Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 148: Unconditional Positive Disregard

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Lincoln Stoller ~ https://mindstrengthbalance.substack.com/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of dreamscapes today we have our friend lincoln stoller from victoria bc canada sorry i couldn't resist uh he is a um oh my goodness uh i can't reamown handwriting physicist psychotherapist and a neuropsychologist you can find uh more about him at mind strength balance dot com and we're going to talk all about him and his work in just a moment for my part would you kindly like share subscribe tell your friends always need more volunteer dreamers viewers for my video game streams, Monday through Friday at 5 p.m. 16, currently available works of historical dream literature. Most recently, Dreams in Their Meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson, a great book by a former, a man who's considered the father of golf instruction. Very interesting.

He shifted over into that in correspondence with his readership. I always forget what's next. Oh, yeah, if you'd all this and more at Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com, a full list of all the books, MP3 downloads of this very podcast. Also, Benjamin the Dream Wizard. Dot locals.com trying to build a community there and that is where I would prefer to

receive any sustaining donations if you'd be so kind, one time or recurrent monthly. Either way, that's enough about me and my disorganized shilling. Let's get back to Lincoln. Thank you for being here. You're welcome.

Good deal. Did I get that right? I wrote down physicist. Was that your first life, so to speak? Oh, mountaineering was my first and then physics and then what happens. Oh, psychedelics and then hypnotherapy and then neuropsychology and then clinical counseling. Very cool. And we were talking just briefly, like I don't do any preparation.

I am thoroughly unprofessional when it comes to like how to build a podcast and do all this stuff. I barely got a handle in the shilling, as you can see. So we didn't talk at all about what your books were and where they, come from and what they're about what would people find at your website mind strength balance has my information as a therapist and my focus is on healing and well healing I suppose if you think you need it and guidance coaching for professional development relationship development stuff like that the books are on one's on sleep one's on dreams one's on COVID the use of hypnosis, self-hypnosis, because that seemed permanent.

And generally, self-hypnosis for health is an underappreciated field. And then three others are on learning, learning as opposed to schooling. Very cool. Yeah, those are not the same thing. Absolutely. More people should probably understand that. I saw an interesting thing. I'm always browsing, but online media and difference.

I think it might have been on, you know, the X-Eight. platform, but formerly known as Twitter. It was an interesting social experiment in a way of they took a room full of people and they said, okay, just look at each other, maybe talk about yourselves a little bit and rank where you think your IQ is and put people in order. And so based on appearance and education, they did this ranking. And then they did the IQ testing and showed that the person who had a PhD and a very impressive title and all this schooling and spoke very well and all these things, she had convinced the

others to place herself at number one. And it turned out she was number six out of all of them. She was the last in line, the lowest IQ. Now, it was over a hundred, it was like 112 or something. But the guy she thought was, you know, inbred corn fed hick from the Midwest. He actually had the highest IQ out of all of them. But just, you know, the appearance and the schooling tricked everyone into thinking it meant intelligence, that it meant capacity, you know, versus just received information, so to speak. Well, there's a lot to it. It's not a simple spectrum, that's for sure.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I've had a lot of experience with very smart people. And also, I've had a lot of cultural experience traveling around the world with people who have no education or aren't literary. What do you mean? Literate who can't write and read.

And, yeah, there's, well, so much of it isn't cultural. I mean, the people who can't write or read come from cultures who don't write or read. So, you know, they live in the jungle and that's their life. It means nothing. So it really doesn't. It wouldn't apply to them. Intelligence test wouldn't apply to them. And well, in a lot of it's cultural or situational, I'd say, it's like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

It's just a bad metric. And that we get into that a lot. It's like. Bad metric. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Your books on both sleep and on dreams. I don't know if you want to say a little bit about those. It's kind of the focus of my show.

Well, I got a lot of people, well, step back. There's a problem with sleep kind of chronically in this society. There is. You know, for the obvious reasons that people aren't given the latitude to define it for themselves. And it's not given a high priority in general. You know, you can look at school. how school is designed to provide daycare for parents who need to go to work on time and so kids have to have a sleep schedule that meets their parents but kids need more sleep but that doesn't matter because no one cares and

so then people get chronically sleep dysregulated and it turns out in my experience as a hypnotherapist and neuropsychologist hypnosis and brain training are very effective for sleep problems which generally come as insomnia but can also be poor sleep and so I wrote this book called the the path to sleep because there were basic things that people didn't know or do about how to you know coordinate their sleeping and waking lives so that it works and how they need to think or not think in order to move into a sleep state. So that's the first book.

