title: Dream

text: The human dream experience and what to make of it has undergone sizable shifts over the course of history. Long ago, according to writings from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, dreams dictated post-dream behaviors to an extent sharply reduced in later millennia. These ancient writings about dreams highlight visitation dreams, where a dream figure, usually a deity or a prominent forebear, commands the dreamer to take specific actions and may predict future events. Framing the dream experience varies across cultures as well as through time.


title: Dream

text: Dreaming and sleep are intertwined. Dreams occur mainly in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake. Because REM sleep is detectable in many species, and because research suggests that all mammals experience REM, linking dreams to REM sleep has led to conjectures that animals dream. However, humans dream during non-REM sleep, also, and not all REM awakenings elicit dream reports. To be studied, a dream must first be reduced to a verbal report, which is an account of the subject's memory of the dream, not the subject's dream experience itself. So, dreaming by non-humans is currently unprovable, as is dreaming by human fetuses and pre-verbal infants.


title: Dream

text: Preserved writings from early Mediterranean civilizations indicate a relatively abrupt change in subjective dream experience between Bronze Age antiquity and the beginnings of the classical era.


title: Dream

text: In visitation dreams reported in ancient writings, dreamers were largely passive in their dreams, and visual content served primarily to frame authoritative auditory messaging. Gudea, the king of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash (reigned 2144–2124 BCE), rebuilt the temple of Ningirsu as the result of a dream in which he was told to do so. After antiquity, the passive hearing of visitation dreams largely gave way to visualized narratives in which the dreamer becomes a character who actively participates.


title: Dream

text: From the 1940s to 1985, Calvin S. Hall collected more than 50,000 dream reports at Western Reserve University. In 1966, Hall and Robert Van de Castle published "The Content Analysis of Dreams", in which they outlined a coding system to study 1,000 dream reports from college students. Results indicated that participants from varying parts of the world demonstrated similarity in their dream content. The only residue of antiquity's authoritative dream figure in the Hall and Van de Castle listing of dream characters is the inclusion of God in the category of prominent persons. Hall's complete dream reports were made publicly available in the mid-1990s by his protégé William Domhoff. More recent studies of dream reports, while providing more detail, continue to cite the Hall study favorably.


title: Dream

text: In the Hall study, the most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety. Other emotions included abandonment, anger, fear, joy, and happiness. Negative emotions were much more common than positive ones. The Hall data analysis showed that sexual dreams occur no more than 10% of the time and are more prevalent in young to mid-teens. Another study showed that 8% of both men's and women's dreams have sexual content. In some cases, sexual dreams may result in orgasms or nocturnal emissions. These are colloquially known as "wet dreams".


title: Dream

text: The visual nature of dreams is generally highly phantasmagoric; that is, different locations and objects continuously blend into each other. The visuals (including locations, people, and objects) are generally reflective of a person's memories and experiences, but conversation can take on highly exaggerated and bizarre forms. Some dreams may even tell elaborate stories wherein the dreamer enters entirely new, complex worlds and awakes with ideas, thoughts and feelings never experienced prior to the dream.


title: Dream

text: People who are blind from birth do not have visual dreams. Their dream contents are related to other senses like hearing, touch, smell and taste, whichever are present since birth.


title: Dream

text: Dream study is popular with scientists exploring the mind–brain problem. Some "propose to reduce aspects of dream phenomenology to neurobiology." But current science cannot specify dream physiology in detail. Protocols in most nations restrict human brain research to non-invasive procedures. In the United States, invasive brain procedures with a human subject are allowed only when these are deemed necessary in surgical treatment to address medical needs of the same human subject. Non-invasive measures of brain activity like electroencephalogram (EEG) voltage averaging or cerebral blood flow cannot identify small but influential neuronal populations. Also, fMRI signals are too slow to explain how brains compute in real time.


title: Dream

text: Scientists researching some brain functions can work around current restrictions by examining animal subjects. As stated by the Society for Neuroscience, "Because no adequate alternatives exist, much of this research must be done on animal subjects." However, since animal dreaming can be only inferred, not confirmed, animal studies yield no hard facts to illuminate the neurophysiology of dreams. Examining human subjects with brain lesions can provide clues, but the lesion method cannot discriminate between the effects of destruction and disconnection and cannot target specific neuronal groups in heterogeneous regions like the brain stem.


title: Dream

text: Denied precision tools, obliged to depend on imaging, much dream research has succumbed to the law of the instrument. Studies detect an increase of blood flow in a specific brain region and then credit that region with a role in generating dreams. But pooling study results has led to the newer conclusion that dreaming involves large numbers of regions and pathways, which likely are different for different dream events.


title: Dream

text: Image creation in the brain involves significant neural activity downstream from eye intake, and it is theorized that "the visual imagery of dreams is produced by activation during sleep of the same structures that generate complex visual imagery in waking perception."


title: Dream

text: Dreams present a running narrative rather than exclusively visual imagery. Following their work with split-brain subjects, Gazzaniga and LeDoux postulated, without attempting to specify the neural mechanisms, a "left-brain interpreter" that seeks to create a plausible narrative from whatever electro-chemical signals reach the brain's left hemisphere. Sleep research has determined that some brain regions fully active during waking are, during REM sleep, activated only in a partial or fragmentary way. Drawing on this knowledge, textbook author James W. Kalat explains, "[A] dream represents the brain's effort to make sense of sparse and distorted information... The cortex combines this haphazard input with whatever other activity was already occurring and does its best to synthesize a story that makes sense of the information." Neuroscientist Indre Viskontas is even more blunt, calling often bizarre dream content "just the result of your interpreter trying to create a story out of random neural signaling."


title: Dream

text: For humans in the pre-classical era, and continuing for some non-literate populations into modern times, dreams are believed to have functioned as revealers of truths sourced during sleep from gods or other external entities. Ancient Egyptians believed that dreams were the best way to receive divine revelation, and thus they would induce (or "incubate") dreams. They went to sanctuaries and slept on special "dream beds" in hope of receiving advice, comfort, or healing from the gods. From a Darwinian perspective dreams would have to fulfill some kind of biological requirement, provide some benefit for natural selection to take place, or at least have no negative impact on fitness. Robert (1886), a physician from Hamburg, was the first who suggested that dreams are a need and that they have the function to erase (a) sensory impressions that were not fully worked up, and (b) ideas that were not fully developed during the day. In dreams, incomplete material is either removed (suppressed) or deepened and included into memory. Freud, whose dream studies focused on interpreting dreams, not explaining how or why humans dream, disputed Robert's hypothesis and proposed that dreams preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled those wishes that otherwise would awaken the dreamer. Freud wrote that dreams "serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up. "Dreams are the" GUARDIANS "of sleep and not its disturbers.""


title: Dream

text: A turning point in theorizing about dream function came in 1953, when "Science" published the Aserinsky and Kleitman paper establishing REM sleep as a distinct phase of sleep and linking dreams to REM sleep. Until and even after publication of the Solms 2000 paper that certified the separability of REM sleep and dream phenomena, many studies purporting to uncover the function of dreams have in fact been studying not dreams but measurable REM sleep.


title: Dream

text: Hobson's and McCarley's 1977 activation-synthesis hypothesis, which proposed "a functional role for dreaming sleep in promoting some aspect of the learning process..." In 2010 a Harvard study was published showing experimental evidence that dreams were correlated with improved learning.


title: Dream

text: Crick's and Mitchison's 1983 "reverse learning" theory, which states that dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are offline, removing (suppressing) parasitic nodes and other "junk" from the mind during sleep.


title: Dream

text: Hartmann's 1995 proposal that dreams serve a "quasi-therapeutic" function, enabling the dreamer to process trauma in a safe place.


title: Dream

text: Revonsuo's 2000 threat simulation hypothesis, whose premise is that during much of human evolution, physical and interpersonal threats were serious, giving reproductive advantage to those who survived them. Dreaming aided survival by replicating these threats and providing the dreamer with practice in dealing with them.


title: Dream

text: Eagleman's and Vaughn's 2021 defensive activation theory, which says that, given the brain's neuroplasticity, dreams evolved as a visual hallucinatory activity during sleep's extended periods of darkness, busying the occipital lobe and thereby protecting it from possible appropriation by other, non-vision, sense operations.


title: Dream

text: Dreams figure prominently in major world religions. The dream experience for early humans, according to one interpretation, gave rise to the notion of a human "soul," a central element in much religious thought. J. W. Dunne wrote: But there can be no reasonable doubt that the idea of a soul must have first arisen in the mind of primitive man as a result of observation of his dreams. Ignorant as he was, he could have come to no other conclusion but that, in dreams, he left his sleeping body in one universe and went wandering off into another. It is considered that, but for that savage, the idea of such a thing as a 'soul' would never have even occurred to mankind...


title: Dream

text: In the Mandukya Upanishad, part of the Veda scriptures of Indian Hinduism, a dream is one of three states that the soul experiences during its lifetime, the other two states being the waking state and the sleep state. The earliest Upanishads, written before 300 BCE, emphasize two meanings of dreams. The first says that dreams are merely expressions of inner desires. The second is the belief of the soul leaving the body and being guided until awakened.


title: Dream

text: In Judaism, dreams are considered part of the experience of the world that can be interpreted and from which lessons can be garnered. It is discussed in the Talmud, Tractate Berachot 55–60.


