Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 149: A Sticky Situation

Episode Date: December 3, 2023

Lâle Davidson: https://laledavidson.com/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend, oh God, you just told me, Lolly, Lolly, right? Lolly Davidson. I am Benjamin the Dream Wizard Davidson. No relation except possibly hundreds of years ago. But it's always nice to meet a fellow Davidson. So yeah, this is our friend Lollie Davidson. She is an author, teacher, and storyteller.

We're going to get into all that in just a second. Oh, and she hails from upstate New York around this heritage. Springs area. I always like to say where people are at in the world. It's the most disorganized introduction ever. We're rolling with it. This is happening today. Right back to our guest in two seconds. Would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers, viewers for my video game streams. 16. Currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent dreams and their meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson. All this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com.

Also, if you'd head on over to Benjamin the Dreamwizard.locals.com trying to build a community there. It's free to become a member. You can kick me some shekels or not. Just follow what I'm doing. That's where I post exclusive recipes for the themed cocktails for each new video game.

It's kind of a thing I do. I think it's unique. That's enough about me. Lolly, thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. I'm glad to be here. I'm excited to hear what you have to say about my most recent dream.

Yeah, very cool. These are always fascinating to me. I mean, there's a lot of people who go, you know, go. They respond to my communication asking them about that and go, my dreams just aren't that interesting, I guess. And I'm like, they're all fascinating to me. It's all a story. Your subconscious is telling you. I mean, speaking of storytelling, that's kind of how I understand it. And it's usually around trying to get a grip on a concept or reflect.

on yourself and your own experience to understand it better. That's how I kind of view those things. Well, let's talk about, oh, of course, and your link in the description below, lolly Davidson.com. What are your books? What does it mean to be a teacher? What's this about storytelling? Yeah.

So I mean, my ulterior motive, which is not too ulterior, or is to promote my books. These are going to show up backwards, I guess. but Blue Woman Burning is a coming of age novel. I write in the genre mostly of magic realism, although I go kind of over into fantasy. And that's because I really, I think I'm fascinated by the subconscious mind, which is, you know, my dreams have always been vivid in my life. So I think it's not a, it's not surprising that I should then start writing fiction

and fiction that's a little weird. Because I try to, I sort of think, I try to write in a way that it's real, but also the subconscious is coming out too. And I'm trying to write in a way that kind of joltz you out of the banal into that other kind of magical dream kind of place. So I have a book of short stories that are called Strange Appetites, which are strange stories. And then I have another novel that is called Against the Grain

that is about activists trying to say The Redwoods. And finally, my gosh, I don't have my most recent book, be on site, which is a ghost story. And so I love ghost stories too. Oh, yeah. That's, yeah, I'm a writer. I teach writing. I teach public speaking.

And then I also do storytelling, like folk telling and also personal tales. Very cool. That's all really cool stuff. I'd like to get more into, what am I trying to say? I've had an idea for a book. for 20 some odd years. And I've sat down and write it a couple of times. And I've discussed this before, I think.

But for me, sometimes I get far enough into what I would consider, you know, like chapter one. And I'm like, I'm bored with the process. And I don't know if I'm just a bad writer and what I'm writing isn't even interesting. Or if I'm too familiar with it, that I'm like, this is no longer gives me a zing of the new and interesting because I'm just writing out things that have been in my head for 20 years. It's hard to tell the different. for me. Even though I have that, so what I've been doing lately is like reproducing

historical literature on dreams. This is almost like me constructing my own masterclass of, well, let's read everything that's ever been said about dreams by thinkers over the past 2000 years. But then I want to transition into, after I got about five or six more books that I've got on deck to be published. There was a point to this. We're coming around scattered. I'm with you. I'm with you. Right.

And the first book of a news series I want to do, I want to do a wizard's guide to X, Y, Z, kind of like X for idiots or X for dummies, whatever that is, you know. And the first one is going to be a wizard's guide to Aesop's Fables and how they relate to current, currently understood psychological principles, fox and the sour grapes, well, like a boy who cried wolf, all that stuff that's ancient wisdom, things we've known for 2,300, 2,500 years at least, and ASAP goes back that far. We don't know which side of the BC coin 500 or 300 years.

But I think there's tremendous value in stories. I think that's kind of how humans understand things in a way as stories. Yeah, there's even, I think there's a branch in anthropology that's kind of the examination of the evolutionary impact of stories. And basically, we tell stories to survive. And, you know, just even the story of like, don't eat that mushroom because that one will kill you. You can't believe what happened to my friend. Yeah.

You know, that's the people who told stories survive, the people who didn't survive. Absolutely. It's, uh, that, that links in an interesting way, I think, to the idea of memes today. Um, we have this, uh, as speaking of stories, like we tell our, each other stories about the world and that's kind of how we communicate in a way. And a description of a thing or an idea is almost its own little unique story. It's, I think of, I think too much. I'm, I think all over the place and I can't stop all day, all the time. It's hard to sleep sometimes. But a meme is described as a unit of cultural information. So we had that now that itself is a meme. The description

of what the word means is, is the meme, like a definition is a meme. And it's a meme made of memes, made of other words that also have their own definitions. And so I consider it like memes are what, how do I say it? Memes are the framework upon which our perception of reality hangs in a way. It's like we have these concepts. I was listening to a podcast recently. I don't remember someone was saying, you know, we don't have quite, we don't quite see reality. as it is, we see it as it is useful to us in a way.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's something to do. And a lot of people get confused with that idea and they say it's something like, well, there is no objective reality. It's all perception. I'm like that not exactly. There has to be something to perceive, but then what parts of it are we perceiving? Like we can't perceive everything all at once our brains aren't that big.

It's not possible. So we have to narrow our focus. And then when we narrow our focus, we're not seeing anything. else around that focus because this is the mental bandwidth we have and we can only move it around and focus on different things. I was going somewhere with that. Right. I'll just throw that idea to you.

Right. Because I think I was talking about in my writing about, you know, the subconscious and I try to write in a way that makes you kind of see that. So I think that's where that's what you were talking about is that, yeah, there's a lot more to reality than we perceive. We can't perceive it all all the time. so that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, and that kind of fits with my concept that what the subconscious is,

is a reservoir of all the things we, all the things to say maybe the analogy is in our peripheral vision, like, because we can't see what's behind us, but we can't also focus on everything that's in front of us either. And really what we can consciously perceive is right, right in here moving around. But the subconscious is everything outside that focus that we are still absorbing, all the, all the peripheral stuff out of the corner of our eye. And it's all there. And it's all acting on us too.

Like we are responding to some of our subconscious without even knowing that's what we're doing. Absolutely. You know, I mean, the classic example is now you've been, you know, abused by your, your father who has a beard. So ever after when you meet somebody with a beard, you have a weird reaction to them. You know, that's the classic example of how. the subconscious is with you, whether you are aware of it or not.

It kind of literally happened to me in real life. And not uncommon, but it's interesting that a specific example. So I worked in inpatient psychiatric for, you know, 20 years, the most intense cases of people at their worst. And there was a gal that came in and I was assigned to, she was one of the people under my care at the time. And when I went to introduce myself, she actually stopped me and stepped back

and said, I'm sorry, this isn't your fault, but you remind me. You look very similar to the man who raped me years ago. I know that's not you. I know, and this is nothing personal, but I can't work with you. It's too intense. And I said, I am sorry. I did nothing wrong, but I'm sorry for your, you know, situation. Just my automatic response.

Like, oh, my God, I didn't know. My very presence put you in that state of mind. And I said, I will immediately have you switch to, to a, a different therapist. I was just blown away by her self-awareness and ability to be assertive and very happy that I was the one who was assigned to her just from the, well, it would have been better if I wasn't, but other other therapists that I may have worked with might not have been so sensitive.

They might have just said, well, that's the assignment deal with it. And you don't have to talk to me if you don't want to. Yeah. I've actually seen that too in those. patient psychiatric settings and I'm not, it's hard to deal with those fellow staff. Now, I'm glad you did that. That was probably very healing for her to have this figure, say, I honor your rights and your preferences and I'm going to do exactly what you want.

That's probably exactly what you needed. I hope so. You know, from that lookalike, you know. Yeah, yeah. And just just those opportunities. I feel kind of blessed in a way, you know, whether you're spiritual or religious or not, but to have those opportunities to do the right thing.

Just purely by accident, weird synchronicity. On that day, I happened to be scheduled. And I think it was, it's one of those conjunction of the stars type of things, too, because I think she'd come in on one of my days off. And I only worked one day and she was gone by the next time. So if it had been anyone else, she wouldn't have had that experience. Nor would I. And that stuck with me for at least 10 years.

That's kind of amazing, yeah. Yeah. So you've talked about, getting back to the subconscious, you've talked about trying to incorporate that in your, in your storytelling. I don't know if you have some examples of how you've brought that into. Yeah, yeah, the easiest one. I just give you the opening line of the Opel maker from Strange Appetites. So it starts this way.

When they cracked my sister's ribs open and slid the curved bone blades back under my skin to repair her damaged heart, they found me. tucked inside. Up until then, I had not known how her ribs cradle gouged me. You might think it's hard to breathe when you're living inside someone else. It is.

Surprisingly, you adjust. So that came from just a perception of like, that's how I felt with my oldest sister that I had been, that she had sort of tucked me inside her to take care of me and then that became a problem.

later on. And so then I just thought, well, what if that was really, you know, what I mean, I'm kind of saying, what if I take that metaphor and manifest it externally as a story, what happens? Yeah. Oh, that's very cool. Yeah. And you can look at that in so many different ways.

I can imagine, excuse me, I got fruit flies. You're killing me. You're killing me. Smiley. Cat hair fruit flies distractions. there's a lot of experiences that changes. I mean, that's kind of a broad category of things.

