Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 118: Obscure Obelisk

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.” – Henry David Thoreau “From Nowhere To Nothing” - https://jbouchard.podbean.com/

Greetings friends, welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Joel Bouchard from West New York State. He is a PhD psych student, army vet, and musician, having produced some alternative or psychedelic rock. You can find him out there. Also the host of the podcast from nowhere to nothing available across all major podcasting platforms. We're going to get right back to him in two seconds. Would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends about my channel. Always need more volunteer dreamers.

hook yourself up before I get super popular, which any day now, right? And you can get one of my currently available 16 works of historical dream literature. The most recent is Dreams and Their Meaning by Horace G. Hutchinson. And you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including, you know, all 16 books, MP3 versions of these interviews, you know, in audio-only podcast form, Encyclopedia. lots of good stuff. So that's enough about me. Back to Joel,

thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited. I'm looking forward to it. You know, we were talking a little bit before we started recording. I'm somebody who has a lot of dreams

and remembers a lot of them. And they've actually, in psychology, you're probably aware of it. They're finding that there are some genes associated with being able to remember your memories, having better memory of your memory. So I don't know if I have,

or not, but it's just kind of an interesting tidbit. It's very likely. I think there's a strong genetic or at least biological component. That's been long theorized, and I think rightly so, that that's basically what we are physically capable of kind of determines how we experience the world in a lot of ways. And the unique range of dream experience that people have, some people can lucid dream. I think there's got to be something also semi-genetic there because I, then, again, there's people who have the theory that you can train yourself to lucid dream. I wonder if the people who succeed and claim so had the predisposition and discovered it rather

than adopted it. So I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I never put the effort into it because it sounds like a lot of work. Like, wait yourself up three hours in and start right. I'm like, oh, I'm not. Yeah. But yeah, no, there's a lot of interesting aspects to it.

I know in my particular case, I've always had a lot of. dreams, but when I ran to sleeping issues and I got prescribed phrasidone, which is technically an antidepressant, but it really has the effect of putting people to sleep more than it does reducing. You did a nice drowsy feeling. Yeah, then I started, when they put me on that, I started having dreams that were subjectively in my dream time weeks long, two weeks long, three weeks long. And during those, some of those, I noticed that I couldn't lucid dream in the sense that I could control anything that was happening.

But there were moments where I would suddenly realize that I was dreaming. Wow. Unfortunately, none of them were very exciting. I was, I was, like you mentioned, the beginning, I was an Army vet. And two out of the four that I had were just me at Army training exercises, sleeping intense, deck and boxes, just doing boring stuff for two weeks. And then waking up and being like, wait, that was a dream, you know. But yeah. Dreaming has an interesting spot in psychology, as you probably well know.

But I've looked into it, you know, being a PhD student. In a lot of the literature in psychology, it's not taken very seriously. A lot of people, you know, with the foundations of psychology with Freud and Young and some of them, it had some significance. And then in modern psychology, they started to say, no, it's just your brain's way of getting rid of junk and stuff. That's a dear. But I think that, yeah, I think they're starting to come back around to seeing some of this as meaningful. And from a philosophical standpoint, which, you know, philosophy kind of picks up where science leads off in a lot of ways.

So that's, in my podcast is a philosophy podcast. So having the two sides of it for me, the background of it, the science of psychology, but then also the interest and the sort of the deeper dive into the philosophy of it, and understanding that science is never going to be able to answer all of your questions about things, and especially something as subjective and personal as dreaming. There's no way of empirically proving much about it, but you can rationalize about it, and I think that that's where things like what you're doing come in. And I think that there is something that is important and worthwhile for them.

Yeah. Oh, there's so much in there. I mean, going back a little bit to the idea of, oh, what was one of the first things you said? It was something about, geez, I had it on the tip of my tongue. It was the history of studying. Oh, yeah, yeah, like the foundations of psychology. Like Ford and Jung looked into dreaming quite a bit. Oh, so that was actually like point two or three. I was going to try and get back. I didn't take any notes. I probably should have. I'm trying to follow along verbally. but you mentioned, so going all the way back to the Trasadone thing and how drugs of a variety of kind of food, there's a long history of people believing bad dreams were caused by eating a rotten piece of meat before you went to bed, that kind of a thing. So there's a long tradition of dismissing dreams as unimportant, just the vapors of a bad meal. But then there's also the idea of dreams that the nature of how people individually experience dreams changing if they drink when they go to bed. don't dream at all because they're not hitting levels, you know, the alcohol's interfering.

There's a guy who wrote confessions of an English opium eater and he described a lot of dreams, especially with the time dilation stuff you were talking about where he would be trapped in these nightmares for what felt like to him centuries. Now, and that connects to another very interesting point you were saying too where dreams are all self-report. I mean, people can just be making the shit up, but, you know, so everything we know about it, is tell me what's in your head and what you remember of it. Yeah, yeah. There's a couple other interesting points there.

You know, one is that idea that, you know, eating something can influence your dreams. Sure. But what they're finding out biologically is that you have so much, so many serotonin producing, you produce more serotonin your gut than you do in your brain. And they're just, you're discovering that your gut actually has,

meaningful ways and impacts on how your brain works. They're really discovering your body is a holistic system. It's this idea of your brain being this computer that controls the rest of your body. It's kind of a false narrative. Your heart, your gut, all kinds of, your whole body works together. And a lot of that influences your thinking just as much as your brain influences the rest of the body. For sure. And then the philosophical end of it is when you look at the self-reported dreams,

and time dilation. From the philosophical point, I like to ask, well, what is time, right? Time is just a construct. Many physicists don't even believe that it really exists. They believe we live in what they call a block universe where the present, the past, and the future all exist at different times, just spread out throughout it. And time is just the way we perceive it with the three pounds of meat that's in our head. Yeah.

So if you think about it that way, the idea that in a 20-minute REM cycle, you could live centuries, it seems strange from just our sort of embedded viewpoint of how we experience time in waking life. But if you start to think about a bit more abstractly and try to wrap your head around, well, what is time? We know that if you're having a good time, time moves very fast or if you're bored, time moves very slow. Time flies. So there's some dilation there even when you're awake to a much lesser extent. But yeah, it gets you asking some of those deeper questions. Dreams really get you very deep into the human psyche. Yeah.

And there's also a very interesting phenomenon that I don't know if it's been discussed much. I think I invented it. But I'm sure it's a concurrent thought that others have had. But the idea of time, your perception of time being a function of your age. So one year to a 10 year old is one tenth of his life, one year to a hundred year old, one one hundredth of his life. So time seems to go faster as we get older as a function of how long we've already been alive and how much time we've existed in general. So that's one way of looking at time being a subjective experience, even if it is an objective phenomenon, if we can prove that. The second point, though, was so an idea occurred to me just now, and that's why I love

these conversations too, but the basic premise of the experience of time in dreams. And so if it goes down to some levels of my personal understanding of it from my own research and reading other people's work. So there's a basic idea theoretical that, you know, we dream the entire night. Our brain never stops turning, like the heart beats and the lungs breathe, but we don't always have a memory of every single thought. We don't have one eight-hour dream that lasts the entire night as if we had never fallen asleep. We fade in and out of them. So there's a kind of a liminal zone-ish where it's not, we're not awake, but we're not so deeply asleep that we can't perceive ourselves thinking.

And only, it seems to be only those experiences of perceiving. our own subconscious thoughts that we call dreaming. So, okay, now how does this relate? This is actually coming back to what you said. That's all the, wait, let me begin to the beginning and then catch up. So when you started describing the idea of being on, say, Trasidon, and I compared it to the guy who was on the opium. There may be a longer period of time. Like, your body may be struggling to awake or heading towards.

awakeness and the substance is keeping you just under waking up where you're where you actually spend longer time in dreamland in that in that space where you are consciously aware of your thoughts and I think a lot of people go you know um what is it a a tremendous number of thoughts can tumble over each other in a five second span in a 10 second span you can take a 90 second cat nap and have a whole little fantasy dream adventure in your head and whoa come back come back awake. So imagine, you know, you know, we had a standard for it, you know, but one minute of dreaming is one day in Dreamland, the longer you're in that zone of I'm remembering what I'm thinking

from, you know, the longer it's going to seem. So we could have those kind of perceptions of, well, this is taking forever. I've been here an entire lifetime. That's not an unknown experience. Yeah, yeah. And that would make total sense because my, my particular. problem with sleeping was I could always fall asleep quickly, but then I'd wake up 233 in the morning and I wouldn't be able to fall back to sleep. And of course, being a psychology student,

when they prescribed me tracetone, I started looking into it and the mechanics of how the drug works. And they said basically exactly what you just said, which is that it will keep you in a restful state, a sleep state, but sometimes your sleep. cycles will get interfered with. So very much like you said, rather than going from a core sleep to, you know, a deep sleep, you know, to a core, to a REM, going through this kind of cycle, you might get caught in one place for an extended period of time. And that's, that is how the dreams kind of happen.

Yeah. And then the time thing that you mentioned, that has been studied psychologically, where they, they say, yeah, if you're, if you're five years old, then one year is 20% of your life. Whereas if you're, you know, 80 years old. One year is so much. And the other part of that that they've looked at is as far as trying to figure out the subject, you know, sort of subjective feeling of time is novelty. You know, they say that novelty tends to slow down time greatly. And dreams, much of dreams are very novel.

You know, the dream I'll be sharing today is one that I've had probably a dozen times over the course of my life. but for the most part, every time you go to sleep, something new or different happens. And I think that novelty might play into the, if not the actual extent of the dream, right? Maybe I didn't dream for two weeks, right? Because I can't remember every detail of what happened, but the feeling of dreaming for two weeks.

Yeah. And having that memory of falling asleep and waking up in a dream and going about my day and things, that might have to do with the novel experiences that were happening, the things that I never actually encountered in waking life. And so my brain is sort of paying attention to it, saying, well, this has never happened before. We should, we should kind of key into what's going on. For sure. Yeah. And there's two things that popped

into my head. One of them is the idea of attention and distraction in a way. Like if we're staring, a watch pot never boils. We're staring at a clock, just willing it to go faster because we're just bored out of our mind. But we can't stop focusing on. being present to the boredom and the slowness of the passage. But then we get distracted by novelty, by this focus of attention, it is something that grabs our interest. With so many words that say, what does it mean to have interest, to be interested?

What is a, you know, and so a lot of these phrases have been applied to dreams and attention and, you know, that theories of dreams being, that we have to become disinterested in the waking world in order to fall asleep. That was one proposed theory of a certain school thought about how dreams function. Or how we fall asleep. The other side of it was tension, focus, time. Damn.

Now, what was the last thing you just said? Because it was the time. And then he went into the perception of something else. Yeah. So bad. Yeah. verbally. No, but that is really interesting.

Because again, this is where the psychology and the, philosophy sort of meet is, you know, much like time, trying to determine what time is, you know, in psychology, there's a lot of focus. The particular branch of psychology that I'm getting into is consciousness, psychology. And it's sort of the wild west. Go ahead. I won't forget now. Yeah, it's sort of the wild west of the academic field at this point, consciousness

studies is because there's theories all over the place, people saying, oh, yeah, you know, consciousness is this, that, or the other thing. But some of the interesting ones are when they say, well, consciousness, and they've done studies to sort of demonstrate this, is that consciousness happens after the fact, right? Like you and I think that we're here having a conversation, and I think that I have control over what I'm saying. But in actuality, I'm saying things. And then retroactively, my consciousness is essentially a fancy memory system, saying, okay,

well, this is what you said. you're going to want to hang on to that for later to know if it was a successful course of action or if you'd want to say something different in the future. And then that's how it integrates its memory. The way that they demonstrated this was looking at a picture of a bee and tracking pupil movement. And what they found is that when you're looking at a pitcher, your eyes actually move too quickly for you to take in any information. So the way that your eyes move over a pitcher doesn't really make any sense for how your brain works. So all that information that's getting taken in sensory-wise,

it takes up to 15 seconds for it to get fully integrated in your brain and to create a whole picture and to have a feeling of this. In the moment, you don't realize that. It's kind of like we were talking about before we started with latency. You know, like, okay, we set up these recording, you know, rigs where we're doing video or audio or something, and sometimes you'll say something in your voice will be just a split second behind.

will drive you nuts, right? Oh, yeah. Well, a lot of people, you know, a lot of the signs of saying that your brain sort of works the same way. You have all the sensory information coming in. And in the moment, you can't actually make sense of it all. It's actually a little bit later that you go, oh, wait, okay, this is what actually happened.

Yeah. So, yeah, the whole thing is fast. The double take phenomenon. We're like, what? And what happened in between those two takes? We noticed something, but it took us a minute to process it to look back and go, I'm startled by this. And that reminded me, too, what you were saying, the idea of... It should be an big deal of, right?

Where if, you know, you have that response where if something's coming at you out of the corner of your eye, you'll flinch, you'll react, you'll try to get out of the way of something. You didn't think about doing that. You had no control over that. Your brain, it didn't make it to your prefrontal cortex. He made it to the just the primal part of your brain and then the signal got sent back down to take an action. Yeah. There is, and I am aware of some of that stuff. It's an illusion of control a little bit and how that plays into our dreams and how we make sense of them.

