Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 146: Ex Senatus Ad Athenaeum

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

Debbie Spector Weisman @ https://thedreamcoach.net/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of dreamscapes today we have our friend debby specter weissman from the hudson valley of new york She's a certified dream life coach and podcast host of the dream power experience on YouTube You can find her at the dreamcoach dot net We're gonna get right back to her in two seconds for my part would you kindly like share subscribe tell your friends Always need more volunteer dreamers viewers for the game streams also 16 currently available works of historical dream literature available on Amazon and the most recent one I'm going to pop it up here being Dreams in their meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson.

You can also head on over to Benjamin the Dream Wizard.locals.com trying to start a community there. I would like that to be the place where I get most of my guests. I mean, come on in, be a member and I'd love to talk to you first. It's also the place where I'd love to take any sustained donations. They have a better ratio than YouTube. so that's to my benefit. Anyway, enough of the shilling about me.

Debbie, thank you for being here. Appreciate your time. Oh, I'm thrilled to be here, Benjamin, and excited to be talking about dreams. I do have one little clarification to make. Please, yes. My podcast is called Dream Power Radio. And that is available everywhere, wherever you get podcasts.

The Dream Power Experience is a new YouTube channel that I've started up, which has videos of all kinds of interviews I've done with people. You know, the Dream Power Radio is an audio podcast and then G-Pardt's experience will be video. There you go. And so a little behind the scenes, I don't research anyone ever. I just talk to people.

And so immediately, the first thing we do before we record anything or, you know, do the, do the interpretation stuff, I ask, well, okay, how do you want me to identify you? What is your name, your proper title? What are, what are you? And so very often I write things down wrong or forget to ask the correct question. And so I'm always happy to be corrected. I think that's how it goes with me for the dream interpretation stuff as well, where I'm like, oh, what about this idea?

And the person goes, no, I don't like that. That doesn't feel right. Fine. The answers are not in me. They're all in you. So we were talking a little bit beforehand that you do something very similar to what I do. You actually use people's dreams to help them forward their aspirations. and I'd rather let you describe what you do, and we can compare notes.

Sure. Well, I am a certified dream life coach, and what that means is that I will help people understand their dreams. And in the sense, I use the dreams as a tool to help get to the bottom of what is it that is deep inside them that they don't understand about themselves. and it usually involves, you know, a self-limiting belief or some understanding of themselves they had not realized. Sometimes getting that is enough for them to solve their problem. Other times, most of the time, it's really the beginning of, you know, a coaching experience where I take them on a journey where they truly get to know themselves,

get them to the point where they're able to understand their dreams, able to understand how they can, solve life situations that come up for them so that they can in other words live their dream life for sure and that's what it is yeah definitely no i think it's very similar to what i do now what i do is in a um well one-off educational context like i'm gonna i'm gonna get a person i may ever speak with them again they're going to tell me one dream we're going to look at what that discrete experience might say about uh how they're feeling about something uh the um understand ending of a particular problem, clarifying their, how they would want to address a situation. What you do is, I think, is a little more close to traditional dream analysis a la the Freudian and

youngian school, even if you're not psychoanalyst specifically, but real, and I've said this before, like real dream analysis in the clinical setting, in a, you know, private counseling type of thing, you could talk about one dream for weeks and really dig into it and really find out what it for you and why it felt so important when you woke up. So you probably have more of a chance to draw out of people what is in them in a more full context and give them a better opportunity to make use of it. Absolutely. You know, we may talk about one dream and that's it for that dream, but then it gets them on the journey because my goal is by the time we're done with our sessions And they run anywhere from, you know, a four-month, a four-week program.

I've got a six-month program, a 90-day program on specific things. By the time we're done with that, the idea is that they don't need me anymore. I've given them the tools that they can use to go on their own journeys and find the solutions to their own problems. Because that's how I see dreams. Dreams, we know the answers to the problems inside us. or I'll say the answers to the problems are inside us. We may not know them on a conscious level, but we know them on a subconscious level.

And our dreams are our subconscious giving us the answers. So the idea is how to get those dreams out from the subconscious into our conscious minds so that we can get the answers, get the insights, and go on from there. Definitely. I love comparing notes with fellow practitioners in a way, You know, that people that appreciate this realm of experience and how it can be of tremendous benefit, I think, because there's still the dichotomy of some people out there who are like, oh, dreams are meaningless.

They're just random noise in your head. They don't mean anything. And then if we look at it on a spectrum, there's dreams mean nothing. And then there's people who are, I say it lovingly, spooky woo, supernatural messages. I'm somewhere in the middle. They mean something. but it's not a where am I going with this the idea it used to be a point of contention even in psychology that the subconscious existed at all there was a time before we acknowledge that

that is kind of a thing and that it's a thing which can have its own in a way desire to communicate and we still don't understand why certain things draw our attention in our conscious mind we look at a person or a situation or an object a piece of art and we feel something from that, we still don't understand what that is, but we just give it a name. Oh, it was attractive. Okay, that's a description of a process more than an explanation. It's like, I felt attracted to it. Okay, why?

What is that? And I think that's the same thing. I don't know if you're comparing notes style, if that's where you're getting from your understanding of subconscious, it can kind of have an intent in a way of pushing messages through to the conscious mind. Very, very much so. And I'll make two points. One is that I subscribe to the statement.

I love to quote this by the great dream worker Jeremy Taylor. We said that all dreams reflect our inner creativity and our ability to face and solve life's problems. And that's kind of the way that I approach it. And then I'll also add that I came to dream work very late in life. For most of my life, I was what you would call, you know, a perfect fatalist. You know, life just what it was, it was, you know, we lived life. You know, we didn't, life demand, you know, showed us what to do. We didn't get to choose how we live our life.

We just sort of go along with the flow and whatever happens, happens. You need to deal with things as they come to you. And, you know, I had a great epiphany. Oh, about, oh, now it's like over 20 years ago. Do you know the film? What the Bleep, do we know? I am familiar with it. I think I've seen it, but it was a long, it was a long time ago.

Oh, yeah, it was a long time ago. Yeah, yeah. The movie came out in 2004. And before I was into G-Mark and even still now, my husband and I own a video post-production company. We also do some creative services. We were hired back in 2000, 2001, to be the post-post-production.

production supervision company for what the plebe do we know. Wow. At the time, you know, we were hired as the filmmakers. I knew nothing at all about the subject matter. And for those of you who haven't seen it, aren't aware of it, basically the movie shows that, you know, we have the ability to make choices in our lives, and we can control how we live our life and not have life control us.

In a nutshell, that's a basic, idea of the movie. That was, you know, total news to me at the time. And like I said, we were hired in like 2001, I think. The movie didn't come out till 2004. So we were living with the movie for three years, you know, because the post-production was a very long process. And, you know, so day after day hearing all of those interviews and, you know, make a big part of the movie, it just really made me question where I was in my life at that point and seeing, you know, what I could do. And it started me on a journey of, you know, what do I want to do with my life? How do I want to live my life?

You know, what can I do? And, you know, I tried different things along the way. And then I got exposed to dream work. And I had what I like to call the, I started with, I. I got involved with doing dream circles. And that was like my first introduction to dream work. And I enjoyed it. It was, you know, it was fun listening to other people's dreams.

I started to remember my own dreams. And it turns out my dreams at first, they were very small in terms of size. You know, I might have like one incident or, you know, just one thing happened in the dream to the point where I got the nickname, the queen of the dream. snippets. But I got a lot out of it. And to the point where I got decided that, you know, the person who was doing these dream circles, a very talented dream worker, Kelly Sullivan Walden, had a program to become a dream

life coach. And I said, I'm going to take this course. Not so much that I wanted to be a coach, but because I just wanted to learn more. about dreams and learn more about dream work and get more of a background and what was involved and everything. And during the time that I was taking this program, I had, I like to call the dream that changed my life. And because of that dream, I finished the program, decided to become a coach because I thought if a dream can have this much of an effect on me, I have to help other people see how dreams can help them in their life.

Yeah. So you want to hear the dream? Is that the dream you brought to share with us? No, no. Oh, yeah. Okay. So let's, well, for my process and there's a, okay, short answer, yes, small tangent. We're going to come right back to that.

My, there's a concept, I think I'm remembering of convergent discoveries where if there's one truth, people will take different paths to get there and two people will independently study something and arrive at the same understanding. of it, and then that's how we get in a way of scientific consensus. But I think I've taken a similar path to you in some ways. I don't think it was a dream that changed my life, but the idea that there is something there to understand, and there's a long history of it, like to people cite Freud and Young. It goes way, it goes back 2,000 years. That's the historical dream literature I've got for sales, all these great writers that talked about it since 2,000 years ago. I'd point to all that.

Oh, so, so I don't know what your process is, and I do want to talk to you. about that because I'd love to compare those notes too, but for mine, this was the point. It's better if I don't hear a dream before we start talking about it. And that's why I don't ask people, okay, tell me your dream so I can, I don't know, research it and come up with ideas. That's bad. That's all me. That's in me in my head.

It has nothing to do with you. So I prefer to go in absolutely blind. And I think that's number one, a validation of my process in terms of people who think it's all Hocum and cold reading and, and, and, and, you know, and. psychological manipulation. It's like, you know, if it was, I'd ask you about the dream so I could make up some cool shit. I don't. I don't want to know anything. I want you to tell me what's there. We look at it together. So that's why I would say, if that's the dream we were going to talk about, don't tell me yet. But we're going to look at something else. So yes, please, tangent over. Sorry. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Here's the dream that changed my life. Codpiece. That's it. a la Shakespeare con piece? Allah, it was just the word, not an image or anything, just the word. And it was because I'll tell you my take because I have this one, or at least what it meant to me at that point and how it still worked with me. So I woke up and because I knew that dreams were important, I said, I have to figure out what.

why am I having this word codpiece show up in my dream? Well, I didn't know what a cot piece was. So the first thing I did was look it up. And a codpiece definition is, you know, a garment that men wore in the middle ages to protect their genitals. You see, they're made of leather, sometimes it's made of metal. And that was, you know, the general meaning of the word. another way it was used in modern times cod pieces were costumes

that a lot of the heavy metal bands in the 80s wore if you look at all the Osborne videos you'll see this big thing in front of him and that's a codpiece or his version of a codpiece so I said okay that's interesting I love history

but I'm not that into medieval history particularly where it involves men with cod pieces. And I like music, but, you know, heavy metal music is one of my favorite genres. So why am I having this? What is a cod piece to me? What could possibly mean to me?

