Of Fish, Dreams and Blank Books

If you consult any number of books or websites in the hopes of learning about dreamwork, almost everyone last one of them will tell you there is one essential practice on which all dreamwork depends. If you want to engage in the art and science of dreamwork, you must keep a dream journal. If you don't keep the journal, you won't develop your dream memory. If you don't remember your dreams, there's no material to work with. Pretty obvious.

It can be a very difficult habit to cultivate. It has to be a daily thing. And you have to be consistent. Sitting down to write down your dreams (unless you actually have the time, leisure and privacy to write them down while you're still in bed in the morning) has to be one of the first things you do every morning. If you wake up to an alarm, hit the snooze button and then don't move. Stay lying exactly where you are and ask yourself what you were dreaming. Only if you are lucky do you recall an entire dream right then and there.

Dream recall is like fishing. It all starts with a nibble on the line. There's the lingering feeling of a mood from a dream. Or the faintest memory of just one image or object. Or you only remember that "I was with Stephanie", or that there was something having to do with Sacramento. Be gentle. Be skillful. If you pull too hard, the fish won't get hooked. Just stay with whatever little bit you have. Now let your attention wander from it for a second or two (kind of like letting out a little line) and then focus your mind on the object again. You might find that something else "breaks the surface" along with what you already had: the background to the vague image; what it was that Stephanie said to you; what specific part of Sacramento you saw. Let your concentration go for another second or two, and then "pull in some line", i.e. focus on the things you remember. You will likely find that something else comes along with them. If all goes well, you feel the fish bite! A whole dream sequence comes back to you in one piece. But be careful! You still haven't reeled that beauty in. Nothing worse than "the one that got away." When the next alarm goes off, don't hit snooze again. Turn the alarm off and get out of bed, whether you remember a dream or not.

There is a short window of opportunity after one wakes up -- I'd guess no more than fifteen or twenty minutes -- during which the portal to the sleeping consciousness hasn't quite shut tight, kind of like that little gap on a baby's skull that hasn't quite grown together (which is why, a friend tells me, babies can still talk with angels). One needs to cultivate the habit of not hurtling headlong into the day. Stay quiet, both physically and mentally, while making that first visit to the toilet for a pee. Don't turn on lots of bright lights. Don't turn on the radio or other loud electronic devices. Sit down in a quiet place with a notebook and pen and write down whatever it was you remembered. Don't be surprised if you now can't recall what you remembered while waiting for the second alarm. Close your eyes and ask yourself, "what did I dream last night?" Just relax and allow it to come to you. Most times something will. But there are those times that it won't. One of the emotionally challenging aspects of dreamwork is the moment when you realize that, despite all of your efforts, you are empty handed. You don't remember anything. Nada. Zero. Goose egg!

It can be discouraging. It can be very discouraging when you are just starting out in dreamwork, and only remembering one or two dreams a week, if you're lucky. But the truth is that the dreaded "dream drought" is something that even veterans have to endure. Even people who have been faithfully recording dreams for several decades, and who have stretches in which they remember several dreams a morning for three or more mornings in a row, still hit patches as dry as the Mohave desert; no dream recall for days, or even weeks.

What do you do then? Many writers on the subject suggest writing anything at all into the dream journal: what one was thinking after one woke up, or even making dreams up. The theory is that the subconscious mind responds to this signal from conscious behavior that says the conscious mind takes dreams seriously, and provides one with dreams on subsequent mornings. This has never worked for me. I've always felt too silly writing things that are not dreams into my dream journal.

Recently I've come up with a new tactic. I've designated a new little blank book to be for dreamwork exercises. Never mind that this means I am now carrying no less than four hard-back blank books in my briefcase everyday. My wife can tell you that I have a hard time passing a blank book display in a shop without buying one. I have a reserve that should last me for several years. But I digress.

I take both my journal and my new dreamwork book to the table where I write down my dreams. If, after all efforts and tricks, I can't recall any dreams, I open up my dream journal and read one of the dreams that's already in there. Then I open my dreamwork book, date it, indicate which dream I'm going to work with, and then do a little dreamwork. For an idea of what that work might entail, I recommend this very convenient collection of exercises generously published for free by Professor John Suler (warning: it's a PDF file, so the link will open Acrobat or whatever PDF reader you use).