And then the second one is called Becoming Lucid, and it's about lucid dreaming and what that might mean, because I kind of think it's a misnomer since anything you dream is a dream, and anything you think you're doing in a dream is a dream, unless you wake up, in which case it's not a dream anymore. So I basically talked about the four situations,

or daydreaming and night dreaming and the dreamy state of when you're waking up and integrating and the strange state when you're falling asleep and provided hypnosis mp3s in that book and i really like some one guy's review of the book said you know if you ever wanted to know what it means you know the buddhist go on of whether you're a person dreaming of a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of a person, you know, read my book. So I thought, very cool. Yeah. And then the other books are on learning and as I mentioned COVID. And there are more coming out. Definitely. Now, that's very fascinating. I mean, some people may not realize how important sleep actually is, good, restful sleep of sufficient quantity and quality. One of the things I like to tell people as often as I can,

and I don't do it much on this channel, because we talk more about dreams and about sleep, but what I'm talking about sleep, let people know that, like, the experiments are, uh, show that the, if you go without sleep for a sufficient time,

you literally become psychotic. You start having difficulty thinking clearly and, uh, visual and auditory hallucinations, a very famous case of a, uh, I think a radio jockey that went three days at, or into five days without sleep for a contest.

You know, he's trying to prove like, I can do this and I'm going to, I'm going to win this contest. And he got wacky and just just not sleeping and certainly not sleeping well can lead us into a kind of state of psychosis where we're just not capable of thinking clearly and our perceptions are off. Well, it can kill you too. I mean, sleeping is a necessary function like eating and breathing. Absolutely.

Yeah, two weeks without sleep and you'll probably be dead. But, you know, a lot of since I started being a clinical counselor a couple of years ago, my sleeping is. has become more dysregulated because I'm basically empathizing with all these people in their strange lives. And it sort of stresses me out. So I found that brain training is helping me again, which is basically meditation is a brain training. But if you do it with neurofeedback or some device,

it can help you get there faster. So that's, I mean, basically what it's doing is it's getting me calmer and it's getting me more flexible in terms of moving into a trance, a sleep trance. Yeah, definitely. And staying there. That's something I've found through my review of the historical literature that I'm republishing and enhancing with additional footnotes and whatnot to really reference and fully explain. Who are these people?

They're talking about. They give one last name that I know, but does the reader know who was, who was Maori and why are his sleep experiments important, that kind of thing? Right. But the idea of altered states of consciousness, would might be the umbrella term. And it includes things like hypnotism and trance and meditation and daydreaming and dreaming in general and how they're all. Psychedelics. Yeah. And how they're all kind of connected for sure.

Yeah. And there's some recent, speaking of psychedelics, some recent fantastic experiments. This is not medical advice. But showing that they have tremendous capacity to treat specific types of conditions and specific maybe microdosing quantities. but they it's like what they said they had people with PTSD I think and they had them experiment with um ecstasy or MDMA whatever whichever one that was I don't know if you know but and then it would say again they're both the same there you go I couldn't I didn't want to express that poorly um but that it kind of reset the brain in a way that short-circuited the that the the

PTSD reactivity to to certain stimuli um I don't know if you've had experience, not experience, but... Well, let me just tell you, there's another interesting thing that came out, which was ketamine is an anesthetic used for... You happen to be used for animals, but it's certainly effective for people. And at a high dose, it's hallucinogenic. And there's a lot of talk also in this area that the restorative properties are chemical, not psychological.

You know, like it's a pill, a magic pill. So they gave ketamine to people who were going, under general anesthetic for surgery in addition to their general anesthetic to see if the ketamine would help these people with their otherwise clinical depression and it did not do anything at all. So it is suggestive that there's a therapeutic aspect that has to be coupled to the chemical effect. So it's not just sort of neuroplastic in its effect. Well, at least this is the suggestion for ketamine. but it needs some intentional work to go on at the same time.

So flexibility is one thing and reorganization is another. Definitely. Yeah. And you keep mentioning the idea of brain training. And I think that's a great way to express it is that we have. It's like muscle training. Any, uh, it is the idea that we, there's certain organs of the body we can't change the function of consciously.

That's disputed mind-body connection, but the idea of the liver does what the liver does. And we can maybe impair it or more or less. by certain conscious actions and certainly physical actions, you know, stressing it out chemically. But the brain is a very different type of thing that we can exercise. And the idea that it's almost really never stops forming new neuronal connections. It's most active when we're young. We have the most, you say, neuroplasticity. But that doesn't mean it, it doesn't ever really stop. Anytime you learn something new, you're forming new connections or strengthening existing connections, really getting that...

