Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 164: Crisis & Competence

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Jane-Marie Auret ~ https://janemarieauret.com/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Jane Marie Array from in the Lansing, Michigan area. I can't read my notes. I can't pick this up. She is a psychological writer. Her book, Screens and The Ego, a meditation on Gen Z is available wherever books are sold, but also at jane Marieure.com. And that will be spelled out in the description below.

Her book has been well received by New York Times bestselling authors. So that's some high praise from people who know what they're doing. For my part, would you kindly like share or subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. If you have a dream, I want to talk to you. You don't have to be an author with a book to sell. That's perfectly fine. Very happy to talk to my internet friends. For my part, I also have books for sale.

17 currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent, the fabric of dreams by Catherine Taylor Craig, lovingly reproduced, recreated, and enhanced by yours truly, if I do say so myself. All this and more, of course, at Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com, including downloadable MP3 versions of these very dream interpretation interviews. If you would also head on over to Benjamin the Dreamwizard.locals.com. That's where I'm trying to build a community. That's where I would love to receive sustaining donations or receive communications from the members there about their own dreams and being a guest on the show. What else do I usually say? Oh, it's free to join attached to my Rumble account.

enough about me. Jay Marie, thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. I also appreciate your time. It will be fun. Wonderful. It is too. So let's let's jump right into it and talk about your book. What is it about? How did you decided me to be written? All that, all that good stuff. So it's a series of short stories, some of which are true and some of which are fictional that take you through the ways that I have grounded myself mentally. Basically, I received really bad therapy and I was really disassociated from my own understanding of who I am and I didn't have a good understanding of like what I should do with my life or what the what any like human purpose really is at all. And I, I don't know. I just

I didn't have a genuine feeling of self-respect. And for a long time, I thought that I was going to, so the first thing that I was really good at, like as an adult, was interpreting literature and learning to read books in foreign languages, right? So when I was at Emory, I studied Arabic of literature, Arabic language and comparative literature, but basically I read a bunch of books that were in a really different cultural context, right? And the main way that you interpret literature is you connect yourself emotionally to the character and then try to find some sort of critical growth

that the character has gone through that you can relate to your own life and thereby expand your human experience, right? So that's kind of the value of reading literature. And as you get farther and farther away from your own experiences and read literature that's like, you know, Viking era literature, whatever it is. As you diverge farther and farther from your own personal experiences, you have to challenge yourself about how you're going to emotionally connect with the character

that you're reading about. And that's the reason that I like Complet as opposed to just English, and I was really good at it for a really long time. And I thought that I was going to get a PhD in the stuff, But unfortunately, I was not capable of making relationships with my professors that, like, got me good letters of recommendations. And I had so many dysfunctional relationships in college, and I didn't understand, like, because, like, at a certain point, if you have a certain number of dysfunctional relationships, you're the asshole, not the other people, right? But I, right? And I was aware of that, right? Like, I'm not above criticizing myself, especially not by the time I was 22. maybe I didn't criticize myself when I was 19. By the time I was 22, I was like, okay,

like the propensity for relationships to fail is greater than what you should, like you, I need to start taking responsibility for it. But the thing is, is that I analyzed all my relationships and ruminated on them over and over again, and I could not find any common behaviors or things that cause these relationships to go awry, right? And so I graduated in 2020,

and I didn't have anyone who really was going to propel me into the type of program that I wanted. So I ended up pulling out my PhD apps when I was 22, and I was like, okay, well, what am I going to do with my life now? Like, first of all, I got a completely useless degree, completely useless degree. I have no idea what I'm going to do. I have no idea what I'm good at, and I really need to start figuring things out. So I, one, got a job at the Amazon warehouse because I needed money. And then I enrolled in a Masters of Finance program, which was a terrible idea because I am bad at finance and I don't care about it. But I did get the degree.

And then three, when I decided that I didn't like either of those, I started working at a home for teenage female wards of the state whose behavior was too extreme for foster care placement. And I'm not sure. You said that you were a psychologist. You were practicing psychologist for a little while. Working in the, broadly working in the psychiatric industry. So I am not a licensed clinical counselor. I don't have a master's degree. I've got my bachelor's.

But I did a stint at, in adolescent psych as well. And burnout is extreme in those. You know, I made it, the average is six, seven months. And I made it two years before I was like, I got to pull the rip cord. It's extremely difficult. no first hand. Yeah, I do. And I figured that you also had that. Yeah, it, it sucks. It's terrible. I did go in thinking that I, you know, I didn't expect to, like, immediately, like, have, like, a messianic impact, but I thought that, like, maybe I would be able to have, like, some,

some good stories from it. But really, um, the, the level of psychiatric trauma that we were dealing with, like, if you, so something happened to a child, which caused them to be taken away from their parents. And then they were put in a foster care home and then the foster care family said this child's behavior is endangering the other kids in the home or is so far beyond what I can do that they need

extra support and then they go into this home and they have like zero power over their lives and zero understanding of who they are. And it's just like a bunch of females it was really bad. It was really, really bad. Like I broke up multiple fist bites.

But but but but but the point of me saying this is that I was bouncing between really extreme jobs and then I had this job at the youth home and the girls who were in the youth home had access to therapy, what we considered therapy, like every single day. Every single day we were doing activities with them like write 10 things that you like about yourself that aren't related to your appearance or whatever it is. Like, we would do these activities all the time. They brought in licensed therapists all the time.

And I saw zero improvement in terms of general sense of self-respect and behavior the entire time I was there, none. And at a certain point, I was like, okay, well, clearly these methods are ineffective, right? Like, I get, like, on the one hand, you can't really improve your own internal life unless you want to, right? So there has to be some participation from the patients. But on the other hand, like the levels of recidivism versus rehabilitation are so piss poor that I don't know why we're doing this at all. And then at the same time, I was having really bad experiences with my own therapist. And then I stopped going to therapy, right? So the reason that I wrote my book, Screens and the Ego, a meditation on Gen Z, is because,

I had to process my own feelings. And the basic way that I did that is, there's an entire methodology to this book. And it sounds, it really should be experienced as a piece of artwork before I tell you the philosophy behind it. Sure. But the basic thing is that I had a real problem with flashbacks. That was a real issue for me. So the way that I dealt with flashbacks is I held the image of the flashback in my head

until I could separate the emotions from the image, and then I turned the image into a black and white image until I could fold it up like a piece of paper and throw it away. And just learning how to stare at my own memories was one of the ways that I've been able to feel empowered over everything that's ever happened in my life that's bad or good or anything that someone did to hurt me or anything I did to hurt someone else. And then it kind of talks about like, hey, you know, like, why is it that human beings have been experiencing terrible crap for like, you know, since the dawn of humanity, but the psychological crisis is happening right now?

And, you know, how much of this is manufactured by people obsessing over their emotions? you know, before human beings had Freudian psychoanalysis and vocabulary to talk about, talk about their own internal lives, they were using the word soul, right? And they were discussing their internal lives in a religious context, right? And what have we lost by stripping the idea of emotions from the original conception of the soul and the way that people have been talking about that for however many thousands of years? Yeah, I actually wrote that now too as like a kind of a talk to point to come back to but so it's a great place to to start i mean um before the invention of

psychology what we had was uh cultural other cultural methods you know sometimes it would be uh speaking to the village elders you would take your problems to them and they were the older wiser people and they would know and they would try to help you sort through things kind of their their role um but also broadly speaking this was a question for spirituality or religion you know what is my purpose for being here. What is what is how do I do the right thing assuming I care? What is the proper way to navigate certain struggles and difficulties successfully? So yeah.

So we, uh, it's psychology has often been, um, described as, as, uh, secular confession, uh, you know, like the, the, the history of, you know, going to a priest and confessing your sins. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Or what? Secular what? Oh, secular confession, uh, like, like, like you go to a priest and confess your sins. And it's like, here's all the ways I fail.

I think I failed according to the rules of the doctrine. And they would assign, you know, they would receive that listen. They would do the listening part of engaging in a therapeutic relationship. And therapeutic relationship can happen outside of a clinical counseling setting. We have therapeutic relationships with everybody all the time and non-therapeutic and traumatic relationships too. But, you know, so you don't have to be formally trained to be a good person. and to listen to someone and help them talk through their problems. It just formalizes that process and tries to scientifically say, well, this method's better

than that method, different schools of thought, long story short, you know, you'd go to a priest back in the day and you'd say, here's all the way is I think I am screwing up my own life. And the priest would say, yeah, it's a problem. Do you want to do something about it? And then you talk about how to make it better. They give you acts of contrition. Sometimes it's Hail Mary. Sometimes they say, you know, you got to go repair that relationship with someone.

You go, go tell them you made a mistake and you would like them to forgive you. see if that works. And very often it does. Sometimes the other person's a sociopath. It doesn't work out so well. And you are, you are actually not the injured, you know, you are the injured party. Not yet, not them. These things happen. But, I'll just pause there. And throw it back to you in terms of the spiritual, psychological bridge. Yeah, I think that the idea of psychology is secular confession. I'm saying one more time. That was a brilliant line. Oh, thank you. I stolen from somebody else. I can't remember who. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, Yeah, you know, the therapeutic relationship with the counselor has been conceptualized as basically secular confession. Just secular, just taking God out of it and saying, okay, well, this is science.

So we're going to go to a doctor and do it, do it with Dr. Freud or Dr. Young, those kind of things. Right. Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to pass that long. I don't want to claim credit for the phrase, though. Okay. Yeah, it's a super insightful phrase. Yeah.

So what I would say is that at least when you're talking about the Abrahamic face. It's the major relationship between your soul and God is that God cares about how you behave and how you decide to behave. And if you decide to behave rightly, then you will be aligned with what God wants, right? And that's kind of like the major story about like starting with the Torah and going through whatever. It's true of Islam as well. And, you know, Islam actually has a much more, like, transactional understanding of good behavior and bad behavior. There's a big thing about, like, weighing the scales of your good deeds versus your bad deeds. And they have, like, different levels of heaven.

You can, like, live in the suburbs or the city center of heaven, depending on how good you are. But that aside, that aside, the basic idea that your soul is aligned, according to right action has kind of gotten dropped as you talk about psychology and I think in particular with the way that psychological concepts have been

I have two points to make on this and I'm going to start with one and then I'm going to go back to the other so the first one is that for the vast majority of problems in society poor people have it worse right this is almost always true poor people have it worse poor people have higher

rates of alcoholism and higher rates of getting into fist bites and higher rates of whatever, right? The lower the socioeconomic status, the higher rate of any destructive behavior, except for like right now, the rates of people who have depression and anxiety and ADHD and these, like, not like severe as in like schizophrenia type mental illnesses, but like the mental illnesses that on a scale are considered less severe, those are predominantly upper-class issues. And that's a very weird reversal of the basic trend, right? And the only historical precedent that I've ever heard for that trend is that before

the French Revolution, but during the time when the French aristocracy had a tremendous this amount of wealth, right? They had already, like, colonized and, like, reaped the benefits of it. Like, Louis the 14th, like, Sun King era. All of the super, super wealthy people in France started talking about this thing called Anhui, which was, like, a weird feeling of purposeless to life, the inability to enjoy things. And, like, it was associated with the upper class who had everything.

And it's like, while other people were living and basically, like, you know, one step away from starvation state. These people were experiencing like a general disassociation from purpose and meaning. Yeah. Not to sidetrack you, but to add to what you're saying. That was about the time that they were talking about or discovered gout. And it was considered, you know, a rich man's disease is like because you had such a sedentary, luxurious lifestyle with rich foods, you would, you know, get gout.

and like poor people who were active and ate less and worked more did not have that same medical problems, less prevalent in a different class of persons. Just to add to your point in that regard. Yeah. Really, I didn't know that that's when gut was discovered. But yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly the trend, right? So it's just, it's interesting that like the, the, a lot of the psychological problems that like contemporary 2020's Americans are experiencing are exacerbating. are exacerbated in upper classes, right? And then my second point was talking about God and mental health, right?

So as you take a human from using type language to talk about what they're going through, like, oh, I feel grief, I feel sorrow, I feel shame or whatever, right? those are words that have a religious connotation that indicate that something morally transgressive has been done to cause these issues, right? And I think that a lot of times when people feel depression, they are feeling a subset of grief or sorrow or shame or guilt. But they don't have the implication of depression is that it's like medical. Like, oh, you should be operating at this level, but something's wrong and you're operating at this level and you need to go to a doctor to get it fixed, right? And I think that when, I think that when misapplied, and it's almost always misapplied, like the number of times that, like, people use the word depression versus the amount of people who just, like, have, like, a pathological feeling of sadness that can't be explained. is not, like, there's so many people who really need to think about, okay, like, why am I depressed, right?