Yeah. And you ask me on my process. So the first thing I do is I write down the dream, whatever it is. This one happened to be one word, but if I have longer dreams, I write them down. And I see, well, I asked myself, you know, what's the symbol?

Well, this one, the only symbol is a codpiece. What does it mean? I kept asking myself, what does this codpiece mean to me? And I kept saying, well, it doesn't mean this, it doesn't mean that. What other thing could it possibly mean? And I let it sit in my mind for a bit, and then I had this thought. Well, what is a codpiece? it's a strong item that is used to protect something precious.

In terms of a man, it's his genitals. And what's more precious to a man and his genitals? Well, how does that relate to me? Well, this goes back to when I had the dream and who I was at the time. I, for most of my life, I was a very shy, very quiet person. I didn't speak until I was spoken to. I didn't offer up my opinions. I had wait till anybody asked me,

and I didn't offer myself up in any way. And I came to realize that I was the precious thing that was behind the codpiece, the codpiece being the rest of the world. And because I was on this journey and knew that I didn't want to be living the life, I was the way I was living life at the time. I said, well, the only way that I can really grow and become, you know, the person I want to be or get on to this journey is to cut through the cotpiece.

And, you know, you would think, oh, of course, if you're shy, if you're quiet, you know, the way to not do it, it's not do it. But there was something about having that thrown at me in the form of the dream. that really gave me that, you know, total embodiment of that idea that, no, I have to be, I have to make that effort to be more self-expressive. I have to make that effort to put myself out there in a way that I hadn't before. And that started me on the journey, which, like I said, led me to complete my studies to be a coach, led me to start coaching people, which also helped me grow my confidence.

One of the things that happened, I'll say, well, one thing first I'll say, two nights later, after I figured this part out, and I said, oh, this is great. Well, you know, in order to have a dream, be real and to meet something, take action on it. So I started this action of doing this. Well, two nights later, I had another dream. Again, it was no image, just one word. the word was almond and I saw it and I wrote it down and started to laugh. Why? Because what is an almond?

It is an item that has a shell and then inside the shell is something precious which is the almond itself. I laughed because an almond shell is a lot thinner than a codpiece. So that gave me the realization that I was. was on the right track. And because of that, I continue on that track. I'm still shy. I'm still an introvert. I'm never going to be this, you know, throw it all out there, extrovert person. But I'm a lot more self-expressive. I put myself out there. And I wouldn't be doing a podcast. I wouldn't have done, you know, this new YouTube channel. I wouldn't be doing so many things if I hadn't started on that journey and really took heed to that dream that I had there.

One other thing I mentioned also, I like to call Dreamwork my third career. My first career was being a writer and editor. Back in the 80s, I wrote a lot of young adult romance novels, and I burnt out. I didn't write another thing, another piece of literature or any kind of nonfiction fiction for 25 years. Wow. After doing this dream work program inspired me and enabled me to start writing again. And so based on what I learned from this course and one of the things we had to do in the course was to do what was called a dream date,

which was doing something for yourself by yourself that is a little bit outside of your comfort zone. And so I, on the basis of having to do this as part of our homework assignments and doing the program, I wrote a book called 101 dream dates. I have to say, I love you to the most important person in your life, you.

And this was the first book that I had written in 201. 25 years. And since then, I have either written or have been a part of nine other books. So that is the power of dream work and the power of listening to your dreams. And it got me out of this shell that I put myself into reignited my creativity and has put me on the path where I'm speaking to you now. Yeah, absolutely. And so much of what you're saying really echoes and validates, I think my experience of it, which is that, you know, it was a long time ago, 20, 25 years ago that I first had an inkling that there was something to this dream thing, that it could actually be something. And it took me a long time to kind of come around as, well, let me try and make this of my second career or whatever, because I think there's something of value there. But it's, I'd say it's a lot more, for me, it was an intellectual understanding and a desire to follow creativity and, and, you know, what if I can do this other thing and write some books and make a living that way instead of, you know, working inpatient, I was speaking of being burned out, man, I was burned out on that. But what a powerful awakening to say, I had this dream experience that changed my

understanding of myself and how I was capable of interacting with the world. And to have that as its own thing that transforms you and then to say, wait a minute, other people can have this same experience and change how they interact with the world. That's, I love that. I almost wish I'd kind of had that thing. But one question about that I wanted to ask you is, described it to people because they've given me a little bit of feedback about this too. But when I offer a suggestion and someone has an epiphany, they go, whoa, wait a minute,

that or they generate their own ideas based on me rambling nonsense. I describe it as a zing, like almost a visceral feeling, like almost between head and gut. Did you have something similar to that, like almost a physical experience of the moment of understanding that when the dream kind of clicked for you? Or how would you describe it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, they call it, you know, the aha moment.

Yeah. And it wasn't so much a body thing for me as much as a mind thing for me. Fair enough. Where it was like, like, like, you know, those illustrations where the mind blows up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. The third eye opening. Yeah, yeah.

I describe a lot of what I do is, um, and especially, especially when I'm, you know, say, trolling online. And trolling has a malicious connotation to it. But not always. It's more of the trickster type of thing. Or the, you know, the wild man in the mountains who's, you know, just it seems like an insane nut. But he's got something you need to know. I call it poking people in their third eye so that they realize they have one.

That's kind of my description. It got it kind of in the dream work. It fits with that too. But there were a couple of things I wanted to get at in your experience there, too. maybe it's already said part of it, but one of them was the range of dream experience. We talk about people who say dream in color and don't dream in color and how rare may be dreaming in color is. A lot of dreams are, you know, it's primarily visual for those of us who see.

It's primarily not for those who are blind. Very interesting. They have more tactile and auditory experiences. But a dream can be no images and a single word. And did you see the word codpiece written or did you just have the concept of it firmly kind of thrust forward into your consciousness. How did you experience that? It was the latter.

I just, I woke up not remembering if I had seen the word or not, but I knew the word. Yeah. I knew I had a dream about this word. And I didn't remember seeing it. Yeah. You know, it wasn't like it was written in neon lights. You know, it was like blinking light. Very well could have been, but it wasn't.

Yeah. It could have been. but, you know, my understanding, my remembrance is that it was just this idea. Yeah. And I talk about the, in my work, too, I talk about the validity of having ideas of you can see it with your eyes in your head, which is imaginary. You can hear it in your head, which is imaginary. And not imaginary in, not real, but it is the original idea of imaginary, which is

it's not physical. It's not tangible. you're not having the reception of light into your eyeballs getting translated into an image. It's literally all in your head. But then there's the, in what I consider the co-equal experience of simply knowing something. So we'll get into a piece of someone's dream and I'll say, they'll tell me, this man was here to hurt me. And I'll say, well, how did you know? And they would, I'd say, you know, did he say something?

Did he make a threatening gesture? Did you see a reason to be alarms? Like, no, I just knew. I just knew that was his purpose in coming to find me. And I'm like, that is as valid as anything else. You can just know a piece of information in a dream. And it's as real as seeing it in your, in your mind's eye. And that's, have you come across that kind of experience?

Oh, all the time. And in fact, you know, before coming on to this show, I listened to a couple of your other episodes. Thank you. Always appreciated it. In an earlier episode that I think ties into, I'm going to say, here because you're talking about that it's you you I'd correct me if I'm wrong but I think I heard that you didn't really think that it was possible to program dreams or to incubate dreams and so this is this model I'd say it's something I'm not capable of teaching or encouraging

and that there's a split opinion on whether but I think it I would say if I'm going to lean one way I'd say it is, but I don't know how to teach you how to do that. So that's why I'd say I don't feel expert in that. Okay. Well, I fully, you know, and big proponent of incubating dreams. Nice. And so I've been tell you about a dream that I had a couple of weeks ago

and how that ties into what we were just talking about. Sure. So a couple weeks ago, I had been doing a podcast. And it's actually one that just came out, I think last couple weeks ago, about happiness. And in doing the interview, I was feeling on top of the world by the time we were done.

It was, you know, it was great fun. And, you know, just one of these interviews where you're just, you know, you're ready to dance and jump up in the air. And it was really great. And after I finished it, I came back up and I saw my husband. He was very upset. Well, like I said, we had this, you know, business. And he was having a difficulty with one of our clients. And as he explained it to me, I realized that I had to do something about this.

I wasn't sure what it was I had to do. But I knew I was the one who had to do something. It wasn't something he could do. I had to do it. And I'm thinking about it, you know, over dinner we're talking about it. And I'm like, I just don't know. And I couldn't really come up with anything. That night I said, you know what?

I'm going to incubate a dream about this. And I got up the next morning and I had it. And if you say, you know, did I see everything written out? No, but I knew when I woke up from that dream, I knew I had to write the client in email and I knew the exact words I had to use to put in the email. And that all came out of that dream. Absolutely.

But I think, you know, to your point, though, it's not easy to incubate your dream. It takes time. It takes effort. So a lot of people don't want to do it because it's not as simple as saying, oh, give me the answer. No, no, for sure. Yeah. The dog wanted to readjust here. This is my value-added content.

Eventually, we're going to get some cat visitors to. As soon as you start telling me something and I got to really take notes, the cats are going to be right here. I know it. But if you notice, if you're going to get some. he knows my dog is sleeping behind me. Yeah, so cute. He may stir about. That's what I need is probably like an extra little table here that just has a doggy bed on it.

Then he can just be near me, but he wants to lay in my lap. He's a lap dog. But I know a lot of dream workers who swear by incubating dreams and they've gotten, you know, remarkable insights, all kinds of, and all kinds of subjects from doing it. So I just want to say that you can be. It can be done. I summed the familiar. Here she is.