We're like, we learned something we didn't know. Now we know something. We're different for it. In some of we have knowledge we didn't have before. But also, well, speaking of the gal that saw me,

and now any guy that looks like me, she's going to have a feeling about that guy. So it's not always positive. But, you know, definitely, let's say you literally go through that experience of, you have to have your ribs cracked open for heart surgery. That's just the way they got to get in there

and do the thing. They've got to go through the breastplate. You come out of that experience changed. There's something found literally in that case inside you that, you know, is physically, needs to be fixed. And then you are physically different afterwards. But also coming out of that experience, now you got recovery time. You have the knowledge.

I've been through a major medical trauma, however necessary it was. It's still from that surgery traumatic. Yeah. And then what, and then you find kind of, in that, metaphorical way, a different person inside you. You come out of the experience a different person. Yeah. Yeah.

So you said you drew that a little bit from a real life experience with the, let's say like maybe an overprotective older sister. Yes, that was, you know, and, you know, and there's probably some sensitivity, you know, if my sister's listening now. Fair enough. I think she, she felt hurt by that story. I wasn't trying to make her into the bad guy. I was trying to explore that dynamic.

And I'm like, like I said, we talked before we started recording that, you know, both of us maybe are more candid than some people like. I sort of feel like, well, why are we hiding? Everybody's got problems with their siblings, don't they? I mean, you know, what's strange about that? But, you know, some people feel like, hey, that's private. And I don't want that knowledge to be in the hands of somebody who doesn't understand it. and, you know, doesn't value it correctly. And so that's maybe why people are private and secretive about some things.

For sure. Yeah. And I mean, referencing this specifically in relation to what I say to every guest beforehand, you know, part of the spiel, and it's almost never makes it on camera, so I'll say it again. But I never record without permission. I never release a recording without permission. And I edit out anything you don't want. So if this brief moment of talking about your sister, you were uncomfortable. comfortable with anyone seeing this clip would be gone this this entire last two minutes of

conversation but as you say you and I are both pretty candid like uh there's I mean it's no it's no wonder that we are sometimes because the world is inherently dangerous I mean it's basically everything's trying to kill us in some ways including other people sometimes and so it's hard for us to say be vulnerable in that way of like expose a vulnerability or or accept that we're not perfect in some ways because any, you know, chink in the armor is a place that arrow can get through if someone were to be hostile to us.

And there are hostile people out there that will, especially on the internet, like if you ever reveal vulnerability, people go, you're an idiot, you're dumb, all that good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, speaking of which, do people, I mean, have you had problems with that

with people commenting on the dreams in your video? then like do you just turn it off or what do you do? I have not had that problem. I'm going to say I'm not quite popular enough to have dedicated haters. Honestly, I will consider that a mark of success when I've got people who hate me enough to comment on my videos because they just try to help themselves. Right.

But then at that point, yeah, I might start. I don't know. That's a tough call too because I don't want Dreamers to be abused by being sharing, sharing pieces of themselves with me and the world. Hopefully everyone I talk to has a thick enough skin that they're, you know, maybe the willingness to go on video and talk about their stuff,

it means there's a little bit of a precondition of a thick skin to say, I'm okay with putting myself out there. Right. But I don't know how honestly I'm going to handle it. I'm personally a very staunch, like free speech advocate. I don't want to censor anyone. I don't want that power personally. I don't want to tell anyone what they can't say.

I also don't like people just being mean for no damn reason. It's like, what are you doing? So I might take people that are not, you know, assuming they're not, they don't have something of value to say. There's, there's, and hopefully that some things of value can come across as mean, but a lot of it's phrasing. But then there's also the flip side of it where it's a concern trolling. Like, gee, I wish this person was, you know, smarter. it wouldn't it be great if they weren't so dumb like that's not i see what you're doing there we're not we're not playing that game so i don't know how i don't know how i'm going to respond to it if if people

were really being mean in the comments yeah i hope not hopefully anyone who's interested in this genres i'm not hopefully i never get a dedicated core of haters right right we'll see yeah yeah i tend to see the world is i mean yes there's there's danger and all of that but if i i i i i If I had to place a bet, I would say there's more good people than bad. There's more people who want to make the world a better place than there are people who want to damage it. And of course, there's that special category of people who think they're making the world a better place by damaging it. And that's where the reality question, you know, there's like, okay, no, but they're really, the tree does fall in the forest, whether you're there to hear it or not. That's true.

And there are consequences for that. So, but anyway, I, you know, it's interesting talking to you because you are clearly such an ethical person and we, and we share a lot of ethics and yet we've never met. And, and I suspect that that's true across the world, you know, that. I haven't met a lot of people. I was just going to say, I haven't met a lot of people that I've had interactions of duration with that are consistently. jerks. Now, either I don't attract those kind of people or I don't pay attention to them or I choose not to engage with them. But, you know, every now and again, say on Twitter, you'll, you'll have an opinion and then someone will go, you're dumb. I'm like, okay, have a nice day. I'm not interested.

You know, don't feed the trolls, so to speak. Right, right. But yeah, it's a, you know, all kinds of places with that. What, what thing that came to my mind is, it just went there, Dante's Inferno and the idea of the ninth, lowest whatever circle of hell being for betrayers. And there's something and that I think speaks to the human. This is why I love storytelling. Like it's that's pure fiction, but it speaks to real ideas. It's a weird thing. It's like this way I kind of view, I'm so I'm not a Christian, but I view the biblical stories is like maybe it never happened, but it is still true. Like it's giving an essence of truth to the story like the boy who cried wolf. This is a real human phenomenon that

does happen. Even if it didn't never happen in this specifically. form historically. I think that's beside the point. Long story short, Dante's in front of coming around. There's a special type of evil to betrayal because you have

it's like it's a, it's a violation of one of the most, I think, sacred things we can have between us with another person that trust, that kind of loyalty type of thing where I can, I believe because of who I think you are, you will not

take my tender heart and crush it. And then you do and then you do that betrayal was like that's in my opinion some of the worst evil in the world that i understand why he put it at the very bottom the lowest level of the most wrong type of human behavior long story short that's my that's my story yeah and and fraud is second i'm just i just looked it up because um you know that that lying is also uh you know one of the the the second worst thing you can do. So even, it's even after violence,

interestingly enough. Yeah. Yeah. And we might even put betrayal and fraud in the same category in a way, or actually maybe betrayal is a subset of fraud because it is a deception you're practicing on someone. Right. I intentionally otherwise look like, make myself look like perhaps a person you can

trust. And I'm not. And I knew that before I did it. that even that is uh yeah i put as some of my highest unethical behaviors is is force fraud and coercion i i i do not use force to get what i want from other people i will not use fraud to deceive them to give me what i want or coercion threat of force um all of these things are just right out the window for me it's like i'm not and that's in that under that level of like control of others category i don't want it yeah i don't want it i want you to listen to me because you

think I have interesting things to say. You think what I have to say is beneficial to you, but I'm not going to twist your arm or threaten to twist your arm or manipulate you in any way. Like, those things are just, yeah, I can't. It's not who I am. Yeah. There wasn't a question there. That's just, I'm just rambling. No, no, no, no. We're just, yeah. Yeah, for sure. But then, kind of to book in the idea of sharing stories about family, I mean, it can be tough to be. be a writer say and balance the idea of this is something I believe is important to share

with because others can benefit from it. And at the same time, it might be embarrassing or, you know, the other people involved might be put on the spot for it. And that's, that's a tough call sometimes as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, my family, you know, we're different. And so, you know, I think both of my.

My sisters are much more private than I am. And yeah, in that sense, it's hard to be related to a writer. Yeah. Because we're using everything we've got, you know. And, you know, not all my books are about me and my life. I would say that, you know, some of them are exercising, like, I wonder what it would be like to be like this, you know? Or I find those are actually easier to write. it's easier.

Like my first novel was semi-autobiographical Blue Woman Burning. And that was really hard to write, partly because of the fear of betraying people, you know, siblings and things like that. But then also because it's very hard to understand your own life, you know, and I think it took me 20 years to write Blue Woman Burning. And I think it was because I didn't understand the, it's really about this triangulation that happened between my mother and myself and my brother. And it took me a long time to understand.

understand the dynamics of it in order to write it. Then the second two books against the grain is about activists. I am an activist sometimes, so I have a connection to that, but the people, the characters were not me. And they were probably derived from little pieces of me and other people I knew. And the same with Beyond Sight. I mean, the main character is probably a subset of me somewhere. And those were easier to write because I wasn't, it wasn't, I didn't have to mine through my own

personal life to sort it out. Yeah. That's an interesting thing too. There's a, I always like to look at the yin yang wholeness of stuff. There's like, uh, my, the idea of mining your life is we write what we know. I mean, that's kind of, and people, and it's, it's almost, almost kind of obvious when someone isn't writing what they know. They're like, they just don't get it.

And they're not expressing it well. Certainly to some. someone who is in a particular profession and someone's writing about that and they're like, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. But anyone who's ignorant of that profession completely would go, well, that's very interesting. I never knew that. It's like, no, no, no, they're wrong. And it's hard to, okay, long story short on that.

But where was I going with that? It's a tremendous reservoir of experience, say, to bring out, go, I know of this stuff. But then there's the other side of it, which is you don't want to only write about your own personal experience. You want to get out of your head and imagine what other people are doing. It brings an interesting question. I had a discussion with someone the other day. So I play the do the video game streams. And in those, we are often, you know, it's a form of storytelling, interactive storytelling, I think, you know.

And some of my favorite games are the games where you can make choices that affect the world. You can choose, I'm going to help this person or I'm going to hurt them. I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to take advantage of them. We have a good and evil. Often people are offered that choice. There's some research out there that says, like, the vast majority of people are not comfortable with playing an evil character. That there's just a few of them that are. And that it doesn't necessarily mean they are secretly harboring the desire to hurt people in real life.

It's something different. The classic example is that there's a game called Fallout. I don't remember which one it is, Fallout 3 or 4 or something like that. But in the very beginning of the game, there's a choice you can make to disarm a nuclear bomb or arm it and run away. and watch the city get blown up and all the people in it. And there's an interesting phenomenon that most people reported they saved the game, blew up the city just to see what would happen, then backed it up to the save and didn't blow it up, decided to disarm it on the, for real.