Well, this is something you can train, right? I mean, everybody knows, and I think you can feel, if you're aware, that you're, well, you have to have some wide view, that there are states in which you're not thinking well, or you're not thinking creatively, or certainly it's easy to focus on other people like our parents who have stopped being flexible. And it's fairly easy to imagine that you could become flexible just in the way that a child this given a paint set or you are given the freedom to create. I mean, this is sort of what we do on vacations. Yeah. If we're lucky. We break our patterns. And it's a skill. It's not just,

uh, it's not just something that happens to you. It's something you develop to do better. Think better. Be more flexible. Okay, we haven't even talked about emotions, but emotions are another flip side of thinking, which are not quite as intentional, but probably more important in terms of your motivation. Yeah. And you can also learn to, I wouldn't say master, because that's kind of asked backwards, but respond more effectively to your emotional triggers or feelings.

So, I mean, this is what the neuropsychology is. It's the intellect, it's the IQ, it's the feeling, emotions, the triggers, the trauma, the memories, all of which we sort of think we're in control of, at the same time we feel we have no control. Yeah. So which is it? It's very interesting. And I've mentioned this before and I love the conception. So I'm very my my work in dreams is is informed by Freud Young. A lot of sources of course reading and republishing all these books. But but I also consider myself, you know, leaning heavily into kind of some of the young end stuff in terms of archetypal things. And I love the way the Greeks conceptualized emotions that appear to afflict us from external. you know, that must be Aphrodite, sending arrows to stab my heart with an arrow against my will. Because that's kind of how we conceive or experience emotions is as if they are beyond our control.

And in some ways they are. I mean, it's, it definitely seems. Well, the triggers. Yeah. The triggers often are. I mean, external ones. But you do have a choice of, you know, how red the red in your heart gets. It's true.

Or how black, you know, your heart gets. 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 DREAMs program features real dreamers gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New DREAMs episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks, highlighting the psychological principles which inform our dreams. 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 Dreamwizard.com. No, for sure. That's where I was going with that, that idea that we may and probably, you know, it certainly we seem to experience certain emotions from certain triggers involuntarily, but there, that doesn't mean we have to respond to them in a particular way. We can choose how intensely we allow an emotion to expand after the initial onset or one of my favorite things to do is like this, this, this almost of a visual, um, concept. idea of get and get something out of your head and hold it in front of you and look at it. Observe yourself. It's like the trick with meditation is you don't try to stop your thoughts.

You don't try to have particular thoughts. You surrender control and you watch them flow by. Oh, I had a feeling. There it is. That's the feeling. I had that thought. Some people misconceived that they are their emotions. They are their thoughts rather than they are the person experiencing thoughts and

emotions and just giving people that context sometimes and practice, that brain training. to say, you know, you don't have to be reacted. You can, you can just be angry. Okay, I am angry. What do I want to do about that? That's the breathing room that, take, take a break, get away from the problem to, to interrupt that. Certainly bad, negative patterns of behavior that lead to bad outcomes that you've noticed in your life. Probably, you know, preaching to the choir here, but also for the benefit of the audience.

Let me add one thing. It's a big deal for me. me to recognize that we all have competing personal personalities, personal inclinations. And so when you, for example, say that you're angry, you can step back and say, okay, I'm angry, but there's another part of me that's reflective, or another part of me that's sad, or another part of me that's frightened. And I think it's really essential in most of my work to try to get people to see them simultaneously, you are really benefit

when you can see your feeling as a layered response of a sad person, a frightened, a angry person, a frustrated person and try to

in a dreamlike way actually talk to these people. Say, why are you frustrated? Why are you angry? Why are you sad? Why are you fearful? Why are you hopeful? Why are you wistful? Why are, you know, What are you looking for? And then you can, sometimes these thoughts float through your head like disengaged sentences. And other times they come forward and say, it's because I feel or think or remember.

And that too you don't have to be attached to. But it's better if you take some responsibility. So you're not a, you know, I say being a victim is great. It's one of the best places you can be because then you're giving everyone else. the latitude to reveal themselves very useful to know, but then you don't want to be trapped in the box that maybe other people are creating or you're creating for yourself. Sure. So you want to see it, but you don't want to be it.