There is a process. There's a process that can be taught. And it can be done. Nice. Well, absolutely. I would refer people to you. And I believe you. It's not that I'm skeptical of it in general, but I tend to try to stay in my lane.

Like, I do a particular kind of thing. And I have a broad understanding and, you know, some historical facts and, you know, the psychology background from. school and all all this good stuff goes together but if someone says can dreams be incubated i would probably lean on the side of yes i think they can and i don't know how to do that that said so i wouldn't claim that you know anything i do is teaching them that so i would send them to you i suggest you you look up a book by um ellie uh lyde i c called dream incubation and she goes through in great detail all the steps that you can take starting to beating your own dreams

okay nice i'm taking all kinds of different notes here i've got um what is it kelly sullivan walden and uh what was it jeremy taylor tart tart what did i write down there taylor yeah yeah yeah got i'm going to go look up some of these people i'm always trying to expand my understanding by reading you know, different people than their perspectives on things. And there's a good chance that there's some things maybe I haven't heard of before. So my journey is far from complete on this. I did want to say in regards to I was going somewhere with that, the idea of the dream incubation thing is even though I don't know how to do it, I very much endorse the idea of if you don't know how to solve a problem, sleep on it. And I don't mean that like, oh, just give it time. It's kind

of the metaphorical understanding of, you know, oh, don't rush. It's like take your time. I mean literally sleep on it. I mean, and there, I can't not tell you how many times I have woken up the next day, not remembering a dream at all. And I have an answer like that to a problem that was, I just couldn't put my finger on what I thought, well, the number one, the understanding of it. What am I really looking at here? How does it work?

And then, okay, what do I want and how do I go about addressing that in a practical way? I wake up the next day, bam, I got an answer. to me it's a mystery like I can't understand how I how that happens and maybe maybe by reading this book of Ellie Leidic and dream incubation it'll it'll speak to something about like why that happens yeah well yeah I think the expression you know let me sleep on it came from the knowledge that we dream all the time and we get answers in our dreams whether we remember the dream or not yeah we're getting the answer and so those times when we wake up and we just have it.

We had a dream about it. We don't remember what the dream was, but we dreamed about it. Because dreams have been part of humankind since humankind existed. Oh, yeah. First recorded dream was on a Sanskrit stone, something like 7,000 years ago. Oh, yeah.

And, you know, it's been, you know, go through the ages and all kinds of examples of the power of dream work. So another book to read is Robert Moss as a secret history of dream work. I mean, that goes into great detail about how dreams have been important to civilization forever. You know, and how civilizations from all over the world, you know, had their same ideas about dream work. Yeah, absolutely. And it goes back to, yeah, these ancient cultures that it was, And this is why I say, we were talking a little bit beforehand, I think that I'm going to have,

I have had, say, a Norse shaming guy on a couple times. And I'm going to have a shaman of a different type. But these were the, you know, the medicine men. The, the, we say it from our superior position of modern, modernism in a way that we look down on these, say, tribalistic or, or primitive methods of engagement. Like, we're just kind of rediscovering things they were doing. for millennia before modern science came along and really finally I think

kind of validating what it always was what was always true. I love those, I mean these things get relegated to the realm of the quote unquote occult as if it were as if we should dismiss it as necessarily anti-science or

less valid. But I'm very happy in my practice to to be busting that myth a bit and going like, you know, these things were always true. We just got, we just got a big head about it in our age of so-called modern medicine. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Like I said, you know, I love history. And I had a historian on my podcast a couple years ago who wrote, he says, actually a Civil War historian, but he wrote a history about Civil War dreams. And what surprised me was that it was very, very common. back in those days for everybody to, you know, sit around their breakfast table and talk about their dreams. It was like, you know, oh, you know, what's dream about? It's like everybody did it. So when the soldiers went off to fight, their letters would just contain dreams.

You know, they'd write back to their wives. This is what I've been dreaming about. You know, and the wife right back, this is what I've been dreaming about. And it's like, who do? And there's been some fantastic cases of kind of, kind of, you know, the way I talked about convergent discovery, there's kind of convergent dreams where a father and a son both have dream about something that actually then happens

and they have letters dated and it's like authenticated in advance of the event and then the event happens. And it's like, I don't know what to do with that either. Like if someone brings me, this is why I say if you try and stay in my lane, if someone brings me a dream and asks me, Ben, is this dream prophetic? I couldn't tell you. Not until it's verified after the fact.

I mean, keep track. pay attention. I've got a friend of mine who says, he lives, you know, half a mile southeast of me, who says that he has had a prophetic dream where one week later, that exact situation played out. And he very distinctly described the sensation of watching it happen as different than deja vu. So is that just deja vu? You just had a, you know, a hiccup, a loop, brain loop happened. You're like, no, this was different. It's a completely different experience. But had he brought that dream to me, you know, a week before and asked, is this going to happen? I couldn't tell them. So I don't like to pretend to know more than I do.

That's how you get into trouble, right? Yeah, it's very hard to say, oh, yeah, this is a prophetic dream because you can't predict the future. Yeah. You know, it is only in retrospect. However, sometimes, you know, I don't know people who have had dreams where, you know, like they'll see an accident happening. And a couple of weeks later, they'll to like that same place. They're in a car or something. They get to that same place.

And they know to stop because they've had that dream. They're paying attention to it. So the accident didn't happen because they knew to stop before something would happen. And then like in then in let's say just for example, you know, they have the dream where they're driving in a car and a bus runs the light and, you know, in the dream the bus hits them. well, in real life, the person would stop and not move, and then they see a bus crossing the intersection. Zoom past, yeah. Zoom passed.

So, yes, that was a prophetic dream. And because they knew how to pay attention to their dreams, see, most of the time when people have dreams, they don't pay attention to them. And that's when we can sometimes get in trouble because that dream literally saved that person's life. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's got to be very personal, too, in that respect. So it's hard to say bringing a third party to ask them, you know, is this going to be relevant to my future necessarily? I mean, all I can do, and I hope it's what we both do, I think, is trying to help someone understand, as you said, themselves better. Like, why would this image mean something to you? Oh, baby girl. She's got an itchy ear.

Ah, she's going nuts. Is that good enough? There you go. I did want to bounce back to something you were saying like I made this note too and I think it's something important to say. So you had that experience of the dream. The concept cod piece in that in that wording, not something you saw. It's just the concept solidly front and center in your mind when you woke up. And you can tell me about your process too in terms of understanding these things. There's like I go in different directions with stuff. Like there is, okay, what is the thing?

And certainly you want to get an understanding of it. And then it's like, what is the thing for? What does it do? What is it meant to accomplish? And it sounds like that's kind of what you did. What is it physically and how does it function? And then when you start exploring the boundaries of not only what it is, but what it does, then you get into the idea of, and it's great what you said.

And this is how I do the teasing apart as well. What is the function of a con piece? It serves broadly two purposes. One, to protect some vulnerable piece of equipment without which, you know, evolutionarily, we can't procreate, and that's a big deal. It's the death of your lineage in addition to a tremendous amount of pain if it's not properly, you know, protected. So this is a very, very physical, practical side of it. But there's a second purpose of it, which is also the social side of things, to prevent exposing what is considered socially inappropriate, a piece of

the body to the public. So it serves that double purpose of protection from those two sides. So you went, it sounds like you would have gotten the exact same understanding I would have suggested, which is that you had this idea of needing to protect yourself from, say, social embarrassment of putting yourself out there and being rejected, mocked, embarrassed by doing something socially inappropriate. You know, this, say a false expectation of yourself that I'm supposed to be, I'm supposed to minimize the space I take up verbally, socially, et cetera. and that, you know, it's like it is as if I am protecting myself with a cod piece. And you didn't even have to have that deep understanding.

Somewhere in the subconscious, you'd come across that word before, decades ago, perhaps, you know, at the time of the dream. And it stuck with you as an, oh, that's an interesting thing. And it was stuck into that concept was also, as I said, what is it physically? What does it do? and what are the metaphysical kind of, kind of, you know, philosophical concepts around it, why would this thing exist and what purpose does it serve? And all of that, bam, and you just extract out that meaning, you go, wow, I don't have to do this.

I have a choice, as you were saying. Absolutely. And the thing about that word, like when I woke up, I said, you know, copies. This is a word I should know the meaning of, you know, that horrible word should. But you know what? I'm not going to get all high on my horse. I'm going to look it up. I'm going to figure out and see what it is.

And yes, you know, you could go in different directions. And the thing about a dream like that, when you have an important dream and it stays with you, the meaning of the dream can also change over time. Sure. And about this, so this dream was now. Now, like 15 years ago, I think I had it. A couple of years, like two years ago, I woke up one night and said, you know, I have a different understanding of the dream. Now I am the codpiece.

You know, I have not only stepped forward, but I am now the strong, powerful thing. You know, they're there to protect whatever it is else I need to protect, but I am strong enough to be my own. own protector. Yeah. And that can reverse the meaning too. In the original meaning, it was the same thing and it performs the same function. The concept remains intact. But what, in what was originally an impediment, like you're holding yourself back. Now you've got this, developed a thicker skin, a harder, I'll get a little feedback there, sorry, you know, harder. No, yeah. Now I'm hearing myself. Echo, why did that start all of a sudden? It's terrible. It's a sign.

Might be. So what the original purpose was to get something out of the way, now you're like, well, I have a properly functional shell that is serving a useful purpose to me. Absolutely. And who knows? A couple of years. So now I'll have another meaning for it that will come up and it'll be relevant.

Because that's the other thing about dreams is that it's where you are, time and place. changes the meaning of the dream. And the other part that is also important, like you said, what is my approach? I also look at the emotion behind the dream. And so the cot piece, it wasn't so much, I guess the emotion was there was a drive. I had to figure out what this meant.

I knew it was important, and I had to figure it out. Yeah, but sometimes, you know, it could be, you know, whatever the emotion is, that that has a very important part in trying to understand what it means. For sure. Being on the autism spectrum, I don't always remember to ask people about their emotions because my emotional content, the register is just low. It's a psychological term. It's a bit blunted or restricted in that respect for me. I think about most people have an emotional experience on a scale of like, say, zero to 80 something. And mine's at about an 11.