Most people were not comfortable even enacting fantasy harm upon the innocent. And that's kind of where I'm at. Wow. Okay, so all of this nested layers of stuff. So I was talking with a guy. And he does a playthrough of the game. as the good as, you know, let's follow the hero storyline. Now let's go back and play it again as the villain.

And I'm like, I can't do that. I can't even bring myself to act that way towards fictional innocent persons. I just can't do it. I don't find it entertaining. I don't enjoy the feeling. And maybe for them there's a, you know, and again, I don't want to cast that as evil necessarily. Yeah. Because in my estimation, having a thought experiment of that.

kind in your head. What if I were evil? What would an evil person do? You got to do that to write an evil character in a story. You know, imagine George Lucas couldn't conceive of Darth Vader. We just wouldn't have a good story. I threw a lot at you. I don't even know if I had a point, but just the concepts involved. I'll let you run with it a bit. Yeah. No, what it makes me think of, though, is that, you know, there's a lot of research pointing to the idea that we are born ethical. And yet I've also seen, you know, research that says you have to teach empathy. But like little babies, like, you know, they get upset if they, not just if you take their things away, but if you took things away from somebody else, they perceive injustice before being taught about it.

So, I mean, it does suggest that, you know, we're sort of wired to be ethical. And the reason we get into so much trouble, though, is, you know, how do you arrive at that? Like I think most people agree, you shouldn't go around killing people and hurting people, but then we have disagreements about what should happen to somebody if they do that. And then we get into arguments about that, you know. But I think, you know, yeah, the thing that creeps me out the most is the concept of, you know, when you talk about treachery, the concept of malice, of hurting people because you want to hurt people. and I suspect that that actually probably is a brain defect.

You know, there's something, as with people who are, what is it, it's not psychotic, but the ones that don't have a perception of right and wrong, sociopaths. You know, it's probably a brain defect, not a choice. and all sociopaths are not serial killers. Like there are clearly people who are sociopathic who choose to live ethically, even though they don't really get, it's more of an intellectual exercise than an emotional one. Yeah. But anyway, so, yeah, I tend to think that doing the right thing is sort of,

we want to do the right thing inherently. Anyway, I also have ADHD, so I will go all over the place, so you have to watch me. Please, no, that's fine. I just rambled until you have something to say, because you're, right? Everyone hears me talk every week. They say, though, the difference between conservatives and, and progresses is that progresses believe in the inherent goodness of people and conservatives believe in the inherent badness of people.

Interesting. Yeah. So if you're inherently bad, you've got to have a lot of laws that make you act right if you're inherently good. But that doesn't, it doesn't line up. Yeah, that's tough, too. Well, speaking of that, so that's an interesting dichotomy. that but so I very often think we need no I I do genuinely believe we need a yin yang balance of

progress and conservation or progress in provision or progressive and conservative um it's it's judging the proper quantity like if you if you imagine that yin yang sign and it's got the curvy teardrops that meet each other if you draw a line across it you can move that line up or down and have different quantities of each light and dark left left and right white and black um and sometimes we have that we need that sliding scale sometimes it's right in the middle 50 50 sometimes it's a 60 40 or or 90 10 um in in in those type of things so and interesting is talking about the origin so i've i've had this is what my brain does i've been thinking deeply and and and and obsessively even about lots of philosophical things for that is suspected spam shut up calling me um

spam likely it's yeah yeah suspected spam it said this time like okay fair enough um for a long time I was I shared that opinion I think that uh you know there's no such thing as evil so much as broken brains and I kind of came around to the idea of well yes but let's say it doesn't matter where it comes from necessarily, evil is kind of in the actions or the nature of the thing, whatever the motivation was. If it was, you know, it's more tragic if it's inborn than if it's, say, a choice. But then we get into that concept of choice and how much of our astroma, say, may have set us up to look at certain situations to make a particular choice.

it's so interesting because I literally have had two dreams on that topic. Oh. And the one dream was promoting the idea that there's no such thing as evil. And one is going, no, there is. Be careful. For sure. Yeah. And that's if we, it's almost what I came down to trying to distill things to their essence.

Some of it is just definitional. It's a tautological. The philosophers would say, if you. define it a specific way. Yeah, that's what it is. If you define it differently, yeah, that's what it is. So saying it's, um, um, it also comes down to, uh, assigning responsibility in terms of just consequences. I think you were mentioning that too, the idea, okay, what do we do? Come Yeah. Um, you know, uh, it's, that, that reminded me of another thing I was going to bring up to the idea of a, uh, have you heard of, I think it's called the psychopath test. It was a book by a guy. So this guy was studying. being brain scans of diagnosed psychopaths.

And what he discovered is that that brain pattern showed up in a lot more people than we realized. And one of the brains that had the typical psychopathic brain pattern was his own. He's like, wait a minute. And yeah, and he is an accomplished researcher. He's never murdered anyone. He's not a serial killer. He's not a, you know, he's a, he's a person who's got his life put together very well. But then he started looking at it.

And he goes, you know, when I was, you know, slightly younger, I had a young nephew. And he and I would play chess. And I would kick his ass ruthlessly every time. And I didn't feel bad about it at all, even when he ended up in tears. I was like, well, he just needs to learn that some people are better than him. And he'll get better eventually. And then he'll beat me. And that'll be good.

And he's just not connecting with the idea that some people throw the game on purpose as a. And then that relates to, uh, uh, uh, uh, kind of an idea that's getting into the zeitgeist lately is that the uh i think his name is yak panxep's research on rats that play together what he found is that i think that's the guy's name um what he found is that if a larger rat and a smaller rat play together usually it's the smaller rat that has to initiate and the larger rat has to throw the game has to let the smaller rat pin him at least 30, 40% of the time or the smaller rat will stop initiating play and that that's their main social dynamic.

So it's a very interesting thing there too. So almost definitionally what is psychopathy in that sense is not getting that social necessity in a way that you're going to be ostracized by perhaps a lot of weaker people relatively mentally or physically if you're not playing the game. you know, if you're not being properly social. Even if you never harm anyone actively, you never have any desire to do anything evil in that sense. You're just not.

And then that brings me around to the idea of its connection to autism. So autism is not psychopathy. But sometimes conditions share elements. And that's a typical thing I would say with autism too, is we're not reading social cues. Or we're just like, well, of course I say exactly what's on my mom. mind regardless of your feelings. I believe it to be true. Your feelings are your business. You know, and I try. So I've had to actually try to become more consciously aware.

So there's people who are, they're very naturally, we'll call it an inborn talent, very naturally empathic. Me, I have to be intellectually empathic. I'm like, oh, this fits the pattern of things I have said in the past where people have cried. I may not choose to use that exact terminology again because I don't want to achieve that result. But it's all in my head. It's not for my heart in that way. Yeah. Anyway, long story, sure. Interesting. So interesting. I love the, yeah, I want to get back to what you were talking about the yin yang. Oh, yes. You know, that, you know, the yin yang and that,

you know, you can sort of look at it through these slices and sometimes it's going to be more black and more white. And I was actually taking notes because I thought, oh, yeah, you are, you are traveling all over the reason. And I want to come back to stuff. And I'm going to forget because my mind's going to start doing the same thing. And then we'll be like, what were we talking about? You know? So, but there is a thread here. And this is what I found in ADHD is that you don't want to, I mean, yes, you've got to

teach your mind to focus more, but you don't want to completely do that because it's a skill. It's a superpower. And it's the skill set is that ability to jump around quickly and make connections between large amounts of things because, of course, we all know that everything's all connected. But yeah, so we seem to be centering on this idea. of good and evil. Sure. And I was just talking,

I was just on a podcast with climate pivot with this man also have been in London. And, you know, I was saying, we were talking about activism and climate change and all of that.

And I was just saying, well, you know, we're never going to get peace and justice, you know, the whole world, you know, we're not going to have that experience altogether.

But we can always get pockets of peace and justice justice here and there. And sometimes it's going to be more and sometimes it's going to be less. And I think that's partly because, you know, that's not nature's, nature's way is not to have like one maple tree. We have thousands, billions, millions of kinds of trees. And so I almost think a perfect balance of peace and justice. It's not like life just isn't made that way. That would be too static. But, yeah. Well, then again, there's many different kinds of peace and justice. I was just getting say that too. That's actually literally what I was writing down.

It's speaking of the definitional side of things is like, I say peace. And for me, peace is I never leave the four walls of my fenced backyard. I never speak to another person. I don't have to go anywhere or do anything. I mean, I'm talking to you, but in this, in very specific, limited context, I'm very introverted, isolated. I'm the, the hermit in his cave, for real, which is actually kind of typical for a lot of wizards. That's the wizardly type. You go up under the mountain and the hermits in his cave and you go seek out that wisdom. I'm trying to put it out there on the internet as if I have something to say.

But other people would say, no, for me, peace is being surrounded by family all the time. I'm very much at peace. They're feeling of it. And that goes to the concepts of justice as well. It's like, yeah, I think we would all agree. Yeah, we want a peaceful just world. And the vision of what that actually looks like behaviorally or in outcomes can be wildly different.

You know, some people want, uh, want murderers put to death. And some people want them in prison for life because that gives them a chance to redeem themselves before they die naturally. And some people want them in prison for their whole life because that's more torture than just letting them off the hook with death. Right. Yeah. A lot of different ideas of what's just in that regard. True. Yeah.

So true. And that, if you had more to say, I'll stop. But I also. No, I'm good. Yeah. I was actually trying to get around with, okay, so progress and tradition when I was getting around the idea of, you've heard of, what is it? Jonathan Heights moral foundations. Does that sound familiar?

