Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 127: Cryptic Cryptid

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

“If you choose to not deal with an issue, then you give up your right of control over the issue and it will select the path of least resistance.” ― Susan Del Gatto

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Seth from the good old US of A. No further details necessary. Just a random person. I will talk to anybody. You don't have to be plugging a book or have a product you're selling. So reach out and contact me anytime. Contact page at Benjamin the DreamWiser.com and across multiple social media type stuff.

Let's get the shilling out of the way. Would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers, viewers for the game streams, etc. And 16. Currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent here. Dreams in their meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson lovingly reproduced and recreated by yours truly,

your friendly neighborhood dream wizard. All this and more, as I said, at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, a complete list of all the books, growing encyclopedia of dream terms, terminology, and historical figures. Downloadable MP3 podcast episodes of the show so you can take me with you to the gym

while you're mowing the lawn. I kind of listen at your convenience. And that's enough about me. Back to our friend, Seth. Thank you for being here. Yeah, thanks, man. Appreciate everything. So how do you want to start this off here?

Because I was going into the night tear stuff. Yeah, and that's one thing for folks out there. You know, this is, I tell people a lot of stuff. And actually, I didn't tell you this. I completely forgot because we just got rambling on other subjects. So a lot of the things I tell people, and I should lay it out there. You know, this is, number one, I bring 20 years experience in psychology to this.

I have the education in the background and whatnot. But this is not counseling and therapy. I do not dispense any licensed service. You're not paying for this. We're just two people talking about dreams, you know. Also, that said, any conversation we have here, I do not record without permission. I do not release without permission. And any reason or no reason at all 20 years from now, you don't want this video on my channel.

It's gone. with no question. I don't have people sign a release because I'm committed to that. If they don't want their information out there, nobody sees it. So I could get to the end of a dream interview and have two hours of recorded material

and the person says, that's just, God, that's just way too personal. It's embarrassing. I didn't think we were going to go there. And so if no one ever sees, if you're watching this now, that means I got Seth's permission to release it.

And if not, then this is just for him. And that's perfectly, it's a chance I take talking to people. You never know. But I'm serious about that. And for two reasons. on ethical concerns, that is just the right way to do it. There's just no reason not to do it the right way.

And it is the most practical way because you need to know you can say anything and no one will ever hear it. That gives us the best possible freedom of association. So you can just say whatever. And I've edited out, small stuff. Had one person who described a dream symbol as it relates to a relative. And they're like, let's just leave that relative out. They didn't give me permission to talk about them.

or their situation. 30 seconds of audio video deleted. No one will ever see it. No one will ever know what episode that was in. Because, you know, it doesn't ruin anything. It's not shady. It's just respectful people. So that's where I'm at on that.

Oh, and then like where to start. Yeah, we don't. So there's always pre-show stuff. And this is the easiest most relaxed process. Anyone can ever go to. It feels, oh my God, I'm being recorded. I'm on the internet. But it's more like number, number one,

no one will ever see this. So you don't have to worry about that. If you don't like it, if it doesn't make you look good, it's gone forever, deleted. But also, you can't do this wrong. You, you have an experience. You tell it honestly. We discuss it. We come to whatever conclusion makes sense to both of us.

And, you know, all the pressure really is on me as the host to like keep it rolling and, and, you know, operate the equipment. And all the imagery and the knowledge and the, the associations and connections are in your head. So hopefully, well, the way I describe it is, I'm the guy that you invite in to kind of stand behind your shoulder and just trying to flashlight around and say, hey, do you see what I see over there? What is that? What if we look at that from this angle? Does it look different to you? Does it now does it make sense?

And so, you know, the number one, the dreamers never wrong. And you can't do it wrong. I ask you a question. You don't have an answer. You don't have an answer. It's fine. You're not failing in the process in any way. Okay.

And then this is all the tangent. actually, that brings me back around, how do you want to start nights? So we were talking beforehand, and that's usually something I do with everyone. We always talk before recording. We're going to talk after to make sure people are cool with it, releasing the video and whatnot. And what we were talking about was that a lot of these dream experiences that you remember are related to night terrors. And you were beginning to describe that it involves for you some element of somniloquy,

of sleep talking, and that you mumble or moan in your sleep. that's your experience of it? Yeah, there's a couple of common themes. Usually in the dream, it's not, I'm not having a good time, you know? It's usually I'm either getting killed or getting all the death or something wild like that. And I usually have those, those little weird spooky ghost sounds that I make and then I wake up, you know. And it's always like a very dreaded kind of feeling, you know. For sure.

Yeah. So we were going to get into, and I wanted to save this for the discussion, because it's fascinating, of course, to me and I hope to my audience. But some people describe, and they have in the past, okay, historically, there's been an attempt made over time to differentiate different types of dream experiences. Not only what does it mean to dream, but also what are different, you know, typical dreams, typical dream experiences. and all the way back to Greek and Roman times, you know, way, way, way back when a pre-Socratic even, we've had this fascination with, well, you know, I closed my eyes and I, and I live this whole entire other life for a minute, for hours. It seems like it goes on forever sometimes. And what is this? And it used to be a very spiritual, mystical type of thing. We used to think

the soul left the body and went wandering, you know, that kind of a thing, which, hey, some people still believe, astral projection, who knows? All of this to say, we're kind of narrowing it down. So there's the dream and the dream experience. And then there's unpleasant dreams, which is its own kind of distinct category. And they used to think nightmare was only, it was only a quote unquote nightmare when you could visibly see a person showing external signs of distress, which would be that sleep talking type experience where someone is describing things or displaying those verbalizations of distress that moaning and, and various, you know, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Just shouting, horrified things. Get away from me. Stuff like that. And then we've refined that a little further. And we've separated out, well, there, you can have an unpleasant dream that is even terrifying and there's no external signs. There's no somnambulism to it. There's no observable external effect to someone watching you sleep.

It's all taking place in your head. And that's what we now broadly class a nightmare as well. And there's these more night. terrors experience, which there's a, there's a documented experiences of, say, a brother sleeping in a bunk bed with the, and on the top bunk, younger brother and the younger brother is having signs of distress is sitting up in bed and crying. And when asked what the problem was, said, I need to go to the bathroom. and it's like, well, why are you sitting in bed and crying and not just going to the bathroom?

So the older brother helps the younger brother get down safely. It says, come on, I'll help you, and walks them to the bathroom. They go to the bathroom. They get back into bed and go back to sleep. And in the morning, no memory of the experience at all. The younger brother was never awake. It was a classical in that sense, the very kind of iconic representation of a night terror where the person has this. appearance, external appearance of being awake and interacting, but no memory of it. They were,

they were completely sleepwalking at the time. So I don't know, now that I've explained all that, if that informs your experience, is that kind of similar to how you understand what night terror is when you, when you use the term? Yeah. And I'm, I think I definitely fall in the category a little bit with the, you know, I always have the external thing where I'm moaning. sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat they kind of get intense sometimes and I've had common themes through all of them and the reason why I brought up

Sasquatch is like I've probably been killed by Sasquatch in my night tears about three times Wow interesting And they all revolve around it getting It's like around dusk or it's dark And that's kind of like how that works. Or it's a person and it's vague and I don't really get that many details.

And they usually are always like stabbing me or something wild. But the most recent one I had, which is the one that I was going to bring up because I can remember those deep pills. Well, let's, let's do that. Let's jump right into it. So what we do is you just tell me the dream experience beginning to end, whatever it is, everything you remember. And then we'll go from there.

So I'm ready to, I'm ready when you are. Yeah. Okay. So it started. It was, you know, the suburbs I live out in the city. And no power, no lights are on on the street, you know, just houses everywhere. Full moon night, like completely full moon, no clouds in the sky. It's bright.

You can see, like, all the details and stuff. And across the street from me, Sasquatch comes out and I freeze. And I just end up like, you know, oh, God, I hope he doesn't see me. And then he eventually makes eye contact with me. And I'm so nervous and stuff. And like an idiot, I wave at it. And then it just rushes across the street and then starts them all with me to death. And then my wife woke me up by that point because I was starting to moan and stuff.

But yeah, that's when I remember. You know, they're the silliest things when I talk about them. But yeah, it was terrifying. pain in my sleep, you know. Oh, yeah. I just think it was funny, like, out of all this stuff I could have done, I freaking wave at it. Yeah. Like, hi.

That is pretty funny. And that's, then there's a reason for that. We're going to try and figure out what that is. I'm just catching up with my notes here. So, for folks out there in the audience, it can be that simple. And that is very short. Okay. So just as an example, a recent episode, I don't know, maybe three, four, five,

six episodes ago by the time this comes out. I had one gal who the entire dream experience was just the sensation of falling through a void. Literally, that was the entire dream. And it went on for a period of time, but it stood out very strongly. And we just talked about it. And we made, we got something interesting. So this is even more material than that. So we can definitely, definitely do.

