Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 116: Sanguinary Dramaturge

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

“You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” – Jordan B. Peterson

Greetings friends, welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Luigi from Germany. I love talking to people from all around the world right back to our friend in just a moment. Would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always got to do the basic shilling. Or no one will know that if you go to Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, not only can you get downloadable MP3 versions of this podcast to take with you on your favorite listening device, go to the gym, take a walk, all that good stuff. But you can also find the now 16 currently available works of historical dream literature. Just published book 16 and concurrent audiobook release on this channel. It is The Meaning of Dreams by Horace G. Hutchinson.

Interesting book, now regarded the father of modern golf instruction. Find out how a sports writer from the early 1900s became an author writing about dreams. Very fascinating work. I enjoyed editing it and recording the audio book for you. That's enough about me. Wow, I never show that long. Back to our friend Luigi, thank you for being here.

I appreciate your time. Yeah, I appreciate your time as well. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm Luigi. I've met Benjamin in a shared server or the shared Discord server. I'm from Germany. I'm 24 years old.

I tend to have a lot of very vivid dreams and a lot of very weird dreams, as people tell me. And I just thought one of the recent dreams that I had would be interesting to ask Benjamin about because he always goes on about how he's like interpreting dreams.

And now I'm here. Catwalking on the keyboard. That is my thing. Yeah, I'm kind of a, you know, legit, autistically obsessed. I found this is like the thing that I'm most interested in. I'm like, tell me another story.

Tell me. Mostly I think because I don't remember my dreams. I think it makes me extra. curious about what other people's experiences are and how it might relate to mine. Yeah, we got the whole ASL out of you. You gave yourself more of an introduction than most people do. Good. But I also want to point out, as people can see right over here, there is a video loop playing

because I will absolutely talk to people who don't have a podcast. They're not pushing a book. You're just regular people. And sometimes, you know, want your face on the internet. Fair enough. I do this, you know, it's like my job, basically. so of course my face is going to be on camera. I'm the guy.

But yours doesn't have to be. I'll talk to anybody, you know, reach out before my schedule gets too busy. And, you know, one of these days I'll be famous. And I just won't have time to talk to all of you. So get in now. Limited, limited time while supplies last, et cetera. Yeah, the shared server run is just, you know, another, say, podcasting duo, the Sitch and Adam show, which some people,

go to the in Kentis philecterium playlist, you'll see one of the episodes I made was responding to, uh, Sitch and Adam discussing dreams. And I'm like, oh, I need to, I need to say something about this. Kind of my thing. And of course, I clickbait titled it. Sitch and Adam are wrong about everything. They're not wrong about everything. I just said that because it's, because it's fun. Um, I don't know if you knew about that or, uh, you know, I, I try not to post in general, you know, general chat, like look at my stuff here. So, um, I, know about a decent amount of your stuff i know a little bit about i know about your political opinions i know a lot about your about the types of discussion you have um i think i think i think i

know a decent amount about your character so far and i've seen some of the plugs that you put that you put down in the chat sometimes like your channel and i think sometimes you also drop a book didn't you recently finish for a new book i think i saw that yeah that's the what I was just talking about. That's the... Oh, yeah. Please buy that, everyone. Buy his book. Oh, thank you. Dreams and Their Meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson. And I think I said it wrong earlier, the meaning of dreams. That's not...

That's actually the title of another book that's coming. There's only so many titles people have done. I got like four or five more to go. Then I'm going to start working on an original, a more original work. These are all so far historical reproductions that I have acquired from sources. And kind of like, I don't know if you're familiar with the guy sticks, Hexonhammer. Does that sound familiar? I have definitely, I've definitely heard of him. I think I've seen a few, like, clips of him.

He is a fellow wizard, more of a political social commentary wizard. Very insightful. Young guy compared to me, I mean, like 10 some odd years younger. Scott married to a wonderful gal and he's living in the, I think the Netherlands currently, and that's where he's doing his show from. But, you know, he gave me the idea and I didn't want to duplicate his efforts, but I'm like, you know, I can do that too. I can find old, out-of-print stuff.

that I think is very interesting and preserve it for the historical record in a modern version, but also use that as a, honestly, as a vehicle to just, I want to do this for a living. It's not quite paying the bills yet, but, you know, the idea is I don't have to have a day job anymore. I can just talk to people about their dreams, publish books on dreams and other stuff. A little behind the scenes, and if anyone's, you know, made it this far into the episode and it gives a damn. When I'm done reproducing older historical works, my plan is to, as I said, launch into

newer works and I've got to kind of and this has been a concept ruin in my mind for a couple of years and I finally hit upon what I think is going to be the formula. I'm sorry I talk a lot of it quickly then we'll get back to you. No worries. What I think I'm in a title so the the historical dream literature series is called augury bibliomancy and chaos and that means you know augury reading signs predict predicting the future by signs sometimes or at least you know like omens people would say you know a flight of crows is a bad omen that's augury of a kind But augury can be, you know, rolling dice. There's a lot of different methods.

Dream interpretation is one method of augury. Biblioliancy refers specifically to people who used to, you know, blindly open the Bible, point to a passage and then read it. And it would supposedly, by the will of God, have some relevant message to you right then, right there. But I think of it in a more broader term of bibliomancy, the magic of text, the magic of books, the magic of passing information from one person to another. You know, you take ideas out of your head. You put them in symbols on paper.

You hand it to another person and they can put your ideas in their head by reading the symbols. Like, wow. And reading symbols on paper is a kind of augury in a way. It's a more predictable cause and effect augury. But anyway, then chaos is like I just appreciate the nature of chaos. Well, the world is chaotic and driven by entropy. and then the fight against it. That's the eternal struggle, order, and chaos.

But the chaos specifically of dreams, we never know what we're going to get. We can predict them. Usually, there are people who can program their dreams, people who have lucid dreams. It's kind of outside my specialty. I deal mostly with the subconscious messages to ourselves. What were we thinking about in our sleep? So that's the psychological framework I bring to things. All of this to tell, sorry, I ramble.

I probably shouldn't have a second cup of coffee this morning, but I wanted to be awake for you. I only got like six hours of sleep last night. Long story short. My forthcoming series, I've hit upon the title. Five minutes later, I get back around it. This is how my brain works. This is why I can do dream interpretation. Crazy associative tangents.

The next series will be called a wizard's guide to XYZ. I think that's what the title I've settled on. So the first one, my planned first offering will be a wizard's guide to ASOP's fables. Because I think those are tremendously. important storytelling that should be preserved in a modern edition. There's a lot of additions of it, but also with psychological explanations. What does it mean? What does the tortoise and the hair mean? Why that story? What are we supposed to draw from? I think a lot of people have an idea of what it means to them, but not a lot of people have the explanation offered of what

psychological principles are being demonstrated and they're based on what we know today and how it actually came from a lot of these old stories. They understood these things, years ago and they are still relevant today. That's my rant. Oh my God. Are you still even there? No, no. I've already gone. You've disappeared. This is just, yeah, I've just put a decoy in my chair that's listening to you now. Right. As long as the decoy responds and tells me a story, would I know the difference? Definitely. That's an interesting debate. I programmed it well. That's an interesting debate we've had in the speaking of the server and whatnot. All my crazy ideas. I got to share them with somebody and well, okay, two things. Another rant. Sorry.

I do not do political stuff on this show. Now, that doesn't mean I don't have opinions, but it means they're not relevant to the psychological process. This is a completely different framework that I'm existing in here. You step into the counseling office as the counselor say, your job is not to look at your customer and say, I want you to believe what I believe. Therefore, that is the purpose of our interaction.

If you're doing that, my God, you're a freaking cult leader. You're not doing psychology properly. And that's one of my big problems with say certain academic perspectives on psychology that are becoming way too prevalent today in the idea of teaching certain people that they need to be political advocates in every aspect of their life, that there is no area of life that should be immune to that in terms of. But psychology and my estimation is one of a medicine in general. you don't cure you don't cut out a cancer by telling someone they're a bad person for believing x y and z you just do the surgery you know and so for psychology if someone comes into the office they say doc i got a problem i'm depressed you let's talk about your life your beliefs your approach your behaviors and you know try and sort out where the problem is and get you to a place where

you don't have that problem anymore so for the long story short for this show the problem is the dream. The problem is I want to understand the dream. And that's what we do. And it doesn't matter what I believe. And my beliefs don't enter into it at all. I offer suggestions. None of these answers are inside my head. I just have, what if we look at it this way? What if we look at it that way? And we take this object and we turn it around and we pull it apart if we can. Um, you know, Rubik's Cube style. We can take all the pieces and put them somewhere else if we want to. Um, that's all I'm doing is, is, uh, as I say, shining a light in the dark to show, help you see more clearly what's already inside your own head. And if we, if we do it right, we get a good answer that makes sense to you.

Another rant. Sorry. It's okay. Yeah. Well, hopefully people like listening to me talk. I don't know. If I, if they don't, what am I doing this for? Oh, so well, okay, long story short on that too. What was my original points? I got to have some place to, you know, argue with people. So if you follow me on some social media, you're not going to get exclusively dream content. You're going to get my opinions about other things. And you might like them, you might not. But that's not the purpose of this show.

It's not what I do here. And I do keep them separate. I think it is possible to do so. I think it's necessary to do so from an ethical standpoint. It doesn't matter if you come away from this conversation believing what I believe in any way. You are you and we're just looking inside your head with your participation and trying to give you a good result.

You got to have that as your focus or you're just doing it wrong. So that's my critique of modern direction, some modern. Folks are taking psychology. It's not a good one, not a healthy one, not a functional one. That's as political as I get on this show. But more about you. Is it okay to mention, what am I trying to say? Certain spiritually connected food chains.

Is that a fun thing to mention? Sure. Sure. The cult of the impossible. Whopper or the Impossible Burger? Yes. I have created the cult of the Impossible Whopper. Where all we do is worship the Impossible Whopper made by Burger King.

The holiest of soy slop that you will ever see. Going to be with alliteration. I'm going to have a head rush and pass out. Yes. We believe that the Impossible Whopper is the only planned base. meat alternative that actually tastes good. And that's our only belief. And of course, that everyone should at least try one.

I think I will. And, you know, I went ahead and joined because, you know, for a LARP. Sorry if I don't take it too seriously. And I don't think you either. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's fun. That's a fun idea. I like that kind of silliness.

I have a very absurdist sense of humor in that regard. And why not? Sometimes you just have an excuse. What is it? Ah, launching into another story. and then you can relate it to that. But there was a comedian I heard recently, and he was talking about as he got older,

he started to realize why men have, you know, little social clubs that they go to. I mean, we wear silly hats and vote on whether we're going to add another card table for poker. You know, just nothing. I just want to, you know, because younger guys are more like I want to find a mate. I have more concerns with dating and social life.

And then sometimes, you know, a lot of times, back in the day at least, people would get married and then they want you know they develop separate interests and sometimes men just want to go and be silly with each other is like the club doesn't mean anything it's like we're we're here to wear silly hats and and and take stupid votes and laugh and you know it's just a just an excuse to hang out and so that's i kind of look at that i kind of look at it like that too with the impossible burger thing and i'll be honest with you i've never tried one never appealed to me i'm like why would i do that i like the chicken sandwiches that's actually

that's actually the main reason why I made this Discord server because I have talked to a bunch of people who I was like, hey, by the way, have you ever tried the Impossible Whopran? They're like, no, it's disgusting. And then I like, have you tried it? Yeah. And then they always say no, but I already know it's disgusting. I don't need to try poop to know that instead it's disgusting. And that's why I made the code of the importance.

possible war, but to entice people into finally at least giving it a chisholars. So, I mean, this probably, there's a whole evolution to this that I find fascinating too. It's like you, let me ask instead of asserting, excuse me, there was a point in your life where you looked at it at actually that specific conundrum and said, that doesn't sound appealing to me. And then you realized, wait a minute, I haven't tried it yet. And then you tried it. Is that kind of your thought process? Yeah.

anytime something new comes out that people like where I'm like I can't see that being a thing that I would enjoy it I try to at least try it out once like there's my my parents always said like there's no like the same with food like I never have to finish anything they cook but I should at least try it yeah And I think it's the same with like media and the impossible opera. Gotcha. Yeah. And then well, that's also so that's a, wow, I mean, my brain explodes with ideas. It's hard to keep them all straight sometimes. But I think that is a very good perspective to have on most things.

The idea of not judging something before you've tried it unless a lot of other people throughout history have put it in a box like eating poop. Not good. And there's really good reasons not to do that in terms of it's not healthy for you. And it smells bad and probably rot your teeth. I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff. Where it's just we get a nasty feeling that biological visceral disgust response of like that is meant to be waste. My body knows its waste before I even try it. And then there's the the odd person who finds that sexually appealing or who does have a what's called coprophagic drive. Like they have this desire to eat poop or drink their urine.

I mean, that, that happens. You didn't tune into this episode thinking this is where we were going, did you, folks? But this is happening. From my understanding, that's like usually a very good sign of like a complete psychiatric breakdown. Could be. That's something that happens a lot in like, like, actual like asylums where they like end up eating their own poop when they're like basically at that point where you colloquially

would say that they're insane. Yeah. Yeah. And there's an interesting language around that too. I mean, insane is a technically, is a technical legal term. Are you responsible for your behavior or not? Sane people are insane people or not. So legal definition.

We would say they're suffering maybe from a psychosis or a parapheria in the sexual sense or a some other disorder. And it's funny because, you know, I worked. in, um, been doing this for 20 years. And I've seen a lot of people eat and smear feces. Not hundreds, but enough where I'm like, that's a thing. And it honestly doesn't bother me any more than changing a, and a, a demented person's, you know, 90 year old gal, she's got dementia.

She can't sit and poop. So you change your diaper. That's just the way it is. And she, sometimes she doesn't know the difference and you, you know, it's got to get done. She can't sit and poop. And it's not, it's not good for her. And it, um, what is it? It's the compassionate.

It's the right thing to do to provide that care. Long story short, back to poop eating. Sometimes the dementia patients will do that. They just don't know what they're doing. A lot of people will do, well, a lot of those who do smear or eat it are doing it sometimes for secondary gain. And that sounds like a weird thing. It's like, what do they want out of it?

Well, it's also common in, say, prison situations where someone is acting out. They are lashing out. They're like, I want you to suffer for hurting me. therefore I will do something disgusting in front of you or smear it on the walls because I can't, that's something you can't take away from me. We can't take away from someone their ability to poop. It just happens. So it's a very, actually a very common form of kind of prisoner retaliation in a way.

And I think of some of the mental health system is, you know, I thought of myself eventually, it dawned on me. I'm a mental health prison guard here. You know, there's people involuntarily committed. And we can, you know, as a culture, we got to have that debate of when is it justified to protect someone for their own good. As a child, their brain is not developed. If they're three years old, you're going to let them run into traffic.

No, you use appropriate force to protect them from their son. You take them out of traffic. You don't let them do it because freedom reasons. On the other end of the scale, you don't let dementia patients wander into traffic or sit and poop. We got to, there's lines of impairment that are very clear. There's always the question of, do you have a right to, be mentally ill. Yeah. And if so, to what extent? Yeah. Yeah. I've struggled with that for a long

time. And that brings me back around the, you know, mental health prison guard things. There were people there. I was not comfortable holding hostage. And I, you know, it's a harsh way to phrase it, but I try to be harsh with myself. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Does, is this morally good? Is this morally, does this person need to be protected from themselves? Is this justified? And I've seen cases where it absolutely was and I had no problem with it because wow, that person was messed up. And I've seen cases where it's not. This is a flimsy excuse and I felt like that person was treated poorly. And I told him so. And I advocated to for their release. That's as far as I could go without opening the door and handing in my keys when we got outside saying, you're free and I'm

fired. You know, so I struggled with that for, you know, but I made it about 20 years of caring for folks and being a kind person on the inside of a bad. situation. And it's not surprising that people acted out. The people were like, screw you for locking me up. I'm going to smear poop on the wall. And I'm like, fair enough. I get it. We can't let you do that. It's not sanitary. But I'm not mad at you. I get it. You know, I wouldn't like this either. It's also, it's also very mentally taxing. I have had to do, due to my school, I was forced to do an internship for a disability home and for a nursery home for old people. Yeah.

