Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 126: Bear in Mind

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” - Leo Tolstoy https://www.castlewrite.com/

Greetings friends, welcome to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Daniel Castlewright out of Denver, Colorado. He's an author. He wrote the book Helix Mysteries. The first change, you can find him at castlewight.com. That's Wright, W-R-I-T-E. And we were joking earlier that it's like a prophetic or, what do you call it? Like predestined to be a writer at someday, type of thing.

Anyway, we're going to get right back to him in two seconds. Would you kindly like, share, subscribe? tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers, viewers for the game streams. 15. Currently available works of historical dream literature. This is the part where I shill my own books. The most recent dreams in their meetings by Horace G. Hutchinson, Book 16 of the ABC series, augury, bibliomancy, and chaos, I call it. All About Dreams. You can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com,

audio MP3 versions of the podcast, complete listing of all 16 books, growing encyclopedia, and all that good stuff. about me. We'll get back to Daniel. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Good deal. Yeah, I love talking to people. Never know, never know we're going to get. So we already miscommunicated about the timing of starting it. It's tough with the Pacific and Central and Mountain. I say get rid of all that. I don't know. How do you do that? But especially when the time zone changes. I'm over that stuff. I don't know how you feel about that. Yeah. It makes sense. I like the daylight or you prefer the, I just want stop changing it. Stop changing my.

clocks. That's what I say. I agree. So yeah, so we've already talked a little bit and I was lamenting earlier that I wish I'd kind of say that. It was a pretty interesting conversation. We'll probably rehash some of that stuff here. But a good place to start is with your book. What is Helix Mysteries? So Helix Mysteries was a project

that I started 10 years ago now. maybe even 11, I guess, technically we're in 2023. And I originally started it because I was actually really frustrated with Blizzard, the game manufacturer, because they, you know, they rolled out World of Warcraft and they were charging so much money to play it. And, you know, I've never gotten into it, but I just thought, man, it's kind of, kind of, you know, frustrating that people go out, they spend, you know, 50, 60 bucks on a game, and then they have to pay 15 bucks a month to play. So it's like, how can I create a fantasy video game, which would have, you know, some, which would be able to generate revenue without that? And so it originally

started as just a script or an idea for an MMO. And then, as time went on, I was, I was, I was like, you know, this actually could make an interesting book. And I've never, ever thought of myself as an author. I never thought I would actually publish a book, like that I would be able to write one. And so on and off for about 10 years, I actually forgot about it at one point, completely forgot that I had this book. And the first chapter in the book starts off with the dream, ironically. You're right.

And so I wrote it down, like I wrote the first chapter, and I forgot about it for several years. I just got busy with life, family, school, everything else. And then one day I sat down and I was like, I had this cool idea for a story. And it started with a dream. And so I wrote it. When I went to save it, it was like, there's already a file that exists. with this name. And it was the same, you know,

basically the same exact thing. Like I had just rewritten it several years later, having completely forgot about it. And so I was like, all right, well, obviously there's something to this. So like I need to hammer it out. And it took me a few years to finally get the story arc kind of completed and then everything flushed out.

And I think COVID kind of helped with that a little bit. And just, you know, gave me some time to write. And then I just, you know, in 2022, I was like, I need to get this public. Like I need to, I want to hold it in my hand. I've got the whole book. I've got the whole story. And so that's what I did. I basically finished it, edited it all myself.

and finally published it. And so I've gotten some really cool feedback on it. It's a story about Sam. Sam is the main character. And Sam goes through a transformation and starts changing into something weird, kind of a mythical creature. And kind of what that plays into.

What would the world look like if things started to transform. And obviously I, so it's kind of a mix of science fiction and mythology and fantasy. I wanted to bridge all of those things together. And just kind of make it, make it a fun transformation of our modern world into a world of mythology.

Very cool. So, and then use some scientific concepts, whether it's theories or things that are proven to back that up. And consequently, in doing so, I had to create an origin story for life, so that there's a little bit of that in there. So it's a combination of things, but it was fun to write. And, I mean, honestly speaking, as I've said in other interviews, I didn't write it to become, you know, the world's best-selling author or whatever.

It would be cool. I'm not opposed to the idea, but I wrote it because I wanted to hold it in my hand. I wanted to hold like an actual book and be able to say, this was mine. I wrote this from start to finish. Yeah. And that's what I did. So it was a project. And I do have, there is a second book that I'm working on right.

now because if I just ended it where I where I did people would be quite quite angry with me you can kind of feel that as an author too like this story isn't finished and you know your audience will have that same experience what what happens next where's the you know where's the full conclusion what happens to all these threads that are kind of dangling yeah yeah yeah so it's definitely that there will be a second book but for now out this is it and I think for me you know unfortunately I live in the real world where you know bills have to be paid yeah and you know the banks don't accept mortgage payments

with hugs and and friendly gestures and positive ideas so once they do I'm I'm gonna rock it but until then you know it's kind of I'm working on it when I can and hopefully it I'm hoping it will be a much faster process this time around now that I know what I'm doing. Yeah. No, that's very true. I found that like the first book I ever edited of mine, you know, some finding historical literature and doing the editing and reformatting and all that different kind of stuff. Well, long story short, the process of the first one was kind of like I do invent the process. And then the other ones I had a pattern.

And I've kind of been dialing that in as I go kind of like with these interviews, you go back to my very. first one ever on this there's no cameras i have a screen recording of the discord and chat uh background that's all i got and they're still interesting you can listen to a podcast style but uh then i got advice from friends saying you know you need to you need to you need some graphics and some music and you need to make it a real thing and i okay so dialed that in and got a better camera and a better microphone eventually and uh you know piece piece by piece um but i there is something very satisfying i'm like hey chill my own works again like holding this like i did this i made this thing happened.

Yeah. You know, I'm going to be working on original stuff eventually. I've got what I, what I'm doing in my process is, uh, consider this my own self-constructed master class in the subject of dreams. Like, what do you,

what do you get from going to college? You get professors who say, here's the books you should read. Well, I'm just reading all the books myself. So, you know, and producing copies for other people to read.

So you say, where does this guy get his understanding? Well, basis in psychology. And I've read every. anything it's ever been written on dreams. And eventually I'm going to have to get to doing some books that are more original, but citations of current research, summaries of research through the ages.

And I've done some anthology works in that regard. But long story short, it's supposed to be about you and your book writing process. You will, I think, have a much easier time, as you're saying, of the second one, when you can find time to do it. And that is a big deal for me, too. I got all kinds of stuff going on. And I love hearing how other people, work because, I mean, again, I'm not, you know, I wasn't brought up in the, in that realm of authors and whatnot.

I, yeah. So for me, it's, it is very interesting. I love kind of hearing how people do things. And it's, you know, because I've created my own method, right? Like, I've figured out what, what works for me. and if you you know if you talk to different authors and you hear different things

and different ideas and sometimes you may get something really cool from that and like oh man I should I should try that right I was actually watching a master class recently or I guess it's called a master class but it's a thing that I

where this guy who was a professional copy writer and he talked about like these different ideas these different steps for improving your writing ability now he was more focused on like blogs and and ongoing writing not not books but he said something very interesting which was and when you write write like you should write a short sentence maybe two of who the audience is and what is the person of what you're writing and you know just you know this is my you know I'm writing this blog entry or you know people between the ages of 30 and 50 to get

them to go and vote right I mean I don't know like what whatever it is sure something that simple right it really helps you set your own tone for you know who are you writing for? What kind of language are you going to use? Yeah. I've been, I'm definitely guilty of sometimes throwing in words into my writing that are not, you know, are not part of the vernacular, if you will. Yeah.

And I, you know, so like my daughter, he was reading my book, she's like, I have no idea what this word means. And in part, I'm like, well, this is kind of a, young adult to adult fiction book but at the same time i feel like you know once upon a time if you read a word you didn't understand what did you do you need to grab a dictionary you have to search for it hopefully find the right right um and i think that that's a really important uh i feel like that's a very important skill that's kind of going away people just it's just kind of glaze over things and they're like i'll figure out what that means or i won't right and they go

And so I want to really kind of bring that back. And I feel like it's important to have an interesting vocabulary. Yeah. So that regardless of the setting that you're in, right, like you can be sitting with a bunch of friends around whatever, or you can be sitting with a group of executives. And when someone says something that you don't understand. understand, you can, you know, at least grab your phone. Like, we live in a world where you don't have to carry, you know, Webster's dictionary.

That's that. We like, you can just go, Google, what is this? Um, and I feel it's a good skill. I feel like it's something that people, uh, are just, like, we're getting lazier and leisure as a population. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And so what, I'm like, I'll have that in. What you were describing is, uh, was my experience of reading. I don't know if you're, you know, been a long, lifelong. fantasy sci-fi fan like me. Pierce Anthony, the author, wrote the Xanth series, robot at all. I think you would probably love those. One of my favorite, my favorite sci-fi fantasy crossovers is his robot-adept series,

where a guy from a technological future interplanetary, like alien planet type of thing, but humans are living there, gets crossed over into a magical setting and goes back and forth. And they take the tech and put it in the magic setting and the magic people and bring him to the tech setting. And that was his exploration of a crossover. Long story short on him, he very often used words that I did not understand because I'm, again, young adult fiction. You know, mostly written, I'd say maybe for teenage boys, but it's not exclusively. But I would come across a word and I did not know what he was talking about.

I would look it up sometimes or sometimes the context of the sentence gave me an idea of the general meaning of the word. And that can also help sometimes too. But that's, yeah, I don't think we should. We should not make our writing so technically complex with a, bunch of jargon that no one can understand that it's just unreadable. Then again, as you were saying, I don't necessarily shy away from words that are seldom used, but the most appropriate shade of meaning. Like we have words that cluster together. Like they all mean a different type of this broad thing. Like the Greeks used to have, what, seven words for love. And now we've kind of

compressed it into love. Well, you love somewhere you don't. Well, is it familial love, brotherly love, fraternal? Is it romantic love? Is it romantic love? of, you know, there's all these different shades to it. And we tend to use different words anyway. So, yeah, that was definitely my, and that didn't turn me off the book. So I don't, I don't encourage to sprinkle it down. Yeah. I think it's like anything else, right?

In my opinion, it should, it's, you know, it's kind of like salt or whatever, right? If you have, you sprinkle it in a little bit for flavor, it adds a little bit of, yes. but if you yeah if you just come if all your writing is this incredibly dense you know hard and and i've i've read works like that uh or passages like that and it's just tedious it is like this sucks like i'm not because the entire point and this is where i feel like a book should be balanced in that um it should be engaging and it should pull you into the story but at the same time, you know, it should add a little bit of depth. Yeah.

If it's too deep, right? Like if it just drowns you, then you can't engage. You can't like enjoy that the immersion as much. If it's just, you know, like you have to stop every three sentences or every paragraph. To look up a new word. You try to learn a new word. It's like, oh, this sucks. It's balance.

it's, you know, having a little bit in there for fun. You know, I did, I have some military references that I threw in and some things that I kind of expanded on and whatever. And I've had like my prologue, which is an important piece of the book, right, because it kind of sets the tone for what's happening. I, one of the things I say is reticle. I use the word reticle. Oh, yeah.

And first person, Shooter gamers know what that is. Right? Yes. Yes. Or anyone in the military or who goes firearms or anything like that. And my girlfriend was reading it and she was like, I, what's a reticle? Mm-hmm.

And I was like, oh. You know, so it's a, you can't cover everybody. Right? There's, there are just going to be things that people need to look up. But you have to have fun with it at the same time. Like it has to flow and you have to know your your audience and all like that. For sure. Well, one advantage I have doing, say, these nonfiction historical books that are more talking about philosophy and science and stuff, they are heavily footnoted.

I mean, if you took a book, I think one of them started with 90 footnotes from the author. And I added like 180 more because I'll come across words that are, I know what they mean or I don't know what they mean. And I had to look them up. Or I come up, you know, historical. persons and I'm like, well, who is this guy he's talking about? Why is irrelevant to the? Oh, he's this guy. He was a doctor in the 1800s and he wrote about this thing and here was his theory on

dreams. Throw that in there in a footnote. Can't really do that in a fantasy novel. Kind of breaks the flow. I don't know if any fantasy novels ever that are footnoted. But that gives me a unique advantage to be, I was going to look up something like, give you an example of something I defined for people. And I don't know that I'm going to be able to, well, I mean, I just throw in things like

for anyone that doesn't know, uh, Where is this one? Talking about imagination and dreams by Frederick Greenwood, which I'm going to be reproducing at some point. And they talk about a Greek mythological character named Cressida. And so I'm like, well, I don't know who Cresida is. I know a lot about Greek mythology, but it turns out he is a character from the mythological Trojan War.