It doesn't have to be long, a little, you know, 30 to 90 second description. description is fine. Some people go on for 10 minutes. They got a lot of details. I'm like, wow. It takes me three pages to write it out. Yeah, they woke up and just wrote it down. Yeah. Or their recall was just that strong. I mean, my, I'm, ironically, I'm the dream wizard that doesn't remember his dreams. I very infrequently even remember that I had a dream. And if anything lingers with me, it is such, such so very few disconnected images, maybe a sensation.

there's nothing to work with. There's just nothing there. And I'm like, you know, it's been a long time since I had a dream that really stood out. And like there was a, there was an experience to it that was connected that I could say something about. I don't know what changed, but it's been a good 20, 25 years since I've had a dream I can remember.

And I say you're a man that cannot lead people, you're a man that can lead to people to treasure that, you cannot find. Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, that's beautiful. And, you know, that's fine with me because I actually enjoy that treasure seeking process. And I don't need the treasure as much as I need it to be found. And you can have it.

But I like that. It's the mystery solving thing. It's like, you know, it sounds self-aggrandizing, but I kind of aspire to be a kind of Sherlockian figure where, you know, the game is afoot and it's all about the game. And it's not even about, you know, it's, and winning the game is solving the mystery. And the results are almost irrelevant. Like, you know, what do I care how it turns out? I just want to know what it is.

And we're going to find out. But, but on top of that, you know, then there's my pro-social side of saying, I hope this is, and I think it is beneficial to you to understand these things better and find out why they happen and why that particular image in that way and that experience. And then hopefully it's a very insightful thing for people to understand about themselves. So we're going to, we're going to aim for that for you. I certainly hope so. So you're in the suburbs in the city.

There's no power. There's no lights, but a bright moon. Is this a recognizable, specific place, or just the general vague impression that you are in the suburbs? Yeah, like it's summertime. Everything's green. And it's just so cookie cutter, 1940, you know, post-World War II style homes, just that kind of stuff. Just your normal everyday suburb kind of things up north.

But it is not a specific place. It's not where you grew up as a kid. It's not where you live now, that kind of thing. You think it's, it is kind of where I live now, yeah. And were you living where you are now when this dream happened? Yes. Okay. So it is kind of real life setting in that.

in that regard. And that, you know, what does that mean? I don't know, but there are broad strokes on that kind of thing. So sometimes you're, uh, let's say you're a city dweller. You've lived in apartments all your life. You are living in an apartment now in a very crowded bustling metropolitan area, but you dream you're in a farmhouse out in the woods. It's a very different setting. And that's going to tell, okay, there's something about being outside of your common experience that we're looking at. But this is actually, okay, so this is actually maybe more closer to home, more realistic. You've put yourself in a setting that is not fantastical, not far removed from your experience. So you're looking at something in that sense. The phrases come to mind. It's close to

home. Whatever's going on here is literally close to home in that sense. And you're showing yourself an image of this is taking place where you live in your neighborhood in that sense. Does that kind of thing make sense? Yeah. I did have one that was far off and fantastical. And I always want to talk about that one because I just remembered it, but I could save that for, you know, by the time between just me and you or something because I think there's a lot more details than that one than this one. Interesting. Yeah. Well, it's good to, it's good to go with the short one. You know, if we nailed this one down pretty quick, it might say something about that other one. And we might have a minute to talk about that too. I mean, my only time limit is I got literally

from this moment about 90 minutes. I got to be done. Uh, because I got, I got, you know, yeah, no, but we got plenty of time. And we might, um, you know, a lot of my other videos go an hour and a half, two hours, three, three hours long, because I'm talking to someone who is shilling a book or a service. And that's fine. I bring them on. I want them to be promoted and to promote me and, you know, mutual benefit. So we definitely talk about their work. And then we ramble on anything and nothing like you and I are just kibitzing about this, that and the other. We talk about your experience, night terrors and whatnot. And that eats up, you know, 45 minutes an hour, hour and a half, two hours of the beginning of the show. And then eventually we get around the dream thing. So it's, it's been a

while since I've just launched straight into a dream. So it gives us a lot of extra time. So yeah, I'm making these these kind of notes to myself, you know, close to home in your neighborhoods, a very more realistic, realistic experience. And then you've got that other one. And hopefully, like I said, we dial this in a little bit. And this, this goes for recurring dreams as well. Once you kind of get an idea of why that pattern, that particular type of pattern recurs, it becomes translatable onto other dreams of its type because there's a reason that image experience comes back. It's because it's saying something about the image or experience itself and it repeats. And very often I've had people, you know, bring them on. We talk about recurring

dreams and they're like, you know, after I talk to you, I stopped having that dream like at all. I'm like, hopefully that is literally proof. We solved it. You don't need it anymore because now you understand it. You've been able to conceptualize that thing in a way that makes it unnecessary for you to dwell on it and to have that imagery come back. We'll see what happens. It's a different experience with everybody. So, um, where in this neighbor, you said you were across the street from where, where you saw the Sasquatch appear, um, were you standing on the sidewalk in the street, on the lawn, on the front porch of a house under a tree? Like near, probably like in between the houses, almost like right on the border of the front lawn. Um, on the front lawn, but, but near the

sidewalk. Yeah, not near the sidewalk near between the houses. Like, you know, like how there's a little gap or there's usually the driveways and stuff there. Okay, so actually standing between the houses, not just oriented between them, but out, out in front. So do you remember any details about the houses themselves or where you were standing? You know, there's a garden hose. There's a car in the driveway. It's literally the best description.

I mean, if you live anywhere in the northeast, you see the suburbs up here. You've seen them all, you know, they're a vague familiarity. You can go down any road, and it feels like your road, but it's not, you know, because all the houses, you know, they just pump these things out after World War II. True, true. Yeah, you know, that big, almost a foot with siding, you know, just that old school kind of 1950-style stuff. So some brick houses, you know. just your normal stuff.

Gotcha. And I'm not trying to dwell on it too much. Just get it. What I'm doing on this, so part one, I listen, part two, we go in the deep dive.

And I'm really trying to see it through your eyes as much as I can, which I assumed you were on the sidewalk. Out in front of a house, I was wrong. So I ask, and you're actually kind of between the houses in a way. In the alleyway,

literally between the houses, are actually a little bit out front. A little bit out front. Okay. Like, I want to say I was like in between houses, like in the front lawn. You know what I mean? So like pretty much like online with like your front window, your day window of your house. You know, like I would be like off the side like five feet or something.

Okay. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, and it may not be that critical. But now I have a better idea of your position. And that's, that's interesting. too because there's uh you know you were not in the middle of the street you were not on the sidewalk you're on the lawn but you're actually closer to this alleyway between the houses which if you think about hiding from a creature you would want to be able to maybe duck back into the shadows and like

maybe they wouldn't see you there's a there's a different level of exposure say being out in the middle of the street completely visible 360 degrees you've actually kind of got you back to uh an escape route in a way um that ultimately i think that's what i was planning on doing in my dream uh Yeah. It was creeping over or something. Like, I feel like stuff's coming back a little bit. But I want to say like I was even like maybe I heard something or something and I was looking. But I was like creeping, you know?

And then I saw the big foot and then I had the sense of terror. And then I was like, oh, don't look at me. Don't look at me. It makes the eye contact. I'm like, oh, it sees me 100%. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, I run a little wave, you know, hopefully it's friendly. Yeah.

And then I just won't hold it doesn't. And that's absolutely common too. So what we're going to get is, you know, literally one minute of a description of a dream. And we're going to go on for an hour and talk about all these. And new things, not new. You're going to get access to more sensory experience because now you're really looking at it. And you're like, wow, there's more than there than I thought. There always is.

That always is. So that's a lot of times I'm counting on it. It doesn't always happen, but almost like 99%. There's more there than it appears in the first telling of it. Which is why I do this process. Like, yeah, we've got to get these details. So any sense of what you were doing there in the first place? You were there to visit someone.

I mean, you're out on the front lawn of a house in a neighborhood. Yeah, middle of the night. It's dark. Moons out. You know, with who I am as a person, if I'm outside at night in the suburbs like that, it's either, you know, there's a fire in the backyard or we're hanging out or something. but, you know, something, how I remember this stream, I don't feel like it was anything like that. And I, you know, there's a lot of, there's like tall tales, you know,

like there's no power on in any of the houses, all the lights are off. There's no street lights here, you know. Yeah. In the suburbs, there's street lights everywhere. They're always on. So, you know, there's, you know, that you can, you know, make an educated guess and say, well, there's no power. So, like, what, you know, but everything looks nice.

So I'm not in an apocalyptic thing. Yeah. You know, but maybe I'm living life after people or something goofy like that, you know. Yeah, and those details. I mean, we're going to get around to it, but also I'm glad you brought it up because that, whether it takes place in the day or the night, often means something. I mean, there is a reason you picked that setting versus another, whatever that reason is. Also that you chose to see, to show yourself the neighborhood with the power out,

with, you know, the lights are all out and the natural assumption is, oh, this is because the power is out. Why? Why at night? Why the power out? Why all the lights out? Why the bright of the moon? And then this encounter. So all of these things lead into it. I don't know if you have any particular associations with nighttime, with the dark, with lights, power outages. How do you kind of conceptualize some of that stuff? Well, back in the Marines, I spent a lot of time. in the night, you know, because we were in a reconnaissance unit. So we just train like, you know, it's real goofy. There's nothing really like secret spy stuff or special forces stuff.