I'm not familiar with it, but. Fair enough. Yeah, I'm on a Discord server and listen to another show on the internet. Shout out to the Sitch and Adam show. They very much get into that. And it seems, according to the research, that we are probably biologically, like programmed in our DNA, born with different levels of different moral foundations. And that one of them is care. harm and fairness cheating is another one. And those seem to be the two highest, strongest represented moral foundations for the, say,

progressive political side, whereas the conservative side has more of a balance across all six or seven, five or six foundations. Yeah. So a lot of us have a different innate sense of what feels just or fair or peaceful as as as as as ideal behavior ideal social interactions. Right. And then there's people like me where, uh,

my moral foundations tend to be a little lower across most of them, but my like liberty is off the charts. It's like number one, number one, don't tell me what to do. And number two, I will never tell you what to do. And I won't use force fraud or coercion to get it.

Um, and then that's, that's an interesting balance too because we've got the side of say people who are high in care and fairness. They're like, well, it's okay to use force. if we're balancing the scales, that that is an acceptable use of force for the sake of caring

for people and creating a fair or just world. And then on the conservative side, we might say it's more people who are like, justice is natural consequences. You screw up. It's your fault. You suffer the consequences. You don't expect anyone to fix it for you. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So complicated. It quickly gets complicated. It does. So what was the name of this guy that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I want to say his

Heights. Yeah, Jonathan Height, H-A-I-D-T, Jonathan Height. And if you get close to it, Google will say, did you mean, it'll give you a suggestion. Yeah. And what was the book was what? Oh. Or was the book or it was a. I'm going to look it up.

Did he propose that in a book called The Righteous Mind? Might be. But it's the moral foundations theory. And it is just a theory. It's interesting how we discuss things too in psychology of like, because it's in the brain. We can look at brain structures. Oh, this is another great thing. So just on today on Twitter, I came across something. Uh, they were talking about, I don't even remember what it was, but we got on the subject of phrenology. And there's an interesting. So this is, I'd learned

this in my studies of the sleep books, uh, sleep and dreams. Um, so phrenology is infamous and discredited for the idea of you can measure how far the nose is from the ear or the, the depth of the forehead to the hair. You can read the bumps on the head. They were, they were wrong. Oh my gosh. They were wrong about a lot of stuff, you know. Yeah. But one thing they proposed that was absolutely proven true and they were on the cutting edge, phrenologists said there are discrete areas of the brain that control different functions. And they were dead on with that. Now, they proposed, they proposed more discrete areas than we've, found and the ones we've found don't line up with the original proposition. So there was it was

hit and miss with that idea. They did say like I believe thinking is frontal frontal lobe stuff. And they were going with, I don't know if you've heard of the famous case of the guy, Phineas Gage. Oh, yes. With the railroad worker. Yeah. And that was that thing, right. That was part of what helped them develop that theory because because it went through his eye socket and popped out the top of his head. He survived how his behavior changed and what areas of the brain appeared to have been destroyed. They're like, it must be the, and now what the phrenologist said is, and you can see them in bumps on the head. No, you can't. That's, the fatty deposits outside the skull. It's got nothing to do with it. But they weren't as wrong as

people think. We owe them actually a pretty great debt for leaning into that and popularizing that notion and people going, you know, what they're right about that. And unfortunately, that gave credence to some of the other theories that have been since, long since, abandoned for just cause. But anyway, that's a little fun fact about phrenology. Well, that's interesting. So I looked up Jonathan Haidt and, and it's, yes, it's harm, there are the five moral foundations. Harm care is one, fairness and reciprocity is two, in-group, loyalty is three, authority

and respect is four, purity, sanctity is five. And so you're saying progressives tend to care most about number one. and number two probably, whereas conservatives tend to care about all five of those. And I can, that's really fascinating because, right, for me, like, I am not going to be loyal to something, a group, you know. Yeah. I'm not going to be loyal to my leader if my leader isn't doing what I think is the right thing. You know, like, I don't value blind loyalty at all.

Yeah. But I am a very loyal person. Exactly. I am loyal to my friends. I don't think I ever truly give up on my friends. I may walk away from them for a few years, but I'm always, I always kind of wonder how they are, you know?

Yeah, and that brings us to that interesting thing of like, how much of our loyalty, say, is inborn. Like, these traits seem to be with us from a very early age and that this is his theory anyway. And so he posits that it is basically biological. This is part of the part, part of the way that we are not a blank slate as much as we can.

Again, we're partly blank slate and partly not. So what does that mean? How much of each we don't know nature, nurture? It means we can choose to be good or bad, I think. I think so too. I think there is actual free choice. Well, there's people who say there's no free will. It's all an illusion.

We are biological machines. I'm like, I don't think so. No. I mean, I do think for some people it's harder. Like I wonder, you know, people who have bipolar disorder. Yes. You know, the definition of bipolar is that, you're, you know, you get to this extreme that you cannot control yourself.

And so it's hard for somebody who's not bipolar to understand that. They're just like, well, why don't you just do it? Like I do it every day. Like, if I get angry, you know, I breathe deeply and I count to 10 and I'm fine. Well, that's not true for somebody with bipolar. Yeah, yeah. And yet they do have some measure of control. And I think there's such a thing as being bipolar and just going, well, there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm just going to go down, you know. or going, I have responsibility to take care of myself. So when I feel this way, I'm going to call my doctor. For sure. Yeah, yeah. No, and it's almost like being, say, being an alcoholic, we might recognize, yes, there's a genetic propensity to go overboard and have the body crave alcohol once you've been exposed to it and all the behavioral cues.

And then you can quit. You can get help. You can choose to behave differently. You can stay out of bars. You know, I used to hang out in the bar every night. Now I don't go there anymore. That's behavioral. only within your control.

It's not like you're being scooped up and dropped there every night. Oh, no, I'm stuck. I can't leave. But an interesting thing that came, a little historical fact, and I love the ideology or etymology of words.

Oh, yeah. There's a Greek word, Krasis, and then there's the modification of it, a Krosis or Akrasia. And it means out of control. Sort of. But as if an apple cart rolling downhill, you know, the, something on wheels that's just being

affected by gravity and pulled in a direction and nothing's guiding it without guidance, out of control in that sense. And that's where we get the term crazy. Acrosia is without control. To be crazy means to be out of control. And then it's got these, you know, what is it, a connotative things of derogation. And, you know, it's like we call so, oh, you're crazy. And they said, no, I have a mental illness.

Right. Well, go back to the meeting of the word, you're kind of out of control. And that's kind of what it means to be crazy. Yeah. In that sense, with, see, and I'm the kind of guy who's like with my neutral language. Well, that's just what the word means. And I don't mean any insults by it. I call myself crazy sometimes.

Yeah. You know, but anyway, but then if someone goes, hey, that's insulting. I'm like, I'm sorry, that's not what I meant. Let me, I'll rephrase it. That's perfectly funny. Right, right. But I'll catch myself. doing that kind of thing as i love those those original meanings and i was going somewhere with

that too the idea of um choices okay so if we're yeah partly programmed and partly not it i i think the the so it's true that we have cause and effect relationships with things and that that's kind of what psychology's predicated on as we can trace things like childhood trauma afraid of the guy with the beard perfectly reasonable cause and effect no you know but how much is which is which. And I think because it appears that we have free will, we have to act as if that is true. I don't think we have a choice to say, out of my hands, it is what it is. You know, I just do what I do.

And I don't think that, I don't think that has any utility to throw our hands up. So we have to kind of pretend at the very least that free will exists. I mean, I think it does. But also that. Let's say we're programmed with different levels of things. So if we had the, let's say the conservative progressive. dichotomy, progressives who are higher in care, care and fairness in those two regards, we'll look at conservatives and say they don't care as much as they should about some things

because this, this feeling, and it seems to be this more of an inborn sense of what is most important in the world. And it can come out different ways and we can have a total convergence of ideas from different moral foundations. Someone might say, that is unfair. And then another person would say, well, that's disloyal. So we're both. both going to agree to the same behavior from different foundational perspectives in a sense. I don't think I'm explaining that very well. It's interesting to look at the world that way too. Well, then, okay, so you read off the five, I think.

And then he had to go back and add a sixth because there's people like me where liberty and authority is kind of the dichotty. Yeah. And people like me are very high on that. it's like authority respect purity sanctity yeah i don't know what the fifth sixth one is yeah i think it's it's liberty something so authority versus respect on that one yeah uh but then okay all of this actually this is where i was going we were talking about the ninth level hell for betrayers and and compared to loyalty so if someone has it's good to be loyal to people that are good

to you you know and that's in that reciprocity sense which also tells you touches on was it fairness reciprocity um so we there's often a convergence of these different foundations that interact with each other and modify the the end result because of that interaction we almost get a um what they call it a permutation effect of a grid of different things that modify each other um there's i can't say this is there's some people who swear by this like it's biblical like oh moral foundations that's that's everything it's all evolutionary and that solves the problem I'm like, it's a good theory. I think it's a very powerful and important theory,

but I wouldn't say it explains everything. I wouldn't treat it like gospel. Not yet. Yeah, yeah. We've got a ways to go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I looked it up. The sixth one is liberty,

oppression. There you go. Yeah. And I think he changed some of them a little bit. So we've got the Care Harm Foundation, fairness, cheating, loyalty, betrayal, authority, subversion. sanctity, degradation, liberty oppression. Yeah.

And that's interesting too because you've got people who are like, if you're innately, if your innate sense of the world is that fairness is really important. And mine is that liberty is really important. I'm willing to tolerate more unfairness than you are. You're willing to, hypothetically, and you would be willing to tolerate more oppression or less liberty for the sake of fairness. and that also seems to be a progressive conservative dichotomy as well. And some people say, say libertarians are a third rail in a way.

It's like they're not actually progressive or conservative. There's something else. They're liberty focused. Yeah. Which is kind of where I fall on the spectrum, in my opinion. Yeah. And then some people put it in that, the grid, the political compass type of thing. There's left and right libertarian.

One of them is hippies on the farm. The other one is Ancap Utopia, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I tend. Go ahead. I tend to be more like on the progressive side, but I do connect with libertarians because the connection of freedom of, you know, I think that a woman should be able to choose whether or not to have a baby. It's just such a basic need to have that choice.