title: Dream

text: The ancient Hebrews connected their dreams heavily with their religion, though the Hebrews were monotheistic and believed that dreams were the voice of one God alone. Hebrews also differentiated between good dreams (from God) and bad dreams (from evil spirits). The Hebrews, like many other ancient cultures, incubated dreams in order to receive a divine revelation. For example, the Hebrew prophet Samuel would "lie down and sleep in the temple at Shiloh before the Ark and receive the word of the Lord". Most of the dreams in the Bible are in the Book of Genesis.


title: Dream

text: Christians mostly shared the beliefs of the Hebrews and thought that dreams were of a supernatural character because the Old Testament includes frequent stories of dreams with divine inspiration. The most famous of these dream stories was Jacob's dream of a ladder that stretches from Earth to Heaven. Many Christians preach that God can speak to people through their dreams. The famous glossary, the Somniale Danielis, written in the name of Daniel, attempted to teach Christian populations to interpret their dreams.


title: Dream

text: Iain R. Edgar has researched the role of dreams in Islam. He has argued that dreams play an important role in the history of Islam and the lives of Muslims, since dream interpretation is the only way that Muslims can receive revelations from God since the death of the last prophet, Muhammad. According to Edgar, Islam classifies three types of dreams. Firstly, there is the true dream (al-ru’ya), then the false dream, which may come from the devil (shaytan), and finally, the meaningless everyday dream (hulm). This last dream could be brought forth by the dreamer's ego or base appetite based on what they experienced in the real world. The true dream is often indicated by Islam's hadith tradition. In one narration by Aisha, the wife of the Prophet, it is said that the Prophet's dreams would come true like the ocean's waves. Just as in its predecessors, the Quran also recounts the story of Joseph and his unique ability to interpret dreams.


title: Dream

text: In Buddhism, ideas about dreams are similar to the classical and folk traditions in South Asia. The same dream is sometimes experienced by multiple people, as in the case of the Buddha-to-be, before he is leaving his home. It is described in the "Mahāvastu" that several of the Buddha's relatives had premonitory dreams preceding this. Some dreams are also seen to transcend time: the Buddha-to-be has certain dreams that are the same as those of previous Buddhas, the "Lalitavistara" states. In Buddhist literature, dreams often function as a "signpost" motif to mark certain stages in the life of the main character.


title: Dream

text: In Chinese history, people wrote of two vital aspects of the soul of which one is freed from the body during slumber to journey in a dream realm, while the other remained in the body. This belief and dream interpretation had been questioned since early times, such as by the philosopher Wang Chong ().


title: Dream

text: The Babylonians and Assyrians divided dreams into "good," which were sent by the gods, and "bad," sent by demons. A surviving collection of dream omens entitled "Iškar Zaqīqu" records various dream scenarios as well as prognostications of what will happen to the person who experiences each dream, apparently based on previous cases. Some list different possible outcomes, based on occasions in which people experienced similar dreams with different results. The Greeks shared their beliefs with the Egyptians on how to interpret good and bad dreams, and the idea of incubating dreams. Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, also sent warnings and prophecies to those who slept at shrines and temples. The earliest Greek beliefs about dreams were that their gods physically visited the dreamers, where they entered through a keyhole, exiting the same way after the divine message was given.


title: Dream

text: Antiphon wrote the first known Greek book on dreams in the 5th century BCE. In that century, other cultures influenced Greeks to develop the belief that souls left the sleeping body. Hippocrates () had a simple dream theory: during the day, the soul receives images; during the night, it produces images. Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) believed dreams caused physiological activity. He thought dreams could analyze illness and predict diseases. Marcus Tullius Cicero, for his part, believed that all dreams are produced by thoughts and conversations a dreamer had during the preceding days. Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis" described a lengthy dream vision, which in turn was commented on by Macrobius in his "Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis".


title: Dream

text: Herodotus in his "The Histories", writes "The visions that occur to us in dreams are, more often than not, the things we have been concerned about during the day."


title: Dream

text: The Dreaming is a common term within the animist creation narrative of indigenous Australians for a personal, or group, creation and for what may be understood as the "timeless time" of formative creation and perpetual creating.


title: Dream

text: Some Indigenous American tribes and Mexican populations believe that dreams are a way of visiting and having contact with their ancestors. Some Native American tribes have used vision quests as a rite of passage, fasting and praying until an anticipated guiding dream was received, to be shared with the rest of the tribe upon their return.


title: Dream

text: Beginning in the late 19th century, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, theorized that dreams reflect the dreamer's unconscious mind and specifically that dream content is shaped by unconscious wish fulfillment. He argued that important unconscious desires often relate to early childhood memories and experiences. Carl Jung and others expanded on Freud's idea that dream content reflects the dreamer's unconscious desires.


title: Dream

text: Dream interpretation can be a result of subjective ideas and experiences. One study found that most people believe that "their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths". The researchers surveyed students in the United States, South Korea, and India, and found that 74% of Indians, 65% of South Koreans and 56% of Americans believed their dream content provided them with meaningful insight into their unconscious beliefs and desires. This Freudian view of dreaming was believed significantly more than theories of dreaming that attribute dream content to memory consolidation, problem-solving, or as a byproduct of unrelated brain activity. The same study found that people attribute more importance to dream content than to similar thought content that occurs while they are awake. Americans were more likely to report that they would intentionally miss their flight if they dreamt of their plane crashing than if they thought of their plane crashing the night before flying (while awake), and that they would be as likely to miss their flight if they dreamt of their plane crashing the night before their flight as if there was an actual plane crash on the route they intended to take. Participants in the study were more likely to perceive dreams to be meaningful when the content of dreams was in accordance with their beliefs and desires while awake. They were more likely to view a positive dream about a friend to be meaningful than a positive dream about someone they disliked, for example, and were more likely to view a negative dream about a person they disliked as meaningful than a negative dream about a person they liked.


title: Dream

text: According to surveys, it is common for people to feel their dreams are predicting subsequent life events. Psychologists have explained these experiences in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto life experiences. The multi-faceted nature of dreams makes it easy to find connections between dream content and real events. The term "veridical dream" has been used to indicate dreams that reveal or contain truths not yet known to the dreamer, whether future events or secrets.


title: Dream

text: In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future. Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.


title: Dream

text: Graphic artists, writers and filmmakers all have found dreams to offer a rich vein for creative expression. In the West, artists' depictions of dreams in Renaissance and Baroque art often were related to Biblical narrative. Especially preferred by visual artists were the Jacob's Ladder dream in Genesis and St. Joseph's dreams in the Gospel according to Matthew.


title: Dream

text: Many later graphic artists have depicted dreams, including Japanese woodblock artist Hokusai (1760–1849) and Western European painters Rousseau (1844–1910), Picasso (1881–1973), and Dali (1904–1989).


title: Dream

text: In literature, dream frames were frequently used in medieval allegory to justify the narrative; "The Book of the Duchess" and "The Vision Concerning Piers Plowman" are two such dream visions. Even before them, in antiquity, the same device had been used by Cicero and Lucian of Samosata.


title: Dream

text: Dreams have also featured in fantasy and speculative fiction since the 19th century. One of the best-known dream worlds is Wonderland from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", as well as Looking-Glass Land from its sequel, "Through the Looking-Glass". Unlike many dream worlds, Carroll's logic is like that of actual dreams, with transitions and flexible causality.


title: Dream

text: Other fictional dream worlds include the Dreamlands of H. P. Lovecraft's "Dream Cycle" and "The Neverending Story"s world of Fantastica, which includes places like the Desert of Lost Dreams, the Sea of Possibilities and the Swamps of Sadness. Dreamworlds, shared hallucinations and other alternate realities feature in a number of works by Philip K. Dick, such as "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and "Ubik". Similar themes were explored by Jorge Luis Borges, for instance in "The Circular Ruins".


title: Dream

text: Modern popular culture often conceives of dreams, as did Freud, as expressions of the dreamer's deepest fears and desires. In speculative fiction, the line between dreams and reality may be blurred even more in service to the story. Dreams may be psychically invaded or manipulated ("Dreamscape", 1984; the "Nightmare on Elm Street" films, 1984–2010; "Inception", 2010) or even come literally true (as in "The Lathe of Heaven", 1971).


title: Dream

text: Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one's state while dreaming. In this state the dreamer may often have some degree of control over their own actions within the dream or even the characters and the environment of the dream. Dream control has been reported to improve with practiced deliberate lucid dreaming, but the ability to control aspects of the dream is not necessary for a dream to qualify as "lucid"—a lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer knows they are dreaming. The occurrence of lucid dreaming has been scientifically verified.


title: Dream

text: In 1975, psychologist Keith Hearne successfully recorded a communication from a dreamer experiencing a lucid dream. On April 12, 1975, after agreeing to move his eyes left and right upon becoming lucid, the subject and Hearne's co-author on the resulting article, Alan Worsley, successfully carried out this task. Years later, psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge conducted similar work including:


title: Dream

text: Communication between two dreamers has also been documented. The processes involved included EEG monitoring, ocular signaling, incorporation of reality in the form of red light stimuli and a coordinating website. The website tracked when both dreamers were dreaming and sent the stimulus to one of the dreamers where it was incorporated into the dream. This dreamer, upon becoming lucid, signaled with eye movements; this was detected by the website whereupon the stimulus was sent to the second dreamer, invoking incorporation into that dreamer's dream.