Yeah, cover of darkness makes the mission go better sometimes, yeah. Well, it's more or less just, I don't know, I guess practicing for warfare and stuff, you know, always staying awake. and a lot of the a lot of the time spent out in 29 palms in the desert and stuff it kind of reminded me of that when you're sometimes out there like you don't even need night vision

you can literally see everything in the desert. Yeah, you let your eyes adjust yeah, and that's really it kind of reminded me of one of those kinds of nights, you know? Yeah, which yeah so there's this blending of things

of like your military experience literally experiencing this type of a thing, but it's now been juxtaposed. It's bringing this experience home with you in a way to where you live, having a similar type of experience at a more, at a place closer to home. So there's something, something going on there? I don't know. You know, I never, I was blessed. I never actually had to go fight people.

I just trained for a football game, though, never played. Yeah. Best way of putting it. That is, yeah, that's the best possible outcome, too. Yeah, it is.

It really is. After seeing everything and, and growing up a little bit more and getting some life experience, I kind of realized I was real lucky because, you know, everybody has these issues, but I really can't, I don't know,

like, if I can really explain how that works, like, why it was those settings. I don't know. I can't really tell me, you know, it's just... When you... When you think of that experience, now that you kind of brought it back to my...

It's kind of like when I was out in the desert training in the nighttime and I can see very crisply. Does that bring any thoughts to mind or emotional connections for you? Like, what occurs you when you imagine being back in that experience? Nothing much. I actually really liked it out there at night. It was very nice. So you could see... A lot of stars.

You know, it wasn't, it wasn't really bad. It was, I always liked it better than the daytime because, you know, out there, it gets to like, you know, you're in Death Valley, you know, you can get to 120 degrees. There are no problem. Oh, yeah. And then nighttime, it just drops and it's like really comfort. It's like nice. You know, it's cool and you're not dying. It's a good time.

You know, I just watch movies or whatever is download on my phone while I'm on watch. And you're not supposed to do that, but, you know. A person, a person legally distinct. from yourself and no longer subject to the military code of justice. May have done something similar. Yeah, everyone has, you know. Right. They don't work things than that.

All right. Well, so, I mean, and this is unique to you. And that's why it's unique to everyone. Someone else may have had a very different experience of it. So you're describing something generally pleasant, you know, in most respects. Someone else might have had a much different experience. Like I was expecting or not expecting, but allowing for the possibility you would say, you know, it was actually kind of spooky out there.

And I didn't like it much. And I would rather not repeat that experience. I'm like, okay, well, that's why maybe you would bring that closer to home and say, okay, imagine it's a feeling similar to that. And now I'm under threat. But it's actually the opposite. It's rather a pleasant experience that's been perhaps ruined by suddenly you've got this danger popping up.

So it's a very different type of thing. And then why? Why power out? I don't know. I can't explain that. All I can tell you is like, that's what I'm guessing from looking back on it right now. I think vaguely, I want to say I was looking for something

and then I stumbled upon the big, you know, big foot. But I can't really, I don't want to like just misremember or bring in something that I'm just now saying, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there is always the issue of what I think Freud called secondary elaboration, where it's like after the dream, you start adding a little bit of elements to explain it to yourself. And it's good to be aware of that, but it's also, you know, there's, it's hard to distinguish. And who knows, maybe I'm getting it wrong sometimes, but between a recovered memory, a legit recovered memory, oh, I remember more than I thought I did, versus fabrication to try. You're making it up.

Yeah. Brett con it. Yeah, yeah, which is fine. You know, and you may even have the sensation that like, why would, why would I be out there if I wasn't looking for something? So there's nothing wrong with that idea because we are literally trying to make sense of it. And there probably was some reason to be outside. Now, it may have been because you needed to have this experience as a part of conceptualizing something else. And sometimes that can give the motivation for being in a specific place at a specific time all on its own.

But definitely we're, so we're looking at these. And it's funny for me to say, I ask questions and people feel like they're on the spot. Like, why the power? And sometimes I'm saying it out loud to myself because I'm trying to say, what if I start throwing out suggestions? What would I suggest as a reason for that? And it is. That was my suggestion pretty much.

Yeah. But I'm just trying to describe what I remember, the details. There was no lights. so obviously you know you have a city there's going to be street lights and there's no street lights um yeah also another thing that you could kind of go into is like well when people aren't around like during the lockdowns um you know they were saying there was coyotes and mountain lions and you know california just walking on the streets because people weren't around yeah and uh maybe it has something to do with that a little bit you know yeah i was going to ask what um the

time frame of this how long ago was this stream? Oh, it was probably a few months ago. I can't really recall. That's fine. But it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, but it wasn't three years ago. I can't really remember. No, no, it wasn't. It was like last year or something like that. Okay. Last summer. That's good to know. Just kind of also cue your mind a bit to now in the background percolating will be what's I doing last summer when this happened. And you don't have to have an answer right now because you haven't found it yet. but it's in there somewhere. Most of the stuff does relate to real-world experiences in some way,

whether it's processing a recent experience or processing ongoing confusion or the attempt to conceptualize patterns. And so we show ourselves these thought experiments. What if? What if I'm in this kind of a situation that's similar to this thing I'm trying to understand? Now let me look at what might happen. What do I think might happen?

So, yeah, so the power out, so that we could, if nothing's coming to mind, it could be that the power out thing is just to really enhance the absence of lights is to enhance the whole moon glow identity with the desert, past desert experience. So it might be like imagine, it's imagining that kind of a generally pleasant, enjoyable-ish experience. Everything is kind of pretty. It's well lit. You can see good. You don't have the fear of the hidden darkness. anything could jump out at me type of thing. You can see it. It's just a just a kind of chill place to be. And then this rather chill experience happening in a suburban setting, which you would think would be additionally safe. I mean, you're not in the deep dark woods where Bigfoot lives. What's Bigfoot doing in the damn deep suburbs? But suddenly this danger represented by the Bigfoot iconography has found you. It has come to you where you live at a G.

otherwise generally pleasant setting. Does that kind of feeling right? Yeah. And maybe because I was thinking about this while you're describing that, maybe it has some to do with, you know, because you're training to always look for stuff and you're just scanning the desert for nothing

and you know nothing's out there. And I don't know. You're, you know, your gunnery or your platoon sergeant or sergeant or corporal is usually just making you do it. And, you know, I think maybe that's where that comes from.

Maybe I was looking for something. And then, you know, this stream is like, oh, well, you're looking for something. Here it is. Maybe it's, like, in a way, kind of describing that, I guess. And that's why I feel like the terror and the dread and stuff. Yeah, that's the other thing I was going to ask is, like, before you saw the Bigfoot, you already had an uneasy feeling? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, like, well, not before. Before Bigfoot saw me, as soon as I, as soon as I saw Bigfoot, I was like, oh shit, it's about to go down. You know, I knew it was not a good thing. Yeah. And that's, well, that's actually fantastic to separate those two. So you were not already previously uneasy in what should have been a pleasant setting. You were actually enjoying maybe the pleasantness, or at least you were neutral.

You were calm. Everything was fine. This isn't, this isn't bad. This isn't unusual. I have no reason to be distressed by anything. Wait a minute. Shit, there's a problem. And if you see it and now, now there's a threat.

So then that is good to say, you know, I was writing this down too, as well, this idea of, so part of you conceptualizing this experience is, is an ongoing attention, a situational awareness in a way. It's like it's part of your job to be on guard in that sense. You know, you're not doing guard duty necessarily, or maybe they called it that, but you weren't. So part, part of this experience is, is you have to be paying attention. So there's something to do with situational awareness, paying attention. And there's a connection there with the idea of if you pay attention, when a problem comes near you, you will see it because you're actually paying attention.

As opposed to someone who's oblivious, problems sneak up on them and get them from behind, that kind of thing. Does that kind of making sense? Yeah. And I kind of getting off topic here a little bit. Sure. When I was in high school, about 17, I had a series of dreams that are eagerly familiar to this. Mm.

And those dreams, though, it was like it would pop up on me. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like I wasn't alert. I wasn't really already. Like I knew after like the first one I had, you know, after that I started becoming like, oh, something's going to get me, you know. But no, this one I was just, yeah, I was, I was pre alert like you were saying.

Yeah. Like I knew I was already looking. Yeah. There's something in there of. So we're dialing it in a little bit. That's where we go. We go from these. We just got these vague images.

