Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 108: Relative Perspective

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” - William Shakespeare https://thegrownupmillennial.com/

Greetings friends. Welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Nicolette Richardson from Jamaica. First interview from Jamaica. That's fantastic. I am truly international. Starting to love it. She is the curator of resources for millennials to live their best lives at the grown-up millennial.com. Also the grown-up millennial on Instagram. Link in the description, of course. If like me, you can't remember how to spell millennial. There are two L's and then a third L. if that helps. But anyway, right back to Nicolette in two seconds. Would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. You've seen in the recent past there have been some weeks. I didn't have anybody to talk to, so I just played video games.

I mean, that's okay, too, but I find this more interesting. Currently, 15 works of historical dream literature available. The most recent one is, I always forget, The World of Dreams by Havelock Ellis. That's Book 15, working on Book 16. you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com. I'm going to pop that up down here eventually. That's it.

That's my housekeeping. That's enough out of me. Back to Nicolette. Thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you for having me. We had a few little challenges, but that's the fun part, right?

For sure. And everyone, you know, I tell everybody it's easy, peasy. You can't do this wrong. Literally true. It's usually all on my end. Technical difficulties included. We've got to do our audio video testing beforehand. And we are now tied for the most trials with a previous episode to try and dial it in.

But I always want you to look good, sound good. You know, as I tell folks off camera, this is not the Jerry Springer show. I'm not here to embarrass anyone. This is an entirely friendly, collaborative process. We work together. So I'm rambling. I've had too much coffee this morning, probably. What do we go back to our actual guest?

Enough out of me. Nicolette, what is the grownup millennial.com? What do you do? Yeah, so it's a great little space, I think, that I've curated over the years because I realized, like, my friends and I were going through the same kinds of challenges, but no one wanted to talk about it. Like, we didn't want to burden anyone else with their problems. So we were all being a little bit insular. And even though we spoke every day or every few weeks, we would never talk about the things that were bothering us. And it just so happened that when one of my relationships was about to literally dismantle into pieces, we had this ground.

breaking conversation that made us realize while we were going through the same things, battling with the same challenges, and weren't able to verbalize that. So that's kind of why I created this space, helping millennials figure things out to live more meaningful lives. Because while we try to do things on our own, it's not always possible to get through life on your own. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of layers to that. I mean, the first thing comes to my mind. I'm a big stand-up comedy fan. I don't know if you know a gal by the name of Eliza Schlesinger, I think is her name just some Netflix specials out there and one of them is titled elder millennial and it's like she's trying to give advice to the other millennials uh here's what I've learned you know learn from

my mistakes and and my successes too uh so when I when I heard you know that the the grownup millennial.com this is the first thing came to my mind um I have to check it out my girl my um stand-up comedy like little catalog is very thin it's just like the Kings of Comedy Cat Williams. That's it. Maybe some Dave Chappelle in there. That's it for me. So I'm not very diverse,

but I've been trying with Netflix. Expand my search a little bit. So I'll check that out. And I get on, you know, being a legit autistic, I get on little kicks. You know, I'll watch only horror films for a while or only documentaries for a while. And now I'm on nothing but stand-up comedy.

Every night before I go to bed, eat some popcorn or whatever, have some crackers and cheese and watch a stand-up special. I consider them, you know, really as much as they're going for jokes and they make a joke out of things that are often serious, which is great. We need levity, but there's a message in there too. They're also very insightful. I mean, I call them stand-up philosophers, which goes back to Mel Brooks, his history of the world part one movie. If you haven't seen Mel Brooks, hilarious. I recommend that too.

It also reminded me the idea that you're in millennials and I'm kind of a mid to early Gen Xer, like 45 now. so I'm also trying to. On the cusp. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to give back to the following generations as they come along. I'm not trying to, you know, hoard any wisdom to myself or whatever I can share. I think it's a very important thing. And it's this, this ties in with the theme of, you know, by the time people see this episode, they will have seen a couple of the past recent ones.

And there seems to be recently there's little, little bubbles and ebbs and flows in the zeitgeist of the world. a growing trend of people sharing their story for the purpose of helping others. You know, not self-aggrandized, not narcissistic, look at me and how perfect I am. Look at how imperfect I am. Know that you're not alone. And here's anything I can offer you to make your life easier. If that can just be a trend that just grows exponentially in the world, that's what I want to see.

Yeah. You know, I think as we're talking about this, I think this might be because we, like millennials have been on this. kind of, we were there before technology existed and then we got on the wave of what this can do. And it did lead us down some very iffy pathways. Depending on how long you're using social media, depending on how intense you were with your social media use. So I think now we're on the back end of it where it's not all pretty. It's not all roses.

Let's tell you the real truth. And I think Gen Zeres are coming up in a time too where it's half like, let me show you the flowery things on half. Let me just come on here with no makeup and tell you the real story. So I think we are trending in the right direction, hopefully, with most of the content that folks are consuming. But you do have some spaces still that it's still a little bit tough if you're just navigating things on the internet, for sure. Definitely. And I'm a little bit, so you hear people say social media has not been good for us. There are people who are kind social media doomers in that way of like this technology was a disaster it's going to destroy us

they're half right in my opinion this is where i'm going with it is you're not wrong there is tremendous potential for evil so to speak or evil outcomes or evil intent but there's uh i class it as just broadly communication and communication can be right or wrong it can be good or bad it can be helpful or hurtful um it's taken us a while and i think we are as you said getting closer to the of learning how to use it wisely. You know, it's kind of like a most force in the world, in the universe is neutral, you know, the laws of physics. They don't, it doesn't have morality.

You can push a rock to get it out of the way so you can farm. You can push a rock off a cliff and drop it on someone. Rock's a rock. Gravity's gravity. You use the tools properly and only humans can decide. Yeah, I'm just saying there's that difference there. And I think we've come a little bit further away from, you know, social media activism used to be like,

hashtag this. I think we've come off further away from there. So if I'm going to use a hashtag, there's going to be like some kind of fundraising campaign or some actual way that I'll help. So I love that we're trending in this direction and I do hope that we continue because I am with you.

Social media can be harmful. We've seen it be very, very harmful in the past, especially it's younger folks. And that's not really ideal. We also see it being the main flagship of consumerism. We are taught to now buy things

instead of dealing with our emotions. That's not great either. But it is still a very useful tool. It brought us together without it. We wouldn't have had this kind of conversation. So it is still useful. Yeah. I think it's definitely comes down to the human actor

that's putting the tool into play. You got to make your choices. You got to say, what am I doing? What am I doing with this? Yeah. Am I going to use my words to help or hurt? Am I going to use this computer to learn how to make things, yeah, that help or hurt or communicate things that help her hurt?

We got to really think about our choices and why am I doing this? What am I trying to accomplish? What's the purpose? Speaking of the purpose, I want to get back to your actual, you know, your content curation for your website, it's kind of hacky interviewer questions, but asking like, are the things that stand out in terms of what users have found most, helpful, what you thought was the best contribution from you, like something like, blew your mind. You're like, I need to tell everybody.