title: Dream

text: The recollection of dreams is extremely unreliable, though it is a skill that can be trained. Dreams can usually be recalled if a person is awakened while dreaming. Women tend to have more frequent dream recall than men. Dreams that are difficult to recall may be characterized by relatively little affect, and factors such as salience, arousal, and interference play a role in dream recall. Often, a dream may be recalled upon viewing or hearing a random trigger or stimulus. The salience hypothesis proposes that dream content that is salient, that is, novel, intense, or unusual, is more easily remembered. There is considerable evidence that vivid, intense, or unusual dream content is more frequently recalled. A dream journal can be used to assist dream recall, for personal interest or psychotherapy purposes.


title: Dream

text: Adults report remembering around two dreams per week, on average. Unless a dream is particularly vivid and if one wakes during or immediately after it, the content of the dream is typically not remembered. Recording or reconstructing dreams may one day assist with dream recall. Using the permitted non-invasive technologies, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electromyography (EMG), researchers have been able to identify basic dream imagery, dream speech activity and dream motor behavior (such as walking and hand movements).


title: Dream

text: In line with the salience hypothesis, there is considerable evidence that people who have more vivid, intense or unusual dreams show better recall. There is evidence that continuity of consciousness is related to recall. Specifically, people who have vivid and unusual experiences during the day tend to have more memorable dream content and hence better dream recall. People who score high on measures of personality traits associated with creativity, imagination, and fantasy, such as openness to experience, daydreaming, fantasy proneness, absorption, and hypnotic susceptibility, tend to show more frequent dream recall. There is also evidence for continuity between the bizarre aspects of dreaming and waking experience. That is, people who report more bizarre experiences during the day, such as people high in schizotypy (psychosis proneness), have more frequent dream recall and also report more frequent nightmares.


title: Dream

text: Some philosophers have proposed that what we think of as the "real world" could be or is an illusion (an idea known as the skeptical hypothesis about ontology). The first recorded mention of the idea was in the 4th century BCE by Zhuangzi, and in Eastern philosophy, the problem has been named the "Zhuangzi Paradox."


title: Dream

text: He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman—how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.


title: Dream

text: The idea also is discussed in Hindu and Buddhist writings. It was formally introduced to Western philosophy by Descartes in the 17th century in his "Meditations on First Philosophy".


title: Dream

text: Dreams of absent-minded transgression (DAMT) are dreams wherein the dreamer absent-mindedly performs an action that he or she has been trying to stop (one classic example is of a quitting smoker having dreams of lighting a cigarette). Subjects who have had DAMT have reported waking with intense feelings of guilt. One study found a positive association between having these dreams and successfully stopping the behavior.


title: Dream

text: Hypnogogic and hypnopompic dreams, dreamlike states shortly after falling asleep and shortly before awakening, and dreams during stage 2 of NREM-sleep, also occur, but are shorter than REM-dreams.


title: Dream

text: A daydream is a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake. There are many different types of daydreams, and there is no consistent definition amongst psychologists. The general public also uses the term for a broad variety of experiences. Research by Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett has found that people who experience vivid dreamlike mental images reserve the word for these, whereas many other people refer to milder imagery, realistic future planning, review of memories or just "spacing out"—i.e. one's mind going relatively blank—when they talk about "daydreaming".


title: Dream

text: While daydreaming has long been derided as a lazy, non-productive pastime, it is now commonly acknowledged that daydreaming can be constructive in some contexts. There are numerous examples of people in creative or artistic careers, such as composers, novelists and filmmakers, developing new ideas through daydreaming. Similarly, research scientists, mathematicians and physicists have developed new ideas by daydreaming about their subject areas.


title: Dream

text: A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are perceptions in a conscious and awake state, in the absence of external stimuli, and have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space. The latter definition distinguishes hallucinations from the related phenomena of dreaming, which does not involve wakefulness.


title: Dream

text: A nightmare is an unpleasant dream that can cause a strong negative emotional response from the mind, typically fear or horror, but also despair, anxiety and great sadness. The dream may contain situations of danger, discomfort, psychological or physical terror. Sufferers usually awaken in a state of distress and may be unable to return to sleep for a prolonged period of time.


title: Dream

text: A night terror, also known as a sleep terror or "pavor nocturnus", is a parasomnia disorder that predominantly affects children, causing feelings of terror or dread. Night terrors should not be confused with nightmares, which are bad dreams that cause the feeling of horror or fear.


title: Dream

text: One theory of déjà vu attributes the feeling of having previously seen or experienced something to having dreamed about a similar situation or place, and forgetting about it until one seems to be mysteriously reminded of the situation or the place while awake.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: June Gibbons (born 11 April 1963) and Jennifer Gibbons (11 April 1963 – 9 March 1993) were identical twins who grew up in Wales. They became known as "The Silent Twins", since they only communicated with each other. They wrote works of fiction. Both women were admitted to Broadmoor Hospital, where they were held for eleven years.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: June and Jennifer were the daughters of Caribbean immigrants Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons. The Gibbons family moved from Barbados to the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, as part of the Windrush generation. Gloria was a housewife and Aubrey worked as a technician for the Royal Air Force. The couple also had three other children: Greta was born in 1957, David was born in 1959, and Rosie was born in 1967.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: In 1960 Aubrey went to stay with a relative in Coventry and soon qualified as a staff technician. Gloria followed, with Greta and David, several months later. The twins were born on 11 April 1963 at a military hospital in Aden, Yemen, where their father had been deployed. The family soon relocated—first to England, and in 1974, to Haverfordwest, Wales. The twin sisters were inseparable and their language, a sped-up Bajan Creole, made it difficult for people to understand them.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: The family's children were the only Black children in the community. Both of the children were often ostracized at school. This proved to be traumatic for the twins, eventually causing their school administrators to dismiss them early each day so that they might avoid bullying. Their language became even more idiosyncratic at this time. Soon it was unintelligible to others. Their language, or idioglossia, qualified as an example of cryptophasia, exemplified by the twins' simultaneous actions, which often mirrored each other. The twins became increasingly reserved and eventually spoke to no one except each other and their younger sister Rose.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: The girls continued to attend school, although they refused to read or write. In 1974, a medic administering vaccinations at the school noted their impassive behaviour and notified a child psychologist. The twins began seeing a succession of therapists who tried unsuccessfully to get them to communicate with others. They were sent to separate boarding schools in an attempt to break their isolation, but the pair became catatonic and entirely withdrawn when parted.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: When they were reunited, the two spent several years isolating themselves in their bedroom, engaged in elaborate plays with dolls. They created many plays and stories in a sort of soap opera style, reading some of them aloud on tape as gifts for their sister Rose. Inspired by a pair of gift diaries on Christmas 1979, they began their writing careers. They sent away for a mail order course in creative writing, and each kept an extensive diary and wrote a number of stories, poems and novels. Set primarily in the United States and particularly in Malibu, California, the stories involve young men and women who exhibit strange and often criminal behaviour.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: June wrote a novel titled "The Pepsi-Cola Addict", in which the high-school hero is seduced by a teacher, then sent away to a reformatory where a homosexual guard makes a play for him. The two girls pooled together their unemployment benefits in order to get the novel published by a vanity press. This is the only accessible work by either of the Gibbons sisters, which remained unavailable for purchase and held in only five libraries in the world until October 2022, when it was republished as a limited edition print by Cashen's Gap. It will also be published as a paperback in May 2023 by MIT Press. Their other attempts to publish novels and stories were unsuccessful, although Cashen's Gap is planning future releases by June and Jennifer Gibbons. In Jennifer's "The Pugilist", a physician is so eager to save his child's life that he kills the family dog to obtain its heart for a transplant. The dog's spirit lives on in the child and ultimately has its revenge against the father. Jennifer also wrote "Discomania", the story of a young woman who discovers that the atmosphere of a local disco incites patrons to insane violence. She followed up with "The Taxi-Driver's Son", a radio play called "Postman and Postwoman", and several short stories. June Gibbons is considered to be an outsider writer.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: In their later teenage years, the twins began using drugs and alcohol. In 1981, the girls committed a number of crimes including vandalism, petty theft and arson, which led to their being admitted to Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security mental health hospital. The twins were sentenced to indefinite detention under the Mental Health Act 1983. They remained at Broadmoor for eleven years. June later blamed this lengthy sentence on their selective muteness: "Juvenile delinquents get two years in prison... We got twelve years of hell because we didn't speak... We lost hope, really. I wrote a letter to the Queen, asking her to get us out. But we were trapped." Placed on high doses of antipsychotic medications, they found themselves unable to concentrate; Jennifer apparently developed tardive dyskinesia (a neurological disorder resulting in involuntary, repetitive movements). Their medications were apparently adjusted sufficiently to allow them to continue the copious diaries they had begun in 1980, and they were able to join the hospital choir, but they lost most of their interest in creative writing.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: The case achieved notoriety due to newspaper coverage by journalist Marjorie Wallace of "The Sunday Times". Wallace later wrote a book about the two titled "The Silent Twins", published in 1986 by Prentice Hall.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: According to Wallace, the girls had a longstanding agreement that if one died, the other must begin to speak and live a normal life. During their stay in the hospital, they began to believe that it was "necessary" for one of them to die, and after much discussion, Jennifer agreed to make the sacrifice of her life. In March 1993, the twins were transferred from Broadmoor to the more open Caswell Clinic in Bridgend, Wales. On arrival Jennifer could not be roused. She was taken to the hospital where she died soon after of acute myocarditis, a sudden inflammation of the heart. There was no evidence of drugs or poison in her system.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: At the inquest, June revealed that Jennifer had been acting strangely for about a day before their release; her speech had been slurring, and she had said that she was dying. On the trip to Caswell, she had slept in June's lap with her eyes open. On a visit a few days later, Wallace recounted that June "was in a strange mood". She said, "I'm free at last, liberated, and at last Jennifer has given up her life for me". She also described it as a tsunami, washing her of her sins and being free of her sister. Jennifer was interred in St Martin's Cemetery, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: After Jennifer's death, June gave interviews with "Harper's Bazaar" and "The Guardian". By 2008, she was living quietly and independently, near her parents in West Wales. She was no longer monitored by psychiatric services, has been accepted by her community, and sought to put the past behind her. A 2016 interview with her sister Greta revealed that the family had been deeply troubled by the girls' incarceration. She blamed Broadmoor for ruining their lives and for neglecting Jennifer's health. She had wanted to file a lawsuit against Broadmoor, but Aubrey and Gloria refused, saying it would not bring Jennifer back.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: The pair were the subject of the 1986 television drama "The Silent Twins", broadcast on BBC2 as part of its "Screen Two" series, and an "Inside Story" documentary "Silent Twin – Without My Shadow", which aired on BBC1 in September 1994. A play based on Wallace's book, titled "Speechless", debuted in London in 2011.


