Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 177: Pediatric Phantasm

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Jenn Johnson ~ https://www.rxforgrowth.com/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of dreamscapes today we have her guest jen johnson she is a wife mother of two er nurse and now author out of ontario california canada i almost said california there's as far as i know there's no ontario in calph moving along uh you can find her book at rx for growth that's rx like prescription rx for growth dot com that link will be in the description below for my part would you kindly like share and subscribe tell your friends always need more volunteer dreamers you'd see that I haven't had an episode in a while because dreams come in their own time. So I need you to reach out. If there's any doubt that I find your dreams interesting or valuable, I do. I would rather have more material than less. Let's do this thing together. I also stream video games Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific time. So you can, most days, sometimes I finish a game and I take Thursday, Friday off, that kind of thing.

But I'm almost always playing a game on Monday and starting a new game on Monday. so you can follow me for that reason as well, if you wish. This episode brought to you in part by one of 17 currently available works of historical dream literature and random cats, of course. We've got a new black one here. His name is Bubba. I'll explain that later if you want to, where he got his name. You always got to give a cat a name that you explain.

Longest intro ever, still going. This episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 8, the literature and curiosity of dreams, volume 1, part of a two volume 7, part of a two-volume set. You can find all this and more, of course, at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable MP3 versions of this very podcast.

An encyclopedia of my footnotes. I put lots of footnotes in these things. I add more to the footnotes that are already there from the 1800s. So I've got an encyclopedia. I've got custom cocktails for almost every single video game I play. I've been doing sober October this month,

so no custom cocktails, but those are coming back pretty soon. Um, what else is there to say? You can also head on over to Benjamin the dream wizard dot locals.com join the community there. It's attached to my Rumble accounts, free to join. And that's where I would probably, uh, the easiest way to reach out to me, join there, send me a message and we'll do, uh, we'll do a dream thing as more than enough out of me. Just so disorganized.

That's how I roll. Jen, thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. It's all good. I'm just, I'm just here for the ride. That's good. And I can be real. And you seem to find.

me at the, if not intelligent, at least charming or, or amusing. And they, you laugh at Mike, Tom Fulery. We can, we can work with that. It's one of those things where it's like, you know, as long as I'm not annoying, annoying the guest, you know, it's, you seem, and I work best, of course, people that are just easy go. It's like, it is what it is. They roll with it.

Yeah. And that's, well, I think that. No expectations, no disappointments. Low expectation. Yeah. What is it say, under promise over delivered, too. I can try to do that too. It's like, I'm just a guy.

I'm just a crazy guy who thinks he's a wizard, but then you get to the end of it and you're like, well, maybe I really got something out of that. That's what I'm trying to do here. Maybe, maybe. Maybe. We're healing. No promises, though.

But so we'll speak in which, that's a great maybe introduction to, I didn't read the title of your book. It is nursing intuition, how to trust your gut, save your sanity, and survive your career. And we were talking off stream and I said, well, come away.

Let's save this for the show. The idea of intuition and how important it is, trusting your gut. Yeah. So maybe you can tell me how you came around to feeling the need to write that book. I mean, what was it about your experience or what was your experience that said, you know, I think I have something to say about this subject to people and crystallize it for them in a narrative form. The easiest way to sum it up is just COVID burnout, working at the bedside, burning out so hard during the first, you know, a little bit of the pandemic.

The first couple of months were just horrific. And so because, you know, we had a four and five-year-old at the time, daycare closed, didn't have any access to any daycare. So my husband was also deemed essential. So he was working Monday to Friday, eight to four. But I was working straight nights. And so I'd stay up all night. And then I'd stay up all day with the kids and then stay up all night and then stay up all day. So completely no sleep for four days, off for five and then back on for four.

And completely out of my mind. Shouldn't have been nursing. Shouldn't have been doing a lot of things. But with that kind of came the thought process of like, well, if I were to pass, maybe, you know, how do you explain to two young kids that mom chose to continue to go to work during this time when there was always an option to kind of opt out and stay at home and do something else? But that's not me. I just, you know, that's where I was needed. So that's where I went. And just continued to show up.

It wasn't anything heroic about it or anything like that. It was just, this is my job. This is what I'm supposed to do. This is, I'm showing up. And so it started to write down my really good stories for my kids about the times that I helped and things that I'd done. And very quickly transitioned into the very awful traumas that I wasn't dealing with at all, which then transitioned to, you know, reading the stories and going through them again. and kind of going like, okay, there's something here, but, you know, what is it?

Listening to a podcast or listening to a live offer, oh my gosh, live author, following from Llewellyn, which is a publisher in the States, does a lot of metaphysical stuff. And the author that was speaking, her book was Intuition at Work. And I thought, Intuition at Work, I used my intuition all the time at work. And it was just that snap. Oh, my God, that's it. That's the theme.

So going back to the stories and going through everything, I'm like, okay, there's the thread of intuition. And did I follow it? Did I say anything? Did it work out? Did it not? Going through all these stories and wanting to put it out. But in our age of misinformation, disinformation at the time in like August 2020, I couldn't put it out without supporting evidence. So went into a deep dive into intuition and the psychology and insight versus intuition.

and the psychology versus physiology and, you know, all these different versions of what's going on trying to figure out, you know, where's the bottom of it? Didn't find bottom, but found a lot of really fantastic articles about not just proving intuition over the last 20 years, but specifically intuition in nursing and having that kind of very recent access to that information. So I'm like, well, nursing says, if it's science, we teach it. So we need to bring this out of a very 3 a.m. conversation when, you know, the ghost stories come up and we're all goofing around. This needs to be, we need to speak about this and we need to start teaching it. And it's just another skill that we can do as nurses to help our patients.

So just kind of moving into that and putting it all together and sending it out into the world. And so it's coming out, November, I'm hoping November 15th on the, the new moon. It's already been bumped once because editing is taking longer than anticipated, but the universe is just kind of, you know, ha ha, you thought you were done waiting, but no, no. We're going to do that. And then we're going to attack on that you need a typesetter and another person to pay to do this for your book.

So I'm like, okay, vein, all right, it is what it is. I'm just going to go with it. And hoping, you know, before the years out that maybe we can get this week. It's just me. I could hope to try and try and get it out because actually was just at a conference where I sold 6,000 books to a health system that they're going to give it to all their nurses for nurses week. So I'm completely over the moon that not only is somebody a buying the book, but then like completely believes in the in the whole concept of it. Yeah. Oh, there's so much good material to respond to in there.

I'll probably end up working backwards. I've been trying to take some notes. excuse my memories, absolute crap. So just the idea of, you were mentioning, okay, a book and then bought by hospital systems, the idea that someone's getting benefit out. Of course, that's what I want from my books, too. And, you know, I put it out there to folks,

and I hope it's never misinterpreted it, is that, you know, mine are works of historical dream literature. So I'm reproducing stuff from the late 1800s in a modern format with additional footnotes and stuff. So we don't, so to preserve, these works in a modern historical edition. So that's its own kind of, so I do all my own editing. I'm like the, I'm the, I'm the editor of these works.

And then I put them under, under the umbrella of my ABC series. I call the ABCs of dream interpretation, augury, bibliomancy, and chaos. Cool. Right. That's, I love that. I think I'm clever. So thank you. I enjoy the chaos a bit.

Well, for sure. And augury is predictions or divining symbols. Bibliomancy is, strictly speaking. it is opening the Bible literally and just random to a random page and pointing at a passage and trying to use that to auger or divine what's going to happen to you in the near future's bibliomancy. But I look at it differently of like the magic of learning from books in general, you know, of gathering historical evidence and science and data, as they say, and bring all that.

So there's magic. And I think there's very little daylight between magic and science. I think they're actually the same thing. And I think it's, it's, no, and I think one of the, one of the, my favorite author says, you know, a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. Because we have no idea how it works.

And we used to, anyway, I think we're on the same page on that. I don't, don't need to over explain, but I was actually going somewhere with all of this. There's another book. So when I was working inpatient psychiatric,

that's, that's my background, spent 20 years in the hospital system doing that. So I would, actually, if you had psychiatric units at your hospital, I'm one of those guys that, you know, worked on the psych unit.

If there was a code overhead and someone was being assaulted, we were the guys that would come running because we're the, oh, thank. It's, and actually it's hard. Yeah, and after a while, like I decided I would rather be a dream wizard than a mental health prison guard. It's a little, even if that job is necessary and there are people who need containment for their own safety, it is draining.

It as you did as you would well know. Oh. All of this to, all of this to say, one of my favorite books that was available on the unit and that I'd never heard of before was a book called, I'm not sick. I don't need help by Javier Amador. And it was his experience as a clinical psychologist with his schizophrenic brother. And it was aimed at families to understand how they, how to be most helpful. And in a constructive way that didn't personally destroy them by taking on too much responsibility for something they can't, they didn't cause, they can't cure.

But also for mental health professionals where there used to be an old school approach to that stuff was you treat delusion by confrontation. You say that's not true. You're wrong. And you need to accept that. You confront, confront, confront, confront. And the, the shift was understanding the delusion as a part of the disorder. It's like this person isn't being, they're not being resistant. They're not being obstinate.

They're not refusing to agree with you. They're telling the truth. This is what I see. This is what I feel. This is what I think. And you just got to roll with it. This is their truth. Yeah, yeah.

And then we found out. And this is the part. of the revolution was, I'm talking too much, but a part of the revolution was we actually were able to put people in functional MRIs that then you have schizophrenic folks that have voices and say, tell us, you know, raise your finger when, when you're hearing a voice. And whenever they identified I'm hearing voices, the functional MRI lit up the auditory processing center of the brain, even though there was no voice in the environment to trigger that. So when they say I hear voices, literally their brain is processing a voice as if it's a problem.

present. Literally, they're not lying. So when people say, I hear voices, it's wild. I believe you. Yeah.

No, this is true. Yeah. So we learn a lot more and it's like, yeah, this is not something they're just making up. And of course, it's taken a couple hundred years to get there from,

you're possessed by demons to, you're delusional to, oh wow, your brain's actually functioning in a different way than other people. Maybe we can work with that. But so in terms of, so hopefully your book is going to have, right?

Hopefully your book is going to have the same benefit. to other people. They're going to, it's going to change the way. And I guess that would be if I were to actually try to be an interviewer instead of just waiting for my turn to talk and say, what would be some lessons you learned that shifted your perspective in a useful way that you would want people to take away from your book? Is there something in there where you're like, if they just grasp this type of thing, I think it'll make their nursing practice better, it will reduce their stress, that kind of stuff.