I'm sorry, she, Creseda. She, daughter of the Greek seer, Calchas. There you go. And now people can go, well, let's look at the, let's look at the mythological Trojan War and find out who this Cressida and Calcas were. And I think they were. Anyway, it doesn't matter who they were. But that's the kind of thing I try to do for people, you know, especially if I come across a word that I don't know, or if it's technical psychological jargon. Not everyone has my training background. And that's the thing with

the jargon, too, is like you'll come across a word like transference. That means something specifically in the Freudian tradition. It's also been adapted broadly to, to cover, you know, So it's how I feel talking to you and then countertransference, if you were the patient, how you feel talking to me is transference. How I feel talking to you as the therapist is countertransference. And those things always interfere and influence discussion. So you might be the kind of person who, because I come across as a stern authority figure, you're like, I'm afraid of my dad.

And this guy feels like my dad. I'm scared of him. Now you know, countertransference is you're arguing with me. like my punk, you know, kid who doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. And he's so sure and he's being disrespectful. And so I'm angry. And now we're fighting with each other over something that was never said and never done. It's just these past relationships that are influenced.

Long a story short. Yeah. You know, so if you come across a word like transfer, for instance, well, I would, I feel like the need to to explain the thing like I just did because, okay, that's a specialty term in this context. And here's how it applies. And if it isn't. sometimes you can do that in the book too where it's a it's a it's like I'm going to say it's kind of a common

trope in a way to have ignorant characters ask questions on behalf of the audience in a way like yeah what the hell does that mean oh well let me tell you uh so I I did that in my book especially with because I did uh I threw in some kind of a few jokes a few stabs at that that occur between branches of the military right and someone who's never served in the military, whether it's because of their age or choice, whatever it is, you know, they would not understand that, right? They don't, especially, and the other piece to it is it's important to explain, which I do, right? And I grew it kind of, I have my main character asked that question, like, what the heck, how are they doing this? Because a lot of

jokes between branches of the military are quite hurtful sometimes. right like they say pretty mean things um and so but yet at the same time they're they're willing to turn around and you know lay down their lives for the other person and you're like how do you how do you do that like turn around and insult this individual um um you know at a deep level but then you're and so explaining that dynamic is something you have to do for for people who otherwise would be like wow these guys are just really mean to each other I mean, it looks like that sometimes. Yeah, you play the cut down game.

Yeah, no, I mean, you have to, a lot of it has to do with just the ability to, part of it is humbling, right? It's, you make fun of other people, but you also make fun of yourself, and you allow others to make fun of yourself without getting hurt by it. because part of it is you need to be humble like you can't walk into battle or something like that as this arrogant

like pompous you know I'm gonna and so that's one the other part of it is that the world can be very dark and you know and there are a lot of things

that are very very difficult to deal with emotionally and psychologically And so part of it is that you make dark, you know, dark jokes or mean jokes and you do so in order to deal with how horrific things can be and how horrific people can be. Absolutely. And so there is, you know, and to someone who has an experience that, like, we live in a very diverse world in terms of experience that people have, and people who have you know I don't care whether you served in the military or not right like if you've never been to a place

where life is truly hard like if you've born and raised in the United States and some nice little suburb you know whatever and you think that because your stomach grumbled once that means that you're starving to death right and you don't know what the actual meaning of starving to death is Oh, yeah.

You don't really know what it, you know, how dark the world can be and how hard the world can be. And so when you're faced with that, like especially as a younger person, if you end up going to another country or maybe if you're born another country, and you have to see that and you have to experience that level of atrocity that exists. you know you start making fun of things right because it's the it's the only way to get through it in a with a level of resilience

right like where you're not it doesn't crush you it doesn't cause you to spiral into despair because you have to function and in the military especially you know if you're in a combat type role or environment you can't afford to sit there and go, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, this is so great.

Like you have to move through it and you have to complete your mission. Otherwise, you get killed or somebody you care about gets killed or your mission gets messed up. And so, and that's one way to do it, right, is to make fun of it. As dark as it may be and as insensitive as it may be, like, that's how you deal and that's how you cope. Absolutely. Um, though it's very common. I,

go ahead. It's very common. I just saying I added that to my book and I thought it was important to kind of explain certain. For sure. That's a great comment. I actually put a little note here like, uh, so I make, uh,

what is it? I clip out things for a five or ten minute thing. And I, I make a little YouTube shorts. Something you just got to do as a creator. It's, it's a part advertising, part clicks,

you know, um, but I think this is a very, and so I try to highlight things that are important psychological principles. that come up in conversation and share that with the audience. This idea of dark humor, but also the first world problems. I mean, it's two fantastic topics.

It is very common in, say, military and police work in among EMTs and emergency room doctors, surgeons, the entire medical profession psychology as well, dark humor. The idea that we see so much human tragedy that it is not conducive to function, to, to it's not what am i trying to say it doesn't help you get the job done if you wallow in the misery of it it's there you've got a that and that feeling is a natural reaction is going to happen it's like a lot of these coping skills it was what they are or adaptive mechanisms are related to restorative function uh restoring function in that way um grief misery uh wallowing and tragedy or that intense feeling that that we get out of compassion and watching people suffer and just hating it,

we got to do something with it. And what we very often do, a lot of people turn into it. That's why a lot of people go from being, you know, sad about something to be angry about something. Anger is a little more empowering, functional, driven feeling. But the flip side of this, well, if you don't want to go to a place of anger where you're raging, that has its place, you go to a place of humor and it discharges the, tragic, you know, core, core of the thing by minimizing it and saying, well, let's turn this into a positive experience that helps us compartmentalize it a little bit better.

That's it. So, yeah, and a lot of people might say that some of those, there is a valid concern that it does not become, what is it, disrespectful or minimizing of the experience itself. So people say outside a certain core understanding of what that is and how it works, might look at that kind of joking and go, oh my God, that's not funny. You can't laugh about that. I'm like, no, no, you have to laugh about it or it becomes crippling. There's just no two ways.

Well, I think that that's part of the problem. And it touches on, you know, a major dynamic, I guess, that exists today, which is the whole censorship of comedians and just in general of anyone, right? Because look, there's a fine line between humor that is degrading. Yeah. Intentionally just, you know, putting someone down and that, like, mean and spiteful. And humor that's just dark. but based in experience.

And I think that what's interesting to me, like I will periodically, when I write tweets on social media or if I'm writing a blog entry or something like that, I have to be very careful. Like I censor myself because I'm like, how is somebody who doesn't, has never had this experience,

has never dealt with X, Y, or Z. How are they going to perceive it? And what's the backlash for that going to be? And I think that in a lot of ways, again, when that kind of backlash is suppressing just kind of spiteful hatred, that's understandable. But when that backlash is against truth, I'd say. Yeah, against truth.

and against kind of just dealing with things and from people who don't experience it, who don't know what it is to deal with it, I think it's very misplaced. And, you know, again, you have to be able to laugh at yourself. You have to be able to laugh at the world because there are beautiful and amazing and wonderful things in this world that are interesting

and experiences that people should have, but there is also a tremendous amount of darkness and evil and just horrible, heinous people that exist. And, you know, if you're just going to go around, and this is part of this first world problem, right, if all you're going to do is get outraged by everything that seems to you like it might be mean, then you need to go out.

and live a little bit, right? Like, you need to go see some dark, dark shit. And just experience that and then come back and re-evaluate your stance. Because, again, if you're this sheltered, like, living in a bubble individual and everything offends you and everything seems mean, and it's not purely uplifting and purely wonderful. Like, you need to go out and see the world. That's kind of how I look at it, right?

And I think to me one of the biggest things is there's a fine line between being like an advocate or a supporter or a group, especially for minorities, whether you're talking about ethnic minorities or LGBTQ or any of that stuff. right and then just being someone who tears apart anyone and everyone who dares to say to ask a question that you know seems like it might be implying that there may be something invalid about your belief system oh yeah right like you're allowed to have your beliefs and that's wonderful everybody should have their own kind of beliefs but

if you're just going to rage on everyone, which kind of goes back to this anger, you know, reaction, you're just going to rage on anyone who, you know, dares ask a question. Yeah. And then you're the one who's wrong.

You are the problem. You're the issue, in my opinion. And those are the people that really need to have a reality check and, and, you know, stop this kind of it's like this whole woke mentality yeah it's like you're you're what how dare you oh yeah well i'm a human being i'm allowed to ask questions and well that i sure shit i'm allowed to disagree i do you remember uh someone who's studied history and philosophy and whatnot i keep

wanting to say that it was a manual Kant but i don't think it was sorry not cont uh i keep thinking it's John Locke, but I'm pretty sure it's not who said, I may, I may disagree with what you say that I will defend to the death your right to say it. No, I've, I've got that saved on my phone as a, as a meme, and I've posted it a bunch of times, and the first name that jumped to head is Voltaire, and it's not, but that's what made me think of, because he said a lot of good stuff. I always think it's Locke, but I know it's not lock. Well, there's John, and here's what I think, because there's John Locke, but I think

it might be John Adams, like one of our founding fathers type of figures that said it. Someone in that, I'm gonna look it up now. I should flash it on the screen. It was this guy, you know,

but we'll see if I remember to do that. Yeah, no, no, well, that's why I'm very much on the free speech absolutist side of things.

I mean, I don't get into politics on this too much, but lately more, because that's what it just comes up in conversation, because we're dealing with it. What is the quote?

You may not have an interest in politics, but politics has an interest in you. So we're going to, We're going to have these cultural clashes over what's the right thing to do, the right way to understand something. It's going to happen. But, I mean, broad strokes on that side is a lot of what I've seen happening, too, it's manipulation of the urge to be compassionate and protective for the purpose of specific political goals. That it isn't actually protecting. it's the it's the lie that the structure or control is being imposed for protecting when it's

really serving a different purpose so that's where I get into the ideas of like a lot of the debates I have with people say on on Twitter and whatnot so yeah hey I'm on Twitter if you if you if you just want to focus on the dream things don't follow me on Twitter because I yeah you'll get posts once in a while we get my politics too my my libertarian libertarian leanings um I as you were talking an idea came to my head which was to explain a phenomenon where we both want the same goal, but we are at odds over the best way to approach it or solve it. And one person is advocating a specific conception of the idea and a specific solution based on that conception. I come along and say, hey, I think your conception is wrong and therefore the solution

is also wrong. And they go, why are you hateful? And I'm like, no, no, no, this isn't about hate. So it's just these manipulative sophistry. It's like, no, no, we want the same. Well, we don't want the same result, actually. We want good result in this category. And we might say broadly, you know, people being, you know, respected and accepted and not oppressed or, you know, the buzzwords. We're seeking a positive outcome. Yeah, yeah.

And so that's where I get into a lot of debates of like, well, we'll do, you know, neutrally. We'll do, you know, the libertarian thing. along those lines of good conception there's something that okay I ramble and stumble because I'm trying to remember there is a logical fallacy informal and it it's you know I think it's called

argumentum ad governum which is basically the accusation that hey if you don't want government to do something that means you're opposed to the thing itself no so I want no one to be starving and hungry I don't want you to be robbed at gunpoint to, you know, rob Peter to pay Paul.

I want a different way to solve that problem. And then that's where you get into people saying, well, then you just don't, libertarians are heartless. They don't care about feeding the poor. Like, yeah, yeah, I want the poor to be fed too. I just don't want to steal from other people to do it. That's two wrongs.

Don't make a right. That kind of a thing, you know. So we get into a lot of those debates where, but then it devolves into that thing of the accusations of, well, you just don't care. That'll never work. And like, I don't know what to tell you. I just don't want to hurt anybody in the process of trying to help.

someone. Yeah, it's, it's, it's unfortunately, it's a difficult, uh, line sometimes because when you're, you know, one of the issues is that, uh, like I love to play devil's advocate, right? Oh yeah. It's, uh, it's one of my favorite things to do. Uh, so, and, and if, if any of your listeners don't understand the term, right, is I will argue on the, um, the side of a point that I will that I may disagree with yeah right sometimes vehemently it's very useful approach yeah I feel it's important to understand the you know the counter argument and so sometimes I will and unfortunately like on Twitter or any you know places like that there's no way to bring that into context right so somebody posts something like hey we should feed

all the hungry people by you know by taking money from everyone else and you then reply or I you know reply well but is that really a good thing to do and here are some

challenges with doing that yeah if you're playing devil's advocate there's really no way to to kind of create that context because you have such a short you know there's such a short

amount of information that you can write with you know whatever it is 250 characters or whatever Twitter allows so to me it's you know you try to make your point as concisely as possible

but unfortunately a lot of your meaning and intent is lost in that. And then people kind of take that and they're like, oh, look, this guy hates starving people. And it's like, no, no, no, no. That's not what I said. It's kind of missing the point of the discussion. Right.