And that's really why I like the idea of interpreting dreams in the first place and why I read Freud's on the interpretation of dreams. Because in the instance that you can't point to any, like, logical reason why you're experiencing what you're experiencing, sometimes dreams can help you understand that underlying association about why you're you're not feeling as well as you could. I believe it 100%. Yeah. Where I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. Yeah. And a lot of people, Freud's been much maligned, I would say, fairly and unfairly. You know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes it's a penis. So a lot of his conceptions, you know, I like the idea that, you know, you can take, say, great men throughout history or whatever, people, movers and shakers that have. done things and not everything they said is going to be correct. He had some ideas that I don't think were, have proven to be true as time has gone on, but like the core of it, genius. And even if he wasn't right about exactly, just as quotes, you know, the dreams being

the royal road to the unconscious. It's like our primary mode of being able to access that vast pool of every experience and thought and emotion we've ever had and trying to make some kind of sense of it and bring it back up to the surface. It's something we don't have the best access to while we're awake and conscious and focused and busy and doing all this kind of stuff. So it's kind of, yeah, just my two cents on dreams and Freud. No, I agree. I also have mixed feelings on Freud.

The one hand, I like him and on the other hand, I don't like him. One thing that I will say is that in practice, 100 years after the writings of Freud, when you go to a therapist right now, the main thing that they'll do with you, or the main thing, main thing that multiple therapists have done with me and like everyone I know is they will take you to your early childhood experiences and they will attribute nearly every like destructive behavior you have as an adult to something that happens in your childhood sometimes yeah sometimes well yeah yeah the point is that but it's not always yes it's not always yes right well the thing is is that even if it is correct you even there is graceable to your early

childhood. Like, how does that help anyone? Like, what are you going to do about that? Like, there's nothing actionable to, like, go on. It's just, like, you've just, like, basically paid someone to help you hate your parents. And by

the way, like, parents are so nice. Like, like, in terms of, like, the history of, like, parents in their relationship with their children, like, since the popularization of Freud, like the entire like dynamic of like kids being special and stuff has changed and I think that that's primarily because Freud has entered the consciousness of like the entire society and people are like oh I don't

want to mess up my kids which is not something that people cared about like like ever before and it's certainly not something that people care about outside of the modern west like oh I'm going to mess up my kids and we've got a bit of a pendulum with that too and like at one point kids were should be seen and not heard. And you beat them when they acted up because that's how they learn. And there were just tiny little defective adults that were ignorant and had to be educated.

And we got the idea of cramming stuff into their heads instead of drawing out natural talents and providing information. It swung back and forth, but I think we're definitely, and this is one thing I was going to talk about too, me being Gen X and you being Gen Z. There's a difference in our understanding of the world,

of the current zeitgeist of the era we're in in terms of psychology and politics. And it's been different between the two of them. And I think right now we've probably swung too far into sparing the rod and spoiling the child in that regard. There's a bit too much. We went through generations of helicopter parenting and over-involved parenting. And now we're kind of getting getting the idea that, wait a minute, it's setting aside

political stuff, so to speak. But Jordan Peterson put in his book, you know, when kids are skateboarding, leave him alone. and his point in that was kids need unstructured, unsupervised playtime with their peers to learn how to be social creatures. And we went through and see, this is a big thing too. So going back to the whole Gen Z and like the 80s thing, there was a bit of a hysteria that popped up about child abductions.

Because we used to, you know, you open the door, you put the kid on the bike and you kick them out and tell them don't come home until dinner. But you better be home before the street lights come on, you know, that kind of thing. And then you just had no idea where they were. I remember being, and this is a holdover for me, you know, my parents being young in the 70s. Speaking about parents, too, and generally mostly good people make mistakes. We're only human.

Long story short on that one. But I remember being five or six years old and riding my bike to the end of the block and there was a field, a farm field. And I would just go throw dirt clods at an old barn in a field by my field. myself. And now it wasn't that far away. It felt like a mile to me, but it was probably like, you know, a dozen houses down. It was, it was just the end of the streets. And they knew where I was. They could find me in literally two minutes. But I felt just a complete sense of freedom. And you know, if I was gone too long, they would come looking for me. They did that once. And if, um, if I got hurt, it wasn't that far for me to limp home. Uh, but I had that freedom to just

kind of go explore the world. And I think that's been lost. There's another another author. Uh, I think it's Jonathan Haidt. He wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind. And it's about, you know, the fact that we've done a disservice, say, to our kids recently in not letting them be human enough, structuring and controlling safetyism in a large degree of like, we don't want our kids to die. And we don't want them to be horribly maimed and messed up. That hurts our heart.

But we got to give them enough room to climatry and break an arm. You have to, or they can't become adults. And then I think we've got this artificially extended adolescence that's going on with a lot of people. So many social factors. And then that feeds into the whole psychology thing of like, okay, how are modern therapists handling things even differently than they used to 20, 30 years ago when I was being trained, you know. So I'll stop there.

I said a lot of things. No, I literally, I agree with 100% of the things that you've said. Thank you. I haven't heard of heist before, but I agree with the idea of the coddling of the American mind. Um, it is possible to, right. Yeah, it's, it is a great title. Um, I mean, I think that in any philosophy, if you, any good thing can be perverted, right? Like, any good thing can be taken to an extreme or misapplied or in, like, I, I can't think of a single thing that, that can't be somehow, like, too much of a good thing. Too much birthday cake. You get sick. Right. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Exactly. So, so, so yeah, on, on the topic of Gen Z, and the general experience of Gen Z people, I think that it's a lot of helicopter parenting in the sense that kids don't really like go play on the street, they like have play dates, right? And it's like a one-on-one thing and it's very structured. I think that it goes a little bit deeper than that. So for one thing,

I think that there's a pretty, serious. Okay, so in my book, I'm almost exclusively talking about how I went through and figured out how to deal with trauma, right? And that's not, that's something that pertains to like any age group. In terms of like only Gen Z, I know that in schools, I have to take so many exams, sorry, my dog. It's okay. Like so many, not exams. Cat.

Like surveys. Cat, beautiful cat. Thank you. So many surveys about like my mental health, right? Oh boy. Like every single time I went to class, people would ask me about my mental health. Like after, like, not to get too political, but when Donald Trump got elected, like, all of my college went into a moment of like serious morning. and hysteria.

And I was told like if you... Safe rooms with crayons and puppies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. I was told, I was told you don't have to do your assignments.

I had a professor three years after Donald Trump was elected burst into tears in the classroom because she felt like everything that she had worked for in her entire life came to nothing because she was an English professor and she had been trying to like undo. what she considered oppressive systems. And it was, and she, like, literally, legitimately, like, burst into tears in the classroom when we started talking about Donald Trump. And the thing is that a lot of this, yeah, okay, so, like, when you give a survey, like a psychological survey, like, hey, kids in my economics class, how are you feeling, today. Question one. How many times per week do you feel so sad that you can't do your homework? More than three times per week, more than five times per week, right? And then like the survey goes

down and it's like, have you considered self-harm or suicide recently? Not until you brought it up. Have you ever burned to yourself? Right. Right. Exactly. Right. That's that's the thing. That's actually exactly exactly the point that I wanted to make is that when when you give someone surveys like that or ask leading questions, you're purposely like dismissing other psychological conditions that people have, right? Like, I never had to fill out a survey that was like, how many times have you gotten into a fight with your roommates over money? Or how many times have you had to hang up on your boyfriend recently?

Or how many times did you get into a fight with your mom? Whatever it is. All of these are aspects of the psychological character that matter and are, you know, like perfectly interesting to talk about, but they're not the things that like people are getting statistics about, whereas people are getting statistics, constant statistics on if you've experienced a microaggression due to your racial identity or if you've considered self-harm or suicide. Like that's the thing that like it's constantly at the forefront of your brain. And what they're what they're not asking about too, that's all obsessively negative. And I wanted to get

to this. I wrote this down way, way back when as well. The idea that, uh, And again, I'm borrowing this idea from someone else. I can't remember who, but he said there's an obsessive self-focus is indistinguishable from the experience of anxiety. It's like what anxiety is, is this obsessing over your state of mind and being and place in the world. And just to contrast that with, you know, there are people describe the peak experiences or being in the zone as almost being disembarrassed. embodied in a way of like they're so in the world at that moment experiencing what's happening or focused on someone else that they lose a sense of self and not that not that we're aiming for that not that everyone should have should depersonalize or or disassociate that those are not

good things but but just that that that idea that if you're training people to constantly think about themselves and check in with their own emotions exactly as you're saying it's it's actually increasing levels of anxiety and my my point about um all the things that they're not not asking, they're not asking how many times did you call, have a pleasant phone call with your mom? How many times did you exercise? How many good meals did you eat? How many times this week did you think about your purpose in life and how you're going to make the world a better place? Not asking any positive questions. It's like dwell on the negative, dwell on the negative. Yes, I'll throw it back to you. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, the only thing that I

would have to say about disassociation is that I think that the idea of completely disassociating from yourself and just focusing on the world is the mental state that a lot of Eastern religions are trying to inculcate and folks right yeah yeah really yeah what were you going to say on it oh uh well not to cut you off but but we were talking about Abrahamic versus versus Eastern and this is this was the point but then it was going to come around to meditation and whatnot. There's commonalities in religions, too. And in terms of,

what did I? Oh, that humans are the cause of our own suffering. Now, there's natural evil in the world. You get cancer, tornado, earthquake,

bad shit happens, forest fire. But mostly what religion is focused on doing, and Eastern and Western, is looking at the idea of, well, how are you causing your own unnecessary suffering? In the Eastern religions,

they take a God out of it, maybe and focus on meditation, but letting go of suffering is a big, big thing. Stop wanting so many things that maybe you can have or maybe you don't need and you will suffer less. It's like the degree of suffering is the mismatch between what I have and what I want. And the Western religions also, they formalize it into different systems. They add a more mystical, you know, connection to a higher power in that sense and say, well, here's what we've identified.

And I was just thinking about this last night. What I'm going to watch it? I'm watching anime. I'm watching, uh, I know, I got a total jazz. X are here. I've been watching anime since Voltron and the Macross saga when I was before I would school in the morning. My cousin, my cousin showed me sword art online and I actually really like it. It's a good one. It's a good one. There's a good one. There's a lot of anime that's just crap and if you show people bad anime, they'll go this anime's crap. No, that's just bad

anime. Uh, one top of my list probably. You were thinking the top of my list will probably be trigone. If you haven't watched try gun. That's I want some people want to be Superman, Batman. I want to be Vash the Stampede. That's who I would want. want to be in my life for real. So, yeah, I'm watching an anime, Ray Zero, starting life from Zero in another world, so Isakai. And it got me thinking about the whole seven deadly sins thing, because they bring that in is there's the witches of sin, and then there's the priests of these differences in gluttony

and whatnot. And I'm like, it's interesting. I spent a lot of my life as an agnostic atheist, and I'm still mostly. I'd say I'm like an agnostic atheist, deist. I think there's mankind didn't create itself or the universe, so there's something above us. There's a higher power. I take that for granted.

Logically, it just has to be. And then, but observing the human condition, and this is where you've developed a new appreciation for Christianity or the Abrahamic fates in general. Because I was big on the Eastern stuff. I'm like, that makes a lot of sense. Very logical.

Long story short. We've, what we've got are, the reason why they distilled it into the seven deadly sins is there's, there's these, these are all the different ways that humans cannot escape being human. We have, so if it's gluttony, we can't not eat. We will die, but we can't eat too much because that's also bad for us. So the balance is, you know, don't be, you know, eat enough,

but don't not to the point of gluttony. And we get into those other things of like pride. It's like, have a healthy sense of self and your accomplishments and, but not to the point where you think you're better than other people and you're hurting your relationships or acting against other people in a way that you think you deserve because you're better than them. So a lot of, and I think that capture, I don't think there's a human, elements of human nature that go beyond those, those seven, it's like the big ones. And then they have the opposites of like, you know, if greed is, is a sin, charity, is its opposite. So it offers also a, not just a prohibition, but a, but a prescription for how to engage with

the world. And I'll stop there. That was, like, all the thoughts I had on that. No, that makes perfect sense. So they identified the five impulses of man that are, like, that taken excessively can offend God. And that we can't escape from. We can't not eat. We can't have to eat.

But if you do it too much, gluttony. So avoid that. Don't go too far. Yeah. Striking that balance. No, that's a brilliant observation. That really is. I'll have to think about that for a while.