Yeah. And that's actually, that leads right into what I wrote down, this idea of how we conceptualize things often, well, I think inevitably informs what we do about. these things and the meaning of that for me is there's a trick of language that that i've noticed across different cultures where in uh say american english or or british english even we say i am angry i am sad and some other cultures say i have anger like the i that is separate from the anger now has a hold of anger rather than anger being me uh i love that too of like just 80 that conceptual distance.

So you can pull it out of your head. It's not in you. It's an experience happening to you in some ways. Well, in between, there's thy feel angry. What does that mean? Are you attached to your feelings or not? And so some people I work with, actually, the more dysregulated people can't do that. They can't detach from their feelings.

Yeah. And so they, you know, what happens when you can't detach with your feelings is it kind of gets amplified to the point where you act on it. And then you're identified with it and you identify yourself with it. And then you get feedback that furthers you, you know, you do something angry. Then now everyone's seeing you as the angry person and they're going to deal with you as the angry person. And your opportunity to reveal your, you know, hopefulness, wistfulness, fearfulness is now gone because now you're the angry person. Yeah. And, well, let's get into dreams.

I'm interested where you're going to, before I forget my dream. Right. Yes. Do you want to transition into doing your dream thing we've got about based on your time, time frame about 30 minutes left? I don't want to cheat you of that experience. Well, you know, we could talk about it. I think we should talk about it.

Yeah. You know, I have dreams that I've remembered for 40 years, although they sort of contract slowly to, you know, a focal image. And then I have a dream. but then the dreams that I have more recently tend to be you know when they're fuller they're more chaotic because now they have all these scenes that don't connect

and sometimes they don't logically connect and sometimes they don't seem to temporarily connect and so the more present dreams are sometimes harder to relay because of their complexity and then you know I wake up because my sleep has been

interrupted, I usually wake up once a night. I usually have two dreams, and I can remember the more recent one, and then the earlier one is less. I want to ask you, though, there's supposed to be REM dreaming, which is what most of our dreaming is, and tends to be more vivid. And there's also supposed to be non-REM dreaming. And I just wanted, I've started to realize what I can now conclude to be a couple of non-REM dreams, and they do have the reputation for being less vivid. And I'd wondered if you had explored that as a different type of dream for yourself.

I have not. So full disclosure, I'm the dream wizard or whatnot. And part of what I think drove me into that is I don't remember most of my dreams or even that I ever had a dream. I wake up just completely, I may fade out of something really. Something was happening. I was having an ongoing thought process. But nothing sticks with me, no images, no sequences, no sequences, no story. d'ory, just nothing.

The typical fragment I would come away with if I'm aware of it at all. I remember one from, I don't know, a few months ago. I have an image of me in my body versus looking at my body, third person. I'm standing by the open rear passenger door of a vehicle. I think it's white. And there's, I can't see any other people. I'm not doing anything. I'm just, just that, just that experience of standing at that open rear passenger.

passenger side door. That's the kind of dream that comes out if I remembered at all, which is extremely rare, nothing, almost nothing since then that I can, that I can hold on to. Long story short on that, getting into the REM thing, it was, it was a bit, well, it was certainly eye-opening for me to understand that what most people think of as the limits of dreaming is that they only happen in REM. And then a while back, I came across the literature that, well, they did experiments where they woke people up at variety of non-REM times and asked what was happening while I was dreaming. So it's an interesting question to say, it would be new information to me. And I trust your word on it, that for whatever reason, REM dreaming seems to be more vivid

than non-REM dreaming, that there's some quality to that. Maybe, and it's interesting to consider, is it the intensity of the dream causing the rapid eye movement, or is it the rapid eye movement phenomenon that somehow informs dreams so that they become more vivid? I don't have data on that at the moment. Well, let me throw a third thing. Please. Bilateral rapid eye movement, no, bilateral movement, even if it's not rapid, tends to coordinate the left and right hemispheres of your brain. They become more synchronized. I mean, you could say it's neurological because your two eyes connect to the different sides of your brain, and

your brain has to coordinate your image, so the left and right, I mean, you can make this is just sort of, you know, neurological bologna, but it sounds good. And so, you know, you can watch your brain waves synchronize by just physically moving your eyes left and right. And you can also say that the dreams that you're having during rapid eye movement are more integrated emotionally and intellectually because in some sort of causative way, you can also say that you, you Your eyes are, you know, here we get sort of metaphorical. Your eyes are taking the experience back and forth from your intellectual to your emotional sides. And there's actually, you know, that dichotomy of intellectual versus emotional is just the crudest of dichotomies.