The easiest takeaway is as a new nurse or someone who's just learning to trust their intuition and lean into it a little bit. The science says, even if, you know, you think something's wrong, you're letting the doc know, the doc is coming back to see that patient, even just by having that doc come back and do another touch point with that patient, you're still improving patient outcomes. So even if you're completely wrong and, you know, maybe you're just a little extra sensitive, you're a little ambitious, you want to like make sure that all your patients are good, great. maybe you've gone a little bit, you're overshooting just a little bit, but even if you're

wrong or things aren't nearly as serious as you think they are, which great, just the dot coming down and having another look at that patient still improves patient outcomes. So there is no downside to doing this and learning how not just to recognize that it's happening because that's, you know, hard point number one is to realize that it's happening and to listen to it. And the second half is, are you going to do anything with it? So you've had that touch point. You're like, I think this patient's sicker than they're really presenting. You know, then it's, am I going to say anything or am I not? And having that kind of internal monologue about, you know, oh, do I think they're sick? Do I really need to get the doc? Do I want to bother them?

And it's in the science again. So critical care nurses, those who are doing ER and ICU, typically will I just love the cat and you're so pretty I know he crawls on my chest at night and lays there and actually

not all cats do this and this is a first I think with this one he puts his face on my face I've never had a cat that does that before he's such a lover oh my god

such a goofball I know I love him but yeah the the science again is critical care nurses are typically the ones who are more often than not trusting they're gotten going with it, only for the simple fact that they don't have the time

to second guess themselves and talk themselves out of it. So if we can try and realize what's happening, figure out how each one of us feels it or is kind of getting those hits, then we can start acting on it and we can start talking about how to then bring it to the doctor and how to talk about it and how to kind of make it a little bit more palatable

for someone who may be a little skeptical about that. But truly any doc worth their salt, you come up to them and you say, hey, I don't know about the woman in six, things aren't really going so well. Can you just have a peek? They're coming and they're having a peak because they know. We know what's going on. And we've seen this person from point A to point B and we're just not sure. So the good docs always stop and listen.

Definitely. And the ones that don't, the ones that don't then, you know, something unfortunately happens. And then, you know, it's kind of a learning lesson for them also. Yeah. And I think a lot of them, probably some nurses need to get over the idea that they're bothering the doctor when he's busy. It's like actually his job is kind of to make sure people don't die. So if you got. And it's literally my job to get him or her.

Yeah, because the patient may not be capable of getting, may not be conscious or certainly capable of getting out of bed and going to the doctor and saying, hey, does this look right? Or this feels bad. I don't, I don't think. Yeah. Definitely. Well, that's a great thing. So there's so many wonderful concepts around the idea of intuition, too. But I'm trying to understand it better myself.

So it's one of those things where it's like, and we were talking beforehand of like, I don't understand what I do. I kind of have a process, but it's more like my dream, my dream interpretation process is more like, I just started doing the thing. And then later I've been like,

okay, well, there seems to be a pattern to it. But that was long after I was doing it. I would just talk to people and things would happen. The cat is actually blocking. So one, a personal story of trusting your gut is like,

There was a, I'm on one unit and there was a guy who he would have kind of command auditory hallucinations. They would tell him to do things and he would feel, he was unable to resist. He would have to comply. And so I just hadn't seen him in a minute. I just didn't know where he was. And it just occurred to me that maybe I should just eyeball him. Maybe I should just walk by and say, okay, he's fine. While I get to his room, he'd gotten a hold of a pair of just little, you know, kindergarten craft scissors.

And he had dug a hole in his neck, hadn't. for his artery. And we caught it in time for him to, uh, you know, be okay. We got him down to the ER and it stitched him up and, uh, it was, it was a close call. But like, if I had just ignored that, if I just said, oh, he's probably fine. Oh, I don't feel like getting up. Oh, I have better things to do. Uh, oh, this paperwork needs to be finished.

I mean, certainly working in a hospital like where you put patient safety at the top, you put staff safety at about like 99.999%. We try. Equal. But sometimes our job was to jump on the grenade. It's kind of what we're hired to do in a sense. So, but it's just that like 0.001%. It's equal, but almost.

You get it. But yeah, no, but if I hadn't. Now, where does that come from is the thing too. And I think intuition and dreams come from the same place. And I go back to my conceptualization of it comes from the, the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious in a way, but also that just the Freudian concept of the unconscious itself, that we've got this tremendous reservoir of every experience and observation that we've ever had in our entire life.

And we can't attend to it all at once. That would be overwhelming. We would be paralyzed and dysfunctional if all of it were in our consciousness at once. So we have to pick and choose, but then something's bubble up. And we don't really know why that's, that's the realm. I think of chaos and magic as well. It's like, what causes that? What causes that bubbling up?

We don't know. But people who take intuition seriously are not like always immediately and unquestioningly follow your thoughts. But it's more like learn that there is something there of value. And the more you pay attention to it, you can develop a skill of discernment in that idea of like, this is an intuition worth following up on now. and this is just a random thought that might be overly cautious, that might be in a paranoid realm. And that's a great thing.

Here he goes. That's a great thing too as far as conceptualizing how we do this. A lot of mental health problems are when normal things go out of whack. So the idea of what is paranoia? Well, it's fear, fear is normal out of proportion to the actual danger in the environment. And we call that paranoia. So sometimes you have a hypersensitive system where things that are not threatening at all. It feels like there's constant danger all around you when you're perfectly safe.

Now, we're all in some danger or the potential danger, but we, you know, under normal circumstances, we can say, okay, this is a, I'm being a little anxious, I'm worried too much, I can discern that from, something doesn't feel right. And this works for, um, uh, the idea of, you know, teaching women too, specifically, because there's a tendency to be agreeable on, on women's side. and to go along with things for the sake of being nice or kind or whatever. And sometimes a little gut feeling says, don't do that. This is not safe. Don't trust this person, this man or whatever.

Or that, whoops. Oh, I thought it was me. It was, it was you. There was noise in the background. I get you. You're listening. I thought the cat just moved the mouse. I'm like, oh, no, what did he do?

Oh, no, that was me. Sorry, the one kid is home. So it's just like, be foreworned. So that's kind of how And all of this to say is that's how I kind of characterize the idea of trusting intuition is like don't be the person who ignores it and gets himself into trouble like walking down a dark alley that doesn't look safe. I'm not going to do it.

But damn, no, lost it. But you get what I'm saying. I think you probably have something to say. I'll stop talking. You're right on it. It's one of those things where, you know, any woman above the age of 12 knows that feeling and knows it really well because you're walking into a room. you're introduced to somebody and immediately it's just like, no, absolutely not.

Or yeah, you're walking by yourself and, you know, hair on the back, your neck kind of stands up. You're like, wait a second. Let me be very aware of my surroundings. And it's, yeah, it's one of those things that because it's a half to, we get very good at it. So this, again, is this why this is working well in nursing because it's predominantly female still at this point? Who knows? I think there's a strong thing. And, you know, not to get to, you know, hardcore evocyc gendered stuff, but they're, because women's experience is fundamentally different in a lot of ways, biologically, they, I think they have evolved to have, and it's a very classic trope as well that women's, women's intuition.

And there is something there. And that's, and then I think that's something that we should trust as well, or that people trust. It's such a hard thing. It's like that's, I'm not trying to say uncritically accept. I'm trying to say, take it seriously. The idea that there is something there. Put some weight behind it. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And that, you know, at the very least, don't dismiss it. Even if you choose not to follow it, even if you consider it and make a decision later. But, but yeah, if there's, and what I describe intuition as is, I love analogies and all these, all these different ways. I'm trying to view things from as many different angles as possible. So you've got the blind men and the elephant. You've got to put it all together. the, it's like a lighthouse in the fog and you're on a ship. And the lighthouse is there to tell you there is something over here. Now, you don't know what it is exactly. You don't know the shape

of the land. You don't know exactly where the rocks are. You don't know, is it fertile soil? Is it a, is it a craggy cliff? So that takes exploration. That takes moving towards the beacon, the light in the dark, get through the fog. But at least it's there to let you know, okay, something's over here. And then you can choose, well, that's wonderful. There's a lighthouse. I'm heading north. I'm not landing on the beach. I just won't get too close.

You don't have to fully attend and investigate every intuition. But I think it's very real. It's as real as a lighthouse in the foggy, on the foggy sea. It's just a warning, right? You know, that something more needs to be looked into or just be aware of. Sometimes it's just that, hey, there's an awareness of maybe I don't think things are going really quite well at this point in time. are they critical? No, but I'm being alerted to the fact that I need to pay very close attention to what's going on. And whether that's in the hospital scenario with a patient, whether that's

in a social setting where, oh, I better just watch my drink, that kind of thing. Exactly, too. And I think when you were describing the book earlier, you said that the process of documenting these stories, you started to feel like there was more to it and that that worked to maybe unlock the ability to address some past experiences you'd had to trauma-wise? Huge. Yeah. Going back, and a lot of these stories were ones that I've told a million times to other nurses through the years.

And it's, you know, everybody's got these little two-minute nugget stories where, hey, this is why I'm freaked out about pancreatitis. Or, hey, this is why ectopic pregnancies make me get on edge. We all have those stories or those conditions that we react. to, you know, theoretically more severely than somebody who hasn't had much experience with them or had a traumatic experience with them. But it's a way to learn and it's a way to share that story with other people to be like, hey, you think pancreatitis is no big deal.

Ha ha, I have this story and you go in the two-minute little blurb. But taking that blurb and then expanding it out to go back into that scenario to sit with those feelings all over again to really try and sit there and go like, okay, what was what happened? It was like 16 years ago, you know, I've told this story countless times, but, you know, what time was it? Was it day shift? Was it night shift? You know, do I remember the hallway of the hospital? Do I remember which room they were in?