Thank you. And I'm not a Christian. So this is just me looking at, I love Greek mythology. I love Norse mythology. I love all of these stories. I think they all have truth in them. And I think the Bible has truth in it too. So even without me being a Christian. So yeah, just to say I'm not proselytizing. So yeah. I also I grew up pretty secular. I had one grandmother who was religious. She was she's Arab American. So she was kind of like insulated by familial associations from the general like. decline of Western religion. But even still, like, I, what can you say? Like, I know a lot about a lot of religions because I just read them. Yeah, they're fascinating stories, if nothing else. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, so the thing, the thing that I was going to say, I think that they're more than fascinating stories, right? I think that human beings have been understand, have been,

pretty good at understanding, like, the purpose and condition of life for a while. And, and really the, the essential question that they're trying to get at is, you know, like, I, nature is completely indifferent to my death, right? Nature, when, when you're an animal and you're in the state of nature, you're going to live and you're going to die. And, and, like, nature will continue to go beyond, right? And then, like, human beings have a specific consciousness about, like, okay, like, we have, we have to behave in a certain way. And like, like, okay, so like a turkey, turkeys will kill a member of their flock that's injured to not attract predators, right? So a turkey's okay with, like, killing its own mother, like hacking its mother to death with its claws for the sake of not attracting a predator if she's injured.

And no one would say that a turkey is immoral because a turkey is behaving in accordance with its nature, right? So a turkey is allowed to do that because the turkey is living in the state of nature. But human beings can't do that. Like you can't, it doesn't matter if your mom is injured. You can't kill her. Even if it's really inconvenient, you can't kill her because that offends something that's uniquely human about us. Right. And so human beings kind of have this like this more complex.

There's like this natural side to us, but there's also this more complex side to us that's like bound by a transcendental moral code. And that's really the main thing that I'm interested in is that like throughout society and culture and time, people feel and know and behave as if there is, the most intimate aspect of humanity is the fact that we have this relationship with this moral code that's beyond space and time, right? And in the Abrahamic faiths, that would be the moment when humanity ate of the knowledge of good and evil, right? Yeah, yeah, I was thinking along those lines too. There's, there's an interesting thing about morality. It's like we don't apply morality to animals because they don't have the capacity to make the kind of choices that we can. Morality is something unique to a higher capacity of consciousness of like an animal just, it's hungry. It eats.

It's horny. It fucks it, you know, pisses on the tree because, you know, something in it. Born that way, it didn't have to learn it. Just knows this is, this is what I do. So, and I think you're absolutely right. it's this dichotomy between you have to have the capacity to make a choice to reflect on yourself and to think about the consequences of your actions and this is that's exactly my understanding of the biblical story too i look at it uh you know the garden of eden

and this is why i think it's um some people who are like well you got to choose the bible revolution can't have both men i i mean why didn't god say let there be evolution i think that's what happened in my estimation the universe being what it's right being what it is why not so this is how I understand that biblical story is like once upon a time in our human ancestry we were we came from that common ancestor with apes so somewhere after that point where the two species diverged we started to head towards being human and this was like some you know maybe they're saying like 350,000 years ago maybe we actually started to become like proto humans and that's kind of where I think the Garden of Eden story took place and it is exactly

when we went from an unaware, not responsible animal that lacked capacity for moral judgment to eating, eating of the, you know, evolving into having the brain capacity to become aware of the concept of good and evil that, wait, I can make choices and choices have consequences. And this is, you know, going back to Jordan Peterson, I guess I steal a lot of this stuff from him because he's, guys, just, if you haven't heard his lecture series on the Bible, set all the political stuff aside and just, he, just listen to those. he talks about one of the first things they did in the Garden of Eden story was they became ashamed and covered themselves they realized they were vulnerable and part of understanding

you know eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that I know how I'm vulnerable therefore I know how you are vulnerable and I have a choice to make I can exploit your vulnerability or not before before we became aware of a choice there was no choice we were just instinctual animals. Now we have a choice. I can, I know how other people can hurt me and I can do that on purpose or not to other people. And that, I think that is when we became human as we, as we conceptualize it today. I'll stop there. I said a lot. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I agree with you completely. And I'm, like, yeah, so, so the thing that I would add is, um, that whether you attribute that moment of the capacity to make moral judgment as something that was, you know, struck upon, you know, or was something that developed gradually over time.

In the end, it's that capacity for moral judgment that distinguishes humans from the natural state of being, right? And that humans can at any time regress into the natural state of being. and at the turn of the 20th century, right, people originally had only, only had Christianity to root themselves in the story of who they were, right? And this kind of goes back to the Nietzschean concept of like history as a myth, right? So, so like the things that you learn about history are not actually important for relaying the facts of the past. the things that you learn about history are a story that give you a modern sense of identity. And that concept was almost entirely indistinguishable from religion for however long in Western society. And people had like, okay, so there was this moment in time when human beings distinguished themselves from animals

and they had the capacity for moral judgment. and that's the thing that that reflects God. Like that's the reason that like we are made in the image of God because we have this knowledge that exists outside of nature. And really moral judgment is not bound by space or time either. So it's beyond. Right, exactly. The truth is eternal type of thing.

So, so yeah, at the turn of the 20th century, we were like, okay, you know, there seems to be some factually incorrect things. about the Bible here. It seems like, you know, the dinosaurs, whatever, like there's some serious problems. Then we threw it all out. And then a hundred years later, maybe, you know, yeah, about a hundred years after, you know, people stopped believing in the Bible, we had kind of devolved into a society that really doesn't have that, that memory of like, hey, we're moral people. Because I don't think that our society, with the exception of, like, people who are like hardcore Christians and kind of like live separate from the rest of society.

Like, like, I don't think that like general, like social structures and like Americans that you meet on the street are really concerned about the moral consequences of each action that they take. When literally, at least in Middle Eastern consciousness, like you bake a cake for the glory of God and you die for the glory of God. and it gives people an almost impossible will to live, like an infathomable will to live despite every hardship that they suffer, as opposed to like modern American society, which is just so, like, weak and so disassociated. Yeah, there's a problem with that in the modern world in terms of,

I mean, what is it? Heedanism and consequentialism are nothing to found a society. on. It's like, where's, okay, so now what? My problem with them, say, with consequentialism, is the idea that, well, you know, the ends justify the means. So we've found that to be a big problem. But, but on top of that, just what makes you so sure those ends you desire are worth the means in the first place? How did you end up at those ends? So even, even those ideas of people, well, it's human flourishing. And, okay, well, what does that look like? I mean, we've got to, we have to define that to them. Maybe a world without cancer.

obviously probably a better place, but beyond that, like how, you know, there's a lot of hidden assumptions baked into the cake, so to speak, when, when people talk about their, the, you know, just consequences or outcomes being, being, being worthy of, you know, first you have to justify what's a worthy outcome. And a lot of them skip that step and go, well, it's just assumed. This is, they have their own tenets of faith in a sense that are unspoken. Where was I going to go with that? You know, to put a pin in the Garden of Eden story, I've had my own thoughts about this. And I don't know if I've heard it expressed this way before, but just the broader concept.

I don't think it, I don't, okay, so with the Bible. I'm all over the place. Squirly brain. I love this. So many great thoughts. We've, one of the reasons I'm not a Christian, one of many, of course. But I don't think that the Bible stories, I think they're all true, but they're not, they're not real. if you take my meaning. It's like they tell a metaphysical truth about human nature and our existence

in the world and it doesn't matter if they actually happened. So this is where I was going to go with it. It doesn't matter if there was ever a Noah and a boat, but it tells a real story about how to plan ahead for the inevitable disasters of life in a way that's going to, you know, pay attention and prepare and take care of your family. And you'll come through it. And then after that, you'll you will be fruitful and multiply all that good stuff um but the adam and eve story i don't think there was ever an adamant and eve i don't think there was one moment where uh their parents were apes or whatever and then they were human i think that was a slow process over many thousands of years and i my interpretation of you know rather than blaming you know human there's all kinds of weird

interpretations of things i don't think it was ever meant to say uh women are evil evil and sinful they caused the fallen state of mankind. I don't think that was ever the right interpretation of that. I think what they were saying is that because of the, because of how the female animal is constituted physically, they awakened to self-awareness first. And then they engaged in selective breeding with males that also showed that glint of self-awareness.

And then together they, they moved away from being animals. So, and my theory on that is, so it's not like, so if you look at it, like the state of nature was better, we never should have become human. Yeah, you can blame Eve for evolving first and call it a sin. I don't think it's, I don't think it's that way. It did introduce sin to the world because before that, like animals have no capacity to sin. So it isn't a judgment, isn't a curse upon the human race. It is and it isn't. It's wonderful that we have the capacity for sin. And that's a weird thing to say. You know, and sin, being, I'm not imbueing it with, with supernatural power the way a lot of people do.

The technical definition is missing the mark. When you become capable of making choices, you become capable of making poor choices. The possibility of sin enters the world once we became human in a way that it doesn't when we were still animals. Long story short. Yeah, I think because of the way, and the reason I think this females evolved first in that capacity is it's, I think it's the, I think it's the. the because they are the child bearing of the of the pair they have to be more aware it's like

the modern conception is you know women uh young girls mature faster than the boys because they have more responsibility suddenly you have a monthly cycle it begins and boys don't so we get to be a little immature longer we don't have to take on that responsibility we don't have to guard ourselves against becoming pregnant or deal with this monthly cycle in terms of you don't want to stay in your pants. Maybe you need a pad. You don't want to let your emotions get out of control because they're going to fluctuate a little bit. It's going to happen to you. So I think long story short, this is my Evo psych explanation of the Garden of Eden story and how I think it explains what they were observing in terms that they couldn't put like we do today. They couldn't say, oh, you know, hormones and

menstrual cycle and all these different things. So that's why I think Eve evolved first and then brought Adam into the fold of human awareness. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. This is my personal theory. Yeah. So what I would first say about the dichotomy between males and females is that that discourse is like unnecessarily contentious right now because of like the past four decades of feminism. And the truth is is that in a state of nature, like the way that you determine if something

is true is true about humanity is you look how long a thing has happened. throughout time and across cultures, right? Like, if something is true in, you know, medieval England and modern Bulgaria and ancient China, it's probably something not all of it. You had a little bit of a stutter there. I don't know if you're back yet. I think you're still frozen. We can give it a second.

Okay. I'm sorry. We can give it a second just sort itself out. No, no. You're pixelated. Okay. It's starting to resolve. I hope.

We'll say we can give it a moment. That's all right. There's no rush. I'm sorry. Okay. You can hear me though or no? I'm starting to hear you now. Yeah.

Your image is still. It needs to stabilize. We had that problem earlier. I don't know. I'm sorry about that. No, not your fault. Technology. I'm amazed any of this works.

That's what, you know, when people, I used to play, okay, long story short on this one while your internet stabilizes. I played EverQuest, one of the original

online role playing games from 1999 to 2004 and people would complain about damn server connections and and maintenance and downtime and you know laggy this that and the other and I was just thinking I'm amazed any of this works how do we do this this is a brilliant experience but I'm able that you're in you know you're on the east coast I'm on the west we're having this conversation we're getting audio and video it usually goes off without a hitch and once in a while you get some static and I'm like I that bother me it happens so I think you're stabilized though you're good Good.

All right. Awesome. You were explaining. I agree. It's good to focus on the positive. Yeah. So I was talking about humanity and the relationship between males and females, right? So if a trend persists across culture and through times and through time, it is probably true.

And you see across culture and through time that males are always the warriors, right? That, like, not always. There are some exceptions, but, like, in the vast majority of contexts, men are the people. who fight, right? And the fact of the matter is that humanity had to diverge from a state of nature, which means that the only thing that mattered in terms of getting what you want was your capacity for power and force. And the truth is that the only reason that we have like a society where we can pretend like human rights are natural is because we have governments that specific like dole out the use of force in ways that we all agree upon.

But the use of force is and always will be like the, like human society is precarious. Like the moment that like human society or whatever, like something happens with the government, like the people who will be in control of this society if it collapses are men between the ages of 20 and 40. Yeah. Immediately into warlord fiddleism immediately. Right. Right, exactly, immediately. And in a society where men are fighting, you know, I talk about this a lot in my story about Uzbekistan and what it's like to grow up, like in the Middle East and in Uzbekistan. And I say this very explicitly that like feminism sounds so utterly stupid to someone who has seen combat because you also, sorry, Sorry, that sounds great.

It's, no, I'm going to stand by the words, okay? Like, feminism doesn't make sense to people who have seen combat because the fact of the matter is that if you need protection, you will do what the person who can provide protection tells you to do. You just do. And that's what human beings have done forever. So, so that's my thing about feminism that people, like, like, you need to ground, like, obviously, like, obviously, like, I'm confident in my own ability to think and solve problems and whatever, right? Like, I have, like, I'm pregnant with a daughter, and I have, I want her to be, like, resilient and amazing and feel great about herself and all of that, right?