It's kind of interesting. Yeah, wasn't there something, if I recall it correctly, the idea of they did some kind of a mapping where it seemed like the hand moved and then the areas of the brain controlling hand movement lit up like afterwards. There was something in there. It was a unique circumstance, but it was that kind of automatic movement where it's like the brain didn't say move hand. The hand said, by the way, I just moved. And there was something else. What was that if it's not coming from the brain?

You know, it seems like our, we focus as you say a lot, you want to get down? What are you doing, Bubble? He's the real star of the show. Everything stops when he wants to get into a new position. You know, we think of the brain as just what's going to. going on up here, but it's actually connected in that network that, you know, the very famous picture of it, like, you take the brain and the nervous system out, and it looks like this weird octopus alien. It's just floating there. And then that's what's living inside us that kind of

moves the rest of it. But to get back before I completely forget, the idea of consciousness. And that's, I don't think you can develop a theory of consciousness that does not account for dream experience. Because we know it's real, we know it's ubiquitous. It's, it is something that happens with humans. That's why I have my, uh, little, branch of what I'm trying to put together of like I think and you can you know take this for what it's worth it's work in progress uh and I mentioned this in the last episode uh but I think or it seems likely to me or I get the impression whatever however you want to tentatively say it that dream experience is more like actual thought unfiltered by conscious attention I think that's

I'm leaning in that direction theoretically. The idea that what we do is that our actual, the way our brain actually functions and the way we process ideas in images and sensory impressions and all this other stuff, that stays the same. The only thing that changes is the outside world goes away and our conscious attention goes away. And then what we're left with is the unfiltered stuff. And this maybe is accounted for by just the theory of the subconscious, although some people think of it as they confuse it with.

its own entity in a way that has a will or a desire that communicates things to us, which is one way of conceptualizing it. But I, so why do why, so how does this relate to consciousness and why his dreams important? But it's a very unique phenomenon where we are both storyteller and observer. And the observer part doesn't know what the storyteller is going to say or do. And the storyteller may not even be aware there's an observer.

It's this weird duel. And well, they posit ideas of dual consciousness. It goes way back in, you know, late, you know, early to late or mid, whatever, 1800s type of stuff. And we've gotten a little bit away from that. They used to think of, you know, each half of the brain had its own consciousness. That was part of that stuff. And some of these theories really weird fell out of favor, but they were never really disproven. People just said, well, we like this other theory better.

A lot of people don't know that discrete areas of the brain controlling different areas of the body or processing sound or, or, or, etc., etc. That actually came from the phrenologists, the people that used to measure the shape of the skull and whatnot. And it's funny to see that part of that fell away and got poo-pooed because it was, you know, all kinds of like social dynamic stuff built into it that was discriminatory, et cetera, et cetera. But they were the guys that said, yeah, each area of the brain has its own function.

And now that's just taken for granted. It's proven. We know. Lights up. Auditory processing. There it is. Yeah. Yeah.

The history of psychology is really kind of interesting because I think if you look at it as a whole, you had a group of people at the beginning that were sort of intuiting the way that the brain worked. And then what happened as the field became more scientific, they found that some aspects of what those guys discovered didn't pan out. So what they did is they got rid of all of it. And then they transitioned into a purely empirical model that was mostly based on, you know, sort of deterministic, mechanistic nature or nurture conceptions, which is a long way of saying either stimulus response or genetics could account for all behavior. We are basically just meat machines, right? Yeah. And we just react to what's going on around us. and that really dominated the psychological field through most of the 20th century, right?

It wasn't until really as recent as 20, 30 years ago that psychologists started to look at it and say, you know what, these models don't account for the human experience. And some of those early guys that we threw everything out from, there was some stuff that should be thrown out, but there were other things that had some weight to them. And as they started to, you know, clinically observe some of these extreme cases, you know, ones that it would be ethically impossible to create this experiment, but if it occurs naturally, it provides a lot of insight. They started to discover some of those things are true. Like, you can watch videos on YouTube of people who have had lobotomies or even like a corpus callosum

severing, and they'll say, hey, draw a cat, right? And there's a, this lady and she perfectly draws half of a cat, the right half of a cat. And they say, do you like this cat? Does it look good? Is it complete? Yeah, yeah, it's good. You know you didn't draw the left half of the cat. And she goes, oh, yeah, you know, I must have forgot or it must have been in the way or something. So the way that the brain communication works when you sever those connections, she can think that she did something right

and then once pointed out she can know that she did it wrong but she can't do the both at the same time or you know there's obviously documented cases of people with multiple personality disorder which is kind of like you were saying this idea of separate consciousnesses right your your brain categorizing and splitting off these different things and that's sort of I think and that's some of the current theories on dreaming

postulate that that's kind of what's happening when you're dreaming. You're not creating a new personality, but what your brain is saying is, all right, hey, we've got some downtime. We know what our regular waking life is, and we want to survive and adapt to that experience. But we're pretty comfortable with what's happening normally, but what we really need to do is sort of run some thought experiments and see if something novel happened during that experience, how would we react to it, right?

For sure. And so you have these dreams where there's always elements that are familiar to you, but then there's some elements that are sometimes are scary, sometimes they're strange, sometimes they seem normal, but they're just a little bit off. And that's your brain's way of saying, hey, you know, how would you react to this situation and how are we going to use that in our waking life? So, yeah, the psychology of dreaming has really come a long way, you know, where it's started out with,

some good stuff and some bad stuff, then all of it got thrown out. Everything started from the beginning. Then they threw a lot of that out, and then they went back to the beginning. So it's sort of been a patchwork throughout. So that's why I always, you know, some people, I hesitate to, even as a PhD student, right, to say, to jump on this bandwagon of saying, well, you know, if it's not scientific, then I'm not interested in it, right? because science is a process, right? It's a very, it has a very distinct description of obtaining knowledge.

But you can't run every, nothing, not everything can be run through that process and knowledge be gained that way. And like we're talking about, dreaming is one of them. It's very subjective. It's all self-report. You can't design an experiment to prove that anybody dreams. So you need to come into knowledge about it a different way. and that's usually through rationalization, philosophizing, having an idea of symbolism and these sorts of things.

Definitely, yeah. And that, again, I've got at least two things there. I'm going to try and say them first, so I don't forget them. The idea, whoa, just saying that, I think I forgot it. Rationalizing. Oh, the utility of dreams. It's like, you know, why bother? Why bother?

How do we know that a dream is important? and need some kind of interpretation. My theory is dreams self-select for importance. If you wake up from a dream and it has a lingering emotional impact, if you think about it throughout the day and it's very puzzling, there's something that draws you to it. There's probably some important, maybe not a message. Messages that seems like giving, again, giving the subconscious a personality that has

intent in a way that it really doesn't, but something meaningful exists within that. some concept, some problem you're trying to solve. And I think that's also my current theory of recurrent dreams is that it is the kind of the crystallized, iconic representation of a certain kind of problem that you haven't found a good answer for over time. And so that formula comes back to say, okay, we're back, we're back here dealing with this again. What if it happens this way? We return to exactly what you say. I think of it as thought experiments. We're giving ourselves license to imagine. It's like we daydream during the daytime. What would I've said in that conversation if I had, now that I've had time to think about it.

I think it's very similar to that, that kind of experience. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, some of the modern psychologists take that, oh, well, you know, it's just your brain getting rid of junk information at night. That's all it is. So dismissive, yeah. Yeah.

I think that, you know, when I look at it, so my dad died a year and a half ago, right? For probably a month or two after that, I dreamed of him every single night, every single night in different scenarios. Him and I, we worked together. And so we were at work, we were at home, we were in situations we had never been in, having conversations we never had, conversations we always had, just running through all these different things. And you go, why would that happen if it didn't mean anything, right? And like you said, you don't have to make it a big, mystical or you know strange

thing but all you have to say is if subjectively right if my mind is choosing focus of intention and focus on this that it's not important to sustain if it could be a person and so if everybody has the

same experience then Dreams are important. It's really rationally, it's that simple. But it has an impact on our lives, right? I think that a lot of people will have a dream. And it has the ability to, you know, wreck your day or puzzle you or, you know, whatever the case may be. So they have tangible impacts on our everyday life. for sure. And that's where I was going with the idea of the utility of it is that if it self-selects and you pay some attention to it, you'll probably figure out a solution that way you couldn't come to you. And I say this too. It's like once upon a time people used to say, eh, sleep on it. You know, in a sense of don't make a decision now, give it some time. I think, no, literally sleep on it. Give yourself that opportunity to process it unconsciously and come back to the problem tomorrow, not just getting distance from it, but really, sometimes there's There's a grand tradition. I got reading all these books. I love it. 16 currently available works of historical dream literature, as I say. There is a grand tradition of people finding solutions to problems in their dreams.

Now, also having dreams where they imagine they were a great poet and they wake up the next morning and try to write down what they remember. It was just crap. It was like, but it felt so good. I thought it was so good in my dream. But then other real solutions, wasn't Edison, it wasn't Tesla, it was someone else, but had some solution to a mechanical problem. come come to him into sleep for all that we take it for granted. These are not, you know, apocryphal stories. So the utility of it can literally be you solve a problem or it can be more of a personal

understanding of something that lets you ease up the need to spend mental bandwidth on something because you don't have to process it anymore. You've got it resolved. You can put it to rest. You can put some new plan into effect. That was continuation of the other. So second point. dreams of the dead also a grand tradition of that going back like to the to the greek and

you know greek playwrights uh you know homer's odyssey what is it the um patroclus comes to achilles as as a vision as a dream and motivates a choice for him did did it was it a vision sent from the gods i mean that's kind of how they conceived of it is you know supernatural forces um but there's also in in recent years this idea that most of the what it's seems from what I've read. Most of the dreams of the dead are not terrifying. They're comforting. There's because we love these people. And for a little while we get to imagine they're still with us. And that's where most dreams of the dead. They're not ghost dreams. They're not boogeyman dreams as much as I spent time with my dad again because that made me happy. And if you can experience

that in dreams, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to make it stop unless it's affecting your daily life and causing you stress in other ways. But why not just have a nice experience? We, we, we it to be with our deceased loved ones again in our dreams because why wouldn't we? You know, the idea that especially after immediately having been deceased, you don't want to like, oh, you can't believe he's gone. So you're just going to choose not to believe he's gone for a minute and draw some comfort from that. Yeah.

No, dream. Yeah, utility of dreams. That is a really interesting topic. I think my favorite one was, I can't remember which Apollo was, but it was one of the Apollo missions might have been 13, where they had a catastrophic. problem and was time sensitive i think that they had to fix this problem within an hour in order to you know survive and um the the captain of the mission was talking back to um earth he said all right let me take a nap and they're like what are you talking about we don't have you can't take a nap

he said no just give me 10 minutes and uh he took a nap he woke up and he had the solution to the problem and he fixed it right yeah um i've never had anything that critical but like i always tell people um was school, right? I've got a 4.0. And I always tell me, I've never taken a note, not a single note ever. What I do is when I'm reading a textbook, I'll read for 15 minutes, you know, get up, take a break, read for another 15 minutes, get up, take a break, 15 minutes. Then after three or four cycles of that, I'll take a 15 minute and a nap, right? I'll go to sleep, 15 minutes, wake up, start over again. And it's all there. Like, I just, I remember it. if I miss that, if I don't take the nap, I find myself going, all right, well, what was that I just

read? Or I'll read a sentence and go, I got to read that again. Because they're discovering that you have a limited well of mental energy, and especially when it comes to something that's very high level like this, you know, PhD studies where, you know, the more attention you're paying to something, the more focus, the more effort you're putting into it, chess masters, they'll find these guys will actually lose weight just playing a chess game. Burning calories. So much energy going on, right? That you can exhaust that well pretty quickly.

And the only way that you get it back is through sleeping. So I'm a big fan of naping. Yeah. And that goes back to the early philosophy of sleep. Like it seems like something that's not optional for people. And we've proven that in terms of like you develop psychosis. But that was the early theories as well, the idea of I think it goes, I don't know which post, you know,

Roman Empire think thinker it was that was talking about this, but that links to another idea too. But they used to conceive of sleep as what happened when the energy reserves of an organism were exhausted and then they had to recharge. And I mean, that's a fine conceptualization. That's kind of how we do. But that also, speaking of your idea, idea of the memory thing like that I've got a terrible memory terrible verbal processing better at

reading but sometimes I need a long time to read think read it again start writing go back and read it make sure I'm answering what I you know like a replying to to something a philosophical type of thing so there's a long process with that for me but that seems an an interesting way to let's say if we use the computer processing or computer function you get your RAM and you get your hard drive space. So sometimes that just piling more and more information into the RAM, it gets full and then it starts leaking out. And as you add new stuff, the other like a sponge, the other stuff falls off. But if you take a break, gives your brain a minute to move it over into storage. And now you get RAM again. So there's very much something conceptually there and something else I was going to say,

oh, diagnosing physical, so the utility of dreams, diagnosing physical problems from dreams. So we talked about the idea of serotonin coming from the gut, say. And if you have an indigestion, that can lead to physical discomfort, that can show up in your dreams, it can bring you out of deep sleep into that liminal zone and even wake you up entirely, various physical sensations in sleep. So they've had historical cases of people who dreamed, one of the famous ones was they were driving a carriage with horses and they're whipping the horses and driving the horses are panting and sweating,

and they're driving them uphill. And it turned out that guy had a heart condition. And they diagnosed the heart condition. related to the dream. They're like, well, let's look at what causes heavy sweating and panting. And yeah, you don't look so your power's not good. Let's check your heart. So there's a long tradition of that too.