Do, you know, do I remember the timeline, you know, specifically of how things happened and how many times I called the doctor and had them still kind of blow me off? Do I remember how long it took before we moved them into the cardiac room? Do, you know, how long did we do medications for before their heart stopped? and then we were doing CPR. And what was the timeline between me coming on to shift and them dying? Like, how long was that process? Because I feel like it was only five or six hours, but I'm not 100%, but being able to sit there and really think about it,

think about situations that I really have not fully thought about, like really put myself into in a decade. There was a lot that was sitting there. And sometimes I would have to kind of go in. would do, okay, that would work on the story a little bit, and then it would get overwhelming. I'm like, okay, no, I got to pop out. I got to come out because I'm getting overwhelmed, the feelings, and everything's too real again. So I'm going to come out. I'm going to give it a couple of days. When I feel ready, I'm going to go back in and thicken it out a little more,

and then come back out and then go back in. So they're, you know, my patient death stories, the two were just so traumatic that it took me going in and out. several times for me to like feel like I've actually really, you know, grabbed the emotions of those moments and, and what had happened and really represented them well in these stories. But it was painful. Yeah. Yeah.

And you're talking about a lot of really great stuff, which goes to the healthy psychological processing of traumatic events. And it's especially the idea of going in and out of it. you know there's a there's a there's a utility to first of all baseline level there's a utility in understanding as well because we we people there's a pop culture idea of closure it's like and some people think of it as yeah well it's been represented as like revenge like not exactly balancing the scales justice can can bring closure sure but it's but it's karma sure sure but also but the idea of closure is that it's it's you take something which every time you

think about it has this visceral negative emotion attached to it and you know truly getting closure on something means you can now think about it moving forward with a significantly reduced level of negative emotion there's there's more an idea of that is it's it's that process of moving towards the integration of the experience the and the understanding of it it's a lot of the intense negative emotions is fear of the unknown it's like this situation was so out of control that I worry it will happen again. And I cannot prevent it because I don't understand it. So you get that understanding of things.

But the process then, so that's like the broad strokes type of thing. But the process is you're probably not going to be able to sit down and in one hour or five minutes or a day or a single session with the therapist if you need one. And come to closure and say, well, thank you. We have, you know, replace the carburetor and the car now functions fine. It's not like that. Sometimes you got to move in and out of it. Sometimes emotions get so intense. Yeah, that you take a break.

That's fine. Take a break. Take a break of a couple of days. And, you know, with therapy sessions, the way they do, you know, take a break of a week. We'll come back and we'll revisit it again next time. And tell me how it felt not thinking about it for a while or how often did it come back for you to process. That's a great thing that happens in dreams, too, is a lot of times we're processing exactly things that we don't understand. It constructs our subconscious constructs thought experiments because we have this intense need to

understand because it's a survival function. And also just curiosity. There's a lot of different motivations for where dreams come from. We still don't know, but theories, theories, of course. But, but that's good too because then, and then that also, you know, not only does it have a benefit to you, but it also makes you a better nurse in terms of, if I understand this better, I will know what to do next time differently, if, if possible, or I'll understand better that if it happens again, exactly the same way.

and I did everything I could exactly the same way that sometimes these things just happen. And it's not your fault. You didn't actually screw up. There really wasn't anything you could have done. Bodies fail. You did everything you could. And just that closure on it as well of like getting to the point where you understand it well enough to say, I don't have to worry about that happening again because if it does, I couldn't stop it.

I don't need anxiety to save me from a future mistake. Anyway, I've gone on long enough. Go ahead. Oh, it makes complete sense, right? Because we come at it from a learning angle. You know, what did I do wrong? What did I do right? How could I have actually done anything differently?

Because once you get to a point where you've gone through the scenario and you really come to the point of there was nothing I could have done or anybody could have done to change that outcome, once you can get to that spot, it's comforting. knowing that I couldn't change it. I wasn't going to change what happened. I had no, you know, I wasn't part of the original incident. I was just part of the aftermath. So getting to that point and getting better with dealing with, you know, that's just how it's going to be. And it is life is life.

And sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And it's hard to look at it in such black and white terms. But, you know, once you start realizing that the losses aren't yours, personally makes life a lot easier and being able to discuss them. So we do debriefs usually after traumatic incidences. And, you know, we try our best to, okay, you know, we've got five minutes. What went well? What didn't go well?

What could we improve upon? You know, is everybody okay? Does anybody need to like take a minute? And truly, you don't usually have the time to take a minute. Usually taking the five alone is kind of stretching your luck because you've already got people screaming in the background. And I'm like a nurse, I just need a blanket. And you're like, really?

Yeah, yeah. And there's always something. Yeah. No. That reminds me too of like hearkening back to the to the beginning of the thing. You know, you're. So you were the thing. The beginning of our conversation here.

One thing you'd mentioned was the idea of documenting these stories because you were thinking about, you know, hey, if I work myself to death, I want to leave something in my kids. But then before that also comes. the decision of why am I doing this and should I continue? That's tough questions as well. And it's, I think we're all trying to juggle our own safety as we were talking patient and patient and staff safety.

But the idea of, well, I need a job to live and to feed my kids anyway. So part of me is this is what I do for a living. This is a practical side of it too. But then we also feel kind of an emotional or it's not intellectual. Like a like a duty or an obligation of like this is, you know, not only. that, but I'm doing something useful and productive and good that helps other people. And then, you know, so many opinions come from all sides. It's like, well, what good is a job if you die and, you know, you're working to feed your kids,

but if you're dead, they don't get food anyway. And how much of yourself should you sacrifice for the sake of others to the point of death? We hope not. That seems like a like a win-lose game when we want to win-win. We want you to feel good about your job and do it well and help people. and so you both get the benefits of this relationship and interaction. And that's probably where, you know, our intuitions will tell us if we're working too hard. And we'll get that nagging doubt.

A lot of times those things are, they're there for a reason. It's like there's something here you need to think about. And if you haven't come to a conclusion, it'll keep coming back. Or if you haven't solved the problem. So part of it, I guess part of your solution was, well, let me write about it. it. Let me write down these stories and different things to actually look at what or anyway, this is my guess or might be my assertion or my suggestion to you about, you know, one of the ways you resolved those unresolved questions about how, where's the

line here and how do I engage this process is, let me tell these stories. Let me write all this out. So that also had, I would imagine a dual purpose of stories for my kids, but also I need to think about this. I need to process this. It was just, they came up so hard and so fast. and it was, you know, the book was written in six weeks. And I don't remember writing the book. I remember getting up super, super early, like 4 a.m., 3 a.m. with like, okay, I know I need to push through the story. I need to get back to it.

I need, like something just came to me. And again, probably in dreams where I've already kind of deep dived into a story. I've pulled myself out. I've gone to bed. Now, oh, wait, wait, no, no, I remember that part. And having to like, no, I need to get up and I need to write it down now while I still remember. and just so cathartic of just going back into all of this and and for you know the perceived purpose at the time was for my kids so I can do things a lot easier if it's for somebody else than it is for

myself yeah so you know if I'm coming at it from the angle oh no this is for my kids this is for my kids this is for my kids I can go into those stories and I can talk about it and we can we can kind go, but if it was just for myself, I don't know if I would have gotten this far. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's a good thing, too, to look at the idea of motivation. I mean, what, sometimes we play games with ourselves in our own head of like, well, if I'm doing this for the right reason, it's okay. And if I'm not, yeah, it's, it's hard too, especially when the question you're trying to

answer is what is the appropriate level of self-sacrifice? Like, well, should I even be writing a book? I'm too busy for that. maybe I should focus on something else. But if you're like, well, there's a reason for this that seems worthy, that seems justified. We can let ourselves do something that we think is important without, give ourselves permission in a way to do something we really feel is necessary.

But it's like, how do I justify this? And I imagine probably as a result of the process, too, is you came out of it feeling better, less intense negative emotion around all these subjects. and feeling like there was a purpose to them, right? So always trying to find the silver lining, going back into those stories and going, oh, okay, well, if I can learn from them and I'm hoping that others can learn from them, then the pain, however awful, might have been worth it. You know, if you can reframe it a little bit to be, you know, let's use this not to harm me or my mental health. Like, let's use these stories to help others and help. others understand and to grow and to figure it out themselves.

Absolutely. And that's actually kind of a core principle of the idea of, from, you know, just mere trauma survival to, to thriving afterwards is transforming that tragedy into a kind of triumph through that understanding and examination process. Because if you can take something bad that happened to you and turn it into something useful, it's a lot, it settles it in your mind.

That brings that closure as well, too. so and it's one of those things okay easier said than done not everybody can write a book and everyone's process is going to be different even if it falls into different categories we could we could get into but he's now he's Jason one of our other little old ladies we've got

two old ladies and one old man who's sleeping on the counter here oh he's cheesy sorry a teeth don't want me touched his leg he's like I am taking a nap he says I'm doing it quit it for sure well we'd be going for about I don't know 35

40 minutes. You about ready to jump into the dream thing? We'll do that. Oh. Right? Let's do it. See what intuitions have to say to you about what other current things you might be going through. Let me do a little note. Okay. I've gotten smart and started writing down the timestamps. I'm like, oh, where was that in the video? I got to scroll through the whole thing. There go. Speaking of understanding process, I was probably at least 100 episodes deep before I even started, before that even occurred to me. Oh, I should write down timestamps. Oh my God. But you've learned. Trauma learning.

I sure did. Sometimes you've got to learn the hard way. That was an interesting thing too. Oh, this is just random, but why not? I'll throw it in there. We were talking about chaos. And there was an opportunity I had lately to conception. So, okay, long story, sure.

Where am I going with this? Oh, and I was going to make you the offer off camera and I didn't, or at least it introduced the idea. So I've got the books I've done, the historical dream literature. And then what I want to do is transition next. So eventually I'm going to run out of books. Other people have written out in dreams. And then eventually I want to do my own series of books.

And what I want to call what I call it a wizard's guide to whatever. And one of them I want to do. The first one I'm going to do the experimental copy or whatever will be a wizard's guide to ASOP's fables. And let's explain, you know, the fox and the sour grapes, the tortoise and the hair. Let's put those in psychological terms and say this is ancient wisdom. And it's not just silly stories, you know, children it's there's real lessons to be learned from these and there's still still value absolutely almost 2,500 years years later there's the kids yeah we get no no no

worries um you don't even I don't care it's that's all good life life is happening oh yeah let me why guy Bubba of course and so your cat's my cat's my my wife it's my call my Wyatt Bubba yeah why guy Wyatt why yet why guy Wyatt please turn it down thank you yeah this is what I get yeah there you go quiet shush shush mama shush hard to be talking shush oh that's great oh I was going somewhere with oh okay so but but um I've been actually making offers to other people to write their own editions of of so I want to do things like a wizard's guide to asap's fables Greek mythology King Arthur in the Roundtable

A bunch of other things Like what do these stories mean? Why are they important? How do we understand them? What can we learn from them? I just watched a great movie the other day The 2019, 2020 remake of the Green Knight

Story of the Green Knight Sir Gowan and the Green Knight. Interesting. Very well done. Very visually interesting And I love the way he told the story. It was a great, great movie. Great, great thing to learn from too.