title: June and Jennifer Gibbons

text: Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczyńska directed a feature film with the twins as the subject, starring Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance, based on the 1986 book "The Silent Twins" by Marjorie Wallace. It will be the director's English language debut. The film will be an international co-production between the UK's 42 Management & Production and Poland's Mandats and backed by the Polish Film Institute and Moderator Inwestycje.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: The Eternals are a fictional extraterrestrial race of humanoids appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. They were created by Jack Kirby, making their first appearance in "The Eternals" #1 (July 1976).


title: Eternals (comics)

text: In the Marvel Universe, the Eternals are an offshoot of humanity known as Homo immortalis which were created one million years ago by the enigmatic alien Celestials to defend Earth with their superhuman powers and abilities. Their primary adversaries are the Deviants, who share a similar origin and pose a regular threat to humanity. Due to their virtual immortality, Eternals have largely secluded themselves from humans, with their god-like status forming the basis of various mythological figures around the world.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Since their appearance, the Eternals have had several of their own series, in addition to crossing into other titles, such as "Thor" and "X-Men". They made their debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with their own feature film "Eternals", directed by Chloé Zhao, which was released November 5, 2021.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: In 1970, Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics to work at DC Comics, where he began the saga of the New Gods, an epic story involving mythological and science fiction concepts. Though he had planned for a definitive ending, the series was abruptly cancelled. Upon his return to Marvel, Kirby continued exploring his interest in high-concept science fiction through "The Eternals".


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Originally titled "The Celestials", Marvel changed the title to "Return of the Gods", whose comic book cover bore stylistics similarities to Erich von Daniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?". To avoid potential legal issues, the name was again changed to “Eternals". The Eternals' saga was thematically similar to the New Gods', and the series was also eventually canceled without resolving many of its plots. Writers Roy Thomas and Mark Gruenwald used the Eternals in a "Thor" storyline that concluded in "Thor" #301, resolving those lingering plotlines. Subsequent to the "Thor" storyline, the Eternals (and the mythology connected to them) have appeared or been mentioned in numerous Marvel comics. In particular, the Celestials' experiment on humanity has been used to explain how certain humans can develop super-powers. The Titanians (created by Jim Starlin) and Uranians (created by Stan Lee) were later retconned as being Eternals as well.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: "The Eternals" returned for a 12-issue miniseries in 1985 under writer Peter B. Gillis and penciler Sal Buscema. According to comic-book historian Peter Sanderson, "editor in chief Jim Shooter disliked Gillis’s scripts, so Walter Simonson wrote the final four issues."


title: Eternals (comics)

text: In 2000, a one-shot comic called "New Eternals: Apocalypse Now" #1 featured an older conflict between the Eternals and X-Men villain Apocalypse. In 2003, writer Chuck Austen and artist Kev Walker rebooted the franchise for Marvel's mature readers-focused MAX imprint, resulting in "The Eternal".


title: Eternals (comics)

text: "The Eternal" series from Marvel's MAX imprint written by Chuck Austen was based on an idea he had been working on for a while: "I pitched this back when I first started working at Marvel, but Joe Quesada was against doing it. He saw no future in this particular old Kirby concept." Austen described the plot as involving "Ikaeden, the leader of the Eternals, who arrives on Earth at the dawn of man, and evolves humankind from homo-erectus so he can use them as slaves to mine raw materials for the Celestials, his bosses, basically," as well as "Kurassus, who is the second-in-command of the mining mission, and who is determined to undermine Ikaeden and kill Ikaeden's precious slave-girl and son." In an interview with Newsarama he gave an outline of his planned plot:


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Neil Gaiman, with artist John Romita, Jr., created a 2006 miniseries, which helped bring the Eternals' role in the modern Marvel Universe up-to-date. Originally solicited as a six-issue series, an extra issue was added to the run, because, according to editor Nick Lowe, "There was too much story to fit into the structure we set for ourselves. Neil was starting issue five and told me that he might need a seventh issue. He just had too much story to fit in six issues (even with the first and sixth double-sized)."


title: Eternals (comics)

text: A fourth "Eternals" series ran as an ongoing series for nine issues and one annual from August 2008 – March 2009.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: The Eternals returned in Jason Aaron's "Avengers", a story arc involving the Dark Celestials, which saw the Eternals all killed in the fourth issue. However, the characters were resurrected in their new ongoing series launched in January 2021 by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Esad Ribić.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: When the Celestials visited Earth one million years ago and performed genetic experiments on early proto-humans, they created two divergent races: the long-lived Eternals, and the genetically unstable and monstrously grotesque Deviants. These experiments also led to the capacity for super-powered mutations in humans. They also performed this experiment on other planets (such as the Kree and Skrull homeworlds) with similar results.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Despite looking human, Eternals are much longer-lived (but were not originally fully immortal) and that kept them from having much contact with their human cousins. Eternals have a low birth rate; they can interbreed with humans but the result is always a normal human (although Joey Athena, son of Thena and a normal human seems to have become an Eternal with long lived properties and powers). Despite this, the Eternals have in general protected the human race, especially from the Deviants, with whom they have always had an enmity. The Eternals also developed advanced technology.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Long ago, a civil war broke out amongst the Eternals over whether to conquer the other races, with one faction led by Kronos and the other by his warlike brother, Uranos. Kronos's side prevailed, and Uranos and his defeated faction left Earth and journeyed to Uranus where they built a colony. Some of Uranos's group soon tried to return to Earth to re-kindle the war, but they were attacked by a passing Kree ship and forced to land on Saturn's moon Titan. There they built another colony (experiments performed by Kree scientists on a captured Eternal led them to go to Earth and perform their own genetic experiments on a group of humans, thus creating the Inhumans.)


title: Eternals (comics)

text: One day, Kronos's experiments in cosmic energy caused a catastrophic release of energy throughout the Eternals' city, Titanos, destroying it, activating latent genes in the Eternals, and disintegrating the scientist's body. The Eternals now found they could channel large quantities of cosmic energy themselves, granting them near-godlike power. The accident left Kronos in an immaterial state, so a new leader had to be chosen. For the first time, the Eternals merged into a single being, the Uni-Mind, to decide which of Kronos's sons, Zuras or A'lars should be the new leader. Zuras was chosen to be the Prime Eternal, and A'lars chose to leave Earth to avoid causing another civil war, and journeyed to Titan.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: There he found that a war (allegedly caused by the Dragon of the Moon) had erupted on Titan and wiped out all but one member, a woman named Sui-San. A'lars fell in love with her, and in time they repopulated Titan. Due to the mix of activated genes from A'lars and unactivated ones from Sui-San, these new Titanian Eternals are not as powerful or immortal as Terran Eternals, but are more powerful and longer-lived than the earlier pre-civil war Titanian Eternals.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: While Zuras ruled, three new Eternal cities were built. The first was Olympia, located in the mountains of Greece, near the main portal between the Earth dimension and the Olympians' home dimension, which led many ancient Greeks to confuse some of the godlike Eternals with members of the Olympian pantheon. Eventually, an agreement was reached with the gods where some Eternals, such as Thena, would impersonate the Olympians before their worshipers. The other two Eternal cities were Polaria (located in Siberia) and Oceana (in the Pacific).