And I got lucky more, well, not really lucky, but like, I managed to get myself out of any, like, poop, shower, pee situation, because I can't do those things. That's not my strength. but I also quickly realized like how depressing it is I think a disabled home was the best like it was it was more like assistant

it was like an assistant living home so those people were all mentally sharp and they had cool lives but for the nursery home it was horrible and I was actually like stationed at the best part my friend

they actually forced my friend to like go into the dementia part, like in the close dementia like part. And he was saying a lot of like scary things of like people randomly screaming, running around. And he eventually the only way to get some respect, what he had to do. And mind you, I'm German, so this is going to make a lot of sense. So he started to walk around as if he owned the place.

So a lot of these old people with dementia started to give him the. Roman salute. It's like, oh, here's the, look, here's the officer. Oh, wow, he's so handsome. Look at the officer. That was the only way. And they were, they were mocking him. No, they weren't mocking him.

They were, like, respecting him. Okay. That was the only way for him to, like, kind of gain charge over them, like, where they would actually, like, trust him and do the things he said, because they were just reminded of the times when they were, like, you. four or eight or something and they were just like oh yeah it's it's the officer a respectable authority figure yeah interesting yeah so i don't have um you know i there are some ideologies i do not endorse but there are also situations where i understand what that gesture is meant in that context and it

it's it's it's tough to say it seems appropriate but so if we look at it from this this perspective that was it was the way they chose to express a particular idea fair enough that population from that time, et cetera. But there's a broader concept there too, which is the idea of if you are trapped in a place with other unstable people, you want to know someone's in charge, keeping you safe from the unstable behavior of the other people around you. So there is something to that of like saying, you know, imagine you're a teacher in a classroom and you need to ensure that other students, you know, students are not.

abusing each other verbally physically, et cetera, bullying, that kind of thing. So if you are a bit of an authoritarian, not really authoritarian as such, but a reliable, dependable, safe authority figure who says, I'm not going to allow these bad things to happen in my presence. People relax.

And they're like, yes, sir, you're getting the job done. This is nice. I like this. So there's a very appealing thing about that type of circumstance. when a group of generally unstable people don't regulate themselves very well, having someone to look to to say, this guy's the hero. He's going to keep us from bad things happening to us.

That's very understandable. And so that kind of dynamic, I appreciate it very much. You should, if you're going to be, what is it, the Spider-Man quote, with great power comes great responsibility. If you're going to be in charge, if you're going to be the guy that gets things done and has the ability to intercede, you got to do it right. And if people see that, they will respect it.

So, yeah, I was going somewhere with that, I think, too. Yeah, sorry, I also kind of went into a tangent there. Yeah, no, no, well, so just that that response is understandable. And, you know, they could have given a more U.S. military salute, but they chose a different one. Fair enough. Old people from a different time. That's how they, that's how they understood that condition, the circumstances they were in. But I've, not only have I worked in memory care, they call it here, you know,

they're always coming up with new titles. It's like, yes, old folks with dementia can't take care of themselves. They will wander off if the door is not locked up. I've been exposed to that in, you know, actual nursing home situations and inpatient psychiatric. That's definitely we get people who have a sudden rapid decline into significant enough mental problems that they're not able to exist in their previous setting. Maybe they were actually being cared for by family and family just hit a limit of, you know, I woke up at 4 a.m. in the morning and, and grandpa, one, was standing out in the snow and his feet were starting to go, uh, frostbitten. We can't keep him locked up. We don't have the environment to do that. So you take him to the hospital to get his feet treated because this is an emergency and they go, oh, he's got dementia. And they're like, and then the family tells the story. We've been caring for him for two or three years. And he's just gone off the deep and is wandering out in the snow and he doesn't even know it. And so he gets admitted to what used to be my environment. And he's

the emergency psychiatric and we assess, okay, what is the nature of this dementia? What does it look like? What are this person's limits, their memory, their executive function? We look at all those things and try and decide, can they go home to their family with education for the family to help them manage better? If not, with support from the community or does this person need to go to a locked memory care because that's just the best place to not have them lose their feet to frostbite before they have to die, you know, or get themselves killed wandering into traffic.

So there's actually some interesting development in like the locked facility sort of deal. Yeah. I don't know if you, have you heard of the dementia villages? That sounds familiar. And I think I did hear about it recently, but tell me, tell me what you've learned. So essentially dementia, they function as a locked psychiatric facility in a way but they're not locked in their rooms and they can go outside whenever they want to it's just that the

entire facility is built in a way to simulate a little city so they have like a specific architecture in which the dementia people can't really get lost they can always like move in specific there's always like good markers on like remembrance markers for them to know where they are. And in an environment like this, they can actually socialize and live like more or less like they would have if they don't have dementia, which is a little bit of more than ethical approach. Yeah. And there's kind of a dedicated staff that just kind of. Oh, yeah.

Is around to help as needed. Yeah, they also, they also like have, so they have like shops. So they have like barber shops. They have like food shops that the dementia people can go into, which are all trained in how to deal with people with dementia. So it's actually just for them, it feels like they're in the city again. But everyone in there is well trained on what to do with, how to treat them, what to do if there's an emergency, what if someone has a panic attack.

It's a very interesting concept. The only problem about it is that it's still in a somewhat experimental phase, and it costs a lot more than just locking them up. So a lot of healthcare providers just don't want to do it because it costs so much more. Yeah. That is tough. There is a resource problem in a way. And it's not that the resources don't exist, but it's in some ways the allocation of what are ultimately limited resources of human time and energy.

I mean, where are we going to put that and what are we going to agree is the best way to deal with these things? I like that idea. You know, and the first thing you thought of when you said that, and maybe outdoors is better and contained in that way. but I thought of um, derelict malls, like from the 80s and 90s that they're just not, a lot of malls are closing people, the idea of the whole culture going to hang out at the mall as a kid.

Um, it just doesn't seem to be as prevalent as it used to be. And a lot of malls are failing stores closing, can't stay open. And then what do you do with this giant empty building? I would say you turn it into apartments and people can live there. And then they have an indoor area that's contained at dementia village, an old mall. You know, and you have all these little apartment units.

And then you have staff that work there. And it could be a great place. You know, I think it's a great idea. And you can have, you know, because a lot of these things have, you know, atriums and common areas and different stuff. And I think it would be every single one of these shops has its own bathroom. So I think it would be very easy to convert. Then again, it's how expensive is that? How many staff?

You know, there's always a staff to patient ratio that needs to be adjusted. And if a place gets too big, there's logistical problems of, you know, maintaining it, supplying it, but also getting everyone the proper care they need. But I know we do that too with the, there's actually purpose built assisted living facilities where they're like, it's an apartment complex with staff and nurses. And you each have your own apartment. You know, so there's like entire apartment buildings that are just old folks getting the help they need because they just can't get around so well. But they're still there in their head mostly. They just, their legs don't work so good.

That kind of thing. A little bit different with the dementia stuff. but I think it's a fantastic idea. And I actually want to see that succeed in whatever way we can. Yeah, it would be really nice. I can just send you, I think I can send you like a link to a mini documentary later that you can watch after the podcast. Yeah, sure. I'm very interested in that.

So you have a broader focus on psychology as well. Is that your field you're getting into or medicine, nursing, something like that? So for high school here in Germany, we have a system where you have to pick between psychology and pedagogics, mathematics, business, and health and food. So health and food. I took the psychology and pedagogics because a friend of mine went there. well and that's where I had courses in basic courses in psychology, like I did some Freudian theory, a little bit of how to activate resources in people with mental illness, that sort of thing. Interesting.

And that's by the end of high school, you got to kind of choose something you want to experience to see if it's your thing. So how it works is after high school, depending on what you took, you can then, after 12th grade, either choose to go into a university, take a university degree that is related to that thing you chose, that topic you chose. So if you took the pedagogics in psychology, you couldn't study higher mathematics. But you would be allowed to study psychology. Okay. Or you have the alternative to do another year of school, which I did, and also do a second language, which you need in Germany. And then you can study whatever you want at university.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I like, well, this morning we were kind of, I don't know if you saw a general chat on the, on the laser addict server. We were talking about public education and that kind of thing. I think there's a lot of fantastic reforms that could happen. And I like that idea of helping students understand where their talents lie, where their natural inclinations are and helping them develop their own idea of refining a specialty. We got to start general and go towards, you're going to have to do something with your life. What are you naturally interested in? Where are your natural talents?

And there's a lot of controversy on how to best do that. Should we be administering IQ tests? And if someone comes in under a certain amount, it's like, sorry, you're just never going to be a genius in some ways at some level. Like higher education will not benefit you in the way it would benefit someone else. And this is what I say, too. there's a tremendous lack of respect for people who are genius with their hands, master craftsmen, that couldn't do a calculus problem to save their life. But that doesn't mean they're less than a nuclear physicist. It just means, man, you know, a nuclear physicist couldn't whittle a piece of wood

into a flute. They couldn't do it. They don't have that talent. But someone else can, man, making flutes for living, crafting chairs, building custom furniture. I mean, it's all kinds of great things people could be doing with their hands that are better for them in terms of they enjoy it more. They just need to discover it, you know, and going to college where they struggle and hate every minute of it because, like, I'm just not much of a reader. I just don't process information that way. I'd rather be building something with my hands. I think we need more respect for that path. And then it won't look like we're excluding kids from university. We're saying, no, you want to go to a school where they're going to teach you how to more fully express yourself with your hands like you want to

and like you have the natural talent for. So I said a lot. Go ahead. No, it's just, I think unfortunately the way the school system is built up, it's completely like antithetical to the idea of making sure that you are able to express yourself and like build on your strength, where it's instead completely built upon you becoming conformist. And, doing exactly what is asked of you in the exact way that you that is asked of you and I think I think that this sort of type of schooling is actually what destroys a lot of people personally I think I'm one of those people that have really suffered under that system it also really like takes it takes away your self-confidence yeah when you constantly

that you're not allowed to be yourself. And I just wish we would have a school system that would actually, like, be more like university in a way where you can just go pick the courses that you want to improve in and not be forced to, like, do everything at, like, a mediocre level. And did you say you took psychology and pedagogics? Yes. So you looked at, I mean, for most people that may not know. know or just those people who don't know.

Pedagogy is basically the system, no, the understanding or the practice of teaching and learning. Am I expressing that in the way you would? It's like that's kind of what kind of what pedagogy is. It's about teaching and learning and it's also a lot. It's very focused on especially children and teenagers, but it's not, it's not like a force to state. So for example, you have concepts like conditioning, conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning is in a way pedagogics. Sure.

And then there is also operant conditioning, which is based on Pavlovian conditioning. So operant conditioning is essentially, if you build on a Pavlovian conditioned conditioning and make another conditioning built on top of that, that's operant conditioning and then you can do that again and again and again and again and that's one way to explain how humans learn where essentially everything we do is just conditioning and the further you get away from the original conditioning point the harder it gets to uncondition these things and as such you become more and more sad in your ways which explains why old people for example have a harder time adapting to new situations because they have such high operant conditioning

that it's hard for them to go back to a level where they can actually adapt again. Absolutely. And that's where we get phrases like you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Now, technically you can, but it's expressing a broad general principle that the longer you've had a habit, the harder it is to change, just in general. Now, that doesn't mean you can't, but man, it's going to be hard. If you're 80 years old and you're like, I'm going to learn something brand new, a brand new way of interacting with the world.

Not so much. Your brain doesn't have that much. What would they say, you know, neuroplasticity anymore for learning new things, absorbing it. But also, man, you got to, here's a kind of an analogous situation.

If you've got someone who's, let's say a teenage girl, this is most typical, who has borderline personality disorder and she is 20 years old, teenage, sorry, teenage 18, whatever. And she's been, having emotional dysregulation and learning bad habits about how to cope with that since she was 10,

it can take up to another 10 years to overcome and retrain those bad habits to respond a different way. And that goes for, you know, if a woman is, or man, let's say it's a man in this case, is 30 years old. And he's had this emotional dysregulation borderline personality for 15 years. It could take another 15 years after that. It takes almost as long to unlearn something as it took to learn it. So there's a concept of speaking of just pedagogy in general. I think it was, I don't remember it was Aristotle Plato, one of those two. He said, give me a child until they're like five years old or seven years old.

And I will show you the man. If you can train someone up to that point to think or understand or behave in a certain way, that kind of gets cemented pretty solidly. I mean, we start forming physical, biological pathways. in our brain that are extremely difficult to reprogram me. Once they're there, it's like laying down, um,

you know, a road through the woods. You can build a new road and you can tear up the old road, but it's always going to be an investment of effort to undo what has been done. Um, so that's why they, we, you know,

in psychology, we spend so much time talking about early childhood trauma. If you just don't screw up kids too badly, they'll probably, they're probably going to be okay. If you do horrible things to them when they're very young, they're going to, they're fucked for life.

And that's really hard to undo. So that's my rant on that. Which is, to add my own little rant, which is also something that I find really annoying when I see people go and basically they just treat. And if you're 16 years old, people say, oh, yeah, that's basically still a child. But if you're 18, then suddenly you're an adult and you're upbringing. doesn't matter anymore. And I think that's just so short-sighted and so like anti-empathetic where someone can be treated and taught a certain way for essentially all of their life and then oh and then like they're on their own for like 10% of the life and now you expect them to

completely override those 90% of the of the lifetime experiences. by their own 10% active effort. That's like the whole thing with people who have like childhood obesity. That's why they often never become like Finn, because it's basically like a learned behavior and it also changes your body physiology. Or if you have like certain traumas, not only do those traumas affect you, even if you treat the traumas, that doesn't mean that the personality that came from these traumas,

will change. It just means that you will be less distressed from them. Absolutely. No, that's for sure. And this, you know, so, it's slight tangent there, but I'm going to bring it back around to the idea of how education is structured. I think you said a very important thing in terms of one thing we need to, in my opinion, really focus on is the idea of lifelong learning. That doesn't mean being a lifelong student in a school under an authority figure. But we all choose, in a way, different masters throughout our life in terms of like the classic martial arts master style. You're earlier you are in life. You, we are imposed upon.

These are your learning masters in terms of reading right and rhythmatic, all that good stuff. And we put kids in that situation saying these are important you will learn from this person. Fair enough. There's, there's good reason to accomplish that in some way, whether public education in its current form is the ideal method. I dispute. But definitely you don't want kids, as we were saying in the argument earlier, you

don't want kids growing up, um, feral without the ability to speak or read or write or participate in socialization with other people. These are critical foundational things. So there's going to, but then later in life, you choose your own masters. Uh, you know, we, we go to say college on purpose to find experts in, for in my case, in your case, psychology and say, sense, teach me. And I will show up and I will do the work you assign for the purpose of learning. And we do that. We never really stop doing that, but people think education is a specific thing that ends at some point. So one of my basic things would like teaching people from a very early age, you never stop learning. Even if you have a diminished desire to learn new things in some ways, it's going to happen anyway. And it's all going to be

variable on your personal inclinations. You're going to, because I think we all, have different things we enjoy doing, you know, like I'm very much self-taught on a lot of things, auto-didactic learning is teach myself by reading a ton of stuff. That's kind of how I'm doing the dream things. Like, I'm reading everything that's ever been written by everybody. And at some point, I will have read it all and I'll know everything everyone's thought. And then I can start working on my own ideas. Okay, how do I understand this and how do I apply it? That was part one, part two. There was a part two. Wait a bit. Oh, reimagining education in a way. I kind of feel like, have you ever heard of the Montessori schools?