What are the lessons of that movie? long story short so it's throwing it out there and i and i like to throw it out there whenever i have a guest who's who's written a book is like i want to bring in other authors like i've talked to someone who i've talked to multiple people who are norse pagans and i'm like it would be better i'm i'm long history with understanding greek mythology that's like my thing i've always loved this since i was a kid but someone's a norse pagan i'm like i would love to have you under my series of me as the editor write a book that is a wizard's guide to Norse paganism or to the to the to the to the Norse North Norse pantheon what are these stories what do they mean and you know you get the Zeus as I would do

Zeus and Apollo they would do let me tell you about Odin and hanging himself on the tree and losing his eye for wisdom and stories of Loki and how they what they mean in my you know in how we explain the war long story short so if I don't know what you would do you know wizard's guide to emergency room nursing. Wizards guide. Should be. That is what I'm saying. Whatever you want.

Oh my God. That would be epic. You know, because I think of wizardry as, I think metaphors are and, and, and, and, and myths are real even if they're not, what I'd say, there's, they're true, even if they're not real is kind of how I put it. It's like, did this physically happen? Maybe not. But it expresses, expresses a conceptual truth.

It expresses a pattern of behavior. Like, was there ever a fox that spoke words and said, those grapes are probably sour anyway? No, no one thinks that. Animals don't talk. But the concept of if I can't have it, I would rather live in denial or reconfigure my mind to say it probably wasn't worth it anyway. We let ourselves off the hook rather than living in the frustration of, you know, that kind of, there's a truth to that, a truth to human behavior. So anyway, that's a huge tangent. I'm going to have to write down a new timestamps like five minutes later.

Listen, the ER version is Murphy's Law. If it is going to happen, it will. Always do what you can in the moment because you never know what's going to come through the door. That's just, you know, we do a lot of things. And whatever we're doing, if it seems a little off tangent, we always go Murphy's Law. And we all go, yeah, no, we understand. Yeah. You have to get that Ivy.

right now and do the blood work right now because if you don't something else will come through the door and you will never get back to that blood work in a timely manner and then when you do it's going to turn into something else so that's actually another book a lot of it is uh one of them is a wizard's guide to to to the application of aphorisms uh of the aspirational aphorism and murphy's law is one of the if he can't go wrong the will go wrong what does that mean and how do you apply that to your like an apple a day keeps the doctor away now that's a silly one but it's like okay what does it mean do are doctors afraid of is it like holding up across to a vampire no that's stupid

it and and but it also made me think of like there's a lot of these folk wisdoms and sayings and it's it's practical application of stuff like that that makes it useful where where you go you know um uh is it true that someone who eats an apple every day will always be healthy and therefore never need a doctor no also not true it is generally the healthier you are the less likely you're going to have medical problems if we understand it at the right level. So there's a lot of people who look at those things and go, no, there's an exception.

There's always an exception. That's not the point. Always an exception. I hate that. I hate that. Yeah. And sometimes the exception proves the rule. It's like, yeah, 99% of the time except this one time when it didn't happen.

There you go. It's kind of proof my point. But it's also, it's a mindset as well of like don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Don't wait to start that ID because you put it off for five minutes to do something, to do nothing. and five minutes from now, you don't get a chance to do it at all because now we have a much bigger emergency. Practical application of principle

is a big deal. So anyway, put a bug in your ear, put a be in your bonnet, put an idea in your head of like, what kind of a wizard's guide when I write? Oh, and I was talking about, you know,

mythological stuff. Like, well, I describe myself as I'm just a crazy guy who thinks he's a wizard on the internet, but a wizard I think is a very real type of a thing. You know, I'm getting the gray hair. I've seen some things. I might have some stuff to share.

It's hopefully I'm speaking magic words that inform and improve understanding and give people good advice. Hopefully I can kind of see the future a little bit. I can say, hey, maybe don't do that. I've seen it before. The results are bad. Maybe someday I'm going to need a cane. I grew the hair out, you know, just because sometimes you got to wear the costume. You got to have like the really wicked cane that's like just carved and like the

snake going down the cane the hole that which again is um i need to get a wood burning kit and do that that's yeah i know right the snake on the snake on the staff with the wings is caduceus which is medical right exactly there's also a really weird thing i mean those of us who look at the world through slightly occult filtered lenses we look at that and go that kind of looks like DNA twisting around yeah a little bit a little bit it's a way it's way it's hey it's very least that's a freaking weird coincidence. Because I don't think they had microscopes and were able to see DNA back then. But how did they know?

How did that symbol come to look so much like that? Weirdest thing ever. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So now, actually, the dream thing, 40 were 40. New time's down, right? New times down.

Yes, yes. Zero. 18. Okay. So this is the part of the show where I should. Shut up and listen. Our guest is going to tell me about a dream beginning to end without interruption. And then we're going to go back over it and talk it through and see if we can figure out what it means 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 DreamScape's 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. Right. So the dream is from many, many years ago. And it kind of, it's always something where it's usually at work when I'm dreaming that I am where I am physically. So it started, you know, 10 years ago, a pediatric floor. I was having a nap on night shift and was in a stretcher in a room that was off, you know, kind of off the beaten path of the floor where we were. It's night shift. I'd already kind of gotten some not so great vibes from the room previously, but would always close the bathroom door. That's just a thing I do.

pulled the curtains, closed the actual door door, and fallen asleep. So in the dream, I'm laying there in the stretcher in the exact same place where I am physically in the real world, quote unquote. And I look over to my left and there's two young children playing on the floor and I take them for both boys, but they're the exact same age as my kids who are a boy and girl. and they're just playing on the floor and I can't seem to move. I can't seem to wake up and I can't remember if I screamed myself awake or just kind of scared myself awake but it was after that that I started to dream more about where I was in the

real world while napping at work and it's usually at work when this happens but it continues to be something where it's the funniest thing that I'm dreaming about where I'm sleeping. And I don't know if it's, I just can't turn off the nurse brain because I'm technically still at work. And in the same department, can't really walk away to go anywhere. But that's, that was just the one dream that it seemed to start at the very beginning of my spiritual journey into finding myself and, you know, leaning into, um, spirituality and paganism and becoming a witch and finding myself that way.

And it's just something, it was just so vivid and it just really stuck. And that was one of two dreams on that floor. The other one was in a different room and could have sworn. So it was made to be kind of a family apartment if patients' families were standing. long term on the pediatrics ward. But it was never used because if anybody was sick enough to actually stay, they usually went out to the pediatric hospital. And I was laying there and I can't, I don't know if I actually physically sat up

or if just in the dream I sat up in the bed. I thought I'd heard two people talking about a blood sugar level. And again, don't know if I actually said out loud or if it was the dream where I said, oh, that's actually not too bad. And then, like, fell back into the bed and continued to sleep. So, you know, nursing, we joke about the ghost stories and all of this. The hospital was brand new. Like, probably hadn't been open more than a year or two by the time this happened.

Nobody really used the family apartment. But people did use the other room. It was usually kind of like a fast in-and-out kind of assessment. as to whether the kid was going to stay on the floor, whether they were okay to go home. But it was just those two instances kind of solidified and seemed to happen very close together when, you know, I was just starting to find myself

and really finding my groove and, you know, the coincidences started happening where I was actually starting to pay attention to the coincidences and follow the breadcrumbs along the trail to my spiritual path. good deal I'll do this real quick here do I need another time stamp I don't know

but there it is so we've got kind of two dreams we can probably talk about them both are very short but did you want to focus on one just in case we end up spending most of our time on it I think the one with the two kids seemed to really that one freaked me out more than

than you know the other one I just kind of sat up and had taken it at face value that I'd heard, overheard to other people talking. But it was the kids that, you know, it just didn't sit well. And especially because they seemed to be the same age as my kids at the time. Yeah, the second one seems to have a more easily understandable. Not that we couldn't get more out of it if we looked into it,

but the idea of, yeah, it's very likely you did overhear someone or that, you know, being someone who is taking a mere break on that. unit anticipating returning to work you would be keyed up to think about what would get me out of sleep and what would what would what would pull me away from allowing myself to rest and it would be if there was a significantly bad blood sugar if my co-workers needed me to cut my break short and get back to work you would probably do that so you could be sitting there thinking you know what can I allow myself a break is this okay and you'd be good uh the answer that apparently came to you was, uh, they can handle it. It's not that bad. That's,

you know, they're, they're, part of that too is, you know, trusting in the competence. You want to, there's always a balancing act. You want to, you want to lend a hand where it's necessary. You don't want to stick your nose in where it doesn't need to be. So it's one of those things where it's like, I should trust my coworkers that they are as competent as I am. I don't need to save them. But also, I don't want them to, um, be hung out to dry if they could use a hand. Uh, so one of those one of those things. Go ahead. Sorry, no, it's just the, sorry, the kids, the one, mummy's just on a phone call. Thank you very much. Where did that burger come from? Oh my God. It was like a doorbell. Random burger. Just, yeah, well, no, that was my daughter ringing the

doorbell. Okay, can we just be quiet, please? Love you. Love you, love you, love you. Thanks. Sorry, the thumbs up was for her to be like, get on the, oh, gotcha, got you. I thought you were just because it was on mute, you were like, I understand what you said? I'm listening. good enough that too i was just like waiting for them to like do something so i was like let me just pause this for a second for sure yeah and then well you've also you've already done a bit of reflecting on this on this experience in general general and it's like uh well it was it seemed to be about that time i was going through some um as you said it's like a spiritual awakening type of thing so you're pegging it to a certain time in your life your thought process your evolution of philosophically

and um it was spiritual specifically but also the idea of that being the time where you started to dream about being where you were at, at the moment, during the period of sleep. So did that carry over to at home? You would have dreams at home in your own, where you would wake up in your own bed. Not nearly, not that I remember. But yeah, more often than not, it usually seems to happen when I'm at work. And it's followed me from different hospitals also. So going from the one, the newer hospital to now a much, much older hospital that we all know is haunted up the wazoo.