There are many other, you know, ways of dividing it visually, linguistically, spatially, emotionally, emotionally, long-term memory, short-term memory. And then these emotional centers like your amygdala supposed to deal with fear, and there's other parts of you that are reactive and other parts of you that are executive functioning. So in terms of just, you know, you're not just organizing left and right. You're trying to unmix the, you know, the soup, the minestronee soup of your mind into some sort of order. Yeah. And I think that's what dreams are trying to do. They're trying to shelve what is essentially a collapsible.

experience of perception into some sort of order. Yeah. I was listening to some other podcasts with some people just talking about the way we perceive the world itself. And the idea of broad focus, seeing everything at once versus narrow focus on something specific. And there's the very, I think there's the reality that we are perceiving. everything at once all the time. But we cannot process that amount of data. So our brains are kind of

as much as the eyes and another sense is, you know, inform that, but very much designed to, in a way, discriminate and narrow down and say, okay, wait a minute, I can process this much information at once. That's where we're going to, and we can move the focus. We can move it around and do see what we need to see. But we're actually taking in all that information at once. And so my conception of the unconscious, which it was also a revelation to me, and I could keep mentioning this, because I love this stuff. It blows my mind. There was a time, like 100 years ago, they were very much in doubt as to whether the unconscious was an actual thing, theoretically. So that's, that's, that is how I conceive it is like the pool of every sensation, observation, thought, emotion we've ever had,

just, almost like the, the physical structure of the brain yielding the complete data set and then dreams also tend to be that kind of focus of let's look around these different different places and it's as mysterious why something in the environment catches my attention why am I interested in this why does this inspire me and not that same thing with like where do dreams come from um it's a mystery as to why that particular focus at that particular time on that subject in that iconic or or imagistic or emotional form um i i tend to think I'd love to get feedback on that, is that my theory, the way I express it is dreams self-select for importance. If you remember them and if you wake up feeling strongly about it, it's probably something important to you.

It's probably something you're desperate to understand, a situation you want a solution for, some situation you need to get a grasp on so you know what you're dealing with. Let me add to that just because I know you'll enjoy it. I think dreams help you de-understand things. They de-focus you. They broaden your attention to the other elements that trigger you. So in my counseling, you know, one of the main problems people have is they're up against a problem and they can't figure out how to solve it. They've built themselves a box and they don't know how to get out of it. It can be as simple as the one woman who's afraid to go out in the sunlight.

and another person who's as an investment banker dealing with all these clients in their, you know, knife-wielding intentions. And what a dream will do is it will take you out of whatever makes sense and reintroduce you to all the other feelings you have. I mean, to reintegrate, you have to re-experience or collect at least the alternatives. and many people are short of alternatives. They're focused on what their mind is telling them the problem is or what the solution is or what other people are doing in reaction to them. And, you know, if you've got a relationship problem, you'll be thinking of the people involved in that problem

and their behaviors, their goals, your fears, your needs. And the dream will throw you, you know, you'll be playing golf, underwater with an octopus or something. It will try to broaden your thinking in a very visceral way. And it won't be... It's not trying to resolve. It's not trying to give you an answer.

It's trying to get you out of the answer mode and trying to, you know, take you on a tour through the wax museum of your mind where all these, you know, animatronic images you know and you know whether you're waking life

as an animatronic image is a good question too because it's all sort of contrived and if you don't believe in it it sort of falls away if you just sit there and stare at people dumbly they'll eventually go away and so a lot of other things in your life

problems and so forth as well as opportunities but you know we're built as human beings to react intellectually and mindfully, and often it gets us on the wrong path, or it gets us entwined with a barbed wire situation we can't get out of. Yeah.

And a dream will break us if we remember it. You know, but wait a minute. I'd say, even if you don't remember it, I feel it's doing its work. I think so. In how you wake up the next day. Yeah. No, there's many times than it happens more often now that I'm paying attention to to it.

The advice, sleep on it. It doesn't just, you know, metaphorically, give it some time. Don't rush to judgment. Realistically, physically, like literally, I will wake up the next day with a solution to a problem. No memory of a dream, but I couldn't wrap my brain around it while I was awake the previous day. And I love this.

A lot of the books, and this is, God, I'm all over the place. I'm legit autistic tangents. this is how my brain works. We're going to circle back, I swear. A lot of these... Well, you don't dream because you're dreaming during the day. I might be, I might be getting it all out. I think about everything all the time.