And the idea that feminism, that idea of feminism is fine, but disassociating from, like, the roots of humanity. or having these like bizarre mantras like I'm a woman I can do anything or like you know I'm the idea of feminine strength is the same as masculine strength is just not true and I wouldn't wouldn't want her to like have to believe in something that's so self-evidently false you know yeah so that's that's I'm big on good to wrap it up go ahead I didn't mean to catch you I'm sorry. So, yeah, so going back to the interpretation of the feminine aspect of the Garden of Eden story, I would say that, like you said, it does make sense that Eve would come to self-consciousness first, you know? It makes sense that a female would be the first person to, like, evolutionarily speaking, to develop this idea of, like, thinking ahead and, like, making, like, oh, if we all behave the same.

way, then we will be able to do X, Y, and Z and, like, set those beginning standards of, like, conduct in order to propagate your society, right? It makes sense that a female would do that. And in that way, it does make sense that a female would, like, start that, that consciousness and awakening. Yeah. But, but, yeah, the idea that females are originally evil, I don't think that that is the correct.

I don't think that that is the intended interpretation of that story. But at the same time, I think that the outrage over that story, like, oh, well, I don't believe in the Bible because the Bible thinks that women are evil is also, like, equally like reactionary, right? Yeah. And I hate using the word reactionary, but it is super reactionary. It's like, hey. Right. For sure. I'll say I pretty much agree with 100% of everything you just said and to reinforce it I'm a big fan of the yin-yang and there's you know there's there's there's hard power and soft power in different ways and there's the light and the dark and there's the up and the down and there's this balance of opposites and the the who was who's the golden mean is that Aristotle or Plato was it Socrates it wasn't Socrates I actually don't know I think it was Aristotle that that sounds right?

to me, we're going to go with that. We're going to say officially 100% Aristotle. But he even said, you know, the golden mean, the golden mean is almost never exactly in the middle between two polar opposites. I mean, you can't be a little bit pregnant, you know, or a little bit dead. There's, there's, there's, you know, and sometimes, you know, you want things perfectly balanced on a scale. Sometimes it is exactly in the middle, but it's, but that's, it's not always exactly in the middle. That's a, anyway. So I think the, the complementary nature of men and women and, you know, as far as feminine goes, feminism goes, I used to consider myself feminist, maybe 10, 15 years ago, because to my unlearned opinion,

I just kind of believe the current propaganda, which was, oh, it's just about, you know, equality. We just, you know, it just means, you know, women aren't oppressed. And then I started looking to do it a little bit more. And I'm like, okay, there's waves. What is this? So first wave feminism, the idea of right to vote and second wave, right to work and be independent financially.

So I don't think it's all good or all bad I think there's elements to it What they were trying to correct for say maybe back in the day Was unfair gatekeeping I mean what you would have is the rare woman That wanted to be a pilot And what was her name that she got lost at sea You know no fault of her own

Can't remember her name Disappeared one of the big missing persons cases Damn off the top of my head I can't Anyway, you know how I'm talking about that lady. Or they were gatekeeping women out of institutions like this is this is for men only and I'm like, I don't agree with that. It may be rare that a woman wants to do something like that. But if she has the capacity, she shouldn't be kept out because, you know, you don't have a penis. That never made sense to me.

But then again, there's going to be natural tendency. So you're probably going to have fewer women who want to work on an oil rig or be a brick layer or, you know, construction work, all kinds of different things. And then you'll get something to do. And, you know, and there's probably fewer men who want to be stay at home dads. But there are some and they love it. And it's perfect. And her career takes precedence. Whatever.

So I think where feminism, in my opinion, went off the rails is, you know, saying maybe we got a problem with gatekeeping too. There should be exactly 50, 50 parity across all things. They didn't understand the rule of the golden mean, which is proper balance, not precise middle of the middle. middle balance. You don't, you don't actually want 50% men and women in anything,

I don't think, except a marriage probably. You kind of need that for a kid. But, um, uh, but the idea that,

um, you know, if, if a man wants to be a nurse is fine. It's not, you don't have to gate keep people out of things. So that's my nod, nod to the,

to the original feminist ideals. And then we've gone off the rails with, you know, there's no such thing as gender and, and, uh, other, other things that I,

yeah, I, I find, conceptually, conceptually broken. So anyway. They're conceptually like, like you can see with your eyes that it's not true as you're believing it. Which has always been really difficult for me.

You know, like the idea that like you can espouse something. It's just like, you know, there's a lot of people who will be showed a piece of evidence and they'll say, no, I believe this, right? So that's also Amelia Earhart. I left her else. There you go. Yeah. If I try to open windows here, I'm going to screw up something with the recording. I know that's what I was thinking to.

It starts with a day. I knew it started with a day. And then all I could think of was your last name. And I'm like, damn, that's not it. Anything else I, oh, you know, I'm going to throw this out there. And I wrote it down so I don't forget it. But I want to make the offer publicly too. So you've got this history in Arabic literature.

One of the, so I have a series of books, I call it. I gave it its own title, made up a fancy word, O'Neurochronology. the study of the interpretation of dreams over time throughout history. Oniros, chronos, logos. Anyway, I'm proud of myself. So I did an original three-volume set of shorter works. Things that are like, I can't publish a book that's 60 pages.

So I'll take a 60 page, 180 page, put them together, and now I've got an anthology. Anyway, I'm working on a new one. And the first work I'm resurrecting from history is an 1850s-ish. or 30s work on Muslim dream interpretation and this produced by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain or something like that

so I wanted to throw it out there if you wanted a writing credit to have you at least review my work when I get it put together make sure I've I want to The answer is yes I would love to do you. I don't want to volunteer you for anything or put you on the spot but at least to look over my shoulder and say

that little um um you know there's no umlouts in in arabic take that out of there i just you know because i may have used the wrong symbol uh there's a word for those what are those called diacritics oh i pulled that out of the swiss cheese in my brain wow diacritics the little marks yeah yeah yeah yeah yes yes the little marks anyway i would love to have a um a professional a second opinion on that kind of stuff and um anyway i'd love to do that i really would i haven't i haven't done stuff like that in a long time. It's been four years have I really critically, like, studied it. But yeah, I would love to do it. That sounds fantastic. That would be cool. Yeah, let's get a second opinion. Like I said, not to put you on the spot. Now I feel weird. Like, I shouldn't have said anything.

I should ask you afterwards. But I'm glad you sound, you're like, that's awesome. No, no, the answer is absolutely yes. It would be super, super fun. Yeah. So, so yeah, I actually do. a lot of my focus on Arabic literature was like modern. I had a thing about modern Saudi Arabian literature because Saudi Arabia has really severe gender roles and they also have like a birth of like women writing really complex novels and the novels have complex gender roles in them.

So I'm not sure if it ever occurred to you to want to read some fiction. but I highly recommend Saudi Arabian modern fiction because it's it's like the antithesis of like Western fiction and it has a lot of really subversive elements of, you know, how you empower yourself within a religious context as opposed to empowering yourself within like the modern Western feminism type thing. So yeah, that's what I'm mostly focused on. But I did want to talk a little bit about on the interpretation of dreams. Yes. I had to read it for a class once. It's Freud's book about how to interpret dreams.

And when Freud wrote it, he thought of it as a scientific piece. I read it in a literature class because the idea, because he said it was based on observation, so it was scientific, but like people are so different that you can't really like, like there's just kind of a flaw in like considering these types of ideas science um and i think that that flaw is like true of a lot of psychology anyway yeah um the main things that he talked about in the second half of his book is that dreams uh are wish fulfillment dreams can be distorted uh dreams have a tremendous amount of symbols in just a little tiny piece or maybe they don't um and dreams

uh uh hang on hang on I'm I haven't read it in a long time no that's fine I think you're right on

with all the descriptions so far yeah yep and then dreams uh have displacement right and the idea of displacement is that

like it's bringing in multiple ideas it's so like at the beginning he's talking about like okay, well, sometimes you're going to dream about something that you wish that happened, sometimes you're going to dream about whatever. But, like, it'll be in weird settings, right?

Like, you'll take something and it'll be in a weird setting or a different setting. And I really do recommend reading the second half of the book because he takes fewer, like, individuals' patience dreams, and you can see how he's extrapolating it. And the point of the course was that the way that he was interpreting dreams is like a brilliant way to interpret literature. A brilliant way to interpret literature because that's like the basic mechanism that you're trying to teach your students when you're trying to teach them. Hey, what does symbolism mean? Like what does it mean when the birds sing in this book, right? And fundamentally, I think it's because it's the same thing, right?

Because like art is digging into your unconsciousness. Sorry, your unconscious. What is the word? Unconscious. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry about that.

No, that's okay. So art is digging into your unconscious, and dreams are digging into your unconscious, right? And personally, I feel like the farther you go into that realm, the, like, you know, art can teach you a lot about your own internal life. They can teach you a lot about psychology. Like these like academic barriers that we have between disciplines, like once you really go into it, like you're you're kind of dealing with the same stuff and it's hard to access. So that was my thing on the interpretation of dreams. And I do have a dream for you to interpret. For sure.

Yeah, I don't want to run you out of time. I'll just say just a little couple of comments on that real quick. Is that like I was saying earlier with Freud is that I think he was right about some things. about some things. So if you take his, um, take his concepts, a lot of them were groundbreaking. Someone has to open the door to the conversation and say, here's what I see. Now, did he see, was he necessarily accurate in his descriptions? Was he, uh, correct in his understanding or interpretation of those descriptions of what he was seeing? Uh, was he necessarily, completely thorough? Like, was he right about everything? And did he see everything? Uh, and,

And yes and no, it's very much a mix of the two. I mean, we owe the entire profession of maybe if I sit down and talk to this person, they will feel better. Psychology, we owe the whole thing to him just throwing wide that door and saying, this is a legitimate practice. We can do some good here. It's a medical thing, you know, to, anyway. So all of, all of the, I would say all of the things he described are real.

He's describing actual concepts that do seem to bear, bear fruit. Did you just describe them all? perfectly in totality even within each concept maybe not quite but but but but but again brilliant ideas and i think it's you can even conceive of dreams themselves as us telling ourselves a story and then it becomes literature then it becomes art in that way of of understanding it and he was definitely right and and what you were saying about the idea of um there's there's the displacement of things where i'm not comfortable thinking about childhood trauma my mother in a specific way. So I'm going to think about something else that

stands as an icon or representation of my mother. And that's kind of what we do with the dream interpretation thing is going to say, okay, where is this coming from? What's the concept we're trying to draw out of this symbol? And then we look at how have you experienced that concept in your life in a way that might be relevant to the, and the setting, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the physical location, all of that I get into. And you'll see when we when we do the thing in a minute. But, but, so was, long story short, is Freud the end-all be-all of dream interpretation? No, I mean, of course, he had that famous split with Jung where Young was like, it's much more

symbolic than even Freud realized. Freud said, it's symbolic, and Young said, you have no idea. Let me tell you. And he went off on, you know, archetypes and all that good stuff. And, you know, and then the very weird combination, so it's Freud to Young, to Joseph Campbell, to George Lucas, to Star Wars. Bam, that line gave a, that line of, of great men, so to speak, gave us the, gave us Star Wars in 1977 and, you know, which was a retelling of a futuristic, you know, space opera, uh, version of,

of the ancient hero myths is what he was going for with Joseph Campbell, here with a thousand faces. And actually, the little convergence of the Akira Kurosawa samurai films. It was all, it was like, this was basically samurai, samurai space wizards is, is what Star Wars is. It's great, great stuff. But go ahead. I had no idea. I actually had no idea about that. That's super cool.

Yeah. Yes, we can thank Freud for Star Wars, basically. Yeah. There's a little, little fun trivia. I love that. I love that kind of stuff. I mean, you know, not to tut my own horn or self-aggrandized, but I think that's kind of, I'm trying to conceptualize what the hell is a wizard.

And I did a video way back when of me trying to explain what do I mean by that. And I think, you know, Gandalf, of course, but Socrates, they were both. wizards. I think there's wizards that walk among us today and I'm trying to be one, trying to embody that archetype. We are what we do, you know. So if I behave as a wizard, then I can become it in that way, in the metaphorical way of, maybe I know a thing or two, because I've been around, I guess, some gray hairs. Maybe my back isn't so good, so I walk with a stick. Maybe, maybe I speak some magic words. I tell you something you didn't know. Maybe I can see the future because I've been there, done that.

Don't do that. I think that's my concept of a wizard. I'm trying to really do it. I had a point with that. Don't remember what it was. I think it's, oh, trying to,

you know, someday I hope to write a book, you know, a wizard's guide to the art of wizardry and tell people what I think it really is and how to do it and how to identify one and what different kinds there are.

I think there's evil wizards. I would consider, you know, it's part of my breakdown I'm trying to get to him. My brain is there's, you know, D&D style almost, there's illusionists. I would say they are actors.