What the hell is going on? We're dialing it in a little bit. There's something going on here with the concept of merely being aware, paying attention, is not itself entirely sufficient to solve all problems. The first step is acknowledging a problem is there. The second step is doing something about the problem in a successful manner that resolves the problem. So there's some, I don't know if I, when I say it like, that if it's like, you know, merely being aware is not sufficient to solve the problem. Does

anything come to mind? I don't know. It's weird because, like, in real life, like, I believe in preparedness and stuff. So it's like, I know in real life that that situation was to happen. I probably would have had a gun on me and probably would be a carpet, you know. Fair enough. Yeah. I don't know why, like, I'm defend, like, in all of my dreams, I'm defenseless. It's really weird. Yeah. Yeah, there's, and that's definitely something. So this is a, um, Bigfoot is in, in some ways. And this is not the only way, maybe that, but, but iconic of a problem beyond your ability. If that makes sense, it's, there's some, something about this image that's crystallized in your mind. It's like, whenever you're considering a problem you can't handle, it's Bigfoot that just

kills you because that's that's kind of the conceptual nature of um and a lot of people you know conceive that in different ways someone might say you know it's a um creepy doll creature maybe coming out from under their bed because that brings back childhood childhood yeah because that brings back childhood memories of being helpless uh or some people would say it was like a crashing wave that swept me off a rock into the ocean i'm being moved by forces beyond my control so for you it seems like the the um something about this this image of Bigfoot is saying, you know, this is, whenever I have a problem too big for me to overcome, it's like getting attacked by Bigfoot and he's just going to kill me.

You know, it's nothing I can do. So there's something going on there. I don't know if that brings any thoughts to mind or just that category of, you know, problems we can solve and problems we can't on our own, you know, effort. Well, interesting enough when I was 17, the very first, Night Terror I remember was, uh, it's going on a whole other dream. But, uh, for some reason, I was like parachuting into the woods behind my house, Missouri. Uh, and this is like woods, woods, you know, like, you could go for miles.

Uh, a lot of cattle farms out there and stuff and, um, kind of a little hilly where I lived. And, like, I'm parachuting. I break my legs when I land, because I landed weird. And then I'm, it's getting dust. scout and I'm like oh shit I need to get home I'm like right behind my house like the hill behind my house I'm not far away but my legs are broken and I'm like trying to crawl and then like somebody walks up I remember denim jeans and like work boots and then I grab onto their ankle and then they stab me my side and I wake up with pain on my side oh yeah and uh I remember that

and then after that it molded into big foot and then I had like a serious series of dreams where I'd be in the woods, it'd get dark out or be getting dark out, and then I know I got to get home and then big fly comes, which is like weird. Yeah. So I'm like, it's happened more than once, which is weird. So this is, this is turning into a very, that's why I say these images crystallize. Sometimes we latch on to something that serves as the, the icon for a particular type of experience.

And it just comes back and says, hey, this is. like Bigfoot again. Here we go. And so there's, there's going to be maybe when these dreams recur, there's usually going to be something going on in your life where you're like, hey, I'm facing another problem that feels as difficult to resolve as being attacked by Bigfoot. Here we go again. Bigfoot's back. And in real life, we face all kinds of problems that are insurmountable. I mean, there's, not that it's a common experience in people's lives. Most problems we can solve. Most relationships we can navigate, most bills we can pay, that kind of stuff. Every now and again, you come across things like, you know, you get teaboned in an intersection and now you got back problems.

That's a big foot attack. That's not something you could have stopped, prevented. It just, it got you in the dark, in the dark of the woods. But also that and those, and that's why I'm conceptualizing it as not only as something where attention is not going to help you. You can pay attention. You can be the safest driver. You've never had an accident. You've never let your oil change go more than, you know, 3,000 miles.

you're your head on a swivel and you get t-boned by that guy that just didn't stop at a red light because you can't assume people are not going to stop in red lights you got to go when it turns green and cross your fingers the act it's kind of that accidents happen type of thing where there's going to almost always going to be something at least there's always potentially something that is an overwhelming catastrophe that we can't solve and it's going to be it's going to have serious consequences so there's i think we're leaning in that direction in terms of why this, why this, you know, and then, and then long story short on that, maybe someone has been in a car wreck and that caused them, you know, pain in their leg and they recovered and now they can walk, but they always, they're a hitching and they're giddy up. They got a little bit of a limp and it always hurts when the weather changes. And so now their recurring dream going forward is, fuck, I'm in another accident. I'm getting hit by another car because that's crystallized in their mind of this as one of the worst experiences of their life that now is.

iconic of every other potential catastrophe that might also be overwhelming. I'm saying a lot of words there. I should stop and let you say if you have any thoughts. No, that makes a lot of sense. And, you know, in a way, that's just life, though. You know, a lot of stuff is out of your control. It's true. And I really do hate when stuff like, I hate when stuff like that comes up because it's like,

I love being, you know, I've lived a, I've lived a full, life and I'm only 27 years old and I can say I've lived a lot and I just the one thing I like is stability and you know I hate when stuff's unstable so I guess I can I can really uh understand that you know yeah good deal and there's other people that are more what am I trying to say they're a little more zen with it that I am a leaf on the wind fine oh my plans didn't work out let's just let's have no plans let's just see what happens I'm very much not that way of myself either. So a lot of these things are like there's no,

there's no right or wrong answer as such. It's more like, what do you prefer? That you have to have a goal in order to miss the mark or in order to fail or in order to be disappointed. That's why a lot of times we say, you know, lower your standards or get a more realistic expectations. And that mitigates a lot of anxiety and frustration that people feel.

It's like, yeah, if you expect something to be perfect, you will be disappointed. How about expecting it to be pretty good? We can aim for pretty good. Pretty good I can do, you know. So definitely there's a, adding to this conception of the problem is, is you're very much not a fan of when things devolve into a unmanageable chaos, which kind of our lives in general are a constant battle against entropy.

Everything's trying to fall apart right underneath us and we have to keep fixing it or everything goes to shit. Which is weird because like in the military that never bothered me like when because it's engineered chaos in a way. Yeah. It obviously never bothered me because I went through it. I think it's like it's like climbing a mountain, you know, like oh, you know, it's a big mountain and it's intimidating. But once you start climbing and you're halfway, but it's not that bad. and you get comfortable. And,

uh, you know, I'm, I'm like a structure work. I, I've, this is a, I'm working on a second skyscraper right now.

And, uh, just recently got off the top. We were at, uh, 17 floors high, which you could do the math on that. I don't know.

I think it's like, floor's like 12 foot or something like that. That's way up there. Way higher than I would ever work. I couldn't do that. Yeah. I couldn't do it. And,

not safety ropes, nothing nothing. Yeah. And I'm, I was still like sketchy to do it too. And, uh, a lot of that is like, you know, if you get a part of a week is an adjustment time for me in chaos and then I'll be all right. You know.

Yeah. It's about right. You can get used to most things in about a week, uh, or to, what I say, two weeks. If you can change a habit for two weeks, you're just about set. You've established a new pattern. Um, something like that. That might be out of, out of, out of, um, out of date data. Um, um,

I think that's true. Two weeks to build a habit. Yeah, that kind of thing. It's two weeks to build a habit a month to break one, something like that. There you go. Yeah. There's a lot of those truisms that are like, okay, is it exactly 31 days? Is it exactly 14 days?

Who knows? But I think the general principle is absolutely correct. Another thing that came to my mind when you were describing that is there's a little bit different level of, say, personal responsibility when you're in the military. You're like, if I'm following orders and it's, goes to shit. I did everything I could and it's the fault of the guy that gave me the order. So all that shit rolls rolls uphill. It's different when it's

your personal life and your personal responsibility. You're not you're not just there kind of punch on a clock in a way. You have goals that can be frustrated and it means something to you. Does that make sense that idea of responsibility versus it's out of my hands? I'm just following orders type of thing. And not in a bad way. But like, you know, I did what I was supposed to. I did what I was

told to do. I've done everything I can. And then there's a little more, it's a little different when you are ordering yourself. You're giving, you're creating your own structure and then you're entirely responsible for whether it works or not, implementation and the validity of the plan in the first place. So I'll stop there though. I think you had some thoughts. No.

I mean, I'm listening to a lot of what you're saying. It's making a lot of sense to me now. Like, it's, it's, uh, just stuff about how I am as a person and thinking about things. Like you were bringing up stuff that in a way that I haven't thought about. makes more sense about like why why I feel this way about life in general. And I think that's got something to do with it. Yeah.

Being being the, I think that's why a lot of, a lot of vets, you know, probably kill themselves and stuff because they get out and you have to go from this life where it's like structured and everything is predictable. And you, it sucks.

It's like, oh, we got to get up tomorrow on hike. But it's like, you know, you know that you're going to have. a hike, you know, you know, like, all right, well, we're gonna, we went this long with that one, we were good. And in a weird way, people are like, well, that, that life seems hard.

And going from being in the military to go into construction, I honestly think it saved my life. I probably would have killed myself, because it's just like similar chaos, predictable building, but, uh, yeah, when a job is over, you get laid off, or when the economy goes into, when the economy goes to crap, you know, you don't have work. And then now you're in that situation. I think that's what I'm scared of maybe. Maybe I'm scared of just unpredictable life stuff happening. Yeah.

I think so. And that's, I love it too. You're phrasing on these different things. Like, that's actually what we're doing with the, with the whole dream interpretation thing is I got to fix that. I keep trying to fix this and keeps falling down. I'm going to get this up near my face. We're actually looking at, okay, back that up.

and we'll give some context. This is the reason why I believe dream dictionaries are not valid is because you can't look at, you can't go to, you know, B for Bigfoot and it means the same thing for every person. There's just no way. So water in a dream, what does it mean? I don't know. What does it mean to you? So we got to talk about you.