Oh, yeah. I've actually, I've actually did an internship in one. Nice. Well, good. Well, you can tell me, and I want to hear your feedback too. I went to one when I was younger. I've always been a precocious brat. As freewheeling and self-discovering and lack of directiveness as the Montessori schools were,

I would not lay down for nap time. I'm going to sit up because you can't make me. I've always been a bit of a disagreeable. fuck that's not it's this is my way i don't like being told what to do which you know reciprocally i don't want to tell anyone else what to do it's only fair hey but i think that needs to be more of the general model through education and what i mean by that is let people in a way be a bit freewheeling in what they gravitate towards and then if someone says let's say someone is they are more inclined physically so how do we work in other than

concepts under a very active kinetic dynamic learning style. They got to run around. They got to put their hands on things. Well, you can teach them to say build a fence. And that involves geometry. How do we make this pole stand up? How do we pour the concrete deep enough to make sure it doesn't fall over? What is a hammer and a nail? How do these things work together? What is what is the physics involved? What is the math and geometry involved? We can work a lot of these necessary things into the path someone's already inclined to take. And I think they will attack understanding and acquiring knowledge with gusto if we do with it. But instead, we sit people in a chair and we say, write the letter A 50 times until you can make it look pretty. Come on. Everybody hates that.

Who wouldn't hate that? It's not the best way. So listen to me waxing, you know, eloquent on, my educational expertise. But that's one of the problems I have with it is a lot of the one size fits all model that's just not it's not we're having some of the worst educational results it specifically in america i think we're doing it wrong top down way way too bad we need much more experimentation you know not only would i you know abolish public schools but i would certainly start with the you know um federal department of education that says you all have to do the same thing and here's what it is like that's a bad idea but my two cents please you you have yourself Yeah, from my experience with Montessori, I personally I have had a very bad experience with Montessori, but I think that's not necessarily related to the model itself, but more related to how it works in Germany and also the type of teachers that were there.

So number one problem was, in Germany, after elementary school, Depending on your grades, you either go to a school for intelligent people, medium intelligent people, or basically dumb people. And usually they don't send people who qualify for the intelligent people school to Montessori. It's usually always just like an alternative for those people who would go to unattargetable. to like go to the unintelligent schools. So that's problem number one. So basically they get a bunch of like children who are already not good in school and they are not very interested and that's a problem.

So yeah. And then the other thing is the teachers, a lot of them, like the parents were all very engaged and they all were really good, but like the teachers were horrible. the head mistress. I was actually part of the class where I helped students, where the head mistress teached. And she was actively ridiculing the children, telling them that they will never amount to anything.

Wow. And I remember one time she made like very, like, she made like a joke in front of the whole class. as to impress me that like how will they ever how will they ever finance my pension the best thing they can get is unemployment and I thought that was very horrible like there were there were a few kids in there where I actively like try to give them they had dreams they wanted to get better and I actually I actively try to tell them you know what if you really like do this

If you study more in this department, if you're like, do your job well, why wouldn't you be able to go to university? Why wouldn't you be able to go to this elite school? But this headmistress constantly, and not just her, there were multiple teachers, they constantly just said, oh, don't even try. Don't give them false hope, that's cruel. Wow. And that was very depressing. Yeah. I have to say.

That's a horribly broken toxic culture. Awful. Yeah. And also in the Montessori school, I always believe that as long as you're not mentally disabled, intelligence is something that's taught, not like inherent. But in Montessori school, it was the first time that I actually found a dumb kid. He wasn't mentally disabled. He was trying very hard and trying to do good and he was starting in everything.

But you could just see that there was, like, he had like just very low intelligence. Like he took very long to grasp any new concept. He was always the slowest in everything. But he really tried. And that was also something that I learned there that some people are just. they're just not savable, quote-unquote. Like, not everyone can go to university. And I always thought that is something that everyone could do if they had the right environment.

Yeah, I got you. I would agree with that in terms of I would like it if that were the case, but I don't think it is. I think there are biological limitations. And someone doesn't have to be, you know, quote-unquote, classically retarded to, you know, have a severe developmental disability in order to just kind of fall short of, what maybe most other people are capable of or half of other people are capable of. There's two important considerations there. I mean,

one is properly qualified staff who do the job well. That's a huge problem. You've got people saying, well, you're just dumb. You'll never amount to anything. And they're mocking. I mean, that's where my drive to slap a bitch comes right to the surface. I'm like, you know, screw you.

Screw you. That's not okay. So that's one problem in and of itself. The other problem is, I'm reminded of the phrase, you know, if you judge a fish by its ability to ride a bicycle. You know, so having realistic expectations of people that match what they're capable of and not putting them in a box, observing the box they exist in. I think those are two separate concepts. There's some people, I would say on the social constructionist side says all boxes are manmade. And I'm like, well, some things are just a box.

It's a box by the nature of the thing that it is. And it's neither good nor bad that it's a box. Boxes just exist, you know, that kind of a thing. You know, fish exist. Birds exist. They're two different things. And they are supreme in their proper environment. So if we get good staff able to accurately judge what a person is capable of and knows how to help them excel in that, you'll get the best possible results.

And that's the problem. How do you do that? Those are, it's like an impossible task. But it's what you aim for. It's what you have to aim for. And you start with, yeah, firing and, you know, excuse my French bitch slapping fucking idiots like that. That, you know, those kids are not dumb. That teacher was dumb.

That's dumb. That's just dumb. But then again, too, you know, and it's a tough sell to some people who want to believe humans are complete tabula rasa. Inherently, each person is inherently capable of what any other person can do. I don't think that's the case. But accurately judging who is and who is not, that's. a that's a huge problem. That's a very tricky thing to do. But I think we do need to broadly, I would say the best way is to let it happen naturally if it does. You find where people are

interested. You see what they can excel at. You encourage that as strongly as possible. And then the results are the results. You know, if someone's really talented in math, man, you send them as far as they can go. Someone builds a really nice birdhouse. You're like, wow, you're a wizard with your hands. You're a, you know, um, and we encourage that too. And then people kind of naturally settle into what they are good at. I think we have too many, too many human constructed boxes. I think it's both sides of things.

You know, we try and fit everyone into a box instead of letting them be the box that they are to the best of their ability. Broad strokes philosophical approach to these things. We have a lot of people who are resistant to that of like, no, you can't just tell a kid they're not good at math. Like, I think they know. I knew I was never going to be, you know, astrophysicist doing high-level calculus. It was never going to happen.

Anyway, I talked a lot. Go ahead. No, I agree with you. Okay. This time I don't actively have anything to add. Fair enough. I do that sometimes. I'm like, let me say a thing.

And they're like, yep. Oh, sip in my coffee here. Well, what if we do this? Speaking of which I've had too much coffee, I need to take a potty break. Are you okay with a brief 10 minute break? Sure.

That's good. Okay, I'm just going to put a little note here, break. 5530. 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 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. Okay, well, I kept you talking for a long time about all kinds of stuff. It was great, chat. I don't mind at all, but I want to be respectful of your time, so you want to do the dream thing? Sure. Excellent. So for folks in the audience who, this may be your first episode ever. Basic process, first step, always shut up and listen. We're going to hear the story told beginning to end, whatever it is. Then we're going to go back through it again, deep dive and kind of look at the elements that compose it, try and make sense of them. And between the two of us, we'll put together something that makes sense. So I'm ready when you are.

All right. Should I go into just... So often my dreams have like typically, similar to like a TV show, have like an A and a B plot. More or less that they transition to. I would say, tell it chronologically. And don't worry about trying to explain it just what happened. Yeah.

And then we're going to explain it together. Yeah. All right. So it started off with me being in a, in a fantasy sort of town. It's not necessarily fantasy, but more like a... You know when you go to like a historic reenactment town? It was something like this, but fantasy fiend.

So I went there and I happened to make some friends there. Those friends then asked me to go swimming with them. so I went swimming with them in a river but it turned out that there was a huge sea monster in that river that was trying to eat me and I was just barely able to climb up on a bridge and be able to evade that sea monster. From then on I walked back again to the to the reenactment fantasy reenactment area where I then started to join a theater group in which I played as a vampire which later turned into me being a real vampire for a bit but so yeah I I I was

playing the part of a vampire and I had to start right to start like designing the play that I was playing in and like getting I one of the things I did was I made we had like a power point not a PowerPoint like a like a movie projector and and someone was playing a game related to the play that we were playing and because we had way too many actors I told them to use their time instead of participating in a play that they should do a live play of the music that was happening in the game so we basically muted the game and instead told them to

play music instead and then I had to take two no four huge pieces of steak or meat and write my lines on them so I don't so I didn't forget them and together with a co-star of mine a female co-star I practiced and then I wanted to run back home and from then on it's transitioned into a reoccurring dream that I haven't had in probably like 10 years but back then had a lot where I participated in a race that was no there were not not really any rules you could like punch the other contestants you could ride the subway it just mattered that you were the first one to get there so I kept running and eventually I couldn't connect the dots at

that time yet that this was like my reoccurring dream but I started to remember some areas of the close to the end and I knew that there was a train that always drove past there so I jumped onto the train basically rode the subway closer to closer to the end jumped off of it and I wanted to get first place but I didn't manage to so I saw that two people were already there so I really did my best I ran over I ran over red red Red Street lanterns, I did everything I could, but I just barely came and forth. But then something happened that made me realize again, oh, this is this, this, this

reoccurring dream. I, oh well, all of us were then apprehended and kidnapped by random people, and we were put into a classroom environment where we were told that this was a test to find the best of the best and only the top 14 participants would be kidnapped and we were chosen once to serve their god and I me already kind of basically knowing where this was going I just tried to find a way to escape so I ran away from the classroom

and I found myself outside of outside of a pretty decent looking university type building but there are also a bunch of of those teacher handlers there that were trying to catch me and they basically told me it doesn't even matter if I run and tell anyone about this because no one's going to believe that in a university building like this some horrible crime would happen I then still managed to evade them

ran away towards an elevator that would lead back to the surface because it turned out that I was underground. And the problem was, however, that once I tried getting on said elevator, I couldn't. So there was already something that had anchored me to this lower plane. so I had to kind of give up and I just went back to the classroom where they had already completely brainwashed the other participants and I then asked the head instructor so how many times have I been here already how many times have we done this and then she listed all few multiple times that I have been here and multiple times that I've been sacrificed. And I asked, so why do we even do this anymore? If you just keep sacrificing me and it turns out I just keep coming back, why do this? And then she didn't have an answer.

So what happened is, I somehow inside the dream figured out a way to control the situation I was in and I transported myself back in time right before I was about to get kidnapped and then hid from them I then was reminded of having to complete the play so I went back to the play area to the theater area participated in the play at this time as an actual vampire and it turned out that the other lady the co-star actually tried to rat me out to this cold and not only had you wrecked she also took away two of the sheets with my lines for the

so I couldn't completely play and then me and another and then I try and then I basically finished the play as best as I could with the limited amount of info I had and from then on I found one of my I found one of my friends that I made in the original like way in the beginning and And it turned out that she was also a vampire. So we then tried to go back to the area where I was first kidnapped. And I purposefully went down the elevator and that was where the dream ended. Okay. Wonderful.

Just to finish you up my notes here. All right, that's a good one. Look at that. So much content. I got three pages of notes. notes my hand is killing me oh try to keep up i'm sorry no no no no not your fault at all that's uh i should do more hand exercises um to uh stretch stretch out okay there we go i'm gonna i'm gonna switch to water i'm gonna finish this coffee anyway this is uh i hope you got some time this has got a lot of symbology on it all right so deep dive how does that work we go um as

And he said, we go back to the beginning. If you know, the Princess Bride, it's a great, one of my favorite movies. So, broad strokes. Let me, I don't normally, well, I don't know, I don't normally do anything. I do whatever I intuitively think. I just have some, just a brief comment on dreams in general. So my concept of what we're dealing with is your subconscious thought process. And it isn't anything, it isn't like subconscious thoughts are different.

different than conscious thoughts. They are in a way. They're more, um, the difference would be that our conscious thoughts are moderated, mediated, influenced by conscious attention. So if we observe ourselves thinking, it changes our thought process. What's happening in dreams is that we are more of a passive observer of our own thought process. And we just kind of see where it takes us without that conscious attention typically to say stop look at it differently what about this etc you know we so there's less direction given to it and that varies person to person and situation to situation and there's lucid dreaming and there's at least the experience of realizing we're having a dream and that we can influence it which is not exactly the same thing as lucid dreaming

although that is a part of lucid dreaming that's kind of the experience of it And there's, there's, there's just broad strokes also. There's controversy over whether lucid dreams are actually lucid, whether they are not simply the dream experience that we realize we are dreaming, if that makes sense. In some ways, there's no way to know. If you wake up and it feels like you had control of your dreams and you can decide what you're going to dream about the next day, maybe, maybe there is more conscious control

there than we believe. So I'm not trying to poop on the lucid dreaming crowd. I think it's a fascinating thing. And bottom line on that subject, if it makes you happy to have this experience, I don't care what it is. That's fine. You know, you do you. And I'm not, you know, trying to be judgmental of it or tell people I know better than them.

But it seems like you had at least a semi-lucid thing where in the dream you had an experience that you've had this dream before or that you've considered this idea in a particular way before. And that can be, well, not just can be. I think it is always a very relevant element to the experience. So we've got this, what happens at the beginning of what we remember is kind of the thought experiment we're proposing to ourselves in a way. Imagine, we're saying, imagine you're in a particular kind of environment, having a particular kind of experience go.

In terms of a movie or a book, we would call that the high concept, what's going on here. So you've kind of proposed yourself as being in a fantasy. setting that feels to you in the dream like it's a historical reenactment, like you know you're not actually in another world, you're in the real world, but there's this imitation of a, of a magical place. Does that describe it well? Yes. Okay. And feel free to say more.

I mean, if you're like, you've got more. Oh, yeah, no, I agree with you in this. Yeah, that was basically what I thought. Fantasy setting. what I'm trying to capture is the way you're conceptualizing it. Ah, I see. Well, I saw it as a type of reenactment, but I was also, so I still thought that the people there were, I didn't think that the people there were necessarily aware that this was a reenactment.

enactment. I thought that they were like very real about it, but I was very sure that this was just a set up sort of like fantasy sort of village somewhere because it was very different from like everything else. Yeah. Good. No, that's great. That's a great nuance to it. So you're proposing this idea of imagine you're in a place where it looks like something that it's not, but you actually have the ability to kind of see that it's not. not in a way that other people don't. So you're proposing a kind of special insight to a circumstance that, which we all do. It's like imagine you can, I just keep saying that, but the idea of looking at the back of

someone's head, they can't see it, but you can. So you can tell, oh, look, you got a cow lick right there. You got this place where your hair curls up. Unless they have a mirror and choose to look at it, they're not going to see it. They might believe my hair is perfect, you know, that kind of thing. It's a bad analogy, but it's kind of the. idea of there's always something, it's a valid concept that we have an understanding of something that someone else doesn't. That happens all the time. So, you know, and it doesn't need to suggest

any kind of hubris on your part of like, I believe I'm the kind of person who has special insight about everything. It's not a narcissistic thing, but it's more like, imagine this concept of there's a kind of a fake situation going on here that the people inside of it, you know, that don't understand is fake. And I think that also relates to the brainwashing and the school. There's something down there with that idea of people being forced to perceive reality in a specific way, that it's not of their own choice and not,

not something they're able to resist in a way. It's like it's not their fault. They're being deceived in a sense. Is that all kind of making sense? Yeah. Okay. Good, good deal. Just checking in.