And the flip side of that, and I've had it done to me where I've responded to someone that, you know, the, what was it? It was something about like the elite not paying their fair share, you know, or something like that. Like I was trying to, and, you know, they're like, oh, you know, this guy's a communist. And it's like, no, no, no, no. I didn't say that there's anything wrong with someone being able to drive a Lamborghini, right? Like, it's fine, right? If you've done something to earn your money, that's great. But if you've earned your money by stealing from people legally.

That's still wrong, right? Like not, not everything. And so, you know, you have to, people forget a lot of times that laws that may allow something to be done legally are still wrong, right? Like once upon a time, slavery was legal. Oh, yeah. That doesn't make it right. The law is no metric of morality. It is completely, it should be, but it is.

not. They are not synonymous. That's it. That's a big deal. Yeah, just because something is legal doesn't mean as good. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean as bad. Right. Yeah, it was one's illegal to run away. Yeah. No, exactly. And the law is reactive, right? Like, there was

a, I had a professor who basically said you can learn a lot about a culture and the problems that they were dealing with based on their laws. Yeah. And Like one of the things, because here's the thing, you're not going to make a law making something illegal if it's not an issue. Yeah.

If we did not have, and so like one of the things was, and I didn't do my research on this, by the way, so if I'm wrong, please correct me. This was just the example of my professor used, was that Puritans had a lot of issues with unwanted prices. pregnancies and abortions. And, you know, this is a group of people that a lot of times, like, if you ask them, like, oh, they were holy and righteous and that or da, it doesn't mean they didn't have problems with, you know, like, because why would you make abortion illegal if no one is doing it? Yeah. Right.

Why would you make drugs illegal if no one is selling them, right? If, like, there are all sorts of different kind of things. And I had a friend of mine who told me that I was crazy because I said that. And I was like, okay, what laws do we have are in teleportation into women's locker rooms? Right. Now, you know why? Because nobody's teleporting into women's locker rooms. Literally doesn't exist.

Right. By that token, no one is doing it. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So now if there was, right, if we all of a sudden, you know, what's his name? Elon Musk and Rents teleportation device.

Then suddenly, you're right. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure he's working on. It's a, you know, they got that whole quantum entangled thing for, uh,

communication, which is kind of a teleportation. Make one specific vibration here and a, vibration happens over here at the same time. And you can, uh, that reminds me of the Star Trek the idea of the subspace communication. That's kind of what it is.

I think we're going to have communication like the instantaneous between Earth and Mars. No. radio signal travel time someday. I don't know. I'm a big, big on speculative sci-fi type of stuff. Anyway.

That could be your next book. Right? Well, I've had my own ideas for a fantasy sci-fi crossover type of thing. And I've sat down and write it a few times. And maybe you could talk about this idea too is I don't know whether I got bored of the idea or whether what I was writing was crap. And I wasn't even entertaining myself.

like I was inspired and moved by these different things. And then when I write, start to put it on paper, I was just like, I didn't want to do this. This isn't good. This isn't, I'm not enjoying this.

Or maybe it's me in the process or, I don't know if you have any hints or tips or tricks for people who are like, I want to be a writer, but I start writing and I'm like, I get bored by the process or I, the material starts boring me because it's familiar to me. I don't know if you experienced that yourself and had to work through it in some way, if there is a way to work through it.

Um, I have, I've had chapters. that I've written that as I was reading, like rereading to do the editing and all of that. And I was like, this is getting really boring. And so, but at the same time, the information in it was in a lot of what, you know, it was very pertinent to advancing the story. And so what I realized was that, A lot of times all it takes is a shift in setting or a shift in, you know, how things are taking place.

So for me, the first thing that I did was I added, like I basically made it remote, at least in part, and I shifted. So the conversation was just kind of very revealing of some of the, things that happened. Again, historical facts in my book. And it was a conversation that was taking place inside this, you know, military compound in a briefing room. And it was like two very long chapters of just this conversation and back and forth questions. And all of the things that were happening and asked, they were important. But it was really boring because you're just like, this person says this. This next character says that.

Then this character asks this. And it was just ongoing. And so what I did was, I shifted the setting. I threw in, I rearranged it. Like, I broke it up into more chapters. I rearranged it. And I took some of the characters, put them on. a plane where they were having like a remote you know they were remoting in i was able to add some

humor as a result um you know and so i just you know a lot of it is breaking it up and rearranging it and that actually took me like a month to do that uh in real world time like it took me a month to to rearrange the chapters uh and make sure that nothing was revealed in this one chapter that wasn't supposed to be revealed or conflicted with something later. So it's challenging, but that's what I did. Because, again, it wasn't that the information was boring, but the setting was boring. Yeah. And so that's one thing.

The other thing that I want to say that I think is very important is, if you're bored with it, chances are your reader will be board with it? That was my concern. Like this is just isn't good. So maybe it. Well, I mean, but it may be good. It's just how it's presented may not be good. Right. Like I've had so I've

like interestingly enough I've always hated the subject of history. Hated it. Like I just I took a history class in college and it was the worst class of like terrible terrible experience. And then

I went back to college years later and I was just dreading like part of the reason like it actually took me years to go back to college to finish my degree was part of it was I hated history like I just didn't want to take any more history classes so much memorizing names and dates right that's oh it was terrible yeah yeah and then I got this professor who uh and now it's been well over a decade and he and our still friends were in contact and we could go have coffee together periodically and discuss the world and all the things that are happening. But he was amazing, right? Like he made the same boring, stupid, you know, whatever that I had no interest in learning. He made it interesting and engaging and fascinating. And I took as many history courses with him as I possibly could. you know, to fill my credits and do everything that I needed to do to graduate. Because of how he presented the information and how engaging he made, like, it was legitimately

interesting. So a lot of times it's not the information, it's not the subject, it's who's presenting it to you, and how are they doing it. So if you were bored with what you were writing, think about what other ways you can present the same information. Because if you took my book and you took some of the concepts that I talk about, and there are a lot of different ones, whether it's about morality or just hypothetical, theoretical, you know, fantasies and whatever, and you just wrote them down one after the other, I mean, yeah, they're interesting concepts, but it would be boring shit to read them. You would like sit there and be like, okay.

You know, I'm trying to reading this. More of a plot synopsis than actually the telling of a story. Yeah. Right. But when you are like, when you have, when the character telling this, you know, explaining this concept is some kind of a mythical or, or. you know, creature that's existed on earth forever, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Then it's like, ooh, that's, that's, that's like interesting, right? So who says it is just as important as what they say?

And to me, like I, I mean, go back to humor, I think humor is so important. So if you can make it funny, then, like, it's great. it doesn't always have to be ominous, it doesn't always have to be boring, it doesn't have to be dry, like, you know, spice it up, make it funny. Even if it's a serious topic, make it funny, who cares? Yeah. And if you're, not everybody's going to like it, right? Like, every person who's read my book thus far, as even people who don't know me or have anything, they owe me nothing, you know, they may not even like me very much. I've heard nothing but positive feedback, right?

Which is wonderful, and I'm happy about that. But I know full well that eventually there are going to be people who read it who are like, this sucks. Yeah. Right? You need to stop writing. That's inevitable. Yeah.

Yeah. It's going to happen. whether it's because they disagree with the, with the value set or the morals or the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or just personally, they don't find it engaging for whatever reason. Because if they are, it's not right for them. That's, I think 90% of our disagreements or problems with people is, comes down to aesthetics in a lot of ways.

Why just don't like that? Fair enough. What are you going to do? Yeah, you're allowed to not like it. And the thing is, that's what makes the world great. Because if everyone liked the same thing, the world would be really, freaking land. We would live in this world where everyone would wear the same thing, everybody would

tell the same stories like it would never change. And so, you know, you have to, they say that your taste changes every like five to seven years. And so I make it a point to try things that I know I hate every once in a while, right? not because, you know, and sometimes I'm like, wow, I actually really like this now. And I used to hate it. Like, I mean vehemently hate it. And now I like it.

I enjoy it. A great analogy for that is, so you're related to the book and the setting and the idea of presenting the same information in a different way to make it more engaging or interesting. I used to have the same experience you're also talking about with, say, foods, hated Brussels. hated Brussels sprouts as a kid. And now actually really like them, but only if they're prepared by being roasted in an oven. So you cut them in half and you toss them in some oil and you sprinkle some garlic salt and parmesan cheese on them

and you roast them face up. And man, they come out crispy and delicious. You dip them in a little bit of ranch. That is presenting the same thing in a new form that actually gives it better texture taste. And also something I use in hate. and now actually rather like. Very interesting.

Still not a big fan of salads in general, but, you know, something you never, something you never, yeah, I love a good steak. I, I couldn't ever be vegan or vegetarian

because I don't think I can ever walk away from, from a well-prepared steak. Oh, yeah. You know, not well done. Yeah, medium rare,

is depending on the color, right? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Yep, medium rare. Not quite, uh, yeah. it. No, no, no. I, I just, I laugh at that when I, like, I go to places and I like, I'd like my steak media, well done. And it's like, what is wrong with you?

Yeah. What? Just order chicken. I've heard an expression. A well, a well done steak is medium rare. That's how you do a steak well. It's not well done. It's not well done. Anyway, just an expression I heard once. You get someone being clever. I am, I came across another guy and they had just random stuff. A guy on the end of the end. A guy on the end. who said in his Twitter bio was aspiring aphorism short witty phrases. And I've decided to, for myself, that I am an aspiring alliterative aphorist. I like alliteration. So whenever I can, I like making my phrases, you know, rhyme or start with all different of the same letters. I don't know, stiff playing with words like that. I've always been into the writing and literature side of things.

and especially the editing and formatting stuff. I mean, just speaking of sci-fi and fantasy in general, I can remember being 13, 14 years old and making my own custom Dungeons and Dragons character sheets because the one at the back of the book, I didn't like. I didn't like the way it was formatted, so I changed it to be my own thing. And I was doing that.

I was doing formatting of pages of text and in Microsoft Word way, way back when, in the olden days in the 90s. So I've always been doing this kind of thing, and now I'm trying to turn it into more of a, well, my day job, basically. Yeah. No, it's good. I think, and this is kind of what I, you know, so when I write, I like to, I like to take ideas that are sporadic, right? and then shape them.

So if you imagine somebody taking a piece of clay, you know, and shaping it and whatever, to me that's like that that's kind of what I do with my ideas because I'll be driving and I'll be listening to a song and it's kind of the beat or the melody or some like a word in the song that I might have heard a hundred times just trigger something, right? And I'm like, oh, this would be kind of cool. And I will kind of just ruminate on it.

it and expand on it and see how I can plug it into the rest of the story. And so a lot of the chapters in my book really just originated as these purely sporadic ideas because I, you know, I'd be like, oh, if this kind of creature existed, how would it have come to, you know, how would it come to be? And what would it's, you know, if we take the, mythical, you know, just the purely mythical side out of it and look at it from a combination of mythical and science, you know, in science, like, how could we interplay those things? So, a lot of times it's when I, you know, when people ask me, like, oh, do you outline your stuff, do you do X, Y, and Z? And it's like, no, I don't. I allow the ideas to kind of,

flow and then you know and sometimes they're inspired by you know something I saw maybe I was watching you know maybe I was playing a video game or watching what's it called

you know one of the Marvel movies right and I saw a special effect that you know in my mind I'm like that's what when my character shoots a fireball that's what it looks like, right? Yeah, yeah.

And that makes me think of, okay, right? Like this is now a character that's wielding fire and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So how would I describe that with words as opposed to, you know, because I saw this flash or whatever that had a certain color in it? And what word would I, you know, what I, like that word pops into my mind.

It's like, oh, I want to, build around that and I want to build an entire scene that's leading up to this you know spark this flash this explosion and I use this word to describe it and like I've literally written entire things just based on that like it's these sporadic inspiration so so I think that you know when you write sometimes just to kind of go back and to add that piece to it. If you're writing something that's boring, don't delete it, right? Save it because you never know.

Something might trigger this idea, like just one word that you can throw in there that's going to just tie the, it'll be like the magnet, right, that you drop in a bunch of shards of metal and it just kind of pulls everything together. Gotcha. Just, you know, sometimes it just comes to you. Yeah, for sure. And that, I mean, we still have no idea. I've talked to so many people on this subject.

