The New York Times takes a positive look at the benefits of prayer in public schools.

"On the first day of the new school year, the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, stood in an elementary school classroom in Queens beaming at a hushed room full of fourth-grade children sitting cross-legged on the floor. 'Please let your eyes close,' said a small boy named Davinder, from his spot on the linoleum. Davinder gently struck a shallow bronze bowl. Gong! 'Take three mindful breaths,' he said, and the room fell silent.... "

In schools in New York City and in pockets around the country, the use of inward-looking practices like mindfulness and meditation is starting to grow. Though evidence is thin on how well they might work in the classroom, proponents say they can help students focus and cope with stress....

“It used to be that you wouldn’t say ‘meditation’ in polite company,” said Bob Roth, executive director of the David Lynch Foundation, a charitable foundation founded by the director of “Blue Velvet,” that promotes and teaches transcendental meditation to adults and children, including those at Brooklyn Urban Garden. “Now we’re working with all the large banks, we’re working with hedge funds, we’re working with media companies. People are having us come in as part of their wellness programs, and that wasn’t the case even two years ago.”

It's the religion corporations love! Remove the pesky "God" character, and you're good to go.

“We’re putting it in a lot of our schools,” Ms. Fariña said about mindfulness, on the first day of school, “because kids are under a lot of stress.”...

Last year, [Public School 212 in Jackson Heights, Queens] converted a large closet in a subbasement into a room devoted to mindfulness, complete with dim illumination and a string of rainbow Christmas-tree lights, allowing users to switch off the harsh fluorescent light overhead.

Oh! We're still saying "Christmas"? I guess it's good for balance when the religion you're practicing in public school is not Christian.

IN THE COMMENTS: About that Bob Roth quote — "It used to be that you wouldn’t say ‘meditation’ in polite company" — Terry says: "When was that? Just another bit of liberal fantasy." And I say: "After the Beatles had their bout with the Maharishi, being into TM marked you as a bit of a flake." That's why we all got the joke in "Annie Hall" in 1977, when Jeff Goldblum (unknown at the time) made that phone call:

Donald Trump has invaded my dreams.

Yesterday, in "Hitting the wall," I confessed that I watched 4 of the Sunday talk shows and listened to at least 3 phoned-in Trump interviews, hashing and rehashing the same few questions.

Last night, I dreamed that I was talking to someone about Trump. I was expressing what seemed to be rather interesting theories, none of which I can remember now, probably because there were no actual theories in the dream, but only the perception that I was explaining an interesting theory. And then I look over and see that Donald Trump has been eavesdropping, listening to my theory, and I'm able to talk to him about what he thinks about it. The dream seemed to have 3 more scenes, in each of which I'm talking about Trump and then realize that he's here again, eavesdropping. How strange it was that this keeps happening to me!

That's beyond the point in a dream where I ought to get to the thought that this is a dream and then to achieve a lucid dream. I can achieve a lucid dream, once the thought occurs within a dream, by trying to look at my own hands. Then comes the fun. I can do anything I want, even things that would violate social (and legal!) norms in real life. But I didn't get there in that series of dreams, even though I had good reason to arrive at the threshold realization that this must be a dream.

If I had begun my lucid dream, what would I have done?

ADDED: In the comments, tim in vermont said: "Stop thinking about Trump. Think about Walker." And I said:

Unlike the rest of America, we the people of Wisconsin have been thinking about Walker for 5 years. I can't remember ever dreaming about him. I don't normally dream about celebrities. That's why this dreaming about Trump is freaky. 

That reminded me of an old Isthmus advice column, published in back in 2012, blogged here, with a letter from a woman who loathed Scott Walker but kept having dreams — sexual dreams — about him. She signed her letter "Violated." The advice columnist gives stupid advice, but Meade does a comment over there that still amuses me after all these years: "Dear Violated: First of all you have not been violated. You have been the violaTOR... of your marriage, of your husband's due respect, and of your own fantasies."

And speaking of still being amused after all these years, today is the 6th anniversary of the wedding of Meade and Althouse.



ALSO: In the comments, Terry says: "It is not beyond possibility that Trump is using his psychic powers to invade the dreams of Althouse." And I say:

What if Trump is invading everyone's dreams? It's as good an explanation as any for what's been going on lately.

And have you ever considered that all of existence is a dream dreamed by Donald Trump? Perhaps we are all unreal, just scenery in his dream. The question then is whether he has achieved the lucid dream state and knows that he can do anything he wants to us, and what does he want?

UPDATE ADDED IN APRIL 2020: On May 9, 2016, I told you something extra about what I thought was this same dream:

I thanked him, effusively, for teaching us to have the courage to speak freely.

In that post, I also said:

I especially like the idea that Trump is teaching us that it works to speak forthrightly about what we think. That might not be true. It might work only for Trump — maybe he has some weird communication genius — but I hope people can absorb and process the lesson and make it work for themselves.

I did not go on to vote for Trump. I considered him too weird to be President (forcing me to vote for his opponent, whom I did not like at all). But he's meanT something important to me all this time, and I've been immunized from hating him. I always want to understand him, and I'm really listening to him.