It's not absent, but it's not very intense. So I just forget people have emotions. And here I am, you know, laughing and having a good time. But it's not like I don't experience it. But it's usually, I'm in the rational space. I mean, well, what does this mean? How do I think about this? Not how do I feel about it?

I was going to ask you, too. So I have something I tell folks, and it seems obviously true based on my experience. but again, nice to have it validated or explore the difference. I tell people that it appears to me dreams self-select for importance. Like if you wake up in the morning, you remember it and it's vivid and it's intense. You know there's something there you should look at. Has that been your experience? Oh, absolutely.

You know, why do we remember some dreams and not? Because we dream, you know, three to six, six, to nine dreams a night, depending on our sleep cycle. Most people don't remember any of them. If you were an active dreamer, you know, you'll remember one. I mean, I don't really remember maybe one sometimes two dreams a night, and I don't remember all of my dreams. But when I do have one that is like, you know, it's like hitting me in the face.

Oh, my God, you know, this one is, you know, I write down all my dreams, with like this one, you know, I write down and, you know, underline it, make sure I try to get to the bottom of it. For sure. I mean, it's also, you know, sort of elated ideas, the whole idea of nightmares. You know, most people who never remember their dreams, you know, they have a nightmare. They're going to remember it. True. And my theory behind that is that because we dream all the time and our dreams are always trying to tell us something,

if we don't believe dreams are important, we don't pay attention to them, they just, you know, fly off into the ether. They're gone. We don't have it. So my idea is that a nightmare is your subconscious telling you, you really need to hear the message behind this dream. And the only way you're going to hear is if I scare you.

So I'm going to scare you. It's going to make you pay attention. Because my belief is that, you know, a nightmare it could be the best thing that ever happens to you if you pay attention to it and if you dig down deep to see what it is trying to tell you. Most of the time, it is trying to tell you something that you do need to hear. And that's the only way your subconscious can get you to pay attention to it. Definitely.

I've come to very much the same conclusion based on my theoretical background in psychology because, you know, why did we evolve? the capacity for anxiety, fear, pain, all of these things that are the worst of human experiences because it gets our attention and says, hey, there's a problem here. You need to do something, or you might die. So nightmares, I think, are very similar to that. It's like, this is a threat. This is something you consider dangerous to you emotionally, your psychological health, or physically, you know, or financially. I mean, that can be an existential threat as well. You know, if I don't attend to this, I won't have food and shelter and all the things that money can buy because I'm

going to lose my job because I'm not paying attention to something that's very important. Or I'm putting my life at risk in a bad relationship with a guy that's, you know, I'm in a bit of denial and I don't want to acknowledge the red flags, but that nightmare is going to throw them in your face and go, you're going to die. Get out. Get out of the house. The call's coming from the basement. That's, well, that also leads me on to the discussion of, if you worked with people on recurring dreams much. And, or is that not typically something you address? Well, I'll address it if it comes up.

Sure. I can't say every client's going to have a recurring dream. That's true. Absolutely. Yes. And yes. And I'm sure, I'm sure you've had this experience, too, that when you get to the bottom of what the recurring dream is telling you, you stop having the dream. Exactly.

I didn't, I was going to just leave that vague and go, whoa. What do you think? That is exactly right. And I've had so much feedback from, from. you know, a handful of people of one, this is episode 146. So, but it seems pretty consistent. Yeah, that if we get close to something,

my favorite is, and I probably told the story more than once. Sorry, you guys can tune out for like 30 seconds. But talk to a guy who, um, always had the same dream. And it ended in the same way. He's in this backyard space and there's these shadow people and he tries to move past them and they beat the hell out of him. We talked about it. And he got back to me a week or so later and said,

I had the dream again. This time in the dream, for whatever reason, I chose to just stop and talk to them. And it turned out they were really cool. And they let me know that they were physically instantiating a barrier because I wasn't ready to move beyond that. And that what they were there, beating me up was the kindness compared to what I would face if I moved forward before I was ready.

That was amazing. I mean, I'm getting the, I'm getting a, I'm getting a, uh, eagerly feeling just remembering that I helped someone experience that. Um, so, so, yeah, that's what, this is so great. talking to someone who's like, you get it. You get all the things. And not only that, I'm not just out of my mind imagining these things or making shit up.

Like other people of this conversion discovery have come to the same understanding of things because it's just true. Yeah. Absolutely. And it reminded me of somebody, not a client, but a friend of mine who says that, you know, she has this recurring dream from time to time. And she's had it like maybe once every 10 years or so. And for her, every time she has it, it's like, she knows.

those, oh, I now have to take a look at where I am. And it's like the dream is her reminder to take stock of where she is at that particular moment and see, you know, what's working, what's not working. And that's how she uses it. For sure. No, that's great too because there are those dreams where it's like it happens so often in a short span of time and it won't go away because whatever it is is significant enough and immediate enough and important enough that you've got to.

to figure it out. Your brain cannot let it go because something's got to give. It's got, something's got to be done. Then there's, yeah, exactly what you were saying, those other dreams where it's like you get the kind of, I call it a crystallization of a particular concept in a particular form. It can be, you know, a sequence of images or other dream experience. And it's not going to be constant because you don't face that problem all the time. But the next time you do face that problem with that situation or you notice the same pattern recurring the dream comes back to say hey let's check in look at the map see where you are on the you you are here again just just just just just pointing that out to you just do do with it what you will um yeah that's

that i love that i love that understanding of it absolutely and that's what makes dreams fun yeah they don't have to be super serious even if i and you i'm of course take it very seriously, the process of helping someone understand it. Hopefully, the process is also fun. If you're dealing with a nightmare about something really serious and your life is in danger, it's going to be maybe a little uncomfortable. But a lot of the discovery process is just, it's the joy, I would say the joy of discovery that reaching those epiphanies of going, wow, that's what it means. Oh, my God, that's amazing. And I can do something with that. I know exactly what to do with that. I'm just getting someone to that point where, you know,

I'm not giving advice. I'm just helping you. the way I describe it, and you might like this. I feel like, you know, I tell people, of course, the answer is not of me. I'm not a prophet. I'm not hearing the voice of God. There's no spirits communicating with me from beyond. None of that.

It's all psychology and a partnership where you invite me in, and I'm kind of standing over your shoulder with a flashlight going. What do you see over there? What if we look at it from this angle? What do you think about this idea? Just offering these suggestions. And when one of them clicks and you go, yeah, yeah, what you just said there?

Oh, that just bam. And they have that little explosion of ideas and go, wait a minute, stop, let me tell you about something. I just remembered something from a week ago or my childhood. And those doors open up. I love that experience. That's one of the most satisfying things for me. Oh, yeah. And it's so important when I'm working with a client, it's not my job to tell her, most of my clients are women.

I have men, but most are women. It's not my job to tell her what the dream means. You know, what I do is I'll ask her question so that she comes around to understanding, oh, this is what the dream is trying to tell me. You know, and I may have to guide her along the way and, you know, do the, if it were my dream, this is what it would mean. But I always, you know, couch it in that phrase because I'm not telling her what it means. I'm just saying that, you know, there are different ways, you know, everybody could have a dream, the exact same dream. and it can mean 10 different things depending on that person situation. So it's always getting to that person having our own understanding of this is what it means,

because it's what it means to me. And that's the only way that person is ever going to really take action on the dream also because they have to come to that understanding. So they're embodying that understanding in themselves so that. so that it gets to the point, oh, well, this isn't going to happen or this isn't going to change or I'm not going to get what I want unless I do something to make this dream, you know, manifest itself. Yeah, very much so. And it's very just a typical of the process and understanding of psychology itself,

which is, you know, even if the therapist does have some good advice, the person has to put it into practice themselves. It's like, well, here's what I think would get you towards your goal. And then you've got to go out and do it. And you're going to do it or you're not. And it's out of my hands. I can't make you do it. I'm not here with the cattle prod, you know.

No matter how great I think an idea is, it doesn't matter if it's not, if the person's not willing to put it into practice themselves. So you've got to turn it over to then trust them to take it from there, huh? Absolutely. Or else it's a waste of everybody's time. For sure. Yeah. Well, speaking of time.

in general, we've been chatting for about an hour. And I like to give people, you know, plenty of time to do the dream thing. So are you about ready to jump into that? I am ready. No. So, you know, in preparation for this, you know, I went through my dream journal. And I found a dream, you know, like I said, I'll write down my dreams. And then I'll, you know, do a little bit of work on it and, you know, get some ideas

of what I think it means. And I found a dream where I didn't do anything. I just wrote it down. so and you know let it go so I'm going to tell you about this dream and we'll see where it goes does that sound absolutely and you've seen a couple of the episodes but for for the audience out there my first and I think most important step is I shut up and listen we just the person tells me the dream as it as they experienced it beginning to end whatever whatever happened then we'll go back through it again try and help me see it a little more clearly and see what it inspires and then

somewhere between step two and getting, step three getting an answer, we collaboratively build an understanding that makes the most sense to everybody involved. So I'm ready when you are. Benjamin the Dream Wizard wants to help you pierce the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his dreamscapes program features real dreamers gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New Dreams episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks, highlighting the psychological principles which inform our dream experience and much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media

platforms and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the Wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature, available on Amazon, featuring the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. The cat on the paper as usual. Come on, baby girl. Okay, and this dream is more than one word. Okay. So the premise of this dream, and this is kind of like what went through my mind,

as the dream is happening before, my family and I had been to Australia and we had seen the government building with places where the legislature met and the names of the parties on the sides of the building or on the insides of the building. In the dream, we go back after... Now, that's in the dream.

This wasn't real life. This is just in the dream. So we go back after a disaster where the building stands intact, but the inside is in ruins. We go in and see a darkened room with the seats charred, and the sides of the building inside are also have charred areas inside. The names of the people on the side walls are still visible, but they are also charred, and the whole thing was very sad to see. Then we walked up a path to a library, which had also sustained some damage.