So for other folks out there who made it this far, again, this is going to be a long one probably. I have no answers. I say that all the time. And this is one of the reasons I can't do text interpretation. Like you tell me six or seven lines in a paragraph and that kind of gets to it. But I got to stop and break down each of what do you mean by this? What was that experience like? Did you feel anything?

Did you see anything else? I got to kind of get in between the cracks and start seeing it through your eyes. So I just can't do it like typing a response. It's very different for when I'm debating. Like I can't verbally debate. I have to process text and give a text response. For this kind of thing, I have to do it verbally. I have to interact with the person, be able to get that constant feedback.

Is that the right idea or am I going in the wrong direction? And you are the expert. You can't do this wrong. I can only suggest things that are more or less accurate, that better or worse resonate with something you're feeling or experienced. It's my little meta-narrative. and where we're out in the process and why I do it this way. And I always encourage people to stop me if you have something to add or if you had a sudden

new thought that didn't occur before. Please, those are fantastic tangents that I think get us closer to where we're going. Okay. What was I saying? If I could read my own handwriting. Oh, and you made friends there. So you're imagining that the people in this place are still worth knowing. knowing, more than worth knowing they're worth being friends with, that these are generally good

people that you would find acceptable or beneficial or companions? I was trying to help them out. They all had their own little problems. And while I knew that this world that they lived in was mostly fake, I still saw that in this, like, questing worlds, they had their own little problems, so I tried to help them out. And then I had some good experiences with them and befriended them. I'm not able to remember what they were like, though. I just remember that I helped them out, and then we got along very well.

Yeah, fair enough. And this is a great point, too, in the idea of, well, how do we experience dreams? and I've said this before and I'll say it again in relation to this, seeing the visual image of something in a dream is no different than simply knowing something happened in a dream. It is an identical experience because there is no physical component. You didn't actually have to do it. You just have to have the understanding this happened.

It is a part of the thought process. So what I would say about that is that I was starting with the idea of, the idea that these people live in a fantasy village that is not real, that they believe something that is not true, doesn't make them bad people that are not worth knowing. And it doesn't mean that their problems that they experience in this setting are also equally unreal. I mean, you can have a false belief about one thing in a broader context. And inside of that still have very real problems.

that relate to you personally or to how you understand what's what's what's happening to you so like kind of multiple layers there so you've got people who are like let's imagine people are completely baffled by bullshit and they exist in a world where their view of what's happening isn't quite accurate but they're still real people with real problems they're good people worth helping and so you have this experience in the dream where well how do I respond to that well I help them and And that's all you needed to know. So actually probably that's all that happened in the dream.

You had a sudden knowing this is how I responded to that. And here's what happened next. This is what I would naturally do is my natural inclination is to just, you know, find suffering people and try to reduce their suffering. Does that kind of make sense with your basic personality and? With my basic personality. Maybe that's too broad a question. uh...

and i so i do tend to not really amplify with people i don't know

but once i do know people i'm very much like a right or die sort of friend where i basically do anything for them it's just i'm a little detached like i'm detached from strangers

but once know you, I'm very likely to do, to like do way more things for you than other friends would. Nice. Well, it's a good clarification on that. Yeah, yeah. And always, if I propose something in one way, you're saying, it's not exactly like that. Let me describe it more accurately. That's fantastic.

So you're putting yourself in a situation where you help because they've become your friends. They don't become your friends because you saw random people suffering and decided you were obligated to intervene necessarily. It's more that other way around of like, I got to know these people and I saw they were worth helping. And so, of course, I did. Yeah. Okay.

Good, good deal. Good deal. So we're just, again, we're not really coming up with any conclusions. Just kind of pick apart the elements. And after a while, we both start rambling enough that like the puzzle piece is like fall into place on their own. We start seeing a picture. Whoa, that's what this is.

We're not there yet, of course. saw it, but I'm trying to also not take forever on this interesting part. Do you, one thing I haven't asked is any physical observation, any visual imagery that suggests the physical structure of the village? So it was a relatively run down village. It had elements of like Renaissance

paintings of like the plague. So very like run down kind of dark foggy with a lot of ill-looking people. Okay.

Like they are not this is not a good environment. for them. Not only are they being deceived, but it's, it's, it's, it's a deception that is unhealthy in some way. Yes. Okay. Gotcha. How did the, do, do, do any of the people you helped stand out to you, uh, in terms of like, do you have an impression? One was a girl. She was this age and one was a guy. He was a blacksmith. Any of those kind of details that you, you, they happened or they didn't, but. no but i do remember specifically one kid's like sitting on the ground with like wearing just a bunch of rags leaning on an old building looking like it like very depressed and decrepit and a

an middle-aged blacksmith who was kind of grisly but also you could see like the sorrow behind his eyes okay but the people I helped I can not remember whatsoever okay at least an appearance

when you arrived in this village did you imagine walking into it from a path on the outside or just kind of appearing in the middle of it? I remember it walking into it from a path from the outside. I remember it like a place that I relatively often walk to or like have driven towards the supermarket to. So when you think of it, it, what comes to mind is the idea that you've, been here before, or that it reminded you, it was as familiar as approaching some other village

that you have in real life that would include you up to the supermarket? Not necessarily. It reminded me more of being in like a walkable distance, but still pretty far away. And it had like its own little, like a pathway. that separates it from the rest of the town. It's like its own thing, because the supermarkets also here, they have like their own little place

where all of them are and there's nothing else around them. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, so that's an interesting connection there that almost as if, so you've decided to show yourself something that immediately reminds you

of how supermarkets are a bit set apart. And is that because there's just a large parking lot? And so they aren't butted up against other buildings? No, they're in their own... So European towns are a lot more walkable distance. Houses are way closer to each other. Gotcha, yeah. And this is like a commercial district that feels almost like cold and industrial

in the sense that there's... Unlike the rest of the city, there's like no houses around. It's all just a few buildings and nothing else. Just a few commercial buildings. Gotcha. So there's some overlap from that idea that you've got this in the style of where you would expect to find a more, you know, non-inhabited commercial industrial district. You've actually got nested within that type of an area, a fantasy village that actually isn't fantasy. but the people living there think it is and they're having problems within that context.

There's something very interesting there. I would, I don't have a lot to say about it, but I would say let that percolate a little bit in the background as we go forward. Something about those ideas overlapping as framing the experience you then have going through all the way to, you know, the very end of getting back on the elevator and waking up. Something in there. So like I said, don't, don't expect to have an answer right now or give me an answer or. or understand it. I think let it percolates the idea, like making coffee.

It's not done until it's done. So how did the go into the river with friends happen? Was that proposed to you? Was that your idea? Or you just followed them there without a word? It happened. It was kind of almost like we teleported there. So I started to leave this fantasy village.

Then I walked a few more stairs. on that path that I walked there, like to the village, but then I was basically already in the water and trying to swim away from that fish that I knew was under me. And that specific scene is also something that I had before, so I somewhat already knew there was danger, but I wasn't quite aware of it yet. I just had this feeling of impending doom before a few, like, swimming strokes later, I noticed that, like, black shadow under me. Okay. Interesting. So there was not, there was no discussion or a vote. There was no, you know, leader.

Like, you didn't say, hey, let's go swimming, guys. and then everyone walked to the river and you remember each step. There's something about, what happened immediately prior to leaving the village? Is that when you, on the heels of seeing the blacksmith or the kid? Yeah, that was like after I met the blacksmith

and helped them out, that I felt satisfied with like, they're okay now, more or less, and that's when I left, and then suddenly I was in the water. Okay. Do you remember anything about the nature of his problem? What did he need?

I don't remember. Okay. Fair enough. And that you may not have experienced that at all. Maybe the, well, for sure, I believe the absence of something is as important as the presence of something. It didn't happen for a reason because it wasn't relevant necessarily to the thought process. So something about, did you have any interaction with the kid before I go too further? I mean, you noticed the person.

No. I just noticed a kid there and I felt kind of like, oh, this is an icky town, but that's about it. Gotcha. So you've got in the symbol of a kid, say you've got someone who's very young, not wise to the world, but, you know, in a very bad situation in terms of their future potential, something about children we conceptualize in dreams as the icon of potential or vulnerability or the sacred innocence, all that kind of stuff. wrapped up together, but there's something about, you probably thought to yourself,

we're reflecting on it now. Like, this is not a good place for that kid to be. He's not going to thrive here. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But then you, now you have a, maybe on the heels of that, you bounce to this idea of, well, you know, in a fantasy setting, well, you probably have a blacksmith. Go. Uh, so the idea that it is a blacksmith may be relevant, maybe not. But certainly it's like the kind of person you would expect there. And you've put them as a successful tradesman perhaps with a with a old soul you can see their soul behind their eyes so you know they're a good person in that sense of like here's someone who made it from a kid to adulthood but they still have problems and that's in a way the person you chose to intercede with

very interesting there not not sure why necessarily not sure what you did to help him but you recognize that you know this person has struggled perhaps succeeded and needs maybe just a little extra hand to keep succeeding in some way and something about that interaction of doing something to write their wrongs in a way to provide useful assistance in a beneficial way, immediately puts you in the water at risk of the monster. When you think of it that way, does anything come to mind? No, no, not really. Not off the top of the head.

Gotcha. No. Fair enough. And it may not have a specific connection, but I think there's something there in terms of your concept of taking an action that puts you at risk in a way, trying to help someone and immediately on the heels of it worrying that something bad is going to happen to you. And so you immediately imagine, whoa, I'm in a vulnerable position under threat and I need to move out of this. this position. There's something. So people, this is funny too. You get the, you get a lot of folks who

are into the dream dictionary thing. And they're like, well, what does water mean? Like, it doesn't mean one thing to every person. It can't. It can't. But we do have common experiences with water, especially if you've swam in your life at all. If you're familiar with swimming, humans are not well designed to move well, you know, move quickly and functionally in water. We are very vulnerable to creatures that can move much better and have sharp teeth. There's a very visceral physical feeling of danger that we get when we see a shadow we can't recognize and we can't swim very fast and we, you know, we can't see what's beneath us. It's a horrible.

That's why Jaws was such a successful movie. Imagine you're just out for a swim and, you know, this horrible, massive, soulless devouring beast comes to, it just tears you up because there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. That's like one of the ultimate expressions of like personal. vulnerability to some kind of threat, whether it's a specific threat or not, just that broader concept. And again, stop me if this does not make sense, conceptually or it doesn't feel like it's right in the dream. Go ahead. It actually reminds me of something that I forgot for a second, but now I remember in the dream. After I essentially escaped the clutches of the

sea monster and climbed myself up the bridge, I found some of the some of the people that I saved were laughing at me and essentially made a whole like they thought it was like a prank to get me in this dangerous situation and see me

like struggle instead of like telling me like a better way to escape. Interesting. Did you feel they how do I phrase this? There are two different types of pranking someone.

There's your buddy and you guys mess with each other and you don't mean no harm. And there's kind of more of a malicious pranking where you want to humiliate someone and laugh at them. Which feeling did it feel like? It was definitely more like a laugh at me.

But it also didn't seem like they understood the gravity of the situation they put me and they like completely downplayed the danger of the situation. Okay. Yeah. There's a there's a kind of um, that's that's the feeling I got to. The idea of that this was an innocent prank that they just didn't realize was incredibly stupid that if they didn't intend to hurt you, they put you at risk of real harm and

they were just ignorant of that. Yeah. of the situation, the idea that this is a very real risk that you've been exposed to. They did it on purpose, but they didn't realize how bad it could possibly be. There's something there with, I don't know, there's the general nature of trying to help someone that doesn't realize how much they need help and how much their response to your help could hurt you, a poor response to your help. Taking advantage of it is one kind, but also doing it poorly in a way that like you're trying to if we did this you're trying to teach someone

how to shoot a gun because it's necessary and they're just not listening to you about gun safety don't point that thing at me what the fuck are you doing you never pointed anything you don't want to want to hit and the person like didn't realize oh yeah that's a bad idea i maybe i shouldn't put you at risk that way for no reason you know i'm not trying to hurt you um i don't know framing it like that brings any thoughts to mind? I think it felt, to me, it felt more like a betrayal than it did like. Okay. So I did feel betrayed, but I also felt like they were just unaware of them making me feel betrayed.

Yeah, no definitely. And they were also trying to make me out as like the. bad guy for like getting upset about it. Gotcha. Making some notes on that too. Yeah, there's some very powerful themes in that idea. So if we were to try to frame it a bit,

you've got a situation where, yeah, there's people you tried to help and the fair, the loyal thing to do would be not to expose you to harm as a joke, that that is a betrayal. You know,

it's one thing if they were completely, completely ignorant and exposing you. Like they didn't know the monster was there. Let's go swimming. They were just dumb. This is more like we know the monster's there. We're going to expose it, him to it anyway, for our own sake of giggling.

And, it was just a prank, bro. Don't be so mad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's something very much there in terms of, uh,

so you've got people that you took, you took a compassionate interest in making their lives better and they just shit on you for a stupid reason for their own amusement. there's something in there about this setting. Very much conceptualizing people in a, they don't even realize where they're living isn't what their perception of reality is distorted. I'm trying to be helpful. They're being disrespectful and they're so ignorant and unaware of themselves and the situation

that they're, you know, treating me poorly in a, I don't want to say sociopathic way necessarily, but there's definitely, what am I trying to say? I don't know if you have a better word for it, like that type of person. Like a self-serving way? Self-serving, yeah, that's pretty close to the idea. Lack of mutual respect comes to mind. Something along those lines. What am I trying to say?

As if they don't value me as a person, but more like an asset, like to improve their lives. People that are kind of users. I was thinking you have like abusive relationship where a lot of people think abuse as physical, but it can be emotional. It's like, and this might lead into the idea of the vampires. Actually, I think that does connect. What is the concept that we think we think of people as emotional vampires? Maybe they're not literally drinking our blood, but man, they suck our life energy away and they give nothing in return. And they laugh at the mess they make of our lives through their lack of respect.

When I phrase that, does that feel right? yeah I mean I don't want a weak agreement I want like that resonates with you or maybe it's not the right concept so I can definitely like agree with this like oh I feel like I often feel like I'm used by people and that despite me like thinking I understand things that they don't understand they just abandon me and they like do things to me that are not appropriate in my mind. Gotcha. Like I just, just like a few months ago, like in October, I had a very, yeah, I guess you could say traumatic experience where I met someone in real life that I met online.

And we had a great time together. but at the end of the week she essentially asked me oh why don't you why don't you talk more about yourself and I told her people don't like it when I do I don't like sharing it because it makes them uncomfortable so I she insisted that I should share more about me in my life and my feelings and that she will

accept me no matter like no matter what I say so I opened up to her and I had like some hypothetical discussions on a like a very long road trip where she drove me to another state and after that she called the friend she was driving my friends that she was driving me to and told them that I'm that she should be wary of me because I'm a potential serial killer and rapist. Wow. And that she should not associate with me at all and contacted many other people that we knew together

and told them to stay away from me because I'm too mentally sick to be anywhere near anyone. And that definitely kind of fucked me up. I'm going to be real. especially since I didn't hear that from her at all like she completely hit that from me and she just ghosted me and I heard that through my friend who said that's complete bullshit like I know you way longer than the few like months that she or like to the few months that she knew you yeah and I have never like you might have some dark thoughts sometimes but it's not like you would ever act on any of them Or like, yeah, she, she was, she was helping me out and being a little more reassuring and building up some of the self-respect I had after opening up. But, yeah. Yeah.