Actors are, you know, really great actors, wizards of illusion, make you believe they are someone else. And there's necromancers. And I'm looking at that as like people who cult leaders, you know, demagogic politicians that capture the brain, that basically treat people like zombies or turn them into zombies through manipulation and control, sociopathic style. And there's people.

who are very accomplished at that. Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, thank you. There's, there's people who are very accomplished at that and they are, it's like, you know, there's, there's evil wizards. They're not all good. It's just people who are very effective at what they do. And anyway, thank you. I like that conceptualization too. That's where I started. I'm like, ooh, necromancers. Oh. Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's a really brilliant conceptualization. I think that most of the time when people were telling stories, especially ancient stories, they were talking about things that were evidently true to them, right? They were just using the language that they had available.

So if you have a guy who has like, you know, a bunch of people who are basically dead following him, that's, it makes sense that he would be a wizard. Yeah, brain dead zombie followers. Right. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and you know, like

people used to call them prophets, right? Like, like the I think prophets yet walk among us in these latter days, yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course they. I mean, of course they do. They always have, right?

I consider people like George Orwell, you know, it's very, very prophetic in terms of a lot of the political stuff we're going through right now. That's who I consider to be like prophets. Yeah, those kind of people. They saw it coming. They told me something we needed to know. Yeah, George Orwell had an amazing insight into the future.

And really, he had an amazing ability to like see, like, politics. Like, I don't see politics. I could see people really well. I don't, I don't have, like, that foresight into it, like, I don't like reading geopolitics as much, uh, just because, but that's, like, the thing that Orwell could see. Does that make sense, right? Like, like, he was seeing, like, massive forces that, like, operate above society as, like, with human beings below it. Yeah. We get into, there's there's so many ways to analyze that kind of stuff too but yeah it's it's definitely what I was talking about that idea of the concept of wizard being someone who can or one element you can scrii the future in a crystal ball you'll get into a meditative state and and a vision

of something remote or removed above a conceptual comes to you and you can describe it to other people there's there's very much an aspect of that so you know people who are able to do that and see patterns and say, here's a pattern I can see that no one else can. And then they describe it and people go, wow, that's crazy. And then it happens. And they're like, wow, he's a wizard. How did he know that? It's that unique insight and the ability to communicate it.

I think you might be frozen again. Oh, no. It's starting to get a little staticy and fuzzy. I can just vamp. I can just talk. I'll jibba jibber for a moment while I let your, let your side, uh, stabilize. Um, I think it's probably a good opportunity to switch into the dream thing or we, we, we, we will run out the whole two hours just, just having a conversation.

I love talking to you. It's good stuff. It's nice to talk to someone who gets it. And you know, speaking, speaking, okay. So you can hear me all right. Hey, I've been able to. You're starting to come through a little bit. I think it's sorting itself out. I'll just make one more comment about, um, feminism. What I would never want to do is have you gate kept out of sharing your. insights and and brilliant mind with the world. That is, I'll give that nod to feminism saying that was a, that was a good idea that maybe people should have the ability to hear what you have to say without some of the other stuff that makes it detrimental. I'll say that. I think you're, I think you're, I think you're back. Yes. I see you moving. I hear you talking. Good, good, good, good.

So we'll shift gears so I don't short you on the, on the dream process. So let me make a little note here of the time for editing. I throw in a commercial right about now. Sorry, guys. Here it comes. My usual process, I'm just going to shut up and listen. Our friend's going to tell us your dream, and then we're going to talk about it together. So I'm ready when you are. Benjamin the dream wizard wants to help you.

Here's 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 dreamscapes episodes appear every week on YouTube. Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks exploring 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, documenting 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. Okay, so to preface this dream, I've never had a problem with not doing my homework. I actually, like, sometimes, I had a problem with not doing my homework between, like, late elementary school and, like, the first two years of middle school. but since then I haven't, okay? So now I'll tell you my dream. Since mid-COVID, so for about four years, I've been having recurring dreams that I haven't completed high school yet

because I've skipped so many classes. The dream never takes place in a classroom where I can actually learn. It's always after hours I'm trying to talk to the teacher about how I can possibly graduate high school, even though I'm really late on a bunch of assignments, how I need to graduate high school, how I need to enroll in a GRE course,

or it's me in my bedroom mulling over hundreds of pages of homework that I know I'm never going to do. So there's no visual similarities in these dreams, nor is there a common setting. I had one again last night. So last night I was having a dream that I was going to watch a movie about a flood in which water starts bubbling up, but I'm in a theater, right? So I'm watching a square of water bubbling up in the woods, and then the spray of water gets bigger, and then the spray of water gets bigger. And then I realize that the movie theater is flooded, but we're still in the beginning of the movie. So I say to myself, oh, this movie needs an exposition and character development.

So I walk around the movie theater, and I meet a woman in a pink shirt, and I think to myself, myself, my husband won't be jealous if I hang out with this woman, so I'm going to hang out with her. I start talking to this woman in the pink shirt, and I ask if she wants to go into the canoe for the rest of the show. So we get into the canoe, and now there's water on the ground, and there are some dogs, and we go rescue the dogs together, and we put them in the canoe, and then we row to the city center. And then the city center hasn't been flooded yet, but we drag the canoe onto like the streets of what looks like New York. And there are people running in the streets and we're in a restaurant. I know the flood is coming. So I tell her, hey, we should both have a boat so that we can take supplies with us.

So I climb to up the pole of a restaurant and I use the waterproof fabric that they hang over the outdoor tables at the restaurant. start trying to make a canoe for myself. And then the water starts trickling in in the city, and I get back into the canoe. And the woman in the pink shirt, who's at this point is like my established lover, because we have this, I don't know, we have this relationship. That was part of it. And so me and this woman in the pink shirt. And then another random middle-aged woman with red hair who's wearing a black vest, and I don't know how she got there. She's also in the canoe with the dogs. And then when I'm in the canoe, I think to myself,

Emmett, I haven't graduated high school yet. I have to call my teacher. It's not I have to finish the story, but first I have to call my teacher, and I call the office, and I say, I'm sorry that I haven't done my assignment yet. I start frantically doing math problems on my phone, and I don't get to finish the story about the canoe. Okay. Ooh, lots of good stuff.

Talking about a flood myth, huh? I love it. That is great. It's writing down times, y'all. Okay. Oh, that's fantastic stuff. I love it. We've got multiple settings.

Seems like it's got multiple parts or transitions to new settings. Sometimes a dream, okay, talk to one gal. The entire dream was the sensation of falling through a void. That was it. That's one, so sometimes there's one setting. There's one of key experience and that is the focus of everything. This one is definitely narrative style. It's definitely going through telling yourself a story about, so how do I, how do I conceptualize a lot of these things? You mentioned, and I wanted to get to this too, you mentioned the idea of Freud, conceiving things as wishfulfillment is one of those things where like, yes, sometimes they are.

In a way, maybe all of them are, but not exactly. I think it's broader than that. And I think it's been proven that it's broader than that. But very often there are wishes and a wish can be a desire or a fear or pushing or pulling on different things. I want a good thing to happen or I'm afraid a bad thing will happen. Very natural to the human condition. So to say every dream conceals a wish, sort of. I think some dreams can be can be very focused on solving personal problems sometimes. I had this experience.

I need to understand it so that I can process it and come out the other side with something beneficial. that very often happens. Sometimes dreams are, are purely conceptual. We just have, um, a curiosity about an idea and we explore that as like a thought experiment in a dream. And now mostly I think there's a blending of the two. And, and I think it's almost always a blending of the two in terms of, you know, our concepts of the world speak to the symbols we're using to explore other, other things. Um,

and actually the, uh, the, uh, a big part of a lot of the historical dream literature that I'm republishing is the idea of a typical dream and being in class and unprepared naked at a presentation late for a train falling off a high place typical dreams they're very often repeated and so for you it's it's also it seems that not only is it fall into the typical dream category in a sense not because it's always the same but because it has it returns to a similar theme but also the recurring dream category because it returns over and over again. So you've, it seems as if my working theories is that recurring dreams have very often something to do with crystallizing a particular concept that recurs in your life.

And you've represented this as failing to complete high school, that something about that time that experience, the necessity of it, the experience of it has been crystallized in your mind as representing a certain kind of experience that keeps coming back to you in the real world. We haven't nailed down what that is, but just I like to start with some of these bigger, broader concepts when we try and narrow in. I'm not even asking you to validate that necessarily like, yes, that is true. Or no, it isn't. But to kind of, you know, put a pin in it and we let it percolate.

So there's some core concept we're going to, we're going to, we're going to. trying to tease out there and you go through multiple um setting so you're in a theater and you're then you're on the streets of a city and but specifically then you're in a restaurant and specifically go to the top of the restaurant and a flagpole and then the water and the water keeps rising through all these there are all these things that the water's coming and you're trying to get away from it or get prepared for it very very yeah very no in the flood uh type of stuff preparing for disasters Um, and where you end up as, as, as a result of this is back at that concept that I'm, that I'm, we're going to try to try to get to of whatever not graduating high school represents to you in this, in the dream context. So it makes sense where we're, where we're kind of starting and where we're heading. You're muted. Absolutely. Okay. There you go. You're not muted anymore. That's fine. Yeah. So, um, so my process is usually, uh, you know, as I say,

shut up and listen. Then we go through it again. So I'm going to start trying to see it through your eyes a little bit better. Now, I don't consider what I do. And I wouldn't do this if I, if, if,

if, if, uh, I wouldn't call this counseling and therapy if I didn't do it right. So then the reason this is not is, we could take this one dream and talk about it for literally weeks of our long sessions. You know, if you're going to do real clinical dream analysis,

it's going to be deep. And it's going to, One dream can take a long. So we're cramming it in. You know, this is a, it's a version of it, and I think it works. And it leaves you with more questions than answers. You're going to have to kind of follow up on your own. But I try to do a mini version of that.

It's a microcosm of it. Okay, so you're in a theater. The first experience, you're at the beginning of the dream. And usually there's like a little fuzzy stuff before, and people don't remember what it was. But so the first, location being in a theater. How would you describe the theater in terms of, you know, it's a modern movie theater. It's a old-timey vaudeville theater.

Actually, I had no, no visuals about the theater. I just knew that the scene that I was watching had a border and therefore I was protected from it. Okay. So it was like, it was like a square, screen and I was watching the, basically the woods flood, right? So like water started coming up and then it came up bigger and it came up bigger. But at no point did I feel anxiety because I knew that I was somehow protected from that image or it was a movie that I was watching or something. Okay. That's fantastic. So this is why I asked the questions. I'm immediately, I get images in my head of, oh, it's a movie

theater. And, you know, for me, it was kind of a, um, maybe late 1800s. You would go and dress up in your fancy top hat and sit and watch, uh, you know, watch a, uh, jugglers or something. Or, or, uh, anyway, this is why I asked because the dream is not in my head. I have none of these answers. I'm not talking to spirits. I have no psychic powers. Uh, I need to see what you see. So it's, you conceptualize it as a theater. You, or at least you use that word to describe it, but that's not quite the experience. There's, The experience you actually had was not even having a sense of where you were necessarily, but as if in a theater like place because you saw the screen, a rectangle through which you're observing things.

And that's, I think you were, I think you were hitting on something right off the bat when you started saying, I felt protected from it. And my thought was removed from it. So you're, this is a situation you're observing more than you're experiencing, whatever's going on on the screen. And I think that's, so that could be for two reasons. And going back, Freud, too, the whole displacement type of thing is, okay, maybe, maybe, who knows, this is actually something that's happening to you, but you need some emotional distance from it. You're going to view, you're going to dispassionately view it as an observer, even if you're observing yourself. You're going to treat it that way.

Or, and this is why I'm not going to tell you which one, we're going to have to try and figure it out, or we don't figure it out. Sometimes we don't get all the answers. but the alternative is you really are considering yourself as someone observing something that is not happening to you, that you're mostly observing this as something that's happening to other people. This is another one of those things we put a pin in and I throw it out there. You can have an immediate response and you know automatically which one it is. Maybe you don't. And that's okay because it may become more clear in retrospect as we move ahead.

So you can always stop me anytime and correct me or throw your two cents. I'm sorry. I didn't, sorry, I didn't know if you wanted me to stop you. You can, absolutely. Now we're talking. Now we're collaborating. Cool. Yeah, I think that I think that I actually have trained myself to do that in my conscious thoughts.

Even when I'm in a situation that's stressful, I'm very good at looking at wherever I'm in or whatever place I'm in through a screen. And that's something that I did as a. adult and it's just you just a certain disassociation that's always been really helpful for me so it started so maybe a more correct interpretation is that um i started by watching this flood and then i realized i'm going to tell a story about the flood that came to me but at first i i know that it's coming and now i have to go and and prepare absolutely and then the next because the next thing that happens is first you're observing this thing that's happening in, uh, through a screen. But then you actually do end up, the flood does come to you.