Sometimes if you pay attention to your dreams, you'll get dream imagery from physical sensations, a mosquito bites you in your sleep, or internal diagnostics that might be relevant to how to tell the difference. I'm not sure yet. I'm not going to pretend to be magical in that

regard too. But if you had something that worries you, and you can lean into it and understand that seems to say something, maybe you go see a doctor and you get something checked out. Yeah, I think that most people, I think most people have had experiences with this, though, and then there's terminology for it, right, a fever dream. Yeah. You think that the sort of dreaming you have while you're having a fever, and it does seem like it's your brain's way of trying to say, oh, man, something's wrong. It's very surreal. Most of mine, when I have a fever dream, it's that I'm working. I never dream about my jobs normally.

but when I have a fever dream, I'm always just working as hard as I can at my job. You know, and I go, oh, my gosh, I can't believe it's this busy. It's never this busy. And I'm sweating and I'm running around and stuff. Yeah. Well, that's your body trying to fight off an infection. You know, your body temperature's going up. Your, everything's raised, you know.

So I think there is something to that. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I just have an endless fascination. Well, partly because I think honestly, you know, I developed, I discovered I had a, a kind of a knack for it in the symbolic association thing and then I'd let it go for years. This was back back in college.

Man, I can't brain today. I had a whole point to that sentence. I discovered I had an act for it. Oh, and I don't remember my dreams, like hardly at all. Like you, as much as you are a prolific dreamer with great recall, my memory's crap. And I think I sleep so deeply. So I have actually the opposite problem is once I fall asleep, I'm good. I'm sleeping like a log falling asleep.

is terrible for me without some kind of a, you had to take melatonin or whatnot. But that also means that when I get into sleep, I'm like deep. And I woke up like, what is it, what is it today as, I have a vague impression of sitting at a park bench and someone was showing me a container with pills in it or something.

And it was in the broader context of something else. And there was some discussion over whether to use it for some purpose or whether it was dangerous. I mean, I don't even know. But that's all I got. And there's nothing but that. Now, you can actually do something with that. But still, without much else context going on.

And I don't have a story to tell. So, you know, really, that's where I shine a little bit. If someone can give me a bit of a narrative, beginning to end, what happened? And then we go through it and we try and figure out, what is this trying to say about a particular experience you're having or a problem you're trying to solve, you know, the potential for heart disease, et cetera. Yeah, it's funny that we're almost diametrically opposed in how we experience that because, you know, even even our two sleep problems are different. I fall asleep easy, but I can't stay asleep.

Yeah. Remember my dreams very well. A lot of them are very detailed. Some of them, it's kind of like you were saying, just sort of a vague impression. But I cannot, I cannot like interpret any. of my dreams. So I know all the symbolism, but I almost wonder if it's one of those things where it's, it's so vivid and it's so real that I'm almost too close to it to try to make any sense out of how it symbolizes something. It seems to be a real thing within itself rather than a

symbol for something. So I look at it and I go, man, what does that mean? It's, it feels like it means something. And it seems very vivid, but I have no idea what it represents, you know. For sure. And, you know, as much as I, I'm undecided, ultimately, part of most of me wants dreams to be understandable to the person by some kind of process you can do yourself. That is, I would, you know, eventually someday we'll write a book out of, you know, a wizard's guide to dream interpretation. And here's how you do it yourself at home. You don't need me. Because I hope someday I won't be able to talk to everybody and and I don't want to I don't want to it also seems very hubrisic or whatever you know self-aggrandizing to say well you need me because I'm good at it it's it's not like

that it's but but the other half of me is like saying sometimes yeah we are too close and what you need is you just need someone to work with and it doesn't have to be me it can be anybody you could I you know so there might be a method in there and I'm going to lean into try and find that so how do people do this at home with a friend what what's a good way to just start talking it out and having them make suggestions and based on what they think. You know, and it may take, I honestly, it is a bit patting myself on the back. I think I do have some unique and eight talent. I've developed it.

I've leaned into it to try and become better at this. So maybe someone at home wouldn't have the same results or close to as good, but my mind might be better. But I'm hoping that something I can discover through this investigation and education, all this trying to build my own master's degree in dream interpretation self-taught so to speak that I will be able to give that back at some point and tell people how to but then some dreams maybe just can't really be seen because they're too close and you got to get someone with distance I use the analogy of like you need a mirror to see the back of your head or you can have a friend look and tell you if your haircut straight you just need some external thing to give you that

reference yeah yeah yes I'm really interested um And, you know, like I said, I'm a very creative person. So like I said, I've got, you know, music online. I play all the instruments. I write all the songs. I like to paint. I like to write. You know, I'm currently writing a philosophy book with my co-host,

but I've also written some works of fiction and things. So the creativity is there. And, you know, the thought process is there. But just trying to interpret them is, very difficult. Yeah. But, you know, you know that there's something there because, like I was talking about reading, you know, reading school, a schoolbook, right?

I'll read for a long time. Then I'll take a nap. And usually 15 minutes, tops. But as soon as I close my eyes, I'll be dreaming. And most of the time it doesn't have anything to do with what I was reading. It's something completely random, completely strange. But then when I wake up, I understand what I read. know, and I've had it happen with the same, like you were saying before, and I think there's

some research looking into it with the default mode network of your brain, which is the thing that works in the background, and the thing that gets affected by, like, taking psychedelic mushrooms or these sorts of things, where if you're not focusing on a problem, but the problem exists. You've focused on the problem. exist. Now you're focusing on something else. Your brain is working in the background to solve that

problem. And so lots of times that's how I've written songs is through that sort of thing. I'll go, okay, well, I've got this piece of something, this piece of something, but I can't figure out how to connect it. And then I'll go to sleep for the night, or I'll take a nap

or I'll start doing something else, and then I'll wake up and I'll just know. I didn't dream about it. I didn't dream about connecting the pieces. But also, I'll wake up and I'll just know how they connect. So, yeah, it's interesting. What's happening while you're sleeping? What's happening while you're dreaming?

How the pieces connect, you know. Sometimes all we can do is try to analogize it. I literally call that process percolating like you're making coffee. It's just got a sift through. And eventually you got, you know, hot dirty water with a buzz. Yeah. And it just, that happens all the time. Sometimes you just put something on a shelf.

It's okay. I'm going to do something else for a minute. But it's still there. The background process. We've come up with so many different forms and terminologies. A few years back we might say, well, that's just the subconscious. That's what you're talking about. But is it?

Or is it a dual consciousness to weigh a conscious attention and subconscious focus? And what is that focus? What keeps it moving while we're not looking at it, while we're not spinning the wheel on purpose? I don't know. We're ever going to know. There's some weird metaphysical questions that get into that is like, are we just the sum total of electrical impulses and biochemical reactions passing through our body? Or is that the evidence of something else intersecting with our physical body and the result is what we can see? Are we what we can see or are we the result of something we can see and something we can't see?

I mean, that is ultimately maybe unpredictable. Where that field of consciousness studies gets really weird because you hear this stuff and you'd think, oh, okay, man, this sounds like something a crackpot would say, but here it is in a scientific journal, right? Or stoner, dude, wait, I just had an idea, right? Even without side of like just the electrical signals that are inside your body, some of the theories now in consciousness are actually saying that your consciousness is generated by a quantum field that's outside of your body. So there's a quantum wave collapse of microtubules in your brain that originates from outside of your body. You're like, okay, that just sounds totally insane. But they're looking at ways of designing experiments to try to establish some support for these theories.

So, yeah, consciousness is just, it's the Wild West. Nobody knows what to think and everybody's trying to develop theories. but one thing that is sort of it's gaining acceptance throughout the field is that

sleeping and dreaming is a form of consciousness which is something that if you would have said 50 or 60 years ago people would have in the field would have laughed in your face they get that definition

dichotomy how can you be conscious when you're just laying there not moving not you know unable to react to anything that's happening around you

but the modern take on it is Well, no, if you're experiencing something, if the only thing that's different is like you said earlier, that the outside reality isn't there. But the subjective reality is just as real as anything else you've ever experienced. That's consciousness. That's a conscious experience. Yeah. And it gives us very unique abilities to make assumptions like thought experiment style.

So I've said this before with some folks too. The dream experience of seeing a car go over. a cliff and explode at the bottom is exactly the same as standing there and knowing there is a car at the bottom of that cliff that just fell over and has exploded. You don't have to see it. You can just know things in your dreams. And it's kind of like we say, okay, take it for granted that there's a trolley on the tracks and you have to pull a lever. Go. How did the trolley get there? Did I see the trolley coming? How did the people get there? You know, that kind of thing. Doesn't matter. Thought experiment. Go. Desert Island. We do that all the time. And I think that the, the, the

context of your dream can affect how real it seems. So like I was saying, I've never I've never lucid dreamed in being able to control a dream. But in one of those long dreams, when I realized I was in a dream was I was stacking boxes for the army, right? And in my dream, I remembered hearing somewhere that in a dream you can't read. And I don't even know, I don't even think that's true, but I heard it somewhere, right? And so also I looked at the box and I realized that all the words on the box were nonsense.

They weren't anything. And I go, oh, man, I'm dreaming. And as a result, when I woke up, I wasn't surprised that it had been a dream, even though it had lasted for so long. But I had another dream. And this was the first multi-day dream I ever had. I went to sleep in real life. And then when my dream started with me waking up in my same bed, I went about my day. and some weird

thing happened where me and my friend ended up robbing a bank in my dream and we decided that I would take the money home and hide it under my bed so I took the money home I hid it under my bed and then I went in my bed

and was just so scared that the police were going to show up and I fell asleep in my dream and then I woke up in real life in my bed and I jumped out of my bed and looked under to see if there was money under there I was so afraid that I was going to go to jail And there was no money under there.

And there was a period of time for about 30 or 40 seconds where I was very confused about what was going on before I realized that it was just a dream where entering the dream and exiting the dream happened so matched up so well that my brain was having an almost impossible time differentiating reality from waking. you know so in that context of of what happens in the dream and how you transition really has a big effect on how real you perceive the dream as being as of well very much so yeah and the dream within a dream phenomenon too is is very interesting as well like uh and that goes connects also to the idea of the theory that possibly lucid dreaming is simply the belief that you are aware you are dreaming but but in regards to the reading thing there is a historical record, so to speak, that many people read in dreams. They have the experience of looking at a sign and knowing what the words mean, but that upon inspection, you know, some people who've gone

closer to look at things in dreams, look at a page and the words are gibberish, not even real characters of the language they speak or strung together in any coherent way. Sometimes it's just a blur of what looks like text. So there's kind of a kind of a consistent phenomenon across time of us not reading per se in the dream state. And what that is, I don't know, but it's a real thing.

Yeah. And that's the feeling that I had doing it was because it seemed like in that dream, up until that point I had been reading the box is fine. But was I reading the words or was I just looking at the gibberish words and assigning them a meaning, you know, which is really, I mean, if you think about reading, again, philosophically, what are letters, what are symbols and things are going to make the meaning that it makes out of them anyways, right? So that's already a pretty abstract thing.

But I think in your dream, it just gets even more abstract, where you look at the symbols and you say, okay, I know what those symbols mean. but then if somehow in your dream it occurs to you that those symbols don't have meaning all of a sudden the illusion sort of disappears right yeah um and i read a i can't remember where the article was but it was in a major news outlet recently um there was a person talking about lucid dreaming and how it's not really all it's cracked up to be they said sure i can't fly and stuff but um my brain just can't fill in all the details they said you know in a dream when you don't lucid dream when you just dream regularly you wake up and you're you think that everything was as it is in real life, and that you just can't remember some of the details. But this person's experience of it was that the details actually weren't there. They said that everybody looked like they just had faces kind of pasted over them, or that the grass was all, you know, sort of like a video, you know, like a 90s video game, right,

where everything has like the two-dimensional textures, you know. It's like the details were actually missing in their dream when they were consciously able to perceive it. So yeah, that's an interesting sort of take on it too is, what is your brain doing to create this world? Because without the outside stimulus that we have in waking life, it's really up to your brain to invent all of that. And how good of a job can it do and how well can it convince you of it is kind of an

interesting thing. How well can it convince you of it versus how well can it just pull a magic? trick to convince you that you're experiencing it. It's kind of funny. Yeah, definitely. And well, there are two things there about the detail. Then another thing about the reading and language in general, there's very often the circumstance where things are relevant because they're missing or they're not relevant so they're missing. And it's teasing that apart as maybe takes part of the part of the art and the science, so to speak. But, but, but. But also there's a pretty regular occurrence of sudden scene changes.