This has a dual purpose. Firstly, I am using the first half-hour of the day to work with dreams (either recording them or doing exercises), and secondly, I'm actually designating a time in which to do dreamwork. I think one of the pitfalls of dreamwork is that we sometimes keep collecting more and more dreams, but we keep putting off working with them, because our lives are so busy. I'm guilty of this. This way, I don't get so frustrated if I don't remember any dreams on a given morning, and I automatically get a certain amount of dreamwork done every week, without having to set aside more time in my otherwise over scheduled day.

You Call THAT Summer Reading?

Although four days ago I escaped the urban circus of Budapest for the idyllic peace of a farm house in southeastern Hungary, far, far from TV cables and internet connections and subway trains and all the other features of my harried life (which I love, but gets a bit much after a while), through the miracles of online technology this posting is being published on my appointed publishing day, thereby keeping my promise to grace the world with another dose of my prose every Wednesday. (Note to self: I should suggest to Google that they develop an application called iStiff, which sends an indistinguishable virtual image of a nine-to-five employee to the office through the internet every weekday morning, while the real employee stays home and putters around the house, blogs, meets friends at cafes, etc. Sounds like the Next Big Thing, huh?)

As this digital missive is being released into cyberspace, its flesh-and-blood author will have already spent days breathing fresh air, taking walks in the woods, watching his kids play with farm animals, cooking meals for ten (we'll be there with another family with children), watching the stars in a clear sky free of city lights, and... READING!

Now, being a corporate editor, reading on vacation is a bit like a busman's holiday, but as any professional reader (or college student) will tell you, there's a world of difference between reading what you have to, and reading what you want to.

Admittedly, being on vacation with that many children doesn't really allow for that much reading time, which is why I have to make every minute of it count. So... no mental-chewing-gum potboilers for me. Why waste that quality time away from the frenetic life, while my blood pressure is down and my brain waves smoothed out to gentle curves? No, I'm going to bring along two books that are definitely not what most folks would consider light beach reading.

The first is a novel. I don't read many novels anymore. First of all, I don't have time for them. I recall when I was younger, being very disdainful of people who say they don't have time to read. But, now I'm in that position. A full-time job, four kids and a commitment to spiritual exercises doesn't leave much time for other things. And the truth is, I do read. But shorter stuff I can squeeze in while commuting or eating lunch: articles on subjects I'm interested in, short stories (especially from my favorite speculative fiction site Strange Horizons). I read chapters from e-books on subjects I'm researching. But novels, no. You have to have long stretches of time to read novels. Reading a three-hundred page novel at a rate of four pages a day is very frustrating.

So, there's this six-hundred-page book I started,...uh,... a year ago on a bus ride to a company outing. I got one or two chapters read on the bus. Then I struggled for a few weeks at three or four pages a day and gave up. Around Christmas I took the time to plow through half of the book, and gave up when vacation was over. At this point I still have 170 pages of Gustav Meyrink's The Angel of the Western Window left.

Many of you will know the name Meyrink as the author of The Golem, but far fewer people know that Meyrink was actually an initiate of the western esoteric tradition, and that he wrote a number of esoterically significant novels. The plot of Angel takes place in two different time periods. One is the lifetime of Dr John Dee (1527-1608), and the other is the lifetime of the first-person narrator, a bachelor gentleman in Vienna in the early twentieth century. We slip into John Dee's time whenever the narrator reads Dee's diaries. I won't spoil the story for you (because you really should read it), but suffice it to say that the interaction between these two times and personalities becomes very bizarre and intricate.

Dr Dee was the Renaissance man's Renaissance man. There's hardly an art or science this man didn't dabble in, if not excel at or pioneer, including magic. And this novel is very much about the magical side of Dee. And the sweep of the novel is incredible: England and Wales, Emperor Rudolf's Prague (including Rudolf himself), Vienna, and more.

I've really worked myself up! I can't wait to get back to it.

The other book I'm taking along is a very thin, but very dense volume by Dr John Dee himself: The Hieroglyphic Monad. I've been wanting to delve into this book for some time now, but just haven't felt the time was right. This is the type of book Georg Kuhlewind would designate a "contemplative book". That means that, unlike a light novel, or an instruction book, or a magazine article, it is meant to be absorbed a few sentences at a time. The prime example of such a book, according to Kuhlewind, is the Gospel of John. One should, he says, read a sentence or two, and then deeply meditate on them to see what they evoke from deeper levels of consciousness. I'm certain this is how the Monad is meant to be read. It is divided up into 24 short theorems, each short enough to read in a few minutes. So, in the afternoons, after lunch has been served and the children are playing in the yard, or in the barn, I plan to drag a comfortable lawn chair out under a tree in the yard, sample a theorem, and then slowly sip my tea and contemplate.