One of the recent episodes was a guy who was talking about the concept of creativity itself and where it comes from. And, you know, that kind of logic versus more inspirational, intuitive side of things. You never know where inspiration is going to come from. That's one of the reasons the Greeks imagined it as a, you know, described it as the muses that sit on Mount, Mount Olympus, that kind of thing, which is interesting. You know, and so they, it's also fascinating the way they conceived of, of humans interacting with the gods or the way the gods influenced them. And because we have, you know, in modern psychology has, has differentiated into, you know,

calling it different things, but it's, it's kind of the same conception. I mean, we think of love, say, like, Aphrodite. as a force which moves us, which comes into us from the outside that affects us and who we are. We don't think of it, you know, so they conceive of these as the gods, you know, man's urge to make war comes from the god, Ares, you know, that kind of thing. So the muses would then be where ideas and inspirations come from, these thought forms implanted or put into our head, which kind of brings me back. We go, well, they had a, I think it was Cleo, the muse of history.

And that brought me back to our discussion of history, too. And my, my problem with it is that I do love, I do love works written by people because you can say, this person said this thing at this time. Here it is. Bam, it's a book. Then we get into other things where it's like, it's a game of telephone. And how do we know the narratives are being told? That was always my biggest problem with history is like, well, who, who says?

And now why should we trust them? Why should we believe that actually happened the way they said it did for that reason? Here were the results. It's, yeah. Then that, I mean, ultimately at the end of the day. I wasn't there. I don't know. So for me, I put history in the context of maybe that happened. I don't know.

It's a cool story. Well, you know the saying that history is written by the winner. Yeah. And there's no way to know sometimes. And there's some, actually, I retweeted something today that was like, um, certain stories have been included in, um, textbooks, history textbooks for high school kids that tell a story about recent political events that I don't think is. accurate. Now, I don't have to get any more specific than that to just say,

uh, I know for a fact, some of those asserted facts are not true in my estimation. So this is, but, but there's kids 20 years for now or there's kids growing up today that are going to read those and go, oh, that's the truth. That's history. Like, it's not. Uh, and how long has that been going on? That, that really bothers. But, but then what do you do with, you know, what's the authoritative source? Uh, well, I guarantee you that if the access power is during World War II, had come out on top. Yeah. Right.

Then, you know, I would imagine that something like the Holocaust would have been equated and presented in a similar way to the way that we now talk about dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. It was necessary for the Lord. Right. Or tool. Yep. And justified. Exactly. Exactly.

Right? And so depending on who's writing it, right, depending on who, you know, who came out on that side. And so it's unfortunate, right? We can, I mean, hindsight is always 2020, and we can say, oh, they could have done this, we could have done that. You know, but that's, but you have to tell history,

in my opinion, and that's one of the things that bothers me so much is, I hate the perversion of history. Yeah. Because to me, like, you can talk about, what would make history interesting is to look at, like, the causes and effects of, you know, how this event triggered this event, which might have led to this or whatever. Yeah. It's also important to remember the context, right? We, you know, the world was very different.

But what I hate is when they start perverting history to, and I call it perversion, right, like very intentionally that. You don't get to change the story because the original story was, you know, morally deprived or because your morals today disagree with what it was back then. This was not my idea. I watched a YouTube video that I wish I had saved. I can't remember what it is now. But the guy went over the story of, that is presented in the new movie that just came out called The Woman King. Oh, yeah.

And he like went through. And I've actually looked up some of the things that he said, to see like if historically that is accurate, or if he was just one of these people who, you know, was just making up something because he didn't like it. And so, like, I actually went through and I looked at some of the history behind it. And I didn't look up every single fact, but the ones that I did look up, he was very genuine about, like he was very accurate with what the history of it says. and you know the fact is that the the quote unquote woman king right like first of all they had a male king

um and second of all women were essentially in that kingdom treated kind of like um like he did have an elite all female fighting force right like that was true except that um you know they would go around and enslave people and then sell them to the white people Yeah. They were not the hero. And they got even, not even remotely. And to my knowledge,

it got their ass kicked multiple times and eventually, you know, finally in a way, you know, the final ass kicking and they were, anyway. But as you were saying, the narrative being sold to us in that story is not historically accurate. It's being served up for political purposes, which.

Right. And I'm like, that's right. Like, there are plenty of, of good historical, you know, whether it's historical,

or whether it's, you know, fantasy, you know, or mythology that, you know, comes from, that comes from Africa. Oh, yeah, yeah. But why not tell that story? Why do you need to twist this story, make the, you know, to fulfill this bullshit narrative, right, that you're spinning because, what, some people on social, media think that like that's great or the people you know in certain organizations think that's great no like stop it we all did bad things right i don't care what ethnicity you look at they all did bad things right yeah i mean you know america um has had slavery and and it was bad but um it wasn't only african slaves right like we've we've had other ethnicities that we've enslaved

and every nation on the planet virtually at some point in its history has had slavery of one form or another and at the very least they've had some kind of a caste system where groups of people were put down and treated like dirt so you know you don't need to overlook that I'm not saying don't talk about it talk about it absolutely it's important to discuss those things it's important to discuss why they're tragic and why they're bad. Because as we as we grow and we evolve as a as a population, right, regardless of what background you come from, I think it's important that our morals and values grow with that as well.

But at the same time, history is history. You don't get to change it. Yeah. To perpetuate your your story. Yeah, because if we don't know what actually happened, we don't know, we can't learn from it. I mean, you can't conveniently rearrange facts in the past. You know, that's one of those things where it's like we are all the descendants of both the conquered and the conquerors.

It's in, we are, there's no, you know, and go that whole idea of tracing, you know, genealogical blood, blood guilt back through the ages to punish people today. It's a bad idea. It's a bad idea. No. You know, and here's, you know, this inspired me to think of something. So I'm looking at the, again, this is another one of those political topics that's that, you know, get into arguments about on Twitter. And we look at the idea of Disney casting a black actress as Ariel in a Dutch or Danish, whatever, uh, fairy tale.

And it's like, I think that's insulting for, for two reasons. It is disrespectful to the legacy of the, of the, um, original author and culture that produced that story. And, you know, the other people have written similar stories. There's been stories about mermaids for ages, but he wrote that one in that way because it was his conception based on the influences of his culture. and at that particular time and place. And there is.

It's what you have to deal with. Yeah. Yeah. It's like here's, here's me telling a story that's relevant to my unique circumstances. So what I've been advocating for is stop taking Western European stories and putting black face on them.

I think that's insulting also to African folks because there are African fairy tales you could be telling. Now, I've been saying this for over a year or two now. And that's, that's my focus of criticizing those, you know, wokeification of movies from,

from that angle. Netflix. Brand new little short limited run series just popped up African folktales featuring African actors directed by African directors telling traditional stories of their homeland. I've got it on my cue to watch. This is what I've been asking for. This is how you do it.

You find other stories from other places and you tell those. Tell them. We're eager for something different. Don't do the 17th freaking remake of Little Mermaid. You just stop. Yeah, so there's, here's what I will say. I will say two things. Number one, I agree with you.

Number two, I can see why they do it. Right. And the reason that they do it is because it's a business. At the end of the day, anybody who thinks that Disney is woke is delusional. Disney is not woke. Disney is a business that rides the popular wave. Right now, woke is the popular wave. They're riding it.

If you, you know, if tomorrow aliens land on Earth and that becomes the new rage, they will forget all the ethnic stuff. They will forget all the LGBTQ stuff. And they're going to ride the wave of aliens. Yeah. If that's what happens, right? They are a business. they know what sells, they know what has sold.

And when you look at making a motion picture, especially in today's world, with all the added expenses for a studio like Disney, right? They're talking about sinking somewhere between $50 and $100 million into a motion picture, even if they own all the rights to it. They're not going to do that because they're like, here's a cool story from Africa, you know, from, from Zimbabwe, and it's popular in Zimbabwe.

And in Zimbabwe, lots of people know this story. And if we made a motion picture out of it, everyone in Zimbabwe would watch it. You think they're going to do that? No. You look at it and they go, and they go, how many millions of dollars have other motion pictures or animations or books that tell this story from Zimbabwe? how much money have they made? Oh, none, right? Like, no one's ever heard of it.

So from a purely business point of view, it's a gamble, right? Yeah. The Little Mermaid is a Trident True Story. Mm-hmm. Right? At least that has made. Yeah. Well, and it's made hundreds of millions of dollars in different iterations, right?

True. So that's one thing. The other thing is that woke is cool right now. That's the new, you know, that's the, that's the, that's the wave that all the social media influencers are pushing. So take those two things together and you've got a recipe for success, at least on paper. Yeah. At least in the short term, too. And then we might find out it doesn't actually work.

Yes. Yeah, which I kind of hope that. I hope people being disingenuous like that of like, hey, what if we just slap this rainbow flag on it? Now people will buy our Pepsi, that kind of thing. And it's like,

once they catch on, you're doing it for instrumental reasons, not for real moral reasons. What does that show that's where they made the, I think it was it wasn't in a Netflix show or maybe it was a prime show where they made the Queen of England where she was black? Yeah, might have been Amazon or something like that.

Amazon's got an unfortunate tendency to be doing that to history. Yeah. Yeah. Just tell a different story. Why? But here's my thing, right? Like, let's play that game, right? Let's play the game where we swap out ethnicities.

Well, what happens when, you know, Pocahontas, right? and comes in and we take all of the, you know, all of the evil white men who came in and we make them black. Oh, yeah. Right. What are you going to, like, nobody would, why is that not, if we're okay swapping out ethnicities in history, then we have to do it the same way, right? Yeah. Are they going to make some kind of documentary or even just, you know, take, what is it, who did it? I want to say it was Marvel.

There's all sorts of movies, especially, you know, people go back in time, right? And they, at some way or shape, way or form end up in Germany in World War II. We're going to make a black Hitler? Right. for those movies because nobody's going to do that so to me it's like don't do it right

stop insulting people by implying that their you know their stories aren't good enough because there are a lot of really interesting stories that come out you know come out of China and India and Africa and pick your

South America right use those characters build them up If you want to diversify people, because that's the idea, right? The idea is that we need to, if you expand, and you know this from psychology, I'm sure, right? If you expose people to different things, then they take it from the space of othering, right? And now it kind of goes into their space, and people are more comfortable with it and they're less afraid of it or whatever. and there's less discrimination.

That's fine, right? But do it, yeah, do it in a positive way, right? Like bring in those stories and tell them in an interesting way. Like Disney and Netflix and all these guys, they have some of the world's most brilliant screenwriters. Are you going to tell me that they can't take an African fairy tale or folk tale and make a beautiful and interesting film about it that is going to be successful because if you're not doing that as as as Disney as a giant corporation what you're essentially

doing is you're like that to me is insulting as a you know if I were um if I were of a different ethnicity I would be insulted because I'd be like wait a minute so the only way that I can have a good as a Chinese person is if I just replace a white guy, that's the only way my story is going to be good. Yeah, it's not good. I mean, I like to look at it from the flip side of thing, too, which is, I mean, imagine we, yeah, we do a historical biopic, as they say of someone, and it's, uh, Ryan Gosling plays Martin Luther King.

Right. It just, it just doesn't know, you know, or, uh, what, cat, the other image I saw was cat Dennings as Rosa Parks or something like that. like that. It's like, it's just, it's just wrong. It's wrong either way to do it that way. I mean, show, depict the person, a person accurately. They do the same thing with the, you know, the Queen of England or whatever, these different historical figures. It's like, you know, I've seen, I've seen some interesting playing with those different ideas, too, of, I saw a play, a Romeo and Juliet production down at the, so I'm in Portland, Portland, I've been down

to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. They did a, um, Romeo and Julie. where the entire cast was, to say, racially diverse. I mean, they didn't, and that's fine. Because, but here's how they showed the difference. It wasn't showing the difference of race. Like, okay, everyone's all different race. Take that off the table. There's ways to present it where you say, okay, here's what,

here's what you focus on based on what is actually different. The Juliet side of the, of her, her, the Montague family was, no, it was Juliet Capulet, Romeo Montague, sorry. Um, the, uh, the Capulet side, I remember, right. I mean, I remember the last, I, I get them confused all the time. Yeah, yeah, I think it was Romeo Montague. Anyway, but the, uh, the Capulet side were all in traditional Elizabethan or, or, or, or Middle Ages dress like you would expect that a Shakespeare play. The Romeo side were all in modern day business attire, slacks and suits and jackets and his family. Oh, that's kind of cool.

And, and the, instead of, uh, swordsmen as their, as their, as their, or their, you know, family retainers. They had dudes with the sunglasses and the little earpiece looking, looking around like secret security. Yeah. So it was like they, they took the, they made it a completely diverse cast. Everybody said the distinct, this distinction isn't ethnic or whatever. The distinction is these, they're, they're, they're out of touch by in time.

