Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 178: The Poet & The Sage

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Simon Drew ~ https://www.simonjedrew.com/the-poet-the-sage/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend, a guest dreamer Simon Drew, originally out of Australia, now residing in Orange County of California. I've already offered my condolences. For me being in the Pacific Northwest, too, I get it to the left coast, so to speak. He is a philosopher, poet, musician, and podcaster's latest book is The Poet and the Sage. You can find that at Simon J.E. Drew.com. Also, a link will be in the description.

both for the podcast and and live on YouTube. I'm going to try and make this brief. For my part, would you kindly, like, share and subscribe, always need more volunteer dreamers. You've seen that, you know, for the past month or so, I didn't have any episodes. No one contacted me. So I definitely want to talk to you.

You don't have to be somebody with a book to sell. You don't have to be anybody special or of renown. I'm not only willing to talk to famous people. All dreams are fascinating. We're all human. All dreams are fascinating. That's enough about I said I would keep this short. That's not happening.

Too late for that. I also broadcast live video games streams Monday through Friday 5 p.m. to roughly 8 p.m. Pacific. And you can find that, of course, on YouTube and Rumble. This episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 9, The Literature and Curiosity of Dreams, Volume 2. It is a collected two-volume set by late 18, 18, 1865. mid-1800's author Frank Seafield, gathering stories about dreams in literature and various curious tales that he's collected

from personal first-hand accounts of people who had prophetic dreams and visitations from deceased relatives, fantastic stories throughout history. Great two-volume set. Of course, I say that it's about all my books if you're going to get any of them by this one for sure. Of course, you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com,

including downloadable MP3 versions of this very podcast. Last thing, if you head on over to Benjamin the dream wizard.locals.com It's attached to my Rumble account, free to join building a community there, probably the best place to reach out to me to say, hey, I got a dream, let's talk. That is more than enough out of me.

They get longer every time. I try and keep it short. Sorry, Simon, to keep you waiting there. Hey, man, go for it. I love it. If it's any consolation, like during that shilling on my half, your image on the screen is replaced by all the things I'm talking about. I put up the here's the website.

Here's the book. So it won't just be you staring at the camera going, God, this guy just won't shut up. Yeah. Can we talk about a dream already? Right. What are we doing here? So you've got a book, your musician, you're a philosopher. I don't know where you want to start.

I mean, we can start with the book and that usually opens the door to a lot of other conversations like how did it come together? What does it mean to you? Why did you feel like it was necessary to get this information out there? I don't know, anything. We're freewheeling now. Oh man, where do I start? You know, the book, it's funny.

Often when I describe who I am and kind of what I'm all about, I say I'm a philosopher in my heart, I feel very drawn to having conversations with people around these deeper questions relating to how we can make meaning in our lives and how we can find purpose, how we can understand ourselves a little bit better. I'm a musician in my being, you know, because from a very young age, I was very musical, had the talent, went on to study it at university.

It's where I feel very comfortable, you know, on stage with musicians. But I'm a poet by calling. And that calling really came to me back in 2020, probably around the same time when many people were, learning that they had different skills or crafts that they wanted to, you know, develop. That's when this podcast popped up for me too. Yeah. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. We were all forced into this kind of state of like, what do I, what do I do? You know, and it wasn't necessarily out of boredom that I,

I felt called to poetry. It was really, it was like, it was like I kind of stumbled across it. And the thing is my, my dad is a beautiful poet, right? But I never knew. that I had that skill inbuilt as well. You know, that totally got passed on through the genetics or something because, you know, through my spirit just, it's funny that we're talking about the poet and the sage now on a dream podcast because the poet and the sage really emerged out of a waking dream that I had. And I just, it was one of those moments where, and this was really the birth of my, my poetry. and for the years after that I was just writing every single night just writing it right and just trying to catch

what was coming through my soul and so the poet and the sage was born out of a waking dream that I just started thinking about and then I was like wow this you know those moments where you just this feels important I need to catch this immediately and so I just started writing

and I took this dream to a friend of mine Sharon LaBelle beautiful philosopher and author, best-selling penguin author, and, you know, she's somebody, I just, I totally trust with any sort of export of my mind or soul, you know, because I know that she'll handle it with the degree of care necessary. And I said, man, what do you think of this dream? Like, I just started writing this thing. And she said, you got to keep on going with this. You got to, you got to figure out what this is. And so what that turned into was a whole book called the

poet and the sage and that dream is a chapter in the book and that was really the you know so the poet and the sage is is a kind of myth uh that spawned out of this waking dream about a young poet and his introduction to the sage and uh the the winding journey that they go on together and so yeah that's That's really what the poet in the sage is. It was the birth of my poetic calling, I feel. Yeah. Very cool. It's so much good stuff to respect.