Harder to say that with brand new ones, but those old, renovated ones, this has been here since the 1800s, lots of death. Y'all. And so the joke is, oh, and the joke is they're literally building a brand new hospital right behind it, like meters behind it into the new hospital. hospital. And so I'm just kind of sitting there like, so do the ghost stay in the, what will be the new parking lot? Or do they meander over? Like what, what are we going to, what's happening there? I don't know. Do they migrate? Do they need some elbow room too? Who knows?

Yes, honestly. It's hard to say. A lot of our conceptions of it are that, you know, the energy is tied to a particular time and place or or set of circumstances. But you never know. I mean, do they wonder? We think of haunted places, but then why wouldn't another place be haunted? Why, why wouldn't the phenomenon meander? Who knows? Once explained just the concept of spirit being tied to physical place, like land. I'm like, so Niagara Falls where we used to live, that's where they had built this brand new, beautiful hospital was potentially a lot of like the War of 1812 and potentially a lot of carryover from that. So you're like, oh, maybe maybe that. Yeah. And it's very interesting too.

You just brought up an idea that. So if someone, say, died going over the falls, they died. in the water. Water's moving. So wouldn't the ghosts go out to see? Maybe. Maybe I don't know. Right?

It gets on. What are the rules? I have no idea. Who knows? Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, I can't explain it. So that's also why I'd separate out what I lovingly call the spooky woo side of dreams, prophetic psychic communications, deceased relatives coming back. I don't know what to do with any of that.

If you said you dreamed about your dead mother, I believe you. I think you did. Was it her? was it a visitation? I can't tell you. I don't know the difference. I can say you missed your mother. You wish she was there.

Of course, you'd want to talk to her again. That's the psychological side of things. But is it possible? She came back to him. Sure. I have no idea. I don't dismiss any of it, but I don't know. It's not my specialty.

So I'm like, I try and stay in my lane as far as that goes. But so, yeah, teasing out a little bit more on the, so it seems to happen that your dreams about being in a particular place. The same place you are sleeping happen mostly at work. So it may not be as relevant to the overall story, but it is an interesting phenomenon to just say, I'll put a pin in that. That's a thing. So then, yeah. How far into your nursing career were you at the time that particular dream happened?

Was it really new? Was it, you know, two years, five years, six months? No, I, so at least seven years, seven, eight years. Okay. So you were not new. At that point. Yeah. Yeah.

Gotcha. Fair enough. But up until that point, you hadn't had dreams that were that specific to location. To that level. To, you know, in the hospital. When you think about that period in your life, was there, what am I trying to say? Was there an event that may have happened around that time that left you with a lot of questions? but you said you were beginning a spiritual journey at that time in in terms of asking certain questions or seeking certain answers or certain understanding or concept of the world.

Is there something that triggered that in your mind? Or I mean, we all, the alternative is, well, some of us are just curious and we always keep an open mind. And sometimes it's just the time is right. And we're like, oh, look into that now. I got, you know, I got the interest. How would you characterize it? Yeah. Yeah.

So moving to that floor. So it was the first time that I'd worked anywhere other than the ER in this hospital system. And so it was a pediatric ward, which I'd never worked a pediatric ward before. But, you know, I'd worked the floor, but that was way up north. And that was all elderly. It was never, you know, kids on the floor. And with the spiritual journey, like, was one of those moments where it was one night shift where, you know, you started to see kind of things out of the corner of your eye.

And it was a kind of triangle layout pattern with the hallway going up the middle. So we'd turn off the lights. Obviously, it was very spacious because they made all the patient rooms private and all these kind of things. I've never seen bigger hospital rooms than on maternity. Yeah. Oh, God. It's huge. I can bring your whole family in there.

You could. And the reason. is just because like if heaven forbid something both traumatic happens to you and babe you need two whole separate teams one for babe one for mom so you've suddenly got two patients in one room uh with a lot going on same bed so that's my crowded it's it's it does get very crowded um so it's kind of thinking about you know walking down the halls and kind of seeing things out of the corner of my eye and you're like okay that's kind of odd but is it just the shadows because it's you know once everybody goes to sleep and they all go to sleep very, very early because it's pediatrics.

Everybody settles and everybody passes out cold and the parents are happy to sleep and we're happy to have everybody sleeping. And so it's very, I hesitate to use the key word, but it's very quiet on that particular word. That's a hundred percent. The ER superstitious, we never say the key word. Yep, yep. And just kind of going around and trying to find something to do and keep it.

busy and have the time passed. And it was one of these moments where I thought, oh, I'd really like to try like reflexology and Riki and I'd never done that before. And it was, again, a thought that popped into my head that I was like, oh, why not? Like, I've got the time now and found a woman very quickly on the internet who ended up being a very good friend down the road, you know, and she didn't advertise that she was intuitive, but, you know, she'd do the reflexology and then she'd do the Riki. And she's like, so what did you see and all these things and then she'd like all the sudden blurt out all this insight at the end of it and you're like I was not expecting any of that and so kind of coming down the path of you're an empath and trying to come to terms with that and it was one she actually was probably

one of the bigger catapults into the spiritual side of you know this whole journey and and letting it be okay and and trying to find this footing and she was just so lovely And you just felt like a million bucks after leaving that appointment. And you're like, okay, so now I'm a little bit empathic. Well, let me bring some crystals with me and falling down that rabbit hole and and doing all these things. And then talking about it a little bit with people if I kind of felt like that was going to be an okay topic. But it was this ward that truly a lot changed.

Like I'd already kind of been dabbling a little bit. Like anytime there was a metaphysical shop growing up and this is before the age of the internet, I would find it. And I don't know how I found it. I would always stumble into it. You know, bought myself my own first tarot deck at grade nine, having no idea what terror was. I always wanted to go in and see the crystals.

Like, oh, I love that stuff. So, and here's like, everything is so weird and wonderful and it smells different and that, and, but it feels good. You're like, okay, like, this is, this is cool. And having that tarot deck follow me around for, you know, a lifetime already. And just every time you think like, oh, it's just the Internet, you know, the Internet listens to you and it's, it targets the ads and it does all these things. And once it figures you like one thing, it continues to feed you those things. And I'm like, but I found all that before the Internet really even got big or because or even way before it was in your pocket 24-7.

Oh, yeah. You know, I just randomly found these shops. And it was always just, oh, no, this is really cool. cool and I really like this. And it's a nice thing to come back to when you're doubting yourself. And you're like, oh, is this really what's going on? Or have I just been played to by the internet kind of thing? Going, no, like, I, this is me. This is way before anything was targeted. And I found it or did it find me? I don't know. But, you know, this happened multiple times where I just, fell into these scenarios and fell into these shops and felt at home in these shops.

So had you met that person and kind of gone down that road before the dream happened? Or was that? Hard to say. Contemporaneous, as they'd say. Yeah. Because I was only on that floor for maybe a year before I went back to the ER. And so I don't know what chicken egg moment. happen first, but what spurred the change to switch to that floor? I mean, you just, I'm just going to try something new or, um,

I don't recall applying. I remember getting a phone call to say, you know, hey, we've got an opening on the pediatrics floor and, and it's a job share, which I was looking for because we didn't have any job share openings in the ER at the time. I was looking for a little bit of a change. I just had the kids. I mean, why and Elise must have been like maybe a year yeah maybe a year and a bit old and I just I do not recall applying and this has happened many times since where opportunities will pop up or things will pop up where I'm like I don't recall applying to go into that program or to get that job or to do that I'm going to go with it anyways because obviously everything happens for a reason. So I was just like, hey, that's interesting. Maybe it just, you know, the process took so long to finally get to

hiring into a point where I forgot about it. And it was just kind of, once you get into a hospital system, it's pretty easy to like one click into a job and it's gone. And you just, you don't really need to do a cover letter. You just, this is a job I'm applying for. And then here's my resume. Click, click, click. Click. Bye. And it's done. It doesn't require a lot of thought. And usually to just ends up being one manager going and talking to the other saying, hey, would you, if you had the opportunity now to hire this person again, would you? And do you mind if I poach them? Because they're interested.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, and for nursing-wise, a lot of it is union-based. And, and, you know, does it, because it's a specialty, the ER plays a little bit into it because, yes, now I've technically had experience with pediatrics because I work the emerge and we see pedids all the time. But a lot of the jobs, it's just seniority. Who's got the most seniority?

And if it's not a specialty, they can't really get around. Yeah, they can't really get around anything. Yeah. But it was just one of those where I'm just like, oh, yeah, no, I did. Yeah, I think I applied to that. I don't remember. But I'm like, yeah, no, I think I, that was good. Yeah, no, I'll try that.

Why not? Give it a shot. Like, see if you like it any better. Yeah. Sometimes you get to experiment with things. Like, if you never leave, never. leave the ER, how do you know you wouldn't like oncology better? Maybe you just really love working with cancer patients, even if they die, but you just, something about that. It's like, I feel like I'm

a long year. Maybe that's your calling. Maybe that's your niche place. Yep, yep. Um, one thing I was going to, you said your son was about one year old and your, your daughter was how old? So he probably would have been two and a half. She might have been just over a year, year and a half. Okay. I had that backwards there. And so again, same age as these kids playing on the floor and, and just, yeah, relevant to the dream there. So that's the next thing I was going to do is get into a little bit the scene or whatnot. So you said you described a room and it had like a gurney in it and you were sleeping. You said a stretcher.

We pulled one stretcher in so that we would lay down on the stretcher. We'd pull the curtains across because the door and the wall that was there was all windows. So you'd pull all that. You'd turn off all the lights. there was room for one more stretcher to my left and then a window out to the out to the world and then one of these big beautiful bathrooms that I always just got the creeps from so I would close the door to the bathroom sometimes you got to be able to get in there with two people to help them sit down or stand up and and a walker and all yeah big big bathrooms I remember

those so your experience was laying down And, what am I trying to ask? I'm trying to see it from my own perspective. You know, I guess if you're looking at something, you're laying on your side, left or right, and facing the curtains, facing the wall, what's, where were the kids in the room? So laying on my back and just kind of turning my head to the side to see these two kids playing on the ground kind of thing. so not necessarily sitting up but just kind of rolling a bit and turning my head to the side. And then orientation wise, you know, you're looking over to the left, you're looking over to the right?