How do you feel about the idea that us discussing this brought that back to mind? Do you think this dream is processing similar concepts? Yeah, could be, yeah. Especially with the female vampire that. was like trying to be part of the play and then ended up sabotaging me and completely, like at first being super nice to me, but then like it turned out it was only pretense and she like sabotaged me to make her look better. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. I think sometimes in at about this time in the process and not always the same exact mark of minutes in,

but once we start looking at the story and identifying some of the themes that are we're expressing to ourselves in specific experiences and imagery, we start to get around to it. It'll bring up something from real life where you're like, this is kind of like the other situation. Wait a minute. This is that other situation. And I'm thinking my way through it. Well, that's what I think dreams are.

And this is what the process is meant to do is kind of bring that stuff back back to mind. And we can hold it loosely. it may not be identical. You may be comparing it to that and thinking in a different line. I thought it's not going to be a one-to-one correlation necessarily. I don't want us to hold on to that too tightly, as they say. But definitely, you know, one thing that came to my mind, and you can feel free to say, you know, pass on this one or not.

But I've been in situations in my life where I get into some pretty interesting discussions and without really announcing it to the other person, I start playing devil's advocate and saying things I don't believe. because they're making arguments to me and I'm like, well, what about this? Well, wait a matter. What about that? And I forget to tell them, I have changed places. This is no longer my personal opinion.

Now I'm just exploring ideas. And so I come across sometimes sounding like a crazy person, which I am legitimately, but the idea of saying things I don't mean hypothetically. Does it feel like you had that a bit in your discussion in the car with this person of like, we're just rambling on philosophy? Yeah, I was basically just doing. yeah I was like rambling on philosophy thinking about different hypotheticals where usually weird things or like bad things could be acceptable so for example like one of the things was

was we talked about someone an animal trainer that had sex with a dolphin a female trainer that had sex with a male dolphin and after they after they took her away for animal abuse the dolphin ended up killing himself because he had pair bonded so much with this human oh goodness yeah and i said basically i mean she she was arguing that this was immoral from the very beginning because any type of sexual relationship with any animals is always rape And I said, maybe in this specific situation, it could be possible that if you have a male animal and you present yourself as just like the whole, essentially, and don't entice them otherwise, then it's their decision to do things. And they can disengage whenever they want, and as such, it would technically be moral, because, like, you're not forcing yourself on them. Yeah. And this is completely separate from the ick factor of like, maybe I don't feel so good about humans of any kind having sex with animals of any kind. And, you know, I can theoretically go, I see what you're saying and separate that from the feeling. Some people can't. They're like, no, if it's ick, it's ick, it's always wrong. Fair enough. And I would even concede that point. So again, I'm getting into your hypothetical with you. Yeah, it's probably better if that never happens. Probably she made a mistake allowing it. On the on the flip side, dolphins.

are notoriously rapey. So it's possible that he kind of initiated. I don't blame the victim. I don't know. Animals can they consent. But it's entirely possible that the dog. And then she kind of goes, that wasn't so bad and let him continue to do it. Again, bad, bad. Not so good. Yeah. But then again, if you. Go ahead. Yeah. She essentially combined this with another hypothetical I said where I said I think people with Down syndrome or adults with like enough mental impairment that they're still able to like make some good choices and live on their own I said that I think those people should be allowed to have sexual relationships with other adults and she took that and combined that

with the with the dolphin thing and basically concluded that I'm okay with raping people. Gotcha. Or like with that I don't understand consent and that I, I am okay with abusing the, the weak people. Yeah. Not really a fair assessment and not at all what you were advocating for. You know, I can, I can tell that from the, from the conversation. There's a big problem there with, I mean, we used to, in America, as back as recently as the

1950s and 60s, we would just sterilize Down syndrome people because we looked at them and said they should not be allowed to breed. That has changed. The mental health rights of impaired individuals, they are legal adults. They have the same rights as anyone else. They can be in relationships and get married and have sex and produce children, produce little down syndrome children if they want to. That is considered broadly their right.

Now, that's a debatable point in terms of there's a good reason, but the outcome and where do we draw the line. is someone too impaired to the point where they are incapable of consent? And with whom, you know, if there's too much of a difference, you know, someone's got a 30 IQ and someone's got 130 IQ, we suspect enough of a difference that there's manipulation, same with the age difference thing. It's something that feels very icky to us because we're like, how do I know this is not exploitative? How would I prove that? And I would just rather not allow it.

So there's, you know, and in some ways it feels like a violation of the rights of a fellow human being to say, you're too stupid to enjoy what other people do, what, you know, sex because I said so. I have a big problem with that. You know, and then protecting people from themselves. So, I mean, I'm with you on the hypothetical guy. I'm like, I wouldn't even, you know, and these are just my thoughts. I don't know what the answer is. You know, it's, it's a horrible conundrum. So you've, you've very much got a situation where you're being unfairly judged.

And I wrote that down somewhere else. You know, you've got the villagers on the bridge mocking you for this situation that they put you in. They exposed you to the monster in the deep. And rather than going with you or warning you, you know, saying, hey, this might be dangerous. Are you sure you want to go there? Or I'm having thoughts that the way you're expressing this makes me uncomfortable. Let's work it out. let's address that first.

It was just, for whatever reason, it seems like this person put you, put you in a category of someone they couldn't be honest with in that regard. Like, uh-oh, I just discovered this guy might be dangerous. I'm not even going to tell him I'm having that feeling because I don't trust him enough. So there may be actually no one to blame in some ways, like a girl alone in a car with a guy that she thinks, holy shit, is he? And then it just feeds and the fear grows, even if it's not true. You know, not trying to make excuses for someone treating you poorly.

but I can see how it could happen genuinely without malice, if that makes sense. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but it's still a betrayal. It's like, I'm not that guy. You could have told me, hey, this is creepy. And I'm like, well, we're just hypothetical. I'm not advocating for anything here. Yeah, no, I've been in those, like I say, I sympathize with you.

I've been in those situations exactly where I'm like, I'm having too much fun with the conversation. I'm like, yeah, what if we look at it this way? And I forget to say, what if? I just say, look at it this way. And that's not what I meant. So, um, so yeah, you get to this, and this is just that introductory portion. Remember what it feels like to be poorly judged by someone you thought was a friend, this betrayal, someone who's not seeing things clearly.

They don't understand the world in which they live in in the same way you do or as clearly as you think you see it, for right or wrong. Dreams are, dreams don't tell you the way it is. They tell you the way it looks to you. And that way they can never be wrong. It's just like, that's what I see. Quite literally, that's what I see in my head. Does it feel kind of like we've given that a bit of a conceptual understanding that makes sense to you?

Yeah, I agree with this. Yeah, it just seems accurate. You're going to scoot over? What are you doing? I got to keep doing the show, Bubo. Hi, beautiful. Are you winking at me? He wants to sit up, but I got to sit close enough to my notes.

All right, that's fine. It's all part of the show. Okay, so we move on. And then that, that kind of cues you in a sense to consider the concept of playing a role. That's not the right way to say it, but you do put yourself as an actor. So there's something about being an actor in a play. There's something very much actor-like in proposing hypotheticals like, what if this was something I believed? What if this is someone I was?

what if I appeared to be something I'm not. So you've kind of given yourself, well, what if I was playing the part of a vampire in a play? And it was just a play. I am not a vampire. And then I know you said you became a real vampire for a bit, but that actually came later. So in the beginning, it is very clear.

This is just a role. I'm just hypothesizing. I'm putting on an appearance for the sake of entertainment maybe or to convey some other meaning. Yeah, it was for for entertainment. It felt, it was like a, it felt like just, back when I was doing theater in school. Yeah. Something casual.

Yeah. And that's the feeling I get when I'm arguing with people is, you know, I'm not belittling their contributions to the discussion, but I argue for fun. You know what I'm saying? I enjoy the process of being challenged to express myself and thinking critically about problems. You know, and maybe there's people who are like, to they. them it's not a, this is not playtime. This is very fucking real. And I'm being disrespectful by saying what, I'm just entertainment to you. No, no, no, no. I just enjoy the process. It's like people who, um, people who, every time they fight, it's a fight. And then there's some people who are like,

it's just a boxing match. We're just doing this for shits and giggles. And there's no, don't, you know, no one's going to die. After it's done, we shake hands and walk away. And then there's some people who take it more seriously. And they, they could never conceptualize that anyone would box for fun. the same way with arguing. So you're like, I'm just playing the role of this person in the play. And someone at a movie projector and they're playing a game. So you're conceptualizing yourself as, what you see image-wise is you're on a stage or your backstage.

Where are you in relation to this playing the role in the play? Yeah, we're like at that point, we're backstage preparing for the play. what's it called when you essentially practice for a play? Is that rehearsal? Yeah, exactly. It was basically a rehearsal where I had to like tell others what they were supposed to do and make sure that they were doing their part right and also trying to actually like

do the, like actually do my part, learn my part as well, which was a little challenging because I had to do all of it myself. So you were imagining yourself in the role of both director and actor. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Were you in a costume at all or dressed normally? Yeah, I wasn't a costume. I had like a Dracula-style costume on, and I don't know why, but I mentioned, like, those meat flaps.

so you know how when dracula like opens his arm like he opens his arms very wide and he like has his cape in his hand and it's like kind of red on the inside it was basically like i had that but it was also there were like two very large bloody pieces of meat there as well that um my script was written on and that i tried to cheat off okay So you didn't have the experience of writing on them, but you discovered that you had in your possession these pieces of meat that were raw, bloody even, and you had already written your part upon them. Yes. Very interesting. There's a lot of different ways to conceptualize that. We could look at it as something unappetizing, raw meat, bloody, raw meat. I mean, not a pretty thing. So there's the idea that maybe the thoughts, the ideas that were written upon these things were meant to be perceived as a bit distasteful.

There's another way to look at it too is that they are, you know, what is meat in that sense. It's what is inside of you. It's the raw material. So you may have, you know, it's the idea of removing something that's inside and written upon it is the real you in some ways. There's a couple different directions to go with that. How did you feel about it? Or a third up. I remember that it was surprising to me even in the dream that it was written on meat and then I was carrying it around.

And I was kind of dubious if this was like human flesh or if it was just like some animal product because I didn't know. but it did seem strange to me. It didn't necessarily, it wasn't like completely disgusting or anything, but it felt very strange and like, it had this weird wet feeling on the body as if it's, as if you have like,

as if you were wearing like wet clothes. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. So kind of, in a way, neither, neither of the things I proposed, those didn't resonate.

I rattle a lot of doorknobs. If you don't feel it like, let me try and describe that a little different way. So that, and that's fantastic. That's for the best. Tell me, tell me something completely different anytime.

So there was kind of a surprise. These are things you, your script was written on them, but you didn't write it. Is that what you're saying? Like, you didn't place them there. You didn't have the experience

that you put them there. They're just there. It was actually written by the, by the co-actor. actress that later betrayed me. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, definitely then that is not something you authored. There's the idea of authority and authorship. The ultimate authority of a fantasy novel is the author. He literally makes the entire story. The characters do exactly what he says because they are his creation in that sense. So that's the basic concept of author. it comes to that there's a

a way some Christian folks describe God the author of all things the creator of reality itself and that's like I said the root of the word authority and so there's two different ways

that there is expressing authority enacting it and then there's being an authority which is more an idea of competence anyway so long story short on that stuff, we're getting to the idea of the words have been written, your lines, your part in this play, your role has been written by someone else on meat that is literally attached to you in this weird wet clothing kind of way.

And it's actually within the folds of your Dracula cape, like perhaps apart from the teeth, the most iconic symbol of the classic Dracula figure is he's got the pointing teeth, he's got the Cape, you know, Dracula. So it almost like built into the nature of this thing is this authorship of what you will be, who you are. You're being told what you are and how you will act. Is that, does that resonate in some way? Yeah, it does.

It was definitely, it felt like I was put into a situation that I didn't really enjoy that. much but it also felt like something that I do often and I felt that this person was trying to help me with these with these cheat sheets but essentially they all did this just as like an elaborate setup to betray me so your initial impression was what if this is meant to be helpful? And then eventually you came around to the idea, this was not intended to help me at all. It's less that I came around to the idea.

It's more that I was told that this was just all the rules later. Okay. So you had an initial benefit of the doubt. You were being generous. Yes. Okay. Initial, I will say generosity of understanding. that's tough too.

So I think this is why my, you know, my background in psychology helps to really understand these dream symbols better in a way that I don't know if people could without, whether they have the same degree I did or the experience I did, but if they understand the concepts I could bring out similar, these are just, you know, I broadly speaking, I think an objective world exists independent of human perception and all we can do is kind of perceive it to the best of our ability, better or worse.

So I think these broad concepts of loyalty and betrayal, these are very real metaphysical things. They're not tangible, but they are real because we know it when it happens. We see it. There's things that are consistent with loyalty and things that are a betrayal of what should be a loyal situation. So, okay, long story short on that, we've got the idea of being a good faith, Gary or a bad faith Barry. I love, that's why I love, you know. And so good, good faith is, and I think, you know, as, as. Um, Adam gets, this was in the chat too.

So, you know, met a narrative on, on the Discord server chat about a show that probably 90% of the people watching me right now, I have no idea what it is. But I think Adam does sometimes let his elephant run away with him. Um, I think his intuition is amazing. Like, he gets gut feelings that are spot on. And then he has a hard time explaining it well. And sometimes he explains it completely wrong, but the intuition was. wasn't wrong. Sometimes the intuition's wrong. Long story short on that. I think he gets some undeserved criticism for jumping to a bit of harsh critique of some people who are when he's like he gets that

gut sense of, let's guys fucking with me. I'm not going to take that. I can hear it. I know. I just know. And very often he's right. You know, so. But okay, long story short on that too. There's, there is a time to be generous. And maybe you start off that way. Maybe that's generally the default. We should always go in like I'm going to assume this person is good faith. They're telling me what they believe until I have reason to believe otherwise. And I think he's gotten better at that in terms of like not starting off hot as he says. I saw that character development arc of him in terms of being a participant in the show, running the, a co-host of the show. He went in hot on a few people. He got some feedback and he said, yeah, maybe I don't do that from the beginning. Maybe I give someone a chance

to show me that they're an asshole. Before I tell him, I think they're a an asshole. Fair enough. Okay. And all of this to express your personal experience of you seem to be that kind of person who's like, I know it's probably for the best to start off giving people the benefit of the doubt. It's like, okay, here's a thing that's been put upon me. I should at least take the suggestion seriously. I should at least regard the question with an open mind. Is that feeling right? Yeah, I think I'm also most. like a good faith, Gary, because so often I see people you have bad faith against me. Yeah.

So I try to be open for everything just in case someone like to avoid people experiencing the same that I do. Yeah. Yeah. And I'd say that's a very matter of mutual respect. I think that's how we should just all kind of be. It's like, I'm not going to assume you're lying to me. I'm not going to assume you're an idiot.

I'm going to take your word seriously. until I can figure out enough to say, I think you're wrong and I think your motivations are suspect. But I think that's only a determination you can come to after given someone, as they say, a little bit of rope to hang themselves. You can't put the noose around their neck before they open their mouth. It's just not, I don't think it works that way. Then again, you know, and I always do this, I flip-flop.

There are times where you get a bad feeling about someone you're like, I'm not going to give them any rope. They're going to put it around my neck. Fair enough. and you just stay away from those people. If you got that gut response of like, I do not feel safer around this person. And that might go back to the gal in the car

for the trip of she's like, I suddenly feel in danger. And her perception was wrong. She was not. She was never in danger. To her, it just felt like it. And it's a tragedy that that motivated her to not be honest. And, you know, it was a reasonable response

from her perspective of like, uh-oh, if I am legitimately in danger, I'm not going to take the risk of saying, hey, I think you're dangerous because you're trapped in the car with the guy. So it's like, fuck. It's hard to, you know, my good faith, Gary's side is like, I see your side of it.