Like the distinction was this is, here's the, the star cross thing is this is never going to work between these two families because they're from 300 years apart. in a sense. Now, they didn't bring time travel into it, but they're putting this into your head of like, so there's a lot of creative different ways to do. And this is the thing too, as we get in the whole diversity, equity and inclusion thing. There's right ways and wrong ways to do that stuff. And again, it's like more of a, I don't oppose necessarily some good outcomes, but the methodology and where you put those things in the, in the hierarchy of what's actually important, I don't think those belong in the top three anywhere. Maybe in the top 10 in some instances, but,

Those are things that are best, I think, to happen naturally as a result of things. Well, equity, look, equity and equality. Or not the same. Well, no, they're not the same at all. There is also, you know, and I am definitely not the first person to highlight this, but I've been talking about it for a very long time before it became popular on social media and, you know, YouTube and wherever else. but demanding the same outcome is not the same thing as demanding the same opportunity.

No, very different. Right. Very different. And that, I think, is what is missing from, I think, that's one of the things that's so different between the days social justice warriors and the social justice warriors of, you know, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 years ago, is that people have historically demanded the same opportunity and the same treatment. And that's absolutely right. I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I don't care what ethnicity, what gender, what, you know, sexual orientation, what anything you are.

You should be treated based on being a human being, right? It doesn't matter. where, and you're, you know, you should not be denied anything that I'm not denied or you're not denied or whoever, right? Yeah. Where you have a problem is that the today's society is like, oh, well, these people should have all the same stuff and they should have the same jobs. And it's like, they're not applying for it. If they're not doing it. If they're not, if they're being denied the opportunity, that's wrong. If they're being denied because they don't have the qualifications, that's not wrong.

Yeah. I used to own my own business. And if you think that I would hire someone because I needed to check some box that said that I have so many women and so many men, almost all of my employees were female because it was an after school program. that, you know, worked with kids. And I've had, I had a couple of male instructors. They were the only ones who applied. Right? There's going to be a different.

Everyone else who applied. Yeah. Everyone else who applied was female. But if you walked into my company, right, and you didn't know me at all, like if you took me out of the equation, if someone just looked at the distribution of employees of my company, they would say that I was discriminating against men because I had too many women working for me. And it's like, but that's all, that's who's applying. Yeah.

I can't, you know, my goal as a company is not to hire people. My goal as a company is to fill my client's needs. Yeah, deliver the product. Right. It's to deliver the product, to teach the information, to deliver the course. So if, you know, if the only people who are applying, are of a given gender, then that's who I'm going to hire, right? My job as a company is not to make sure that I hire the right people, you know,

the right distribution of the, you know, ethnic and gender curve. Like, that's not, it's not what it's about. A business's job is to be a business is to deliver its product and serve its clientele. And so I always laugh about that. And it's like, yeah, if you are blatantly discriminating, like, if I have, applied to work for you and you're like, I'm not hiring you because you're black. Absolutely. Right. Like that is a major issue. And if you're like, I'm not hiring you because, you know, you're an idiot who doesn't know, you know, I need someone who has medical expertise and you have

none, right? The only medical expertise you have is how to put a bandaid on your finger. Yeah. I'm not hiring you. Sorry, man. We've gone to. There's something out there called horseshoe theory and it um it has its own realm of thought but the concept is also and there's a lot of people that argue against it doesn't exist etc in that specific way but there's a way that sometimes you go from a bad idea through a good idea all the way back around to a bad idea and they don't it's not a full circle but you end up on the bottom and so like it makes a horseshoe so that then that does happen the concept is valid the application is debatable but this is this is we went from someone saying I'm not hiring you because you're black to equality of, okay, now we can't use race at all.

And then someone saying, wait a minute, disparate outcome is proof of racism. Now we've come all the way back around to saying, I can't hire you because you're white. And we people are doing that is accepting black applicants only or something. I'm like, this did not solve the problem. This is not your back, your horseshoot all right. Yeah, there was a, into discrimination again. So. Yeah, there was a, there was a guy who just sued. like some major medical company.

And he was like an executive. He was like marketing, some kind of marketing executive. And he sued them because they fired him and hired two women, two women, one black and one white. And he sued them and won like $10 million because he was able to show that it was blatantly because of sex. that he was fired because they needed more women and they just decided like, hey, we're going to fire you and hire these two women. And so it's like, what do you do it? Right? This isn't about like we're going.

And look, I know that there are people again who are going to sit there and just like, well, they did the right thing because they, you know, gave jobs to a couple of women. And it's like, yeah, and this goes back to what you said, right, stealing from one person to pay another. It's not good. You took this person's, you know, this guy's livelihood, decided to give it to somebody else. That's crap. Yeah. If you wanted to expand the pie, like maybe create some more positions. Yeah.

Wait for some natural. You know, to accommodate these women. Yeah. Wait for natural attrition, keep their resumes on file. I can't tell you how many times in my life I've applied for jobs. And they're like, hey, we don't, you know, right now you're not the best fit, but we'll keep your resume on file. And some of them have actually called me back and been like, hey, you applied for this position six months ago. Are you still interested?

Oh, no, you're not because you've already found them of the job. That's fine. But, you know, but at least they do that. If you present yourself well, you do well at the interview, you don't show up wearing, you know, pajama pants and flip-flops, a lot of times, you know, you make a good enough impression. They will remember you and they will call you back. Most of the time they won't. Like, let's be real.

Most of the time they won't. But sometimes, sometimes they will. And I think that, again, like kind of to circle back, it's important to remember that as a society, we should give everyone equal access and a fair shot. Yeah, for sure. But whether or not they choose to take the shot or they actually make it, that's a very different story, right? If you go, and the way that I explain it sometimes is like,

imagine if you were at a basketball game, and they said that everybody, you know, in the front row of seats, right, gets to take a shot. And if you make the shot from the three-point line or the middle of the court, right, you get a million dollars. And you have all the different genders and, you know, ethnicities and everybody else in this row. And somebody says, I'm not going to go and take that shot. I'm not interested in it. And somebody else says, well, you know, you've got these guys here who are, you know, built and play basketball and they're built like athletes and they're better at shooting. I can't even hit the basket, right?

That's not fair. I should also get a piece of that million dollars. No, you should not. You get an opportunity to go and take that shot. if you don't make it even if it's because of you know some biological advantage that someone or disadvantage against the other

against the competition that's it you just don't you don't get to do that right now this is not the same thing as by the way I hope that this is not in any way confounded with an opinion on the whole transgender women in sports or anything like that in women's sports.

I think it's someone that's not what I'm talking about. I think if someone bored with no arms, you just can't shoot a basket physically. You're going to have to do something else. There's other opportunities for you. That's it. This is one area that's just, you know, what are you going to do? You can't run a race without legs. There's a basic minimum requirements, which this is what I was looking at too with the idea

of equality versus equity is that, you know, equality means there will be differences and outcome. And that is a good thing. It's something we should expect and endorse because different people will be interested at different levels. based on their different people have different strengths different strengths and they will put in different amounts of effort so what you want to do is say okay someone with a natural talent and they develop it and they perform well they should be able to succeed more than other people that don't have the

interest don't have the talent don't put in the work that's a that's a good system that rewards that kind of investment of effort and and attainment and it gets it benefits all of us in terms of like we get the best of the best rising to the top who say here's something I can offer to everybody because I've got I've made it happen this have instantiated this potential the equity side of thing cannot it can make absolutely everyone equal but it can only do it by cutting the tall grass you can't make a person taller but you can cut the legs off of other people and make everyone the same height it can only equalize downward and that's bad for everybody it suppresses the innovation and and natural excellence that moves us forward in a lot of different ways imagine if no one was

allowed to be any smarter than anyone else. Wow. I mean, and that's, I don't know if you remember the book, Harrison Bergeron, that was short story. They had a, it was meant to be, the funny thing about Harrison Bergeron, it was meant to be a parody of the anti-communists. Oh, I bet this is the world they believe will happen. And look at how absurd it is. And we're actually seeing that today where people are being, excellence is being handicapped for the sake of not leaving, the handicapped behind. And it's like we can include them. And I think we should. I mean, this is where I, where I fall down and I've said this before. I don't know if I've said it on this video. It's like, you don't take anything away from people who can use stairs by adding wheelchair

ramps. People who can use stairs can also use wheelchair ramps. And you just have them both. That is the quality of access without saying we're going to, okay, instead of just adding that, we're going to also require that everyone who can walk also sit to a wheelchair, whether they can walk or not. Now everyone's equal. Right. It's just, it's not fair. It's not the same. That is absolute equity. It's bad. It's bad for everybody. It's better that we, you know, just because some people can't walk, uh, we don't, we don't hurt everyone else who can. We, we, that's, that's the danger I see in, in that, in going in that direction is the, no, I agree. The disfugementional measures that it, that it,

demands that it requires in order to enact such policies. Like, that's a bad method, It's a bad outcome for everybody. It's a bad outcome for the people in the wheelchairs, too, that you make everybody use a wheelchair. Come on. All right. Well, now everybody's got a, you know, now the wheelchair ramp has a traffic jam on it, right? Yeah. Now it's not so easy for that one guy that needed it to get what he needs to get it.

Because now everyone's piled up behind him or in front of him trying to get in the same building because now we've handicapped everybody. It's like, you know, so we've got to allow for disparate outcomes and actually consider that a good thing. not a bad thing. You know, if more women want to go into teaching, great. More men want to go into biochemical engineering. Great. I want people happy in their specialty, excelling and putting effort into what they want to do,

not trying to jerry rig a predetermined outcome, you know, before, before you even start. Yeah. No, I tell people all the time, especially young people, when, you know, when the conversation goes to like, what should I go to school before? And I tell people at the time, find what you love to do, right? Forget, you know, this idea that, oh, this position pays well.

If you're miserable, it doesn't matter how much money you make. You will be miserable because you're going to spend a third of your life doing this thing that you don't like. And even if you make a lot of money for it, you're going to be a lot less happy than if you were making a little bit less money, but doing something that you couldn't wait to do. single day. Yeah. Figure out what you love. And if that so happens to be a, you know, fit some gender stereotype, then who cares, right?

It's your life. It's like people forgot that we are individuals. Like, my job is not to live my life to make everyone in the world happy. I couldn't do that if I tried. My job is to be happy, to find a world. way to be happy. Ideally, that is in a way that's a better society and it's conducive to society and doesn't hurt people, right? It becomes morally wrong when it starts to, you know, deprive other people of happiness. Yeah. But at the end of the day, what I need to look at is

what makes me happy. And if, you know, if a woman says she wants to be a stay-at-home mom, you stay-at-home mom. If that's what makes you happy and your life-allowed, for that like you know you found someone or you you have a billion dollars and you don't ever have to go to work who cares who cares that society says oh that's that's the you know stereotypical right like it doesn't matter enjoy your life and and you know try to be productive try to be helpful try to be decent and and you know make the world a better place but you know but don't forget because like i tell my daughter this all the time. My daughter is 16 now. And I tell her all the time, like, don't worry about what the

latest fat is. Don't worry about, because those things come and go. And don't worry if somebody says that they don't like that you're, you know, playing to this or playing to that. Are you happy? Because I'm, you know, I worked my butt off to do. occur the opportunity to be happy. But then I also have to step back and go, but my parents work their butts off so that I would enjoy my life.

Right? So if all I'm doing is spinning my wheels, then at what point in which generation does somebody finally get to say, oh, now I'm enjoying my life. Right.

You got to be enjoying what you're doing as you're doing it for sure. Are we going to work like eight generations, 10 generations in and bust our butts and, you know, be miserable. Is that the job? The job is like, oh, go be miserable so that maybe your kids will be happy. And then when your kids have kids, well, they need to now go be miserable so that their kids will be happy.

That is one pattern maybe we don't want to fall into. Right. But enjoy the world. But it's not a bad thing falling into patterns. And that's one thing I've learned as I've gotten older is that if you study, especially history, you study, mythology and storytelling. You start to see,

what is it? I'm going to get this wrong, but there was one ancient dramatist in antiquity of 2000 years ago. It says there's only like 47 different stories and different combinations of different elements, something like that. Don't quote me on that,

but the idea that all of us are going to repeat a pattern of some kind. There is nothing new under the science. I don't know about the ancient one. I was thinking it reminded me of Joseph Campbell and the, like, his whole thing on the hero's journey. That opened my eyes to it, and then I started looking into it.