Anything like that. You know, it's so funny that every time I write something and I'm like, this is something from the, or record something, because there's also a podcast element. I feel like this is from the heart, but I'm not sure if people will resonate with it. The most opened or the most red blog post has been, am I outgrowing my friends? So it shows that there is some kind of disconnect with. us as or friends are growing with us through our adulthood

and also making friends in adulthood is a lot different than we thought it would be. So I was really surprised by that because I was literally writing about my own experience and how that has affected me. And then recently, I released episode 87 of the podcast, which is just a solo cast of me talking about

why we need to talk more and have deeper conversations. And one of my friends said me like a four minute voice notes just about how that really resonated with him and he's really been withdrawing a little bit and he realizes that, you know, sharing is more helpful to him in these situations. So it's always the things that you least expect. But yeah, that's why you have to be passionate about what you do, right?

Because people will see that in the work that you create. And I'm continuing to see it even as I struggle with imposter syndrome. I'm continuing to see the impact of the work on the internet. Yeah. No, I resonate with that too. The idea of imposter syndrome, true, because I'm like, I've given myself this title of wizard. And I think I'm trying to embody that, my concept of it. You know, I don't, I'm not going to pop out a magic fireball. It's not how it works. But, you know, myth, mythologically and psychologically, this image of the, the wise elder who appears to know things that other people don't and can accomplish things that other people can't or, you know, and you can share that, that wisdom, you know, so that that, that concept of a wizard. But. You know, in the very beginning, I'm like, that's a clever title, but I feel a little silly. And now I'm like, hopefully I'm on that road. Hopefully I'm really, you know, once I hit a thousand episodes, maybe I can call myself a real wizard. But I don't think there's anything wrong with embodying the ideal in practice as much as you can and go on with that.

This is what I want to be. It's as much aspirational as it is actual. And I think sometimes the things that we put in our heads are things that we want to achieve. it's like do you really have to reach a thousand episodes to be a wizard you know like it's really about the people you've impacted there's no way now to know how many people you've impacted by the episodes but you have this discord server bringing people together you have all your other platform so why are you not a wizard right now i'd like to think that you know you are what you do in a way so if i provide something of value at that moment that that's what i was you know i think we do that with

a lot of roles in life too. And it's, it's interesting because, psychologically, maybe you talk about people wear masks. And we do that. We kind of put on our game face when we say when we go to work. You got to interact with other people in a certain way to keep things Copa set and get the job done. But we're also embodying

roles that have uniforms, exterior signs of our, what we're meant to be doing, the box we put ourselves in by choice. And and also behaviors that go along with that, that, you know, if someone is going to wear, say, a police uniform, they need to live up to the standard of protect and

serve. This is what the box is and this is what you do in that box. If you're going to be a parent, this is what parent does. If you're going to adopt the role of baseball player, you better come with cleats and a bat and a glove ready to play the game because that's what you're there to do. You show up in a, you know, a helmet and shoulder pads and a football, you're not playing baseball. You know, it's not the right role for the, for the circumstance. And that doesn't even say one role is better or worse than another, but it's very much fitting, fitting to the environment and the needs of the moment. I'm rambling again, but I think you get the idea. No, I absolutely get the idea. And I recently published a poetry collection called The Years I Live Inside, talking about really how

I was managing reality in a pandemic and also bringing together some of the realities I heard from my friends. And it's interesting because it really allowed me to look into this idea of performance and how much we perform on a daily basis. That's why so many of us were, I want to say crushed, but we took the pandemic on personal. Like it was very difficult because we were just used to turning out this performance every day. And then by the time we got home, we're too beat to even think about anything else. So we were just used to the whole cycle. Now that we weren't able to do our whole routine, the whole pretense, the whole performance, we were at a last as to who we are and what we are.

We had so much time to just listen to our thoughts that we were probably going to go crazy because we never had that time before. So I think that's why I kind of focus a lot more on those introspective kind of moments now since the pandemic, you know, listening to myself a little bit more, going back into meditation now as the silence almost becomes deafening because it's easy to lose who you are in the performance.

Oh, yeah. And that first thing is, popped in on my head was an old, old tweet from forever ago, but I was dwell on the idea of social media being a performative thing as well. And that's one of the downsides that I think people are getting to know right now is, what are you looking at on Instagram primarily? You're looking at the either staged or selectively chosen best parts moments that maybe only happened for five seconds. And now it lasts forever because there's an image or a video of it. And people look at that and go, wow, their life is so perfect. Why?

aren't I that good? I mean, we get down on ourselves about that and you're like, you had a moment like that yesterday, but it just happened. You didn't capture it. But maybe also don't remember it. We kind of have a memory bias for the negative and that's psychologically over, you know, evolutionary psychology. We remember the bad. It's like, oh, we don't want to repeat that. It keeps us alive, basically. It's my fear and anxiety is so strong. I'm rambling off topic again, but the idea of the performative thing. So the tweet. Long story short, too late for that. It was just the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

And he asked her, who are you? And she's like, I'm Alice. And he's like, okay, that's a name. You know, the concept of, okay, you're a creature with a name. But then I think there was another part in the, I think a Mad Hatter or March Hare also asked her, who are you when you're at home? The idea of who are you when you're all alone, not in relation to anyone else? What is the core of you that then relates to other people?

If you can't, if you don't have any concept of that, you probably need to spend more time alone and thinking and absorbing, you know, information about yourself. Long story short. You say you're rambling, but it all comes to the same point. Yeah, I was having a chat with someone. I can't remember which podcast episode was. And she was saying,

we're comparing our absolute worst day to someone's filtered, best day, staged picture on Facebook and Instagram. And it's not fair to us, right? So I'm trying to tell myself now as much as possible, it matters more about how my life feels and how it looks. Like if it doesn't look like someone else's like picture perfect kitchen and their stocked fridge on Instagram, that's okay because I am happy and okay. in my life right now. I know who I am and I'm okay with that. If it doesn't look picture perfect or

Pinterest perfect, that's fine because it's still my life. And I know I'm secure in myself and that's okay. That's enough for me. Yeah. And that's very powerful. It seems like that's something we've rediscovered. I think if we go back into the recent past or even distant past, we knew the difference between real life and a portrait. I mean, this was obviously the person stood there for hours, possibly days while the artist did little strokes. It's in no way represents real life. It's a portrait. And then we kind of got into pictures and they were obviously, you know, weird 100 years ago, 150 years ago, nobody smiled in photographs.

No, it was just staring into the camera. Yeah, yeah. This is very serious. And then, but we kind of lost that a little bit. It started to be fooled by the, there are kind of successive approximations. We're getting closer and closer to media. that kind of looks like reality. Film did a big deal with audio and sound and color,

and then we get the more pixels packed in in our eyes. I've said a slight tangent there. I think we're going to hit a point where they can make pixels so small that the photoreceptors in our eyes can't distinguish between a picture of a window looking outside and an actual window looking outside. I think we're going to get pretty close to that. And we've got to keep in mind this is not reality. no matter how much it looks like it or might feel like it.

Yeah, I mean, I can't recall which movie I was watching with my husband. I think a year ago. And they created this video that was like the person saying something. And I'm like, oh, this is so cool. And he's like, this exists. I'm like, what? Yeah. He's like, yeah, deep fake.