It's just how my brain works. I'm all over the place. But a lot of the language they use trying to describe what's happening as we are falling asleep or what it means to be asleep, like definitions of what is sleep and how does it function. But a lot of them lean into the idea of abstraction or distraction, certainly. Like, while we're... focused intensely upon something, I think it's impossible to fall asleep. That's where the busy

mind keeps us awake at night, that kind of thing. But there's a, there's a, there's a, what am I trying to say, a very real connection to that idea of abstraction, because as I was saying, the, the idea that the, the, the senses perceive everything all at once, all the time. And the brain's job is to kind of refine it down and focus. And that's a very functional necessity. We, if we think about too many things at once, if we're too, um, scattered. We, we talk about that and say, you know, my mental health experience, someone's thoughts being scattered in such a way that it's, it's not like mine where I kind of eventually loop back around, but they just can't put anything together. They can't,

you know, dementia. They can't follow a multi-step process to get to the end of it. And so what you were, exactly what you were saying that the, um, so while we're awake are, are the need, the very real survival need of, of intense focus on discrete things that are, have you, utility that the dream experience seems, yeah, it does that. It expands it. And you said inside the box, I like the fish bowl analogy. It's like for most of our waking life, we are inside that fish bowl experiencing being a

fish. We go to sleep and we kind of hold the fish bowl. I'm going to say, get the idea out of our head. We hold out the idea of looking at ourselves in the fish bowl. And that's where we broaden that view, as you were saying, and kind of get to the abstract level of what's really happening here. What is this kind of experience? That's what I bring to the dream interpretation thing is saying, you know, there's this one thing to be inside an experience having the experience.

It's another to hold it out in front of you and say, what type of experience is this? How does it fit in the broader patterns of experience that other people have had or patterns in my life? And that's, it takes that level of abstraction to recognize patterns, I think. I don't know if you see where I'm going with this. I feel like you just rambled. That's okay. Rambling is fine. Yeah, yeah.

Rambles like this. me it's rambling um yeah no i don't have anything to say uh to enter that fair enough that's just fine um well we are our window is closing i think we've got maybe about 10 minutes i we could probably talk for two hours if we had more time i love it that's why i've got no kidding i've gone as long as four and a half hours with one dreamer that was it was a long multi-part game you know i wasn't going to cheat them of that experience so you should try i don't know if you would want put this on air. But we should do a hypnotherapy thing where I take you

on a guided visualization and then you'll have something like a dream. But, you know, it gets a little weird, so you might want to add it first. Well, we'll record it and I'll apply my own rule. If I'm not comfortable with it, we'll put it out there, right?

Yeah, at least you'd see. It would be interesting for you. I'm no, I'm absolutely open to the experience. I think that's you know, any kind of a thing that is going to help me understand better and then give me a better opportunity to explain things to people that have less specific knowledge. I mean, that's kind of wrong. I classify all these things as educational. And I think of it as educational even when I am wrong and acting a fool. And, you know, definitely

definitely in that archetypal sense. I mean, sometimes I'm the fool, sometimes I'm the savior. Sometimes I'm the trickster. You never really know. And I just go with it intuitively in that sense. Like, I never know what I'm going to do or what's going to happen. We just put it all out there and hope somebody gets a benefit. Everybody should be a therapist, I say, because it really gets you in deep with other people's stuff. But some of it is problematic because some people are adversarial and they need to put it on you.

Yeah. And then as a professional, you're obliged to take it. And some of it can be quite, it's hard to tell where the sharp edge of the knife is, you know? Yeah. And, you know, people can be self-destructive and that's strange too. it's all, I mean, what we're talking about here is basically creative exploration, but a lot of people can find it to be very,

I don't know if the word frightening or threatening or, you know, at some level we're sort of maybe talking about memories of trauma and upset, which for some people might be the only way to their recovery, but then even that's hard to define, you know, do you need to forget it or you need to resolve it? I don't know. As a therapist, and even you can relate, your job is basically just to be a joker, you know, just to invent, and I say people pay me to say stupid shit. And I don't have to be right, because I'm just trying to do things differently, take them out of their thought patterns.

