiapam, Oaxaca, and other places in Mexico, and reportedly in West Africa as well, whistled speech is men’s language: although women may understand it, they do not use it. Though whistled languages are not secret codes or secret languages, they may be used for secretive communication among outsiders or others who do not know or understand the whistled language though they may understand its spoken origin.

Foreign accent syndrome is a rare medical condition involving speech production that usually occurs as a side effect of a brain injury, such as a stroke or a head injury, though two cases have been reported of individuals as a development problem. The condition was first described in 1907 by the French neurologist Pierre Marie. 

To the untrained ear, those with the syndrome sound as though they speak their native languages with a foreign accent. However, researchers at Oxford University have found that certain, specific parts of the brain were injured in some foreign-accent syndrome cases, indicating that certain parts of the brain control various linguistic functions, and damage could result in altered pitch or mispronounced syllables, causing the speech patterns to have a different sounding accent.

A case of foreign accent syndrome occurred to Linda Walker, a 60 year old woman from the Newcastle area. After a stroke, her normal Geordie accent was transformed and has been variously described as resembling a Jamaican, as well as a French Canadian, Italian and a Slovak accent. More recently, researchers from McMaster University published a study where a woman from Windsor, Ontario, after suffering a stroke, began speaking with what some people describe as a Newfoundland accent.

In 2008, Cindy Lou Romberg of Port Angeles, Washington, who had suffered a brain injury 17 years earlier, developed foreign accent syndrome after a neck adjustment from her chiropractor. A visit to the hospital ruled out a stroke. Afterwards she spoke with a Russian accent and even appeared to make the grammatical mistakes of a Russian speaking English, as if English was not her native language.

Idioglossia refers to an idiosyncratic language, one invented and spoken by only one or a very few people. Most often, idioglossia refers to the “private languages” of young children, especially twins. It is also known as cryptophasia, and commonly referred to as twin talk or twin speech. Children who are exposed to multiple languages from birth are inclined to create idioglossias, but these languages usually disappear at a relatively early age.

Poto and Cabengo are a pair of identical twin girls (real names Grace and Virginia Kennedy, respectively), who used a secret language up to the age of about 8. Poto and Cabengo is also the name of a documentary film about the girls made by Jean-Pierre Gorin and released in 1979.

They were apparently of normal intelligence and developed their own communication because they had little exposure to spoken language in their early years. They were left in the care of a grandmother, who met their physical needs but did not play or interact with them. The grandmother spoke only German, while the parents spoke English. They had no contact with other children, seldom played outdoors, and were not sent to school.

Their father later stated in interviews that he realized the girls had invented a language of their own, but since their use of English remained extremely rudimentary, he had decided that they were in fact retarded and that it would do no good to send them to school. When he lost his job, he told a caseworker at the unemployment office about his family, and the caseworker advised him to put the girls in speech therapy. At Children’s Hospital of San Diego, speech therapist Alexa Kratze quickly discovered that Virginia and Grace, far from being retarded, had at least normal intelligence, and had invented a complex idioglossia.

Their language was spoken extremely quickly and had a staccato rhythm. These characteristics transferred themselves to the girls’ English, which they began to speak following speech therapy. Linguistic analysis of their language revealed that it was a mixture of English and German with some neologisms and several idiosyncratic grammatical features.

Many speech and hearing experts, as well as psychiatrists, offered speculation as to why the girls had not picked up English, as most idioglossic twins do as they go along whether or not they retain their personal language. Kratze pointed out that the girls had had very little contact with anyone outside their family, and that contact within the family had been minimal at best. These factors contributed to the girls’ developmental disability, even if they had been born with normal intelligence.

Once it was established that the girls could be educated, their father apparently forbade them to speak their personal language. He was quoted in Time magazine as saying “They don’t want to be associated as dummies. You live in a society, you got to speak the language.” Asked if they remembered their language, the girls confirmed that they did, but their father quickly stepped in to chide them for “lying”. They were mainstreamed and placed in separate classes in elementary school. However, they were still affected by their family’s emotional neglect.

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”.

All writing does not just contain semantic information. It also contains aesthetic information when seen as a shape or image, and emotional information such as a graphologist would analyze. Because it eliminates the semantic information, asemic writing brings the emotional and aesthetic content to the foreground.

By contrast, email is writing almost devoid of aesthetic and emotional content apart from what the words contain. Asemic works play with our minds, enticing us to attempt to read them. Some asemic works make the viewer hover between reading as a text and looking as a picture.

Illegible, invented, or primal scripts (cave paintings, doodles, children’s drawings, etc.) are all influences upon asemic writing. But instead of being thought of as mimicry of preliterate expression, asemic writing can be considered as a postliterate style of writing that uses all forms of creativity for inspiration.

Some asemic writing has pictograms or ideograms, which suggest a meaning through their shape. Other forms are shapeless and exist as pure conception.

Asemic writing has no verbal sense, though it may have clear textual sense. Through its formatting and structure, asemic writing may suggest a type of document and, thereby, suggest a meaning. The form of art is still writing, often calligraphic in form, and either depends on a reader’s sense and knowledge of writing systems for it to make sense, or can be understood through aesthetic intuition.

It can also be seen as a relative perception, whereby unknown languages and forgotten scripts provide templates and platforms for new modes of expression. Asemic writing occurs in avant-garde literature and art with strong roots in the earliest forms of writing.

Eurythmy is an expressive movement art originated by Rudolf Steiner in conjunction with Marie von Sivers in the early 20th century. Primarily a performance art, it is also used in education and as a movement therapy. The word eurythmy stems from Greek roots meaning beautiful or harmonious rhythm. The term was used by Greek and Roman architects to refer to the harmonious proportions of a design or building.