Slowly. Patiently.

Puttin' on the feed bag

(RSS feed, that is)

There are times I can be downright geeky. For several years, I was the one people came to at the Hungarian Press Agency's Econews when they had a problem with Microsoft Windows. But there are times I can be nearly Luddite in my resistance to adopting new technologies, especially if I suspect there's some evil, hidden capitalist agenda behind it. Only fools try something just because it's new.

And that's the way it was between me and RSS technology. For years now I've seen links on pages offering "feeds" of various content. "Sure," I thought, "like I need more stuff cluttering up my life. It probably involves getting lots of spam and getting placed on lists of idiots who do things like send in Reader's Digest contest entries."

I also knew it had something to do with what, in the golden era of Netscape (long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...) was referred to as "push technology." Wow, was that ever a flop. Another idea the world and the Scribbler just weren't ready for. "No thank you," I proudly said, "I can go looking for the stuff I want. I don't need to have it delivered to me."

And then I became a blogger.

When you configure your blog, among the settings are the settings for your feeds. I got to wondering what this was all about. Then I noticed the links on my blog for feeds. Hmmm. How does this work? I kept wondering what a reader would see and experience if they subscribed to a feed of my blog. For that matter, if it would even work.

And besides that, part of the blogging game (and I'm sure I'm not telling most of you anything new) involves reading other blogs. It makes sense. Novelists read novels. Journalists read newpapers and magazines, and bloggers read other blogs. It's just part of learning how to do it. And, of course, one needs to understand that blogging is a social activity, not just a solitary craft.

The long and the short of it: bloggers read (or should read) blogs.

So I went to a friend's blog and subscribed. Due to the fact that I've been a Google person ever since I got my first invitation to G-mail three years ago (I'm a Google whore: I use G-mail, Blogger, Page Creator, Analytics, Google Documents, Google Talk...), setting up the feed with Google Reader was absurdly easy. Hmmm. The research I'd read about RSS said it can save time for people who regularly check certain websites to see if there's new information. Hmmm.

So I subscribed to all the blogs I read. And you know what? I, er, have to admit. It's saving me time. I just open my feed reader, and it shows me which blogs have new postings, and I can read them right there. If I want to comment, one keystroke takes me to their blog. Amazing. No more clicking around on links and waiting for blogs to load, only to find out there's nothing new.

Now I still think you'd have to be crazy to subscribe to a feed of something like CNN. Your reader would be full-to-groaning with new stuff all the time. But for the conscientious blogger, I have to admit this is a good tool.

Not to say that it isn't a good thing to be a bit Luddite sometimes.

Goin' to the dogs - Part III

So The Scribbler posed lots of unanswered questions in the last "dogs" posting. And he's been digging to find the answers. As a matter of fact, he has even employed the formidable talents of Hellibrarian (hereinafter referred to affectionately as "Hell"), to help him dig.

This whole adventure presents much food for thought on the nature and reliability of information in the Internet age. For a while it seemed this posting would end up being a cautionary tale about the dangers of believing what you read on the Internet, and the virtues of checking facts in more "traditional media" such as newspapers, respectable journals, and long-established reference works. You see, I thought I'd found "the truth" in a newspaper article written by a plucky investigative reporter. But after checking her "facts", the twist is that this posting may as well have been entitled "Snarky journalist repeatedly shoots self in foot in major Axel Springer newspaper."

You just wouldn't believe how many websites there are out there dedicated to those five exercises originally called "the rites of rejuvenation" in the Kelder books, but which have eventually come to be known as "The Five Tibetans." Hours of Internet searches established that there are many dozens of them out there. It would be difficult to say exactly how many.

"Five Tibetan" sites mostly fall into two categories: what we'll call fan sites or propaganda sites, and commercial sites.

The propaganda sites are altruistic in spirit. They're put up by people who are so convinced the five "rites" are incredibly beneficial to anyone who will do them these inspired souls feel they must spread the word, and copyright be damned. Anything this important to mankind as a whole, they seem to think, can't possibly be proprietary. Many of the images are- and much of the text is plagiarized. And after browsing through a certain number of them, it becomes apparent that almost all of them reproduce the same diagrams, instructions and background material, and claims of miraculous effects; at times shamelessly cut and paste from one another.