We kind of encapsulate one type of idea or process of thoughts. And then suddenly we're somewhere else. And it's like not even a fade to black. It's just a sudden jump cut. And now we're somewhere else doing something else. And there's no need for the, there's no need for the continuity of. And now I got on a train and I traveled 300 miles east. And now I'm in a different location.

No, I'm in a different location. Done. So the not only does time get dilated or compressed, but space is irrelevant as well. And that's fantastic thing. It's all imaginary. It's all literally so you can think anything you want as fast as you want within limits. So that's that. Yeah, I like that part in the movie Inception where he's teaching the student a dream.

And he goes, dreams are funny because you always start right in the middle of them. And he goes, think. How did you get here? How did you arrive at this? She goes, well, I just came from, and she doesn't know, you know. And that's the way a lot of dreams work. You know, as a matter of fact, one of them that I, I try to write down the ones I think are real interesting.

One of them that I had written down, it is a lot of just that jump cutting, right? Like one, and like you said, there's no, you don't have to have any logical reason for why it happened or a sequence of events or anything. It's just, okay, well, I was doing this. Now I'm doing this, you know, and that's just the way it goes. For sure. And then just that, well, the last thing about that before I forget is the, because it is such a consistent phenomenon, the idea of not being able to visually display to ourselves printed words, I wonder if there's a, it feels to be like there's something

relevant there in terms of our thought process as such, like as it occurs. And this kind of goes to my broader theory of the idea that we think more in images, sensation, impressions, feelings, connections, rather than, and then we, we filter that

through our conscious attention, and we can kind of zoom in and, what is the, the, the CSI enhance, enhance,

and we can go down further, further and fill in more details. So we've got that element to it, but, but that we filter

the way we actually think through our conscious attention and turn that into language and symbols and stuff. I'm not conceptualizing

that, expressing it correctly, but the fact that a written language symbols are so ubiquitously missing from people's dreams says something about the way we actually think is not, we don't think in language in that way. We actually have to translate our thoughts into language and then put them into speech and get them out of, am I making sense? Are you, you have something to say about no, no, that actually just gave me a great idea for a science experiment. Yeah, yeah. And it's actually so good that I shouldn't mention it, but because somebody... It's okay to keep it quiet, but I won't impress you.

I would like to study a lot of these things, but... I'd rather just see the field advance than personal glory for myself, but I would be fascinating to see if they did a study, fMRI, right? So you put the electrodes on somebody's brain. You let them fall asleep, and then you examine what's going on in Broca's and Wernickey's area in the brain, which are the brain regions responsible for, for understanding language, right? What is it going on in those brain areas during a dream?

Are they even lit up, or is one or the other lit up, or, you know, how are they interacting in a way? And I wonder if that would shed any light on why written language is so difficult to, not difficult to comprehend, but difficult to perceive in a dream. Yeah, as a visual experience, as we read letters on text, yeah. feeding it, which is just kind of a mind-boggling thing. For sure. And then there must be something distinct about the area of processing written symbolic language characters and verbal processing, because we have very often distinct

impressions of, and then this person said these exact words, and I heard it. Now, why would we be able to say, hear a spoken language in a way that we cannot read a written? language in such a clear mental image. Very strange. It's not like we've never seen words on paper before. And we couldn't maybe conjure that image as in our sleep if it was necessary. Yeah, of all the wild things your brain does in a dream, how can it not recreate written language? Yeah.

Yeah. And it would be interesting to see maybe, okay, maybe we've got a handful of people they can. They have a very distinct impression of written characters, a stop sign. It was big and red and I saw the S and the T and the O and the P all brightly. Now then again, are we seeing that as a visual image of a picture, a symbol versus text like reading a book? I don't know. But if we could find those people who do, what then would be the difference?

Why can some people do it and other people can't? Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. I'd rather we get more into understanding how dreams work than say inventing AI to start imitating human thought. I don't know if that's a good idea. Right. I don't get political on the show, but I'm very worried about, you know, the Matrix happening, like in real life and Terminator. We've had some profits in the past that said, be very careful.

This is dangerous technology. Well, some of the interesting parts about that is like when you look at the early, the very early stages of AI training, the AI kind of acts like it's dreaming. It almost acts like a dream world. Yeah. Especially like if you play around. with AI Dungeon or Dolly, when they were, the image generator, when they were doing it at first, you go, man, some of this stuff is just like,

it's like dreaming or like tripping or something. There it is. It sort of resembles human thought, but it doesn't, there's no that logical consistency is missing, that the jump cuts are there, all that strange stuff is present. So yeah, this idea of neural networks of trying to get a machine to think like a human

And it's interesting that the early processes of it resemble dreaming. And I think that that goes back to that, that sort of primal or primitive way of processing information. Absolutely. And there's a bit of a human hubris in there as well from the position of what makes you think you know how humans think to program another entity or thing, machine to do what you don't really understand? And I don't know.

I'm not so sure. Yeah, like we just talked about, the history of psychology is just a patchwork of theories that has changed drastically over the past 20 years. And we're still not sure that what we have is correct. You know, neuroscience and biology, those are much more established sciences. But even neuroscience, it's very isolated. You know, they look at the functions of specific cells. specific neurons rather than holistically how the being operates. So, yeah, it is human hubris to look at the human machine.

I won't even say the human brain, the human machine, and say, yeah, we know how that works. Let's teach a machine how to do it. How to imitate us. We have no idea how we work. I want to give due respect to all those branches. And I think their research is entirely valid. And the conclusions they come up with in a limited brain is, you know, it's good science.

It doesn't always extrapolate well to explaining other things. So we're like, well, we're looking at this cog and we can measure the diameter of the wheels and how fast it turns and we've done an experiment. We have results. Yeah, but how does it fit in the machine? And what is it do? Why is it there turning like that and how does it influence the other stuff? We don't know yet.

I mean, we're getting there. I'm not, I'm not dogging on it. I'm not knowing everything yet. We've been a long road. The most recent analogy I saw made by a neuroscientist was that, right now it's like looking at the hands of a clock and saying that you know how the clock works yeah we're about that far away we can observe the human we can see what it does um and we can even observe some of the machinery but we don't really know exactly how it all integrates and um you know

and like you said science is i'm not a science denier obviously says the guy in a phd program right Science is important. And it's very important that the process is followed and that the process, you know, helps us gain knowledge in a way that is unparalleled to any other method. So it's very important. It is legitimate when done correctly. But it's very important to also recognize the limitations of science and to realize that it's not going to answer all of our questions. There's always going to be questions that are not.

not going to be answered by science and we're going to have to, you know, either come to rational situations, rational conclusions, or say, just accept the fact that we'll never know, you know? And I'm something that's very comfortable with not knowing things. I like the mystery. So that's why I'm a philosopher. I'm into that sort of thing. Because whereas some people say, well, I don't know what happens after I die and that

scares me. I go, no, I like it. I think it's kind of cool. Yeah, I'm not really worried about it. that I don't know what happened before the Big Bang or what happens after I die, you know. Yeah. I've got my own theories and we'll find out. I'm not in a rush to get there, but I'm not afraid that it's going to happen someday.

And that's another philosophical question. A lot of the folks who are like, what do you mean if you couldn't live for a thousand years, you wouldn't want to? And I'm like, I don't think so. I guess you just die of boredom eventually. There's only so many things you can experience and places you can go. The older we get to, the more categories of experience we start. identifying. I don't know if you ever played

massively multiplayer online role playing games, MMORPGs. So back in the day, I played EverQuest for five years back in 99 to 2004. I was an online gamer, man. I realized there were only three types of quests. And once you understood that, it kind of ruined the game.

Everything was, you know, once you take the story out of it, run over here and deliver a package. Go kill X number of things or go collect X number of things. So travel, kill, collect, and it's the same repetition. After that, I was just like, I don't need to play. this game anymore. It's the same. Everything, they just put new words and pictures on the

process. I think you live for a thousand years. You're going to get into that same thing where like, you know, you're just bored, so bored. And then people get into extreme things and hurting others and I don't know. Yeah, I just wrote a paper. I just finished it yesterday, a research paper on gerontology, which is, you know, the study of aged people. Wizards. And what's happening in that field is, you know, they're identifying that really what makes people old. There's a lot of interesting studies coming out, right? They just did one on metabolism,

and they found that your metabolism doesn't slow down until you reach 60. So technically, you know, somebody could stay in the same amount of shape from 20 to 60 years old, or that your mental faculties. You're, you know, some of your sort of plastic working knowledge decreases a little bit, but your crystalline knowledge, your ability to retain facts and things, actually increases throughout your life. And so looking at these things

and you're saying, well, you know, when you put all these pieces together, it doesn't seem like people should be as old as they are. What's causing this? What they've sort of stumbled upon is this idea of accumulation, which is just saying that the experiences of life and the things, whether it's physical, emotional, psychological, whatever the case may be,

as you go through life, you just start to collect baggage, right? And so regardless of the fact that your body and your mind and these sorts of things can, you know, technically keep up throughout life, the things that you experience and the ways that those things affect you and the way they integrate with all of your prior experiences, coupled with the people that you know dying, right? You gradually become more and more alone. home, right? All of these things just sort of add up and they accumulate.

And they think that that's really what causes old age. It's not one particular physical thing or psychological thing. It's just sort of everything, you know, going on and on. And if you think about it that way, you go, yeah, you get to that age. You get to be 80 or 90 and you say, you know, what are, what am I doing here? You know, what, what's coming? I'm tired. You know, get it over with. It's hard. Yeah, it's hard to imagine at my age that happening, right? Because even though, you know, I'm 34.

So it's like I still feel pretty childish in the sense that everything is interesting to me. Everything is interesting. Everything's new. I always like studying new stuff and meeting new people and doing these things. Yeah. But I'm getting up there, right? At some point, it's going to be, oh, well, you know, it's just it's all adding up. you know i think it's probably you're going to find a more consistent personality

trade across time you'll probably a very be a very inquisitive 80 year old at some point of like you know the the things you think about and find fascinating will probably change and you won't think of as many all at once but that's i i i get the impression if i understand it correctly that certain traits like being naturally curious it's not it's almost not something you can develop in someone and it's kind of a stable personality trait that exists over the lifetime. So I don't, you know, just in your case, I'll probably still be a disagreeable, cranky, but friendly, you know, lovable asshole. You'll probably be a, you know, people will go, he's got such youthful energy.

He's so curious about things. I bet that'll still say that about you. Well, speaking of time and the duration of things, we're having so much fun talking. We forgot we were going to do a dream and we're already an hour in. You have time to, we'll fit it in, we'll do the thing? Yeah, okay. All right. Good deal.

Let me just rank this down here. We got one. 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 Dreamscapes episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks, highlighting the psychological principles which inform

our dream experience and much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms, and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the Wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature, available on Amazon, featuring the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. How about that? 109. Okay, so as per my...

It's just been a lot of fun talking about it, you know? Oh, yeah. You know, and I would, if I were a better, if I were more confident in my interview skills, I might actually do that and just talk to people, but kind of the dream is, it's the draw of the show. It's the unique thing that I do. It's the mystery to solve together. I get to play, you know, Sherlock Holmes.

Dr. House-ish, which is great. I love it when I've discovered that, oh, God, it's just a modern Sherlock Holmes in the medical setting. That's great. Wow, lost my train of thought. Anyway, I love doing this. So I wouldn't want to give it up for just an interview show, like, you know, but then again, I always have to be careful of not eating up people's time too much.

We're like, you know, we've got an hour. We're going to get around with the dream thing or not. So, yeah. Well, as per my usual process, I'm going to shut. up and listen. Our friend's going to tell us the dream beginning the end, whatever you remember, or write it out. We'll go through it again, a bit of a deep dive, and then put together something that makes sense for you. So I'm ready when you are. Okay. All right. So the particular dream I'll tell you today, I had to add a hard time narrowing it down. Like I said, I remember so many of them.

But this specific one is one of two dreams that is reoccurring for me. So I haven't kept track of how many times I've had it, but I'd say it's upward of a dozen. Usually it'll happen every six months, every year, somewhere in that span. Six to 12 months, it'll pop up.

And it goes something like this. I usually start, I'm in like a Model T or something, like an old car that doesn't have a top. So, you know, it's open to the elements. and I'm on like a cobblestone road and the road is just there's no buildings around it's just in an open field

and it's a really nice day out I don't have any sense of what the temperature is but the sky is blue there's very few clouds but the ones that are there white and puffy the sun's shining the grass is nice and green and I'm pulling up to a low stone wall.

It's very well maintained. And there's a big ornate wrought iron gate in the wall. And the gate's open. So I drive the car through. And as I'm driving on this cobblestone road, there's just headstones, as far as the eye can see, in every direction. And they're all uniform.