You know, it's important for the baby as well as the mother, as well as the family, to be able to decide when and where you have your children and what happens to them. You know, like I don't want to give birth to a child and have it and give it away. I mean, if I'm going to give birth to a child, I'm going to keep it. You know, so for me, giving birth and then putting it up for adoption is not a choice. Not that there's anything wrong with that choice. Not for you. That's why I think you should be able to choose because for some people, that's the right choice.

It's just not for me. Yeah. I grew up, had friends that were adopted and would have maybe been aborted if that were not an option. Who knows? They might have never existed. Interesting. interesting conjunction of circumstances

there I was going somewhere with that almost lost it oh yeah freedom of freedom of choice type of thing there's also interesting philosophical stuff negative rights and positive rights and how they interact and there's a libertarian argument

for the right to abortion that comes from a what am I trying to say comes from the perspective of self ownership and right to bodily autonomy in that way. Right. And they call it, what is I was looking at this other day. And it's like there is a right of eviction is what they would call it.

Yeah, I want to say prior claim. Like you have a prior claim to your body because you were there first. I, you know, I mean, it's, it's a, it's, it's gets very sticky very quickly. It's like, well, okay. So this food is mine because I found it. no, that's not how it works. But I think when it comes to your body, it's like, that's the only thing that is truly yours. Yeah. And if we don't own our body. If we don't own our body in that way, can someone say, take an organ from us for the sake of someone else? Look, you have two kidneys.

You only need one. Now, me as a person or the government as an entity is going to forcibly remove part of your body to give away to someone else. And someone might say, who's high and say, care and fairness would be like they're going to die so this is justified and it doesn't matter if it violates this other stuff so i i tend to go so this is why i don't look at um that's where i was going with this too is this is why i don't look at moral foundations as gospel because there's other considerations we do have a rational mind and we can look at how to apply these things and a lot of it's based in principles like what are your foundational presuppositions your axioms that you base everything on one of mine is self-ownership that's what i i don't like to be told

what to do by other people. I don't like to have force used on me or I don't like to be lied to all those things. And I should not do that to other people because it is wrong because that violates their self-ownership and autonomy. Yeah. Long story short. There's a woman who wrote, I think she was a judge, Judith Jarvis Johnson or Thomas, sorry, who wrote an article in defense of abortion. And she basically uses that kind of argument that you're saying. It's like, like, well, okay, let's say there's this amazing, you know, pianist who's just brilliant, like irreplaceable, nobody can, can, and he needs a kidney.

And you've got one. Do you, should you be forced to share, should you be forced to be hooked up to him and give him your kidney? And she's saying, no, you can't. Even though his life is valuable and he will die without your kidney, you know, it's your kidney. you do not have to share it if you don't want to. It would be nice if you did, but you don't have to. And the same thing, it's like, well, it would be nice if you had that baby, but you may not have the capacity to have the baby.

You know, that's the other thing. Anyway, it gets very complicated. I wish more people were like you, though, because, you know, we probably have different politics, but I feel like we could talk for a long time about the places that we have in common. And through that, we would be a, able to construct laws that kind of please both of us. And ideally, that's what we do, but that is not what is happening in this country, unfortunately. Or at the very least,

displease both of us only to the same degree. It seems like a lot of what we do, a lot of what we do in America is just like, how upset are you by this solution? Okay, about 20% me too. Let's go with that. Either one of us is going to get what we want. Right. Well, what I say, the sign of a good negotiations, you're both unhappy with what you got. Right. Right. Yeah, that's part of it too. Okay, I can live with that. Well, speaking of time, though, or I don't know if we mentioned time at all. Like, we could talk a long time.

Probably not. Like, if I, we could. I think we could take it the next hour, just spitball. I don't want to cheat you on the dream experience, though. So do you want to get into that? Yes. Yeah. Shall I just tell it to you?

Yeah, that's how we do. I'm just going to make a little note of the time. 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 Dreamscape's episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks,

highlighting the psychological principles which inform our dream experience and much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms and through the contact page at benjamin the dream wizard.com, where you will also find the wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature, available on Amazon, featuring the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. And as per usual, step one is I shut up and listen.

Our friend's going to tell me your story. tell me the dream like a story and we're going to see what we can make of it. So I'm ready when you are. Okay. Yeah. So I've always had this recurring dream or nightmare and I don't know always, but it's like at least two decades where I have some gum in my mouth and I'm chewing it and I want to spit it out and I can't.

It's like stuck to my teeth. And so I'm usually in a public place. So I'm trying to kind of discreetly get it out of my mouth but it's stuck to my teeth and I keep pulling it out. And you know how gums stretches. So it stretches these long strings. And I'm pulling and pulling, pulling, and winding up the strings and wadding it up

and then trying to throw it away without somebody noticing. And a certain point, and it's endless. I cannot get to the bottom of it. Every time I think I've gotten it out, there's more. And sometimes it's worse than others in terms of, like, other people have seen that I'm wadding this stuff up and throwing it away. Sometimes that's not part of the anxiety. at all is just that I can't get to the bottom of it.

But, you know, and then it's very messy and it's all over my hands. And so the one that I had recently, though, was worse. And maybe it was worse because I had just had a tooth extract. It was my first tooth extraction. In this one, I'm pulling and pulling and pulling the gum out. And then it starts to pull my lining, the lining of my mouth. So as I'm pulling the white strand out, there's a little bit of pink to it, that I realize is my skin.

And then I'm like kind of horrified because what do I do? Like if I can't cut it because then I'll be cutting the inside of my mouth. But ultimately I decide to go ahead and cut it just to get that part out and then it starts to bleed. And then I'm like I have this gummy, bloody mess in my mouth. And in the dream, I'm trying to explain to my husband like it's just so upsetting. I can't get it out and now it's bleeding. And I was so upset that I started to talk in my sleep, which,

point he woke me up and I was just like hey God you know I'm like oh I'm usually usually when he wakes me up if I talk in my sleeve I'm like yeah yeah I was dreaming this one it was like it took me a moment I just like oh right that was a dream I'm so happy that was a dream oh yeah so that was the thing so I was wondering what you thought about it I have my own theories about why I keep having that but I'd be curious what you think or if you've heard this a version of this before Oh, yeah. I want to, I want to say a couple of things about that. There are a classification of typical dreams that this would seem like it would kind of fall under. It's very mouth focused. Usually it's teeth falling out or other things pulled from the mouth. Hair in the sense, gum. So this is actually a, you're going to get comfortable, buddy? He seems like you wanted to move. I don't know. This is actually a well-known genre of dreams, we might say. It's the falling dream, the flying dream. The flying. dream, the mouth focused teeth falling out type of dream, the naked and public dream, which this is a very similar thing.

You have elements of, I'm in public and there's this embarrassment of being seen, pulling things, stretchy gum, but also the focus on the experience itself, which is just distressing enough, let alone being, having being additionally embarrassed by it. So typically with, again, speaking of typical dreams, typical of, recurring dreams specifically is that you've captured the essence of an idea in this kind of crystallized form in your case gum and endless quantities of sticky strands that I can't fully remove from me and that is usually representative of some kind of a situation in your life some situation that comes back periodically um and you return to that iconic imagery to

say, okay, this is happening again. How do I deal with it this time? Or now that I've seen another instance of it, do I have enough data in my subconscious to properly understand what it is and what to do about it? And a lot of times, I've been amazed by this. I can't tell you how many people report this as true and I've personally experienced it with dreamers.

If we nailed down a good understanding and maybe even a likely way to address it, the dream itself might stop. completely or it changes form. Then again, there's some circumstances in life where you can't help but experience some of the same things over and over again. It's just that maybe the nature of it. You got to get up every morning and drink some water. I mean, you can't live without water.

So if something's related to that, it's the dream might come back when water is a problem in the future. And I'm dehydrated. Dehydrated. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I do want to know what you think, but not for.

first. Otherwise, I think that's cheating for me. That's like, oh, sure, tell me what your dream means. Aren't I great? I try not to do that, but we build a meaning together. And it's kind of fun to also to kind of, this, what I call kind of like stump the wizard stuff. How close can I get to what you think it means and how much can I add to that if it's, if I'm accurate? Yeah. So we'll try to do that first. I'm glad you had a recent experience of this because those are usually the best. And there are a little more, there's a little more to work with. Sometimes all we've got, you're moving again, you're moving again. There you go, buddy. Get comfy. Sometimes all we have is the pattern. And okay, well, let's analyze the pattern. But it's actually better. So my process

typically is, let's go through this. About how long ago would you say you had this particular dream where your husband had to wake you up? I want to say it was about a week ago. Okay. Oh, I also wanted to say, you know, when you jumped into my, my Discord server, the main channel, somniloquy, sleep talking. That's what you were talking in your sleep. You were somniloquized. Oh, yeah. And my wife's had that, the thing to have woke her up or she'll just speak words. It's very common thing.

And it falls under the general category of somnambulism, sleep walking. And people have done some crazy stuff. People have done acrobatics on rooftops in their sleep and no memory of it. And displaying skills that they would never. attempt in real life because of fear and whatnot. It was a guy, I think a guy shot a policeman and a horse while he was sleepwalking and only got off because he was able to produce 50 people he, he knew who came in and said, this guy sleepwalks all the time. He's out of control. He doesn't know what he's doing. We'll lock up the guns next time he goes to bed. And they're like, okay, fine. I think the policeman

of the horse lived. But yeah, who knows what he thought he was shooting, a highway robber, something like that. Right. Long story. I'm all over the place. this most recent instance, do you have a sense of being in a particular setting? Were you in a mall? Were you in a public park? Were you in your bathroom when this mouth experience was happening? I don't remember the specifics of where I was, but it was some kind of public setting, but I couldn't be more specific about what kind.

Were you, you know, sitting, standing? Standing, walking around. There were waste baskets because I was trying to dispose of it. But more like residential kind of waste baskets. So maybe, you know, that's a clue. Like not the public kind that you would find like a round, you know, receptacle on the floor kind of waste basket. Like a smaller, lower, like when you would find in your house?