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Eighteen-thousand years ago, the Celestials returned to Earth. The Deviants attacked them, but the Celestials counterattacked, resulting in the sinking of Mu and Atlantis, and much worldwide havoc. The Eternals helped rescue many humans. An Eternal named Valkin was entrusted by the Celestials with an artifact of great power for safekeeping.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: At some point during the early centuries, Ikaris and the Eternals came into conflict with the immortal mutant, Apocalypse. This conflict ended when Ikaris and the Eternals defeated him. Ikaris believed Apocalypse was dead.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: 1,000 years ago, the Asgardian god Thor encountered some Eternals, but the encounter was erased from his mind, to prevent him from learning about the Celestials, who were about to return to Earth. An Eternal named Ajak became the Celestials' spokesperson, and put himself to sleep when the Celestials left, to wait for their return 1,000 years later to judge humanity.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: During the early 20th century, a human scientist made contact with the Uranian Eternals and was taken to live with them along with his young son, who would later become Marvel Boy. The Uranians were eventually killed by Deathurge. After World War II, some Eternals allied with humans and Deviants to form the Damocles Foundation, which tried to create a new breed of superhuman to rule Earth. Some Eternals, such as Makkari, were also active as superheroes, or living amongst humans, keeping their true nature hidden. The Eternals also helped to move the Inhumans' city to the Himalayas to keep it hidden.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: At some point, Thanos of the Eternals of Titan nearly destroyed their colony, but they rebuilt it, and would help Earth's heroes to oppose him on several occasions.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: In recent times, Ikaris met the archaeologist Daniel Damian and his daughter Margo, and accompanied them into an old Eternal city in the Andes, where he awakened Ajak. Ajak began the process to receive the Celestials. These movements alerted the Deviants, who decided to attack New York and to provoke fear in the humans against the coming celestials. When the Celestials returned to judge the worthiness of their creations a few years ago, the Eternals found themselves clashing with the Deviants again, and decided to publicly reveal their existence to humanity. Zuras feared what would happen if the Celestials judged unfavorably. They encountered Thor again, and were attacked by Thor's father Odin and the Olympian gods, who tried to prevent their interfering with the gods' plans to attack the Celestials. Eventually, the Eternals decided to help the gods and formed a Uni-Mind to assist the Destroyer's assault on the Celestials.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: They were forced to dissolve back into Eternals by the Celestials, and the shock of the attack killed Zuras. Before his spirit fully left the material plane, he instructed his daughter Thena to take his people to explore space. Since then, the Eternals have helped Earth's heroes, particularly the Avengers, against several menaces. They also discovered the existence of the Titanian Eternals.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Some time later, the Deviant's aristocracy, led by Brother Tode, attacked Olympia, kidnapping the Eternals and intending to disintegrate them. The hero Iron Man (James Rhodes) rescued the Eternals and helped them defeat the deviants. Then the Eternals transformed the deviant's aristocracy into a synthetic cube, killing them. The Eternals formed a Uni-Mind to discuss their future on earth, after which most of the Eternals (led by Valkin), went to the stars. But a handful – those most heavily involved in Earthly affairs – remained behind on Earth. Thena came to lead the remaining Eternals but she wasn't very respected by her subjects.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: With the ascension of Priestlord Ghaur as leader of the Deviants, the Eternals joined the Avengers in defeating him after he absorbed the power of a Celestial and tried to gain godhood. Meanwhile, Ikaris questioned Thena for her poor choices as leader of the Eternals. She was subtly being controlled by a brain mine put in her by Kro. After a special ceremony, Ikaris succeeded her as leader of the Earth's Eternals. The lover of Ikaris, Margo Damian, was captured by Ghaur's minions and was killed as a result of a Deviant experiment on her.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: After the death of his daughter, Daniel Damian decided to take revenge against the Deviants and the Eternals. With the help of ancient Eternal machines, he forged a prophecy to incite war between the two races and transformed Ajak in a murderous monster. When his plan was discovered by the Eternals, Ajak reverted to his original form and regretted the killings that he had committed, so he killed Damian and himself.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: The Eternals Gilgamesh and Sersi briefly became part of the Superhero team Avengers. When Sersi became sick with the "Mahd Wy'ry" disease, a uncurable degenerating Eternal disease, Ikaris and other Eternals tried to bring her to Olympia and perform a rite of Cleansing. Sersi rejected the idea, on the basis that the ritual was designed to kill the infected Eternal, and solicited his family to perform the "Gann Josin" bond between her and her lover the Black Knight. Ikaris was furious and performed the bond without consent of the Knight. Later Thena and other Eternals helped the Avengers in the battle against the Gatherers and Proctor, who was an alternate Black Knight and who infected Sersi with the "Mahd Wy'ry" disease for spite.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: The Eternals fought once more against Ghaur and the Deviants, with the help of the Heroes for Hire. The mad priest tried to form an "Anti-Mind" with some captured eternals, to defeat any invasion of the Celestials. Later they were at odds with Apocalypse and briefly posed as a superhero team called "the New Breed".


title: Eternals (comics)

text: The Eternals began reappearing on Earth in Neil Gaiman's new take on the immortal beings. Most seemed to have no memory of their own history and abilities, except Ikaris, and few records of their previous appearances remain. The Eternal known as Sprite, angered at having to remain an eleven-year-old and unable to grow any further, managed to change reality, inducing collective amnesia in the Eternals as well as distorting their perceptions of history. He used a Uni-Mind with the Dreaming Celestial and other unwilling eternals to achieve his desire, transforming himself in a mortal 11 years old kid. This can possibly be seen as Gaiman's attempt to retcon some details of the characters; early stories as well as officially published statistics portrayed most of the current generation of Eternals – such as Ikaris and Thena – as being "only" several tens of thousands of years old but Gaiman's run describes them as being closer to a million years old.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Makkari was working as a medicine intern, Sersi was planning to kickstart her party planner business. Meanwhile, Thena was working as a weapons scientist in Stark Industries. She was also married and had a young son. Druig was apparently alive again and he was the Deputy minister of Vorozheika (a fictional post-soviet country). Ikaris contacted Makkari, but he did not believe the eternal's words about the past and rejected him. Then, Makkari met Sersi again, become attracted to her and accompanied her to a party that she was organizing for Druig of Vorozheika. Thena assisted too. In the party, the amnesic Eternals are attacked by mercenaries of another faction of Vorozheika government. The reunion of the four Eternals triggered a recovery of their powers. Ikaris was captured by two deviants and they were experimenting in ways of destroy his body, until that they seemingly killed him with a particle accelerator. However, Ikaris was resurrected by a special machine in the Antarctic base of the Eternals. With their returned powers, Druig took control of Vorozheika. Thena frees herself from the mercenaries that captured her and Makkari went to talk to Sprite, who now was a young celebrity. Sprite trapped the amnesic Eternal and told him his plans and the reasons why he did the reality changes.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: It was uncovered that Ajak had been revived too and that it had been he who contracted the two Deviants. He succeeded in awakening an amnesic Zuras. The two Deviants managed to kidnap Sprite, and the trapped Makkari, using him to awaken the Dreaming Celestial, who was under Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Upon awakening, the Celestial decided to judge humanity. The Eternals, now remembering their past, arrived in San Francisco, and realizing that they cannot stop the Celestial, decided to leave him be. Makkari was transformed by the Celestial into his spokesman. The Deviants called him "Skadrach", and respected him, because the Dreaming Celestial was adored as their god. Sprite was killed by Zuras because of his actions and the rest of the Eternals then embarked on a quest to find and recruit the other members who had similarly forgotten their true selves due to Sprite's trickery.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: The Dreaming Celestial told Makkari the reasons for the creation of the Eternals and Deviants, and helped him to find more Eternals. Ajak, jealous of Makkari's new function, manipulated Gilgamesh into killing Makkari. With help of Sersi, Makkari was reborn and the Dreaming Celestial stopped a planned autodestruction. Then the Eternals stopped the invasion of the Horde.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: With their numbers completed, and with the new information given by the Dreaming Celestial, the Eternals debated what to do with mankind and the Deviants—leave them alone, protect them or rule them. They formed another Unimind to decide what to do and decided to hold themselves apart from the mortal world.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: When Celestials literally began "raining" down on Earth, the Avengers are forced to reunite again and just in time to see the arrival of the Final Host which is composed of Dark Celestials that are each physically unique and were the ones who easily took down their brethren. In an attempt to learn more about these new breed of Celestials, Iron Man and Doctor Strange travelled to the Mountains of Greece in order to try to get some answers from The Eternals. When Stark and Strange arrived, there were no signs of life to be found as almost all of the Eternals were dead, with Strange deducing that the wounds were self-inflicted. Only Ikaris was left barely alive and reveals that the Eternals were never meant to protect Humanity as they thought. Instead, because the Celestials saw the human population as a useful pathogen to act as antibodies against the Horde, the Eternals were created to defend the process under the false impression that they were actually protecting the human race. This discovery drove all Eternals mad which either made them turn against each other or commit suicide. Ikaris is also able to reveal that the only way to prevent the Final Host from unleashing the Horde is the Uni-Mind and sends a message into Stark's mind before dying.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Due to the cosmic energy that suffuses an Eternal's body and the unbreakable mental hold they have over their physiological processes, the Eternals of Earth are effectively immortal. They live for millennia, do not fatigue from physical exertion, are immune to disease and poison, and are unaffected by environmental extremes of cold and heat. Most cannot be injured by conventional weaponry, and even if they somehow are, an Eternal can rapidly regenerate any damage as long as they are able to retain their mental hold over their bodies; this mental bond can be broken. In the 2006 series it was also stated that Eternals are able to absorb oxygen directly from water, and therefore cannot drown. In the same series, Ikaris was plunged into molten metal and experienced great pain, but no physical injury, which the Deviants attributed to a forcefield which protects Ikaris even when unconscious. It is unclear if all Eternals share this degree of protection.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: At one time, the official limit to the Eternals' durability was such that they could only be permanently destroyed by dispersing their bodies' molecules over a wide area.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: This degree of extreme durability was revealed to have increased to a much greater degree; as demonstrated in the 2006 "Eternals" limited series, it is shown that even total molecular dispersal is insufficient to destroy an Eternal. As long as "The Machine" (a restoration device of Celestial origin; possibly the Earth itself) keeps running, any destroyed Eternal will eventually return, as was the case with Ikaris after he was completely vaporized by a particle accelerator as part of a series of "experiments" performed upon him by the Deviants.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: This same cosmic energy can be channeled for a number of superhuman abilities. All Eternals are potentially capable of:


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Some Eternals choose to focus on a particular power in order to increase their effectiveness with it. Sersi, for example, has developed the power of transmutation further than any other Eternal. Additionally, some Eternals choose to focus their cosmic energies into other, non-standard abilities. Ikaris, for example, channels cosmic energy to greatly enhance his senses, while the Interloper uses his to generate fear in others, and Makkari uses his cosmic energies for superspeed.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: The 2006 retcon of the Eternals' origins and abilities introduces a significant limitation to their powers, and possibly to their free will, with numerous references to Eternals being "programmed" or "hardwired." They cannot attack their Celestial "masters" for any reason, whether they make a conscious decision to do so or are tricked into accidentally striking the beings. Any such attempt shuts down the body of the attacking Eternal and is implied to be an automatic defense mechanism of the Celestials' armor. On one occasion, when the Eternals attempted to form a Uni-Mind with the intent of keeping the Dreaming Celestial asleep, they were immediately shut down and reverted to their original forms. Furthermore, Eternals are compelled to attack and neutralize any being that attacks a Celestial.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: As presented in Gaiman's Volume 3, the Eternals are aware of their role on Earth and the duties and constraints placed on them by the Celestials. Ikaris describes himself as "a humanoid-based repair and maintenance unit left behind by unknowable alien gods to make sure that the earth is still here and in good shape when they get back." Zuras phrased the same concept more philosophically: "We are the Eternals. We are the court of last resort for humanity and for all living things on Earth. [...] We do not choose sides. Countries are lines in the sand, empires rise and fall. We are timeless. We will still be here tomorrow, and a hundred centuries from now."


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Marc Buxton of "Den of Geek" stated, "Jack Kirby delivered the original electrifying Eternals saga. Other than a Hulk robot (because reasons), there was no mention of the Marvel Universe anywhere in this series. But this was Kirby at his 1970s finest, getting all metaphysical and theological as he combined his imaginative saga with real world legend."


title: Eternals (comics)

text: According to Diamond Comic Distributors, "Eternals" #1 was the 17th best selling comic book in June 2006. "Eternals" #2 was the 28th best selling comic book in July 2006. "Eternals" #3 was the 28th best selling comic book in August 2006.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Jared Gaudreau of "CBR.com" asserted, "The seven-issue mini-series covered previous themes like creation and did an excellent job expanding Eternals lore and adding numerous new side characters. One of those great additions came in the form of a love interest for Thena named Thomas Eliot." Marc Buxton of "Den of Geek" wrote, "This is a must read for any fan of American Gods as Gaiman and Romita examine recurring themes of mythology made real and they channel it all through a magnificent Kirby lens. Do not be surprised if the coming film borrows liberally from this fantastic series." Colin Cheney of "Fatherly" said, "The series is a good, grounded way to enter the Eternals-verse: Romita’s art is appropriately bombastic, and we get some good bang-pow comics action—but it’s also pretty talky (because it’s Neil Gaiman). But also because it’s Neil Gaiman we get a nice right hook to the jaw of the problematic inspiration behind Kirby’s original comic."


title: Eternals (comics)

text: According to Diamond Comic Distributors, "Eternals" #1 was the 52nd best selling comic book in June 2008.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: K. Thor Jensen of "PCMag" called the "Eternals" comic book series the "last high-profile attempt to reboot the concept," stating, "This was the bridge that brought the group into the modern era, and it’s a very solid read." Eric Diazof "Nerdist" included the comic book series in their "Essential "Eternals" Comics" list, writing, "Daniel Acuna provided memorable pencil art. In this short-lived comic, the Eternals are more intimately tied to the X-Men, with stories that crossed over with the mutant’s time in San Francisco. When the Dreaming Celestial awakens and towers over the mutant home city, it forces the Eternals to take action. Not one of the most well-known runs, and it only lasted eight issues and one Annual. But it is worth a read for sure."


title: Eternals (comics)

text: According to data combined from all direct market distributors, "Eternals" #1 was the 4th best selling comic book in January 2021.


title: Eternals (comics)

text: Matthew Sibley of "Newsarama" asserted, ""Eternals" #1 is not just a fresh start for the creative team and for potential readers, but also for the Eternals themselves to define who they are." Barry Thompson of "Polygon" said, "In terms of execution, "Eternals" #1 is extremely good. Gillen introduces and entices the uninitiated without bogging itself down with exposition or patronizing anybody who brings some prior knowledge to the table. As far as fulfilling its primary functions, "Eternals" #1 checks all the necessary boxes." Colin Cheney of "Fatherly" asserted, "Esad Ribic’s artwork — and the colors by Matthew Wilson — is quite beautiful and cinematic. The storytelling is sharp and clear: Gillen has a witty, wry way of letting his characters reveal themselves and the wider world. We get a good sense of the characters’ personalities (particularly Ikaris and Sprite) quite quickly… And hell: you get a little bit of Iron Man." Adam Barnhardt of "Comicbook.com" gave "Eternals" #1 a grade of 4 out of 5, saying, "Readers looking for a strong character-driven story serving study on the likes of Ikaris, Sprite, and the remaining Eternals will find Gillen and Ribić's Eternals #1 to be a delightful read. Readers looking for something akin to a blockbuster event may need to keep looking, save for an epic, applause-inducing cliffhanger. It's an intriguing new start for readers new and old, alike and, at the very least, it's evident this creative team is setting out to establish a definitive take for one of Marvel's biggest unproven ideas."


title: Eternals (comics)

text: The Eternals made their live action debut in a film adaptation for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, released on November 5, 2021 with a focus on Ikaris and Sersi as its central characters. Directed by Chloé Zhao with a script written by her, Patrick Burleigh, Matthew and Ryan Firpo and stars Gemma Chan as Sersi, Richard Madden as Ikaris, Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, Lia McHugh as Sprite, Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, Lauren Ridloff as Makkari, Barry Keoghan as Druig, Don Lee as Gilgamesh, Salma Hayek as Ajak and Angelina Jolie as Thena.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: Alternative for Germany (, AfD; ) is a right-wing populist political party in Germany. AfD is known for its opposition to the European Union, as well as immigration to Germany. It is positioned on the radical right, a subset of the far-right, within the family of European political parties.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: Established in April 2013, AfD narrowly missed the 5% electoral threshold to sit in the Bundestag during the 2013 German federal election. The party won seven seats in the 2014 European Parliament election in Germany as a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). After securing representation in 14 of the 16 German state parliaments by October 2017, AfD won 94 seats in the 2017 German federal election and became the third largest party in the country as well as the largest opposition party; its lead candidates were co-vice chairman Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel, the latter having served as the party group leader in the 19th Bundestag. In the 2021 German federal election, AfD dropped to the fifth largest party.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD was founded by Gauland, Bernd Lucke, and former members of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) to oppose the policies of the Eurozone as a right-wing and moderately Eurosceptic alternative to the centre-right but pro-European CDU. The party presented itself as an economic liberal, soft Eurosceptic, and conservative movement in its early years. AfD has subsequently moved further to the right, and expanded its policies under successive leaderships to include opposition to immigration, Islam, and the European Union. After 2015, AfD has often been characterized as an anti-Islam, anti-immigration, German nationalist, national-conservative, and a Eurosceptic party. The AfD is the only party represented in the German Bundestag whose environmental and climate policy is based on the denial of human-caused climate change.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: Several state associations and other Factions of AfD have been linked to or accused of harboring connections with far-right nationalist and proscribed movements, such as PEGIDA, the Neue Rechte and Identitarian movements, and of employing historical revisionist and xenophobic rhetoric. They have been observed by various state offices for the protection of the constitution since 2018. AfD's leadership has denied that the party is racist and has been internally divided on whether to endorse such groups. In January 2022 however, party leader Jörg Meuthen resigned his party chairmanship with immediate effect and left the AfD, as according to him the party had developed very far to the right with totalitarian traits and in large parts was no longer based on the free-democratic basic order.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In March 2021, most of Germany's major media outlets reported that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had placed AfD under surveillance as a suspected extremist group. Shortly after this announcement, surveillance of AfD was blocked by the courts to give equal opportunities among political parties in a key election year.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In 2022, it was ruled that the BfV may classify and monitor the entire party as a suspected right-wing extremist. A corresponding lawsuit by the AfD was dismissed, because "there were sufficient factual indications of anti-constitutional efforts within the AfD".