Just kind of a normal, you know, rounded on top, headstone. Nice, even rows. It reminds you of looking at like Arlington Cemetery or something, except instead of the crosses, it's just regular gravestones. And it's just all over. The terrain, like I said, is just these big rolling hills. And so as I'm driving, I can see,

rolling hill upon rolling hill upon rolling hill of these headstones and i usually drive on this you know really well-maintained cobblestone road for about ten minutes or so and then i on my left-hand side um about a hundred feet away there's a mansion and it's pretty nondescript um it's only two stories tall and it appears to be a manchew. be made out of stone, just kind of a white building. It's got some columns and things. And the only variation

to this dream is that sometimes the front door to the mansion is open and sometimes it's closed. But regardless, I never go inside. What happens instead is to the right of the mansion,

there's a nine-story tall stone tower. And the tower is also very on to script. It's just a stone thing. And I get out of the car and I go into the tower and the tower is completely bare on the inside. It's just these rough

wooden rafters with stone structure. And I climb up the stairs all the way to the top story of the tower and I look out the window. And when I look out the window from above,

the mansion is no longer there. but I can see farther than I ever could, and it's still just graves as far as the eye can see. And after I get done looking out the window, I turn back into the stone tower, and suddenly I find the inside of the stone tower fascinating. Like, it's very interesting, right? But nothing has changed. All it is is just, you know, these big square blocks stacked on top of each other, and these rough-hewn wood rafters.

But I get up close to them, and I'm looking at the cracks in the stone, and I'm looking at the splinters on the wood and going, oh, wow, this is really interesting. This is really neat. And then I wake up. Okay. Here we go.

What we got here? 114.53. All right. Lots of great detail there. So the beginning of the dream, up to the approach to the mansion or it is the entire sequence except for sometimes the doors open or closed. I guess what I'm trying to ask is, is this a rough sketch of an aggregate of all, say, 12 instances

of the dream? Here's what usually happens. Or where there's sometimes discrete changes along the way. The headstones are a different color. There's the path down the road takes five minutes instead of 10 minutes. Is it always kind of the same pattern? this precise thing? Yes, it's always the same.

And that's what's interesting about it is that telling you it, I can visualize it perfectly. It's hard to explain, like, I always start out at the same spot. So I'm in the car and I'm in front of the gate. But like the street doesn't approach the gate head on. It approaches at an angle. So I'm sort of driving along the stone wall and then I turn into the game.

So really, all the way from beginning to end, it must be very, very close to the same every time because I can visualize all of it. So vividly. It's a bit of a new experience for me. It is and it isn't. Debt with many recurring dreams. But there's,

a surprising and unique, I think, uniformity, similarity to this, this, this, this, this. It is like literally the same sequence of events. That has happened before. I talked to one guy who's, you know, there's very few deviations. It's always the same pattern. So there's something about the pattern itself that seems relevant more than, more than, well, in addition to the concept. Sometimes you get a concept going and then you play with the details a little bit. You move things around within an idea to try and get a different look at it.

But this is trying to understand a recurrent pattern that you've noticed somewhere in you, in your behavior, in your environment. There's something going on there. Yeah, and that's what's interesting is because I made mention of the temperature because I live in Western New York, right? So we're about to get six to ten inches of snow. A little chilly, yeah. So, but during the summer it's 90 degrees. So I'm used to a day like the day in the dream where the sun is shining and the sky is blue and the clouds are puffy and the grass is green, that doesn't really tell me anything about what time of year it is. Because we have days like that in summer where it's 95 degrees, but we have days like that in February, what we did a couple days ago where it's 26.

So the fact that I don't have any sense of temperature sort of throws me off in the dream because I don't know how to perceive this day. But, you know, the sun is always over the same hill. You know, the gate's always in the same spot. It always looks the same. To my knowledge, everything remains the same except for the door to the mansion. And for the first, I'd say half a dozen times in the dream, the door was always closed. Oh, so the opening is now kind of a recent change. Yeah.

So in the last, you know, like I said, if I've had the dream 12 times, which I'm guessing is about right, it's probably, you know, 12 to 15 times. The first six times the door was always closed. And then since then, it's been sort of erratic, whether it's open or closed. Okay. Well, that's what we're going to do a little bit here is start going through this a bit. deep dive deep dive section so you're in some kind of an older car i mean the idea of a model t comes along does it feel i mean what am i trying to say you have put yourself in a vehicle that is kind of iconic of the 1920s 10s early yeah yeah it's i say model t because you know it's

i say model t because you know it's black and so back in the day they didn't make any other colors of cars. It's just this black, open-topped vehicle. Another thing that strikes me as strange about is that it doesn't make any noise. There's no noise in the dream. There's no sound. So as I'm driving through, everything is in this complete silence. And there's no people in the dream. So as a result, the entire thing is quiet and there's no perception of temperature. And those two things are really the two elements that stick out to me as being strange because everything else is so vivid. Okay. And yeah, actually, that is because it is so prominent enough to stand out to you to say, that was very strange and I sure noticed it.

I would say there's probably something in there in the realm of absent sensory experience, lack of input. something there. I'm not, I'm not, a lot of what I'm doing is throwing, throwing, you know, water and coffee and then we're going to, we're going to let these things percolate, but there's something in there about why you've got visual, you've got visual stuff going on. And that's, it's a very visual dream in, in all the elements. You're not hearing the car. You know, it's complete silence. And though the sun is shining, you're not feeling the warmth. So there's irrelevant to the missing elements. This is something you have to see in. can't be told maybe in a way, like you're not getting, that's, that's a stretch maybe,

but, but that, that's where I'm going with this kind of stuff of like, there's something about, you can't just hear about this. There's something about the visual medium that, or shutting out auditory input that's necessary to the process. So I'm in there. I don't want to say too much. That's, yeah, the more I start. Yeah, an interesting tidbit about me is that I actually, I don't have any sense of smell. Oh. You're not going to have any smell dreams, yeah. No. As a matter of fact, the only time I could smell was when I got COVID.

And obviously it wasn't a real smell, but I was perceiving the smell of coffee brewing all the time for about six days and then it went away. Yeah, I could smell up until the point I was about a teenager and then it went away completely. But yeah, the idea of having absent sense is not all that foreign. to me, but hearing is one that I do have. Yeah. So it could be analogous to something. Imagine other senses we're missing. It doesn't seem like you didn't have the experience of feeling numb.

There's a different quality to that. But there's something about selectively choosing the frame through which to view something. I mean, view is a metaphorical sense of like sometimes you close your eyes so you can hear better. And sometimes you, you know, put on, say, noise dampening headphones or go to a quiet place so you can study and focus. There's something about maybe that kind of idea going on there where there's the this absence is relevant to so. That's just the impression I get.

So very strange thing you had going on with the COVID deals. Like a lot of people lost their sense of smell while they had COVID and you got it back temporarily. What is that connection with the nose and how it hits the brain? Yeah. It's strange. Yeah. Yeah, the dream.

I yeah, I always, the feeling that I have in the dream is always very happy and peaceful. Okay. Which struck me as strange the first couple times I had it because, you know, I think that when I woke up the first couple times I had it, my instinct was to say, well, I'm driving to this graveyard. Like, it should be a somber or sort of depressing or even creepy experience. But in the dream, it's always very peaceful and I always am very, very, cap you're up you're kind of tempted

yeah a lot of driving and everything in the dream is very well maintained you know all the stones are of roughly proportional size

you know the mortar's all intact the right of wrought iron gates nice the cobblestone street is nice the mansion and the stone tower are built very well even though they're very plain the grass is cut

you know the tombstones are uniform. So everything is very nice. But, yeah, it's just strange. It seems like, you know, I remember feeling a little disconcerted the first couple times I woke up from it thinking, well, who has a happier or nice dream about a graveyard? Yeah, a ginormous graveyard stretching into the distance. If I were to get a mental image of, try to see it through your eyes, I don't know why.

to me, this is just what my brain did as soon as you started describing it. You're driving in my head, this is what I see. The sun's on your right. You're driving along the wall on your left and you get to the gate and go in? Is that actually? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

I'm on the road. Complete guess. The sun's to the right. Gate. So sun's to the right and the wall and the gate are to the right initially. That's where I start the dream. But immediately I drive through the gate and then the wall is on the left, the remainder of the dream. Gotcha.

So you're actually turning towards the sun? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the road goes at an angle to the wall. And so I start outside the wall and the gate. I drive through immediately. That's the first thing that happens in the dream. And then as I'm driving, the sun stays on my right.

The wall goes farther and farther behind until by the time I get to the mansion and the stone tower, the wall isn't even in sight anymore. Okay. So we've definitely got a representation. of boundary there. There is the world outside this area and then there is entering through the gate where this other area exists. I don't want to give it any more characterization than that,

but it's definitely crossing a threshold into entering a place versus I was on a lonely country road and there's a graveyard over there. You know, it's a walled area. There's an encapsulated idea in this place. place. It's also very, as you were saying, it's happy and peaceful. So the mood in the dreams, and I always forget to about it. How did you feel? What did you think about that? I got to get better at that too. Give me, give me another hundred dreams. But I'm glad people volunteer it too,

because it could have been a very different experience of like you were dreading going in there. So there's something almost reverential about, about this. It's not, it's not a celebration. But it's like it's not sad. What am I trying to say? Of course, it's happy. It's peaceful. Yeah, well, and then another interesting part about this is that, so the first time I had this dream, you know, it would have to have been in my early 20s. And at that point in my life, nobody really close to me had died yet.

All my grandparents lived into their late 90s. And so I hadn't really known anybody that had died yet. and yet I was in this graveyard. So that seemed kind of strange to me, too, at the time. Since that time, all my grandparents have died and my dad, as well as some other people that I've been close to, but that's never changed the character of the dream, how I feel in it. It's always calm, it's always peaceful.

Yeah. And there's no specific graves that stick out. I'm not traveling to anybody's grave. I'm not seeing any writing on any graves. There's just a sea of headstones as far. as you can see. Yeah, that's one thing I was going to mention is, and that's kind of where I was going with it too,

is like, this wasn't a small cemetery with your relatives' graves, and it was dark, and it was creepy, and you were sad. This is a different conception of death. And I don't even know that it's death.

In a sense, it's like, we, what is it? More people are dead, now than are currently alive throughout history. Something like that's like we are living in a world where most of the people who ever lived are dead.

And we're kind of traveling through a world they left behind. I think there's something in there that you've some way of conceptualizing your something. Something tells me it's like, what am I getting? I do feel, I feel like that's relevant because there is something about it that seems, ancient kind of you know i i think that it's hard to put my finger on it but i think that in the dream especially at the end when i'm in the top of the tower overlooking everything i think there's there's something in my mind that says it took a long time for this many people to fill this graveyard you know this wasn't something

that sprung up overnight or over decades or even centuries it seems like whatever is here has been here for a very long time and I think that you know that the stone tower kind of feels the same way the construction of it is this sort of thing that

it's very sturdy it's very rough and it seems very old you know there's no frills to it there's no facade to it it's just this sort of monolithic old thing

yeah yeah definitely Definitely. That's kind of where I was going with it, too, the idea of, and the idea that it takes you a long, you got to go a long way. It takes 10 minutes driving to get through rolling hills to get where you're going. So there's a, I'm going to worry at this bone a little bit. It's got a representation. That's why I said it's a, not respectful. What did I say? But reverential. It's like you're, you're imagining the, the beauty in a way that all these people have lived and that you are, alive too, but not just that. The there's something like reverential like a privilege. It's a privilege to have to be passing through where all these other people were. That's not right. Because this is not an abandoned city. It's it's past evidence that they existed.

And it's, it's a, it's a thing of beauty. That's why I go with that reverential theme. It is, it's not meant to be scary, creepy, disgusting. It's not it's not the the horror of the body falling apart in death. It's, and that's why celebration doesn't seem like the right word, but reverence for. Yeah, I think reverential is a very good term. And I almost feel like that's, that's part of the reason that the audio is missing, right? Because I feel like if I could hear the, the wooden wheels of the car on the cobblestone or birds singing or something else, I feel like that would take away from

the actual experience of the dream a little bit. I feel like that that absence of sound and just being able to look, you know, around myself as I'm driving. Because I'm not really driving the car, right? I'm not paying any attention to driving the car. The car is just moving. And I'm not operating the wheel or anything.

I'm looking around at the sun, at the hills, at the gravestones, at the wall, you know. Yeah, there is something, it's almost this intense, just this hyper being in the moment. You know, I'm very in the moment as I'm traveling through this, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why I'm, I got a couple of ideas that I think the theme might be leading to, but I want to, it's always hard to, well, it's variably difficult in different circumstances and different mental capacities for me and different people, but to not. lead you somewhere, but to hold on loosely onto an idea that I think that might be where we're going. And so I don't want to start saying too much about that because then I can color the whole rest of the perceptions. But if we get there, I wouldn't be surprised. So we may let this segment. So we have kind of a few distinct segments, even though they all blend together. There's the approach and the crossing of the boundary. There's the necessity of passing through the evidence of people,

that came before you in in a way that feels reverential and bright and sunny and orderly and uniform in that sense like a there's a commonality to all these expressions of like everyone was given the same respect in death and the person who buried them cared to put them in a nice neat line this that's why that's why I keep getting that that idea of reverential uh uh reverence um and it's not flat. It's rolling, it's rolling hills. So it kind of works with,

like there's a natural flow to the landscape in a way that makes it seem even more right in a sense. Yeah. Rolling hills feel right for the circumstance. Yeah. And, you know,

it's when I was mentioning how everything seems very, um, kind of perfect or picturesque, the hills are much the same because it almost seems like all of the hills, the size, the shape, the height are all pretty uniform as well. There's no hills that are towering above other ones or there's no hilltops that aren't perfectly round.