Looking over left, yeah. And the kids were on the floor at my feet on the left side. Where were they in relation to like the door to the room, the windows? So they were in between. So there was, so door curtains, my stretcher, and then them on the floor. Okay, so you were actually looking towards a... Just kind of...

So what it means is like... Yeah. So there was a wall, and then between you and the wall, the kids are playing on the floor. They weren't playing by the door to the room. Oh, they weren't playing by the door. No. So you were between the door and the kids.

And them. Okay. Yeah. Now, why does that matter? Maybe it doesn't. But just getting that layout of like... It does. It may say something, the positioning of the people, the objects in the room.

It may not. Now, for some reason, now, what am I trying to say is we may never know the reason. There was a reason. There's always a reason. Like, why your brain decided to put them in that particular place and not a different place. I like to do the counterfactuals in my head. What would be different about it if the kids had been playing near the door? If the door had been open.

If the door had been open in the hallway was. dark and that that that has all of its own own little meanings yeah shades of meaning so what were the kids and it's interesting too that instead of a boy and a girl you said they looked like two boys boys yeah yeah um was it after the dream or in the dream that you said oh they're the same age as my kids like it was probably a realization in the dream that oh they're kind of the same age as my kids at the time yeah That's interesting too. So your brain or unconscious chose to put not your kids in and not an identical representation of kids, one boy and one girl, but two boys.

Part of the questions that we'd want to tease out are like, well, of course, why? We're always looking for why. But was there anything that happened around that time where you'd been dealing with a family that had two boys? I mean, are there events in the immediate or surroundings of that dream where it's representing something that happened, some interaction you had with people? Or are we looking at more conceptual stuff being drawn out of your past or your thought process, trying to tease out those differences. Being 10 years ago, it's like, God. I know, it's hard. Unless it's a strong memory of, yeah, there was this woman and she had two ways.

and here's what happened. There wasn't anybody who, like, stood out. And thankfully, it was a pretty trauma-free year up on the floor. There may have only been one patient where, you know, it was just a newborn babe that had to be shipped out that was pretty sick that I really, really had to advocate several different times for the talk to get looking at them. And I wasn't happy about it. But, um,

The only other thing I can think of is there was a mother and her two kids. So she did have two boys. And the younger one was just diagnosed with idiopathic thrombocytopinia. So just for some reason wasn't producing platelets. Was it platelets? Thrombocidopinia. I think platelets. And for some reason they couldn't figure it out.

So this kid was happening to every time he had a fever. and of course because he was quite young. Again, I would probably say like eight months to a year when we first started seeing him. He would have to come in. We'd start IV. We'd do antibiotics. And the family would be there for a few days while we kind of wrote out the fever and made sure that his blood cultures were negative.

And we saw them quite a few times through that year. And then I ended up seeing them one time when I went back to my ER that I'd come from to go to Peds. And, you know, it was kind of nice to see them and the boys were growing up and and all this kind of stuff. But the brother was kind of a little bit of a hellion. Like, he kind of ran around and kind of ruled the roost because everybody was so caught up with the younger brother that the poor older brother.

And I don't know what dad did, but dad, we didn't see much of dad. He was there kind of in bits and pieces. But it sounded like maybe had two or three jobs kind of thing, like really needed to to work to make ends meet. And so poor mom was left on her own with these two boys and, you know, the older one, you know, typical two, three-year-old just going nuts kind of thing. And having pretty much ruled the roost around that floor. But, I mean, nothing ever, thankfully traumatic ever happened with either of the boys.

It was just, you know, it was the first time that I think I'd actually met a family repeatedly, where I actually kind of recognize them and I knew it was going on. And in the ER, we get that occasionally, but usually for all the wrong reasons. You know, you're seeing your addicts come in several times or your homeless come in several times. And, you know, there's those kind of connotations with that. But or your patients who are completely non-compliant with meds for one reason or another and usually have super bad attitudes. that for some reason or another, want to keep coming to the hospital day after day.

Yeah, that's interesting. Help me. It was the first time it was a kid's frequent flyer. Help me. Take these meds. You're like, sir, we've, what do you want me to do? I can't. We're like, we've discharged you with these medications.

We've done all the things that we can do. You know, every single day was the same. And we kind of figured out that for the one, the other unfortunate part was he would always call 911 and say that he couldn't breathe to, to, to, to, EMS, so EMS as well as fire would always rush to his place. He had COPD. Like his lungs weren't functioning as per normal and he wouldn't quit smoking so we couldn't get him

home oxygen. And then he wouldn't take his medications. So it was all these factors, but he would always come in for a certain show. So he'd come into the ER and he'd want to be wheeled in front of the TV to watch a certain certain show at three or four in the afternoon kind of thing. And you're just like, really? He's got a routine.

you doing? Yeah. He absolutely had a routine by the time I left that ER and they actually had to develop a care plan for him because he was using so much resources. What are we just nursing? Meals on wheels to show up and hang out with him during his favorite show. Oh, something. Or he needed TV like he didn't have access to TV or whatever else.

Maybe that could have been too. Who knows whatever happened to him. But he was, you know, had he not been so abrasive, we probably would have gone along with it. Whatever. You can wait in the waiting room. As long as you don't want to register and you just want to wait in the waiting room

until the show's done and then leave after that. Sure. Next time, just call a taxi. You don't just call a taxi. You don't need an ambulance. It was, yeah. It was the abuse of resources

that kind of really tick us off, but you just felt bad. Yeah, for sure. Well, so the situation you were dealing with in real life, as it was represented in the dream with these kids was you did have kids that were exactly their same age or close enough that it was.

So there's a strong connection there. Very close. I know this family that I'm caring for. Oh, they have kids the same age as mine or close enough. And so very reasonable that you would probably see it in your dream. And my thought or suggestion that would be, you know, like, why did they show up is, is that you're thinking about being, you know, your kids and being away from your kids and how these kids are the same age as yours. And, well, what if this was happening to my?

kids and so even in your even in your sleep or whatever or especially in your sleep perhaps while you're trying to take a rest you would perhaps give yourself a visual image of well they're near me i am between them and the world the door the they're contained they're safe they're not i'm not going to have to jump up to save them from running out the door because they're going to have to get past me first anyway so a there's a there's a theory um that that that Freud put forward or some other people before him too, but that dreams are sleep preservers in the way that if we have things like hunger,

we feel hungry or cold or whatever, we might dream about it instead of doing something about it. So in a way that helps us stay asleep. So there's something to that in the dream type of thing of like giving yourself permission to rest is part like, okay, the kids I'm responsible for or kids that remind me so much of my own

that it's as if I'm caring for my own kids, they're safe enough that I can, allow myself this time to breathe and rest and restore. So there's maybe something like that going on. I mean, see you nod and they're like, this feels right to you. Yeah. It makes it makes sense, right? Because they were in and out so, like so frequently.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A strong impression of this particular set, you know, group of people. And we would get a different answer if you like, if I said, hey, did you know anyone like that? You go, no.

Well, then we go a completely different direction. And we'd start looking for, okay, well, why do you need to see your kids in the dream right there or, but kids that were not your kids. And actually, now that you look back on it, or did they appear to be those two boys specifically or actually just more generic? It was so, it was dark. Like it felt like it was dark. I kind of just saw the back of their heads. I didn't see skin tone or color, which would have like, I don't as far as you know.

But again, it could have been. Well, sure. I don't know. What I mean by that is that it wasn't them specifically. as in the impression from the dream would have been, yes, it was definitely them. I saw them. It was them. It was those boys specifically.

If it wasn't, then it's a little, a little different look at that scenario. Sometimes we take a category of thing and we say, okay, here's a representation of the category. Close enough. You get it. We don't, our brain doesn't, sometimes doesn't go into extra detail unless it's necessary or relevant to, to the message we're trying to get across or the concept we're trying to understand. end. You know, it goes as far as it needs to and says, okay, you get it. And honestly, that's actually the moving on point is like, okay, you get it. We've come to a conclusion here. One thought or idea has been bookended onto the next, the next connecting idea.

Did you have any sense of what they were doing on the floor? You said playing. They were building just playing. They were talking to each other. Was it blocks or was it cars? There was some kind of It could have been either blocks or cars Or the impression of a toy Children's toy Okay yes yeah And

Observing them It was brief You just You became aware of their presence You look over They're safe You go back to sleep In the dream

It was all pretty quick Well it kind of freaked me out To the point where I was like I need to get up No that's right I was conflating the two You told me about the second one This one actually

Oh the other one disturbing Yeah. It's like, what are these kids doing here? Yes, to the point of like, yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's. Yeah.

So you looked over at them. I mean myself awake or and just kind of like, what the hell? And just kind of freaked and tried to wake up. I couldn't read them real. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah. How did you become aware of the presence?

Was it a feeling of like there's someone in the room with me? Was there noise? Did you hear the cars, the blog? no no noise just it seems silent and it was just me going like okay weird and then looking over and the boys were there and it was just like such a shock that somebody was in the room with me while I was trying to sleep that it just jarred me and it was okay no I got to get up like what's happening gotcha and it you know even after getting up it kind of just a weird feeling for the rest of the shift yeah and when you got up and looked at the spot on the

floor where they would have been in real life. Did you see anything that was like, what am I trying to say? We sometimes, you know, in the, in the dark of a room, you look out of the corner of your eye and you see what looks like someone standing in the corner. Turns out it's a, it's a, it's a coat rack with a hair or something. Yeah. That it's just a trick of the environment. There was nothing there is what I'm asking.

There was nothing there. Oh, and nothing that could have been mistaken out of the corner of your eye for the shape of a person. Oh, the room was, the room was clean otherwise. Yep. It was just a stretch. structure was the only thing in the room. Got, got you.

Just ruling that out. That would be, well, I mean, be an easy pick. The easy pick, yeah. And I guess it's a stupid question in a way just because if there was, you'd go, oh yeah, and when I turned the light on, there was a pile of clothes and I thought, you know, I'm like, I wondered, was it a kid? Oh.