You do end up having the experience of it. So about that, I think that gives us very much gives us a clue of like, okay, this is not something. Uh, let me, let me start over again. You may, it seems like you have, have reported and described a, a typical pattern you have of being of a more distanced, uh, dispassionate, um, observational stance on even even things you're experiencing like you just you got a problem you're going to consider it you're not going to hold it close you're going to hold it out in front of you and

look at it go what is this thing what am i looking at here a little more rational uh less less emotive or or um visceral knee jerk response to things um even even even things that are that are happening to you so it looks like we're going going in that direction um so what you notice is the water is coming it's a forest scene and there's this water in like a spout like an old yellow geyser or how would you describe it yeah yeah like an old yellow geyser

it started it started as a little mound I said old yeller whoops Yellowstone go ahead go ahead sorry I knew what you meant because he used to with geyser yeah I knew exactly what you meant yeah it was it actually was exactly like a geyser It was a little mound that was trickling water and then it got bigger and then the water started rushing and then it got really big. Right.

And so here's where I introduce what I call counterfactuals, the idea of it wasn't, it wasn't a river overflowing its banks. It wasn't glacial melt, you know, turning into a cascade. It wasn't a tsunami on the ocean. There's something about this forest setting and the idea of the water, the problem coming up out of the ground. What struck me is a natural environment. So a more natural kind of problem. You know, it wasn't the breaking of a dam. Breaking of a dam would be some kind of man-made failure or in a sense.

This seems like a more natural problem you're considering. I don't know if that evokes any anything. Yeah, it was more of a volcano, but with water coming out. Maybe a way that I could have interpreted it, instead of saying I was in a theater, a way that I could have conveyed it to you is that I saw on the news through a screen that a volcano of water had erupted. And now suddenly I have to go find a canoe. Maybe that's a more accurate recollection of the dream. Sure.

Excuse me. This is where we get into Morphorite and stuff, and I think he was right about it. there's what he called secondary elaboration where we start thinking back on the dream and filling in some things. And that does happen. But I think he generally considered it a problem. And I don't necessarily because when we start bringing these images back to our mind, things come to us, connect the free association style that connects to it.

And we start saying things around it that describe, try to better describe, what did I see, what did I feel? that kind of a thing. So you've got this, but very much you're describing, you know, it's, it's in the woods, it's a geyser, it's volcanic, it's none of these things are manmade. There's something natural. So if we look at two categories of evil in the world, natural evil and manmade evil. This is definitely of the natural evil variety. It's a problem we're going to have to deal with. It's a flood. It's a volcano. It's a hurricane. It's cancer. It's not something you necessarily have control over. It's something that's going to come to you, whether you like it or not,

You got to deal with it. Couldn't be avoided and it's nobody's fault. Does that feel right for the description? Yes. Yes, absolutely. Gotcha. That's cool. I mean, those are, yeah, just exploring where, what is this thing?

What does it look like? What is it doing? What does it behave like? And we get better answers. Do you need a moment? Do you need a break? I'm fine with that. Either way.

Sorry, my dog wants to come in. Just give me one. moment. Do you want to take five or um not a problem I could I can vamp for a minute too this is a great guess I'm going to say that while she's not while she's not here I'm really having fun talking to her I enjoy all my guests but uh you know she's don't cover she's back I wonder if she'll go back and listen to this all righty we can we can always take a break too if you needed a minute um you know I think that I muted myself when I when I gave my explanation My dog needed to come in.

I'm really sorry about that. No, no, no. That's okay. I would say if you needed more time, it's, I'm fine, I'm fine with that. So I've got a little wiggle room to me.

We've got, suddenly we've got 10 minutes left. When I, when I said, I thought I would need to be done. You're not on a hard time limit like that too, or are you? You don't have to go away.

No, I'm not. Okay. Otherwise, if you were, I try to rush. And don't worry about the squeaky toy noises. That's perfectly fine. It's not,

not a big deal. Let me see here. Animals. You should see some of my live streams there, constant interruptions. Okay, so all of that just describing the state of a natural problem coming to you. How did you get from observing that screen to finding a canoe? Did you find the canoe first or the woman in pink? Woman in pink.

I found the woman in pink. And I think that she had the canoe. What was the, what did you see or experience in that search or in that? the finding where was where where where did what location did you find yeah yeah yeah so um i saw the volcano through a screen and then i said oh this story doesn't have this story needs an exposition it needs an exposition i need to find a character um so i look around and i find a woman and i say to myself my husband won't be jealous uh if i develop a relationship with her her because she's female, right? So I go to this woman, by the way, my husband's not a dick,

just putting that out there. It's just a dream. Right. So I go to this woman and she has a canoe because she also knows that something is coming. Or actually, I don't remember if she has the canoe or if I have the canoe. Okay. And that's fine if it's, that's fine if it's, that's fine if it's, a little vague. I mean, I think that would, it would mean one thing if you brought it.

It would mean one thing if she had it. And it means something else, I think probably that you, you're not sure. And something about the two of you coming together causes the discovery of the canoe. I think that we've got somewhere, somewhere we're heading.

Right. Okay. Lots of interesting things here. So lots of, and this is another thing I would say, you know, Freud is right about in terms of the density of things. The more you look into stuff, the more,

are packed inside of it. So that's what I'm trying to do is extract it apart in some ways. The observation leads to the realization of some kind of necessary action. And the necessary action you thought was this story needs exposition. I've got to find a character. So what does that mean? How am I how would I describe that back to you? There's um, there's, There's something going on in there that describes the way you approach problem solving as in general, I think, if that makes sense. And I'll try and describe what I mean that exposition is explanation, basically. So what a cutie. Oh, what a cutie.

Look at that. You know, it's, yeah, it's description. I mean, we need a, we need someone to tell us what's going on. We need to put this into words, basically. And in order to do that, you need a perspective from which to give a description, someone who's observing the scene, experiencing the scene. I need a character. I need to know where I need an explanation. I need to know.

And in order to get an explanation, I need someone to give the explanation. Am I on to something there? Does it feel right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And feel free to tell me if I'm wrong. I'm happy to be wrong. If you go, none of that.

But here's what I was when you said that, here's what I thought. That's fine. Yeah, I think that I believed that I was writing a story or I believed that I was going to go through something so that in the end I would be able to write the story. And I was like, okay, this is the major problem that I'm witnessing through a screen. I need an exposition, so I need a character. And then I go through when I start problem solving for the major problem. but then my dream gets interrupted because I haven't finished high school yet. Yep.

So the chain of thought appears to be I'm observing something. I want to be able to communicate what I'm seeing. The way I do that best is by the exposition of some kind of a main character. I pick a perspective. Who's seeing this? And it's probably if you're a writer. I mean, it's like that's one of the big things, especially stories that follow say one character and it's all about his thoughts and his motivations or whatnot or hers.

And, you know, even when they're wrong, they're telling you that their true thoughts, even if it's an incorrect assessment. And then that becomes, that's part of their character too. So you're like, yeah, I have an observation. I want to be able to communicate this, tell the story. I need a perspective from which to give exposition. And that leads naturally to, okay, well, who do I find. Who do I choose? Who is suggested to me by my subconscious is this woman in pink. When you think about her, does anything stand out about her other than her clothing? And what kind of clothing was it? You know, height, body shape, demeanor, anything kind of jump out at you describing her? She was an athletic-looking African-American woman, pink shirt.

She looked a lot like, um, uh, the star cross country runner in my high school. Oh. There's a high school link, huh? There's a high school. Now, now that you think about it, right? Um, and that's fine too. Um, and, uh, it's a pink shirt and any other, um, you know, skirt pants, track shorts. Um, it's, it stands out or it didn't.

Yeah. So, no, that's an interesting. So I just ask you, well, what does she look? like, you know what, she looked like this gal I knew in high school. What was your relationship to that person at the time? You were aware of her. You were friends with her. You went to track meets.

You used to be a runner and she was your chief rival. What? Yeah, I was a kind of chubby girl who was on the cross country team for the first two years. She was a really, really fast runner. and she occasionally talked to me at track meet dinners. Once a week we would have track meet dinners or once every two weeks or something, and they were like the first high school parties that I went to,

and they were obviously supervised by adults, but there was like one adult and 40 teenage girls, so you would have whatever conversation. I talked to her a couple of times. She was cool. I was pretty indifferent to her. Yeah. So you would say she was...

Her name was Jessica. Aspirational, inspirational, role model type. Like, if you want to be a good runner, you recognize her ability as a good runner. And she was kind, or at least socially interacted with you. You know, she wasn't a mean girl. She was just... No, she was cool.

Yeah, she wasn't mean. Yeah. She didn't really take no... notice of me. You weren't on her radar because she's like, you know, she's on the team, but she's not, she's not in my league, but I'm not going to be a jerk. Yeah. Right.

Exactly. Fair enough. That's how it was. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting connection between, oh yeah. I remember interacting with her at track meat dinners and where does the canoe trip take

you but to a restaurant. I don't know what that means. Yeah. But, but definitely there's, there's something. And it could be as simple as thinking of this particular woman reminded you of being in a restaurant with her. And so, of course, your brain goes, hey, let's set the next part of this dream in a restaurant. It could be as simple as that. It could be a little more meaningful. We'll see if we can tease out, tease out something going on there. So there's something about, as I was saying, it's not

that you brought the canoe or found it. It's not that she already had it and gave it to you, but the meeting of the minds, the connection between the two of you, something, there's like a, there's like a magic that happens when two people can do something, one person can't. And what comes out of that is, Bam, we got a solution. We got a canoe. Water's the problem. I need a canoe. I need something to float on it.

Could have been any kind of a thing. Counterfactuals, it could have been a yacht. Whoa, she had a yacht. I mean, that's putting her on a pedestal perhaps. It could have been, she gave me a rubber ducky, a flotation ring. You know, one of those kids pool toys. But this was a canoe. What kind of a canoe?

An old, you know, dugout made of a solid tree or a modern fiber glass? Yeah. It was an old canoe. And in terms of old, are you looking at, what era would you put in? 1920s, 1800s, like literally Native American dugout? Yeah, I would say more of a Native American dugout canoe. It was an old, ancient canoe-looking thing. It didn't have seats, right?

The canoe didn't have the boards across it where you would sit on. You had to sit on the floor of the canoe. so. Okay. If it was, you know. And do you have any sense of the physical setting you were in, you know, the surroundings, the environment when you met her and discovered the community together?

Yeah. So we had gone from inside a building into the woods that was getting flooded by the volcano. So there was a lot of fluidity in the settings. Yeah. But we rode from the flooded woods, like a swamp to the city and we knew that the flood was coming. Okay. Interesting there too.

So seeing it in my head and kind of feeding it back to you describing. Observing the problem at a distance through a screen. I need an explanation. I need a perspective through which to analyze the situation. I find, and you find her indoors, you know, you discover that she's in your immediate environment that you don't have to look very far to get the help you need to to to settle on a perspective through which to analyze this and so it we might even analyze the rest of the dream through this perspective of

something that this person taught you something that you were inspired by them to become lots of different ways to do that I'm not saying it's any one of those things but something something about that is is that when you chose this person as the main character to give you the exposition for a reason at least in that in that particular setting And then something about the two of you coming together made it possible to then leave this contained distance and enter the natural environment in which the adverse event is taking place and gives you the tool you need to overcome it. The flood's coming. I need a boat. Hey, there's a canoe.

And it's very interesting that it's ancient, too. You described it as ancient old dugout style. That's why I wanted to get a handle on it too because that might have said something about the, era era of the tool itself is what I'm trying to say so if I'm going to analyze something through a particular perspective um there's going to be markers of where that perspective came from and so there's so the idea that it's ancient uh in thinking of storytelling in general you might be like this is a very old problem and a very there's very old solutions and so you showed you gave yourself a physically old solution to this problem we've been building boats for

a long time. But, you know, of course, it isn't, it isn't about water. I mean, the, the, the, um, the problem isn't an actual flood. That's, that's where drain it. That's like, another thing where Freud was right, we give these symbols in there. It's like, so it's, it's like this. It's like a flood. Let me tell you a flood story to get your, get your brain going down the right. Understanding of what you're trying to process here. This, this one. She let, she lays right on the notes. This is, this is baby. Oh, always, always. Hi, Steve. Oh, no.

And then if I get her in the right spot, she'll do the, let me see if I can make her do it. No, there she's going, she's going. There it is. Okay, she's got that little nerve behind her here. Okay. Long story short. So then you enact the plan to escape from the immediate danger.