You know, they're just slightly offset. So you have one, then you have another, and then you see one in the back, but they're all roughly, roughly the same size and shape and height. And it just seems very, very nice. I don't know. Definitely. Yeah. And there's there's some of that feeling too where you go and you mentioned what like Arlington, the idea that it is a beautiful visual display, even though you're looking at where people died. You also have that respect for what they did in life that led them to have a place of honor in that way. And this seems this seems something like a place of honor because we've got two, we've got everything is well maintained, cared for. You know, which is very much the opposite of falling apart, actively falling apart. Even the things that are old are so sturdy, they're still there.

Even if they're showing signs of weather and age, they're still standing. And there's something about the inherent value of something that's just crafted well to endure. And that goes for physical objects and I think metaphorically for ideas that are worth exploring. something solid and valid about an idea that it indoors over time may or may not be where we're heading in that in that metaphysical sense but did anything happen well did you have any sense of yourself what you were wearing any any movements or anything you're doing you're looking around you're kind of seeing things and a lot of people don't it's like first person shooter you're looking out of your own eyes you don't really see your feet that kind of thing any any sense of

Yeah, no, not really. I can't think of, I think that if I knew what I was wearing, it would help me clue me into the temperature a little bit. Sure. And I think that's part of the thing that drives me crazy is that, you know, I never look down to see what I'm wearing, so I don't know what the temperature is like outside. And like I said, the car seems to be driving itself so that I have the ability to look around and focus on other things while we're going. The only motion I ever make is at some point while we're driving, I reach forward. and I pull a lever back. But it doesn't seem to have any effect on anything that happens in the dream.

So at some point there's a lever on the side of the car that I pull back. You know, nothing happens. There's no real, you know, it's not something that I've ever paid much attention to in the past, but I know that it happens. And that element of the dream recurs as well. Like at some point, you pull the lever. Yeah. And the dream goes on.

That one definitely. that's definitely a part of the dream that seems more vague that contrasts me with all the other vivid elements of it. You know, where it goes, I, you know, I go, yeah, I know I pull a lever and, you know, I'm reaching out like this, but I don't know what color of my sleeve is or if I'm wearing sleeves or, you know, what the lever looks like or anything. I just know that I reach out and pull a lever. That's why I follow these things in my intuitive sense, too, is I didn't know. you're going to tell me you had of experience of pulling a lever. It's asked, do you have a sense of yourself, anything you were wearing, that kind of thing? And that brought that out as I, and it's interesting that it doesn't seem to have any precipitating cause. Nothing occurs which you go,

oh, it is lever time. And nor does it seem to have any kind of effect. That's interesting, too. No cause or effect from, but yet you're taking an action. So you're taking an action that has, no reason for it and accomplishes nothing. And you're not even really driving. You're kind of being shown. You're being shown something. You're showing yourself something. And in a sense,

letting yourself also know that in some ways, you're just long for the ride. You're not even making any of this happen. There's something in there. It's one of those things we just kind of say it. And then we don't have to have an answer right away, but it might add up to something later. Yeah.

Unless you have to your question. Yeah, I know that I The only other detail I have about the lever Is that I know I'm pulling it as I'm going down the side of the hill So it's always I come up I'm cresting a hill as I'm going down I reach out I pull the lever And then I just continue driving It's usually

I'd say it's about halfway through the drive The wall is out of sight to the left But the mansion and the tower have not yet come into view that's good details too yeah about about what you see and the so there's a sequence of events you've reached a point where the bound you've gone so far beyond you can no longer see the boundary anymore you're well into this thing whatever it is but you haven't reached the center yet you're still on the journey towards what it is you're trying to reach and there's some some expression of feeling out feeling like you need to take action like there's something you're something

you need to do to justify yourself being there or that's not that's not the right word maybe it is maybe it is not but it's not justifying your presence it's actively contributing whether it seems like going through the motions or not yeah the i think the general feeling around around it is that um you know okay the car is driving itself i'm looking around at at the graves and at the hills and at the sun and the clouds and stuff i'm having a good time and then it it just suddenly occurs to me It's not urgent, but also I go, oh, I should pull that lever. And I reach out and I pull it. And that's it.

Yeah, there's kind of an absent mind of realization. It feels like it's something that I should have known or should have remembered to do. And I forgot I was distracted by the scenery. And then all of a sudden it occurs to me that, oh, I should pull that lever. And it's almost immediately after you pull the lever that you, the mansion comes into view? Yeah, I think it would be shortly thereafter. Like I said, I'm usually going downhill when I do that. And then, you know, I never see the mansion and tower from far off.

When I see them is when I look to the left and the mansion is immediately to my left. So I don't see it coming up. I don't see it approaching. I'm driving and looking, and then when I look to my left, it's there. Mansion is suddenly. Ooh, Roggy. Yeah, it's suddenly there. And then, again, as far as more details go, it's really, it has a flat roof.

Like, there's no pitch to any of the roof. It has, you know, two stories, and there's regularly placed windows along it. But the windows are very tall, but there are very tall, but there's. so narrow that I can't see inside, anything inside. And the door is the same color as the rest of the mansion. It's just this white. And sometimes it's open, sometimes it's not. It looks as if, you know, around the windows,

the window sills, the window ledges and those sorts of things, as if there might have been some sort of ornate carving or façade to them in the past. but I'm either too far away or they've become too weathered that I can't make anything out. And the thing that's interesting about the tower is that I can't see the door of the tower from the car. And so I never remember how I get inside. I see the tower. I get out of the car, I start walking towards it. And then the next thing I know I'm on the ground floor of the tower and I'm walking up the stairs.

Okay. So about, so there's something about the destination, may be the wrong word, that comes upon you suddenly. There is something in there. The idea of, it isn't like you were running down this road and you suddenly caught side of the man mansion in the distance and thank God my, I'm tired. I want to get there already. And so there's a sense of relief or anything. It's more like it surprises you that it's suddenly you've gone far enough, you've seen enough, you've put enough, you've gone enough distance. There's, there's a variety of ways of looking at this in terms of made enough progress, advanced towards something. There's an approach metaphor in there. You've got to reach,

you got to get somewhere. And then the somewhere, it may, You know, I don't think anywhere in this dream, go ahead. I'll help you out again with some more of my feelings in it. Yeah, yeah. So usually when I look to the left and I see the mansion of the tower, they're there suddenly, but I'm not surprised. So I go, okay, there they are. I get out.

And my feeling is always that I'm going to go into the tower. And then after I'm done in the tower, I'm going to go into the mansion. but I never make it that far. I always wake up first. So I go, okay, I'm going to check out this tower first, and then I'm going to go in the mansion, and then I'm going to continue on my trip. The road continues to go on, you know, well past the mansion.

It just continues on indefinitely as far as I can tell. And so in the dream, it feels like I'm just making a quick stop, right? I go, oh, hey, hey, here's some buildings. Here's some stuff that is new. I'm going to get out. I'm going to check out this tower. I'm going to check out this mansion. I'm going to get back in the car and I'm going to keep driving.

But I just never, I never make it that far. So it's not actually say like the dead center destination. It's more of a happenstance. Yeah. I always tell myself is that, you know, oh man, six months or a year from now when I have the dream, I'm just going to be screaming to myself in the dream to check out the mansion. Go in the door.

It's open. To try to go in there first. But I never can. I never remember. For sure. That was going to be a question. I had to does the road continue on or it was this like ends in a cul-de-sac or something this is this is the place there's nowhere else to go apparently there's more to see your journey is not over technically or and that's also the feeling you're getting from this is a stop along the roadside I'm going to check this out because it's interesting did you have that feeling of you definitely had the feeling of wanting to see what was inside the tower and also there was a plan to okay when the tower is done I'll go look in the house or the mansion yeah Yeah, in my waking life, I like to do urban exploring, right?

I like to find abandoned places and look through them. So it kind of felt the same in the dream. I pulled up, I go, well, there's obviously nobody around. And these two buildings are kind of interesting. And they're almost kind of very opposite from each other. One's very tall and thin. And the other one's kind of short and, you know, expansive. And yeah, I just want to, I just kind of want to look around.

and see, you know, what are they doing way out here in the middle of a graveyard and what's inside? Yeah, for sure. It's interesting that you didn't choose to go into the mansion first. It was even, it was closer. It was immediately to the left and the tower is actually further away. The mansion's on the left and the tower's on the right. So I drive past the mansion to, I parked the car in the road.

And the mansion and the mansion in the tower are about 100 feet, I'd say off. the road. So I parked the car on the road and then I walk to the tower. And as I'm walking to the tower, I think, yeah, I'm going to check out that mansion next. Yeah. So you were definitely drawn to that first. Then there's, okay, so this is where I pull up a couple of associations that you tell me if they, they seem right. There's mansion is wealth, fame, fortune, etc. Towers are more associated with ascending, high places, learning, spiritual matters in some ways. Now, this isn't like Dreambook style of, but this is broad human associations. I mean, if we look at a, well, a mansion, what does it make you think?

I mean, it's a mansion. So it's a place where wealthy people live, so it might represent riches or material gain in a way that a tower is more associated with, you know, as I said, climbing, climbing the heights, academia, specifically. When you think about it, those symbolic references in that kind of way, does anything come to mind about your choices in regarding what interesting. you most or why you would choose one first and then the other? Yeah, yeah.

You know, I've always been somebody, you know, obviously interested in education. And not just formal education. I'm working on my PhD, but really, the only reason I'm working on my PhD is because I was in the Army. And so it's very cheap. I don't have any student loans or anything. I just, I basically go to school for fun. I've got a job that pays me much more than anything with a PhD in psychology would pay.

me. So I'm probably not going to get a job as a result of it. It's just very interesting to me, so I keep going. And I've always been that way throughout life, just very interested in learning and stuff. And money has never really been very important to me. My podcast has gotten big enough where I have opportunities to monetize it. I don't, so I don't run any commercials.

I don't sell any products or anything. Yeah, I don't really have any social media follow. You know, I don't, I don't really, same thing with my music, I don't really advertise or go after monetizing things. I more, I more do things for the experience of doing them. And then I share them with the world if people want to partake in them. But I've never really, I never really marketed anything. So, yeah, that would kind of be the association that I'd have with the two concepts of, sort of wealth versus achievement maybe.

I do consider myself very achievement driven. I like to take on projects. And, you know, I like to get involved in a wide variety of things and kind of master concepts and then move on to new things. But usually there isn't a monetary element to them. Fair enough. Yeah. And that's kind of what I was thinking back in the beginning.

seem like we were talking about naturally curious type of guy. And that doesn't mean you wouldn't have a focus on, you know, meeting life's necessities of, you know, having a place to live and food on the table. And, you know, money's not unimportant. But it doesn't seem to be, you're not chasing fame and fortune for their own sake. If those things happen incidentally, fine. That might be one kind of way to think of how the, why the mansion kind of, in a way, suddenly.

pair. It's like, oh, there it is, but it wasn't very interesting. It's like, that's not, that's not the place I think is most worth exploring first. Like it's, you, you didn't, there was no absence of mansion. The mansion's there and it's there. It's actually easier to reach, perhaps than the tower. You have to go further to get to the tower. You got to climb to the top of the tower. It's not, it's, it's more difficulty involved in the tower. But at least you know, the, the, the concept of the mansion is kind of in place. And it's, um, It also has the impression of being very old and once very, I don't know if you said ornate or anything, but that it is in a bit, that it had a past glory to it that is now a little faded, but it's still sturdy. It doesn't look like it's falling apart.

No. Yeah. I don't think I want to jump on any further down down that idea either. Just those ideas like it's a, it's not a place without value. It's not a place you pass up because. it's so falling apart you think it's dangerous or it looks you know like those um big old houses and scary movies like i'm not going in there no but that doesn't look like yeah so i want to go this actually is maybe a nice place you wouldn't mind going into it it has a history to it as a past

glory it's still sturdy um but i'll stop that you were going to say something yeah no it just um it has the the feeling looking at it um that it's just nice enough but it's also just worn enough that it's sort of uncertain whether anybody has been living there or keeping it up. You know, just go either way. Maybe somebody lives there and it's just a very old place. Or maybe it's been abandoned, but recently, it's very hard to tell by looking at it if it's been, if it is currently inhabited or not. Yeah, I think it is conceptually, impersonal in the same way driving through the graveyard is. There's something to that idea.