But no. Yeah. Just to clarify, I suppose, so I can see it, see it better in my own mind, too. I think you said specifically that it was the surprise, the surprise, the, the surprise of a sense of someone in the room with you and then seeing that these kids were in there that it made you want to and I think the words you used were scream yourself awake or did I write that down wrong was it that was the idea no no no it's scream myself awake yeah it just freaked me out yeah I'm just going oh my god what you know what what's happening what's going on

why are they in here um yeah it's very reasonable and it took a minute to kind of like get going to be actually to able to actually get up and wake up. Have you ever had experience with the sleep paralysis issues or sleep walking or no okay. No. No. No. No. It needs to get ruled out just in case. Yeah. Sleep paralysis like maybe very, very rarely, maybe once a year if that. Um, but again, more at home than, then at work. Sure. Um, mind you, it's happened once or twice now at work, uh, in the ER. over the last four or five months maybe have you developed an understanding of of that phenomenon with yourself i mean obviously you've got the name for it and you looked into it a little bit and

you kind of kind of kind of know what it is yeah i just kind of just you know your brain's going but your body's it's not picking up what your brain's putting out basically it's the it's the natural function that keeps us from sleepwalking well you know and then when it breaks and that's funny that they're allied conditions one is Uh, the, uh, brain is asleep and the body's awake, sleepwalking, uh, the body, bodies, a, wow, asleep and the brain's awake. He's sleeping. The brain's awake.

Sleep paralysis. The, the opposite condition. Um, and, and that's where we get the idea, you know, I felt like something was sitting on my chest was and I couldn't draw a breath is because you're, you're not voluntarily breathing yet. You don't have control with that. You can't literally can't voluntarily draw breath because it's still switched off. So anyway, it's good thing.

it's good that you know those things. The next question would be now, knowing, because you're familiar with that phenomenon, did this particular dream feel different? This was not an episode of sleep paralysis because you can tell the difference. Yeah. It's never happened before where, you know, I, oh my God, it's so shocked and need to get up, need to get up, need to get up like and trying to get myself up. It's never happened like that before.

Okay. Had you had an episode of sleep paralysis before this? Or this might have been before those started? Okay. Yeah. Usually it's biological. It's a lifelong condition. It's not something that sudden, I think there's sudden onset late life.

On set. No, it's like it's, so there's something. I mean, that's how we know that there's something biological going on, whether it's like, you're either kind of born that way or you're not. And I think we're born that way in, in regards to like, I'm, I'm, I'm. I get messages on Discord. We were talking about that earlier from a guy who dreams like every night, long, detailed. And he doesn't send me everyone because he would just be sending me messages every single day. And he's nice not to do that.

But I am quite the opposite where I almost never remember that I even had a dream. I wake up and all that I become aware of is, oh, I'm awake. Sometimes I'm coming out of the tail end of something of like, I think I was just, dreaming. I got nothing. Normally what if a dream follows me out. It's something like my one of my most recent ones. I was standing behind the open rear passenger side door of I think a white vehicle. And that was the entire sum total of the dream imagery that came out with me. Couldn't tell you why I was there. I didn't do anything. I was I did I get in in the car? Am I getting in the car? Am I getting out of the car?

I have no idea what's going on. That's the, but typically I get nothing. So, and I think we're just, we're just kind of born that way. Now you can do different things like, I think what is it?

Like if you drink heavily, it kind of interrupts your deep sleep and you just don't dream as much. So there's things you can do. But let's say you're, uh, um, like me and you've taken a month off of drinking and, and,

uh, still no dreams. But, you know, and in my life before I ever had to, a drop of alcohol. I was the same. I,

I have maybe five dreams from my entire life I can remember. That's typically, so long story short, same thing with the sleep walking things. We think it's, you know, biological. Well, you know, you're a nurse anyway, explaining medical stuff to you, but mostly to the audience, I suppose. But also we're trying to tease that out too. So it doesn't sound like it was an episode of sleep paralysis and you don't typically have that kind of twilight hallucination when you're coming out of it.

It's more like, okay, I'm awake, but I can't really. It's almost like your body's asleep, like when your arms is asleep and you can't move it, that kind of thing. So this was definitely not that kind of experience. So this was actually definitely fully asleep, fully an actual dream experience. One of the questions we'd want to look at is kind of why was it so, again, counterfactual. You could have looked over at him and comforted yourself, which was my initial thing that I was saying. I was going down the wrong, wrong path, I think. Oh, they're here.

They're safe. I don't have to worry about it. You're like actually, no, they're here. They're not supposed to be here. This is bad. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Yeah, yeah, very interesting. It's, uh, maybe we go a different direction with that, which is,

this is something I thought from the very beginning, but I'd like to not lean into my, I like to ask questions first before I start making suggestions. Absolutely. One, one thing that, that occurred to me, which sounded like a possible explanation, it seems more likely the, the further we go. the idea of not feeling comfortable taking a break to the point that your brain invents a reason to get you up like there's responsibilities there's danger there's something happening that you're not attending to that needs to be done that you

probably shouldn't be asleep like as much as dreams are often sleep preservers they can also be sleep disruptors of course if if it were exclusively true that dreams only exist to keep us asleep then whence nightmares why Would we ever have a nightmare? So this almost seems like a mini nightmare of introducing a moment of panic. And that the nightmare's got to have a genesis in some aspect of yourself that is expressing itself. So I'm going to stop there and let you give me feedback on the general concept. I mean, we can dial it in.

It seemed like it might have hit a nerve or said something that resonated with you. The whole taking, like not taking a break. I'd been, so the first five years of my career, we didn't take naps on nights. If you happened to fall asleep while we were watching a movie, that was acceptable, but it wasn't common practice for somebody to go and have a nap. Schedule a nap, have a break, because truly there really wasn't many of us. So there was one registered nurse for the ER, one registered nurse for the floor with two RPMs, and, you know, up to 14 beds. but we really didn't have enough staff to like do breaks properly, I don't think. More than likely, yeah, you could have slept eight full hours and I'm sure it would have

been absolutely fine up there. You couldn't have the entire staff passed out for eight hours. That's not going to work. Yeah. Oh, no. Somebody had to. And they were like, you had to do your hourly checks. You know, they were very rigid about their hourly checks, which is shockingly enough because

most of the people who had been on the floor had been there for months. And like, we're just waiting for long-term care or for, you know, they, in Canada, if they hit the three-month mark and they're deemed alternate level of care, which means there's nothing medically wrong with you why you can't go home. You're just not able to go home. You're not strong enough. You're not safe enough, whatever. So, but once they hit that three-month mark after being ALC, they have to start paying. So a lot of people have figured this out where they'd stay to the three-month mark. They'd get the bill.

They'd go home for a day. either something would happen or they would come back to say oh I wasn't safe at home I was too weak I couldn't I had a fall I whatever else and then they'd get readmitted we'd rework them up and then you know it would take time to get that three month mark again they'd leave they come back again it was a whole it was a whole game which fine whatever there wasn't enough long-term care beds but yeah what do you do when someone actually the emphasis is a nursing home or that you're waiting for a bed to open up or something wait yeah yeah you wait if they're if they're sick enough like Typically in that three months, somebody will more than likely potentially have a fall or get aspiration pneumonia or potentially have a stroke or something that then, you know, you're actively medical again.

So you kind of come out of that. It was just kind of a weird waiting game that, you know, there was only so many beds on long-term care. Once somebody died there, it was more often than not somebody who was already on the active side that was teed up to go over next. And so, you know, you'd had these people who the hospitalitis would sit in and they were very used to the nurses kind of catering to them. And you're like, this is not nursing. This isn't even like caretaking at this point. This is just kind of ridiculous. But the lack of sleep, you know, they kind of expected you that you'd be up all night.

And as a new grad, you're like, oh, you know, whatever is the common practice. So I would try to stay up. And then, you know, getting into that routine of not sleeping. at work, wasn't until I came back down south that, no, no, we scheduled two hour breaks.

Like everybody, we were right on it. Everybody went for naps. That was a more than accepted practice. So it was five years of that before, actually it was a five years. It was probably two years before I went over to pediatrics and then came back.

So like, knowing that this is what most people did, it was commonplace. So it's weird that it. And it was a common practice on the pediatric. way on the pediatric unit as well they they also had a lot of people went down oh yeah yeah everybody you know nothing was really happening most of the kids were stable unless you had um puffers or antibiotics that you had to give in the middle of the night just because that's how they

were ordered you weren't doing anything for these kids in the middle of the night so you just and again if they were that sick they would go out yeah it can't be nobody but you really there's not much to do except wait just just the case there's an emergency no yeah for sure you know you're checking in on everybody making sure, you know, that the monitors are hooked up properly and, you know, is an oxygen probe falling off of a toe somewhere and you got to put it back on because it's dinging and all this. But you really, the parents were at the bedside. So the parents nine times out of ten were the ones, if the kids were to wake up, they were comforting them first and trying to get them back to bed before we even realize that the kids were up. Okay. So.

Yeah. So it wasn't exactly that this that sleeping or napping during the shift was new and you were adapting to that and questioning it. It was an established process. So we're not looking at that as an explanation. I don't know. Something else crossed my mind. The idea of missing your kids and like here I am taking care of other people's kids while my kids are well I'm not taking care of my kids. I don't know if any of that those kind of thoughts cross your mind or you're nodding a bit.

Yeah, because we were doing. I think I was doing a lot of night shifts also again, right? So your body's all over the place. And it was only part time, which was nice. Oh my gosh. This whole Alexa, turn off. I would totally reprogram her to be, you know, Alexa, SDFU. Yes.

The kids tell her to shut up all the time. You're like, that's not really nice. We don't really want to say that. But 100%, I'm like, what are you doing? I am always very courteous to artificial intelligence because I don't want them to say, you know, Alexa call an ambulance or whatever. It's like,

I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. You have been so rude to me. I think I'll just watch. Oh, no. Listen, who's got the power now? Guess what?

We're not calling anybody. We're going to let you rot. 100%. I can't even. A little basic courtesy just in case. Avoid that matrix. And a very kind of. Canadian thing.

You know, you're trying to, this is just how we are. So it's like, just stop. We're not telling her, we're not telling her to be quiet. Yeah,

yeah. But it was, you know, my kids were pretty young. And my daughter had just been born. Or no, I'd just been back after 10 months because I went back early with both.

And, yeah, the thought of taking care of other people's kids while you're missing your own. It's a, weird dichotomy of thinking, you know, and especially, so my son is a pretty severe asthmatic. So we had been in and out of the hospital and been up to that floor once or twice. I think before, yeah, it must have been before he was, before Elise was even born,

because I got a video of him at 10 months struggling. Ha, I remember that. So we've been up to the floor once or twice with my son being ill. And I know that we'd been up once with my daughter when she was a month old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd been up to that floor when she was sick. And I was, you know, trying to silence the things and wean her oxygen down and doing my own thing. I'm like, I'm just going to manage this.