You saw me taking some notes here because my memory is terrible. Kind of working backwards a little, a little bit. There's a couple of interesting. So the idea of dreams and waking dreams. And we have, we all have a concept, I think, of daydreaming, that idea of like you let your mind wander or wanders on its own. involuntarily, which is kind of how dreams, dreams happen anyway. And we have, you know, what we would call fantasies. And, you know, of course, a lot of people attach specifically sexual meaning.

But it's anything, fantasy is anything fictional in that sense. It's like it is simply immaterial or it has not actually happened. Every piece of fictional literature is a fantasy technically. It's not under the capital F fantasy genre. We think of that as wizards and warriors and whatnot. But basically every story is a fantasy because it's made up. Long story short on that. sorry, I'm like, I ramble.

No, no, no. Well, and actually what Carl Jung, and I think even maybe Sigmund Freud did, although I think it's more unique to Young, if a person came in and he couldn't do any dream work with them because they don't remember them well enough or they just didn't have one that came to them in that time period, he would have them do daydreaming. He would have them make up a story. He's like, okay, let's just close her eyes and see what comes to you.

What's the story your mind's telling you right now? And they could actually do a dream analysis on a, on a piece of, daydreaming. And actually one of the books I'm going to be editing for forthcoming is on the kind of the psychology of daydreaming and how that fits fits in there. But I think it's basically coming from the same source, the idea of whatever bubbles up from this vast unconscious we've got with all our thoughts and experiences. So, you know, and that's, you know, speaking of the, let's say literary genre of fantasy, then there's a, the genre of science fiction, of course, just breaking them down.

They're all, they're all fantastic stories and whatnot. Every piece of science fact was once science fiction. Now, maybe was not written in a book with aliens and spaceships, but someone had to dream up. They had to conceptualize or imagine something that did not exist that performs a certain function and then build it.

So every, you know, so all of all of the great accomplishments of mankind start as daydreams or literal, nocturnal dreams. but also the idea of uh it's as you were describing um becoming a poet discovering you discovering you have poetry in you i mean that's what a a musical lyricist is as well they're writing poetry to music basically and then there's

poetry not to music which is its own category but it's uh uh and a lot of it tells a story or it's to evoke a certain feeling or, well, tell a story or evoke a feeling. I can't think of a third category. I don't know if you can, but that's, yeah, so that's basically this is very closely tied together. And then the idea of a poet meeting a sage, I'd say both of them speak magic words in a way. You know, it's like it's trying to communicate something. And if you accomplish successful communication of some, you know, whether of some truth or,

truth is a good way to put it. You're speaking magic words in my conception. The sage is another word for a wizard in a way. It's in that same category. A wizard embodies elements of the sage in that thing, which is like, you know, I'm just some crazy guy who thinks I'm, it thinks I'm a wizard on the internet. But I really mean it in terms of that.

And again, it's that love of wisdom. That's what a sage does. It means to be sagacious to, to have that wisdom. And the love of wisdom is what makes you a philosopher. So wanting to learn and understand and then communicate that to others. All of those were the thoughts that I had as you were saying that.

So I'll stop there. It's a lot. I love what you're saying about how poetry is speaking magic words because that's really what I learned. And this is why to me it's a calling. It's not something that I just chose is because it was really thrust upon me. And I felt just the great importance of widening the mind getting out of the way and allowing the things to come through that needed to come through. And it taught me.

And it really facilitated my own personal awakening and perhaps my conversion back to some sort of deeper spirituality, a deeper understanding of the nature of our reality. Because I would have these experiences where I would free my mind and say, okay, I'm about to write, I'm about to write, and I want to get out of the way, and I want to see what comes out. And the things that would flow through were so profound and interesting and free-flowing. And sometimes I would step back and I'd say, you know, I didn't know what that poem actually meant until the very last line,

which actually pulled the whole thing together. And that's a weird experience. And in many ways, it mirrors the artistic experience, the experience of the mystic. One of my good friends and actually my mentor, my teacher, is a guy called Rocco German, beautiful poet, mystic. There's actually no word that can describe him. He's the sage, you know. He's the guy.