And I was like, huh? And I went on a whole thing. I was like, this is mind blowing and a little bit scary. I'm not going to lie that this exists and people can do this. for good or not. So yeah. Yeah, we are scarily close. That's going to be a new technology we're going to have to,

we're going to have to deal with because if, because what do they do like in saying courts of law? You're accused of a crime. They're like, we have video. That's you. And you're like, that's not me. That's a deep fake. Okay, now prove it.

How will you know? How can they prove that? I don't know. Hopefully we're going to figure it out. But that's something that needs to be figured out for sure. Yeah. No, that's a very scary thing. I was going somewhere else with that, too.

The idea of reality difference. There's a guy, his name's Wokel, Wocal Distance on, on Twitter and on YouTube. He did a great rant about, and I'm not going to do it justice, but the idea that he's, I think he's got a son,

and the son was like, you know, I want to get a strawberry slushy. And he's like, then that set him on this path of like, once upon a time, strawberries were tiny little, tiny little berries.

And they had a particular taste that wasn't too sweet and it's a berry. It's nice. Then we started growing larger strawberries. And then that became the icon of the strawberry. It almost looked like a heart shape with the lushest and bright red. And they never looked like that until we started cultivating them. Then someone said, well, I can distill that down into the strawberry syrup and it's extra concentrated sweet and a very strong strawberry flavor. Then someone said, I can synthesize that in a lab and they put it into Jolly Ranchers. Then someone said, I can take a Jolly Rancher flavor and I can put that in milkshake type you know slushy and we've got we're like six 10 12 series of realities removed

from what an actual strawberry used to be and now just the icon of a of a strawberry is is associated with strawberry and not the actual berry or what it used to be yeah he calls it something like a hyper reality type of thing that's where we're getting into with the with social media stuff yeah and there's so many stories like that right because like how the food we're eating is it even real. So that's where we are too. Because we've been around so long and we know what existed before technology, maybe we'll be okay. But like, what saves the generation after us? Like the younger millennials even who are at a crossroads in terms of using social media for life and also realizing that social media might not all be real. So that kind of disparity is

going to be interesting to continue to witness, but, um, yeah, we're in an interesting place. I'll just, I'll just, I'll sure. And it is, I'm also, I'm with you on that too. It's like, I was born in, uh, uh, you know, late 70s. So I actually, you know, existed in the world of payphones before, before, and people had car phones in the 80s, but they were like, it was a whole thing. It was a giant bag and it had like, I think it was actually like a satellite phone or something, because we didn't have cell. cellular towers around. That's a new thing. I remember the very first connection to the internet I ever saw you had to take your phone, the headset, the handset off, and you put it on a cradle and you could listen to it. Do, do, do, do, make it all the sounds. And we were on there, my friend and I, 1989, doing a little text interface on a bulletin board. They used to call them BBS's bulletin board systems or something like that servers. And to see it evolve from there.

Crazy. Yeah. And then also, so you're on the cusp of that too in terms of like you, you had the world before like the iPhone like 2007 or whatever it was. Like here's the here's a phone that you know, we used to have the flip raisers. And now here's a phone that I can actually access the internet and show you pictures and video. And then social media took off after that. So there's definitely people being raised in a world where those things always existed. That's the new reality.

It didn't, you know, it reminds me of the transition from. the horse and buggy to the automobile revolutionary. We've seen a lot of little revolutions. I mean, when you go to a history museum, you're like, oh, this is really cool. But we've also lived a few of those histories too. I mean, just the idea. I mean, back in the day, you used to have to pay to use the internet on your phone. Like, it's pay per use.

Like, you going to this website would be like one quick would be a cost. And here we are. Just streaming and doing things. That used to be a thing too. Whoa. That blows my mind. Like now it's just, it's all a package deal. It's all incorporated.

And you had to make the text messages short to make sure that you were only going to be charged for one text as opposed to two. Right. So it was a whole thing, trying to record the, like the radio on a cassette. Like you didn't have Spotify. I did that. Yes, I did. Yeah. So, you know, it's a whole different reality.

Seeing that this is what we used to do. And now I asked my 14-year-old cousin if she knows what a cassette is, she did not know. what will blow their mind to is ask them what the save icon is do they know that when you click out the same icon what's that the floppy disk the floppy disk yeah yeah specifically the 3.5 inch is the one that they put up there it's got the little slider on it was the hard case before that was the true floppy it was in just this flimsy plastic the big ones those were the um five inch or 4.5 or whatever they were and then the original ones were like eight inch they were almost like records in in that case.

And then before that, it was punch cards. The stuff's come, it blows my mind to see the progression of stuff, you know. Yeah. It is crazy because I remember in for the first thumb drive that like I bought was like 256 MB and it cost me like 40 US dollars in like 2006. Oh yeah. That's wild. Nobody even uses a thumb drive anymore.

No, now it's all cloud based. Yeah. Which a lot of people, I've actually spoken with some folks and I was like, they're like, well, it's just, it's in the cloud. And I'm like, the way they said it, it's like they didn't really know that there are physical, everything has a physical source somewhere. If it's saved, if you can access it, it's saved somewhere. They think it's in the cloud, like the cloud is like digital information floating in

the stratosphere. It just means it's accessible from multiple locations from a single source. What blows me away is YouTube. We're going to make an interview here and it's going to go up. And a million other people are going to make interviews that go up. And that's what 200 million hours of video every day? Where are these servers? How the hell do they do this?

The infrastructure has got to be huge. I have no idea. I've been meaning to look into it, but I'm like, I'll get around to it. But that blows my mind too. Massage. All this has got to be saved somewhere. Somewhere. Yeah.

So we can just pull it up on press play. Yeah. I wonder if they're going to get to a data. maybe technology will keep going outpacing like you said the tiny thumb drive of the megabytes and you know now we've got terabyte drives you can get in there barely bigger than the the old 3.5 floppies um so maybe that'll keep up but i wonder if you know say youtube is going to have to hit a point where they're you know hey guys anything 20 years or older we got to let it go we can't we're out of room uh sometimes you got to compress your hard drive delete some old photos or whatever to save some room uh we can't i don't that we can endlessly expand. I'm curious to see. Is it possible? Well,

there's so much information everywhere. That's true. Yeah. We're almost generating too much. We have a problem filtering it. That is one of the problems with social media, too, is like the infinite scroll. Someone's always saying something somewhere. And you got hundreds, thousands, millions of people saying it all at once.

You got to kind of pick and choose what you're going to pay attention to because you just can't, not enough hours in the day. I've heard the, even something like TikTok. The videos are. shorter so you could essentially watch more, but like, how much can you even watch? Like, it's not possible. For sure.