Yes. Yeah, like when you would find in your house. Not necessarily your best. bathroom. But it wasn't the, yeah, large public. And I think I know what you mean, the kind you find like in the park near the corner and it's got like a big thing around the top of a hole and you try and get the trash in. Sometimes it's overflowing.

Right. Right. Interesting. But no other any visuals at all other than a waste baskets you're trying to toss this into or any. Yeah, I'm sorry. Usually I have lots of details. And this one I don't because I was so literally wrapped up.

up in the gum, you know. Yeah. Well, and that's, you know, you can ever do this wrong. That is also, we might say diagnostic. We're kind of ruling, ruling stuff out too. So there's a very, it seems to be independent of setting. And setting is maybe not going to be a clue for us. So I also look at, well, what's not there sometimes speaks to what, what we're dealing with as well. If it was like, I always have this dream and I'm in a mall in front of a, in front of a KB toy store, which I don't know if I haven't been in one of those since the 90s. exist anymore. I don't know. I don't know. Right. Maybe toys. Uh, you know, that would say something specifically maybe to me about, okay, this is a dream about my childhood. Because I haven't

seen that store since I was like 16 years old or something. So maybe that's relevant. But for this one, it's a little bit disconnect, but the idea of trash cans, so the waste bins of like, you know, there's a proper place to put this stuff. And you're also kind of cueing yourself that it's the idea of this is, it's not like you're saving a piece of gum and sticking it on your, you know, on your bedpost overnight, you know, that song, to say for later, it's very much garbage. You're trying to get like a sticky gummy. And I think the gumbiness of it is like it's something that's sticking to you that doesn't, that is not easy to remove in that sense.

I don't think it's about gum in that. But gum is the stand in for the concept. Yeah. And it's really getting in the way of my being able to communicate. Like there's some need for me to communicate something. I can't do it because I can't get this stuff out of my teeth. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask too. Now, that was your sense at that moment is like, I have something to say, but this,

this gum is in the way. So it must be removed for that reason. Yeah. Do you have any sense of what you were trying to communicate or just the act of communication itself? No. And I was trying to sort of think about, well, when, what, what had happened to me during the day, you know, I just came out of a very busy month.

where I was launching a novel. I had been on several podcasts, and I was performing. I got back together with these two women that I do storytelling with, and we did some performing. And then I also had to do a memorial for my mother who died a year ago, who was 99s. Oh, you know, we got to see her out in a good way, so it was, it was a good event.

but you know getting back together with my family and then right after I kind of finished all that stuff then I had a tooth extracted so and I took the day off so it was like two days later that I had this dream and so I feel like it could be related to sort of any one of those things to family to the writing to getting back together with this these two storytellers performing I don't know Yeah, no, this is all good. And actually, this would be something I would ask anyways. Okay, what was going on in your life at the time? And usually dreams are not random. They're connected to something we've experienced. Even if it's not the experience we've had, but the experience goes meta and we're like,

okay, this is a type of experience I've had before. Now the concept triggered by the experience, now that's what we focus on in the dream is that sometimes that higher level. And sometimes it's very directly related to a specific physical experience. But these are all the moving pieces that I, I'll have going, oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Let's put it over there. We'll throw it all in the goulash and see what we come up with. Yeah.

I think you struck on a very important word, communication. I mean, it's very typical expression in a sense. Humans, most of us were very verbal. We communicate nonverbally more than we know, but our conscious understanding of communication is usually, I speak my mind. I share my ideas in this form. And writing, too, but less. So we think of communication is speaking to another person most of the time.

I don't know if that's changing, actually, with today's, with the Internet ever since then. And kids now that are being raised on the Internet in a sense of more text-based communication, I wonder if that'll shift how people's dreams present in the future. I'll have to start paying attention. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Different generations have a different experience of what it means, what certain concepts mean. So speaking of memes in general.

Okay, so where were we going with that? You gave it, go ahead. Well, there was one other thought that I had. So this is sort of, I don't know if you want to hear, you know, another possible connection. So often my dreams, so not often, but sometimes my dreams are really telling me something about what something was something that's going on in my body. Like it's a signal. Like, you know, before I had, I don't know, pure guy. So you might be uncomfortable with this.

But before I had my first menace, I had a dream that I was giving birth to babies. And then I woke up and there was the telltale sign. So it was like my body knew what was going on and it visualized it. And I woke up and I was like, oh, that's what it is. There's actually a very famous case of this. There was a guy who had a very intense dream of being a, say, like a coach driver. And he's with a whip. He's driving these.

sweating, panting, struggling horses up a hill. He shares this with his, with his physician, and he gets checked out for heart problems. And he does. He has a heart problem. His heart was struggling to pump blood around his body. And it was, it came out in the dream. Very common. This goes back 2,000 years to Galen of Pergamon, I think, in the, in the Greek or Roman era.

And he would use dreams diagnostically to find out people's problems and then prescribe based on that. So we've, we've almost in. some ways too far separated like the medical and the metaphysical. Like I think we need to bring that back together in some ways to get that holistic thing, but that's a tangent, all on its own. Yeah. And then before I gave birth to my daughter, I had this dream that I was kind of frolicing in a den, in a wolf den with these pups.

And all of a sudden the mother came home. And I was lying there with the pups going, oh, no, you know, is she going to, she going to accept me as one of the pups, or is she going to tear me apart? Yeah. And I really think that was clearly a dream about, okay, is, am I going to be at one with this process or am I going to be ripped in half, you know? Yeah, yeah. Very interesting.

So I wondered, you know, I don't know if I'm a typical alcoholic, but I definitely developed, like many people, sort of was a very moderate drinker and drank, you know, every day for like 25 years, but it was bothering me because it was kind of, you know, it was like a glass of wine a day, was becoming two glasses of wine a day, it was coming three glasses. All of a sudden I was like, where did that bottle go? And it really bothered me. You know, I was really like, this is not good. This is, you really need to.

And so it took me a long time to kind of quit. And so I did quit for like seven years. And then I started going, well, I can drink again, you know, and not, I'm not like an obsessive drinker. and I can do this and not go into it. And then that's been a little like, you know, not, I would say over COVID, you know, I really got back into drinking and then had to quit again. So at the end of this performance, I had some alcohol. So I wondered if a dream was about the alcohol.

Like it was saying, you know, like, because doesn't alcohol cause plaque in your arteries? Like maybe this is a dream about plaque. that, you know, my body is going, ugh, you've got this stuff stuck in you, like, and I can't get it out. Yeah. I mean, that's a, that's a metaphorical understanding that could very well apply. I mean, if that feels true, we could even just say, it is. And it might be partially true, but it also might be more things. I tend to, what do I try to do?

I try not to tell people what it is. I try to give suggestions, but I also have my own intuitions about these suggestions. And I like to share them, like what I think is, what I think, feels right to me, which is terrible to say to someone is like, you don't know. Let me tell you what I feel. No, no. I wouldn't be here. No, no, I'm really interested in another take on this.

For sure. Yeah. It's a puzzle. And so going through the dream, like it's sequentially, we had the very first opening scene is you realizing your mouth is going. Like, how did it actually start? Yeah. Or you enter the dream mid.

extraction in a way. Yeah, I think I already had the gum in my mouth. Like, it wasn't like I put it in my mouth. And whether it was an actual wad of gum is unclear to me. I don't think that it's, I don't think it's a case of like where I picked up gum and started chewing it and then couldn't get it out. It's just like, there's gum stuck in my teeth. And I'm like, hold up, let me see if I can get this out.

I don't know what it is exactly. And it originally, it wasn't, it wasn't a giant wad filling your whole mouth. It was more like little bits in your teeth and then it just was endless. Sometimes it's a wad. Sometimes it's a sizable wad and I'm able to get out the bulk of it, but I can't get out all of it. You know, so I'm like, I got it. You know, this is it. This is like got rid of it.

I got all of it out. And then there's more. And then I start pulling. And then it's like, oh, shit, there's more. Yeah. There's still more, you know. So, and then sometimes it just goes on and on and on where I keep. It's like there's another wad and I throw it away and there's another wad and I throw that away.

And then there's more, you know, it's just so frustrating. So interesting idea of an endless quantity originating from within you in a certain way, but also a failure of process. Like if only I could complete this properly, it would it would resolve the problem. And then being, I think you mentioned. being horrified. And it was, it was not an embarrassment horrified or partly was, but mostly something else. At the point at which I realize that now I'm not just pulling out the gum, but now I'm pulling out the lining of my mouth. That's where the horror comes in. Because now, how am I going to get this thing out? The only way I can do it is by, you know,

really hurting myself. Yeah. And this is a new feature. The new twist. We have not had that before. Yeah. And the feeling, having the mouth fill up with blood was also kind of horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Because now the blood is also in my mouth and now I can't get the blood out either because

it's mixed in with the gum. And so it was like, oh. So the gum is still there and the damage. Yeah. And it's all stuck. I think that's where I was going with the idea of that failure of process type of thing is because that's showing, like trying to fix it made it worse in a way. Yeah.

Yes. But you're in this position where you're like, I can't not do something about this. Like it's not something I can just, okay, I'm just going to live with my mouth gummed up and what, shut permanently? That's not happening. I don't think any of us would like that physically, but also we don't like that idea expressively. And that's where I think I'm going with this is leaning into that. And it can always be something else. If you literally, if you have a dream about a toothache and you have a cavity, that makes perfect sense.

We don't need to go any further. That seems a one. one to one correlation, but when it's some of this other stuff, especially, you know, expeling something from the mouth that is, and gum, especially, and it doesn't have to be, you know, hubba, it can be just a gummy substance. It's, it's more about what the thing is. It's an impairment, an impediment. It's, it's something that you don't want there and you wish was gone because it doesn't, it,

limits restricts function in a way. You know, like this can't stay. This is not optional. I'm not just going to live with this. And I think it does, it feels to me like it relates more to the expressive side of thing. It's like you've got desire to speak and to speak well.