We talk about your life and your experience and how you understand these things and how it felt when you were in a particular place. But then also your kind of train of logic on these things. but most importantly what matters to you. And it's all personal. So for you being someone who was, it's like the dog wants them. Okay, go on, butters.

You know, and being able to reflect accurately and honestly and without, you know, not that you should be ashamed of anything, but a lot of people are not comfortable with their own feelings and their assessment. So you're looking at, well, there's things I liked about being in the military and things I like about being out. And to be able to honestly say it was a comfort in a way. It felt right to have this structure provided for me. And now I am providing my own structure. And it's a unique challenge. And that's why I was going at that level of responsibility thing. It's like if you're following someone else's structure, hey, the decisions made, I just got to do it. No worries. And it's

not on me if it fails. And the other side is, this is all on me. I have to not only, I got to know what I want. I got to know how to get it. I got to do it right. And I got to hope shit doesn't happen that's going to jack it all beyond my control. Well, that's terrifying in a lot of ways. I mean, if you just sit and think about how overwhelming that is. And most people don't think about it. So what they're getting is like, this is just life, man. Like, where are you making a big deal? Like, well, if you think about it, it's kind of a big deal to, um, to be responsible for yourself. Uh, so, so how do we relate this back to, to what you're going through? is there is so you've got this um you've you've got a memory going on that's like your it's saying

okay it's like when you were in the military it's night it's the bright of the moon you can see very clearly but now you're home you're out of that setting but but there's a context that's similar there's there's a connection between the two of like this is this is like this but distinctly different and and they overlap and suddenly a overwhelming problem appears. And at that moment, the anxiety ramps up like, oh, shit, here we go again. Another potential disaster that's probably going to get me. And you, so you go into more of a stealth mode. You're like, oh, shit, can I hide? You have that thought for a moment? Yeah. That's, I, that's exactly what happened. And like, I'm like, oh, shit, can I hide? And then I was waiting.

And then, you know, Bigfoot scanning and, like, look in it. I'm like, oh, shit, if you sees me, I'm fuck you know like thinking like that's exactly what i thought and then his eyes meet my eyes and i'm like oh hell you know what you know hoping it's like well i can't do anything i guess all i can't do is wave and hope for the best yeah no no and there's and so you actually had a whole conceptual moment there of the idea of you're just going about your day kind of doing your thing there's a there's a, and there's a process to problems finding you as if they were animated creatures that had a will of their own, you know, we might conceive of it that way of here is something that, you know, if I'm doing what I should do, it should make me less susceptible to being

found by all the many problems waiting for me out there, all the different ways I could screw up. So the first instinct is, you know, I'm just going about my business. Oh shit, here's a potential problem. Is it going to miss me? Is it like, it's like a, you were talking about T-bones at an intersection. It could have been like, won, they go by right in front of you and it barely missed. Whoa, problem didn't get me, but man, that was close. And so your, your first instinct is, okay, can I hide from this problem? Can I make myself less visible? Is there any way I can avoid having to confront the problem or deal with the problem because I do something smart and stay off the problem's radar and stay out of the arena with the problem?

and what you've shown yourself is in this instance you're like first instinct hide from the problem in a way or stay away from it so that I don't have to confront it and you say nah it found me and what is that going to be like when it does and that is a very interesting reaction it's you know it's scanning around there's that moment of hope where maybe it's going to miss me ah it saw me shit and you wait and smile or just just like uh how do you say i smile because like i every time i look back on it like i laugh like it's funny to me you know what i mean yeah i do that i just thought it was so weird like why did you wave at it like why did you i almost want to say i smiled like you know a big

goofy open mouth smile like hey you know yeah yeah So, any, any strong recollection of the manner of the wave, because there's like the, what, Jim Carrey Truman show, hey, neighbors, he's got his whole arm over his head. Yeah, Forrest Gump. So he's lieutenant, Lieutenant Dan and he's waving like a good ball. That's exactly what it works. I feel like it, that's, that's exactly what it reminds me of. When he's standing on the dock and he's, like, waving at him. Okay.

You know what I mean? It's exactly. like that. Okay. No, no. And that's what I'm, that's what I'm getting towards as well. So there's a, there's a lot of different ways you can wave. You can be like, you know, just, we do the head wave. Nod. So, you know, but there. This is like a hand moving like animated wave. Yeah. Well, you know, and at that point, it's an interesting thing to do because it seems goofy, but you're like, he saw you. You're not going to wave gently, slowly, one little hand gesture and he's going to stop seeing you that we already saw you. So there's no way out of that. You've,

been seen. So you give a very kind of goofy, animated gesture of, of, you know, I'd say a friendly. I mean, you're trying to be, you're trying to make friends with the problem. Yeah. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of validity to that in terms of making friends with a problem in general. What am I trying to say here? Sometimes we got to make friends with a problem in order to deal with it. We got to say, look, this is happening. It doesn't, it doesn't help me to be angry about this. And sometimes it does. But let's say a given situation, anger is not going to solve this, put that off the table. I don't need the motivation. I already got the motivation. Anger is useless. Being resentful towards the problem, being, you know, failing to take

it seriously because you don't want to get to know the problem and understand it well enough. You're treating it dismissively. There's a lot of ways where we're being friendly to the problem is actually the right approach. You want to say, all right, this is happening. Come on in. Let's work this out. Let's see what it is. Let's deal with it. And, yeah, so that concept, of making friends with some problems. Like, well, this has to be dealt with one way or another. So I might as well, it's like making peace with a, with a, or coming to a place of a peaceful acceptance in a way.

But it, apparently that failed as well. You're like, this is not a problem that can be solved by friendly gestures. Like, you know, waving like, hey neighbor is not going to not going to solve it. This is maybe the type of problem that doesn't respond to making friends with it. Okay. Now, I've said a lot there. I don't know if that brought anything to your mind. And make a lot.

That makes a hundred percent. sense because right after that wave it runs across the street starts bawling me to death so it's like obviously that was not the right way to go about it yeah i'm like i'm like thinking i'm like it's big for it like it's it's going to catch you it's going to be stronger than you it's going to see you at night it's something that lives in the woods like it's not it's in it's in tone with itself it it knows how to see it probably knows how to move around at night it could probably identify someone like you standing perfectly still with full moon, you know, full room, everything like that. Oh, yeah.

You're screwed. This is something that you, there's not anything you can really do. So, like, why, why try at that point if you know, like, you're going to get molded? And that's why I'm like, why did I wave? Yeah. You know, and because I know, like, running, you're not going to run from it. like, be like running away from a grizzly bed on a flat ground. Like, you're screwed.

Peanut butter. No burking. Come here. He wants me to throw his toy. It is not time for that right now. Come here. Benjamin the Dream Wizard wants to help you pierce the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams.

Every episode of his dreamscapes program features real dreamers, gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal vision. New DreamScape's episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks, highlighting the psychological principles which inform our dream experience and much, much more. To join The Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature. available on Amazon, featuring the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. Um, all right, you did everything you need to do. Yeah, I'm ready.

And you're back. Good deal, good deal. So where were we? Um, I probably should not have been listening to a podcast while I was out there. I probably should have just been letting my thoughts percolate. Now I'm like, And anyway, that's okay. Well, that also, there was a wasp. And so I got the wasp spray. And then I found another. I killed like eight wasps.

And one of them was building the nest. Two of them. It's a wasp season. There haven't been as many spiders around, so we're going to see a lot more wasps this year. Yeah, I love living up north. We don't really have to worry about that stuff for a few more weeks. Yup, it's just the beginning of it.

It's happening. Just got to hate wasps so much. just the even wasps and mosquitoes i would eradicate you should take um a transmission fluid because it smells sweet oh yeah um and you you mix it in with some gatorade and some sugar and then you cut a gatorade bottle and then you flip it you cut like the the boob part yeah yeah to where it's like a normal cup and you flip it upside down and where it's a funnel and you put it in in the cup and then the wass will go in there to get the sugar and they can't get out and they just drowned.

Oh, yeah. That's good times. I am merciless with those kind of flying, stingy critters. Hate them. Hate them. I don't mind bees because it's like one and done, you know? Bees not so much. Yeah, they're going to sing you, but they're going to die.

So it's all fair. Yeah. But no, like, like, that's why I know God's real, because it's like, what kind of fucking creature is that that can sting you multiple times, you know? Yeah. Oh, yeah. They got, that's, that's the one thing about it.