And actually, there's a reason these mythologies are ubiquitous because the human condition is the same, period. No matter where you grow up, being human is being human. But there's also patterns to these stories, and you're going to fall into one pattern or another. You can't always break the mold. And even breaking the mold is its own kind of story. That is it that's already been captured by the storytelling process. So, you know, if you look at like, um, uh, the idea that's, uh, you know, being falling into, falling into naturally being drawn to and choosing to enact the role of a, uh, you know,

married parent in a traditional role, say, all this kind of stuff. It doesn't need to be rejected because that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a good story. I mean, that is a, that is a pattern that has been well established. And you can take different roads too. Um, and, and different, we're going to get different results. is one of the things too is like if you choose a different story it's going to end differently for you and you can choose your story that's one of the things too that allowing this to diversity of uh of choices and opportunities um you can't expect all roads to lead to the same goal if you choose not to

have a family you're going to have different results like me i don't have kids so i'll get older eventually and i mean i'm already old now but uh get even older and i won't have you know kids calling me to see how I'm doing. I won't have someone to, you know, take care of me. I might end up in a nursing home. I mean, who knows. But maybe what I can't. Or maybe you might meet some, some amazing woman who's going to have kids and who are

going to love you and, and they will be that thing, you know, that for you. Like, part of the interesting thing is you don't know, like where the world is going to go. And part of it is, again, opportunity, right? Like, there are a lot of arguments. made by people, but America is not the greatest nation in the world in a lot of ways. And statistically speaking, they are 100% correct. Like if you look at the numbers, America is not the greatest nation in the world. A lot of things, maybe not even the freest.

But we do have some of the greatest opportunities for people. And when I thought about myself as a parent, when my daughter was first born, I started thinking about what I want to give her, that I could, right? and I don't come from wealth, I don't come from, you know, anything like that. And I would not, you know, I knew that, I mean, short of something, you know, some crazy opportunity coming my way, I wouldn't be able to give her this amazing life of leisure and whatever. But what I could do is if I worked hard, I would be able to give her an opportunity to choose. Yeah.

And, you know, and the other, like, a while back she was. to tell me the bad poop, sorry. That wind's going nuts right now, yeah. Yeah, hang on one second. You're going to finish up. Let me go inside. It's like really, really loud. Yeah, hang on.

That's right. Well, while you're moving, I'll just say is, so if you, if the story you've chosen and the satisfaction in life that you want is I have,

I draw my satisfaction from providing my kid with the opportunity to choose their own path. That can be its own reward. That can be its own reward too. So, yeah, we don't need to, That's what I'm saying about stories is like you can, the more you know about different stories, the more you can consciously choose and say, well, this is a story that I know works out well because it's historically proven.

You follow the certain path. You get a certain result. And I get to choose. If that's the result I want or I want to aim for, I can choose that story. I can be in a different story. And it's like, I guess my broader point originally was there's no escaping patterns. You're going to fall into one or the others. So even the, the rejection of, say, a traditional homemaking life for a woman, you're going to fall into a different story.

You're the strunk, independent career woman who doesn't have kids till later in life, maybe doesn't get married till later in life. You're going to sacrifice something for your goal. You can't have it all. That's probably the biggest lie that women in modern days have been told is that you can have it all. And when they fail, they think it's their fault. No, you've been sold a lie. You've been told a story that's not true. that certain outcomes are possible when they're not.

Everything is choices. Everything is, and that's, it's choices, it's tradeoffs. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. Some of them are,

you know, you may have opportunities that come your way. And based on where you positioned yourself, you may not be able to take advantage of them, even if you see them clearly. And then there are opportunities that sometimes fall into your lab that you can jump on and, you know, depending on the choices you make. And you have to be ultimately the one, I think to me, one of the most important words that people have to really understand these days is accountability.

Oh, yeah. People have to be accountable. And, you know, like I said, just going back to my daughter, because she has friends. whose parents are like, you need to go to college and you need to become a doctor or lawyer and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Some of it is cultural, right? Some of it is just, you know, people who are like, this is what you have to be because I don't want you working in a factory or a Denny's as a waiter. And so my daughter, like, asked me, she's like, you know, what do you, like, what would you want me to be? And I'm like, I want you to be whatever you want.

Right. If you want to find yourself a partner and that person is going to support you, great. If you want to go work as a barista at Starbucks, awesome. If you want to go and collect garbage, great. Like, that actually pays relatively well. It does, yeah. If you want to go to school and become a geneticist, awesome. Right?

Like, whatever. But the thing is that I want her to have the opportunity to make that choice as opposed to be forced into it. For sure. Because, you know, because I didn't put in any effort to, you know, and so now she lives in some town where the only choices she has is to work as either a waitress or, you know, or be. some, you know, some trucker's wife or whatever it is. Those are her two choices in life and that's all she's got. So it's, but at the end of the day, right, like I explained to her, she's accountable. Because I'm like, look, if you choose not to go to college, then that's your choice, right?

I'm not going to force you to. I encourage it. I think it's in the society that we live in. yes there are some people who are quite successful as high school dropouts right and some of the most successful people out there never finished high school and they're still successful however the percentage of people who are high school dropouts who have become successful versus the percentage of people who are high school dropouts have failed miserably and end up you know in some really really bad places is astronomical right whereas the number of

of people who let's say chose to go to college and get their degrees and aren't successful in any way, right, and are in some horrible space versus the alternative is a much different ratio. So I'm like, look, I encourage you to go to school. I feel like it's, or go to college, I feel like that will set you up for better chances of success. Does that mean that that's the only road to success? No. at all. Right. If you, you know, you want to go make TikTok videos or whatever the new platform is today.

I don't know. You can make a living. Who knows what's coming down the pike too? Yeah, if you can do it great. But the thing is that I just want her to have a choice. That's it. Right? I don't want her to be forced into something.

Yeah. That's it. And past that. them opportunities, yeah. Yeah, and past that, it's giving her tools, right? Like, at the end of the day, I am not, I'm not oblivious to the fact that she's, you know, she's going to face difficulty, she's going to face challenges, she's going to have issues as a female, right?

In today's world that we live in, I know that. I'm not blind to it. So what can I do? Well, I can prepare her for it, and I can give her some ideas on how to deal with certain things. I can tell her what red flags to watch out for and stay away from. But I can't control what she does. It's her life at the end.

Yeah. That's where she is. I mean, one of the best advice for modern young women is probably stay off the dating apps. Just never. You know, just because it's like, well, for a lot of reasons. But it's not the best way to meet someone. It's not, I mean, hookup culture is not a good idea.

just in general. It's not making anybody happy. There are a lot of problems with that kind of stuff. But then again, maybe you've got sites that are more like, what is that, the e-harmony, where it's like we're looking to make compatible matches with people for relationship purposes.

This isn't like, you know, the 4 am. booty call type of thing, which is what a lot of this is turned into. It's a very bad idea. Meet someone in person, meet someone with common interests. You know,

meet someone through a shared experience in, in volunteering or cultural clubs or church or whatever. whatever, whatever your, whatever your thing is. Yeah. But, um, okay, we're, we're heading, we're getting close to two hours. You have a time limit today? I didn't even ask. Uh, I do.

I have a, I probably have about an hour left. That is, that, I think we can do what we need to do in that time. Um, the dog's getting a little restless. I think he wants me to take him out for a potty break. You get to take a, take a quick 10. Um, and I'll come right back. Yeah, run him around and then, uh, Benjamin the dream wizard wants to help you pierce the veil of night and show.

shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his DREAMs program features real dreamers, gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New DREAMs 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. Peanut butter. Well he'll get to us when he's ready. Um, okay, you're all set? I'm all set. Oh, you've got to readjust the hair. Big, big difference in the videos, too.

My hair used to be, I used to keep it short. I mean, the beard's always, it hasn't always been this scraggly, but. That's part of me living the story. I want to be the wizard. Well, you got to look like one. You got to look like a wizard. For sure. I have, you know, if you've read my mug.

I cannot read the text. I'm not saying I'm Batman I'm just saying no to ever see me and Batman in the same room together yes sir I should I should maybe that'll be the screen capture for the for the thumbnail

I mean I want to put your face on there but having that mug up there is actually kind of an interesting team too who's behind that one right maybe I'll do that for it's Batman clip oh yeah peanut butter I mean

peanut butter Here, there you go. Now it's not, it's not, uh, you'll, because it had some coffee stains on it, but. There you go. Very cool. It's Batman. Mean of butter.

I don't know why he doesn't have a beard. Like Batman is always clean shaven. I feel like he should have a beard. I wonder if it's, uh, part of the thing. Like, uh, in Fight Club, it's like suddenly, uh, one of the lines was suddenly, uh, they had a reason to keep your fingernails trimmed short. Maybe that's what it, for him is like a practical. No, maybe.

Maybe so, maybe so. And maybe like putting on the mask and like taking it off with the rubber, it would be really unpleasant. Something like that. That's one of our little recons like the audience does. Well, of course he has reasons. Right. Peanut butter. He's going to interrupt us one way or another.

So, okay, we get into the dream thing. So as per my usual process, I just shut up and listen. You tell me the story beginning to end and we'll see what we can make of it. So I'm ready when you are. All right, sure. So my dream, I, uh, this. This was a long time ago, probably 2012, is my guess, 2011, something like that. So the dream was that I was being chased by a bear.

And the bear was not a normal bear. It was a very weird-looking creature. In fact, it's front legs or arms. I don't know what you would call that on a bear. It had like really large elbows, almost like they were supposed to be wings or something like that, but not quite. And what was unique about it was that it was very fast and it was very smart, like intelligence smart, not just, and it was always able to catch me and find me. Because I tried outrunning it, I tried hiding from it. I tried getting into a car and driving away from it.

I tried shooting it. I basically went through the gamut of getting away from this thing, and nothing worked. Like, it always found me. It always caught up to me. And at some point, I think when it, I think I drove away, and then I, like, dumped the car very cleverly. and I hid and just when I thought

I got away from it because it like continued to chase the car or whatever it was right there it was like on top of me and so and I woke up like in kind of a cold sweat

and it was already fairly early in the morning it was probably you know like 6 a.m. or something like it was I could have it was my normal wake up time I could have gotten up. And what was interesting was that when I woke up, like, I felt awful. I just, just this, this feeling of like frustration and, um, and, uh, disappointment and, you know, just being tired and exhausted. And so, um, but I woke up with this thought

that this bear wasn't really a bear. it was some part of myself, like a characteristic or a trait of myself, that I really didn't like, or maybe that I was afraid of, and that there was no way to beat it or to kill it unless I confronted it, consciously confronted it head on. And so I decided that I was going to try to go back to sleep, and face it instead of running from it, instead of hiding from it. And I did, right? So, like, I closed my eyes, and the second portion, I guess, of the dream when I went back to sleep. It was very, very short, but essentially I was on the deck of an airplane carrier,

which is weird. I've never served in the Navy. I've never, you know, it's not like I spent time on the deck of a carrier, but I was on the deck of an airplane carrier. And, you know, the point was, I think, subconsciously, was that, you know, I was surrounded by water, obviously everywhere there's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to run, really.

And I was in this kind of, like, wide open space, and I had no choice but to confront this thing. and it kind of reared up, you know, stood up on its hind legs and, you know, if you've ever seen movies with bears, like it was much, much taller than I am. And, but I just, like, I knew I had to beat it. Like, I knew I had to, you know, kill it and that was it. Like, that was my only option. And so in that moment, I had, I had.

like a mace appeared in my hand, like one of those old style, you know, medieval maces that's just like a stick with a ball and spikes on it. And I just, you know, swung at the bear and like knocked its head off completely, which I don't think is possible to do for a human being, but that's what happened. You know, and it's odd because throughout my life I've had a lot of dreams where, like, I didn't have the strength to do the damage necessary to my opponent, whereas in this case, like, I just, like, took its head clean off with one swing. And moments later, I woke up, right? But this time, I was, like, I felt refreshed.

I felt like I had a thought that kind of went through my head was that I somehow overcame this part of myself that I was that I was bothered by and I don't know, I never figured out specifically what it was what the characteristic was, but I like I

I mean you have to realize it was minutes apart like from the time I originally woke up to the time that I woke up the second time maybe 15 minutes, 20 minutes at most, but the day difference was I felt refreshed. I felt like I was going to have a great day. I felt better about myself. It was amazing. The difference at that 10 to 20 minutes made was just staggering in how I felt

and how my day kind of began. And I don't actually remember what happened throughout the day whether it was really good or bad. But I do remember that the dream was kind of very impactful, and it was something that stayed with me, you know, clearly to this point. So, but yeah, that was it. Right. There we go. Great.

Great description. And, yeah, that the fact you can still recall it so clearly, and that you've kind of dialed it in a little bit to say, this felt like a piece of me that I needed to confront. Those are all, we can do. take those as matters of fact in terms of the dream, uh, because this is the feeling that the dream left with you. It carried its own answers in some aspects,

but it sounds like, yeah, that was the, you know, it, it was, um, very much going to be, I think, some kind of a threat that needed confrontation or, or escape from. But the fact that you said, um, you tried all these things to hide, to attack to, uh, or to shoot, say, from a distance, and to run away or drive away. So run, run, hide, fight in a sense. All of these things were, and what was eventually successful was being trapped with the problem to the, you know, to a point of it must be dealt with win or lose.