My husband and grandson and some other people go ahead and take a bath inside the building. My daughter and I and several small children stand at the entry, and we watch as the children are doing some kind of religious ceremony. After that, my daughter and I sneak into the building. We were not supposed to be there. We went to a small room right past the front door where we saw my husband and grandson in the bathtub. At that point, a guard comes in and orders all of us to leave.

Then I write to someone like a teacher and tell her that we were able to see the ruins. She had been with us when we saw the buildings when they were still intact. And that's the end of the dreams. Okay. Trying to catch up here. Okay. No, that's fantastic.

That's a lot of wonderful imagery. So you were saying the, don't get in the feedback again. I'll back up and slow down. The premises that you had been to Australia to a government building. And you said you did not. This is not reminiscent of natural trip. I've never been to Australia. I've never been to Australia.

I have no idea what this government building is. But I knew that we had been there when it was an intact building. And then we're going back in the dream and it's in ruins. Gotcha. Yeah. About how long ago did the dream happen? Oh, about three years ago. Okay.

So we're looking at 2020. Yeah. Interesting. Had you been paying attention to the news out of Australia at that time, specifically what came to my mind, just a suggestion, is the political controversy, perhaps, over the COVID response. Does that feel like something? This was maybe like a month or two before COVID, so it's not COVID related. And, yeah, and I had not been paying attention to any kind of Australia news. So I had no idea what was going on in Australia at the time.

Fair enough. Yeah. So, okay, that was the first thing that popped into my head. Well, I was aware of some of that stuff. I wonder if you were. You're not. So this is where we go. Do you see what I seem like, no, that's not it.

Knocked on the wrong door. We're going to go. We're going to move on. It's interesting that, I mean, some of the first things that stand out to me, this is a foreign country specifically Australia so it's not the U.S. It is a foreign country. It is specifically. It was in Japan, that kind of thing.

It's a government building. So it has to do with the way maybe a, or the thought occurs to me, the way Australians may particularly view how to compose their social organization in a sense, something along those lines. And there's, uh, the idea. idea of a disaster that left the exterior intact, but the interior destroyed. And that you, not only that, but you went inside to get a better look at how that was what that interior destruction kind of looked like.

And not only that, it's, you're with your family. So you're bringing this, whatever this is affects more than just me or there's more than just me involved in it. And the. And the idea that there were these names on the wall, names are a particular thing in terms of identifying something. You give it a name and you know what it is. And names specifically for people, names identify individuals. All of this is precursor to go through it again.

We're going to walk me through it, but I want to share my preliminary thoughts. The next place you go is to a library. And then there's specific ideas of what is a library of broad strokes. we know it's a place where they gather books. It's also another kind of government institution in a lot of ways. It's a place that we've say our society has chosen to make this a thing. We deem books are important. We're going to make them available for free to people, you know, with a library card, that kind of thing.

And then you have a particular kind of experience there. You've got your, not only your husband, but I think you mentioned your son. Grandson. Oh, grandson was there. Yes, so you're there with the grandkids. And then you're, you're showing yourself a bit of a separation of like, well, I do one thing. Maybe I'm watching. But he's engaged in something.

He's engaged in a bath. He's cleaning himself. There's something, you know, there's some reason that needed to take place inside this building. It's like, what an interesting idea that the, there's a bathtub in a library. What? What are we doing there? Oh, it's bad. Right.

That, right? That's fantastic. And it makes perfect sense in the dream for some reason. hopefully we'll get around to. And so you and small children, I think you said, and were they grandkids specifically? This was a different group of small children. Yeah, my daughter and I stand in the entry to the building

while we're watching some small children do a religious ceremony. That's right. Okay. I was catching up. That's why I go back through these things sometime. Yes. Just ceremony. also very interesting and this was a different building or this was the library this was the library and there were small children doing a religious ceremony which is very interesting too because

what am i trying to say there's a there's a connection between public rituals that have a kind of religious feeling to them or that there's a connection in my mind anyway and and i think this is the way a lot of people conceive of it is that there's very little daylight, so to speak, between what we endorse culturally and what we enact politically. So it's kind of like what you believe is what you do in that sense.

So watching a particular kind of religious ritual is like, well, this is what the people here believe. This is how they act and what they enact publicly. Something like that. And you actually, then you report sneaking in. So there's kind of a

you don't want to be observed doing this. You know, there's a sneaking to it. Or at least you don't want to alert the people you're observing to your presence. Maybe it might change their behavior. They might stop the ritual. You're trying to get a better look. And this is where it gets husband and son.

Husband and son were in the bathtub, I think is what I wrote down. Grants, that's right. Again, grandson. And then a guard comes. You've been caught and makes you, leave. That's kind of where, okay, good deal. I don't know if you have any, now you haven't examined this yourself in terms of trying to figure it out. Is there anything that stood out of, those suggestions that kind of threw out there that you were, that you felt that zing of like,

oh, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. Just the whole idea where you're talking about, you know, the institution and, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the rituals that we're not supposed to be seeing. I'm still not even now, you know, I've been looking at this dream, still not sure where it's really taking me. For sure. Yeah. Well, if we start at the very beginning, so what is the first physical location you can

remember being in the dream, like the first image of, okay, here we are. The dream starts. Yeah. Well, we're outside this, looking at this government buildings, like a legislature, legislator. legislature meets there. And we're looking at the building, which we had known at some time, we'd seen it when it was intact, but now it's in ruins. The outside is still standing, but the inside is all, yeah, we go in and it's all charred.

Everything is there, like the seats and the names, everything's there, is all charred. Gotcha. The outside is still intact. Okay. So that's, yeah, that's why. I got that a bit of confusion in the very beginning. You hadn't been there in real life, but the dream experience was you are now at a place that you had been before,

and now it is in a different state. It is now in a deteriorated state than what you had previously witnessed. It's only in the dream we had been there before. Yes. In real life, he'd never been in. Yes, and that's what confused me, that little difference. So the idea that you needed to, understand it from that perspective is its own unique message. So you're what you're looking at,

what is it? It is the idea of a change over time, but it's specifically a deterioration. It's that maybe a once great institution has now been reduced to a state of decay of some kind, something important where important work was done is gutted. It's not. It's not. serving, it's no longer fit for purpose. Are you feeling something around that idea? Yeah. Yeah. And then, I can't speak and right at the same time.

And it's very interesting that you've chosen to set this in Australia. If you think about the idea of Australia, does anything come to mind off the top of your head? Like, what is Australia to you? Or what is your understanding? Yeah, what I was thinking about, like, what does Australia mean to me? It's far away. It's different.

They speak English there, but it's a whole different society. And it's big, the big place. But the thing that was really standing out for me was just how far away it was. Yeah. That is absolutely what I was key in on as well. The idea that's far away and that it's a, it's something that is so similar and yet so different. Like they speak English there. It's, you know, it's not just a, you know, people make a government, but it's like, you didn't set it in China or in India where it would be very different. It's like it's, it's a shade of different enough that it is foreign, that it is outside, say, of my experience or not.

not the world I live in, but close enough that, like, I can, I can understand. It's like, what I want I trying to say? It would interrupt me anytime, but. Well, I was going to say that the other thing that, you know, for me, because the emotion is important, it was very sad to be there. Yes. And I had asked myself, well, why was I there? You know, because it made me feel so sad.

You know, and then in the end, when I write to the. this teacher who I was reporting back to the teacher and saying how, you know, it was different from the way it was than we had been there because, you know, the teacher had been there when the buildings were intact and now they weren't. And I was letting this person know, you know, why am I letting this person know what importance is that it's a teacher? Yeah. Now, the teacher is, I'm teaching the teacher perhaps. Yeah. Someone who's a, what we would consider a source of understanding,

someone intended to be a repository and almost like a library in a way. There's some similarities there. The person who's supposed to know something, well, you're giving them updated information so that they can be more accurate maybe in passing that along or something, something in there. I what I'm thinking from this so why Australia and and and and in all the things you've said is there may be something close to you that you're having a hard time seeing and it's easier to see if you give it a little remove if you step back from it and say what's imagining this has happened happening far away from me to someone else and then maybe I can look at it more objectively I don't know if that feels right um well it does and and the thing that I was thinking about in terms of looking at this afterwards is because

it involved the family and you know in the and the two people who are not in this dream and I don't know if that's significant are my son

and my granddaughter and the granddaughter is my daughter's daughter so it's not like you know it's like it's not like one part of the family It's like, you know, two people who are not directly, you know, connected in that way, were not there.

And if that has significance, why they weren't there and, you know, the daughter, you know, my husband, the daughter, the grandson. Yeah. It might have something to do with similarities between those people. like you would include, say, your husband and the grandson, because there's some connecting link in their personality and their approach to the world and your experience of them. But the people that are not included being your son and your granddaughter, there may be a similarity between them.

Yeah, that's independent of it doesn't have to be your son's daughter. Right. And I didn't feel that they were excluded in the dream. It's only looking at it and saying, well, you know, why these people and not those people? There's a couple different directions to go with that. One is that they weren't important because it didn't speak to what you were trying to understand. And the other side of it, if we're going with the idea that possibly you needed to see something removed from your immediateness to get to get that.

What I wrote down was objective, objective distance. Distance for room for objectivity. You might have left them out completely because you're not ready to look at why this is related to these two yet. I don't want to say that's definite, but it's like one of those put a pin in that and say, okay, maybe that makes sense later on, maybe it doesn't, and we can kind of validate which ones.

You weren't ready to look at it because it's too close to home or really, they weren't important at all. It doesn't speak to what you were actually looking at. Either one has potential validity. Gotcha. Sure. So, what am I looking at here? Did you know what you would find inside the building before you walked in?

Or were you kind of shocked to see the state of it based on the exterior? What was your experience of that transition? I said the emotion was sadness. Even looking at it from the outside? We knew from looking at the outside that it was going to be, you know, something sad to see. And we went in anyway. Gotcha. to feel, I guess, feel that sad.