So there's something, you're getting even more distance from it. It isn't like you, you rode the canoe to the location of the guy. and put a plug in it. That would be a completely different experience. So what you actually have to do is get away from it and go through. And it makes sense, just a logical sense that there's like this swamp like area where there's already some flooding and it's above,

you know, you're not walking on solid ground. You're definitely, you're in the water. You're already, you're already dealing with the immediate effects of the problem. And you're successfully overcoming it by getting more distance from it. I'm going to stop there.

You got a thought? You started nodding. Yeah. So, um, the water actually. did not induce any anxiety in me throughout the entire thing. I didn't have any anxious feeling about the fact that a flood would calm or that I was in any danger. Now, I have had

dreams in the past where I was drowning. And I would wake up from those dreams because I was right, right. So I have had dreams where I was scared of water in the past. But in this dream, the water was kind of just like, oh gosh, this is. happening. And I was really much more concerned about the fact that I had a friend in my boat with me. And that was like, and I don't remember what I had said to her. I don't think that we had any dialogue. I was just like observing that in this story, I have an exposition with a friend in a canoe with me. Okay. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Very interesting too. So there was never at any point in the dream, a sense of anxiety, threat, danger.

Yeah. Maybe, let's see, what do we make of that? We get anxiety or feel threat or fear when we, what's, it's the disparity between the demands of a situation and our abilities. So something about this, you're conceptualizing. Whatever this is, I have it under control. I don't feel this is beyond my ability to understand or adapt or cope with. There's something like that going on in there.

And the presence of anxiety would say the opposite of like you're conceptualizing this flood is a really big deal. And it is beyond your ability to deal with. Every step of the way you seem to have, I need to find a person. There she is. I need to find, now we need a boat. There it is. We need to get away from the guys are done through the swamp. And then you end up on the shores of a of a city.

And it's, you described it as kind of New York like. And that may mean something. It may not, but that's a good easy filler for, um, but, but it's definitely you've gone from a state of nature to moving towards inhabited civilization. There's, there's something about, um, so this, you've got a, um, a natural problem that is not manmade. You've got the collaboration with a competent person that you've respected from way back when a physically, physically competent person. You could have put in a person who was your writing English teacher at the time. So there's something about the physical abilities of this person that speaks to the nature of the problem you might be dealing with,

as you chose them as the avatar of who to turn to for advice and partnership. And speaking of that, too, just to quickly address, I mean, not to say you do or don't have any particular sexual orientation, but I don't think it's necessarily indicative of, you know, you've got some secret lesbian tendencies or something. Now, you may. In reality, you may, and we just haven't mentioned it, but I don't know that that's what that's about. You know, what is it like? Yeah, I agree with you. I was, I was hesitant to include that detail, but I was like, yeah, I should include it. I don't I don't think that I do at least not consciously but I did in the dream I in the dream

but you didn't it was like I was going to say you didn't actually have any sexual relationship with the person but you had a relationship that was intimate yeah yeah it wasn't a sex dream so I don't that's why and even a sex dreams like if I had a dream that I stabbed my cat and I woke up horrified feeling terrible that doesn't mean I secretly want to murder kittens that's that's not how any of this stuff works. No, and even when you have sexual dreams, say, I think I talked to another person where it's the concept of being so close to someone that it's as if as close as you could possibly be,

which there's, there's few things that are closer, more intimate than, um, the sex act in that sense. So, so for this one, there's,

um, um, um, um, one of the, I'm trying to say. And maybe we'll tease it out a little bit more, too, as we go along. But the idea that you formed a very intimate bond, that you've taken this concept so much to heart as if you're holding it to your chest like you would embrace a lover.

And it's more of the concept of being that close to something or being that vulnerable and trusting and allowing that much intimacy. That's where I think we're going with it. I think the sexual angle is just not useful. or true. You know, take your word for it. There's no reason to suspect it's not. Okay.

Yeah. To suspect it's not. Yeah. For sure. Right, right. No, it would, it would be okay if it was true. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Yeah. I'm not just, no, it's just, it is either true or not for you. And so we're going to, we're going to go with that because I think that's, well,

that was my gut sense anyway. Do you have a clear representation or image or experience of getting from the canoe to the restaurant? Or you just kind of ditched it on the shore and suddenly you were somewhere else? No, we did not have a clear thing. Like, at some point, we had to get out of the canoe. We dragged the canoe to the restaurant.

But I don't remember when we got out. But the canoe came with us and we had to physically carry it. But it was easy. It was easy to drag. It was like nothing. That's interesting, too. So you didn't leave it behind. There's something about this tool that, uh,

Sometimes it is not conducive to the circumstances. What am I trying to say? It's like it's something you don't leave behind, even if you can't use it for the moment. And you showed yourself bringing it along. That's very interesting too. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's like, I'm going to need this later. This is not, I'm not abandoning it. I'm not done with this. But it was also easy enough to bring it along. It wasn't the, you didn't have that experience of panting, sweating, difficulty dragging this. that would again I like to go with counterfactuals that's one of those things where it's like if you did you'd go okay maybe this maybe I'm I'm bringing something doesn't belong and it's a

detriment to me but this okay so we just say this was easily brought to the restaurant and did you have any particular kind of experience at the restaurant where you were um did you talk to the people there or no so at the time everyone in the city knew that a flood was coming so people were running around. But we had gone to the restaurant, and I said, we need more than just the canoe.

So I started taking the canopy the fabric that they use over the outdoor seating, and I was going to try to make a waterproof boat with that stuff.

Okay, I got slightly distracted. I found another piece of paper they're from who knows when oh this was another this was another interpretation I have with someone I'm gonna have to find out where that belongs sorry it's completely distracted me you get there there there were there were there were there were not other people there sorry and there were other people in panic because they knew the flood was coming everyone in the city knew the flood was coming okay and it's okay so this is very well could have been the entire dream was you and this

one other person and no one else was present but You showed yourself, you went to a habit, habitated, inhabited. Right. Inhabited city, very, very much iconic of human, civilization itself. And those people there have become aware of a problem. You got the sense that they knew about it when you arrived. You weren't the one that told them necessarily. Yes.

Okay. They all knew. They all knew. And they were in a panic about it. They're like, whoa, this is a big deal. But you never had any panic. I know exactly what to do. I can handle this.

So you're showing yourself maybe a difference between how you handle a certain kind of problem and how other people might respond like, okay, number one, chill the fuck out. Number two, do something useful. So you had this experience of knowing you needed more than just one canoe. Like you is, was that so that you and your, and your partner each had one? Or were you planning to save other people? What was the purpose of making a second canoe? I wanted extra room for my stuff.

Oh, and I completely forgot about the dogs thing. There was in the swamp, you saved dogs. Yeah, in the swamp, we saved some dogs, which is nice because I have dogs and I like saving them. Yeah. Well,

and that's, uh, I would say that's probably one of the few things in the dream that's maybe the most easily understandable and directly related to your life. If we're on to something here, it was like the first thing you would do after you were safe is make sure your dogs were safe because you care about them a lot. And, you know, also, in this conceptual setting, you're showing yourself, you've already got a

partner so your husband wasn't present. You didn't think, you did, you did have a moment of saying, can I be this intimate with someone or bring, bring something this close to me in a way that is, doesn't threaten my husband? And you're like, no, he'd be okay with this because she's a girl. So he's not going to be jealous or feel that this is inappropriate or betray. of him in some way. And that whole thought may have been inspired just by realizing that the conceptual approach you were going to bring to problem solving was related to a relationship you,

you know, brief, even distant relationship in high school with a specific archetype that happened to be female and you go, wait a minute, is my husband okay with that? Oh, she's female. He doesn't care. If it was a man, you might have gone. I'll have to explain to him why this is not what it looks like. But anyway, so that might not be. all that relevant to.

So where did the dogs go when you reach the shore? They kind of disappeared. They were, or they weren't. Yeah, they did. Okay. They disappeared. You showed yourself successfully resolving that part of the dilemma.

Like, okay, my dogs are safe. I don't have to think about that anymore. This is what it seems like. And you get to this restaurant and there's other people. How did you just show yourself people being in a panic? Or did you just know? that they were freaking out. So they were like running.

They were running and they, they were trying to build boats. Okay. They were also building boats. Did you get a sense that they had seen you or they also kind of independently hit on the same necessary solution? I think that they all saw the same video maybe. I don't know.

I didn't have a complete explanation, but everybody knew that a flood was coming. And they were all trying to figure it. out. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And this is this is a, it's a very simplified problem too. So even if you're dealing with something more complex, sometimes the answer is obvious. And if it's a flood, it's obvious. You need a boat. So you're showing yourself, okay, other people are freaking out, but at least they are aware of the problem. They're doing something about it. And then their action is effective. They're going to build a boat. Whether they're going to do it in time, at least they're

doing the right type of thing that they should be doing for that for the, for the, for the action. that scenario. So you, the purpose behind needing to build an additional boat or a second boat is that you had stuff you wanted to bring with you. Did you have a concept of what that stuff was, what you needed to fit into this larger or second boat? I started raiding the restaurant for food and I put the food in the boat. I think I missed that part. I think you did tell me that too. I did tell you that. Yeah. But I did. I started, actually, it was weird because I wasn't taking food from the back of the restaurant. I was picking it off from the ceiling as I was picking off the canopy.

Interesting. I was picking off the food. So there was food like stuck to the ceiling? Stuck to, yeah, but it wasn't abnormal. Right. It felt completely natural. Well, where else would you find food? Of course, it's on the ceiling. I'm like, now wait a minute. That is very, now looking back on it, that is very unusual. Why show yourself that the food was on the ceiling?

How was it packaged or was it? Was it just like a chicken leg when you picked it like a piece of fruit or? Yeah. It was it was packaged in to go containers. Okay. Yeah, because they knew the flood was coming. And so maybe the rationale was get the food off the taste.

so that it wouldn't be harmed by the flood that will store it on the ceiling maybe there's something there i have no idea i don't think that's so bizarre to me too i'm like i don't know what to make of that yeah yeah interesting nothing nothing comes to mind when you think about the the action of retrieving it yeah my dreams uh are very often absurdist in that way i've had a lot of absurd absurdist dreams I just chose that one because I had it last night. Sure. I remember my dreams a lot. People have a dream the night before they talk to me.

Right, right. I wish that I had kept a record of my dreams, but very often I'll tell like, you know, whoever is around, like, oh, I had a dream about like zebras that walk on two legs and talk or whatever. Like I have a lot of dreams about, women with really, really large molars, like that's a recurring thing in my, like multiple dreams over time. I've had problems with women screaming with like huge, huge teeth. So I don't know.

I have dreams where everything is upside down and it doesn't bother me. I don't know. That's something. Yeah. Well, it's very often, there's one or two elements of a dream where we're like, I would probably never going to figure that out why and then it like the whole understanding doesn't really hinge on that it's sometimes it's a throwaway element sometimes it's as easy as that kind of a we come up with any kind of rational explanation going of course it'd be on the ceiling that's keep it safe from the water uh it did it did that's why i did say you know plucking a chicken like like like like like pull a piece of fruit off a tree just to see if that sparked sparked anything in you um not necessarily so there could be an explanation that we'll never find it some elements are just so bizarre but i And that was kind of coincident in a way with realizing that the awning material would make a good boat fabric. Because it was waterproof. Oh, it's waterproof, of course. And it's interesting. You take something that covers from rain and you're using it to put it underneath you to protect from something coming from down below.

I don't know what that means either. But there was something about climbing a flagpole. How did that come into it? I had to climb the flagpole to get the, you get the awning. Okay. So that's how you, you climb the flagpole to reach, reach the awning. Right.

And then when I, when you say food like stuck to the ceiling, you're not talking about on top of a roof. You're talking about like to the underside of the ceiling. Was it climbing the flagpole that revealed you where the food was? It was like on a rafter that's like going through the ceiling. Gotcha. Okay. It was like food on the raft.

and I took it down. Okay, fair enough. Interesting. And it was to go food. It was all pre-packaged and ready to neatly packaged and ready for you to take with you. Very convenient, very, almost like it was left there for you to find in a way. You'll get what you need. Just look around.

Be creative. Is it stashed in the rafters? Something like that. So, okay. We're getting very close to the end. I got to go all the way back to this. It was this one here. Then the moment that I do start feeling anxiety in the dream

is when I realize I can't finish the dream because I haven't graduated high school. So in that moment, that experience came while you were climbing the flagpole while you were retrieving the tarp material. While Jessica was building the boat, I had to stop building the boat with her, because I had to do math problems on my phone.

Okay. So that's, so you didn't actually have a full scene change, a full transition to now you're back at your old high school. Now you're talking to a teacher. But you just had this, you had your process interrupted by this sudden shift of focus to an unfinished task in a way. And not more than an unfinished task.

There's something that's been noodling around. And like I said, this is where we're going because, of course, it's at the very end of the dream. And I'm like, let's just throw this out there. Part of it was for me to say, very often there's a concept, the idea of not finishing, but it's specifically not finishing school, not, not completing the process of learning something. And what, what that does is it makes you prepared to then implement that learning. So where am I going? Where am I going with that in this one?