Well, the storage problem actually made me think of something. They're getting around to using lasers and crystals. So I don't know if you remember the Superman movie from the 80s. He goes to his fortress of solitude and he takes a crystal and puts it in and a image of his, you know, parents from Krypton pop up and, you know, but they're actually doing that now. They can encode. binary using a laser in crystal and it has like tiny tiny it's a it's not ready for prime time so to speak but it's one of those things where like we couldn't have Superman style memory crystals that get red by

a laser in the near future yeah that's that's actually coming i mean it's pretty cool that almost everything from movies that seem like really far-fitched we're living to see it happen which is kind of wild but kind of cool Yeah. It's like, but it's equally terrifying and hopeful because we've seen a lot of movies where everything goes to shit. It just goes really bad. And that's trying, I think these, I mean, it's the human history of storytelling. We're trying to warn other people how to avoid problems. It's what you're doing. It's what I'm doing. We're trying to share useful information with people. But then also inspire new things. The Motorola flip phone. We're talking about that. 1960, Star Trek communicator. Bam. Same thing. I mean, so in my opinion, this is how I phrase it, every piece of science fact was once science fiction. Someone said, what if? And then they decide, can we build that? You know, thankfully, we've changed some of it, like the original will go into the moon, movie with a shot him out of a cannon, shot a bullet out of a cannon. And then it landed in the eye of the moon.

And then these people got out of the bullet. I'm like, that's never going to work. I'm glad they abandoned that. We do not want to wrap. We're refining that idea. We got the right. Okay. Great idea.

Good start. Let's work on. this. Yeah. Let's get the engineers involved. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really cool to kind of think about that every idea that, you know, exists now was a crazy idea that somebody had for sure. And that's another thing as we're talking about all these things and assisting folks to kind of realize, but we shouldn't be continuing to make the same problems, is that you need to bet on yourself. Because half the people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and those folks, like I understand. that they're from wealthier backgrounds for sure, but they still believe in themselves

is enough to start this company on literally nothing. So believe in yourself. It may not be, like, I don't think you have to have the goal to be like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but it's just the idea that those things can also be possible for you, that kind of success. Yeah. Well, that's kind of what I'm doing with this dream wizard thing is like, you know, for 20 years I worked in, inpatient psychiatry.

didn't want to do that anymore. Like, you know, I'm going to shift gears here and follow my passion in a little bit of way, been a way that is, I think, what am I trying to say? You know, in a practical way, like putting it into some kind of a form. I'm not just trying to become a rock star. It's like not very limited. And I'm not trying to become a multi-millionaire. And that's, you know, I want just enough to make a comfortable living like I did before

in terms of maybe one day that the videos get monetized. I sell enough books, all that good stuff I push at the beginning. It's supportive people who like what I do. And at the same time, I get to do something that, you know, I think is beneficial, entertaining and useful and helpful. And I hope by sharing examples of the process of analyzing dreams, you watch enough of these. I think you can do it yourself. You can do it for yourself.

Keep a dream journal. Talk with a friend. tell your friend about the story of your dream and give them as much detail as you can and let them ask questions. What did that look like? What did that feel like? Then what happened? I think you can work out a lot of these things. In some ways, I want people to no longer need to be a guest with me personally. Like, I've given enough back that they can enjoy watching me do it, but they can do it for themselves. And they can get the very real, real benefit from it out of that. So yeah. Yeah. And I think, this is why I was really interested to be on this podcast too.

It's because, like, I don't have the dreams. I'll just say, like, to a husband or from like, oh, I thought about, like, I dream something and I probably remember or don't. It's like, oh, okay, that's cool. That's interesting. And then that's where it ends. Then you never think about it again. And then the same dream pops up.

And I'm like, oh, okay, that's interesting. But not thinking about what it's kind of trying to make me realize or what is bringing to my subconscious. So hopefully I'm going to learn some skills today. I'm very excited. Well, that seems like a natural, yeah, natural segue getting into the, getting into the dream thing. So, um, Benjamin the Dream Wizard wants to help you pierce the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his dreamscapes program features real dreamers gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions.

New Dreamscape's episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms. as well as free audiobooks, highlighting the psychological principles which inform our dream experience and much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms,

and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the Wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature, available on Amazon, featuring the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years.

That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. What was I going to say? You were mentioning, so personally, and this is all, it's all highly personal, you know, personally, I will often wake up in the morning remembering I had a dream and maybe a couple almost fragmented fuzzy images and nothing else. I never have a story. It's just something like, I think I dream too deeply. And by the time I'm awake enough or almost awake enough to remember.

remember it, it's kind of over. I'm coming out of it. It just stops too quickly for me to hang on to anything. I've got like five dreams of my entire life that really stayed with me. And I think it can be that rare. Like most dreams, we're just kind of processing the day and maybe nothing spectacular. And we're not really facing any challenges that are so intense. We need to really dwell on it and have a meaningful, intense dream about it. But when you do, that's usually the ones you wake up and you feel it for the rest of the day. You're like, wow, you keep thinking back. on it and it's crystal clear and really, really your mind just can't let go of that experience. There is something there.

And it could be very beneficial, especially with recurring dreams. Those, those tend to be some kind of a theme that's, you keep coming back to because you need to understand something about it. So is that, speaking of which, is that the kind of dream you brought this time? So kind of a recurring theme or something else? Something else. So the one I brought is a dream I've had like two, almost two, two and a half decades ago, but I'm still trying to figure out, like, why. It's still so

vivid to me. I was wondering if it really happened. And I thought I was like going crazy for a little bit. Because as a child, like, who do you talk to about dreams? Like, your parents aren't going to, like, sit down and chat with you about this stuff. So I've been carrying this kind of weight with me for a while just to see what this whole thing was about. Good deal. Well, let's hear the story. I'm ready when you are. All right. So I have a very vivid memory, and I still have a picture of it. My sister and I going to like a music recital. I'm in this like little puffy dress. It is blue. In the picture, it's cream, but in my dream it was blue. And we are on our way from that music recital on our way home. We decided to take some kind of

shortcuts driving in my father's like blue Volvo. I think it was like the 80s version of the Volvo. And we stopped at the pharmacy. Everyone came out and I came out after everyone else, went into the pharmacy, walking around, couldn't find anyone. So just me in this stark white place by myself, decided I would just walk outside to see what was happening. And then there's this homeless guy sitting at the front and he grabs me. Doesn't do anything. Just grabs me. I'm screaming for like a good five minutes and then I am suddenly back in my parents car. But the whole shock of that, just like not see anyone around and then this person just grabbing me like that, those two things from that dream staying with me the most.

And it wasn't that long either. But yeah, that was the dream. Okay. Yeah. Very, very, very. I can imagine that being a very intense experience. Five years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's, it's interesting. You said, so there is a picture of you in this kind of address. Interesting. So this is something you would have worn in real life. And you're even doubting whether maybe it could have happened in real life. You might have had this experience. Yeah, because I used to, so I used to sleep like really deeply in the car. I remember once we were on the way home

and I slept the whole ride I got up and just started walking out of the car and then my mother called me back and she was like we're not at home and then when I finally opened my eyes I was like standing in the middle of the gas station so I used to have those little moments where I would like zone out for a little bit

in sleep but then when I woke up I was like bathed and everything at home and the dress was like already packed up and in the wash. So I'm just wondering like, I don't think it happened because on the way home, I don't recall us going this way and no one else said anything about this. But it felt so real. Fair enough. And dreams can.