It's like, bees are naturally defensive, you know, versus offensive. They're, they don't want to, they don't want to die. I think they, they're programmed to know that the, you know, I get one and done. And wasps are like, you know, to fuck you. I'll sting you a hundred times. I'll get my, I'll get my friends to come back and sting you too, because I can. What are you going to do about it? I'm going to rain liquid, liquid death upon all you, you and all your kin is what I'm going to

do. And I think because I'm paranoid, I can't tell whether I might have gotten a little overspray dusting on the dog's coat. So I'm going to give him a bath later. Just make sure he doesn't lick it off just in case. He's probably fine. I probably don't need to do that. But this is me looking at a potential big foot. Like, yeah, rushing. Yeah, you can't worry. You can't worry about that. I mean, you got to, you got to take that stuff seriously. Yeah. You know, you don't know what kind of, that's a little dog too. Like, oh. Yep. You know, like, you know, the chemicals affect animals before they'll affect us. Yeah.

And that's the true. At a much lower dose, yeah. But anyways. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that also. Well, I think it's also kind of related to what we're talking about in terms of problems and addressing them.

I'm definitely in this state of mind where I'm like, okay, I'm looking at a potential problem, a potential problem that is very serious. A dead dog when I wake up in the morning, I don't want to deal with that. A dog, I got to rush to the emergency room. These are huge problems. Or, or I take 10 minutes on a sunny day. I give him a bath. Problem solved.

Even if it's not highly likely that he got enough of a dusting to really do him any harm, why would I not solve a problem very easily with 10 minutes of effort? It's better to be proactive and reactive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially when the consequences are so severe when the reaction is burying the dog because there's nothing you can do. And for the rest of my life, I will regret.

I didn't take 10 minutes when I could have and just solve the problem. So this is problem solving. This is like looking at what's realistic and what's possible. And sometimes we conceptualize things like that that are, you know, catastrophes, that are disasters that are things so above and beyond that there's nothing we can do. The problem finds us in as if it were an alive thing with a will and beeline, bam, we're in it. And problems can feel like natural disasters feel like that. I mean, we personify or anthropomorphize tornadoes.

It's like, it came straight from my house. Well, it did. That's what it looked like. You know, it went over there, and then I went over there, and then it went right towards me. Now, we would also say, oh, the tornado missed me as if it had a will, you know, as if it were something alive that could control itself. And we do tend to conceive of things like that,

because it seems that way in nature. It seems like nature targets us where it doesn't in its own way, even if it doesn't actually have a consciousness as far as we can tell. But so that's what we're getting to with this idea of the Bigfoot thing and conceptualizing problems and trying to get my head back into that space as well. So, and then you did like the, you tried to make friends with it in a way of like, hey, what if I just embrace it in a way, you know, come on over, buddy. I'll give you hug.

No, no, it's just vicious. And it's coming for you. so any strong impressions of how it moved towards you did it leap over a car did it no it just knuckle drag gorilla i think i'm coming to the mole you the death kind of run you know okay so it was kind of um all fours galloping type of thing like really yeah okay and then what was the actual assault experience like you know did it grab your head first did it pick up by leg and smash you on the ground. What it was? I'll be honest. That was a part where

like, they say that you never die in your dreams. Yeah. You'll always wake up before you die. And, uh, I don't know about that because it was like I knew I was dead. You know what I mean? Like, I was like, fuck, this is it. I'm going to die.

Like, that was literally like that feeling was what I had. Yeah. And then I didn't end up waking up in like the middle of. love it, you know, like, I was getting mulled up pretty good. And just like any, like, animal gorilla attack you see on, on live leak, you know. Oh, yeah. You know, it was like that.

And it was, like, knowing, like, what that was like you're dead. And then my wife woke me up because I was moaning like a spooky ghost. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. So this is interesting, too. So reading back through the historical dream literature that I'm re-presenting. publishing. It is a bit of a common trope.

And it is almost universally true that people's experiences, I was falling or something. And before I hit the bottom, I woke up. The, the intensity of the negative emotion regarding. I heard that is from your brain, your body, you're sleep deprived and your body is falling asleep faster than your brain. so your brain sends like a shock to you and it like shocks you awake i get that all the time and it's normally i'm always falling in my dream gotcha well there's a um there's that's that's

that's the only sleep thing i've ever looked up yeah yeah no there's there's uh when you when you looked it up did the words appear hypnagogic jerk does that probably phrase sound familiar yeah so there's there's actually two distinct experiences and one is you are dead asleep you've been asleep for a while and you have a dream of falling, the experience of falling while dreaming, the dream of falling. There's a little bit of... I've had a very few of those. Yeah, and very common. It's its own cat, the falling dream, very, very famous category. If we're going to break them, you know, the, the, um, running away from a monster and your feet are stuck in molasses or you can't, your body lacks the physical strength to effectively escape, very common dream, falling dream.

the flying dream. A lot of people have. And that very often goes with lucid dreaming. People that fly tend to be more lucid dreamers. Not universally, but those categories are related. Yeah. So what we're dealing with on, I was going somewhere with that.

Hold on a sec. A dream categories fall. Oh, so there's a distinct experience called the hypnagogic jerk, which rather than being deadest, and having a falling dream, that's its own category. This is more, I am relaxing in bed. I'm on the edge of going to sleep, the edge of lapsing into being unconscious.

And suddenly we get a very intense physical sensation as if the bed weren't there and we were falling physically falling through space. And we try to, we jerk. We try to catch ourselves. And it's called, you know, hypnogogic because there's, um, It's from the words hypnos and gogos, meaning, you know, leading to sleep. That, that experience of falling, hypnagogic is falling asleep. And we have hypnagogic hallucinations physically like that.

It's a tactile hallucination because you're not actually falling. You're in bed. You're not moving at all. Also, another, another very common hypnagogic hallucination is hearing a voice call your name in the room, in the house. That one freaks people out. And there's two reasons that we assume for that. One is that it is caused by a distinct physical cause in the environment. Generally, the house settling as heat dissipates and the wood shifts or someone still awake in another room and you hear just a, you know, the squeak of a chair being pulled out from a desk.

And we, our brain is trying to make sense of it. And the most, the thing we're most sensitive to is our own name. So we, we, our brain will go, oh, someone called my name. That must have been what that sound was. I can, I know exactly what you're talking about. I got put under anesthesia to get my wisdom teeth pulled. Ah, yeah. And how, how they wake you up is they just say your first name.

There you go. Yeah. No, we are very attentive to that. It's so wild. Yeah. I actually had a. It was the weirdest thing ever. I had a knee surgery while we're going on 15 years ago,

torn meniscus from my old high school wrestling injury. And I woke up and the first thing I realized was something in my mouth. So, I mean, I reach up and hold the tube out. And the lady sitting next to the bed who was supposed to be monitoring, she couldn't have done anything anyway. But that's what they're there for, to keep an eye on us as we're coming out of amsthesia to make sure we don't roll out of bed and smash her face, anything. It happened so quickly she couldn't stop it.

And she said, oh, you're not supposed to do that. And I'm holding it in my head. I said, should I put it back? She's like, no, you can't do that either. I ex-tubated myself from the post-surgical, you know, breathing tube. That was pretty funny. Long story short on that. I was always getting a kick out of that.

Just by, you know, I acted so quickly. I'm like, I want this thing out of my mouth. What is this? She's like, you can't do that. I ask, should I put it back? No. No, no, you shouldn't. Well, of course, not aware and awake enough to know what the hell is going on.

Okay. So relating back to your experience in the dream there is, okay. But also that in the dying experience, it is most common that the intense negative emotions around, I'm being attacked, I'm falling, there's a legitimate threat to my life, that those experiences are intense enough to cause us to wake ourselves. out of the experience. So that's like 99.9%. There's a few cases where people are like,

not only did I reach the bottom, I splatted, I felt myself come apart and knew that I was dead and then I was a ghost looking at my self splatted on the ground. That has also been documented as an experience. So it isn't always that we never die in our dreams, but that it's a very rare occurrence

that a death is complete. pleated in a dream. So it actually sounds like for you, you're in that 99.9% where this was a fatal experience. You were going to die, but then you got awakened before you could see what happened.

Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. The same thing with the UFO, the UFO is abducting the Amish. My wife woke me up before that one could come true. Yeah. I didn't know where that was going.

I just remember seeing the horse and buggy going up into the sky with a green light. And then next thing you know, I'm awake. What is like you were just like? doing the go ghost thing. What a fantastic juxtaposition, too, like the, the icon of a someone left behind in time and something from our sci-fi future in a way, aliens.

Now they're coming together. And there's something about this future sucking up the past in an alien abduction manner. That's got its own fantastic symbolism, too. But that was such a weird one. Oh, my God, that was weird. It was funny weird. It was like, what the heck is going on? Yeah.

Why are they only taking the homage? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And that would be, you know, my assumption would be there's something about that idea of an archaic way of living being confronted by some future thing that they were ill-suited to deal with or even understand. There's something going on with that. That's, that's fantastic. But in terms of the Bigfoot thing, so what we're looking at, since we've dialed in some of these broad strokes in terms of why the particular setting, what it really is. relates to from your personal experience, what the, the kind of nature, general nature of the

bigfoot thing being the overwhelming problem that finds you and, you know, you just can't deal. We might look back. I think you hit it right on the head, man. I think, I think what it is is it's manifesting the, uh, how you're not in control of just everyday life of where you're at and the unknown variables of stuff and how like, you don't know six months from now you could lose your house you know what i mean for sure yeah catastrophic natural disasters in a way there's there's there's going to be something probably that's going to overwhelm you at some point um now that being said we don't typically go through our daily life

obsessed with those things every minute of every day to to dysfunctional levels that's where we get to you that's where we get into you know anxiety disorders where it's like i'm i'm just constantly on edge because, you know, every time a pen drops, I'm like, oh, startled, exaggerated startled response because you're so on edge because I'm expecting a catastrophe at any moment. This one seems like, so what is more normal is that something happens in our life that gives us an inkling. Like, we have a near miss, and it makes you a more cautious driver, in a sense. So what I would wonder is what was going on in your life about a year ago that made it necessary to kind of process that possibility as a Bigfoot dream.