I'm sorry, you know. Even if it is ultimately unfair. And I think it was realistically. Like if this illusionary circumstance had not been pulled over her eyes by the wrong impression. So yeah, it looks like you're definitely processing the idea of

what if someone assigns me a role that is, just a part in a play. We do that with some people too. You know, it's, uh, uh, uh, hero's journey style. I mean, sometimes you're the hero. Sometimes you're the, uh, wizard in the cave. Sometimes you're the fool that leads the hero astray down the wrong path and, in, in, in, you know, and into the desert where he has a magical experience anyway. I mean, there's all kinds of different parts we play in other people's stories. And it's usually up to them to decide what they think of it, whether it's true or not. You know, like we, we can't change their mind against their will.

it's impossible, you know. So it's a very powerful analogy there. Go ahead. I do definitely feel a lot like I, like in real life that I'm just basically playing in a play who I'm the only one who doesn't have the script. Yeah. Where I'm just trying to, well, I just see this like as the play it is, but everyone else like acts as if this is just how like is if this is like reality. It's just normal and it's real. But I see it more as like a weird, like people just constantly act in a different sort of way just to be like, because they think it's socially acceptable.

Sure. Yeah. I think that's a very real concept. And actually most of us do and we have to. It's like right place, right time for some things. and a lot of times the mask we wear is the role we take on voluntarily. I was thinking about this the other. I just think about everything.

My wheels never stop spinning. Like, what does it mean to be a parent? It isn't actually a thing. It is a behavior. You know, a parent is what a parent does. And that's very different than, say, being the biological sire or dam in the animal sense of an offspring. That is one kind of thing.

But then there's actually, you know, a parent is one. one who parents is one who takes on the role of a nurturing responsibility, just like a baseball player is a person who plays baseball. If you don't have a bat in a glove and you don't run around the diamond, according to a certain set of rules, you're not playing baseball. So we have all these archetypal things that express a certain way of interacting with the world. And a lot of us,

we would say put on our game face when we go to work. We don't show everybody, everything and let it all hang out because maybe not the time and place. We got a different focus, a different responsibility in that environment. So there's nothing wrong with wearing different masks or adopting different roles, but it is a mask. It is a role.

And I think you're someone like me who kind of steps outside of themselves and the situation they're in with other people and looks at it from a third person perspective while still inside our own head. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely probably related to both of us being autistic.

I think so too. It's like I can't help. but observe myself acting. There's a Taoist concept of act without acting. Wish I could. I, you know, there's some things I do unconsciously. There's mannerisms. There's all kinds of things where I'm actually not as aware as I think I am,

but I cannot not be aware of something at all times. I'm always aware. There's never me just being. For me, being is me watching myself be. That's my being. It's a very strange experience. that maybe most autistic folks don't have, or maybe I'm expressing something

that's more common to human experience than I realize. It's an open question. There's definitely a lack of autopilot. Lack of autopilot. Yeah, that's a great way to express it. You don't just go and you just don't just do. You're like choosing to do at all times.

And the inability to, yeah, turn it off, for sure. Well, that's a very interesting arc too in terms of, you know, a play and, and the idea of a movie projector comes up and a video game is on there. Now, that's a very different kind of experience where there's interaction between the player and the game. Like the player makes choices in a way that an audience at a play does not. I don't know what to make of that, but it's a common thing in relation to the meta idea of video games. And so you're backstage, trying to learn your lines and be a director and some other. people are playing a video game on a projector and it's projected where

backstage or on the main stage? Sorry, could you repeat that one again? The question. Oh, sorry. The people playing the video game through a movie projector. Is it being projected on the front of the main stage or? No, we're still on the backstage. Okay.

That's interesting too, because none of this has taken place during a performance. This is all rehearsal. This is all backstage. kind of behind the scenes beneath what will eventually be the public display. Exactly, yeah. Okay, good deal. Do you remember anything about the game? What kind of game it was?

Mario Brothers, you know? Yeah, I think it actually was something like Super Mario or something. And there were like a bunch of like actors that signed up for like playing some part in the theater play. but they were basically all useless. So I gave them all, because we had way too many people there, I just gave all of them one note, one musical note where they had to press a button,

and then they were all together, like, supposed to make, like, this song. But they only had this one simple task of, like, pressing this button at the right note at time. Yeah. Very interesting that you did not simply dismiss them. You did not hurt their feelings by saying, you're just not good enough to be here. You have no part in this. You gave them a role. You gave them a validity, a purpose in a way. Or you acknowledged they were capable of contributing something. Am I thinking along the right lines there? Yeah. That probably speaks to your personality too. I believe from talking to you, you would never look at someone and say they were just inherently useless. Yeah, no. That's not the type of judgment.

No, I can say that with confidence, I think. And that can be tough too. It's like even people who are like, this is all you can handle. Just don't screw it up. Please, I'm giving you a chance. Just help me look good. Help me help you, please. And this is, this may relate.

So backstage, the idea of black backstage at a play is almost like the unexpressed thoughts. There's something going on with that there. And then what comes out of our mouth is the act, the acting, the role we take on, which is a result of our thoughts, but it is also the performance of our thoughts. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And what we've got going on is maybe subconscious or it may just be unspoken thought process. You got something going on there with this conceptual, conceptual understanding. And you're even giving, if we think of it that way, your own thoughts a little bit of validity. Well, I thought that. You're, you are a thought. Here's something you can do in the broader realm of, And I think that's something us, you know, Aspy folks do as well. It's like there are no, it's brainstorming.

There are no good or bad thoughts. There are just thoughts. Some of them will be useful. Some of them will be wrong. But they are thoughts and they all, they're all here. You have to acknowledge them all. Does that make sense? Does that feel, right?

Yeah, it's definitely like, it's not necessarily intrusive thoughts, but having like actively thinking is definitely something I do a lot and I think it's also very interesting to have this internal monologue with yourself at all times to make sure that what you think is correct and if you find any flaws within your own thinking to like self-correct yourself through more thinking yeah absolutely yeah and there's a very meditative experience to it, in my estimation, what do I mean by that? When you're meditating, people say to let your mind go blank, but that's not actually what happens.

What you have is the experience of a lot of thoughts, but you don't, you neither grab and hold them, nor do you push them away. You do nothing. You just let them float. And the general goal eventually down the road is that those thoughts will become. less prevalent. They will be less, it's almost like the intensity of the, the intensity and frequency of the, of a light dimming a bit, where you, where it's no longer as attention grabbing.

And that's what, where people head towards that idea of, of an empty mind meditations. Incredibly hard to get to. It takes decades for some people to get there. But where was I going with that? When you were observing your own thought process, you go, there's a thought. there's an idea there's a possibility there's a there's a very wide open brainstorming that we experience and of course just because you had a thought and this is where it relates to meditation doesn't mean you hold onto it doesn't mean you push it away either you just go that is a thought

acknowledged moving on and sometimes those thoughts are like uh i mentioned in another episode recently when i was very no an interview i did with someone when i was very young i had the thought wow some people are evil i could choose to be evil now i don't want to do that but that is a choice available to me. Wow. Okay. I'm not, I mean, I'm not going to do that. And I didn't, as far as I can tell, you know, it's not what I wanted to be.

But just realizing that was an option that people, people, people, human beings can choose to be evil. It's not just something you are necessarily. Yeah. I actually had a similar experience with that. Yeah. Where I, I act like, I had this moment where I was like in middle school and I thought why shouldn't I exploit everyone else's stupidity that I'm able to see yeah and so I I stole like

two times or like three times like not nothing big but I still stole yeah just to see if I if I could do it and if that's something I want to do I have I actively made the decision that I do not want to become a professional criminal. Yeah. No, you're expressing something exactly like what I went through. It's like just knowing that that was possibly a person legally distinct from myself may or may not have shoplifted something once many, many decades ago. You know, because you look at these things and that's part of the stupid experimentation

of youth. What if I do this thing? How would that, what would that be like? And then you look at it and go, that was a very bad idea. You know? And hopefully, hopefully it's nothing so extreme. that anybody gets hurt. Usually it's not.

Most of us don't want to hurt anybody. And we're not, you know, we're not dumb enough to think, this will have no consequences. Then we just do it. And it hurts someone. That does happen.

But most of us are smart enough to know that's too far, whatever that is, you know, that idea. So, but all this related to this idea of playing roles and then the video game idea. And it's a, you know,

a simple eight bit game. And it's a very, you know, so there's like, these aren't even complicated thoughts in a way. They're, but they're, they have a role in the play.

At least they're going to be present doing something useful. And then you said to me, you know, use the time on the play, but do a live play. Yeah, yeah, okay. That's a, and there were four huge pieces of steak. We already went over that. Rehearsing with a female. What do you remember about your interaction with the female co-star? Was she also dressed as a vampire?

Did, or was she? Yeah, she was also dressed as a vampire, but she was absent for, the for, she was basically just there introducing herself and then she was absent for all of the rehearsal. Okay. And then she

owned and she was, even during the live play later, she just basically abandoned the stage and like made us fin for ourselves. Okay. Did she, did you have a feeling that she, played her role or she was actively absent after having

promised to be there having lines to speak and she just never appeared on stage so i i i don't remember her being on stage but i did feel like i just didn't visualize her being on stage for the rehearsal but i do i do remember that she was like actively absent from the live play leader. Gotcha. Yeah, there's, there feels like something of a setup in there.

Here's all these lines. Here's my promise to participate. I'm even at rehearsal. And then when it comes to do the thing, nowhere to be found. There's a social concept of showing up, being present to participate in something. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And we express it that way. Well, you just didn't show up. You were there, but you didn't show up. And so we distinguished that from physically present and mentally and socially invested and participatory. So, yeah, and that's very much a betrayal setup, another expression of that idea of this,

this isn't right. I've been assigned a role and this other person isn't even playing the part. They said was a part of the role they assigned me. What? What is even going on here? Very, very interesting and confusing way to, way to experience that. And that, and it was the knowledge that this co-star, this fellow vampire female was not present for the live performance that made you want to run home?

Because I wrote down to you that you wanted to run back home as a result for some experience. No, I ran back home after the play. Okay. After the live performance where I did my best even though it was not, like there was a lot missing and I knew it. but I still like toughed it out and did the play, but then I ran home or tried to run home as quickly as possible. Okay. So you went through with your responsibility.

You felt like this needs to, I need to do my part. Even if it was kind of assigned to you in a way, you felt a responsibility to follow through. But then afterwards you wanted to get back to your safe place in a way. You wanted to go where you felt more comfortable. Yes. And then it was this idea of arriving home that suddenly you had another scene change, fade to black, and, oh, this is a recurring dream.

I'm participating in a race. Is that kind of how that happened? Yeah. Okay. Although it wasn't necessarily a fade to black, it was more of like a smooth transition, you know, like in movies when it's when it like, when like the picture slowly changes into the next picture, it was kind of like that. Okay.

But they're like overlapped in a way. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So do you have a memory of arriving home? And it was at home where you realized, oh, I'm in a familiar experience of participating in a race? No, I never did arrive home. I just wanted to move. towards my home and that's where I got into this race and I never throughout the dream actually

arrived at home. Okay. So there's something about this desire to return home, the process of returning to a place of comfort or safety that brought your mind around to, oh, I am participating in this race. That's what's happening to me at the moment. That's where I'm at. Something like that. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay.

There's something in there. Something in there. You know, some folks, let's say if they had a different experience, their idea of returning home might include I'm in danger. Or it might include that's where all of my favorite things are. And then they start thinking about favorite things. But for you, in this instance, there's something about the idea of seeking the comfort and safety of home, the place you feel most comfortable and where you keep all your stuff, et cetera. etc. Something about that is like,

feels like participating in a race. And it's a very familiar feeling that brought this race, this, a competition, you know, competition of sorts. I don't know any of that inspires some thoughts. It does or it doesn't.

I don't even know what I'm trying to ask. No, not really. Fair enough. I do think that I don't think that the running home I think that that was the initial I think that was the initial situation

that made me start running where I wanted to go there as fast as possible but during when I transitioned into this reoccurring dream with the race I essentially forgot all about wanting to get home and was then focused on becoming first place on the race.

Okay. Okay. That's a different way of looking at it. So, well, different than my initial concept, which is why I asked the questions. There's something about not arriving home. Even if that was your intent, you end up in a race and then you kind of adopt that as, there's an involuntary aspect to it of like you didn't go oh i forgot there was a race i'm going to participate in that you're kind of in it there's something about living your life which is

analogous to being in a competition or some element of it where there's the um broader concept of the rat race which is we just think of what i got at work so i can eat and pay my bills yeah and then eat and shit and sleep and eat and shit and sleep and go to work and go to work and that's kind of, and then we get stuck in, we feel like we're on a wheel. That's where the kind of rat race thing is like, it's actually an analogy to that wheel of like it's a mouse on a wheel. You're not getting anywhere. You're putting in a lot of energy just to stay in the same place, the rat race.

And then we conceive of ourselves as little rodents running through mazes, multi-layered, beautiful concept. I don't know if any of that makes sense to you. Is that kind of? Oh, that makes a lot more sense. Yeah, that seems a lot more accurate. Yeah, and there's a competitive element, too. Like, there will be, you know, as much as,

the metaphor of the spinning wheel that goes nowhere. There are people who do go somewhere. And we do actually physically move. We can go a lot of places. But are we accomplishing anything? And are other people doing it better? Yes. And no, probably. You're going to run, you know, no one's perfect at everything. So we're down to, uh, out of, out of two and a half pages, we're down to the bottom of the first page. Sorry, I hope I'm not, uh, eating up all your time. But I don't know. I'm okay. Okay. I want to give you a really good answer. And these are, it's fascinating to me. I'll talk as long as people want to. We're not going to go four and a half hours.

We're about two and a half hours in, but we're going to try and wrap it up for you pretty soon. And it, you know, in a very real way, life is a game without rules. I mean, we have the physical laws of nature,

gravity, etc. In a sense, that's a kind of rule. And in my estimation, we have objective moral rules, but humans can do anything. We can be evil.

You know, we can choose to do anything. So there are no rules. We can use physical violence. We can cheat in a sense. But then it's not even really cheating. It's just I found a better way to get where I'm going faster than you. Fair enough.

So you have this concept of, I'm in a race where there are no rules. It's anything goes. It's the broad experience of living life in the wide open. You can do anything that is physically possible. And you had this experience that some areas became. familiar as from a previous dream. What comes to mind when you think about that? About the previous dream or?

Well, in this current dream, you're now, you were, say, on your way home or that was your intent and you realize, oh, I'm in a race. It's anything goes. And what I wrote down was that some areas became familiar as dream. That's my little shorthand. So familiar from a previous dream? Yeah. So I somewhat recognized the area and I could anticipate what the rest of the race would look like and how far I am into the race.

And I could abuse this knowledge into giving myself an advantage by essentially having a little bit of future side, knowing when training. will arrive and such. So that's how I jumped on the train without anyone, like, knowing that it was there and got into a lead again. Okay. Does anything stand out to you about what you saw or experienced when you had that realization?

Were you looking at something particular? Were you at a train station? And it brought it to mine. It was... I had this, I had like an eerie sense of familiarity, like, kind of like, do you know liminal spaces? Oh, yeah, yeah, the concept, yeah. Yeah, it was kind of like that feeling that you get where you, it feels familiar, but you also know it's not quite right and you feel some sort of like danger from it. okay but it was nothing where I could like it's not like I could pinpoint like this location to any

specific thing that I know of I guess part of what I was asking and you have it or you don't and maybe I've already asked it and you've given me an answer but the idea of when you had that sudden experience of an eerie potentially dangerous liminal space was there a physical environment you were present in. You were walking through grass. You were entering a subway station. Oh yeah. So I was in a tunnel with a train with like train tracks on the left of me and a lot of competitors around me. And I then hopped onto the train from from the walking area where everyone else was running. running and hitched a riot. And this was taking advantage of something that the others didn't.