You say doctors make the worst patience, right? Oh, so, so bad. Absolutely. The absolute one. worst. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But that's kind of a funny way to look at it, that, you know, we'd already been up to the

floor as patients prior to, prior to me being a nurse up there, and then taking care of kids who were very similar in age to my two. Yeah. There's a lot of reasons why this particular image were there. And there's an interesting thing, too, where it's like sometimes, what am I trying to say? Sometimes if something hits a little close to home, we use a. close representative because we are allowed to, what is it, we are able to better objectively assess it if it's close but not the same.

You know, if we're looking at someone else as kids, we can have, we have a little more emotional distance than our own. So sometimes we'll take it and in a dream will replace the person we're actually thinking of with a, with an approximation that allows us to look at a little more objectively. I was going with all that. It might have been that really. So if we follow that theory, you were thinking of your own kids,

but that was a little too personal. So you're like, well, what if it was someone else's kids? Okay, it would still be disturbing enough to get me out of sleep like your wrong place,

wrong time. And then it's like why. And so there's, I keep coming around to that idea of, there's got to be. I think I probably would have been more freaked out. Had it been my own kids on the floor. Yeah.

Being like, oh my God, why are you here? And like I would have gone into like super mom nurse mode and like flown out of that bed versus somebody else's kids where you're like, oh, what are you guys doing in here? Like, oh, okay, we'll get you back in your room, like, whatever. Yeah. Very much less.

That's what it brings me around the level of responsibility. Yeah, that idea of, um, and a lot of dreams are, um, dream symbols are sometimes amalgamations of different things. And this one does seem to be the case. It's like it's these kids and it's not because it's, also my kids, but it's not. And it's all at the same time. It loves, dreams love to mush things together that are in similar categories and say,

well, these are both representative of the kind of thing we're talking about. Yeah, keep coming around to that idea of, of, for whatever reason, maybe that night, you're, you were a little too worried about not taking care of business. Like, can I allow myself to rest? It's like to the point that you felt it necessary to show yourself something so unusually disturbing that it would pull you out of sleep. And just so that we're kind of book-hending it properly, you didn't run out of the hallway and there was an emergency happening. I mean, you weren't pulled out of sleep to attend to something that actually was really going on. Oh, that would be amazing.

It was quiet. And people were like, why are you back so early? And I'm like, I can't sleep. How did I make, Mark? Yeah. What a strange nightmare too. And nothing, nothing was happening. No, there was no, nothing changing, nobody needing immediate assistance, nothing like that. Yeah. And no, no, we spoke of intuition or no inklings that things needed to be attended to that immediately came to mind.

Not that you couldn't work. This is 10 years ago. It's hard to say, huh? But still, nothing stands out. Not that I remember. The chance of there being a puffer that I didn't want to forget or an IV antibiotic that I didn't want to forget is, highly likely because a lot of the antibiotics and the puffers were being given like every four-ish hours. So, you know, kind of worked myself up that, you know, midnight, midnight and six, or if maybe one was off schedule and, you know, it's at a weird time where we weren't expecting it to be. I stress out about those because I'm like, I just don't want to miss it. Oh, no, and I will. That's my biggest thing is like, you get me on a routine. I am like a clock. You throw me a curveball

and I have no idea where I'm out of what I'm doing and I'm completely panicked because I'm like, I'm going to forget it, I'm going to forget it. And then I do. I work myself up into, don't forget, don't forget, don't forget, don't forget. And then a moment of inattention goes by out the door. You remember that?

It was a movie, I think it was called Memento. I don't ever saw that. It was so good. I'm that, I'm that guy. Don't forget, don't forget. Hi, who are you? Yeah, gone. Ah, gone.

Yeah, yeah. So that would, that would definitely. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The problem is, is I always feel like I'm forgetting something. And sometimes I am. It just never goes away because I'm almost always forgetting something. So, I mean, that's why I have my routines. Like I pat my pockets with wallet, keys, phone, that kind of thing.

I'm like, I think that's it. Let me know if I forgot anything or, you know, I'll get out to the car and I'll go, oh, I can't get into the car. I don't have my keys. That's a good reminder. So if you set up certain systems like that. Like, wait a second. For sure.

What's happening? He's a boy. He's napping on my notes. You know. He's a cute pie. He does it. We call it the bunny arms with his hands. Got the little T-Rex hands.

A little T-Rex hands. I love it. He's such a cute old man. Well, do you feel like we talked about it enough that you have a better understanding of it? I feel like we don't have a narrative. Like we don't have a solid answer that really kind of ties it all together. I kind of prefer it when I can do that. But maybe I'm rusty.

Maybe I'm out of practice. Maybe this one didn't need that much explanation. And the dreams old. old. It is too. It's old, right? If they're really fresh, and we can go with current events, that's a, that's a much better type of thing. Oh, it changes everything.

Yeah. But, no, it makes a lot of sense with, you know, worrying about my kids and probably, it was probably fairly fresh from coming back off of mat leave and trying to get back into the routine of nursing and, and, you know, I don't want to forget. I don't want to forget. I don't want to forget. And a new floor, like I came back and, and went pretty quickly to peeds. So, you know, not just coming back, but then coming back to a new floor and a whole new set of people and a new building and, you know, a different site.

So I had to drive to a different site that was, you know, all over the place kind of thing. So it's probably more than likely what that was. There you go. Well, sometimes the epiphany or explanation of the dream isn't all that profound. Sometimes it's, sometimes I want it to be bigger than it is. And dreams are very simple. Your brain's always turning over. So sometimes you just remember something that wasn't that groundbreaking or anything like that.

But I think you just did a better job of explaining the constellation of ideas around it than I was able to reproduce from my own mind from my notes. That's usually what I do. I'm like, here's all the pieces and how they fit together. Here's the rainbow. But at the very least, these were a lot of things maybe you hadn't considered previously to as to the reason why this dream might have come in this way. Well, good. Usually that's enough. We get something.

It's nice to go to kind of look back and go like, oh, yeah, I know that makes a lot of sense now as to like why that was happening the way it happened and why it stuck so hard and all this kind. You're like, oh, okay. Fair enough. Like there were a lot of changes going around not just, you know, mother, mother changes and identity, you know, changes. And then going back to work and working at a new, not just a new area, but. a hospital and, you know, all those kind of, and then the spiritual aspect of it and falling down that rabbit hole. So, no, there was a lot of change in upheaval. We might get into that a little bit more that it might have a connection, but it seems like it didn't. And that's fine.

Like, what we don't want to do is reach for a conclusion. We've decided ahead of time. We want to let it be what it is. And we did. We did. So, yeah, yeah, we're satisfied by the, by the discussion around it. And you don't have more questions. We could probably wrap it up. Sounds good. Okay. So, uh, oh, wow, he's drooling. Oh, buddy, boy. Oh, and this guy's falling over.

He's so comfortable. Let me end the show. There's there. Seriously, the notes are completely smeared. That's hilarious. It's amazing. Boy. Fantastic.

I know. He's like, what? I saw it. I saw it. What I do? A funny video. You know, they do the little, I don't know if it's from TikTok. They had a compilation or whatnot.

And it was, it was cats that had come back from, uh, being neutered or surgeries and what night. Oh, my God. Yes. And so they had this one orange cat. He's sitting there making like a stupid face and there's drool. And they like were holding up a tape measure next to it. It was a good five and a half, six inches of drool hanging there.

And they're just, the person on the video was just cracking up. Oh, that was hilarious. God, that's so funny. I know. This boy's going to get his operation pretty soon. We got to, before he starts spraying. Oh, mama. Right?

I was going to tell you the answer. Like where his name came from on that? Why we call him that? Might as well wrap up the show that way. So my wife is the, we are the unofficial neighborhood rescue, cat rescue. She just walks around, she's walking to the stores. Mew, meo in the bushes.

And now we have cat distribution system has found her multiple times. It just needs to distribute a little more equitably to other people. It's distributed to us all of them. Too often. Too often. So she finds and she's like, oh, you poorly know, you're crying, crying, crying. you must be hungry and cold and whatnot. And so he was so hungry that he couldn't wait for her to open a little packet of tuna.

You know, and this was a, not a can, but one of those plastic bags. Squeezy, yeah. Yeah. And so she pulled it open and went to, went to open it up. And he was chewing on the plastic. And he cut his, he cut his lip. And so it made her think of that character from, you know, Bubba Gump. Bubba Gump.

Boba Gump. Yep. Exactly. Now he's fine now and his lip healed and everything was fine, but he was so starving. So we call him Bubba. Yeah. He's my little Bubba boy. And my Bubba, so Wyatt, I was reading a romance novel at the time that we had him. Just a really trippy harlequin typical romance. And I don't typically read romances with kids because I'm like spoils it. And so sure enough, you know, it's this the woman, she's got a child and the, Cowboy comes in to save her. And they name the kid Bubba. I'm like, what a stupid nickname? Her baby.

Like, why would you name a baby Bubba? Like, that's ridiculous. And I was in my head constantly, like, just driving down this name. Sure enough, Bubba all the time. Bubba, Bubba. Like, it's just stuck. It's so funny. Yeah.

And I think I love the way my wife says it too. And I think I've started to say she, Bubba boy. Bubba boy. It sounds like baby boy. You know, like that boba. Cute. Okay. Well, I was looking at the wrong notes anyway.

I can't read these. This is what it is. All right. So we've come to the end of the show. We did the thing. This has been our friend Jen Johnson from Ontario, Canada. I got to write this time. She is a wife, mother, two ER nurse, and now an author.

Her book is Nursing Intuition, How to Trust Your Gut, Save Your Sanity, and Survive, I can't read my own handwriting, survive your career. You can get it. And actually, it's right in the background right there, RX for growth. It's in the back. I just noticed that. So, well, there you go. That works.

All right. And then for my part, would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. Video game streams 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., Pacific Monday through Friday, most days. This episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 8, the literature and curiosity of dreams, part of a volume one, part of a two volume set. all this and more, of course, at Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com. Also, you can go to Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com.

Become a member of the community there. Free to join attached to my Rumble account. One of the best ways to reach out to me. And that's it. Jen, thank you for being here and for such a fascinating glimpse into your life and mind and dreams. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.

It's been an absolute pleasure. Deal. And everybody out there, thank you for listening. See you next time.