Oh, there's very, very sad. I think, shoot, I think that's a little after my dog died. My mom started getting sick before she died and I got laid off at work. Wow. Speaking of catastrophes that are just like, you can't stop death, you can't stop sickness. and you can't predict when you might lose a job. I mean, I want to just like draw a line on anything go, that's why that's it.

That's got to be it. Oh, man. Yeah. That'll sure put you in the mind of, you know, in the mindset of wondering or needing to process an experience or having it be so traumatic that it pops up in your dream in this iconic way. And it's like, God, they're big foot. Here we go.

Oh, shoot. what? I think no, I got my dog dying. That was two years ago. Gotcha. Fair enough. My mom died last year. That'll do it too. So it was, this was before or after your mom died, do you know, or? I can't remember if this was, this dream was two years ago, or it was a year ago. I'd have to ask my wife. Fair enough. Because she knows. I think she wrote it down. She usually, like, she gets a kick out of it. She'll, like, she'll wake me up when I start moaning. And she just asked me all these details tell me tell me everything right now that's the best way it is the best way to do it yeah while it's fresh you got to get it out of your head or it fades it

disappears yeah unless it stays on its own which some dreams do they're like i couldn't stop thinking about all day and they're all sad i don't think i've ever had like a good dream stay they're all sad like i yeah i had this one where i was on an airplane and i had a baby and it was a girl and then like there was like oh it was like not my current wife's but I had this dream when I was in like high school but I'm on an airplane

I have this baby and it's a baby girl and some some women lady comments on it and then I end up saying like oh no she's dead like yeah like that I remember that one I remember all those dreams I had when I was 17 about being in the woods and not

I don't remember the dreams vividly like I can recall the big foot one, but I do remember like, you know, stuff going on. Yeah. It is a pretty common experience that we have more negative memories, like negative emotions seems to form stronger memories in that regard. No, intensely positive does as well, but not to the same degree, unfortunately. We're kind of programmed to. Evolutionarily. We're kind of.

You see a deer get molded death by a bear. You're going to remember not to fuck with the bear. exactly yeah we are yeah it's uh the positive experiences and positive emotions don't have as much of a life saving quality to them so there we're just we are geared to be kind of negative nancy's in that way of like what could go wrong you know uh because that's going to keep us alive more than fantasizing about our wishful thinking that things will all work out which we need too we we also we need hope and fear to keep us alive optimally hope to for something to reach for and fear to keep us out of trouble.

But definitely the fear, anxiety, worry, the prop side of things is way more intense. Yeah. I got to do a shameless plug out there at all the Dune's Day Preppers listening. You guys, you know, you got to look at the sunshine and the rainbows. You know, that's such a depressive way of living your life of preparing for the end, you know? And it's like you're always thinking about this negative thing. You need to like have positive stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not just enough to survive. You got to have something you're living for as well. Exactly. You got to have both. You're looking down in all your survival books. You're not looking up and seeing stuff around you.

And I think that's definitely an issue that a lot of people, it's something I notice about those guys, all the preppers and stuff. They have that mindset. And it's like that's not healthy. Yeah. And then there's also positive emotion that comes from it, too, of successfully avoiding problems or being properly prepared or the process. process of repairing can be its own enjoyable experience.

So sometimes it's, uh, uh, and I do that too. Like, uh, so we're talking about video gaming and lately I'm playing, um, Horizon Zero Dawn. And what do I do in the game because there's, um, harvesting you can do to get different components to make different types of arrows or potions or, you know, other materials you need in the world. I am an obsessive harvesting hoarder. I just save everything.

My inventory is always full. I need everything. I'm going to use it sometime. Yeah, I'm very, I'm very much in that mindset. And you know, there's been a few occasions where... All of them. You always keep everything. Like fall out of fall four is like a good example.

Yep. Why do you have 15 teddy bears, you know? I might need all 15 of them for sure. And that's, no, that's always a little bit of a little bit of a thing there where you're like, is it worth the hassle the inventory management? Or is it, you know, is it worth the hassle to do inventory management because I will need these things? and then you can only find out later. I just did a quest last night where on a lark,

you know, this is a side mission. Oh, look, a little exclamation point. Let's go see what they need. Oh, there's a poor child dying and they need some medicine. Oh, the only guy that's got the medicines over here. We'll go see the guy. And the guy says, I need a particular item from a particular creature. And I was able to go, I got that.

It's in my inventory. I didn't have to go anywhere to get it. I didn't have to go on a hunting mission. I already, I'd saved the Thunderjaw heart or whatever it was that this guy needed. And mission, fastest mission of my life. It was done in less than two minutes. Fast traveled here, fast travel there. Done.

Handed in. Now, not as. I kind of hate when they do those ping pong quests, though. Yeah, run over here, run over there. Yeah. No, but I had a bit of a satisfaction with it because it's like I saved the thing. I was diligent in my hoarding and I found a use for it. Now, there's probably 99 other items in my inventory that I have no use for.

And never going to use them. I'm going to end the game. and they're all going to be sitting in my inventory as they were from day one. So it's the other side of things. Like, how useful is this really? I get the opposite thing. What I like to do, especially with like Fallout or Skyrim and stuff, is to beat story stuff before that they issue it to you.

Like there's a few games you can do that where they'll go like, well, in Skyrim, they'll do it. Yeah. When you go on, if you, if you, on your way to, uh, White Run, if you go to Bleak Falls Barrow and get the stone and then go to White Run and then talk to that guy, he's like, you already got it. And there's like this whole different dialogue where he's like, oh, wow, you're a different, you're a different person than I thought you were. And I get satisfaction out of that. Oh, for sure.

You do, you streamline your play through and you get to the point where like, no, I already did that. And you're like, here, I did it. And they're like, oh, wow. You know, I don't know why I like that. That's good for you. No, that is a unique, unique satisfaction for sure. Yeah. And then the idea of, well, you go, you're going to buy a new suit of armor or whatever.

And the guy's like, oh, but I need one special component. You're like, got it. Got it. Got it on the way. That's why I like looking up some quests online. It's like, I don't mind playing games that are four or five years old. The puzzles have all been solved. And I can just go, show me on the map.

I want to go get this thing done. I don't want to run all over for hours looking for something when I could just, someone's already been there and done that. So sometimes I like the discovery and the mystery and problem solving. And sometimes I'm like, there's a big map. I could look anywhere. Where the hell is this thing? You know, and basically what it is is I'm either going to find the person that already did it and take their advice.

Fair enough. Stand on the shoulders of giants. Get it done. Or it's just never going to happen. I'm not going to spend that much time and effort discovering everything for myself for the first time as if it's never been done before. Maybe something. Go ahead. Well, it's, you want to be in that sweet spot right in the middle where you're prepared and you have stuff.

Like, you know, during COVID-19, you had a gun. Yeah, you just got back from Costco. You got those two big things of toilet paper before. Oh, yeah. You were freaking out. You know? Yeah. You were all set and like just set enough to where you didn't like, oh, I've been hoarding pounds of toilet paper for 20 years.

I'm ready for this, you know? And, you know, you were that guy that just obsessed over that one thing. But that sweet spot is you had enough to get through it. And at the same time, you still enjoyed life and you still did everything else. Just like in a video game, you know. Yeah. You do enough to do it, but you can still enjoy the story and everything else. And you're not just farming wheat for 19 hours on wow to get gold for a clan or something, you know.

Oh, yeah. Well, this is an interesting bit of synchronicity because I was actually arguing with another guy on Discord, uh, in a, in another server about the risk management, I would say is the broad category. There are some people who are like, no risk is too great. And there are some people way over on the other side, or the polar extremes are, you know,

no risk is too great and any risk is too much. I hate, it's called ORM. Yeah. You're talking about operational risk management, which is the military's way of identifying risk. can you control or mitigate the risk and how it's like a whole thing on planning and i think you were in the same topic with this where you can there there is risk that is too great to a point but you can make that risk that seems like it's too great to being well that risk is just

yeah i think you faded out for a second there and see as you can make it where it's just oh instead of being extreme, it's high. Yeah. Yeah. And I'd say either one is not conducive to function. You know, you can't ignore the potential for risk and you can't be paralyzed by risk. You got to find out that, as you said, that sweet spot, you know, there are some risks that are like it's too great. I think one guy actually jumped out of a plane.