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In September 2012, Alexander Gauland, Bernd Lucke, and journalist founded the political group Electoral Alternative 2013 () in Bad Nauheim, to oppose German federal policies concerning the eurozone crisis, and to confront German-supported bailouts for poorer southern European countries. Their manifesto was endorsed by several economists, journalists, and business leaders, and stated that the eurozone had proven to be "unsuitable" as a currency area and that southern European states were "sinking into poverty under the competitive pressure of the euro".


title: Alternative for Germany

text: Some candidates of what would become AfD sought election in Lower Saxony as part of the "Electoral Alternative 2013" in alliance with the Free Voters, an association participating in local elections without specific federal or foreign policies, and received 1% of the vote. In February 2013, the group decided to found a new party to compete in the 2013 federal election; according to a leaked email from Lucke, the Free Voters leadership declined to join forces. Advocating the abolition of the euro, AfD took a more radical stance than the Free Voters. The Pirate Party Germany opposed any coalition with AfD at their 2013 spring convention.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: The AfD's initial supporters were the same prominent economists, business leaders, and journalists who had supported the Electoral Alternative 2013, including former members of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), who had previously challenged the constitutionality of the German government's eurozone policies at the Federal Constitutional Court. AfD did not regard itself as a splinter party from the CDU, as its early membership also contained a former state leader from the Free Democratic Party and members of the Federation of Independent Voters, a pressure group of independents and small business owners.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: On 14 April 2013, the AfD announced its presence to the wider public when it held its first convention in Berlin, elected the party leadership, and adopted a party platform. Bernd Lucke, entrepreneur Frauke Petry and Konrad Adam were elected as speakers. AfD's federal board also chose Alexander Gauland, Roland Klaus, and Patricia Casale as its three deputy speakers. The party elected treasurer Norbert Stenzel and the three assessors Irina Smirnova, Beatrix Diefenbach, and Wolf-Joachim Schünemann. Economist , along with , , , and , were elected to the party's scientific advisory board. Between 31 March and 12 May 2013, AfD founded affiliates in all 16 German states in order to participate in the federal elections. On 15 June 2013, the Young Alternative for Germany was founded in Darmstadt as the AfD's youth organisation. During the British prime minister David Cameron's visit to Germany in April 2013, the Conservative Party was reported to have contacted both AfD and the Free Voters to discuss possible cooperation, supported by the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group of the European Parliament. In June 2013, Bernd Lucke gave a question and answer session organised by the Conservative Party-allied Bruges Group think tank in Portcullis House, London. In a detailed report in the conservative "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" in April 2013, the paper's Berlin-based political correspondent Majid Sattar revealed that the SPD and CDU had conducted opposition research to blunt the growth and attraction of AfD.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: On 22 September 2013, AfD won 4.7% of the votes in the 2013 federal election, just missing the 5% barrier to enter the Bundestag. The party won about 2 million party list votes and 810,000 constituency votes, which was 1.9% of the total of these votes cast across Germany.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD did not participate in the 2013 Bavaria state election held on 15 September. AfD gained its first representation in the state parliament of Hesse with the defection of Jochen Paulus from the Free Democratic Party (FDP) to AfD in early May 2013; he was not re-elected and left office in January 2014. In the 2013 Hesse state election held on 22 September, the same day as the 2013 federal election, AfD failed to gain representation in the parliament with 4.0% of the vote.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In early 2014, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled the proposed 3% vote hurdle for representation in the European elections unconstitutional, and the 2014 European Parliament election became the first run in Germany without a barrier for representation.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD held a party conference on 25 January 2014 at Frankenstolz Arena, Aschaffenburg, northwest Bavaria. The conference chose the slogan "Mut zu Deutschland" ("Courage [to stand up] for Germany") to replace the former slogan "Mut zur Wahrheit" (lit. "Courage [to speak] the truth", or more succinctly, "Telling it as it is"), which prompted disagreement among the federal board that the party could be seen as too anti-European. A compromise was reached by using the slogan "MUT ZU D*EU*TSCHLAND", with the "EU" in "DEUTSCHLAND" encircled by the 12 stars of the European flag. The conference elected the top six candidates for the European elections on 26 January 2014 and met again the following weekend to choose the remaining euro candidates. Candidates from 7th–28th place on the party list were selected in Berlin on 1 February. Party chairman Bernd Lucke was elected as lead candidate.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In February 2014, AfD officials said they had discussed alliances with Britain's anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP), which Lucke and the federal board of AfD opposed, and also with the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, to which Britain's Conservative Party belongs. In April 2014, Hans-Olaf Henkel, AfD's second candidate on the European election list, ruled out forming a group with the UKIP. stating that he saw the Conservatives as the preferred partner in the European Parliament. On 10 May 2014, Lucke had been in talks with the Czech and Polish member parties of the ECR group.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In the 2014 European Parliament election on 25 May, AfD came in fifth place in Germany, with 7.1% of the national vote (2,065,162 votes), and seven Members of the European parliament (MEPs). On 12 June 2014, it was announced that AfD had been accepted into the ECR group in the European Parliament. The official vote result was not released to the public, but figures of 29 votes for and 26 against were reported by the membership. The inclusion of AfD in the ECR group was said to have caused mild tensions between the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the British prime minister David Cameron.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: On 31 August, AfD scored 9.7% of the vote in the 2014 Saxony state election, winning 14 seats in the Landtag of Saxony. On 14 September, AfD obtained 10.6% of the vote in the 2014 Thuringian and 12.2% in the Brandenburg state election, winning 11 seats in both state parliaments.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: On 15 February, AfD won 6.1% of the vote in the 2015 Hamburg state election, gaining the mandate for eight seats in the Hamburg Parliament, winning their first seats in a western German state.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: On 10 May, AfD secured in the 5.5% of the vote in the 2015 Bremen state election gaining representation in their fifth state parliament on a 50% turnout.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: After months of factional infighting and a cancelled party gathering in June 2015, Frauke Petry was elected on 4 July 2015 as the "de facto" principal speaker of the party with 60% of the member votes ahead of Bernd Lucke at a party congress in Essen. Petry was a member of the national-conservative faction of AfD. Her leadership was widely seen as heralding a shift of the party to the right to focus more on issues such as migration, Islam, and strengthening ties to Russia, a shift which was claimed by Lucke as turning the party into a "Pegida party". In the following week, five MEPs exited the party on 7 July, the only remaining MEPs being Beatrix von Storch and Marcus Pretzell, and Lucke announced on 8 July 2015 that he was resigning from AfD, citing the rise of xenophobic and pro-Russian sentiments in the party. At a meeting of members of the Wake-up call (Weckruf 2015) group on 19 July 2015, AfD founder Bernd Lucke and former AfD members announced they would form a new party, the Alliance for Progress and Renewal, under the founding principles of AfD.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In February 2016, AfD announced a cooperation pact with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). On 8 March 2016, the bureau of the ECR group began motions to exclude AfD from their group due to its links with the far-right FPÖ, inviting the two remaining AfD MEPs to leave the group by 31 March, with a motion of exclusion to be tabled on 12 April if they refuse to leave voluntarily. While MEP Beatrix von Storch left the ECR group on 8 April to join the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, Marcus Pretzell let himself be expelled on 12 April 2016.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: With the European migrant crisis remaining the dominant national issue, elections on 13 March were held in the three states of Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Saxony-Anhalt, and saw the AfD receiving double-digit percentages of the vote in all three states. In the 2016 Saxony-Anhalt state election, AfD reached second place in the Landtag, receiving 24.2% of the vote. In the 2016 Baden-Württemberg state election, AfD achieved third place, with 15.1% of the vote. In the 2016 Rhineland-Palatinate state election, AfD again reached third place, with 12.6% of the vote. In Angela Merkel's home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, her CDU was beaten into third place following a strong showing of AfD, who contested at state level for the first time, to claim the second-highest polling with 20.8% of the vote in the 2016 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state election. AfD voter support in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania appears to have come from both left-wing and right-wing parties, with support for the Social Democratic Party of Germany down 4.9%, CDU down 4.1%, The Left down 5.2%, Alliance '90/The Greens down 3.9%, and support for the National Democratic Party of Germany (NDP) halved, dropping to 3.0%. Rising support for AfD meant that The Greens and the NDP failed to reach the 5% threshold to qualify for seats in the Landtag of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and consequently lost their seats. In the 2016 Berlin state election, which AfD also contested for the first time, the party achieved a vote of 14.2%, making them the fifth largest party represented in the state assembly. Their vote seems to have come equally from the SPD and CDU, whose votes declined 6.7% and 5.7%, respectively.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: At the party congress held on 30 April to 1 May 2016, AfD adopted a policy platform based upon opposition to Islam, calling for the ban of Islamic symbols including burqas, minarets, and "adhan" (call to prayer), using the slogan "Islam is not a part of Germany".


title: Alternative for Germany

text: At the party conference in April 2017, Frauke Petry announced that she would not run as the party's main candidate for the 2017 federal election. This announcement grew out of internal power struggle as the party's support had fallen in polls from 15% in the summer of 2016 to 7% just before the conference. Björn Höcke from the far-right wing of the party and Petry were attempting to push each other out of the party. Petry's decision was partly seen as a step to avoid a vote at the conference on the issue of her standing. The party chose Alexander Gauland, a stark conservative who worked as an editor and was a former member of the CDU, to lead the party in the elections. Gauland supported the retention of Höcke's party membership. Alice Weidel, who is perceived as more moderate and neoliberal, was elected as his running mate. The party approved a platform that, according to "The Wall Street Journal", "urges Germany to close its borders to asylum applicants, end sanctions on Russia and to leave the EU if Berlin fails to retrieve national sovereignty from Brussels, as well as to amend the country's constitution to allow people born to non-German parents to have their German citizenship revoked if they commit serious crimes."