You may have come to this point in your dream where it's time to build a boat and Jay Marie doesn't know how to build a boat. And so you actually can't do that. And you're like, shit, this is just like when I, the way I feel when I realize I'd never finished high school. I'm going to stop right there. You having a feeling or thoughts about that that concept of, I didn't learn.

I don't know how to do this thing. And it gives me that feeling of like I'm unprepared to graduate. I'm unprepared to move on to implement knowledge. It was more that I felt like I had to step out of something exciting. It was like, oh, like, okay, I'm doing this something. It's super exciting. Oh, damn it, I have to do my homework. So it wasn't actually a feeling of like, uh-oh, I'm ignorant.

I don't understand the next step in a process. I don't know how to implement this thing. At no point. I mean, I don't know how to build a boat, but at no point in the dream did I have that concern? Okay. That's interesting. So that's getting us. So now we start looking about, we've explored this whole thing.

And it could be, okay, one way to address this is this happened last night. So is there any circumstance in your life you're going through right now where there's some kind of a natural problem that you're didn't cause and you need to figure out how to communicate it and maybe it's a physical problem and you're the avatar of physical ability came to you and gave you the ability to find a boat to deal with the problem of some means of conveyance or a problem solving technique. You're dealing with any like specifically physical issues lately? It could be with anything. Did you say you're pregnant currently?

I am pregnant, yes. I am pregnant. I'm almost 17 weeks, and I have a girl. But I have had very little dreams about that. Actually, that's not true. I think that I've had some dreams where I've told people that I was pregnant. But that was always like me centered. It was always centered around like my identity, like, oh, I'm pregnant now.

I haven't had a lot of dreams where I've really communed with the consciousness of a baby. Sure, sure. So well I'm more thinking What brought brought to my mind when I'm thinking what's a what's a physical What's a what's a What's a situation that means? Yeah moving moving moving I have had to move yeah So uh

Less than two weeks ago I drove from Houston Texas to Michigan And my husband is currently in New York because of a job and the reason that I'm not in New York Is because I don't want to live in New York with three dogs. Yeah, that's a big deal. So, yeah, and it's just, he's, he's paying $1,800 for one bedroom in a five-bedroom apartment. And I'm like, I, I'm not, I'm living with my mom right now. Can't live like that. I never could. Yeah. Yeah. That's, whoa. Yeah. So expensive. Everyone's crammed in right there. Well, there's, go ahead. So he was, he was looking for a really long time, you know, like he, he really was like, this is the best deal that I can get and still, like, be in the area and go to my job.

And I'm like, look, I, yeah, it's still an awful deal. Yeah. Yeah. There's very much a physical problem in that physical spatial problem separation. Yeah. Well, then how would the... That makes sense that he would be absent from it. And then also, I think that I told you at the beginning that, like, one of the main things that I had to do at the beginning of COVID,

but I graduated in 2020 was to decide to not get a PhD, right? Yeah. So it didn't occur to me until this conversation, but it makes sense that I would have these recurring dreams about not finishing high school as a displacement for like not continuing my education. So that seems like something, an abstraction. Weird that it's focused on high school and not college, but that's the main thing. It could be.

And then if we, you know, lean into the country. of the 40 inside of things that the displacement would be is maybe you're not really ready to fully confront not pursuing higher education further so you shift it back a little bit to something you actually did complete so you but you can imagine what it'd be like if you didn't and it's a little safer with that at that distance so that there's that possibility yeah um yeah yeah no I think that that makes sense here you want to go that's did you have something oh just rambling still and and And thinking about it, and we may have hit upon a very real and true element of it. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure it is or it isn't, but I'll say it this way. So I'm not sure that's all it really represents. Just because a lot of these things get, they're very rarely so specific. They're usually a little bit fuzzier, a little more conceptual in terms of, because you were, did you only start having these dreams about not finishing high school since you decided not to pursue your yeah i don't have an exact time but it's like not something i used to have dreams about drowning in a flood when i was in high school i remember those dreams okay uh these dreams about not finishing high school are very recent you know like a couple of years and that and and they only started after you decided not to pursue the

PhD or yeah okay well then maybe it is I was gonna say I okay again the counterfactual if you've been having these dreams for 10 years and you only a year ago decided not to go further in in post secondary they wouldn't be related but this very well could be it was very well could be and it did seem like something resonated with you of like ah I really don't want to think about how I didn't do something I thought I wanted to do like were you um was it kind of a natural confluence of events that made it more difficult to pull that off or, you know, impossible lifestyle-wise? No, no. I didn't do well on my, on my, like, graduating project, and I couldn't get the recommendations that I needed.

I didn't think that I had good recommendations. So I ended up pulling my apps, and I was like, oh, gosh, what am I going to do with my life? No one's going to accept me into the programs that I want. and you know I and even still like like there's kind of just like problems in higher ed right now because like there's always been this issue with the ivory tower but people are so far like up their own bus in the literature department in specific that like they can't oh gosh it's like really bad it's like being it's kind of like working in a cult like I don't know how to describe okay so like we're talking about feminine I know that you have to go soon. We just tell you really briefly. Okay. I can imagine having critiques of feminism would not go over well with certain academic types, right?

So one lady had a picture of a baby on her door, and I walked in and I said, oh, is that your grandchild? Because she was old. And she got really, really quiet. And then she said, come with me. and she led me down a hallway to another faculty, and she started screaming. She pointed at the door of the department chair, and she said, you see this room, it's almost always filled by a man. And most of the time, an idiot man, when you came into my office, you didn't ask me about my work. You asked me about my reproductive capabilities.

You only like me because of my uterus. Wow. She screamed at me. She screamed at me in front. She led me out of the hallway to be in front of other people, and she's so. screamed at me and humiliated me. It was really difficult to like continue this. That is unbelievable.

A bitch is a picture of a baby in your door. What the fuck? No, here's the thing. Here's the thing about that. Okay. So she, this seemed rational to her because she was so offended that I asked about the picture of the baby on her door.

So she sent me an email about it and then she sent me another email about it. And so eventually I reported it to the like office of respect or something. And I was like, I need help with this woman. And the Office of Respect wrote back, like, you know, when there's interpersonal conflicts where both sides are legitimate, normally what we do is we do mediated communication. So they invited me and invited her. And they were like, okay, well, you know, you shouldn't have asked about that picture of the baby on her door. She shouldn't have gotten as angry. Let's just shake it off.

So the entire, like, organization, like, thought that that was like a, appropriate and proportional and okay. Like, like, the entire, like, cultural milieu was, like, that level of feminist. Okay? So, so I don't know why I got that. Anyway, the point is that that's the type of environment

that I was operating in, and I decided to not do a PhD, even though I probably would have liked being able to just, like, read because that's, because I like reading anyway. And I've been, I've made significantly more, money than like people who get PhDs doing their 40s like in my 20s so it's okay well I consciously know my own my own story real quick I consciously chose not to get into you know to go for a master's and get a hang out a shingle and going to private private practice because what I was doing was you know in first in adolescent psych and then an inpatient

psychiatric I enjoyed it I was able to it matched a skill set that I had in terms of being a little on the autistic side I suffer less burnout with with emotion dealing with people with emotional trauma. I can just be present and calm and help them through hold their hand while they suffer. And it doesn't hurt me physically viscerally, emotionally as much as it does other people. So very, very, very proud of that. And also, you know, it was a lateral move financially. I'm like, I don't really need this.

And then, you know, I hit upon the dream thing. And I'm like, I'll just teach myself. I mean, I don't need a formal education. What am I going to do? Get a PhD in dreams. I mean, whatever. You know, so I don't think higher and higher and higher levels of degree. degrees and accolades and titles is necessary.

I think if you can just show what you've got by doing it, do what you do and then make a living at it. Yeah, I agree. I think that you very clearly demonstrate the complexity of your thoughts by the things that you say, right? And you really don't need to have a degree to show that the things that you're saying are legitimate because, like, they're self-evidently interesting things, like the thing you were saying about, like, the cult leader.

being a necromancer. You said a couple other things that were really smart. So, yeah, I agree completely. I think that like, trying to prove it. Yeah, you do. You do. And like the, the things that you share already prove the point.

That's my point. But anyway, we were getting into that. Yeah, well, now that you're mentioning the idea of, um, the,

the academic environment and how, um, I want to say toxic, the words overused, but, but the idea of, um, it feels what popped in my head was the idea of fighting forces of nature.

Like I'm really going to wade into this and turn the tide myself. I'm going to get swept away by the flood. Maybe I need a boat to get the hell out of here. All of this could be very, very intimately related with that. And then it's like, well, now what? What do I do? How do I, you know, I solve the immediate problem of survival. I need to not drown.

I have a boat. But that's not good enough. I also need to go to, you know, I have to interact with civilization and I have to gather provisions. And then the ending of the dream, the idea of being interrupted by unfinished business from the past, specifically this returning theme. Can you tell me a little bit about other dreams? You did in the very beginning. And we're going to try and this is why I've gone four and a half hours with someone before.

But you were talking about you've had these dreams before. all take place in slightly different settings, so to speak. And I don't find that surprising at all because if it's a recurrent problem, it's going to recur over multiple different kinds of settings. More thematic. What do I say? Thematics are wrong? I think you get what I'm saying.

Anyway, I don't need to belabor that. So maybe you could say a little bit more about other dreams where you've, where you've hit a certain point of action in the dream or steps in a process and been interrupted by this. by this realization. You know what? Actually, I have a real problem writing stories that conclude. I'm a very good writer,

and exposition comes so naturally to me. And when I'm like walking my dogs, I'll just think about something and I'll come up with a story really naturally. But I have a hard time with them concluding. And, you know, it does seem like, I'm like oh damn I I haven't finished high school right at the point where the dream could have

concluded um and I didn't think about that until until you started you asked me that question but in terms of like my conscious thoughts so it seems like now that you think about it the the oh I didn't finish high school comes more towards the end of dreams where maybe something should have something else should have happened and there's a that's that's fascinating you say that too so that we conceptualize this is a, what am I trying to say? There's a, there's a face palm. There's a, there's a hit in your head of like, this, I should be able to do this. What, what?

Did I never finish high school? Come on. You know, it's something as simple as that where it's like, you're so far removed from that where you're like, oh my God, I thought high school was hard when I was in it. Now I realize how easy it was by comparison. This is actually a much, some people might even go lower and say, would you never finish kindergarten, you know, because we look at that as more insulting. But high school is at least like, okay, that's the beginning of now, now I know the basics.

And I'm going to, I'm going to begin on a journey to learn. It's like foundational stuff. So does that make sense where I'm going with this idea of like it's, there's a certain layer of foundational information you're supposed to have? And if you never even get that much, you're screwed, you know. And so having these representations of failing to learn something basic that should have been nailed down before you launched another adventure. I'll stop there for a second.

I don't know if you have thoughts. Yeah, yeah. The idea of high school being like in the middle of advanced education and basic education. Yeah, that's a pretty transition point. Maybe high school is the thing that distinguishes between like people who just kind of think and people who really, really think about. something maybe like I don't know I I guess that like maybe it comes back to the fact that people are so anxious about I'm sorry I think that I do have to go soon we're gonna wrap

it up just a couple of minutes is a yeah yeah yeah no just the the final thing I suppose I would say on that is that just to reinforce your point too is like I don't I don't see people with a degree is better than people without or high school but there is a dividing line between that's that's the point where people separate from I'm going to work with my head and I'm going to work with my hands I don't see either one is better but you need different kinds of specialty training for each and so there's yeah it's it's very much that that bare minimum that everybody gets before they decide how they're going to proceed in life in general but I think we're both out of time so I mean at least you got we got a good discussion about it we actually

described some things that are relevant to you're like that makes sense to me in my life we got enough answers to leave you with some things to think about. Thank you so much, Benjamin. This was wonderful. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, no, no, for sure. Well, let me just do the wrapping up stuff. We'll send people to your website and all that good stuff.

This has been our friend Jane Marie Array from Lansing, Michigan area. And you can find her at jane-marie.org.com. Link in the description below. She is a psychological writer and deep thinker, as we've come to appreciate. Her book is Screens and The Ego, a meditation on Gen Z, well received by New York Times bestselling authors.

So she's got that going for her, which is nice. For my part, if you would kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers.

17 currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent, The Fabric of Dreams by Catherine Taylor Craig. All this and more, of course, at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including MP3 versions of this podcast. podcast. Also, Benjamin the Dreamwizard.locals.com trying to build a community there. It's attached

to by Rumble account, free to join. And that's the housekeeping. Jay-Marie, thank you for the talk. I enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. All right. And everybody out there, thanks for watching.