And that's especially, there's multiple, multiple things going on here. One of them is the idea that dreams, when we're in them, feel very real. Even the, even the fantastical things. You're flying. Sometimes you don't even think I'm flying. It's like, of course I'm flying. I don't even think about it. Why wouldn't I?

It's like breathing. You don't even think about it. So the very realistic or real feel to a dream is something. Then we've got the issue of being about five years old, which that's on the cusp of transitioning from being incapable of distinguishing imagination fantasy from reality. That's kind of the age where we. start putting it together that, oh, the things I think about aren't as real as the things that actually happen. There's actually a difference. We kind of don't get that until roundabout five

years old. Then there's the potential complication of sleepwalking issues. It sounds like, do you sleepwalk at all today? Not anymore. It used to be a sleep talk, and I used to occasionally sleepwalk, but I don't think I'd do anymore. I might sleep talk still. Like, if I'm really, really tired, I might do some sleep talking. Yeah. Gotcha. Fair enough. Yeah, no, and that's actually very common and more common than people probably know.

A lot of people get close to being awake but aren't really, you know, awake enough to roll over in your sleep is what they call it. Well, you have to, there's a little bit of voluntary movement going on there. You're not, you're not really in your sleep. You're not really awake. Yeah, you're in this kind of borderland state or in between zone of not really fully conscious, don't want to be. and that's sometimes just beneath that line is kind of where some of the sleep talking happens you're you're thinking about something you want to communicate to your partner in bed and you just start saying it out loud or you're speaking as if you're talking to someone else

who isn't even there or you're talking to yourself out loud or you're laughing about something you know lots lots of people to do that so but it's all kind of very often you won't even remember it and most now maybe not say most but I'd say you know a one wide swath of sleepwalkers, unless they remember having a dream, have no memory of how they got where they're at because they really weren't consciously absorbing that stuff. It was all perceived as dream imagery at the time. So we can go two ways with this. One is to say, this might have actually happened and there's nothing to learn from it or we go into the dream thing, which I don't think is very useful to go the first path. Like, thanks for coming. We might as well, yeah, we might as

well treat it as if it is a dream experience and see if we can pull something out of it and what your five-year-old brain might have been telling you about how you were perceiving the world and processing events at the time. Yeah. And it's so funny, too, that as you were, as we're talking through this, I just know I'm remembering that I used to sleepwalk. Like, it used to be pretty heavy. It's being kind of bad. And I just, I completely forgot about that before this conversation. Yeah. Yeah. No, and these are good things. So this is why, well, that's one benefit of talking directly to the wizard. is, I'm kind of getting this broader perspective.

Where do we go with this? There's a lot of different elements and possibilities. And even if this was an episode of sleepwalking and something similar happened, why, do you want to roll over, buddy? You got to move. Okay. He's got to move. Oh.

Yeah, my little peanut butter. The inheritance from a deceased relative. He gets to retire with us. Right. Yeah, he's a cutie pie. Oh, completely forgot. You could have been having a sleepwalking episode, and this is still the dream that happened within it.

So none of that means it isn't relevant, but it was definitely intense enough that whatever we get out of it, I think looking at it a little closer is going to give us something, something useful to you, I hope. So we begin at the beginning, and it's you and your sister at a music recital. Yeah, so we used to call it, we were there. So we were already there. Yeah. They used to call it musical evening at the school I was at. And then we were all on our way home, my sister, my father, my mother, and I.

Okay. And what, so the setting for this musical evening was definitely your school from real life at the time. Yeah. Do you remember being on stage or just being in the lobby knowing a performance had concluded? Where were you? when you started. Yeah, that's funny. I don't recall being on stage at all. I just recall us like being there because we could all see this chairs and the stage and then just us leaving, walking, walking to the car. Like it was a part that we were there and that we were all leaving along with everyone

else that was leaving and walking to the car park. Okay. And you said it was mom and dad and sister? My sister. Yeah. So there were just four of you total. That was your family at the time. Okay.

Yeah. So if, you know, again, if we're looking at this as purely dream imagery, there's something about that event specifically, that kind of event, the theme of being in public, a public place that was important to you or meaningful. You know, so we're definitely starting from a place where you didn't start at home. You didn't start in the woods. You didn't start in the Antarctic, you know, flapping around with penguins. something about where your brain starts with with this imagery of like, okay, imagine it's this kind of setting. Here's where it goes from here.

So it's definitely a theme of, say, being outside the home in public. Again, I'm not drawing any conclusions from this yet, but this is where my brain starts going and I start throwing out little stuff of saying, what is it about being away from home at an event, say, and then attempting to get back home and having this adventure of this experience happen that is meaningful to you. And you don't have them answer right away. But if you think of it, no, now that I'm thinking by,

because I, because I, my brain, sorry, is kind of like a photo album. So I'm like, I'm going back to the picture. And I think when the picture was taken, there was an argument at home about what,

like, we were all supposed to wear. Um, and in the picture, my sister is upset. And I am like, like smiling. Like, I didn't want to wear what I had on either, but this is what we all have to wear.

So I don't know if that's probably a contribution to the fact that we didn't start at home. Because like, but by the time we had gotten. So in real life, we did attend a similar event a few weeks before or at least a week before. Yeah. And in real life, we did like go and it was fine once we were there. But it was a little tense at home with the outfits. Gotcha. Great.

And that is part of the benefit of going back through these things a second time for the deep dive. But the deep dive in general are just asking these questions, just kind of focusing on the sequence and the process. These connections suggest themselves spontaneously. I mean, I didn't ask you, was there an argument at home? You just said public, public the dress, how I dress in public. There was an argument about that. These pieces start coming together. And that's, so that may be a very, and probably is a very relevant part of it where

there's something about, and what I wrote down was an argument about public presentation. And your mom wanted you to represent the family well. So there's this maybe strong emotional connection with an understanding of the values of your parents and how you're absorbing it as a kid. And when we're going into public, you're going to look nice. That is important to us. That's a value our family is going to represent. So it may not even be about appearance or public presentation, but. in general about the values of your family and how you were processing them at the time.

So some of these themes are like packaged in type in layers of the onion. And we get down to that core. And it's like all of these Russian nesting dolls. I love it. I love the mystery. And we're just in like, so where were you? I was at a music recital. That's it so far.

And you were leaving. Did you have any emotional content at that time or thought process about leaving? was it a do you have detailed images of walking to the car, getting in the car, or just kind of a scene change? So it was just like us walking to the car, almost like when you watch those movies,

there was a zombie just moving, because usually there would be other families we're talking to or I'm seeing friends on the way. But no, it was just us walking to the car, not talking to anyone else. There were other people around also walking to their cars, but that was it, us walking to the car. Okay.

Okay. Very interesting. So they're, you know, natural to say we're in public. There's other people, of course. And that's definitely going to be related to it because it was like a public image presentation thing going on. But also the idea that it really isn't about the other people. They're there. They're more scenery in a way. Like they might as well be trees. You're walking in amongst the trees. You don't have any interactions with them. It doesn't seem to be, you know, and sometimes that's how it works with our deeply held beliefs and stuff. It's not even about us in relation to other people. It's about. us what we believe and why and what's important to us and then we carry that to other people but we're not getting that from other people we do sometimes but apparently in this case maybe not a lot of speculation here don't don't hang on to any of it but these are this is what comes to my mind um yeah but you're not interacting with other people they're they're not obstacles in your past the path they're kind of irrelevant in a way they're just present scenery that that's the word that comes to mind so not as much about other people as it is about you or the family unit definitely. And you said in real life the dress was white.