Something, something's got to give here. And that it was more of a direct physical, say, melee situation versus ranged attack that was. is ultimately successful and took its head off. All I think very important elements about the way you conceptualize the problem and how it needed to be resolved in a more, there's something very, very close and personal about that kind of combat. Hands on. Hands on. Yeah, that's very different from, say, I'm removed by distance and by, you know, the, it's a very different type of thing where you're using a melee weapon versus a range weapon.

you know, it's, you're closer to the problem yourself. You're going to have to wrestle with it in a way, which is interesting, you know, bear. That brings to mind the idea of wrestling, you know, like a wrestle a bear with Daniel Boone style or something. But, okay, so my process is, now we go through it again one more time. I'm going to try and keep it as short as possible because I know you've got a time limit, but these things can take, can take a minute. And usually phase two, like blends into phase three where we start. getting these ideas and by the time we're done going through it we're starting to get a picture of what it is um in the very beginning you're being chased by bear what is the setting

what where are you at are you in a city landscape are you in the woods uh where's where's this bear um i don't remember the very beginning of it i do like i don't remember the setting uh of the very beginning i do know that at one point uh it was kind of like off road driving so it's at some point I was in the in the woods but the but it was like there was no I don't recall any city settings

it was it was all kind of rural or suburban maybe at best okay sometimes that makes a difference like when people say you know the dreams are set in school that we have different conceptions so

it can be it can be what makes sense to us like where would you encounter a bear Oh, in the woods. Well, I must be in the woods because bear. Sometimes it's that simple. It can also be more of an iconic representation of the idea of, what is it, I'm trying to say. The nature of the problem itself in terms of this is not a city life problem.

This is more of a natural or wild type of problem. That's the right setting to encounter this or the right mindset, the right encapsulation for, just not going to encounter many bears in the city. So the nature of the setting and the animal are saying something about, you know, this is not a city life problem. Maybe this is more of a, what am I trying to say? It's not a problem of say civilization, but more baseline human nature, so to speak, in that nature nurture. This is more nature, more of a natural problem. Something along those lines.

This is how I start putting things together. Like, what is, what are we seeing here? So the thing that seems to stand, so you've given a lot of descriptions are like, here's what it seemed like and felt like it wasn't exactly a play by play. And that's fine. Not everyone can do that. And maybe no one can actually do that. We jump back and forth in a lot of these things.

But probably the most important, not important, a memorable thing is that you were driving this car and you tried to ditch it to trick them. And that's probably where you got the idea that this thing was smart, intelligent smart. like it was able to recognize car empty he must be over there so it's uh um and you said it had these large elbows that were almost wing like so the um you'd say they were they were like wide or broad or um in a way they kind of stretched back like it if if you put your so like if you imagine a bear standing on all fours right but instead of instead of instead of its, you know, elbows being straight down.

They kind of angled back almost to its, you know, the middle of the bear and then kind of came back to its shoulders. Gotcha. So it had much longer arms than a normal bear. In that sense? Yes. It had much more reach. Yeah, but it, the overall length of its, that's why I say it's more like wings. than just elbows because it wasn't just that it had long legs that just happened to be folded.

That's why it seemed that way. It's more like they were, it just got really wide in that area where it would be an elbow. But the length, I mean, proportionally, it was pretty similar to a normal bear. It is a very interesting feature to distort in that way. way. Albows? Yeah. Yeah.

No, no, I'm, and I don't have an answer to that right away. Of course, that's what we're trying to do is think, think through this thing. I mean, the elbow is, um, as I'm doing now, the elbow is something we lean on. It is the hinge for the, for the arm itself. It's something about why wasn't it an abnormally shaped head or hind legs or it was longer in the torso, something about these arms being in a different shape that it seems. I mean, when you just dwell on that idea, does any. image or word or anything pop into your head in terms of like, I mean, elbows, of course, but

you're looking at that shape in mind. I mean, it's, I think that the, like, it's interesting when you say, you know, it's something that you lean on. If I was to continue with the thought of, you know, that the bear represented some characteristic of myself that I didn't like, but it was a characteristic that I leaned on, right? I mean, at the time, I was dealing with PTSD and kind of therapy, and so there was a lot of, I would say that, and I don't want to say necessarily anger or anything of that nature, but there were some characteristics of myself that maybe I, you know, would lean on or turn to as a primary tool that I didn't like.

Right. So I historically grew up with, interestingly enough, my dad was a very, very, very patient person. Like to the, like abnormally, so I would say like you could deal with. And I was that way before my tour of Iraq. And then when I came back, that patience that I had was gone, right? And a lot of it was replaced with kind of very snap reactions and, you know, dealing with things in ways that I didn't like or wasn't happy with, which, you know, translated to all sorts of situations and people. So the, if you think about the elbow in that capacity, right, like it's something that you lean on. Yeah.

But that isn't healthy, right? Like, it's not, or it's not what you want. It doesn't even have to be healthy or not. It's just necessarily a way that you want to deal with it. Yeah. Or at least can, that may be it. At least. At least.

Yeah. Conceptualizing it that way as a, um, um, leaning on a quality that is not rely, over reliance on a quality that you actually don't want to have or over reliance on certain ways of being in the world. It's interesting too, the idea of a bear being, bears can be teddy bears. They can be just an icon of wild natural places. Oh, look at there's a bear over there. He's eating fish.

Isn't that nice? It can also be this icon of kind of a certain brute strength, aggressive power in the world. I mean, guys often conceptualize ourselves as bear. in some ways. Like, you know, I like to hibernate and we're kind of big and furry. And so in some ways, if you're looking at this as a representation of you or a piece of you, you're like, okay, this is the bearish quality that maybe I have that I'm not looking at as something I want to be.

I mean, and that's very important to say, you know, you came back with, say, the PTSD stuff and that changed your maybe natural calm patient nature into one of more, maybe a short, shorter temper or more reactive to situations. Right. That normally you would be able to just sit through and go, eh, no big deal. I guess, you know, I'll just wait a little bit longer and we'll see how this shakes out. And then sometimes there's that, the agitation, the frustration becomes so intense. You've got to resolve it by action.

I've got to do something now. I have to stop this. This is an intolerable feeling. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, I don't like, I've never been one of those people who, um, I've never appreciated control through fear. Yeah.

I don't believe that if somebody, you know, to win an argument or to debate or whatever it is, right? I don't think fear is the right way to leverage that. I think that it's, you know, if I can't convince you through calm, logical, rational debate than you know

then it is you know we either agree to disagree or I need to strengthen my argument but I think just intimidating someone into intimidation doesn't make it true or real or good right exactly and so that's where

and that's something that I've never liked just from observation I've never appreciated observing other people that way who we do use those tactics because they're easy right as a guy especially if you're a bigger guy it's not hard to intimidate people um but to me it's uh i've always felt that that was kind of uh or uh very low you know it's just kind of a very uh to use a word that you use very brutish kind of

behavior that I think the world that we live in, especially if you're someone who respects others and wants to be respected for being a decent human being or for what you do

or what you know, as opposed to just being respected because people are afraid of you. I think that that's, you know, it's important to be able to do that, right? To put that aside and be the more intelligent, be the more, you know, even, even tempered in a good nature, whatever, pick your word person, but just to be able to, to me, I guess, how can I put it?

the base form of control right like when we were kind of cavemen if you will yeah that was it right the guy with the biggest club and the biggest

muscles and sizes was the kind of that that was the way that you settled an argument right yeah and took control of your tribe I think today we don't live in that world and that shows kind of a growth of us as a species and if you resort back to that

right like if you kind of revert back to this like oh I'm just going to smash you if you don't agree with me it doesn't leave any room for growth or development as a human being and so to me I feel like that's the that's what I want to strong for, right? I always want to strive to grow and to get better, you know, and to, and I, so to me, relying on something like brute force or having people fear me, that stagnates myself, right? That stagnates my own growth, because now I don't need to get better at arguing. I can just terrify you into agreeing with me or, you know, submitting to me. And it's like, why would I do that? That, seems like I'm hurting you and I'm hurting myself.

Oh, yeah. For sure. There's probably an added context to of being a parent and this is, you know, 10, 12 years ago, you've got a four, five year old little girl and you've got to, you've got to decide how you want to interact with her. What patterns of interacting with the world are going to be instilling because our core nuclear families are our initial model for how relationships work and how whether or not the world is safe and we can trust it to be fair with us or we're going to be dominated by force

or are we going to be listened to our concerns going to be taken seriously. It sets us up for a lot of them. That's one reason why, you know, the Freudians and whatnot go back to relationships with our parents and whatnot. It's a very, very powerful pattern establishing principles in those in those situations. So probably there's an underlying motivation of that. It's like you're definitely looking at yourself saying there's qualities I've started to display that I do not want. I don't think are good for me, for the people around me.

And so I'm going to examine a situation. So in a sense, when we can't quite assert control over reactive or automatic reflex, knee-jerk reactions emotionally and whatnot, we can very much conceptualize that as a type of monster or animal chasing us because when it catches us is the display of that behavior in the real world. It's like if we can hide from it or evade it or run away from it, then it doesn't control us. Then it doesn't channel its energy through us to be enacted upon the people around us.

So you've got this initial conception. of you've tried, at least you're telling yourself, look, I've tried running away. And if we just focus on that one section that seems to be the most clear, the, you've tried running away. Number one, you've removed yourself. At the time, were you living in a more, you know, residential or city, city-like, or were you living in the country? Yeah, it was more suburban, yeah.

Suburban. So in this sense, I would say you've even taken yourself away from where you live. This wasn't set in the city or suburbia necessarily. You're running away into a more rural setting because it's because it's away from where you might do harm to other people if this thing catches you and takes control while you're there. And so, of course, you've got your tools for driving. Oh, I've got a car.

I can drive. Well, bears are fast. So the tools at my disposal are, they can carry me so far and it still catches up with me. And then you tried the trickery in a way, well, maybe I can do something clever to deceive this thing and misdirect it so that it misses it doesn't actually catch me. And so you were probably in your life at that time trying different strategies to get control of this tendency. And what you found out is that, well, it's it's a bit too smart. I can't out with it. I can't just be clever and assume that it's going to solve the problem.

It finds me. and even hiding from it. So you're kind of conceptualizing that run, run fight, run hide, fight thing. Like, well, is there any other option? No. And, um, one thing I didn't get down to was when the, when the shooting happened, uh, in what way did you try to deploy shooting at it?

What did that look like? Uh, I just, I, I want to say I found a rifle. Uh, I don't remember if it was in the car or wherever I tried to hide from. it first. But it was like a hunting rifle. Gotcha. You know, that should have theoretically stopped it, right? Like the, you know.

So it wasn't like, you know, wasn't a pellet gun or anything. Like, it was an anti-bear thing. And it was just very clear that there was no, you know, that there was no way. to really deal with it without confronting it. Gotcha. And I think that that's part of it, I think to me, is admitting, right, to myself, like, this

is something I need to deal with. And part of it was that this is something that I have to, I don't know necessarily handling, like, which way to handle it, but that I knew that if I confronted it, that I would be able to overcome it. Yeah. Right? That was a, it was a known fact. So I could, it could have kept running from it indefinitely, and it would always catch up

to me, right? Like, there was momentary reprieve, but ultimately you're kind of like just waiting for it to catch up. Yeah. Or you can just face it. And it's scary, right? It's a scary thing to face. Yeah. But if you face it and you, you know, then you can come out ahead, right like you can you can finally kind of put an end to it to the constant running to the constant fear and so yeah um which i think was the relief component of it um you know it's just for sure well that's that's deal deal with whatever it is that's what i was trying to get to like what what how are you conceptualizing the methods you tried that you're showing yourself okay let's review there's all the things i've tried in the past and what didn't work and one you know escape we've got

deception. You can't, you can't really get away from it's going to follow you everywhere you go. You can't trick it. You can't trick yourself in that sense. You know, you can't. There's no clever. Well, if I just think about it this way, then it's okay. Like self-deception. In this way, if the bear is you, then you're trying to deceive it. We can't trick yourself. Reality obtains. We do. We lie to ourselves about all kinds of things, but the problem stays. We just pretend it's not there, which doesn't really solve anything. So not that we can't trick ourselves. And you try to, I keep conceptualized and arranged versus me, like, this keep and the keyword that popped into my head I think is distance like holding it at a

distance as if it wasn't a part of you attacking it as if it was well from you yeah but if everything that I did like if you really think about it including shooting it um so a part of me knew that none of those things would work um yeah uh you know I still tried. For sure. I guess. Well, I'm also looking at why was the arranged attack unsuccessful. It wasn't that this thing could not be killed.