There's a consistency of that kind of experience through the dream. It's definitely in a relative state of disrepair compared to the rest of it, like the manicured lawn and the headstones. Like that all has a bit more. Yeah. Yeah. That has a bit more value, importance to it in a way. Like that seems right.

and this place, I don't know that it doesn't seem wrong necessarily, but it seems right that it is the way it is, which is slightly tarnished. What I think of is things that were once considered to be very valuable, and now, you know, it's not worthless, but it's just not what it was or doesn't.

It's something maybe that other people would value, but when you look at it, it's not as pretty. There's something that, visual representation of value in terms of what's important going on in the way you choose to or have chosen or have showed yourself, things are constructed. Then again, we've got the tower and the tower is in a similar state of, or how would you compare the, you know, but yeah.

So, go ahead. The tower, the way I described the tower is, the tower is not fancy, but I don't think that it ever was. And so as a result, it's almost kind of hard to tell if it's worn or not. Because if you imagine like a castle turret,

you know, that's kind of what it looks like. It's just this stone structure, just stone on top of stone. And when you walk inside, there's just these big wooden rafters that are holding up the ceiling. but it's almost kind of ageless. You know, it's hard.

You can't tell by looking at it from the outside or the inside, whether it was built, you know, 10 days ago or 10,000 years ago. It's just, you know, it is what it is. It's this sort of plain, sturdily built structure. But, you know, it's impossible to tell whether it's worn like the mansion is or not. Yeah, it's got kind of a timeless, timeless, ageless quality to it. It seems very old, but no way to tell how old because it was so well done. It's kind of an expression of an inherent value in there that's a little different than the mansion, which lost some of its value from losing a bit of its exterior luster or something going on in that representation.

So without dwelling too much, I wanted to get a sense of those things. And there was no actual experience of how you get inside the tower. No door found below. Right. When I get out of the car and I'm approaching the tower, I don't remember ever seeing a door on the first level. And there is sort of, that's like the only real jump cut in the dream I can think of is I'm walking towards the tower and I glance over at the mansion and then when I look back,

I'm on the first floor of the tower. And I still do not see any door, but also I don't look for it. So I'm in the center of the first floor of the tower and I'm looking at the first stairs that go up to the second story. But I don't look behind me. I don't really look to either side to see if there was a door that I came through or not. on it, just in there. Okay. Yeah.

That is interesting, though, too. So there's something about the way you're conceiving this that needed you to not walk through a door to get inside there. You drove through a gate to get into the graveyard, long rows. But this is a different kind of experience. You're mysteriously transported inside. Even if there was a door behind you. you just have no memory of it so we could say it's not there but certainly you have no memory of walking through it no experience of entering a door opening a door yanking at an old heavy door that

kind of thing um that's probably a unique kind of experience to the to the type of place it is that that getting in is not not easy and you might not really understand how yeah yeah yeah seems inaccessible almost until you're inside. And I think once I'm inside, the idea of my previous plans of going to explore the mansion and then driving on, they don't really exist anymore. From that point on, I'm focused on getting up to the top of the tower and then looking out, and then after that I'm focused on examining the inside of the tower.

But the idea of leaving the tower again, it kind of leaves my mind. And the dream ends before I get a chance to do anything else. So you climb, how many, I'm seeing like a wraparound staircase that has landings every now and again. So there's actual floors to it? Yeah. Yeah. So the way that it works is against one edge of the tower. There's stone steps up the little. landing and then you walk to the opposite side and there's stone steps up to the next one.

Okay. So it keeps going. Gotcha. So it's more of a square tower. I imagined a round one. I didn't even ask. Yeah. No, yeah.

It's square. Gotcha. Okay. And nothing on each floor is pretty bare. No, no experience beyond kind of just walking through and making your. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I know that there's nothing in any of the tower.

There's nothing at all. All there is is the stairs and the wooden rafters that hold up each floor of the levels. But there's no furnishings. There's not a table. There's not a jar or anything. It's just not even any windows until the very top floor. But also it didn't seem any dirty or broken or cobwebs or. No, no.

As a matter of fact, even though there's no windows, it's very bright. lit on the inside. There's no windows or light sources, but it's brightly lit. I don't have any problem seeing. There's nothing hiding. There's nothing that seems dirty or uncapped or anything. It's just there. Yeah.

No experience of windows and yet illuminated. There's something in here about, well, it's not like secret knowledge, but maybe it is. this more like the, I, let's get up, let's get up to this. So you reach the top floor. And that's where there is, so far as you can tell, only one window and it looks out. Yeah, yep, there's just one window. And it's, it's a big window. It takes up almost the entire wall of the one side of the tower that's facing the mansion,

which is also the way that I came from. And so I walk up to that window. Like I said, it takes up almost the whole wall, except it's about waist high. So I just walk up and I look out. And it doesn't occur to me that the mansion is no longer there. Like, it doesn't seem strange or anything. I just don't see it from where I am. And I look out and that's all there is.

is just the hills and the headstones. And no different experience or visual impression of what could be seen from there. You saw what you expected to see in a way? Yes. So the hills and the headstones are much like I would expect them to look from that vantage point, you know, based off my waking dreams. The only things that seem strange from a waking viewpoint are that the mansion is no longer there and that the sun seems very bright. Okay.

Yeah, there's something about the view, literally the view from this kind of place, whatever this place is, this perspective that has removed the mansion from your sight in that way. And in such a way that it's only on reflection, you go, oh, yeah, it was gone. I mean, but in the dream at the moment, you're not even missing it. You just can't even see it. There's some things are, what is that phenomenon where we, it's right in front of us, we can't see it. For whatever reason, I think it might be something like that, but there's no difference in the dream. It's gone physically, which sure it can be. Or you're looking right past it because it's no longer irrelevant.

It's not even in your field of view anymore. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's a chance. I'm trying to, you know, think of it, nine stories up. And the tower and the mansion are in very close proximity. So I would have to look quite a ways down in order to see it anyways. I might just not be looking down. That's possible.

I'm looking out for the most part. Yeah, very much so. Well, you very easily could have made the tower four stories tall and had the mansion still within your view. It's like by the time you get to the top of this. place, a place worth climbing, a place with a view you want to experience, the mansion will no longer be visible from this place. It will have faded from your view. There's something about looking and the site and climbing up high to get a vantage point, a vista, that removes, I'd say less important things from your notice and gives you the bigger picture further into the distance than you could see at ground level. It's very much something to this. That's a lot of the climbing metaphors that people have in their dreams is something about getting

up high that signifies, you know, achievement, attainment, climbing Mount Everest style. But also better understanding. We tend to think of, you know, our levels go up in video games. And we level up with our degrees in real life. There's also connection with education in that regard of like towers being classically, I mean, part of a castle, but also,

um, well, in, in the case of, of, of storytelling, like where a wizard lives and, you know,

where, where arcane knowledge is. So it's very much, there's, there's like, a, I think this educational attainment is, is,

is a theme running through this thing. And the idea of the people that have gone before, well, what you really value in life. Um, and definitely with your military connection, the idea of, of a reverence for,

for people that have gone before you and given their lives, perhaps. You didn't get that sense, though, that of any reason why the people had died. They hadn't done anything. It wasn't actually an Arlington-style place. They weren't soldiers. No. Yeah, no. I never got the sense that I would have known anybody that was there.

Yeah, it was reverential, but also kind of abstract. There wasn't really any personal connection to it. Yeah. that's it in a sense that's how we we feel about a lot of the people we read of in books it's like okay their ideas survived but I don't know the guy I mean he's been dead a long time I don't have any sudden sadness that he's no longer with us I just read read his words from 300 years ago that there's something something in there along those lines um and it is there is something about taking in this view and having that experience where say the um pursuit of material

is no longer even on your radar, so to speak, turned you back to examining the structure of the tower itself in fine detail. There's something there about a... Have you thought about becoming a teacher? It's maybe not the right way to do it, but like... Not a right way to say it, not do it, you do whatever you want, of course. something about sharing information. And if you, in order to,

there's a meta level of, it's one thing to climb the tower, it's another thing to understand the tower. Does that make sense? Yeah. So it's one of those things where when I'm climbing the tower, I'm not really paying much attention to it. I'm just focused on getting to the top.

And then after I taken the view, it always seems strange to me after I wake up because, it feels like after I wake up, the dream should end after I look at the view. Like, okay, well, that's the pinnacle of the dream. Right. Yeah. Looking at the view and then it should end. But it doesn't end there.

It goes on with turning back to the tower and really, you know, looking at the stones and wondering how they were cut and, you know, looking at the wooden beams and wondering what kind of wood they are and, you know, and what they did with them. And I go back down the levels. I don't make it all the way back down to the bottom, but I know I at least make it down to like the seventh level. I go 9, 8, 7, and then each level, and I'm looking, just looking at the inside of the tower. And again, like I mentioned before, there's nothing in it.

It's very bare. But something about it captures my interest and seems very fascinating, even though on the walk-up, I wasn't really paying much attention. Yeah, and there's no sense of what the examiner. is for it's just captured your attention in a way that seems irresistible yeah yeah yeah as a as a as a full experience you are this and this all kind of is again and again it wants you to

the dream wants you to start with the imagination that you're in a very old car no top on it this kind of 1920 style thing and that or early 1900s and that kind of sets the opening point of, okay, imagine you're this type of person and this type of place. And here's this type of experience you're going to have here. And it keeps coming back. What is it about that? Do you have any special connection to that time period or those kind of old cars? What, when you think of like an old model team, I mean, what comes associatively comes to mind? Yeah, not really. You know, they were never really my thing. The only real experience I had with them is my grand. My Tampa's brother had a car museum where he had several large barns and two-story,

and on each story he had just dozens and dozens of these old cars. So we used to go there for family reunions and stuff, and they ended up burning down. They had a big fire, and they all ended up burning down. But for the most part, I don't really care for that style of car. I don't have any personal connection to it. I think the important part in the dream is having the best view. So even if I had a modern convertible, right, you're sitting so low that it feels like the doors and the windshield and things would still be in your viewpoint. It seems important that in that style of car, the seat is at the very top of the vehicle.

So 360 degrees, you can look in every direction and see what's actually there instead of trying to look around. something or look through a windshield or something. Fair enough. I think that's the important part. Yeah, that may very well be. And I think, well, if that makes sense to you, I think it probably is. I think it's also a little bit of imagining yourself as someone from another time is part of it. There's definitely human experience. It doesn't a dozen changes, but there are modern times versus.

And then, of course, in the early 1900s, they thought they thought they were. We were living in modern times and they'd just ask any eugenicist. We're going to perfect the human race any day now through the miracle of science. Right. Right. So there's something about that where you're looking at it. Like imagine I'm even in a different time and place. But also, also the view.

I mean, you could have had a very different kind of vehicle, but it was this particular kind of vehicle. And it wasn't. And you did want to maximize the view, a very important element. That is a difficult, I think that is a difficult element of the dream. It's much like with the temperature. You know, I can look at everything around and have it be very vivid, but I don't have any idea what the temperature is. I feel like everything else in the dream is very similar for time period, right?

When I look at the mansion and the tower, they don't have any specific architectural style. I never see my clothes. really the car is the only thing in the dream that points to any type of time period. Anything else in the dream, you know, if the car could place it in 1920, but if you change the car, the whole thing could have easily been placed today. Or if it was in a, you know, a car, you know, a wagon, it could have been 500 years ago. Yeah.

The structure of the mansion and the tower and the graveyard and everything else, it's all kind of timeless outside of the car design. Yeah, there is that theme of ancient things enduring timeless quality to stuff, an endless, seemingly endless expanse where you have to cross a boundary to get into it. But once you're in there, you don't see that wall anymore. The wall disappears. Now it's just graveyards forever. Related to then also the comparison of yourself to someone else from literally 100 years ago.

Sometimes there's a, not meaningful, but humans latch on to things like increments of 10 and 100. So you might say, well, what was it like 100 years ago? Or what if I, what if I was, what if I compared myself to a person from that time? Because fundamentally our experiences are similar in some way, even though we're separated by 100 years. I could very well be having this experience today or back then. So let's imagine it's back then. There's something about that of you're viewing, viewing, well, we already kind of hit upon an idea of like, you're viewing patterns over time. That's way too vague.

It's not trying to understand how some things repeat and why. Or given that some things stay the same, there's the death and taxes type of thing. Like there's death all around someday, you will join them. You have the kind of basic representations of do I achieve piles of money or piles of knowledge in a way, which what's more important to me. You pick the tower is the most important thing. And with the intent of exploring further, at least dabbling maybe in entering the experiencing the wealth or fame side of things maybe. But that gets lost completely in the fascination. with the tower itself, with what it represents to you,

and understanding how it's made, the elements of it in fine detail. Yeah, it has no right to be as interesting as it is. Yeah. But it just seems, you know, just looking at it and wondering, well, how are the stones cut, you know, how are the, how's the pillar made, you know? All this stuff, all of a sudden that seems very interesting.

You said this dream first came to you. How long ago? That was the first time you can remember having one? Yeah, I think I was probably about 22 or 23. So that would have been like 11 years ago. What was transitional periods you were going through in your life at the time? Was that you were just getting out of the military? No, actually, I joined a little bit later.