And it also becomes obvious that site after site repeats the same "information" as fact and truth, when it is apparent their authority is another website, which may also have merely parroted another website.

The commercial sites are just as numerous as the propaganda sites. The amazing thing is that they also mostly just repeat the same things you can find on the propaganda sites, but they're using it to sell something (an e-book, a video, a training course). It's pretty amazing that anyone can create supplemental materials for something as simple and easy as five basic exercises to be performed every morning. And they really are basic. But where good health and longevity are being promised, you are bound to find some snake-oil salesmen hanging about.

That brings us to the article I mentioned earlier. The German version of the Wikipedia article on The Five Tibetans lists a link to a 1999 newspaper article that appeared in Die Welt, entitled "Suche nach dem Buch aus dem Nichts" (translation: Search for the book out of nowhere), by Susanna Schwager (article: part I, part II).

From the very first word of Ms Schwager's article, you can see that her viewpoint goes far beyond healthy skepticism. She has a chip on her shoulder. Admittedly, some of her targets are deserving. However one feels about the efficacy of the exercises themselves (she clearly doubts it), the publishing and promotional phenomenon that has come in the book's wake brings new meaning to the word exploitation. She takes Scherz-Verlag, the publisher of the German translation, to task for publishing a children's Tibetans, and a Five Tibetans cookbook for gourmets. But beyond the excesses of the Scherz-Verlag, among the exploiters of the phenomenon the real topper is the training course to become a "certified" teacher of the Five Tibetans for (hold your breath!) 700 Euros. Certified teacher of something anyone can learn in five minutes?

But Ms Schwager's venom is not just for these money changers in the temple, she's out to ridicule anything she perceives as New Age-y, and she's going to start by proving the book is a fraud. She goes to the Zurich Central library with the hypothesis that the book was all an invention of some clever conman in 1985, who falsely claimed to have found a miraculous book published earlier in the 20th century. She and the reference librarian dug (in real hardbound references) to find the 1939 and 1947 editions of this book.

They started with the National Union Catalogue of the Library of Congress. They could find neither a Peter Kelder nor a book called The Eye of Revelation up to 1975. They also looked in the bibliography of France's Bibliotheque Nationale. No dice. When the journalist asked the chief librarian, a Dr. Kohler, what it meant if you can't find a book in any bibliography, he answered, "It always means something isn't quite right (Etwas stimmt nicht). It's a very strong indication that the book was never published. Naturally there are rare cases in which a book just wasn't registered (in the bibliographies), but every book resurfaces sooner or later, especially if there's a new edition." The journalist reports that Dr. Kohler took an interest in the case and did his own research. After two days he gave up. He said he couldn't even find it in esoteric collections, which usually don't have any gaps in them. Nor could he find either Harry R. Gardener or the Midday Press in old listings of publishers. The first record of the book is the 1985 edition by Harbor Press.

By the end of the article, Schwager asserts: there was no Peter Kelder; there was no Colonel, there was no 1939 edition, and no expanded 1947 edition (on which the 1985 edition claims to be based), and the was no Mid-Day Press. The whole thing was an invented con. She also pokes fun at the idea that the 1945 edition was "lost" until 1985.

After reading this, The Scribbler was itching to publish this information for the first time in the English-speaking world, but then I thought perhaps he should do a bit of fact checking himself before relating data from a single source as fact. It's a good thing he did.

Shortly after contacting Hell, she said she found evidence that there really had been a Mid-Day Press in Los Angeles, because she found other books published by them. And then she found (why didn't I think of looking there?) a rare book seller on e-Bay -- Jerry's Rare Books -- selling what he purports to be the only exisiting copy of a 1946 edition of Peter Kelder's The Eye of Revelation.

Here's where the story get real juicy! If you look at the e-Bay offering, you'll see that he's asking (hold your breath again!) $97,500. He doesn't intend to sell it to the average punter, though, he's looking to sell it to an ambitious publisher! In the description, he says:

"As far as is known for certain, this is the only surviving copy of the 1946 edition of the Eye of Revelation! The first four sections of the 1946 edition are largely similar to the 1939 edition; however, section five is entirely new and contains information about:

* Tibetan Mind Magic
* Mantrams
* The Magic Quality of "Aum"
* and more.