Parachute wouldn't open. Oh, yeah, the Red Bull guy. The Red Bull guy. He lost his skydiving instructor thing for that. It's illegal. But you can get a lot of trouble for it. To do what, sorry? To jump out of an airplane without a parachute, right?

Oh, well, I didn't know that story. This was just a guy who his shoot wouldn't open. And he thought for sure he was a goner. And he bounced. And he lived. Now, he was a little broken, but he didn't die. And he's walking. You know, he didn't paralyze him.

He didn't lose a leg. He just got messed up by bouncing off the ground hard. But he lived. And that can happen. Now, should you rely on? that and just jump out of planes without a parachute no that's a bad idea so there is uh there's always the chance that that an extreme risk 99.999% chance you are dead there's still that 0.000% chance maybe it doesn't happen but you can't lean into that highly unlikely scenario i'm

going to survive the jump yeah and that's what risk management is risk management is like all right what's our risk you're jumping out of a plane okay well how can we stop that we'll give you a parachute Okay, well, you know, what's, what's another precaution? Because now you go, well, what if that shoot doesn't open? Now you're dead still. It's like, okay, well, we'll give you a second parachute. Like, well, what if that first parachute? It opens slightly and now you're tangled.

All right, well, we've got to give you a knife now. And now you have this whole entire procedure where you're safe. Like, underwater cave diving, the most dangerous sport in the world. Never in my life. Never. Oh, God. There's this YouTube channel I was obsessed with. they do all this like dive talk or something like that wow and they just they talk about all these

underwater cave accidents and stuff and people with like 20 years of open water diving go into these underwater caves and they just all die and oh yeah um i can't even watch i can't even watch the video i can't i'll i will have a hyperventilation you know moment where i'm like i will feel like i'm choking myself like i'm drowning and just by watching it it's so reactive to that you know movies where, movies where the characters like, take a deep breath

and hope I can make it. Oh, the scenes are torture for me. You can't. You're gonna try to hold your breaths. You know, and the funny thing is, I,

like when I'm watching the movie, hold it as long as water. I do. I catch myself doing that. I catch myself holding it. And I'm like, I don't have to do this. But I'm also,

sometimes I'm curious, could I hold it as long as they do? Because I'm sitting in a chair. That's why you do it. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. That's what it's about.

You're trying. trying to see, can I do what he's doing? Can I do that? And we have to realize also, I'm sitting in the chair in a theater. I'm not already exhausted and panting from exertion. Yeah. I'm not swimming under the water, eating up my oxygen. Yeah, I'm just, and I can't hold it as long as they do. So they, I mean, it's also.

There is a common thing, though, is both your heart rates are up. Your heart rate, like I remember I was watching the Count of Monte Cristo, like two nights ago. in that scene where he, they throw him off and he is in the bag and they throw him off the edge of the fortress and he's like underwater and he's trying to unhook the the ball and chain so he can swim up. Oh yeah.

My heart was like beating out of my chest and I'm trying to hold my breath for it and everything like that. Yeah. No, it's true. And that's, well, that's why we watch movies to get those

intense reactions as if we're in the scenario to kind of feel the adventure of it. If we felt nothing, we had no connection to the characters, or, well, that's a bad movie. We got a lot of those. Like, this is boring. I don't care what happens.

There's nothing exciting going on. Yeah, we definitely want those. And then that's what actually, I mean, this is a whole theory of drama and storytelling where it's like, well, why do we do these things? And it's very often to reach a catharsis to get something out of the experience, some emotional response within us released in some way, either experientially or that we can let go of.

Yeah, that's a whole, that's a whole another thing, which is really cool thing to explore as well. But before we run out of it, we got about, I got maybe 10 more minutes. Before we run out of time, did you want to talk it all about relating this to the other dream?

You said, I just remembered this one. That one would take way too long. It has a lot of details. And this wasn't a nightmare, though. This was just, it's a dream I remembered. But,

okay. Yeah, maybe you say. It involved, everything. It involves like aliens. Like, it's almost like the movie Contact and like they like come to Earth or something. They're like and the dream was,

I didn't like it at all. It was kind of a nightmare because the aliens came and they were like, we want me. And I was like, oh, fuck. You know, like they're like in that one thing and you're like, I don't want to go. And it's like, what do you think the government would do if the aliens came down and said, we want

you? They're going to give them you like yeah pretty much you the world would say yeah it was a good call even if the aliens weren't going to do anything you know they'd still go oh that was a good call yeah yeah yeah well for sure a lot of people do the calculus on that and they're like you know this is uh the extinction of the human race or we hand over one guy that people are just going to be practical about it which you can't blame well exactly i'm one of those people um a lot of people are like well i hate big game hunters And I argue with my wife and family and friends about this, but I'm like,

you understand that, like, that rich snob paid a lot of money. And this is in Africa, you know, who, there's no government to, to hire the Rangers that guard these rhinos. These Rangers are going up against groups of people with AK-47s and machines. They're not going up against,

you know, Billy Joel and a shotgun. They're going up against serious people. Yeah. And, you know, that costs a lot of money. And it's like you have to sacrifice one of the herd so the herd can survive. And it's like, it's kind of weird that people don't understand that. And it's like, no, that's like, I would gladly like sacrifice myself if like a kid would live or, you know, if more than one person would live, I'd probably do it.

Yeah. I think you got to kind of have, you got to kind of have that mentality for going into the military as well. I'm doing this for a reason. I'm doing this because this function I'm going to provide is necessary so that other people can have a good life. You know, for me too, I'm getting paid and this education and whatnot and, you know, all the benefits the soldier gets. But that isn't enough necessarily to put your life on the risk in your life on the line. You got to have some reason. I'm going to go a little, yeah.

I'm going to go a little political and dark here. But a lot of people are starting to wake up and see that. going to the military is very stupid to get physically hurt and everything, just so this rich congressman can get a stock boost. And then come to find out today, you know, they just passed a vote to take 22% of the VA's budget. And it's like, okay, well, what's going to happen? Well, they're essentially cutting all these things for people that, like, cancer treatments,

you know, just normal health stuff. The suicide hotline, you know, there's like 22 veterans. Stiaidae and the VA's cutting this. I mean, the government's cutting it. And it's like, cool. I like to see how you guys all talk about taking care of people and the people that, you know, did put it all on the line that are messed up that are hurt.

You're just kind of spitting on them. Well, we, we do have some rather messed up priorities. I, that's a whole kettle of fish. It sucks. It sucks.

I think we're a little too. Aggressive around the world. I think that's one of the big problems. One of the big problems. And, you know, that's putting it mildly. I know. But I'm trying to be mild about it. I think we,

I honestly, I think we can all say we need to work on ourselves. We need to take some inner time. We need to just lock or go on a vacation. Relect. Yeah. Sometimes you've got to step back. What we need to do. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, we're, we're over extended and spending a lot of money and then not taking care of the vets and whatnot. It's like, I don't want to go. Everybody. I don't want to get. Our roads are bad. That too.

Well, yeah, we're spending a lot of these decisions that are being made about how to spend money we don't have and over extending ourselves. And I can't imagine that it's actually necessary in the way that like, well, they just have to do it because the alternative is worse. I do think there's a lot of people stealing the silver from the Titanic as it goes down and getting into the lifeboats and leaving us holding the bag, you know. Like, think about it. Like, what have we just stopped? What if, you know, like everyone's hovering their hands over the nuclear launch button, that red button? What if we just, what if we were the people that go, you know what? We don't care.

We're done. Yep. It's not worth it. It's over with. We don't care anymore. Do it. Press the button. We don't care.

Kill us all. It's fine. Yeah. Do you think, like, you know what I mean? Stop playing the game. Yeah. That was a message from the, from that movie back in the, uh, well, war games back in the 80s with those.

What Matthew Broder? I do exactly. This game's not fun. Interesting strategy. Interesting strategy. The only way to win is not to play the game. Yeah. Space Odyssey.

Ah, that's a, yeah. Shall we play a game? Shall we play a game? Shall we play a game? Yeah. Okay, but we're going to wrap it up here. And I'm going to get going. No, that's perfectly fine.

These are serious issues. And it all fits the theme. I think that's what you start getting on a certain topic. And there's a lot to explore around these things. And it seems like if someone said, hey, Ben, write an article about problem solving and go. I wouldn't, I wouldn't have anywhere near this much to say about it.

Because it takes a conversation to kind of pull it all out. So that's, I think these are always fascinating. I never regret going on tangents with folks. But, okay, speaking to which, who is this? This has been our friend, Seth, from the US of A. And, you know, he's just a regular guy like, like you and me. So I'll talk to anybody. You know that.

And if you would, kindly, once again, like, share, subscribe, tell your friends. Always need more volunteer dreamers. 16 works of historical dream literature, the most recent here in my hand. And you can see it's actually, look at this thing. It's kind of thick. It's 300 something, was it? 353 pages. These are not small, these are not small books.

Dreams in their meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson, one of 16 currently available. works. You can find all this and more at Benjamin the DreamWizard.com. And that's about it. For me, I'm just going to say, Seth, good talk. Thank you for being here. Great talk, man. Thank you. Good deal.

And everybody out there, thanks for listening.