There's a reason to feel, to see it, you know, to see it for ourselves and feel that sadness. Yeah. There's something there. So I like to do the comparison of opposite. So what you did not experience was the shock or surprise of being like, we're here. We're going to see something amazing. And you get inside and it's destroyed. And you're like, what the hell happened?

No, you knew. You knew before you entered. to see more closely, you knew what you were going to find and you were already proactively sad. Like, this is going to be, this is going to be a sad experience, but I got to see it for myself. I got to actually go in there and have a look. Even if I know what I'm going to find, I got to actually see it for myself. Is that speaking to something? Yes. Yes. You know, what it is, though, I'm still exploring. Yes. What is it that I'm sad to see?

You know, did it have anything to do with the names of the people on the wall? I look at that as maybe people either from my past or people who maybe I wanted to meet would never have the chance to meet because they were gone. Yeah, any experience of the names? I was going to ask, did particular name stand out or you just saw placards and you knew there was a name? Right. There was like a place where there would be names and they were all like charred over. So and there was nothing. I could not see any names or any names that I was going to look at. It wasn't like I was seeking out anybody. It was just these were just nameless names that, you know, I wasn't able to access. Yeah. Nobody, nobody specific. It wasn't like literally the name of a person from your life.

No, there was nobody else. So the people I mentioned were the only people who I knew in the dream. Other than, you know, then we have the children doing the religious ceremony, walking by and, you know, looking at them. Yeah. You know, that seemed to be some sort of maybe that's some sort of, you know, and the word came to mind was, was retouched. or just getting some sort of, you know, forgiveness, clarity, something I got from watching that.

Okay. In a way, they're giving their own, their own blessing to the way it was and saying, well, this is, you know, let's accept it. Maybe it's acceptance. Sure. Very well, could be. But just to go back to the experience of going inside the building, what you're describing is kind of a consumption by fire. That was the specific nature of the, maybe not the disaster itself, but what gutted this building was fire. Yeah, like it's, I used the word charred, charred in the eyes, it was fire.

Absolutely. Yeah, and that's a particular kind of thing. I mean, it wasn't a burst water pipe. It wasn't smashed by a meteor strike. It was something dangerous, a tool. humans use that that makes our lives better we cook food we heat our homes but something dangerous got out of control and wreaked havoc on the inside i don't know if i phrase it like that if something comes to mine consumed by fire you know like i and i go back to that time and at the time

this was actually right after the holidays and you know I was trying to remember was there something that happened at the holidays that you know made be sad some event where you know if the building was the equivalent of the family and the family was you know

charred which meant it was the building was intact so if it is the family the family still intact, but it's been burnt. You know, something's happened to make it burnt, but yeah.

But then, you know, I quickly move from going to that building to the library. You know, for me, library is a place of learning, a place of, you know, growth, a place of gathering,

a place of knowledge, getting wisdom. Yeah. Before we leave that other room there, did you have an experience of your family with you in the kind of charred ruins? Were they doing their own things, or they were just kind of behind you and you knew they were present? We were all together in, we were together in the building. And you were all looking around at things? Yeah, we were all looking around. Did you notice anyone doing anything in particular?

You know, the kid was looking under a desk. your husband was tapped your shoulder and pointed anything yeah no I didn't really have any you know recollection of just we're all observing gotcha fair enough just just real kind of ruling that out in terms of anything more to glean from that from that experience it seemed important the important elements of it yeah do seem to be the nature of the type of building the preemptive sadness knowing that what you what would you going to find you still had to go in and see it for yourself and then just really absorbing what you were seeing there. Interesting connection too with the idea of we can have a family that

is intact. Nobody's dead. Maybe they're even all physically together for a holiday. But then there's the emotional or immaterial bond of, of, you know, of familiarity, of mutual support, of all the different ways that a family can be interrelated and connected to each other. You could be in a room with a complete stranger and you have nothing in common and you speak not one word to each other you're physically present the exterior shell of an idea well we were together technically but then the connection the image the interior is missing so there there may be something there in terms of like um i don't know what is an idea popped into my head that may or may not may not be related but the idea of as you have a certain experience of your grandkids say and when they're small and they're just so happy to

see you and they jump in your lap and then they get a little bit older and they start get a little more distant. And then they start having their own lives. And then they don't call so much. And what felt like a really close and loving emotional bond and their eyes lit up every time they came over to see grandma, they grow up and they move on. And what that, that, that there's a sadness. Anyway, I don't want to say too much about that, but just that idea popped into my head.

I don't know if anything resonates. Well, in terms of my own life, though, the kids are still relatively small. And even then they were much smaller. So they were, you know, very young. Okay. That may not be it. Yeah. If they were heading for teenage years and you're starting to notice distance.

Yeah. I don't think it has anything to do with that kind of relationship. I would look at the, you know, my husband and the grandson taking a bath. I'm curious about, you know, bath to me is, you know, a cleansing, you know, ridding ourselves of something. and taking a bath in the library, though. Right. Yeah, well, then we're moving on to the library section of it, which is, did you have what I call like a scene change,

like fade to black in the library now, or was there any experience of moving to a new location in the dream? Well, we all left the building and walked down the hall. Yeah, we walked. You did, and what was the transitioning space like? Was it you're in a public park setting? Yeah, it seemed like, you know, we're walking, you know, from the other building.

We walked to the library. It didn't seem like it was a very long distance. Okay. They were very close to each other. That's an interesting experience. A lot of people have that fade to black and bam, we're in the library now. But for you, it was like you had to leave the building and you showed yourself, you and the group physically relocating to a new place, the experience of the travel.

that's interesting too. Why? I didn't need to see that and not a sudden scene change. I even wrote we walked up a path. Yeah. There was a path to the library. Yeah. Any physical description of the area you walk through?

There's a path. You know, it could be a dirt road through the forest. It could be, you know, a concrete sidewalk. My sense of it, my sense of it, there was a concrete path. You know, like it was in, you know, this center where, everything was concrete. You know, I didn't have the sense of, you know, nature or trees or grass or anything.

It just seemed like, you know, building, you know, concrete to concrete. Yeah. That's interesting, too, that idea of showing yourself moving along a path to a new location. Yes. Rather than, I don't want to admit, it feels like there is something actually very important.

important about that process, something, something about how you are conceptualizing the, the broader thing you're looking at or, or the way of getting to an understanding is you've got to take yourself from one place to another. And the place you go to is that library, which you said, you know, is a place of, you know, learning, but more importantly, growth. I mean, what is learning? It's new things. Your, your brain gets bigger in a sense, metaphorically. It gets packed full with more dense, with more information. I also note I noted in the dream, though, that the library

also sustained some damage. I don't call it charred in the dream, so my sense is that there's some damage, but it's not as much. And it's, you know, more intact than not intact, although it's not perfect.

Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. And I, if we follow the idea of, of government buildings being kind of social order in a sense or the structure of social order. There's something almost more resistant to destruction about knowledge itself. It's almost like it can't be destroyed completely.

It could, but someone would have to really try. You know, it's, it's naturally resistant to destruction. What was it from V for Vendetta, but ideas are bulletproof. You can't just, you can't just throw an idea into a fire. You can throw a book into a fire, but the idea. exist beyond the book, that kind of a thing. Say, that's a very important thing. Yeah, so if we have this idea of, like, like the physical representation of, say, social order, in a sense, like, what does a government do?

And again, you can correct me if you're like, no, it's not social order, it's something else. But then the conceptual idea of knowledge itself being, it's been damaged, too. It's not as, it's not in as good a shape as it should be, but it could be worse. Yeah, I think it has more to do specifically with my family. You know, the government could be like the way things are run, as opposed to, you know, not a government being run, but the way the family is run. And, you know, it's, like I said, it's intact, but it's got issues.

You know, the charness. You know, there's damage done. and which is why, you know, I see a more hopeful sign when we go into the library because, you know, like I said, my husband and my grandson are there taking a bath. So they're, you know, maybe wiping off or getting rid of the stuff that's not working, you know, the stuff that caused the tarness and things to, you know, get things better. And I think that also has to do with the religious ceremony, because if I look at this dream as being, you know, all aspects of the dream are an aspect of myself.

You know, I'm looking at, well, you know, the children could be the, you know, the young, hopeful side of me, you know, having the religious ceremony, so it's a way of hoping to, you know, purify or atone or make better, even celebrate or whatever, but, you know, it's having some kind of ceremony to, you know, make things better in a sense, going, because it's right outside the library, which is a place where, you know, there's growth. Yeah.

Looking for the growth and looking for that. the port though that causes a little kink and all that understanding is when the guard comes and kicks us out yeah yeah i'm trying to uh see that in the context of like so we're following a certain path and then we get there it's like bam why at that moment um so i want to see a little bit better maybe the idea of you entering the library so it's it's interesting too so in the other building your family was with you but you come to the library and you see them already there in a way, at least your husband and your grandson doing the, uh, doing the, uh, doing the bathing experience. Um, if you could describe it a little bit like,

uh, the, the shape of it. Is this a, um, you know, a small county library? Is this one of the big city with the pillars out front and it's huge on the inside? What kind of library was it? Yeah, I, I don't have a very clear picture of it, but I do feel that it was large in the sense that I'm only, I'm imagining. I'm managing. in the dream, I'm imagining we're just on one floor but it's a big enough space

so that you go from room to room and you know, I kind of see it it's not so big that it's like this big um

uh I'm specifically saying it I don't feel like it's so you know overpowering, overwhelming place. It's a big enough thing where you can walk pretty easily from place to place. It's not like we're walking vast distances. For sure. Yeah. There's something different about those libraries that are huge cavernous on the

inside and there's so many books. In some ways those represent maybe, I'll never know all the things. There's too much here. I can never pack it all into my head. This one actually feels a more man. But it also isn't the, say, you know, Port Uncle County Library way off in the sticks where they got an encyclopedia collection, but that's it. And the other place has like all the encyclopedia has ever printed. Very, very different expression. But you're somewhere in the middle where it's a graspable something. You can actually navigate.