Yeah. So the dress was like closer to off white. Yeah. And somehow when I, in the dream it's blue. And I can't recall if I ever had a blue one. I had a yellow one and an off white one. But I can't recall if I actually had a blue one in real life. And this is one of those things where it may be.

relevant. It may not. Who knows? Maybe just at that time you're like, I like the color blue. So I'm going to make my dress blue. Hold on. Wait, I just had a little bit of a connection. So I'm wondering. Benjamin, just the talking through. I'm wondering whether it might have been, so not even just the journey to the pharmacy, but in the pharmacy, which is with the lights on and the blue dress. My grandfather had died a few weeks before that and we used to always take him a little container of like that luxurious powder with the puff and it would always be off white but on that day it was a blue one with like gold writing and now as I'm thinking about it the blue of the container was the similar blue

to the dress that I was wearing. I'm not sure if there's some connection with that. Because at the time, too, I mean, yes, your grandfather, dad, you're kind of not sure what that means, but then you're kind of realizing that the other

folks around you might also assume be passing away, because my grandmother had died before I was born, and then my mother's father at the time was kind of getting sick. So I'm I'm not sure if there was some kind of isolation thoughts going on there. Yeah.

But yeah, now as we're talking through it, I'm just remembering that the blue from like that powder puff was the blue up the dress I was wearing. Now, when you say powder puff, this is, you're getting a container from the pharmacy. So there's medicine of a kind? Yeah. So the powder, it was just literally talcum powder, but they used to come in like some circular containers from like a fancier brand that my grandma used to you. So we always thought it was good gifts for them. And there was like a translucent container that it would come in and it would have a puff that you could put over your hand and like packed on the powder. Okay. And that whole casing that time was blue.

Interesting. I would say it's more relevant that that's what popped into your head as we're talking about it. Um, you know, I'd say that it is relevant because it occurred to you, because some connection there was like, wait, that was like the blue of that talc. And that made me think of my grandfather and that he had just recently died. Whoa. And all of this. So there's something, definitely something in the dream.

Did you, an address is, so there's a lot of different ways you could say you were related to someone. And there's related by blood, but there's also the relationship. There's relative things that you, so if you, uh, your grandfather always wore a blue suit. That was his favorite suit. And you put yourself in a blue dress. You could say, I'm, I'm, I'm wanting to. dress like him. There's some some some some manner I wish to be similar but this was like the um you know I think yeah that as you're saying that now I think that might be the connection

because I I remember going through and I kind of felt weird not having more vivid memories of him because for the entire time that I knew him he was in a home and I'm not sure if I just chose not to remember him in the home well like I I see a figure in the chair but I can't see a face or I can't make out the clothing. So maybe I just tied it to that one container of powder that I remembered because I, for some reason, I can't make him out in his later years. And we only have pictures of him younger. Yeah.

Yeah, that's very good too. I knew there was, I was trying to tease that apart a little bit. Look inside it, the idea of what is this, what is this connection? Why would the, what would the blue of the dress be like the talcum powder? And the powder is very often, it can be an appearance thing. you're trying to get rid of shine on the skin. You're trying to decrease the amount of sweat if it's hot. You know, there's different ways to use it.

But again, also very related to exterior appearance or sometimes, you know, clothing is uniform, as we were saying, like wearing a uniform, adopting a role. Definitely a certain type of dress for a public musical performance. That's adopting a kind of presentation for a role as well. So there's all kinds of that kind of stuff going on there. And then you did end up in a pharmacy, which maybe, maybe something about the blue dress, like the, a lot of these are connected dots type of things, you know, so I'm at the recital where we would, you normally go in the blue dress that's like the talcum powder and that in your mind takes you to the pharmacy. But you're, and do, so back to the actual storyline, do you remember the drive to the pharmacy? Like any scenery or kind of like, no, then we just drove.

It was just, it was just like dark. Because, I mean, the car was tinted. So you just saw like some streetlights, but I don't remember anything significant about the journey from school to the pharmacy or from the musical event to the pharmacy. Do you remember having any interactions with parents or sister? No, it just was quiet. It's nothing. No one said anything. Interesting.

Yeah. And I don't know if that's significant or not. Sometimes our brain is, what am I trying to say? sometimes it skips over things that aren't really that important. Like, you know, there was no reason for you to imagine a conversation because that wasn't the point. Maybe. Or? Or maybe the silence is.

Maybe the silence is the point. That's where I was going to. Yeah, yeah, the idea of, um, there was no communication. There was no camaraderie. There was no interaction. It's almost like you weren't there together. You were there at the same time in the same place. Um, moving in the same direction.

But, you know, like it wasn't, um, You don't remember your dad singing and your mom cracking jokes and punching him in the shoulder. You don't remember bickering with your sister in the back seat. There's really nothing. You're kind of you're imagining yourself there. And again, your family almost props in your internal drama that's going on, which is not unusual. You were saying about being five years old and not not having memories. We just don't.

I mean, I have like maybe one strong memory, too, two, from when I was like four years old. and one involves watching my dad build a tiny little brick retaining wall and just hanging out with him on the, you know, on the sidewalk. And the other was exploring an old field near a, near an abandoned barn. And I stumbled into a tiny ditch and it was barbed wire there and it got stuck on my pants. And my friend went to run that. This hilarious story. My friend went to run for help and I'm sitting there like, because I can't, he can't help me. I can't get out of it.

I'm not hurt. You know, I'm not bleeding or anything. Barbed wires. I just can't get my pants. untangle and stuck in a ditch. And then it occurred to me, I could just take my pants off. And I did. And I wiggled out of my pants and left the pants behind and ran home in my underwear.

I'm like, I think I didn't even think of like maybe I could untangle the pants and get them back. I'm just like, I'm going home. Screw this. I don't know what happened to my friend. If he came back with help and I was gone, it's like, there's just his pants. What's going on here? Long story short.

But I don't remember much else. So no, no worries that you don't have many. memories of a person you barely met maybe a few times, didn't see him, you didn't have enough of a connection to remember a face, but other things, you knew he was important to the family. There were gifts given to him. Someone went out of their way to make a connection with him to show he was meaningful. So you probably latched on to that. Long story. Long story short. Yeah, then this all relates back then as well to the silence in the car is that at that time, you may not have been very able at five years old to imagine what a conversation occurring in

the car would look like. We're a little better with imagery and events, very, very clear and distinct things, but fabricating a conversation five years old probably wouldn't, may not occur to us. So my gut feeling is I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the silence, even though I've just talked about it for like five minutes. So that's what I do. I'm going to think my way out loud through some of these things. Like, is this important or not? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.

We'll leave a little question mark, but we can move on from that. Do you remember, oh, but there was something interesting that happened. You mentioned there was a shortcut. They decided to take a short cut. Yeah, how did you know it was a shortcut? Because. Or you saw the scenery change or? Yeah, so the scenery did change.