The 1939 editions of the Eye of Revelation have earned millions for their publishers. This 1946 edition can do the same for whomever purchases it. It has been long, long sought after and--with the new, authentic, information--has every chance to outsell any previous edition many times over."

The pictures in his offering (pictures: 1, 2, 3) seem to be convincing evidence of it's authenticity. But I'd still take a documents expert and a lawyer with me before I coughed up $97,500!

He also mentions that the only known copy of the 1939 original is in the New York City Public Library. That was pretty easy to verify.

So, the very premise of the article in die Welt is in error. Ironically, it took Internet resources to check the facts from a traditional medium (a respected newspaper) which is supposed to be more reliable due to the presence of professional journalists and editors. And her facts came from what should be considered a reliable source: a senior librarian at a well-established major library.

But we still don't know who Peter Kelder was, who the English Colonel was, where these exercises come from, or how they really work (or do they?).

All of that is yet to come in "Dogs" - Part IV.

Moving in the old furniture

The Firm is in a state-of-the-art office building. With identical data outlet sockets in every room, modular office furniture, and an efficient office administration department supplied with plenty of hand trucks and burly workers, they can move a person's working space (including desk, files, computer, lamps, cabinets) from one room to another inside an hour. I recall the dizzy feeling of working in one room at nine in the morning, and being moved, and working somewhere else by eleven; phone working, computer on the network, cabinets and files set up. I'd never worked for a huge multi-national company before I came to The Firm, so I was unprepared for the psychological effects of being moved four times within my first year. At first I put up a fight and tried to ultimately personalize my space with art prints and interesting objects. Then each time I moved it took longer to unpack the boxes and get out "aesthetic" stuff. I've adopted a much plainer style of decorating my office.

Same goes for staking claim to a patch of cyberspace. I recall all the effort I went to creating my first websites: writing them in html, uploading them to my ISP's server with an FTP client, rewriting and uploading every time I wanted to make a change. Things are so much easier nowadays with Google and other on-line hosts. And there are other reasons I created pages. I was a very hands-on forum administrator for a few years, and I created pages of references for the members. And each time I changed ISPs or had to abandon a server for some reason, it would take a long time to motivate myself to upload my old pages and get them to work right again.

Blogging is a new medium to me. It took me some time to warm up to it. There were a few weeks I didn't think I wanted to keep doing it. There's a feeling associated with it that very much reminds me of the pressure of writing a weekly newspaper column. But there's a positive side to that pressure (which I realize nobody else but me is putting on myself), and that's the impetus to create.

So... I've decided I'm gonna be in this space for a while. I may as well unpack my boxes and decorate a little. You'll notice a new sidebar on the right containing links to some of the old html pages I mentioned above.

The first one, Resources for Dreamers, I created for a short-lived dreamwork forum I ran two years back. There's good stuff on that list. It took some digging on the Internet to find a lot of it. I actually have found more since I made that list, so I plan to update it sometime soon. Stay tuned!

The next one down, The Secret Archives, is one of the first websites I ever created, back in 2000. It's corny, and has that retro look to it. But I've decided to leave it as it is. It's a repository of my writing from the 1990s.

And the third link, Mystical and Occult Libraries and Text Archives, was something I created for a mysticism forum I moderated for several years. Those links also took some digging to collect. I've also found more to add to this list since I created it, so keep your eyes open for an update of that, too.

Phew! Unpacking and setting up house is hard work. But before I call it a day and crack open a beer, could somebody help me get this chest of drawers over to that corner over there?

Virtually Gathering Around the Digital Camp Fire

(or: What Exceedingly Strange But Wondrous Things These 21st Century Relationships Are)

I just recently read a very interesting novel by the German writer Thommie Bayer. What struck me after getting about forty or so pages into Singvogel (sorry folks, only available in German) is that the vast majority of the "action" in this novel takes place as the first-person narrator is sitting at the computer all alone in his writing studio (he's a screenwriter). We hear the narrator's internal monologue while he's reading and answering e-mails (we also get to read the e-mails), doing research on the Internet, and while he's working. One could easily imagine that reading about a guy sitting at his computer would be dull. But whats' surprising is that it isn't. An incredible number of things "happen" while he electronically communicates with friends in various cities, and with his wife who commutes to another city.