Exactly, yeah, because they couldn't know about it. I essentially had a bit of future sites due to already knowing how this course looked like. Okay. Did you have any sense in the dream that this is definitely unethical or cheating, but I'm going to do it anyway? No, it was It was very clear to me in the dream That this is a no like holds barred situation Where everyone can just do whatever they want to

Gotcha Well the purpose was to win and you didn't hurt anyone to do it You took advantage of a natural environment That other people missed I mean yeah And you didn't have a bad feeling about it And I don't suggest that you should But your reaction in the dream could have been anything

It could have been, I'm doing what I need to do to win, but I don't like it. But it was more like, that's just the way it is. I'm doing, you know, it's like if you could run faster, don't hop on one leg, just run faster. The purpose is to win the race. And the race is running, therefore run faster. Why would you not? You know, very practical solution to I have a goal and here is an opportunity to get myself there ahead of other people, which is the entire purpose, reach the goal faster. A very practical application of that using.

your existing, properly using your abilities and your knowledge and your, your perception. So you rode, it says you rode the subway to the end of the race and you wanted to win. So your purpose was not to come in forth, but you did. There were some other people ahead of you. Did you witness them arriving or they were waiting for you when you got there? Like they'd already, they already arrived. So the first two, they already had arrived. but the third person, we were basically in a...

It was like a basically a photo finish situation where he just barely got there before me. So I ended up not being the top three, but instead being number four. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. And the last little bit,

of it after you hopped off the subway. You said, you ran over a, what I wrote down was red street. I don't even know if I heard that correctly. Red Street and lanterns? Oh, uh, over red lights from like street lanterns. You know, like, uh, what are they called? Not street lanterns. Uh, uh, you, you know, like, um,

uh, where they're like, like, uh, where they're like, red, yellow, green lights and you're supposed to wait for, it's to hit green. Gotcha. So you ran through a red stoplight that would have stopped. Yes, a stop light. If you ran a car. Gotcha. Gotcha.

Fair enough. So you ran past the red light. You should have stopped according to rules of normal society, especially if you were in a car, but you ran right through it because this is a race and I don't have to obey that rule. Yes. Gotcha. Fair enough.

Fair enough. and why wouldn't you? Of course, your competitor did, and you just barely got knocked. There's something important to your concept of what's happening here that is, you were far enough behind that you were never going to get first or second place.

You were almost third, but not quite. There's some self-concept there of like, that's about as good as I could do, and you showed yourself what you thought was a realistic appraisal of where you would actually come in, had this been a real race in a way? Is that kind of making sense? it's a very humble way to view yourself.

It's like, I'm pretty good. I'm not 256, but I'm not top three. And I think that's the way I think of myself too is I am literally not the best. It's just not who is, but certainly not me. Also, I'm not the worst, you know, I'm maybe, maybe top 10. I'll take that. Yeah, it's good enough. That's still sufficient narcissistic hubris.

I can live with that, though. You know, I'm not number one. I'll be number four. So that's probably showing yourself of like for better or worse, a realistic appraisal of where you, how you view your abilities in general and your kind of place in the rat race of life is like, I'm going to do okay. I'm going to come in pretty close to the top. But, you know, there's better.

There's better people. So not bad at all. How did you come around to the understanding of being kidnapped? Is that something that happened at the finish line? you were actually physically grabbed and thrown into a van with a bag over your head? So I was at the finish line and I was basically congratulating the third placed guy that he barely managed to like get in top three before me.

And then I was like, and then I was like trying to sit down and I noticed that there were like some people in suits coming and then suddenly I had like a sack over my head and then I was like at the school like scene. Yeah. And that's fine too. So there was something about, um, something about the process of being transported that was not necessary. It, you know, sudden scene change fade to black bag over the head. I've been kidnapped. Okay, where am I? Take the hat off. I. I'm in a school. Very classic middle school, younger elementary school or college classroom.

You said it was a university at one point. Is that this was a kind of university or? Usually in my recent dreams, what I get is like a mixture of my university and my middle school. Okay. And that was kind of what it was. it had elements of both words okay so what does that mean

I think there's a blending because you are not placing this experience in the context of this is like when I was in middle school nor this is like when I was in university this is more

this is how I conceptualize education this is what it's like in both places throughout the whole spectrum something like that making sense? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because it's a mixture of the two. It's like it is neither one or the other, but it is both.

So, you know, you're not separate. You say it's the whole spectrum. I think I think I'm seeing something along those lines. Man, can I keep my hair out of my face? Oh, the joys of being a wizard. But I use some gravity magic. Right? I should get one of those globes that makes it,

it makes it float. I should do that. Yes. I think honestly you can't get the little desktop ones. You get at Spencer's Gifts or whatever. It has to be actually a pretty powerful one, which I'm not going to mess with that. I will kill myself.

I am not a math magician nor an electrician or any of those things. I know what you do not know. So it was almost immediately following. How many other people were there with you? You said the top 14 were kidnapped, but you were told that or you could tell there were literally 14 other people around you? I was told there were 14 and it was basically just like a full kind of like middle school

classroom of people. Okay. So there was actually more than 14 of you there? As far as you can ask me? I don't know. It just filled the room. Okay. I did count them.

Yeah. I wouldn't expect you to go, wait, stop the dream. One, two, three. Yeah, right? One of the people, but at least the feel, and again, 14 people could feel like a full room plus, you know, a couple extra. How many, you know, guards, teachers, whatever, you know, people in suits? What did you call them? They were like a teacher slash handler.

Yeah, there was like basically one teacher and like two handlers. Okay. And they were making sure that we were like not supposed to. to not, like, not able to leave. And they were like, tasked to, um, teach us of these ways to like, uh, not offend the, the flesh deity. Excuse me. Yeah, that was going to be where I'm going.

Next is, um, so they, the initial instruction is explaining to you what you're doing there and why. That's kind of the opening salvo. You were brought here against your will because this was a, you know, the race was a test to find the best. And only the top 14, interesting number, not sure why that number, but maybe we'll get it. Maybe we won't. Would be kidnapped. And they would be regarded as the chosen ones to serve their God as some kind of a sacrifice in a way.

Maybe not literally you would be murdered, but you would be expected to do something or service. So, we were basically taught a way to be, like, a way of etiquette that was too complicated and too much at the same time for us to be actually expected to learn this, which could have probably, like, kept us. But since no one was able to like remember all of this in like a very short time It was meant to be like just a pretense to basically sacrifice us Which I then remembered with what would happen if I just went through this which I had in previous dreams which would essentially be I would be forced into a hallway where I would then follow to the end of it where a room where there's a room where there's already like a bunch of like gas and like sickness coming out of it and once once you enter you get infected and then slowly get

absorbed into this blob of flesh. Ah interesting. That's that is a very interesting concept. So you've this idea of an active deception intended to trick you into cooperation that would lead to your death, destruction, absorption. Yes. You're being deceived for the purpose of so they don't have to carry you down the hallway and chuck you into the room. Like there's something about the nature of the deception being a necessary part of the process.

Does that feel right? Like they had to make you believe you were going to be okay, even though they knew you weren't because they needed you to walk down the hallway willingly. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. There's something there.

There's something there. It makes me think of, you know, again, that psychopaths is the wrong word, but manipulative energy vampire people, manipulative people. They need your active participation because if you catch on to them, if you see through their realize you will you will walk away you won't go down that hallway and get absorbed on purpose willingly you they they have to make you believe you're doing it of your own free will and that you know enough to accurately assess the situation and believe you're going to be okay and that it's all for the best something yeah something along those lines yeah and there's a very

interesting powerful thing about you know first you have to go down the hallway on your own legs believing a falsehood about your safety, then you have to pass the threshold of entering the room where the danger exists, exposing yourself to danger. And the nature of the danger is this, it's something in the very air and it's as a corrupting nature and there's gas and it's like a sickness gets into you. And eventually what that does is breaks you down. And in a sense, in the dream, your physical form. But I'm thinking this is a mental form of sickness. of breaking down your identity and becoming absorbed by the flesh creature, the something else, becoming a part of something else and losing yourself.

Is that feeling right? Is that resonating with anything? Yeah. It does feel right, yeah. When you think about that, do you, does it feel like more of an interpersonal relationship absorption or more of a mass society facing the crowd, losing your individual? probably more like a mass society thing. Yeah.

Where it's like, where I'm just basically being groomed into doing the bidding of others by being gas lit into it. Yeah. Yeah. And that is exact. That's a very real phenomenon. That does happen to people. I mean,

we wouldn't even be able to express it as groomed or gas lit into behavior. You know, if there wasn't a very real thing there that we could show that that happens. That's a process. And you're doing this in the context of your education. Maybe not specifically because that's how you think of it, but there is a form of being misinformed, which also can happen, which is like the corruption of education.

You could have a teacher telling you something that is true or a teacher telling you something that is false. You could have a friend telling you something that is true or false. You can have media sources deceiving you for their own gain or properly just truth-telling. There's a lot of different ways we get deceived into behaviors, maybe against our own best interests. But in a way, it's all education,

even if it's miseducation, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of where I'm going with that. But then I think there's also the layer of you looking at some of your experience with your schooling over the years. And are you graduated now from university? No, I'm currently So technically So

Technically I passed The second semester and I would have been in the third semester right now But I got sick And so I stayed home this semester Okay And I've also been like kind of struggling with kind of like depression and stuff I was diagnosed with basically a heavy depression.

So basically my psychologist said the only reason he can't prescribe me or like diagnose me with heavy depression is because I'm still somewhat able to function in society. But for everything else I fit the definition

of heavy depression. It's just definition-wise, he can't, like, actively say, oh, yeah, heavy depression because that would mean I would no longer be functional. Gotcha. And I don't know how the, say, German medical system might differ from the American diagnostic and statistical manual. I don't know if they use the same. Yeah, they use the DSM. Oh, they do.

Okay. Fair enough. Which, yeah, that's interesting. I don't know if I've ever heard it described that way before where someone would say, I mean, you're depressed, but you're not depressed enough to be actually depressed. I get that too. It's a matter of degree. It is.

And there's a level of withdrawal. But I mean, some of us are heavily depressed and we're like, I just don't want to suffer more than I need to. So I'm going to keep going to work. So I don't lose my house. So I don't end up broken homeless and on the street and suffer even more. I'm not loving life. Doesn't mean I'm not depressed. It just means I'm able to avoid the worst possible consequences that heap misery on top of misery.

I don't know if that's a good reason not to diagnose someone. But I'm not your therapist as much as I have a background. And I don't know your specifics. I'm not asking for him. But that seems a little weird to me. I don't know. And he can't prescribe medication because it's not bad enough, he says. No, he did give me medication.

It's just... That technical diagnosis. Yeah, it's a technical thing where he can't describe me with like a major depressive disorder. So he had to go with like a medium. Medium. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a grande.

It's just a venty. Exactly. Fair enough. Yeah. That's fine. And you know, if you look at that and if he's right, thank God. I mean, it can be a lot worse. It can be more miserable and more dysfunctional.

And that's small comfort in some ways. But yeah, I remember I've been through depression too. And thinking back when people would say, it could always be worse. And I'm like, oh, God, it could be worse. It was not comforting. You know, other people have it worse. Oh, God. Other people have it.

worse. These were not words of encouragement for me. These were like, you mean there's people more miserable than I am? Oh my God. That was a horrible thing I didn't want to think about. Yeah, I've been, I've been like diagnosed with depression since I'm like 11. I think the last time that I was like not depressed was like when I was around seven or eight. So I've, I've been basically depressed my whole life like clinically. in the sense that I actually got diagnosis. That sounds very much like me. I think I had a similar path, like eight, nine years old.

I remember I just started hating life. Like, I don't like this at all. I don't want to be here. That's a very early age for me to, you know, have those thoughts. Yeah. I also think it's somewhat genetic because my mother has depression and her mother had depression. Oh, yeah. That's how we know for sure that it is genetic.

It's like, oh, look, it runs in families. It sure does. anxiety and depressive disorders. I would say, you know, my inheritance of, you know, depression, anxiety, and autism, 100% genetic. Now, it expresses itself differently in my case than with other people. We're all unique. But, yeah, basically, biologically, it just happens.

It's also part of the human condition, you know, and it could have very well been less severe with me. And maybe it is in some cases than with people in the past in my family. you know, we've had a much better environment to grow up in, in some ways, in modern world, less stressors due to technological and medical advances, things we didn't have to deal with that were, you know, and then the efforts of our parents to give us a good life in terms of a lot of things that could have gone horribly wrong and been much worse. And there's some people who argue, if you'd struggle just a bit more, if things were just a bit worse, you'd actually be a happier person because you'd appreciate things better.

it's an argument to make, I don't think that affects genetic, biological, clinical depression in the way people think it does. But anyway, back to, back to, it's the get good of life.

Just get good, dude. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's, the funny thing is that that is right and wrong. If you don't get good, you probably can't have a good life. So you have to at least aim yourself in that direction. and put forth some effort.

If you just sit around waiting for good things to come to you, never going to happen. So get good, yes. Actually, literally, technically good advice. You should definitely try.

And then again, on the other side is like, yeah, but shit happens. You can't get good your way out of a hurricane or earthquake. Shit just happens. And that's the natural evil of life. You know,

you get cancer. You know, your mother dies young in a car crash. Not your fault. You can't get good your way out of that. It's going to, you for the rest of your life and you got to make some sense of it and struggle with it and it'll always be a major trauma that influences how you understand and proceed with everything you become a

different person after something like that happens um anyway so i'm always on the yin yang side of things i'm like yeah get good is not fair and it's absolutely true fuck what do we do with that um but i want to keep i've kept you here forever i want to keep going with your stuff so you choose to escape you realize the falsehood and you run away from the building. Maybe it doesn't even matter how you got away. You just choose to leave and now you're imagining yourself running into a different building nearby. Yeah, I was essentially like managing to run out of the building that I was in and then I met these other two people who like there's other two handlers in front of this university like building that tried to get. me in. Okay. But these were two different handlers. It wasn't the same ones from the... Yes, those were two different handles. Gotcha. So you're in a larger system where it's not just

the people in the room that just the three people that decided to kidnap you. They're just representatives. They're, they're cogs in the machine doing their job. And there's more. They're everywhere. Yeah. Okay. And they, you knew their purpose was to catch you, but they didn't actually try to do this. They said, look, even if you tell people, people, no one will believe you. And they were there to maybe gaslight you more. Maybe, maybe make you question your resolve. Try and try and get you to quit resisting.

That was their purpose more than, more than physically restraining you. Yes. Gotcha. Yeah. There's a, there's a very powerful thing of breaking someone's will. And that's what happens with a lot of, say, abuse victims is they no longer look at their life as something they can change. they are completely broken in terms of the ability to fight back.

They can no longer conceive of successfully fighting back, that that will only make everything worse. So they keep themselves trapped, like on purpose. And then the abuser has to exert less control. They can do it more selectively to just push a few buttons to get the results they want. They don't have to beat people anymore. They beat them enough. Now they know the consequences.

Kind of like training a dog in a way. I mean, no one should beat their dog to train them. But once the dog knows the pattern, and they're like, if I behave, I get a treat, done. That's very, like you were saying, very much the conditioning. There's something about society that conditions us to keep our behavior in certain reasonable bounds or unreasonable bounds, depending on how you look at it. But that's kind of the purpose of socialization. How do you exist in proximity to other people in a way that doesn't make other people want to kill you?

Yeah, for sure. So you escape to an elevator, you get away from them, whether they made a half-heartedly. or realistic attempt. It seems like their main purpose was to, yeah, to, again, reinforce the breaking of the spirit that would allow you to resist. And for some reason, you realize that this university was underground because the elevator went up. And then you had that realization, I must be underground. Yeah. That's interesting, too, because we've got, from the beginning of the dream, we've got this village is not real.