You have the feeling of, this isn't overwhelmingly large. Anything interesting about the room in which you found the bathtub and the bathers? Was that a type of room? It just seemed, the only thing that struck me was that they were in a room. room. It was separate from, you know, like a room with books or anything. There were any books and it. The only thing I saw was the bathtub. I think it was one of these clawfoot bathtub. I was going to ask about that too. Yeah. Yeah. Big enough for the two of them so that it was, you know, they weren't cramped. They fit into it. And, but that's all I remember seeing was

actual bathtub and them in it. And we didn't have the interaction. It was just, it was almost like we were walking by and we saw them and that we continued walking. We didn't stay. We didn't interact. We just, it's like, oh, there you are, you know, and then walked on. Gotcha. And interesting, you know, it was a bathtub. It wasn't a shower.

And it wasn't that there was a, say, a fire, you know, extinguisher thing on the ceiling that it popped and it was raining down on them. It's very definitely a bathtub. Like, you've got to get into a bathtub. It's bath time. It's its own kind of ritual in a way, definitely cleansing, cleansing rituals. But also, and just a question out there, if you don't have to answer if you don't want to. Is it normal in your family for, say, you know, an adult to bathe a small child as a part of the bathing experience? Well, we'll both get clean at the same time.

Or there's some families where adults don't get in the tub with kids ever, no matter how young. Some people have that as a moral standard in their own mind. Yeah, it just wasn't done. I mean, at the time of the dream, the kids were still taking baths. Gotcha. But, you know, we would, you know, sit outside the bathtub while they were in the bathtub. I didn't go inside the bathroom with them. Yeah, and I'm fine either way.

I don't think there's anything necessarily improper about adults and baby kids. Yeah, my husband never participated in that. So it was like, you know, when I would see the kids, I would, you know, sit outside the tub while they're taking a bath. He never did that. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and I don't think there's anything wrong with either path. I mean, if you've got literally an infinite 18 months and you're just going to jump in the bath with them because you've got to get clean too, I don't think that's a bad thing. But it's definitely differs from family to family. And some people are like, we don't do that. That doesn't feel right. Fair enough. That's your family standard. So it might say something about that that, that they were in that situation together, which was a different than your typical family standard. You wouldn't see that in real life. I'm not sure what to make of that, but there's a, I think,

you're right on on the idea of it's more of the both of them sharing the same ritual in a way yeah because it was uh in the dream it didn't seem unusual yeah and it didn't feel uncomfortable or anything you were looking out like oh we don't do that it felt like okay they're there they're doing that that's fine yeah and that was that the basically you observed that happening in room there's so it's uh it's uh it's almost like a uh you've got this a room in the middle of the house of knowledge in a way the center of learning the place where all the

understanding just kind of exists ready to be tapped at your fingertips and there's a dedicated room set aside for a bathing ritual I don't know if that putting in that nested context brings anything to mind I don't know so much that I mean it could be yes the ritual but again it was me being an observer, observing them.

Yeah. As opposed to, you know, passing judgment or having any interaction. It was just I saw it, you know, I saw it. My daughter saw it. And there was no commenting. There was no, you know, discussion about it. It's just, oh, there they are. Let's move on.

Yeah. And nothing, no relationship. to anything you've seen. Well, you mentioned like a clawfoot tub, uh, which is an older kind, something from the past, a relic of the past in a sense.

Yes, and it made, and it made perfect sense in these surroundings. Yeah, like it felt natural. Like, well, of course I'd see that there.

There it is. It'd be interesting. Um, where am I out here? Three and this cat. Come on, girl. Uh,

or, and was there any, anything that happened? to make you decide it's time to move on from that observation or any experience of what was it what was the transition to the next next scene like i think it was more like we were walking through the library and uh you know we so they they went to take a bath and then the next thing we saw was this group of small children having this little religious ceremony and that was inside the library? I don't recall.

This was actually, we saw them outside the library. So were you You know, let me go ahead. Yeah, let me clarify. Sure. We went to the library and at that point

husband and grandson went off to take a bath but we didn't see them at that point. At that point my daughter and I, while they're doing that, but they went off And then my daughter and I watched as a small children

were in the entryway doing a religious ceremony. After, yeah. Then at that point, we snuck into the library because we weren't supposed to be there. And then after that, we went to a room where we saw them in the bathtub. Okay.

And then at the point that we saw them at the So that's when the guard came and made us leave. Okay, gotcha. I probably wrote down my notes out of sequence. I think I was trying to catch up as fast as I could. There's a lot of stuff there. Like, I can't remember at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, interesting. So in order to, so you get to, when you see the kids doing the ritual, are they like on the front steps in a way doing it? Or you said they're in the entry. They're right outside the entry. Just outside the entryway. So you hadn't even entered the building yet. It's a small group.

Gotcha. Maybe, you know, no more than six. Okay. And your experience of it was that you walk the path from the government building that had been gutted on the inside, but the exterior was still intact. You get to a place that is obviously a library. You know it's a library. And at that point, before you even see the children, your husband and the grandson

go off and you know they're leaving to go bathe that the bath is going to happen. And then what you see is children in front of the building performing a kind of religious ceremony. What did that look like? What was it? I mean, I assume they weren't drawing a pentagram and lighting candles, you know, were they dressed any particular way? Yeah, it looked like they were in a circle. You know, it was almost, you know, I get the feeling, you know, the word Buddhism comes into mind. But I wasn't spending a lot of time, you know, trying to decipher what they were saying or what they were doing. It was more like, I'm observing them.

They're doing this little, to me, like, or walking by, oh, they're doing a religious ceremony. And, you know, that was my comment on it was. they were doing a religious ceremony. It was, you know, I didn't have a reaction one way or the other. Gotcha. And the way they were dressed, did it suggest Buddhism, you know, orange robes or they were just dressed as kids normally? They were dressed as kids, but, you know, somehow I, like, the idea of, like, brown tunics comes to mind. Sure.

Yeah. I didn't, but, again, I didn't dwell. on it. Yeah, an interesting circle. Right. Kind of all facing and murdered each other. There wasn't a person at an altar, say, or a lectern or whatever. Well, they were just like right outside the door and just in this little circle. Gotcha. Doing something. And also, you know, as I'm saying, to my recollection, it,

it all was very fast. You know, we're walking. We see them. We walk into the building. We see, you know, my husband and my grandson. And next thing we know we're being kicked out. Yeah, yeah. But you also had the experience of sneaking into the building. Like you felt like you weren't supposed to be there and you had to sneak in. Did you sneak past the children at the entry point in any way? Did you go around to a side door?

How did you get inside? No, I think they said they were at the entry and I think we just kind of walked around them to get in. Like, you know, it seemed like the entry, the door was open. So we didn't, you know, we just been able to just walk in, walk through the store. Sure. You didn't have to break in or, you know, put on a hoodie and wait, wait, wait to wait till the nightfall. We didn't have, we didn't open the door. Didn't even have to open the door, yeah.

It's interesting, too. It's like there's a, there's a, a lot of, what am I try, the metaphor of walking a path to a destination, the metaphor of a, of a ceremony taking place on the, on the cusp of entering some place that is that you haven't been invited to that you feel like you're sneaking into and then that eventually get kicked out of there's there's kind of an almost a secret secret knowledge type of type of thing and that's not i don't think that's the right word at all but i don't if that makes brings anything to mind yeah like yeah i don't think that yeah i i don't think that yeah i wasn't sending a secret knowledge i was just thinking that you know it was a library and

And again, because we weren't in it very long, you know, we just came in. We saw the guys in the bathtub and then we were let it out. So we weren't in there very long. Gotcha. Yeah, it's an interesting idea, this idea of the length of time. Yeah, it's very brief. You get in there. You barely have a chance to experience the place.

You see that your husband and the grandson had already entered. They'd been there for maybe a minute. because you had to have time to observe what was going on outside and then make your way inside. And they were already well involved in doing what they'd come there to do. And almost immediately this, this sense of, you show yourself saying an authority figure who has the power, perhaps, or the right in a way to limit access, and you got to go. You're not supposed to be here. You're kicked out. I don't know.

That's why the idea of that secret knowledge came to my mind. Maybe something like, you're not ready to know this, to see this. This is not for you or you don't belong here type of feeling. Something along those lines. Maybe maybe I wasn't ready to be there, like to get the knowledge that was supposed to be there. Maybe I wasn't ready for it. Yeah. Or at least that was your perception of yourself in relation to the place.

yeah, that for some reason you needed to show yourself an authority figure kicking you out. It can also be that you, you know, you feel like you're being denied and understanding unjustly, perhaps, unfairly. Yeah, well, yeah, then we get, you know, we get into the, you know, the emotion and the emotion in the dream was, was more of, I don't know, maybe disappointment. It wasn't anger. It wasn't feeling unjust. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't an intense emotion.

It was more of a, oh, that's how it is. You know, we have to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's why, you know, when you asked me that, I'm thinking, well, maybe it was just, I wasn't ready. So I didn't have that intense reaction to it.

Yeah. Yeah. There is something of the, I would say, righteous anger at an injustice. that would be a very different experience, but this one was a, more of a disappointment. What am I trying to say about that? What am I thinking? Disappointment is, meets with the sadness of watching a once great, say, noble building where important things are supposed to happen, but it's been gutted on the inside.

I'm thinking these things are very much bookends in that idea of this reason it started here and reason it ended there and that they are connected. It's the beginning and the ending of a thought process in that sense. Well, yeah, if I look at the building being

the family, let's say, and the family having, you know, you know, it wasn't destroyed, but it had some damage to it. But we all go together to the library in a sense to maybe learn how to fix things.

And in the end, though, not quite ready to get to that point. Yeah. Maybe so. There's a sadness in and a disappointment in failure, even if you give your best effort. That's a different shade of meaning, I think. sometimes like being denied something where this is refused to you, but sometimes you do your best and it just doesn't work out. And it's not really your fault. But what am I trying to say? Sometimes authority figures are legitimate. Sometimes they're illegitimate, but also sometimes they just

represent the way things are. We might have sadness and disappointment that we can't fly like a bird. That's just kind of how it is. That's, you know, God, I wish that was possible. Me personally, I use that example. I want to, like Superman, ever since I was like four years old, not going to happen. And I'm sad about that sometimes. And then I let it go. What are you going to do? And I think the overall reaction I had to dream was just feeling sad. You know, I'm sad that this is what this is. And the thing about the dream is the dream is saying that, you know, at that point, you know, I wasn't ready. to, I wasn't ready to, to stay in the library or, or defy the actions of the guard. Yeah.