So that would have been the year that I went in. Um, gotcha. And unfortunately, I don't remember if this would have been before after I joined. Um, I don't, I'm not sure. I could very easily see it coming before as you were considering joining. That there's something in. Yeah, that was a very busy year for me because I, I got married that year and I joined the military that year.

Um, and in joining the military, I left the only job I had ever had since I was 17. and, you know, there's just a few different things going on. Yeah. Big, big transitional period in your life. So that's part of what I'm seeing in here in terms of thematically is, I'm having a hell of a time wrapping it up. You brought me a good one. Yeah, yeah.

The idea of trying to decide what's important to you and why. I mean, when you got into the military, was it for the purpose of, you know, doing a GI Bill or, or was it, because some people go, I want an education, I'll go serve and I'll get it. And that's why they serve. Did you have a different motivation? Yeah, you know, I'd say that that's pretty accurate. I got my associate's degree through community college. And then I went to go to a four-year school. And before I, you know, when I got the first proposed bill, I said, you know, I can't pay for this and I didn't like the idea of student loans, so I didn't go.

And then four years passed between when I graduated from community college and when I joined the Army. And that was, you know, my primary motivation was to be able to continue going to school. Okay. I mean, that fits. If I had a guess, I would have, well, that's why I suggested it. I'm like, okay, this occurred to me. That's probably related to it.

So definitely your, the destination you've ended up in almost by happenstance, by a roadside happenstance is actually, you've discovered something of intense interest. But in order to get there, you had to go through a very stark representation that you are going to die someday like all these other people did, which sometimes keys our mind in a how do I want to live? what does it mean to live a good life knowing that it's going to be over at some point there's something in there i don't know if any of that's resonating with you in terms of the progression of the scene yeah i think that um i think that might be a fair interpretation um

i think it's interesting that um two things stick out to me about the death part of it one is that at this point in my life nobody i had known it died yet the other thing that sticks out to me about it is that as a person, I'm somebody who's not afraid of deaths. Of course, this might change the closer you get. But one thing that I've always reflected on in life is that, you know, I've only lived 34 years, but it seems like I've been alive a really long time. It seems like I've lived a really good life. So I've said to several people, I've said, if I died tomorrow, there's no reason to be sad.

Like I've done a lot of stuff and I've I lived a really good life even at this point. I would love to live to be very old like my grandparents, you know. Yeah. But I don't see the sadness or fear in death that I think a lot of other people do. Yeah. And I think maybe that might account for the middle of it a little bit, you know, kind of the nature of it. I think so. Yeah, yeah, because this was, yeah, this is very much.

not a dream imagery or emotional content of fear, of being afraid of death. And knowing you're there's two, two kinds of people, well, I'm not too, but there's more than two kinds, but the broader strokes of there's the person who has the sudden realization, oh my God, I'm going to die someday, and they're terrified and they're fearful of this inevitability. And they do everything they can to avoid it and they're very careful, all this other stuff. There's some people go, I know my time is limited, so I don't want to waste it. I'm going to use it well in a way that's, you know, it's not fear of death that motivates you to make the most of what you got as much as the knowledge that it's coming.

So your conception of death at that time may have been more impersonal. No names on the gravestones. They're all uniform. Could be anybody. They could all be the same type of person. Or at least the gravestones are not individuated. They're not distinctive. There's not some tall, some short, some gray, some blue, you know, whatever.

So more, yeah, more of an impersonal relationship with the concept of death. And maybe even knowing you would face a risk of it serving in the military, like, you're going to have to confront this one way or another because shit happens and people will shoot at you. You can shoot back, you know. So, I mean, that makes it. But then to have this keep coming back over time as. something something you feel like you need to continue to see there was something you'd said in your you know like you like to master one thing and then move on to another um it would make sense that there would be multiple towers like if your dream imagery had been more along those lines of

oh and in the distance i see more towers and i'm drawn to them too um you got to stop i'm going to let you outside in a minute. Just a minute. But this is the same pattern over and over again. Like you'd need to re-examine your choices. But you don't seem to me today to be regretting your decision to get into philosophy and psychology and explore these things. You're having a good old time. So it doesn't seem to fit. It doesn't seem like you'd need to return to that imagery for that reason to re-examine that question. Yeah. Like I said, the only thing that ever changes is the door to the mansion being opened or closed. And that happened,

that would have happened after I left the military. Yeah. And that's the only, that's really the only variation in the dream. Yeah. And it is very interesting. Why the door open, it's like,

what I considered it when you first said it is, the first thing that popped into my mind was something in your mind wanting to make it more enticing. Like, look, look, look, I open the door for you. Go, go, go, go check it out. Like, you might be...

I remember when I woke up the first time from the dream and the door was open, feeling scared. Because I think up until that point, the, you know, the six or so other times that I'd had the dream, it seemed very certain that nobody was there. And then when I had the dream and suddenly the door was open, in the dream, it still never occurred to me that anybody was there. But when I woke up, I thought, oh, well, if the door was open this time, who opened the door? Right, you know? And that was after you woke up, though, like in the dream, you didn't have that experience?

No, in the dream, it seemed completely normal. But after I woke up, it seemed, that seemed a little bit strange to me. You got to stop. He wants me to throw his toy. Of course he does. He woke up from his nap, and now he's ready to play. Come here. Come here.

Come here. Come here. Come here. If you won't be quiet, you've got to get back in my lap. Calm down. An open door feels to me, and you can say if it feels to you, but like an invitation, almost like an enticement. Like, and that might make you feel weird about it afterwards, like doors open that's strange, as if there's something. Yeah, it's weird because I have a mixed feeling about it, right?

because in my dream, the thought process is always tower, then mansion. But in my waking life, it's always, oh, the next time I get into that dream, I want to explore the mansion. But then the first time the door was opened, it freaked me out a little bit. Yeah.

So it's kind of a strange, mixed feeling where it's like, in my waking life, that's all I want to do is the next time I have this dream, I'm going to go into the mansion instead because I want to know what the inside of that looks like. And now, it's pretty much, you know, it doesn't bother me because it's, you know, it's happened enough times. But the first time, it was, it was a little bit jarring.

You said it was about, have you ever noticed over time any pattern to life circumstances that seem to coincide with the dream coming back? Like, when's the last time you can remember having it? The last time I had it, that would have been, I wanted to say it's about eight months ago. Okay. And I don't remember anything specific happening. I never remember anything specific happening throughout my life when it comes up. It almost seems like just as I'm starting to forget that I had it, then I'll have it again. You know, oh, yeah, there it is.

Maybe it's some manner of persistent, I hesitate to say fear, but, concern like um what am i trying to say there's something to that idea of oh just about when i'm about to forget it it when it seems like it's gone for long enough and it's not relevant anymore there's something that's hard to let go and there's there might be something that's related to the enticement of even in your own mind opening the door to the changing something in the dream but in a way that makes you what i'm trying to say like there's maybe some expressed part of you that you've not hidden consciously, but maybe, um, not suppressed either. The only other detail I can offer, yeah, um, regarding the door is that it seems strange

to me. The mansion is, it's this big place, you know, it's obviously a huge building. Yeah. But the door is a normal front door. It's just a regular, you know, it seems to me like there should be. be a big double door. Right. Yeah, yeah.

That's kind of what I imagined. It's just a normal sized door. And it just, it's just opened inward to the point where it looks like it might not like it got taken off its hinges. I can't see the door at all. But it's just black. I can't see into the building at all. Yeah, that always seems strange to me.

It's just a regular house door, but on this big mansion. Yeah. That is, that is odd. I wonder if this is just a puzzle that neither one of us can see very clearly. We've identified a lot of symbols. Or if I'm just pooped today. I got to wait way early. I've already done another interpretation earlier today.

And sometimes the brains are firing on all cylinders. Usually by the time I get to the end, I can see a little bit of a story arc and we tie it together. And this one is it's got so many discrete elements. And they each seem to have some relevance to some aspect of your life. But there's no. full through line. There's no story. There's no explanation for the need of recurrence. What I would hope to give you is not only that narrative, like here's to sum up what I think it's describing, but some understanding of it that is relevant enough, that that solves the

mystery enough, identifies the pattern sufficiently, that it's no longer necessary to have it again. It doesn't seem to be that much of a distressing dream. So, and it doesn't come back every night. So is it necessary to try and stop it? I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, because I think, you know, I can imagine it being hard to interpret because there's no other characters in the dream, you know, there's no people. So that, that takes something away from it. That's true. Very solitary experience. You know, just the kind of person that I am, I'm the kind of person that loves mystery. That's why I like philosophy,

so I can think about the idea of what is time, or where did the universe come from, or where did, so this idea of having things that are out there that I can't understand, and I might never be able to understand, not only do those things not bother me, those are the things that I really enjoy thinking about.

And maybe it's just a reflection of that in some way. could be i mean that's definitely a possible understanding i wish it was a i wish it felt more certain i want to give you i want to give you something more certain uh there was um you know it was about what was it you ever seen the um uh p b herman's big adventure uh long time ago yeah long time ago yeah when i was a kid too i mean that was from when i was getting the 80s um but uh you know he gets picked up by the truck driver and she says it were many years ago and it was was about 100 episodes ago that I had my first experience of, I can't make heads or tails of this thing. It was episode 19, I think called, I called it Going Nowhere, because he had this wonderfully

strange experience of being restrained to a chair in the middle of the sand of a broken down Roman coliseum and this little old babushka lady with a with a, with a, with a, with a, with a, with a, kerchief over her neck, approached, pulled a pair of wire clippers out and started sniffing off the tips of his fingers out of which sand flowed. Couldn't make heads or tails out of any of that stuff. It was just the most wonderfully bizarre sequence of images. It seems like it should have a lot of symbolism that leads to some meaning, but it's hard to pick apart.

Yeah. That's the way I feel about this one. And that's why I thought it would be interesting to bring it on, is because having it so many times and having it occur the same way every time, it seems like the symbolism is very strong. but I can't make heads or tails of it. So yeah. Yeah.

What I would be interested to hear is if our analyzing it, breaking it down, seeing a little bit more of the details, getting a little bit of feedback on the ideas, changes the nature of the dream the next time he has it, you have it, or if it is exactly the same, man, the door's wide open and nothing changes. Yeah. Ordovich just never comes back because we looked at it enough to render it less. mysterious, so it doesn't need to be remembered and re-experienced? I genuinely feel there's got to be something there to the reason why it needs to come back,

why you need to return to that image. What unresolved, uncrystallized conception is teasing around your head. Yeah, yeah, it'll be interesting to see if it does come back or if it changes or whatnot. But yeah, I don't know. why, you know, I don't know why I, my brain feels that I need to have it either. It's a, you know, it's a strange thing. That is, that is kind of the proof in the pudding. I think you have identified a lot of things in it that do relate to, you know,

who I am as a person. So maybe it will be the case that I'll be able to pick apart some things on my own the next time it happens. Yeah. Hopefully the dream experience changes. You're able to have a different experience of it now that some of the elements have been more fully explained, if that makes sense. And you might come away from, if it returns, you might come away from it with some sudden understanding that wasn't possible until you dreamt dreamt it again. That's what I'm trying to say.

I'm brain dead. So I'm getting tired. It's the middle of the afternoon. That's okay. It's not your fault. I don't know that I could have done any better with this had I been more awake or less, less tired from a long day. But I always a fascinating experience.

I'm glad we got to talk for about an hour beforehand and then jump into this for an hour and a half and really look at some of these elements and get an understanding of where they came from. So hopefully it's been just in general a beneficial experience to you. Yeah. No, it's been a lot of fun for me. And, you know, like I said, I'm somebody who, likes the mystery. So I'm not at all disappointed that we didn't get to the bottom of something.

I like the fact that it will continue on for at least a while, a while more. So good deal. And I can claim it's still a higher than 99% success rate, even after missing, if you're just missing a couple of them in terms of a grand narrative. So, well, if you feel satisfied for now, pending, pending future results, you want to, we'll wrap it up. Yeah. Okay. Good deal. I kept along the map, too. give you another one and we can pick it apart and get an answer out of one of those sure yeah and I'd always be happy to hear from you again in the future in terms of has anything changed I mean not a lot of people get back to me some people do um I have heard from some people who because of my

our collaborative analysis their recurrent dreams did change and they were allowed to progress beyond areas where they got previously stopped so maybe there is something of that nature in here you needed to get a better idea of what this was starting to show you. And then you can move on. Maybe there's actually more to this dream that you haven't been able to have yet. That would be fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, that would be. I'm excited. Good deal. Okay, well, by way of parting here, I'm going to say this has been our friend Joel Bouchard. I can't read my own handwriting from West New York State. And he is a PhD student army vet musician, podcaster with the show from nowhere to nothing available on all of your favorite podcasting platforms.

For my part, I'll say, wow, would you kindly? Like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers and viewers for the program. 16. Currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent, dreams and their meaning by Horace G. Hutchinson. Wow, I'm really getting brained at the end of the day here. You can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com.

all 16 works, downloadable MP3 versions of the podcast and stuff. And I'll just say once again to our friend, Joel, thank you for being here. It's been a good talk all the way around. Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Good deal. And everybody out there, thanks for listening.