We've got the depths of water that are unseen that have a danger lurking in it. We've got backstage at a play, not up front. All of these are hidden areas, if that makes sense. And now you're even in a broader hidden area that is like underground. It's not open to public display, but it's a, where am I trying to go with this? It is, the first thing it made me think of is this is the subconscious. You know, it's what's backstage of what we put forward. It's the underground portion that we have to come out of to be in the light of day.

Am I going anywhere with that that makes sense to you, conceptual, or does underground mean something different to you? Yeah, it was like something that was hidden, but it's also in a way easily accessible. Gotcha. So this elevator, you can basically use this elevator whenever you want to, But, and it's also disguised as a university. But in the end, it's still like a barrier to go there in the first place. And then you would also have to actually investigate it, which, why would you do that? Yeah.

So it's like a facade in a facade. Yeah. Yeah. There's all kinds of, um, that's that, that facade and a facade is a great way of saying. And I'm glad I rambled enough to kind of get, get, get, to that. It's a fantastic way of saying it's the secret behind the secret, but is that the final secret? Whoa, what's actually happening here? What happens when you get to the surface on the elevator? You mentioned, and that's just kind of rhetorical, maybe we're going to get there.

You felt anchored to a lower plane. Very interesting way of describing that, which maybe you just meant physically stuck at a lower level, you know, like rungs on a ladder, but you kind of said, a lower plane. And that makes me think of spooky woo spiritual kind of ascendancy type of stuff, but also the idea of leveling up in life. Like you're stuck at a lower level than you could be if you

rode the elevator or how are you conceptualizing this idea of a lower plane? It essentially I don't know if you're familiar with D&D but. That's actually the first thing I thought of. Go ahead. Like a Litch

can't get too far away from its philectory. And it kind of felt like my heart has been like taken by this place, by the school, and they have control over it, and I can't move too far away from it. Okay. Like, as if there's, like, a barrier that's, like, preventing me to go further.

So I was forced to go back. gotcha that is a very unique and interesting feeling in this regard the the the idea that you're you've been trapped you are bound to a place or an idea in a way that you cannot actually escape from you're going to have to confront it on some level or you're okay there's the idea of confrontation to escape to to fight through and push past and get out of there's also the confrontation with acceptance. That's its own kind of confrontation facing the truth. I am actually going to have to deal with this situation. I can't just run away. It's not going to go away if I run away. I'm bound to it one way or another. And in this sense, in the dream, you're more physically, more literally

bound. Like, okay, I can't escape. I need to do something else. And so you actually choose to seek a confrontation by returning to the classroom. You're like, I need to go back to the place I was trying to be, that someone was trying to deceive me and have an experience there. Is that kind of what it felt like? Yeah. And you're there and you're looking at the other people and for the first time now you are conceptualizing them as brainwashed. They've, they've drank the Kool-Aid.

They've been successfully hoodwinked. And you asked the teacher how many times you have been there, how many times you have escaped and returned? Not escaped, but essentially like how many. times have I already been sacrificed like I felt like I've basically like been reborn in this like cycle of like dying to this monstrosity and then like repeating this and trying to escape my fate multiple times and then the teacher seemed to also be aware of that happening and then like said like this happened like X

amount of times already and then like listed different dates. Okay. So you performed a critical analysis of the situation. You went back to confront what is happening here. I finally have accepted that I am not able to escape from this confrontation. So I'm going to have it. How do I have it? I start asking questions.

I start looking clearly and critically at what's happening. Tell me how many times. Tell me the circumstances. tell me everything. You've decided to look and now you're going to see. You're going to get your answers. And they start giving you specifics enough to say it's true. You know, you, to say the evidence that what this was not more brainwashing. Does that feel right? Or like you believe what they're saying this, you've been, this has happened dozens of times like this and like that. You felt it was the truth and not more gas lighting? I found it. I found it was.

more like I was pointing out the reality of it and that we've been through this spiel like multiple times and that there isn't even much purpose to it anymore and yet she keeps trying to do it do it even though she knows that in the end I come back and she tries to do it again and she is also aware that she keeps having to do this and but she still does because it's her role. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. And so you, you ask, and I wrote this down, if this keeps happening, why? And this person had no answer. They,

they didn't really understand their own behavior. They were also just acting. They've been assigned a role. Yeah. That, so rather than thinking of this as a person, I just wanted to deviate a bit, it's not a person that's been assigned role. I think it's a symbolic representation of a process.

it's a thing in and of itself is where I'm going with that. The idea of, what is it? Like a fire is a bad example, but there are certain things that do what they do. A waterfall. A waterfall, like a physical example. A waterfall has no purpose. It's responding to the presence of water, the slope of the earth, the fact of a drop, and the force of gravity.

A waterfall is what it does. and you have a certain relationship with it. You can choose to go over it. You can choose to admire it. You can choose to swim at the bottom. You can throw rocks at it. You know, whatever you want to do. But it is what it is.

So this thing, this teacher, this hoodwinking influence is kind of a certain, it's a, it's a concept in and of itself that cannot change. It is what it is. I don't know if any of that is starting to make sense. Or if I'm expressing what I'm trying to say clearly enough, it cannot change. It simply does what it does. It's like as much of a, it's like as much like a constant that just does what it does because it does

and not because of any reason for it. Yeah, it isn't choosing to behave this way. There's no malice in it even. It neither loves you nor hates you. It simply does what it does. It is a gear turning. So there's something that's where I'm going with this. And I'm like, sorry, I don't mean to cut you off.

I'm like, wow, I'm on, I'm on something. You are confronting a process that is what it is. It's definitely this gaslighting to turn you into a voluntary thing that gets, you know, tricked into being consumed by the world and society or whatnot. There's a, there's a cycle there that exists self-contained that you will return to, that you feel inextricably bound to. Maybe not, maybe not, because I think that's where this is going. having the sudden awareness that this is a cycle, that you have been there before, that you're not going to just be able to run away because you will be brought back. So you return intentionally to have this confrontation, to look at it for what it is,

and to challenge it to explain itself. And what happens then is you acquire the sudden ability to transport yourself in time, to go back to before you were kidnapped. Yes. That's an amazing response to this confrontation. here's what I see happening. You can tell me there is a cycle that has a beginning. And that beginning is in a way participating in the race to the point of the kidnapping.

So you're actually able to go back before the beginning of this repetitive cycle and break yourself out of it before it begins again. By hiding? Yes. By removing yourself. And hiding, I don't think is like, this is not a cowardly response of, I don't want to face this again, but I'm going to remove myself such that I am not present. They can't find me because I'm not participating in that shit anymore. I am now hidden somewhere else. I have removed myself.

I don't think it's at all a cowardly hiding. And then you need to complete something. Oh, the play. Now you're back to the play. You realize, so there's like nested layers within layers of things. and it actually it actually takes you as far as back as the village in the beginning again

or just the play? It was just a play. Fair enough. So this was an entire tangent nested inside the play in a way. Like I do sometimes, I go, here's thought A.

Now here's thought B, but here's actually thought B sub one paragraph two. Wait a minute. Okay, back to C. Let me continue that. original train of thought. So it brought you back to the play, and now you have become an actual...

You're not playing the part of a vampire, now you've actually become a vampire. How did you know you were? What was different? What felt different? It was just that during the play, I actually noticed that I had now become a vampire, because now I felt like the teeth coming out and I felt like a little bit more powerful.

And yeah, that's basically it, yeah. Okay. And I felt like I had embodied this role a lot, like literally instead of figuratively. Yeah, gotcha. And then that's when your female co-star showed back up again. She actually attended her role in the play, played the role she wrote for herself in a way. She was there present. She was

not there. She was away and I found out through a random other member of the theater that apparently

she took some of the some of the some of the my cheat sheets with her and was apparently she said like she was going to give them to me but I never received

them so it was most likely a lie to make me look like an idiot because I didn't know my lines. It was kind of an active sabotage. Yes. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yes, steals your lines and so you were unable to

complete the play like you actually had to just stop. That's all folks. Or did you improvise? you know, the audience I, I improvised. The audience was a little confused, but it was enough to go through it.

Okay. Okay. Oh, yeah, that's right. I didn't read my own notes. Finish the play as best you could. And then it said back to friends at the start, but you didn't end up in that village

or those friends were in the audience from the village? So there was one friend from that village that, village that also turned out to be a vampire. Interesting. Was it Blacksmith or the kid or someone else? No, it was someone else. It was a random girl, not someone I recognized. And not someone of malicious intent, like a genuinely good person, or were they part

of the problem that drew in the water? Yeah, just a generally good person. Okay. And she then essentially went away with me and hit together. with me from the people that were hunting me and that was the end. And you said something about going back to the elevator, like on the surface? Yes. And what was your intent of going to that elevator?

To go back down? I was trying, yeah, I was trying to go back down and find a way to end it, like, finally, like completely. So it could never happen again. Nice. I think, okay, you tell me if this is right. It took us a long way to get here. You, let's see, how do I phrase this?

You have noticed a cycle in your life where you get poorly treated by people, although you're trying to be a good friend, beneficial. And part of you thinks that in order to break this cycle where you're being, you know, not treated well, that you have to kind of become a monster. Some unappetizing, unnatural elements need to be adopted in ten. You got to toughen up a bit. You got to become a bit more. You got to become a bit more of like what you, the things you don't really like about a vampire.

You know, you don't have to become a monster that abuses people, but you've got to be a little more threatening, menacing. You got to take on some of those things and say, look, I'm sorry if you don't like it. This is my boundary and I'm not changing my mind no matter what you gaslight me with your appeals for compassion. This is what I need to do for me. You can call me a monster if you want to, but I'm going to set this boundary for my own health. And the way you're understanding this is as if you've been indoctrinated to sacrifice yourself for others. And you desperately need to break out of that cycle, even if it means you got to become a bit of a monster. And actually, by the end of that, you find a companion who's a similar kind of monster and you go together to confront this problem.

I'm going back down there to make sure this doesn't happen again. I'm going to solve this problem once and for all. I'm going to confront it finally for the last time. When I tell the story that way, how do you feel about it? Yeah, this sounds a lot like what I've been thinking about recently. Nice. Yeah. Nice.

That's pretty good. Thank you. I mean, we took a long way to get there. And the last episode I did with Math Dad Wizard, we spent an hour trying to get my audio problems fixed. And I was only able to give him an hour. which included a little bit of chatting and a little bit of the dream interpretation. This is the way it really should go to really get a powerful answer. So what do you, how do you use this?

I'm not entirely sure. I don't have an answer. I think confronting the truth, seeing it for what it is, absolutely critical. I think you're showing yourself that is a necessary element. It is something you need to see. It is something you should confront that you cannot escape confronting. So don't run away. Look at it.

Go face to face. Ask the tough questions. and then choose which elements of the monstrous side we all can possess are useful and necessary in the world. I mean, you don't want to be a rabbit because the wolves eat you. You maybe don't want to be a wolf because you don't want to eat rabbits. Maybe you want to be a honey badger. Just leave me alone. I'm tough as shit, but I only eat honey and I'm not going to bother anybody, but don't fuck with me.

I mean, there's a lot of different ways to be a monster in the world. I don't know if you know Jordan Peterson's comments on being a monster. that sounds familiar? No. He says the worst thing you can probably do in the world, you don't want to be harmless. Harmless, a harmless person is not a good person.

You want to be a person capable of being a monster who chooses not to hurt anybody. That's a much different kind of thing. Someone who is harmless, incapable of doing harm, there's nothing heroic about that. The heroic thing is, I have tremendous power and I choose not to kill you because it's wrong because I say so.

I say that's wrong. That's my limit. So you want to actually be a monster who is in control of itself and makes good decisions for the right reasons. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And I think we all need to be. We all need to be someone who says, for my sake, I'm sorry that you are upset. I am not willing to do that.

And I am not willing to be manipulated by your crocodile tears into being someone I am not, because that's not healthy for me. just not doing that to the point where I will sacrifice a relationship if you're not willing to respect my boundaries. That's very tough for a lot of people to do. It wasn't always easy for me. Now I'm like, you know, 46 years old and I'm like, oh, fuck that guy, whatever. He's going to be a dick. I don't need him.

It's not, not something that everyone comes to naturally or easily. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would say sleep on it again. Yeah. And see if, you know, and also this thing's idea of a recurring dream. If this stops recurring, you've got your answer and you kind of know the direction you need to go. Now your dreams are going to be something else.

Or you're going to go back in that dream. You're going to go down that elevator. You're going to have a confrontation that's going to help you play through what it would be like to put this into practice. And then you can look at that dream yourself. You bring it back to me. We'll talk about it again. It's fine. I love a continuation story.

You were going to say something. I talked over you. Please. Yeah. No, we're going to have to see how it goes. my dreams are often very unpredictable but I thought this was a really great experience I've I don't know if I I think I kind of it's kind of like like a better version of terror reading and I'm not saying this in a demeaning way because I do think that

terror reading really works in the sense that it puts an image in your head that then causes you to move or like interpret things a different way. But this is different where the image is already in there. And you just help interpret it in a way that's more sensible. This is what I say. None of the answers are inside of me. Like I didn't create this story. Hopefully what I did was help you fill in the gaps that made the story obvious

for what it already was. That's always what I'm trying to do. In a way, I just had this analogy popping in my head. It's like an archaeologist that goes digging for dinosaur bones. I didn't put them there. And I want to be very careful about how I expose them so I don't change the shape of them by chiseling too much rock and I hit the bone.

But we want to get the real shape of this thing. Is it an ectheosaurus? Is it a Tyrannosaurus? And then we look at it and we know when we can, but it's just that exposing what is already there in its true form. giving it the proper names. And I really hope that this has been, it is always my goal that people have an enjoyable time that what I say makes sense in a useful manner and that they actually do have some

ability to put it to use, that this moves you forward along this path that you have self-identified as a necessary element of growth that's going to make your life better. So definitely, you know, keep in touch and let me know that that was the case or, you know, And maybe talk to your therapist, say, hey, I had this dream thing. Here's the video. He can watch it. He can watch our conversation. But at the very least tell the story about here's what we discovered might be important

to me. How would you recommend I put this into practice and how do we track my progress? That might be the best thing to do. Yeah, it was fun. And I think it also gave me another perspective of try. of like maybe just pulling through something I already thought of doing, but was kind of too afraid to, if that's like,

of like how society will think of it and such. It's very true. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of moving parts. You know, we, we don't want to be so dependent that we cannot act in any genuine manner

that makes us happy or is functional. And we cannot be so independent that we care nothing. for what anybody thinks because we rely on others to be our mirrors, our feedback. Am I a good person? You know, without other people to kind of give us a little feedback, it's really hard to know sometimes. So that's a very important balancing act. I don't recommend anyone go to either extreme.

No man is an island and no man is an insect in a collective. Humans are something very different. So, well, on that note, though, we've gone on long enough. I want to get you. It's probably like you're eight, eight, nine hours ahead of me, probably over, over in the Yeah, it's about to be 11 p.m. Late enough for you, huh? Yep.

I'm definitely about to go to bed now. Good deal. I heard you yawning a little bit earlier, and I tried to rush a little bit, but give you a good answer. Let me wrap up the show, and I'll just say to everybody out there watching, thank you for being here.

Like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers, viewers for my video game streams, etc. 16, currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent. The meaning of dreams. No, dreams and their meaning.

Damn, I'm going to get that wrong. Dreams and their meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson. You can get that at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. Pop it up down here, a little thing, little graphic on the back end. We'll fix it in post. That's enough for me. I'm going to say, Luigi, thank you for being here. A fascinating journey.

Always. I've enjoyed the conversation. Me too. Buy his books. Like and subscribe and leave a comment and buy his books. I do everything. I paid him to show. There we go.

And everybody out there, thanks for listening.