You know, to stay and, and learn. And that would have to happen for another day. Yeah, definitely. There's a, the word just, you know, like kind of acceptance of how things are popped into my head just as you were describing some of that. And I think that's probably a good way to look at what's going on here. It's like, there's something you need to just see for what it is. and it may be it's maybe it's not going to be pretty but you got to go in and have a look at the damage in in that sense and yeah as you were saying the idea of moving on where do you go once you've grasped the ugly truth in some ways you go to okay now what do I do about it and you're not sure yet the uh your your your your own accurate self understanding would say uh maybe is is the guard saying you the answer you don't have an answer yet at the answer

is not here, or as you're saying, you're not ready for it, but I don't think it isn't like, what am I trying to say? The way it feels to me is not like you're blocking yourself from understanding you could have and maybe should have like you're doing something wrong, but that you, you know, you're getting shown to be kicked out of the library because you can't find that information yet. It's just, it's not there to grasp currently. is something along those lines? I think so because then

you know I go to well what was happening around the time of the dream and this was a holiday time my children you know live far away from us so we only see them

you know gathered together holidays and other times in the year but this definitely there was a holiday time and while because I didn't write it down at the time, I can't tell you the specific incident, but my sense is that because things happened at all kinds of family gatherings,

and there was probably some incident that, you know, made me feel sad because of the way it happened and realizing that I really couldn't do anything about it, you know, but it was sad nevertheless. And I think the dream was kind of reflecting my sense that, you know, there's ways to hope about it. it wasn't going to happen at that time because circumstances were not letting it happen at that time.

You know, being a guard, it was, you know, an authority figure was out of my control. I couldn't do anything about it at that time. And, you know, I could look back and remember when things were better, which I think was reflected in the note to the teacher. Yeah, we hadn't gotten to that part too. So you got kicked out by the guard. And then what was the experience of writing the note to the teacher? How did that experience play out?

Well, again, you know, in the dream it was just like it in the dream, it's like that's the next thing that happened. Okay. You know, you talk about that. Yeah, sudden scene changed. And then out and fading in. That would be a fading out and fading in thing where, you know, it kicked out. You know, fade the black, fade up on I'm writing a note to the teacher.

And where were you at physically when you're writing the note? You're at home at your desk. You're on the hood of the hood of your car. I didn't have any recollection of exactly where that was. It was just, I was writing the note. It was like there was no specific place. Was it like my lined paper, where you'd type in it on a keyboard? I was actually writing it.

Hand by hand. Yeah, since I was writing it like on a pad. Okay. Are we talking about small notepad, legal pad? Any other? My sense was that it was, you know, like a yellow pad, you know, that kind of size. Sure. Is that something common to you have around the house? You take notes on that kind of stuff occasionally. Okay. Yeah. That would be the type of thing.

Yeah. I'm taking a written note. That's the kind of thing I would write on. I bought literally, I bought these in bulk on the Amazon, got like 50 more of them. I can't tell you how many of those we've bought over the years. Like, you know, cases. And for me, it's not the same as, you know, I can be typing up notes on the computer and looking at it right there.

Not the same. For me, I'm a very old, old school tactile in that sense. I don't know how people do it. Most of the time I do type. So it was a little unusual that in a dream I'm not getting it. Yeah, and there's something more personal. What popped into my head is like a handwritten note. And it means something in and of itself.

You weren't firing off an email. This is more personally. And if we imagine the teacher is also in you or you are also the teacher, you're sending the message. There's a lot of times we talk to ourselves. Sometimes literally in the mirror, we're like you're good enough, you're smart enough, you know, all that, like you're from SNL, that guy.

Stuart Smalley, love that character. I go with the concept that every aspect of the dream is. an aspect of myself. So yes, the teacher would be the, the wiser side of me. Yeah. And people are the wiser side of me saying, well, yes, things, things were better. So there's, you know, hope that they will, you know, when things were intact, and there's hope that things will be intact again. You can rebuild, you know, go back to the library, learn how to build it back up and go do it.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, right in that note, it's like, uh, in a way, it's formalizing the process of of encapsulating what you've learned and giving it to that, yeah, that source of communicating it back to yourself in that way, but decision-making going forward. What's the wiser part of yourself exactly, as you said? Yeah. That's fantastic.

Yeah, I mean, at that point, that's where the dream stopped. But if I was going to continue the dream, then, you know, I could have a conversation with the teacher afterwards and say, well. Who knows tonight, right? maybe after this analysis, we could have been, we could have been programming. That would be fascinating. I want to, if that happens, I want to hear about it. Right.

Again, this was a couple of years ago and, you know, well, family issues change from time to time. It's a little different place that we're in. Yeah, and you might have thought something was very significant back then, and it turned out it wasn't as bad. It just felt wrong or it felt sad at the moment. You let it go after that. Process the feeling. and let it go. Yeah.

They're always just like that. For sure. Yeah. Well, a lot of times I get to the end of these and I try and draw a narrative that tells the story of the dream in a more simplistic sense. And I don't know if I can do that with this one. There's a lot in there that we vaguely touched on that seems to make sense. But I'm not having something I can put my hand on and go, here's the two sentence

explanation that just gives it back to you. But maybe that means it just needs a little more time to percolate and settle, or what we got is actually so simple that it's hard to put into words. I don't know where you're at on that. Well, again, like I said, I look at this dream and, you know, I go to, because, like I said, that, you know, we had some family issues at the moment. I'm looking at, you know, not everybody in the dream was specifically those people in the family

in terms of the real dynamic. But that, you know, there's a very solid structure and a solid structure remains. The things that got damaged, you know, we can go to our sense of knowledge and go back and rebuild them. Absolutely. and make it into something different.

And explaining that to the, the wiser side of me, sort of cementing that idea into, the next step is to put that into action. Nice. That's kind of the summary I was looking for. Very nice. I'm glad you're here to help you with that. Your life, you know, putting the dream into action, you know, I probably did something that kind of smoothed over that particular family dynamic. and maybe so or you found a way to just be at peace with the fact that sometimes there's nothing you can do and you that that word acceptance jumped out of me up earlier of like acceptance of the way that happened sometimes crappy things happen i think maybe that's you know the part of the religious ceremony religion is all about you know in the in the good sense of religion it's a sense of you know getting peace you know conclusions getting some you know understanding a greater understanding of that. Definitely. Well, I think unless you had more questions about it, I think we've probably

explored it as much as we can. I think so. You know, I certainly have a more better, more better, like great, great grammar. A better understanding of it than I did when I first started with you. So I thank you for that. Absolutely. It's always great. When you could talk to someone about your dream, it just helps open up. Yeah. And someone who really takes it. seriously and that isn't dismissive like uh whatever i don't know it was a thing no no really what was it let's look at it because you know that there's wisdom there you just have to sometimes dig it out but it's there yeah absolutely just having someone willing to talk it through with you uh it's a huge difference and that's what i'd say to you know folks out there listening and watching is that you can do this

for your for your friends uh you know for your relatives for your spouse uh talk about your dream in the morning take it seriously said let me let me try and see it through your eyes what did you see what happened what is it how does that feel you feel you feel. What does that mean to you? Great. I, and I think you've, of course, find that practically beneficial through your, through your, through your business in that sense of like, let's, let's take people and really look at things that they can make use of to get some value out of in their life, to make their lives better, more successful. Yeah. See, that's, you know, I'm by nature a very practical person. So that's why I look at dreams from a practical standpoint of,

you know, what can I get out of the dream that's going to be of practical use to my life or dealing with a client, you know, what can the client get out of the dream that can be of practical use to them to make their life better? Absolutely. Yeah. And then finding that very often or almost universally, there is something there. There's something there that is going to be useful if you're willing to look for it. That's, I love it.

I love talking to you too, just having so much, like I said, convergent discoveries of the more genuine, as I say, practitioners I talk to, the more, a lot of my theories that I'm like, well, this makes sense to me. Let me ask someone else. I'm finding it's, you know, we're both discovering the same truth and putting it to good benefit. So I've just, I love that. I love that feeling too. Absolutely. And I told you when we started, I can imagine that I could be talking about this for, you know, more than 10 minutes. Yeah. Oh, there's so much there for sure. Well, speaking to which though we're coming up on two hours i think that's a good that's a fantastic episode length so uh you're you're good to uh to wrap it up absolutely absolutely this has been a lot of fun well thank you

yeah that's always the plan hopefully is much fun for us to do it as it is for people to listen to it so i'm gonna gather gather my dumb notes here where are they got to get back to the page one once again my friends in the audience here this has been our friend debby speckler weissman from the Hudson Valley in New York. She's a certified dream life coach. And I'm going to screw this up. So it's, it is the dreamcoach.net. If you want to find her online there, you had or have the podcast, Dream Power Radio,

and you're starting a new endeavor, the Dream Power Experience on YouTube. And if you would send me an email with all of those links, I'll put them all in the description. So by the time people, people find this video, they can just look down in the description. below and find that there. Fantastic. Okay, good deal. And then for my part, I'm just going to say, would you kindly, like, share, subscribe,

tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers, viewers for my video games, dreams. I also play video games and have fun in that respect. I have 16 currently available works of historical dream literature, reproducing and enhancing, if I may say so myself, these great works about sleep and dreams that have informed under our understanding for at least two millennia. All this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you can find also audio MP3 versions of this Dreamscape's podcast. And if you would head on over to Benjamin the Dreamwizard.

Dot locals.com building a community there, and that is where I would prefer to receive any sustaining donations. And the last thing to say is just Debbie, really, thank you for being here. I've enjoyed talking to you. That was been my pleasure. Good deal. And everybody out there? Thanks for listening.