It came from like the regular two lane road to a more narrow road. and we were just parked like, it felt almost like an alley. And we were parked just on the side of this alley to enter this really small pharmacy that was just like off the road. So you actually parked in a kind of narrow alley and then walk around. And that's where we got out and walked out to get to the pharmacy. And it is interesting that you knew this was some kind of a shortcut, that that stuck in your mind, that there's something about deviating from the normal. regular or typical path,

taking a different route. There's something in there that your mind needed to explore. The idea of changing a pattern. I don't have, um, I don't know. Interesting. Yeah. This is,

this is where my brain goes with these things. I'm trying to think through why, what does a shortcut mean? What does it mean to you that? You know, as you were talking, I'm saying the silence and the, car might not be that significant.

I'm now wondering in like my five-year-old brain, like, how I came to process that my grandfather passed away because I don't recall. The only thing I recall was that when we went to the home, they said he's no longer with us. And I can't recall any kind of conversation at home or any kind of sit down. about it. So I don't know if in that moment I just felt like the silence of knowing that this happened

and I don't know what this means for my life. And it kind of pushed me in a way to get to know my remaining grandfather a little bit more and we a little bit closer with. You remember that over the next year, six, seven, eight years old, reflecting on And now that I'm thinking about it, I feel like I did make kind of an effort to do things more, to like, you know, talk to him more even as he got older and got more grumpy. To kind of, you know, have those relationships or even if I wasn't there, he would like buy things for me and leave them for me.

And now I have those core memories of him. So I don't know if that was like a subconscious thing pushing me to do that. Because now. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So yeah, if we look at the silence that way, you didn't have communication with your family about the event. They didn't sit you down and explain what it means. And certainly, I mean, I think at five years old, you can grasp the idea of you're not going to see this person again. You may not really understand death or what it means, but it means you don't get to see someone again. And even in, you know, kindergarten, first grade or whatever, you know, five, six years old, you can get the idea of I like certain people and I would like it if they don't go away. You know, I enjoy their company. So there's definitely some, but, but yeah, maybe that silence is a little more, you know, no one was communicating with you about what does this mean.

How do I understand this and how do I, how do I deal with it going forward? You know, you got understand what something is and what it means in order to say, well, here's what I want to do about it. So, yeah, afterwards, this may have been a pivotal moment in terms of, you know, once you grasp the idea that someone's gone, you can't see them anymore. You start looking at. You start looking at at and that that made me think too of the idea of you go into the pharmacy and the pharmacy is empty like even your family isn't there right you walked in after them they walked in ahead of you and when you walked in they were gone nobody was in there yeah that might have been that direct if we go with that theme that would be a direct connection of like as i'm thinking of this um

grandfather that i'm no longer going to get to see anymore what if i move forward with my life and i can't see any of my family anymore everybody's gone. Did you have a sudden thing, sudden phone call? Oh, no, I don't know what happened just now, but I'm just going to turn on Do Not Disturb. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I saw earlier. I had my phone ringing in the background. Never got up to go. Go turn it off. Now we got a little cat visitor here. There's more of them. There she is. They are the co-stars. They just don't just don't lay on the, on the on the on the books there um and she i don't know if that makes makes sense to you so you were slightly distracted when i mentioned it but the idea that you know you follow your family um

through life in a way you're with them one minute and the next you're all alone in this in this store by yourself that's connected to your to your grandfather being missing where we're used to get his talcum powder um and maybe the idea of a uh taking a shortcut is like something something unexpected could happen we could take uh take a wrong turn so to speak end up in a, I could take a wrong turn and end up in a place where I've got nobody. And there's nobody left. I don't know if that resonates with you in terms of the dream. If it doesn't, we can look at different angles.

But it seems to connect. Yeah, I think so. Because at the time, too, it was just also around the age where we were kind of doing, not like a family tree, but like at school we're talking more about family. And it seemed like everyone else had like both sets of grandparents still around. And then I would have had only one grandmother at the time because my mother's mother died before I was born. And then now my father's father passed away. So I have one of each remaining.

So, yeah, I definitely see that line of reasoning. Yeah. Gotcha. And well, then that also takes us to after you came out. And I want to focus on this a little bit more because I think I have an idea, but I want to flesh it out a bit before I go. too far down that path. You okay? You're going to live?

She gets in her ear and just loves it. A whole time. I'm just going to scratch your ear open sometimes. You got to move, boo-boo. So do you remember having any emotional experience or thoughts as you're in the pharmacy alone? There goes my phone. I think it was just fair. Like, you know, when you just realize, like you're a little child and you realize you're in the

supermarket by yourself. It's kind of like pang of fear like, okay, I'm in here by myself. Maybe I should leave. And then as I go through the door to leave, this homeless person grabs onto my hand. And then that's that shock. Like, what is happening here? Yeah. And then suddenly I'm back in the car.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. Was this person very near the door or did you have to walk past them to get to the car? They were sitting by the door. Just one second. Sure. Yeah. We're getting interrupted by cats and phone calls.

I'm leaving all this in. I think it's hilarious. He, hopefully we're not getting phone calls from family emergencies. If that's the case, we're going to pause and pick this up later. Baby girl. And for the moment, you get entertained by cats. Look at the kiddies.

Look at the kiddies. She's so fluffy. Those listening, on the audio only podcast. Our guest has received, I think, communications from family really had to take this phone call. Not a big deal. I really had to take this phone call. Apparently, um, my cousin is almost here to pick me up. So I might have a bit of a time crunch, but let's continue. I think we're very close. I think we can get it done. If you got 10 or 15 minutes more tops. Absolutely. There we go. Perfect. Perfect. I think we're, I think we're, we're getting in on it.

So, um, any, do you remember any of the details? about this homeless person. Like, what made you know they were homeless? Just the way they dressed or something they said. So I think they were just like sitting in almost tattered clothing in the dark, sitting on a bit of cardboard. I just assumed they were homeless, I guess. You know, little images.

Yeah, if I visual, you're going to have an iconic view. And I think we all kind of see it. The person in the old ready coat with the fingerless gloves and the unkempt hair and beard. And they're pushing the shopping cart maybe and they're talking to themselves. Well, all these, I mean, that's in a million movies, that kind of a thing. So certainly by then you probably would have seen someone. And you may have had a person like that pointed out by your parents as, look at that poor guy.

He's, he's, he's homeless. And so that's stuck in your head. And was it a man or a woman? I don't recall. I just say manned because I guess that's kind of what I remember, like my five-year-old self, I kind of only saw homeless men on the street. Sure. But it was a shadow. He was like, or they were like just in the shadow of the pharmacy, almost, the building.

So I wasn't able to see if it was a minor woman, but they held on to my hand for a little bit as I was leaving. Then after a few seconds, maybe minutes in my dream world, I was just back in the car with my parents and my sister. Okay. And you don't recall that they said anything to you? Oh, there was no exchange. the grab. Do you remember which hand it was? It was my right hand. Okay. May or may not be interesting. And you remember it being firm enough that you couldn't pull away, but what pain? Yeah. It wasn't painful, but it was firm. Yeah. And did you remember, you know, fight, flight, or freeze, thinking anything, any emotional?

beyond shock, but terror? Immediately trying to run away. Absolutely terror. Because at the time, I was terrified of anything dirty. Like, I don't want to walk barefoot. I don't want to do anything that involves any kind of dirt. So I was terrified that this person who's been living on the street had just touched me. Oh, yeah.