And then it starts to sound like everybody's dreaming, you know. Yeah. But they're not as fluid as a dream. They're much more concrete, and that's often a problem. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's a difficult thing. I mean, what you said inspired a thought to me, the idea of I've had at least a few dream interpretation collaborations. That's how I think of it as a collaboration. I say, none of the answers are in me. I'm not hearing, you know, the voice of God. I'm not communing with spirits. I'm using no psychic powers. We are, you've invited me in to your mind. And I'm kind of standing over your shoulder, shining a flashlight in the dark saying, do you see what I see? What if we look at it from a different angle? I think of that is. I think of that is. the process of therapy itself in a way, even though I can't say this is therapy, you know, capital T licensed. I'm trying to bring that, bring that experience to it. But there are, I do, and I have, like I said, specific experiences, I have felt that resistance to certain suggested

understandings that might actually be pretty true. You know, I have a strong gut feeling. Now, sometimes you can see it on someone's face or you can, you can hear it in their voice. They go, Hmm, hadn't thought about it that way. I don't think that's it. But then you get people who like, you can feel the pull. It's like a pull away from don't look at that. That is not, we're not looking at that. And I don't, you know, in these formats being not the Jerry Springer show to,

to, you know, embarrass anyone or be salacious shock content, not wishing to do any harm in the process for entertainment, any of that. It's going to go with it. It's okay. Fair enough. You say no. We're moving on. Let's get what else we can from.

a different part of this process. If it was more private, if this was actually private counseling and therapy, I might also shelve it on a particular day, but then in the notes, it would be like, let's come back to this. Why? Oh, yes, I do that all the time. Right? You have to. Well, another funny thing is just to mention in therapy, often the most important topic on the

most important issue is what they mentioned at the last moment, parenthetically, incidentally, irrelevantly. On the way out the door. It's the thing that's hidden furthest under the rug. And so I take those things and then I put them back. I said, okay, well, let's take this ugly little

piece of garbage you collected at the bottom and put it on the top. And now what does it look like? And where does it direct your attention? Yeah. So that can be tough. That's where we get some of that counter transference type of stuff too

where it's like, I think this, I think this is important. because looking at it will be beneficial to you. Oh, yeah. But you're not going to like this. And it might be unpleasant. And we do this together. How can I make you feel safe enough to trust me to walk you through this and not let you drown, you know?

Well, this is why it's hard for me to do because I get how far do you want to get in other people's business so that you want to be able to escape it because they can't. That's tough. Yeah. I mean, you got to go there to help them, but you hopefully can escape what they can't. but if you get too far, and there's always a question of going too far, it weighs on you. I mean, it does bend you, but hopefully not break you. And so you like to lift people out, but not get stuck in their swamp. Anyway, that is, I would say that's on the art side of the art and science of psychology itself is, you know, we bring our, our genuine precise.

I love, what was it, Rogers? I think is the two things he said, client-centered therapy, but unconditional positive regard. I want you to come out of this better than you went in. But also genuineness, I'm just me. I'm the real me at all times. That doesn't mean, no, I have a problem with my filter. I absolutely do. But it doesn't mean being unfiltered, saying stupid or careless things that aren't focused properly on trying to be helpful.

It's not careless, but it can be stupid. But yes. I call it unconditional positive disregard. I'm stealing that. I don't care what you think is important, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think sometimes we have to do that, especially when there's, yeah, there's like resistance and whatnot. But that's, I think the reason I don't push that in my interviews, for a lot of reasons I've already said, but also because I can't pick up the pieces afterwards.

I get one shot with someone. I've got to make it the best experience I can for them. So if I get too much resistance, it's like they're not ready to deal with that. That's not open to discussion at this time. And I can't, you know, it's, that's my, like, let's say my, this is not any license thing. I'm not charging money, but I bring my 100% of my professional ethics to it of, I'm like an open can't, worms, I can't stuff back. Right, right.

I know what you mean. Yeah. Well, we've got five minutes. I do have to go in four minutes. Yeah. I don't know if we're going to get to the dream at all or if you want to just tell it to me and I'll give you my impressions. Oh, the dream is strange.

The dream was being in a kind of maze with panels in the corridors. And they all seem to be closed. if you look, there were handles like, you know, the door handles on a Tesla that push in. And if you went around, or as I did in the stream, looking for these handles, I could open them, and then they would open them to kind of a series of, what's that the game, Tesseract, where you fit the pieces together. They fall down and you have to fit them before they reach the bottom. Tetris.