But it gets better. He gets an unsolicited e-mail from a woman who's seen a film he wrote. A lively and intimate correspondence begins. But wait! It gets even more complex: he starts getting e-mails from the woman's jealous boyfriend. And as I read about this dynamic, unpredictable, and very engaging life getting played out on the Internet, the realization hit me: Oh my God! This really is what 21st century life is like!

Well, at least for some of us. But that "some of us" is actually quite a few of us. Those legions of men and women who go to an office and work in front of the ubiquitous "one-eyed monster" all day. And even the ones who stay home have unlimited, always-on, broadband now.

If there is one thing that typifies to me the watershed that came with the dawn of the 21st century, it is the way that social interaction has been transformed by the Internet.

It used to be, going back to prehistoric times, that the way people met people was face to face. At school, in church, at work, at parties, in the neighborhood. But now a surprising number of relationships start on Internet forums, chat rooms, blogs, or some other digital format used on the Internet.

Currently, of all the women who play significant roles as friends in my wife's life, easily 9/10ths of them are women she met in mother/baby forums when she was pregnant. There is a core of them who met on one particular forum topic, realized after a time that they were a compatible group, and formed a private forum of their own. This group has been together for six years now. Since they met on a Hungarian language forum, and they're mostly from Budapest, they began arranging to meet in person. They even have a monthly "women's night" when they get together at someone's house for dinner.

And they forum together daily.

I have a group of friends I met on a forum for Rosicrucian mysticism that I was moderating. After two and a half years, the forum became unstable and politics broke it up. A core group decided it was time to form a private forum. I wonder how often this happens: a core group meets on a public forum and recognise their compatibility, so they form a new, private forum?

My friends are spread across several continents, so we can't meet personally, like my wife's pals. But we're still close. We know a lot about each other, and we've gone through many experiences together. We often mention how odd it is that we feel as close or closer to one another as we do to the people (colleagues, for instance) we see physically every day.

Watching what my wife's forum does has led me to the conclusion that forums are sort of a "feminine" mode of communication. It's all about networking and the group. Her forum doesn't even really bother with lots of topics and threads. They just write everything into the same thread and share everything with each other. It's as if they were all sitting in the same room and knitting or spinning wool and having a conversation as a group.

The implications for how the organisation of society will change are staggering. It's (at the risk of being cliche) revolutionary. The ways people have met one another since time immemorial are no longer the rule. The way relationships develop over time is also new. And the nature of the groups we organise ourselves into are new, as well. Welcome to the Aquarian age.

This doesn't mean that traditional relationships are suddenly obsolete. The typewriter didn't make the pen obsolete. It's a new layer of our society. And one that permeates through old boundaries. Forums can be totally international, cutting across all sorts of boundaries of class, race, religion and education. But we will always need the people who are physically near us and will always long to physically meet some of the people we have met through the Internet.

I'll wrap up with an anecdote. My wife was contacted by a woman whom someone had recommended to read my wife's blog, because my wife writes a lot about being the parent of children who go to Waldorf school. This woman asked if she could publish some of my wife's postings as articles in the newsletter she edits for the Waldorf school her son goes to. We met (face to face) through a home-birth associated gathering (our children and their daughter were born at home) and later at a Waldorf-associated gathering. Last week we were invited to visit them at their house on the Hungarian "great plain".

We drove south of Budapest onto the puszta, the famous Hungarian great plain that separates the rest of Europe from the "Balkans". Though I've driven across the great plain many times, this was the first chance I'd ever had to stay there. We spent two nights at the farmhouse of these friends we'd met through the Internet. Saturday morning I went jogging, and it was wonderful. The soil there is almost pure sand, so jogging on the dirt roads is like jogging on the beach. Where there is forest, it's scrubby and thin, and where there is no forest, it's all tough stringy plants that can take sun and dry heat. It reminded me of California's Sacramento Valley, actually. And the stars at night! We were vast distances from any city lights. I don't remember the last time I saw the Milky Way from horizon to horizon. And the stars have colors! I'd forgotten that.

We spent time cooking and enjoying good meals together, and our children played together doing the sorts of things they don't have the opportunity to do in the city.

We've invited them to come visit us in Budapest.

It all started on the Internet, but it's developed into a real flesh-and-blood relationship between people who can look one another in the eyes, clasp one another's hands, share a satisfying meal. But I can guarantee you we never would have met one another ten years ago. And I never would have had the same opportunity to learn the bit of practical geography that came with that visit.

Amazing, this medium. And the transformation is only really beginning.