And you've got this. So you've got interacting with family, social. You've got writing, expressing yourself. You've got performing. It's another layer of communication. And just in general, the idea of storytelling is, so for you,

the expression or communication is kind of central to your identity in a way. I mean, it's like to the level of this is part of who you are. So you may be, where am I going with that? You may be exploring the idea of, am I doing this well? Is something holding me back?

Am I being blocked by some impairment to my verbal ability writ large? Or, was like, how important is this? Like sometimes we look at things going, okay, imagine I couldn't walk anymore. And in our dream, we show ourselves in a wheelchair. It's like, what would my life be like if I lost this capacity? And I don't know that this is quite that kind of exploration. I lean more towards the idea of, of the impairment. Where am I going with that? The idea that maybe you wish you could do, what you do better than you do currently or that you feel something might be holding you back or when you feel like something's holding you back where you don't have the ability or or opportunity to express yourself as fully as you'd like um you you return to this this uh kind of iconic representation of it's as if i've got something inside of me this expression i want to get out And it's, it's tough too, because the gum is, it's something you don't want there.

So it's hard to say the gum is the ideas you're trying to express because you're, because actually what, what it is. But then again, it might be because sometimes we have so many things to say and we want to say them all. And we just can't get all of it out of our mouth. If that makes sense. So the idea that the gum is endless, like you probably have endless ideas and endless stories in you and endless things to say.

say so there's the possibility of going in that direction of like the gum is actually the things you want to express but you can't get them all out but then wait then again you're trying to throw it away so there's a completely different layer that seems to modify that of like well this is something that you think is in you that you don't want there that you wish you could get rid of so it may have have to do with what am i trying to say um verbal tics is sometimes a way like people who say it like or um all the time they're like god i wish i could just stop saying that you know like, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, okay, I want to stop there. Just let you kind of react to some of those ideas. I threw a lot at you. And I'm not sure which direction to go with some of it. Yeah, I mean, as you were talking, a couple of thoughts occurred to me. One was, isn't there expression about things getting caught in your teeth? Isn't there a, there's a stuck in your car? you suck in your craw or, you know, you win by the skin of your teeth or you lost by the skin of your teeth or, yeah. So I was wondering about like, because sometimes my dreams do that too, like they'll take a pun. I have a brain that sort of naturally punning. That's very common. So dreams love puns. Yeah, maybe it's some kind of pun. And then I also thought it's interesting that I keep coming on gum because of course our teeth are embedded in gums. Yeah. Oh, I didn't see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

why, you know, I'm trying to get rid of this gum that doesn't belong. And some part of me is going, yeah, but actually it is part of you. You know. It is stuck to you to the point that it's, you're pulling out pieces of yourself. Like I'm going to damage myself. And that reminds me of a dream, a series of recurring dreams that I had when I was when I was just entering adolescence. And it was about these men who were identical, except one was good and one was bad.

and they were fighting to the death. And I thought I wanted the good one to win, but as they were fighting and as the good one was killing the bad one, I realized that I was in love with the bad one. And I later came to understand that that had to do with a kind of a, you know, I was a very moral kid, and I wanted to be good, I wanted to be perfect. And some part of me was saying,

do not try to kill your bad self, because that's you. You know, like, don't let this perfect version of you kill the real version of you because the real version. You love that version. So suddenly, like, when we're, as we're talking, I'm like, oh, is this a new version of that dream where I'm trying to kill, I'm trying to get rid of some part of me that by doing, you know, you keep like this.

Yeah. Definitely. I would say it's absolutely. I would say it's absolutely related. If we're talking about something and the more we look at it from different angles, it's almost like if you visualize like a neon light goes, Zing, here's what it's connected to. And it shows you that other thing going,

it's like how do we get these associations in our mind? I think it's because it is connected. If it inspired that, it's definitely related on some level, even if it's just a similar category of type of thing. Right. No, but I would say because it is, your understanding of what you've been showing yourself this whole time has definitely changed.

We know that from the dream experience itself, you get to the point where the, you finally understand the gum is actually generated by you in a way that, that is attached to your flesh and inseparable from you. And if I keep trying to pull it out, I'm going to injure myself. Yeah, yeah. Or that the process you've recently attempted to use is. causing more harm than good or is going to get yourself hurt in a right yeah yeah yeah yes it's failure of process that resonated that resonates a little bit better yeah yeah yeah and there may be um

what i don't want to say is that you're showing yourself see look you're how wrong you are like the gum may need to come out it may actually represent something that you don't want in you that's an impediment like i'm kind of leaning in that direction that it's but it is something that is also coming from within you You know, it's not, you weren't, you didn't get stuck on a giant piece of fly paper on the floor. And now you can't get off of it. That's an external type of threat. This is, there's something in you, in your communication process. Yeah.

Yeah. That reminds, I thought that came to my mind a little bit ago was the idea of a mush mouth. And, you know, it's a funny way we talk about, but people don't talk very clearly and they're, you know, mumble. And they're just not, they're, they're, they may be brilliant, but they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're. They're not speaking clearly, not enunciating, but not getting their point across. So there's some people who have described in their dreams, teeth falling out as they're trying to talk and it's making their words garbled. And I like that's definitely communication related. It's like, okay, so what's your communication difficulties?

But as I was saying to have this come up with, after your experience with family, you know, promoting a, especially promoting a book like podcast style, like I'm on the spot to speak well. even if we let ourselves off the hook a little bit. You know, I'm just going to ram me. That's the way it is. I'm putting this whole video up unedited. I don't care how stupid I look. This is all, I think people like long form,

real, real conversations, even if you're goofy, I think honestly, but also I'm lazy. I'm not going to edit it. Screw it. So there is that aspect of it.

And I always wish I speak. Well, if I go back and listen to these things, I have new ideas. Like, why didn't I share that? Why didn't I think of that at the time? You can't think of everything.

I do my best. And hopefully next time I will remember that kind of thing. So I think we've kind of come down to the resonating the idea of that there's some problem maybe with communication that you're trying to address that seems to come back regularly or at least anytime you feel like you failed to communicate well, maybe this I got the gum in my teeth again. And whether you actually failed or not, doesn't matter perceptually.

This is, I feel like I should have performed better. And then trying to conceive of. a way to resolve the problem or doubling down on it or punishing yourself too much for perceived failures, you get to this point of like, hey, don't, don't hurt yourself because now it's going to make it worse. Now you got gum and blood in your mouth. Like if you double down on the wrong solution, it's going to make everything worse. And then what is that wrong solution? I don't know if you had an experience in that period of time where something went wrong with stage performance.

There was some conflict with family drama. Stakes were made, as they say. Oh, got you, gotcha. Yeah, there were some. I mean, the performances were overall good, but they definitely, like, I got some lines wrong in one show. Well, that would torment me. It would. Yeah.

Oh, that embarrassment. I couldn't live it down in my head. Yeah. And, yeah, I think consciously I'm comfortable with that. Like, I'm okay with a few mistakes. But our emotions don't care about our rational thoughts, do they? Right. Right. This is true. This is so true.

That's a funny thing. Like there's the facts don't care about your feelings. Well, feelings don't care about your facts. Honestly. It's very true. I know. So many problems would be solved it. They did. Right. You know, if you could just say that alcohol is bad for me, okay, I'll stop. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Man, I wish I'd enjoy that. I feel you. Yeah. But yeah. So I felt like I was just something that was hovering on the edge of my mind as you were talking to, failure of process. I was going to say that a recurring dream that I had also sort of younger that I solved by coming up with another dream that solved it and it resolved it. So in it was

in this one, my mother keeps driving by and we had this van that we did a lot of camping in and there were many kids. There were five kids. And I was number four. So I felt overlooked a lot. And so in the dream, she's driving down the road and I'm on the sidewalk and I'm like, Mom, you know, hey, it's me. Literally left behind and left out. And she keeps, yeah. And I was literally left behind at a gas station. Oh, geez.

When I was four. And it was pretty upsetting. Oh, yeah. And, um, okay, 12 kids, maybe. Five? No. You could, you can count five. You got five fingers.

Yeah. So over and over and over, I'd have this dream. And finally I had a dream where this big mouse came up. He was like a, not a Mickey Mouse, but a, you know, a mouse that was like three feet tall. And he came up on this little speed car. And my brother and I used to watch Speed Racer. So he comes up on this little speedy card. And he's like, is that your mom?

And I was like, yeah. And he says, hop on. And he rides me up to the car and I'm able to get in. And I never had that dream again. Wow. So I tried in this one, when I woke up and I was so upset, I tried. I thought, okay, obviously we can't get rid of it that way. So I sort of imagine that this goddess comes down with a wand and that the gum sort of turns into mercury and it all just goes into her wand and she pulls it out and goes away.

And I don't know if that will solve my problem. I'll have to, you have to talk to me in 10 years, see if I have the dream again. Right? Because they can go away for a long time and then come back years later. Yeah. One feature of the dream was at the very end of it, you turned, you went looking for your husband? It says what I wrote down was. I'm trying to explain it to my husband.

How did that transition happen? And, okay, a lot of things I don't see that maybe might be relevant. Did your environment change when you went to cut the gum out? And what was the tool you were using to try to cut the gum out? Was it a kitchen knife? Was it a pair of scissors? I think it was scissors. Scissors.

I think it was scissors. And, no, I don't recall the environment changing. But I was having trouble convincing him that this was really a bad thing. You know, like he was kind of like, ah, you know, don't worry about it. And I was like, no. After you had cut yourself as a part of the process. And my mouth is full of blood. And I'm like, you know, I'm trying really so hard to explain to him.

Like I'm trying to put it into words. This is why this is so upsetting that that's why I began to speak in my sleep. And that happens to me a lot too, where. where if I try really hard to say something or to express something, I often will wake myself up with the effort of speaking. Yeah. There's an it just a small tangent. And I'm certainly going to come back to this.