The gestures that build the basic movement repertoire of a eurythmist are connected to the sounds and rhythms of language, to the tonal experience of music, to fundamental soul experiences such as joy and sorrow. Once this fundamental repertoire is mastered, it can be composed into free artistic expressions. The eurythmist also works to cultivate a feeling for the qualities of straight lines and curves, the directions of movement in space, contraction and expansion, and color.

The element of color is also emphasized both through the costuming, usually given characteristic colors for a piece, and formed of long, loose fabrics that accentuate the movements rather than the bodily form, and through the lighting, which saturates the space and changes with the moods of the piece. Copper eurythmy rods and copper balls are used in various eurythmy exercises, including therapeutic exercises.

Eurythmy’s aim is to bring the artists’ expressive movement and both the performers’ and audience’s feeling experience into harmony with a piece’s content. Eurythmy is thus sometimes called visible music or visible speech, expressions that originate with its founder, Rudolf Steiner, who described eurythmy as an art of the soul.

When performing eurythmy with music, the three major elements of music, melody, harmony and rhythm, are all expressed. The melody is primarily conveyed through expressing its rise and fall, the specific pitches, and the intervallic qualities present. Harmony is expressed through movement between tension and release, as expressions of dissonance and consonance, and between the more inwardly directed minor mood and the outwardly directed major mood.

Breaths or pauses are expressed through a larger or smaller movement in space, giving new impulse to what follows. Beat is conveyed through greater emphasis of downbeats, or those beats upon which stress is normally placed. Beat is generally treated as a subsidiary element, expressed through greater emphasis on the down beats. Eurythmy has only occasionally been done to popular music, in which beat plays a large role.

The timbre of individual instruments is brought into the quality both of the tonal gestures and the whole movement of the eurythmist. Usually there will be a different eurythmist or group of eurythmists expressing each instrument, for example in chamber or symphonic music.

Eurythmy is used therapeutically, normally on the advice of a physician, to compensate for somatic or psychological imbalances. The aim is to strengthen the organism’s salutogenic capacity to heal itself. Eurythmy has also been used in many social contexts, including workplaces and prisons, with the aim of rejuvenating individuals and their social relationships.

Conlon Nancarrow was a US born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He is best remembered for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, making them play far beyond human performance ability. He lived most of his life in relative isolation. Today, he is remembered as one of the most original and unusual composers of the 20th century.

In 1947, buoyed by an inheritance, Nancarrow bought a custom built, manual punching machine to enable him to punch piano rolls. The machine was an adaptation of one used in the commercial production of rolls, and using it was very hard work, and very slow. He also adapted the player pianos, increasing their dynamic range by tinkering with their mechanism, and covering the hammers with leather and metal so as to produce a more percussive sound. 

Nancarrow’s first pieces combined the harmonic language and melodic motifs of early jazz pianists like Art Tatum with extraordinarily complicated metrical schemes. The first five rolls he made are called the Boogie Woogie Suite and are probably the most jazzy of all his works. Later works tend to be more abstract, with no obvious references to any music apart from Nancarrow’s.

Many of these later pieces are canons in augmentation or diminution or prolation canons. While most canons using this device, such as those by Johann Sebastian Bach, have the tempos of the various parts in quite simple ratios, like 2:1, Nancarrow’s canons are in far more complicated ratios. The Study No. 40, for example, has its parts in the ratio e:pi, while the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo.

His music has a mathematical beauty and elegance that happily coexists with musical expressiveness and a puckish sense of humor. Nancarrow did not see a clear delineation between the two approaches and he never worried about it. This natural, organic esthetic is one of his most relevant contributions to 20th century music. Another important contribution relates to a kind of semiological extrapolation. On the one hand, his music can be heard as symbols, with their often recognized analogical correspondences.

The complete contents of Nancarrow’s studio, including the player piano rolls, the instruments, the libraries, and other documents and objects, are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel.

Punctuation is everything in written language other than the actual letters or numbers. Punctuation marks are symbols that correspond to neither sounds of a language nor to words and phrases, but which serve to indicate the structure and organization of writing, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.

In English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example, “woman, without her man, is nothing,” and “woman: without her, man is nothing,” have greatly different meanings, as do “eats shoots and leaves” and “eats, shoots and leaves.”

The rules of punctuation vary with language, location and time, and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic and are thus the author or editor’s choice. Tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages, may have wildly different rules.

The earliest writing had no capitalization, no spaces and no punctuation marks. This worked as long as the subject matter was restricted to a limited range of topics. Expanding the use of writing to more abstract concepts required some way to disambiguate meanings. Until the 18th century, punctuation was principally an aid to reading aloud. After that time its development was as a mechanism for ensuring that the text made sense when read silently.

Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Christian Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud and the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks and an early version of initial capitals. St Jerome and his colleagues, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin, developed an early system. This was considerably improved on by Alcuin. The marks included the forward slash and dots in different locations. The dots were centered in the line, raised or in groups.

The use of punctuation was not standardized until after the invention of printing. Credit for introducing a standard system is generally given to Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They popularized the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, invented the semicolon, made occasional use of parentheses and created the modern comma by lowering the virgule.

The standards and limitations of evolving technologies have exercised further pragmatic influences. For example, minimisation of punctuation in typewritten matter became economically desirable in the 1960s and 1970s for the many users of carbon film ribbons, since a period or comma consumed the same length of expensive non reusable ribbon as did a capital letter.

Although texts in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages were often left unpunctuated until the modern era, there has been evidence of punctuation usage in ancient China since the 3rd century BC. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts, however, they often look different and have different customary rules.