It could, but it was the nature of the attack. And I think it was that distance is what I'm trying to get to. The idea that holding it, attacking it from a distance as if it was separate, not letting it get close, not acknowledging that it is actually a part of you by engaging with it right in your face. I think that was maybe the nature of why. that attack didn't work. I can't, I can't kill this from over there. It's not, it's not, it's not actually, it doesn't exist over there. Um, it exists much closer and has to be attacked much closer. If that makes sense to you, I think that's, uh, I'm trying to conceptualize

does why the two different kinds of attacks had different results. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, uh, obviously right, if you think about just sheer power, you shoot something with a, high powered rifle versus, uh, you know, a mace. You're going to do a lot more damage with I think it should be more successful, yeah. Right, but it's not. And I think that, no, I think you're absolutely right in that. You have to have, there are certain things that until you acknowledge, I mean, you can think about it almost maybe in the term of either denial, and that's not the, it's not the right

word. It's in the right area, I think, yeah. Yeah, but it's not even deny. It's more like um acknowledgement, right? So you have to acknowledge that this is a

a problem that's close to heart so to speak. Great. It's, it is a real thing. It's not because when we think about, at least for me anyway, I can't speak for other people obviously, but when something is at a distance,

whether you talk about geopolitical problems or whatever else, right, when something is somewhere over there, it's happening in a city, another state, another country, another continent. It doesn't bother us,

right? Like, not that much. Maybe, yeah, we're bothered by the fact that, you know, there's some people recruiting children into,

you know, to fight their war. like that's a bad thing we know that we all but you know I'm hungry I'm gonna go get a cheeseburger yeah like that is right yeah let me maybe I should just turn off my phone and stop reading the news and I won't feel so bad yeah and so distance I think gives this perspective because the closer that something is the more real it becomes right this is something that happened in my town, that's bad. This is something that happened to my next door neighbor.

Oh, my God, this is a tragedy. Right? Yeah, sure. And so I think that maybe that was a part of it was just kind of that I had to acknowledge that this was my problem, and it wasn't something that was just this thing. thing that was there and I could do something so simple as squeeze the trigger and it's gone,

right? I had to acknowledge it, face it, and, you know, defeat it with my own strength, not using the power of, you know, a firearm or something like that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I was thinking of a way to explain a concept, and I'm going to use all the wrong words because I'm not up fresh on some of the lingo, but there's a, in a sense,

it's kind of a schisming we do sometimes, or that can happen, where we shunt off emotions we don't like into that, well, that's not me. That's not, that's the concept involved. And sometimes we project that onto others.

And this is where a lot of people get the idea of projection wrong. I'm not angry. You're pissing me off. And. Right. So it's like I'm, this isn't something I'm doing to myself. I'm not in control of my own emotions. I'm externalizing it, the locus of control, so to speak.

And we, we separate that. Well, that isn't really my anger. That's the anger you put in me. And now I'm suffering from it in a way. So broad strokes concept. So sometimes we do that too. And like it's trying to hold this, this bear off as if it were a separate thing is kind like that.

And what you did was you woke up feeling, okay, all these things I've tried to avoid the problem and keep it at a distance. This is led to nothing but frustration, disappointments as that's the kind of feelings you, you had up with, or woke up with. And, and the idea that, you know, a very clear message that, okay, wait a minute, this is not really a bear. This is a part of myself. And it's a part of myself that I don't like or I'm afraid of. And that there is actually no escape. There is only the potential to confront and see what happens. So you go back to saying, look, I'm going to, I'm going to do that. I'm going to show myself what I think is likely

if I face this thing as a part of me and decide to tackle it head on. And then I think that's a great explanation. You said, you're on an aircraft carrier and the first thing came to mine was, well, this is not a normal setting for me. It's not, it's not the woods. It's not where you would find a bear at all. It does, it calls to mind military service that as a concept, but a specific kind that is out of your element. Like this is not, it's what am I trying to say? There's the different branches of the military

and they each do, you know, there's a lot of things in common. They choose weapons and there's a built command structure. But there's a difference in tools, tanks, aircraft, boats, all that kind of stuff. So different specialties involved. So you've actually said, maybe, maybe I'm thinking you're telling yourself this confrontation is going to happen in an unfamiliar environment because this type of confrontation is unfamiliar to me.

I'm not actually sure how to do this. I'm going to put myself in a place where I'm, where I have no experience. I don't know what life on a aircraft carrier. I don't know what it's like to be a sailor and to live on, on this, this floating fortress. And so I'm going to put myself in a place where my skills don't exactly translate, but it's in the same realm.

It's all military service, but it's service I'm familiar with. There's something in there of like, Maybe you've never attempted this kind of confrontation with yourself before. And you knew it had to happen, but you weren't exactly sure how to get it done. Is that a feeling you were having it? Yeah, no, I definitely, I definitely have never, I've never had a dream like that before or since, really. But it was a, I think really, I think really, What it was was that I needed to be in a setting where the other options of running, you know, shooting, keeping it a distance, whatever, they were off the table, right? Because, you know, I was so, the proximity was so close that if I tried to run, I would not be able to get away.

for sure right and and and and kind of being in the middle of the ocean right there was there was no escape there was nowhere that you know even if I could dash away from it you know and whatever dodge around it and then like where would I go at the end of the day I'm in this very small like an aircraft carrier is massive but it's a small space in terms of trying to outrun a bear It's true. I don't mean, that was the, that was the part I should have acknowledged first. So you did definitely want to say, okay, confronting a problem is like trapping yourself with it on purpose. So you've put yourself there.

And I was just thinking, okay, why not a mountaintop plateau with sheer cliffs and there's nowhere to run? You could have imagined that. Why not a cage or a Roman Coliseum? You're there to fight the bear. And that's, you know, you could have chosen different conceptuals. I think this one was unique to you because it was a valid point. I'm going to conceptualize it as military service, which I'm familiar with, but I'm going to put myself in an unfamiliar place because I'm doing something I've never done

before. I'm confronting myself as a better. So it's more of like explaining why this type of trapped space versus another. I like to give people that kind of context, if possible. It could have been the first thing that just came to mind. Like, well, if I was on an aircraft carrier, I couldn't run away and seen. Let's go. It might have been that easy.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a valid point. I've never really. thought about it beyond like that that I was putting myself in a space where I was definitely going to have to fight it. And that's a that's a way. And that's a way.

Yeah, I'm not saying you missed anything. Yeah, yeah. But, but it is interesting that it is I did that it wasn't, you know, Coliseum or Cage or a, or a clifftop, you know, I, I don't know why.

And maybe it is because in part this is, I, I assume, subconscious level. It was tied to military and military service and all of that. That's kind of where I was going with. It's like giving you also a clue to the nature of the problem is that, well, this was actually caused by what I experienced in that military context.

And that's, I'm going to have to confront that too, that that's the source of this problem. Right. I think there's something there. And then you kind of, well, as you were saying, subconsciously knew it. So you're like, let's make sure to give myself a little hint as to where I need to look to solve the problem. Right. Yeah, yeah, which part of my subconscious basement do I need to go into?

Yep. No, that's true. That is, rummage through the boxes. Yeah. And then, you know, so it's a very short section of the dream. You're face to face with the bear because you came there for the confrontation. It presents itself in all of its bareness. It gets up and tall and towers over you.

It gives you a visual representation of, what it feels like to be face to face with this feeling that you can't, you can't prevent in a way. You might be able to control it when it happens, but feelings just happen to us. And that's what you're actually trying to do is like stop that feeling from happening. Stop it from ominously looming over you and taking control, you know, conquering you,

defeating you versus you defeating the bear. So you're looking at it like this is, this is a, you know, you didn't get into that scene and go, oh look he's cute i'll just put him on a little leash and make him dance on a circus ball i mean that's a different idea of how strong of a problem is is you're like this is really scary and dangerous and um so you give yourself that visual representation of this is towering uh fearful presence um but um you remind yourself i am here to face this uh you know the only thing i can do is fight i knew this was coming um and so

you give yourself a weapon. Why a mace? Also, we would say a military weapon in a lot of ways is what knights used in the middle ages. It's a more, and I don't know if it makes sense to you or, you know, I'm always making suggestions and people agree or disagree. And it's your head, so it's not that you can't be wrong. It comes to mind of like, if you're, what am I trying to say? If you're going to be in a hand-to-hand fight, you're going to use hand-to-hand weapons.

So it could have been, could have been your fists. It could have been a samurai sword. It could have been a spear. It could have been a, you know, a stick with a pointed end. But you picked a mace specifically. I mean, you've been a fan of the sci-fi fantasy genre all your life, fantasy specifically, knights in armor and whatnot. Maybe you're thinking, you know, what weapon would be,

what weapon would I use against a bear if I had to fight them? Well, a mace is pretty good. But I've always, you know, what I wondered about that is like, why not a sword? A sword, you know, whether it's a samurai sword or a great sword or a, you know, short sword, whatever it is. Like, I am far more familiar with swords than maces. I've never been, never even been a fan of a mace as a class of weapon. And especially not the ones that are just like the stick and ball, right? Like when there's a chain and you can, there's different things you can do with it.

Yeah, but like just this very, very kind of simple rudimentary thing. And I mean, a sword would have made a lot more sense, right? Because I could have impaled it through its jaw or a spear would have made even more sense. Yeah. You know, I think that's a good, that's good direction. And in fact, I had had some, I had had some sore training at the point that that dream happened because I was this, I studied kung fu for a little bit. And so I actually had some training with a sword.

And that wasn't the weapon I went to, right? It was this unfamiliar. And it turned out to be the best thing, right? Because maybe if I had stabbed it, that wouldn't have killed it in one strike. Yeah. And so I think maybe, like, and I do apologize, I will have to run in a minute. But I think the one, like if we go along with the theme of being in an unfamiliar setting, that perhaps it speaks to the idea of sometimes doing something that you're unfamiliar with,

being in an unfamiliar setting is the way to grow. right it's the way to to defeat something that um that that maybe has plagued you for a long time and the only way that you can overcome it um or maybe not necessarily the only way but but sometimes that is the best method take yourself out of your comfort zone yeah you know I'm comfortable with yeah I'm comfortable with you know being in a certain space maybe with certain weapons. But instead, what works is putting myself in a place that I'm unfamiliar with. Maybe I'm not necessarily comfortable with.

And that is the most effective. Yeah. And the quickest kind of- Getting out of your element and using unfamiliar tools. I think we dialed that down. Like, why amaze? Because you never trained with one. You don't think it's particularly effective at all.

But here, it got the job done. A tool you've never used and placed where you're out of your element. And it's conceptualizing, like, this is how I'm going to have to beat this thing. I'm going to have to do something difficult and different. Very nice. Well, respecting your time limit. I mean, you feel like we've got a pretty good handle on some of the... Oh, I think that's great.

I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that dream. I'd never thought about that, you know, that piece of it that we just talked about that, that I think was the most interesting piece. do it and that's something that I'm going to have to think on. I'm unfortunately one of those people that sometimes I'm just like, I need to process it. Like I need to delve into it a little bit more and sometimes discover new things. So no, I think that that's great.

That's actually, I mean, why I do what I do is give people, maybe some unique insight. Should I say shining a flashlight over their shoulder in the dark? And what do you see? Do you see what I see? But also giving people something to think about. Like now you can go, you know, I have a different person. perspective on this dream and maybe even how meaningful it was to you at the time, how necessary it was.

And you can reflect also on the changes you've made in your life since and how maybe you've, you know, conquered the bear because that's what you set out to do and regained that what you feel is the more natural and authentic self absent, the traumatic stuff that was attacking you and causing you to be someone he didn't want to be. I mean, we get all of this from a, you know, five minute description of some imagery while you're unconscious. That's Fantastic. Yeah. I love it.

Yeah. Okay. Well, we're going to wrap it up for you and get you out of here. And we'll, you know, keep in touch and let me know if new insights come to you. Like, I just thought of this other thing. Like, here, this fits too. I'd love to hear it. So, definitely.

I'm going to say to our audience out there. This has been our friend Daniel Castlewright from Denver, Colorado, who is an author of Helix Mysteries, the first change, a kind of sci-fi fantasy-ish book. You can find him at castlewight.com. Link in the description below. For my part, I'll say, would you kindly like share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. 16 currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent dreams in their meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson. All this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, all 16 books listed and MP3 versions of this podcast.

And the only thing left to say to our friend Daniel is, thanks for being here. I've enjoyed talking to you. Thanks so much for having me. You have a good one. Good deal. And everybody out there? Thanks for listening.