There's an experience called a hypnagogic jerk, which I think most of us have experienced as soon as I describe what it is. Like a lot of people don't know the word, but you're laying in bed, you're comfy, you're falling asleep. And all of a sudden you feel like you're falling. And you jerk yourself. And, like, that, you know, it's a jerk as in a physical motion. And hypnagogic means as you're falling asleep.

So hypnosis, so go-gose to move towards, moving towards sleep, or leading towards. Long story short, I love, I love etymology. Yeah, yeah, me too. But that's a great phenomenon. And that is, I think that's very similar to what happens as sometimes as people are coming out. We have hypnagogic hallucination sometimes. A great way to explain that is like, you're laying in bed, everything is peaceful and quiet, you're calm, you're comfy, and you hear your name being called from the other room.

Like, that freaks me the hell out. And it's just some environmental stimuli and it's close enough to the pitch of a human voice. And it could just be the, it's cold outside and the house is settling in the cold. The woods contracting. and we're primed. The most common word we hear for years and years is our name. You know, that's a,

no one says other words to us more sometimes as we're younger. Right. And the thing we love to hear the most sometimes. So anyway, there's that illusion of, there's no ghost in your house. Well, I don't know what you believe.

Maybe you think there is, but that's typically. But what's it called? What's that called? Hypnogic hallucination. Hallucination. I know somebody who had exactly that. So I'll have to tell her.

She will be disappointed. Oh, well, yeah. like the idea of it being a ghost. Well, you never know. I'm not going to rule it out. I cannot tell you it was or was not, but I can say that we do have a psychological explanation for it that doesn't rely on the supernatural. Even though I think that's, here's my thing.

This is way off, but it's fun too. I am happy never knowing whether ghosts, vampires, and werewolves, aliens exist because I would need to meet one face to face personally to believe it. And I hope that never happens. I'm perfectly funny. It's okay if I never know. Yeah. So have you gone looking for your husband in a previous dream to solve your situation?

Or is this the first time that happened as far as you know? Hmm. I think I've gone to him before. Okay. I can't think of any specific incidences. Sure, but it feels familiar. That's fine. Yeah.

You don't have to have a proof that it happened. Yeah. Okay. Because that would have been, it would have made sense if it had a, never happened before, but it doesn't mean that it's not relevant. Because of course, you've kicked it up a notch. Now I'm bleeding. Now, I just can't, not only can I not get the gum out.

Now I've got physical damage and the problem is escalated in that sense. But I would imagine that in, it's not surprising to say, turn to him as like, I've got a real problem. I'm going to go to the person closest to me that I can rely on the most, who's my strongest advocate and best, you know, my life partner. there's there's no surprise that that's someone you would you would turn to and sometimes it could be a best friend or it could be your mom it doesn't matter who you're closest to but that would be the person you would go to first say the first person you know you need help what do go to my husband done the first thing pops into your head um so for this one and what you're

doing is you do you as you're trying to express it to him do you have blood or gum coming out of your mouth or you're trying to talk while you're holding it in. I'm holding it in. Yeah. Okay. That would be a very different experience to have it be easily visible. Like you wouldn't need to explain it so hard if you were just, you had blood dripping from your mouth and this long stringy gum and you're like, this is a problem.

Please, you know, help me. Right. But you've actually hidden it from him visually in your dreams. Yeah. He actually can't see. you have to communicate, you have to tell him verbally, because he can't actually see it for himself. And so he's actually responding to you like it isn't as big a problem as you think it is. Is this kind of where it's coming from?

This is, yes. Go ahead. Well, yeah, it strikes me too that, yeah, certainly I've always had this insecurity around my writing. So maybe this is about like I have this. insecurity. I'm trying to pull the insecurity out. He doesn't understand why I have the insecurity, why I can't just get rid of it either, or he doesn't see the problem, why it's such a big problem, you know, but that's partly because I'm holding it in. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm not fully allowing my problem to be seen in a way.

Right. Yeah, and that would be a different experience of like, well, you swallowed and it was at that moment that it just happened to be going down your throat rather than visibly. And you're like, wait, this is a problem. And you can't see it. But it's more like that that feeling of holding it in. It's very, and this is where things sometimes get too personal or whatever. If I ask questions, you don't want to answer or we can always cut stuff out. Yeah.

Of course. But it depends on your relationship with your husband. Sometimes, even the people that love us the most and God, they're there for us 110%. But we have different perceptions. of reality in some ways. Like, I don't see what you see. And that's okay. We're different people.

And it's not meant to be invalidating of your perspective. It's more like if you ask my honest opinion, no, I don't see it. I mean, I don't know what you want from me. Yeah. In that regard. So it's, it's, uh, so you might feel a certain way. And he might say, I believe you feel that way. I don't see you experiencing that problem.

I don't, I don't perceive you the way you perceive yourself. And that's just an honest expression. And I don't know if that resonates with anything or if that's too personal or like I don't want to dig up. Yeah, no, I think that's true of our lives. You know, like he, you know, he thinks that I'm very talented and very smart and that I, what I do is good. And he thinks I'm too hard on myself. And you're like, don't you understand? That's my process.

That's why I'm able to succeed. I feel that 100%. I have very high standards for myself and I never meet them. And I've had to learn to be okay. I've learned to be okay with that. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's really what it's about is that, you know, the doubt that I have about

communication is necessary because it's what propels me to keep trying, you know. Yeah. It's an interesting situation with that. It's like, imagine we were constantly satisfied about everything all the time. What would you do? What would anyone ever do? Like, I don't need anything. I'm fine.

I don't even get out of this chair. In fact, I might as well just take a nap. And then our lives. So it's almost like the gap between what we want and what we have is what makes us move towards what we want. And then what do we do when we get it? We set a new goal. We go chasing after that one.

There's a dual. Again, back to the yin yang thing. There's this idea of we don't actually want the result. We want to chase the result. But if we never catch it, then we lose motivation to chase. So we have to set. Yeah. So we have to set these reasonable goals that let us succeed.

And we go, hey, I did it. Next goal. That's like almost on the heels of it immediately is next goal. If we don't collapse from exhaustion, we start planning the next mission in some ways. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, okay. So back to you.

Sorry, I can ramble all over the place. You've definitely kind of keyed it on certain things that resonate. And I, I explain it like a like a zing that almost goes. those, you know, third eye to heart or gut chakra or whatever. You kind of get a visceral response to the, that makes sense. I feel that. So we've got some kind of a process of trying to deal with your perception of yourself, having difficulty communicating, you held back by something that's innate to you,

perhaps coming from inside you. And that some thought you had or method you may have actually tried in real life to move yourself past that difficulty. You're like, that's more, that's doing more harm than good. Maybe that's not the way to go. But then you're also bringing your husband and go, okay, now, I don't know what to do. I've made this worse somehow. And you're having trouble getting him to see you the way you're experiencing yourself, which is really hard to do with anybody. And it also fits with the default of like, he thinks you're just wonderful and maybe even, you know, pedestal, rose-colored glasses, worships the ground, you walk on. And as much as you love, they're like,

I'm not as perfect as he thinks I am, but I don't want him to stop seeing me that way. You know, okay, now he wants to go potty. And that's tough with our partners, too, of like, I'm actually struggling with something. Maybe you're telling yourself, he actually can't fix this. You know, I'm bringing it to him. It's just something he can't see. It's something I have to deal with myself. I don't know if that makes sense.

Yeah, nobody can fix this than me. But you're trying so hard to communicate to me, wake yourself up. And then he actually does, in a way, in a very physical way, he solves the problem for you. He gets you out of the dream. He wakes you up. That's a wonderful. So in reality, you did reach out to him unconsciously, and you got him to do that. Wake me up.

Get me out of this. Speaking of this. I think this guy needs to go potty real quick. I'm just going to let him outside. I'm going to come back. Two seconds. All right. All right.

Yeah, yeah. I almost never do this on stream, but we're doing it. Get out of here. Okay. Get out of here. Yeah. Oops. He's saying either that.

What happened to myself? Either that or I'm going to. poop on the carpet is what he was saying. Give me, you let me out of here. You know what's going to happen. He's persistent. He's a,

well, he was letting me know. He was communicating his needs. Isn't that great? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I,

you lost, you lost yourself. I know, we got to get you out of here. Yeah, I can't see myself anymore. I don't know what happened. I clicked on something,

but I can still see you. So, um, you've got to click back on the, uh, room name, the green room channel on the left. And that'll be, bring it up, bring it back up full screen. And then you got it.

Oh, got it. Turn to camera on again. We lost you. Oh, okay. There we are. There we are. Maybe I'll cut this. No, I probably won't. This is, I think we'll find this stuff fascinating. Wait, what happened? Something unusual. But, yes, we got to let you go. We could probably keep talking about this for a long time. Okay. Yeah. This has been helpful. I hope so. Yeah. That's always my plan is to try and give someone a clearer, clarify, bring the picture into focus or give. or give them something useful they can do with the experience.

Yeah. Yeah, but that's good enough. So, okay, let's, we'll do the, we'll do the wrapping up. You feel satisfied though. You don't have additional questions. No, I'm good. I'm good. I've got stuff to think about here.

Even if you did, you got to go. So that's, that's okay there. Well, then by way of parting, I will say, once again, this has been our friend Lollie Davidson from upstate New York around the Saratoga Springs area. You can find her at LolleyDavidson.com. That's L-A-L-L-E. Um, she's an author, teacher, storyteller. And, uh, for my part, would you kindly like share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers, viewers for the game streams.

Uh, 16 currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent dreams in their meanings by Horace G. Hutchinson, all this and more at Benjamin the dreamwizard.com. Including mbby three downloadable versions of this podcast. Uh, and head on over to Benjamin the dream wizard. Dot locals.com trying to build a community there. That's all the shilling for me. That's enough. Lali, thank you for being here. Always nice to meet a fellow Davidson. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good deal. And everybody out there, thanks for listening.

All right, bye-bye.