So that was a part of it. And then the shock of this stranger, actually, across. did me outside of pharmacy. Yeah. And but absolutely nothing. I didn't speak to you. Didn't try to pull you closer. Didn't try to touch you in any inappropriate way.

Just held you. Um, and you don't remember being let go of, but being back in the car. Yeah. Okay. And family there. Just the same sister in the back and my parents in the front. Okay.

Um, you know, One thing I didn't consider, which is possible, is that you may have actually been at a recital, fallen asleep in the car ride on the way home, had this brief experience of going to the pharmacy being grabbed by the stranger and then woke up actually in the car. We could theorize. Maybe those elements are real life events that bounded an even shorter dream or the whole thing is a dream. Well, we're kind of treating it that way for now, which is not unfamiliar at all. is, you know, sometimes we have sudden scene changes in dreams. No transition at all.

You know, I was on the highway doing 90 miles an hour. I'm sitting in an office chair at work. You just teleport in your mind because ideas connect like that. And they don't need physical time in between as fast travel, like video games. So my thought, and it's even better because so we got this, what happens to, maybe in your five-year-old brain, what happens to people who end up alone with no family to care for them? No one who cares for them. They end up homeless. And I'm suddenly alone in this store, and I'm leaving to try and find other people, but I'm, you're almost grabbed, you were definitely

grabbed involuntarily by this icon of homelessness. Like, it's almost like, this is going to happen to you. You're, I'm your future in a way. And that, no, and bam, you're back in the, you're instant escape mechanism. You're back in the car. I don't know if I laid out that way if things kind of, if you're like, whoa, yeah. Or if you're like, eh, almost, or what do you think? Yeah, I think, yes. I definitely see it that way just because, again, there was like no real conversation around it.

And it seemed to me also that only people who were really sick would die. I didn't know if my grandfather was ill. I just know he had to be in this home for care. I don't know what kind of care it was. Even to this day, I'm not even sure. But it kind of brought to the reality then that people can just die. They don't have to be like really, really sick or visibly very sick because we had gone just the previous weekend and he was fine. So I think even in that the way that person grabbed my hand, I think it was the suddenness of it.

Like the thought was that how quickly things can also change was also maybe something I was trying to, you know, communicate to my smaller self. For sure. Yeah. And these are very transformational traumas that we all go through that are universal to the human condition. This idea of, you know, we develop an awareness of ourself. and then we separate fantasy from reality. And then we have events like this on the cusp of that where we're like, people can go away forever.

My parents will probably go away forever. My sister will go away someday. Oh my God, I'm going to go away someday. And then for the first time in our life we have this epiphany. I'm going to die. Everything dies. I'm going to die.

And we have to figure a way to make sense of it in the world and say, how do I feel about this? That's like a shock is the idea of a thought. I've never had this thought before. And here it is. and I can never unlearn it. What is seen cannot be unseen. That kind of thing.

One of the rules of the Internet, right? And these things stick with us. Yeah. And I would say that's probably everything we've talked about. It sounds like this was a kind of a healthy in a way, transformational trauma. And not all traumas are healthy, but some of them are like, you can't avoid it.

You're going to have to confront these things as a part of being human. That sounds like why it might have stuck with you is this was the turning point in your life when you realized maybe not that you were going to die that might have come a little bit later but that people you love can just go away forever and you're going to have to find a way to understand that what does this mean to me and at the time you were very worried oh no i'll be all alone and i'll end up in a bad place i don't want to be like other people have that i've seen end up in bad places so yeah yeah you know what this has been really helpful because i'm also like remembering that my parents used to go to a lot of funerals.

I used to always go with them. And it didn't occur to me that they were actually dead. Like, you would go, you'd go to the graveside and you sing these songs. And my favorite part was to sing these songs by the graveside. It never occurred to me that someone I knew would be in this position and I would have to do this also. So I even have memories of other people's funeral that I went to, but I can't. recall my grandfather's like I don't yeah I only remember one bit when we went to the house that my parents used to my father used to live in that's where he was birth that's the only part I remember

um I like actually blocked it out like it was too emotional for you uh we do that a lot too we let memories go like I don't want to think about that anymore that was that was too painful at the time I think it was because it was the first person but I actually knew to die in our family Yeah. Yeah. So I think it was maybe that's why the dream stuck with me so long. Like I had to was something that I kind of needed to figure out. So thank you.

Yeah. Well, and people are also very different in the way they respond. So maybe me having the same experience at a younger age because I've got the autism spectrum stuff, my emotional response is very constricted. I could laugh and joke and I'd love to have a good time. And it's not like I'm completely a robot, but I don't get the same attachment to people. So I would have processed that situation differently. On your personal level, that was probably a turning point that actually helped inform the rest of your life in terms of how much emotional value you place on relationships and getting, and you did.

You made a conscious effort to change and say, well, if someone's not going to be here very long, I'm going to spend as much time with them as I can. And you're probably still that person today in a lot of ways that really values connections and friendships and spending time with people. Absolutely. as you were talking through, I was like maybe that's kind of where I am now in terms of I don't want to be like when someone passes away. I don't want to say I didn't do this or I didn't spend enough time with. And I think one of my friends passing away while I was in university, that was the regret. I had a hard time dealing with her passing. I also felt kind of like an imposter because I'm like, I don't know her that much.

Should I have been like grieving in this way? But I was also grieving all the things and all the times. I didn't hang out with her or didn't do specific things because I now don't have any of those core memories to hang on to as part of her memory. So I think this dream and like synthesizing all of this information is allowing me to realize that yes, I am this like connected, emotional person. I want to ensure that I am doing all the things and spending the time while we have our loved ones here so that maybe self, selfishly, I'll be able to deal with the passing a little bit better on my end. If that happens in my lifetime. For sure.

And you know what I'm going to do after this is something I don't normally do? I'm going to call my parents. I'm going to get off this call and I'm going to, I'm going to give him a call and just say hi for no reason. I think it's a good idea. Just because calls, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's a good idea.

Well, speaking of family, you got family coming over to help you out, give you a ride somewhere. And I'm going to get you out of here. So let's do this. Okay, for everybody out there listening, this has been our friend Nicolette Richardson out of Jamaica. I love that. I love talking to people all over the world. She is the curator of resources for millennials to live their best lives. And I think you can see why she's good at that from this interview here.

You can find her at the grownup millennial.com and at the grown up millennial on Instagram, links in the description below. For my part, would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. 15 works of historical dream literature, the most recent, The World of Dreams by Have Luck, Ellis. I got a block on that. It won't come to me sometimes. You can find all this and more, Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com books, downloadable MP3 episodes, encyclopedia, something else I can't remember, links to all my other social media stuff.

And that'll do it, Nicolette. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. It's fascinating conversation. And thank you. This was amazing. Thank you so much. And for everybody out there,

Thanks for listening.