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In the 2017 federal election, AfD won 12.6% of the vote and received 94 seats; this was the first time it had won seats in the Bundestag. It won three constituency seats, which would have been enough to qualify for proportionally-elected seats in any event. Under a long-standing law intended to benefit regional parties, any party that wins at least three constituency seats qualifies for its share of proportionally-elected seats, regardless of vote share.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: At a press conference held by AfD the day after the 2017 federal election, Frauke Petry said that she would participate in the Bundestag as an independent; she said she did this because extremist statements by some members made it impossible for AfD to function as a constructive opposition, and to make clear to voters that there is internal dissent in the AfD. She also said that she would be leaving the party at some future date. Petry formed the Blue Party in September 2017. Four members of AfD in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania legislature, including Bernhard Wild, also left the party to form Citizens for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which folded in December 2018. On 6 November 2019, Petry announced that the Blue Party would dissolve by the end of the year


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In 2018, André Poggenburg, AfD's regional leader of the eastern Saxony-Anhalt state, resigned his post after making racist remarks concerning Turks and immigrants with dual citizenship. Poggenburg gave as reasons for his resignation a shift to the left in AfD when it jettisoned from extremists in order to appear more moderate to voters. In 2019, Poggenburg started a new far-right party, "Aufbruch deutscher Patrioten – Mitteldeutschland", which planned to field candidates in state elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in Fall 2019. In August 2019, party founder Poggenburg left AdP because his internal call to support AfD in the upcoming state elections of fall 2019 was denied.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: Ahead of the 2021 federal election, AfD campaigned with the slogan "Germany. But Normal", and took a position of opposing further lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Having moved further right on economic issues and remaining strongly right on socio-cultural issues, despite attempts to normalize, AfD's manifesto for the federal election was deemed to be still too radical for the party to take part in government.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In the federal election, AfD saw a dip in national vote share by getting 10.3% of the vote, compared to 12.6% in 2017; however, the party emerged as the largest in the states of Saxony and Thuringia, and saw a strong performance in eastern Germany. The party's results drew a mixed analysis from AfD members and political commentators, the latter of whom attributed the slight decline to visible infighting, whereas AfD candidates such as Alice Weidel blamed media bias against the party. Political scientist Kai Arzheimer commented that the result "wasn't any appreciable increase, but it wasn't a disaster for them." Arzheimer also posited that the result demonstrated that AfD had firmly established itself in German national politics but had not reached beyond its core support. AfD's top candidates Tino Chrupalla and Weidel praised the result as "solid", while party spokesman Jörg Meuthen stated that the party should reevaluate the result and aim on "sending strong signals towards the center" to win back new voters. Meuthen left the party in January 2022.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD held their three seats in the 2022 Saarland state election but lost all their seats in the 2022 Schleswig-Holstein state election. In the 2022 Lower Saxony state election in October the AfD won 9 more seats compared to 2017 to a total of 18.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: The AfD is broadly considered to be a right wing and national conservative movement in both socioeconomic and sociocultural terms. AfD's policy brief and mission statement seeks to define the party as both liberal and conservative, with an emphasis on protecting sovereignty, Western identity, and German culture in what it calls a "peaceful, democratic and sovereign nation-state of the German people." Political scientists and journalists have also described the AfD as synonymous with opposition to immigration, Euroscepticism, and holding a nationalist bent, with various shades of German nationalism from civic nationalism to hardline sentiments visible in the party. Other commentators have categorized it as a radical right populist party or as "a typical radical right-wing populist party", with an emphasis on nativism. Within its elected representation and grassroots membership, AfD has grown to contain interparty factions that range from more moderate conservatives to radicals.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD was initially founded as a liberal conservative party of the middle class with a tendency toward soft Euroscepticism, being supportive of Germany's membership in the European Union but critical of further European integration, the existence of the euro currency and the bailouts by the Eurozone for countries such as Greece. At that time, the party also advocated support for Swiss-style semi-direct democracy, major reforms to the Eurozone, opposition to immigration, and opposed same-sex marriage. During this period, the party espoused economic liberal, ordoliberal, and national liberal policy stances. Former party MEP Hans-Olaf Henkel likened AfD's early platform to the Conservative Party in Britain rather than hard Eurosceptic or nationalist parties such as the UK Independence Party or the National Front in France. AfD was also compared to the Tea Party movement by some media outlets due to its campaigns against Eurozone bailouts, although AfD's early leadership disputed this and said it was not looking to attract right-wing extremists into the party.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In 2015, more moderate members, including founder and former chairman Bernd Lucke, left AfD after Frauke Petry was elected chairperson to found a new party, the Alliance for Progress and Renewal, which was renamed the Liberal Conservative Reformers in November 2016. At that time, AfD was performing poorly in opinion polls, polling at around 3 percent, and was suffering infighting; however, an influx of refugees and migrants boosted their support later in 2015, with the party turning from matters related to the Eurozone to focus on opposing migration, in particular Muslims and Muslim immigration.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD underwent a further shift to the right after Petry left the party in 2017 and formed The Blue Party, following AfD's adoption of more hardline Islamophobic, anti-immigration positions, and historical revisionist remarks by leading AfD figures. The party now resembles other populist radical right parties in Europe but is somewhat unusual because it maintains visible ties to even more extreme groups. AfD has been described as, and accused of, containing members sympathetic to the Identitarian movement and Pegida. The AfD leadership has been split on whether to embrace these movements within the party.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In March 2020, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution () classified AfD's far-right nationalistic faction known as "Der Flügel" as "a right-wing extremist endeavor against the free democratic basic order" and as "not compatible with the Basic Law", placing it under intelligence surveillance. In early March 2021, most of Germany's major media outlets reported that the "Bundesverfassungsschutz" had placed the whole AfD under surveillance as a "suspected extremist group". In response to claims from AfD members that the move was intended to damage the party's chances in the 2021 German federal election, the agency stated it would not make public announcements regarding investigations into the AfD or its candidates for the foreseeable future.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: Political commentators and analysts have described the party as containing two prominent factions: subscribers to more moderate right-wing and national-conservative policies, such as parliamentarians Jörg Meuthen, Alice Weidel, and Beatrix von Storch, and the more hardline identitarian "Der Flügel" wing, comprising figures at state level such as Thuringia state leader Björn Höcke. Political author Jeffrey Gedmin has described the present incarnation of AfD as somewhat lacking in a consistent ideological vision and containing a broad church of members who are conservatives, social conservatives, radical-rightists, and others who do not present clear ideological narrative. He also described some of its core voter support as ranging from far-right nationalists to moderate but traditionalist and disaffected conservatives. The two most dominant factions of the AfD have been noted as the "Der Flügel" and the more dovish and moderate national-conservative Alternative Mitte (Alternative Midpoint).


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD is an economic liberal party. Despite the 2015 split of economic liberals, AfD can still be broadly characterized as neoliberal on economic terms, emphasizing deregulation and much limited state intervention. Attempts of some factions to emphasize small and medium-sized enterprises, and advocate protectionism over free trade, did not have much success or changes in party policies.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: Over time, a focus on German nationalism, on reclaiming Germany's sovereignty and national pride, especially in repudiation of Germany's culture of shame with regard to its Nazi past, became more central in AfD's ideology and a central plank in its populist appeals. Petry, who led the moderate wing of the party, said that Germany should reclaim "völkisch" from its Nazi connotations, while Björn Höcke, who is an example of the more right-wing or national conservative ideology, regularly speaks of the "Vaterland" ("father land") and "Volk" ("nation" or "people", but with a strong ethnic or racial connotation).


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In January 2017, Höcke in a speech stated, in reference to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, that "Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital" and criticized this "laughable policy of coming to terms with the past". Höcke continued that Germany should make a "180 degree" turn with regard to its sense of national pride.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD supports a ban on circumcision for non-medical reasons for those under the age of majority, saying that the practice composes a "serious violations of fundamental rights".


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD describes German national identity as under threat both from European integration and from the presence and accommodation of immigrants and refugees within Germany. Former leader Petry said in March 2016: "I'm not against immigration, but ... the economic and social consequences of migration on both home and host countries are equally momentous ... The immigration of so many Muslims will change our culture. If this change is desired, it must be the product of a democratic decision supported by a broad majority. But Ms. Merkel simply opened the borders and invited everybody in, without consulting the parliament or the people."


title: Alternative for Germany

text: In its program, AfD wants to end what it describes as mass immigration and focus on taking in small numbers of skilled immigrants who are expected to integrate into society and speak German. It encourages German nationals to have more children, as opposed to trying to boost the German population through foreign migration. The party wants to review EU freedom of movement rules and states that immigrants must be employed and contribute to social security through paying taxes for at least four years before being allowed to receive state benefits. AfD calls for mass deportation of foreign born criminals with multiple citizenship or permanent residency. The party describes the Geneva Convention on Refugees as "outdated", calls for stricter vetting of refugees, and believes the German government should invest in special economic and safe zones in third world nations as opposed to taking in large numbers of asylum seekers without background checks.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD is critical of multiculturalism in Germany, stating that "the concept of a multi-cultural society has failed." The party favours banning the burqa, the Islamic call to prayer in public areas and the construction of new minarets, ending foreign funding of mosques and putting imams through a state vetting procedure.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: The AfD began to employ anti-Muslim rhetoric during the leadership of Frauke Petry, who responded positively to comparisons between the party and Pegida. In 2016 the party adopted several anti-Muslim positions, and stated in its manifesto that "Islam does not belong to Germany. Its expansion and the ever-increasing number of Muslims in the country are viewed by the AfD as a danger to our state, our society, and our values." The party has run a poster campaign that explicitly referenced the Eurabia thesis, and the party has been seen to have been strongly influenced by, and to be a part of the counter-jihad movement.


title: Alternative for Germany

text: AfD is supportive of a ban on kosher slaughter within the country, as well as the "import and sale of kosher meat".