Tetris. So I would open these kind of Tetris, three-dimensional Tetris spaces, and then there would be other doors and other indentations and other handles. And then I would try to get in through this series of doorways that I would create, and then I would tend to get stuck. And then at one point, I was looking for a bathroom. Bathrooms play in my dreams. And I found a bathroom, but it had no toilet, and I had to take a dump. So he said, oh, I'll go to another floor. and then I found another bathroom it also had in a toilet and then I found myself in a stairway and it had then become sort of nightmarish

it had this the stairway went around in a square depression going down and then the center was just this big black dark hole and I considered throwing myself into the hole but I thought you know

you don't want to do that in a dream because then you might do that in real life so I mean this is one of the things about dreams if you want to explore or become lucid, and remember, you have to want to do it in real life. You have to want to explore and think about going outside your box in real life, because there's a relationship between real life and dreaming.

Anyway, so that's the two images I was left with are the opportunity to throw myself down this black hole into which the stairs descended and trying to escape through these series of doorways that I opened that got increasingly narrow and I couldn't fit through. And that seemed to be, on reflection, two different ways to look at the same sense of being trapped in something. And then I have to relate it to my life,

and I have a son and an estranged wife, and I am feeling trapped with her recently. And so I think, hmm, okay, well, maybe. And it reminds me in a very simple, and perhaps an effective way to think differently. Right? Yeah.

And what's the benefit? And then you have to look at, well, do I want to think differently, or am I committed to what I think is right? And why do I think it's right? And I think if you follow these things long enough and it doesn't take very long, you become confused.

And I think that's actually a nice place to be. It's where I try to get my clients in therapy. I try to get them confused. so that they let go of what they think. You know, it's like a dog when you're playing with a dog chew. How do you get it to let go? It just wants to tug and tug and tug and this is the solution. It thinks it's fun.

Dogs are always happy. But people aren't always happy. And they pull on their dog chew until their eyes bug out. And you kind of want to get them to, you know, you could say relax. You could say many things. and then you watch them and some people don't relax and some people do

and like I say if you can do it yourself you're in a much better position yeah anyway yeah no that's all great stuff so my my impressions what was jumping out at me and do it super short

and try to get you out of here is you know I think it's consistent with your personality that you like to solve puzzles like that resonates with me the idea of finding solutions. So you've got this iconic representation of Tetris. It's a puzzle solving game. We've got involuntary pieces coming at us. We've got to find where do they fit or we're going to run out of time. We're going to fail the mission. And you're in a maze, which is another kind of puzzle,

searching for answers, you know, acknowledging the complexity of a situation that it may be beyond you. It's like you never got out of the maze necessarily. You just found new areas and new puzzles to solve. And then, you know, if we had more time to get into it, the separate part of the dream, definitely that there's this, what does it mean? We have to get into this, my initial impression, but what does it mean to, to poop, to need a place to evacuate your body, to get the stuff out that isn't, that you don't want or that needs to come out, the refuse. So to set aside something, and you're, you're finding nowhere to relieve yourself in that sense of this, of this burden, this, something is like poop is, they call, you know, birthing a brown baby. That

kind of thing. It's like there's almost like an urgency. There is an urgency to get it out. It's got to go somewhere. And we just, you know, it's going to happen in your pants if you don't find a toilet, that kind of thing. It's just a human, human condition. So, and what that led you to, it appears is this is literally a downward spiral into, you, and use the word depression, not to, not to put you on the spot and hold you responsible for your words, but that, um, so maybe the inability to solve puzzles effectively to find a solution you're looking for, an inability to unburden yourself of things that are refuse. And then it leads you in a way down this path to, well, this is, looks to me like the road to a very deep depression, a very, you know,

downward spiral. So what I would suggest is, is just as a broad snapshot of your personality is, You know, you're a person who loves to problem solve and you have some things you wish to be rid of to unburden yourself of and that you realize that you, if you don't satisfy maybe both of these things in the proper, proper quantity. That is the road to a deterioration in your own mental health. And I almost never go straight to you. Let me give you an answer. But that's that's my impression. I don't know what you think. I like it. Thanks. I've got to go though because it's 11.

It is time. We'll get you out of here. Let me do the goodbyes. Once again, this has been our friend Lincoln Stoller from Victoria, BC, Canada. He is a physicist, psychotherapist, neuropsychologist, and author. You're going to find his books and more at Mind Strength Balance.com. For my part, would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. 16. Currently available works of historical dream literature most recently, dreams in their meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson.

All this and more at my website, Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com, a full list of all the books, etc. Also, Benjaminthreadwizard.locals.com. And the last thing to say is, Lincoln, thank you for being here. This has been absolutely fascinating. I've loved it.

All right, let's do it again. Yeah, definitely. And everybody out there, thanks for watching. Okay, thanks, Ben.