But, you know, he always shares this quote with me. I forget who said it first, but it's something like the mystic swims. in the same waters that the psychotic drowns in. And so in many ways, the poetic or the artistic or the mystical experience is one of going into a kind of insanity, but bringing back from that realm something of value and not drowning in it, you know? And that's how it felt to me.

It felt like just dipping my toes into that kind of space and coming back with something that was beautiful and actually surprised me, you know. Like, I'll tell you that, you know, I grew up as a Mormon and so we always read out of the King James Bible. So it's got all the these and the thows and theions and that sort of thing. And that's just naturally how I started writing my poetry, you know. It's in this kind of old English style, you know, and it feels otherworldly, you know. And so it, you know, it just, what it taught me is, it helped me to believe again in the power of the human soul to bring up that stuff from the depths and to say, you know, there were people throughout history who wrote absolutely profound poetry and words of wisdom and things that appear to be sacred.

in nature or appear to be, you know, you read like the Tao Te Ching and you're like, man, this work stands on its own. There's something about the way that this is written. And it just made me believe again in, well, okay, that all came from human beings. We have that capacity. And perhaps as a poet, that's the thing that I uniquely write. You know, that's just what's coming through, you know. For sure. Yeah. And again, working backwards, it's, uh, I have a, so I've got my historical dream

literature and I've got a plan for another series when that's all wrapped because I'm going to run out of other people's books from the 1800s to reproduce to preserve that material. So that's what you do. You take, you take that old stuff that really not many people are looking at and you just, that's a, that's beautiful. I love that you're doing that. Thank you. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, some people are, some people are impressed by it. And some people go, oh, so you're not even writing your own books. whatever. I'm like, yeah, well, they said it better. And I have to start somewhere. And that's so necessary. Yeah, absolutely. I hadn't heard of 90% of these things. There's a couple of them that

crossed my radar. I mean, everyone's familiar with, oh, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud. They did dream work in psychology. And then that kind of legitimized it in the mind of people. This can be a practical, medical thing. And it, because dreams had been up, it's been a purely mystical thing for centuries and and then very very much a religious thing at the height of the you know middle ages and whatnot and eventually came around to well we can look at this from a purely psychological brain chemistry and and and biology standpoint which is then of course my focus coming from that coming from that background but um I was going somewhere with all that ah oh okay okay wow got a I got like legit autism and I got up to

really and I haven't had enough coffee probably so we're gonna we're gonna go all over this I think this is too much coffee so we'll balance us all right I'm gonna drink a little bit more here that's what I think actually makes my the dream interpretation stuff I do I think as you were talking about a calling I think it makes me uniquely suited to it because I have a squirly brain and it shoots me off on tangents and some of them are are brilliant and some of them are not and I don't hang on to the ones that are not you like meditative style well that did work moving on moving on okay still I had a point oh I'm gonna forget it again when I I'm done with the reproducing the works of historical dream literature. I want to write a series and one called a wizard's guide to X, Y, Z. And I do, I want to do the wizard's guide to the Tao Te Ching as well as Greek mythology, as well as the knights of, knights of roundtable and the King Arthur mythology. And I'll be starting with a wizard's guide to Aesop's fables, just preserving some of this. And I kind of almost want to make this one specifically like a bathroom book where on one page is the Aesop story.

On the other page is the explanation or psychological, meaning or human reference to human nature. Was this was the story mean? And bam, one and done and you're in because you should, you know, honestly, uh, uh, this is medical advice. You shouldn't sit on the toilet or strain for too long. Uh, you should just relax and let nature take its course. Read a brief thing by my books and get out.

Uh, read the back of a shampoo bottle, whatever you got to do. Please don't make that the only, uh, advertisement of your book. It's great to be by the toilet. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, if that's funny, if that's the selling point, I'll take it. Somebody I've had on my show multiple times, beautiful, beautiful man named Dr. Joseph Syracuse, a professor, he prefers professor.

Now, this is a guy who, one of the world's leading historians, probably the leading expert on nuclear weapons history and political diplomacy, international diplomacy and such, written over 50 books with Oxford Press. You know, this, this is a serious guy. And he always says it all goes back to Aesop's fables, fables. He just said that it's everything. So we know, we know those are 2,300, 2,500 years old. They're older. Yeah. Guarantee they're older than that.

There's that, that's when they got collected. Yeah. By a guy, we're not even, we're pretty sure he lived. But there's historical evidence he lived. But it also could have been a pen name. It also could have been a bunch of. It also could have been a bunch of different authors, but it's definitely a bunch of different stories from different places that have all been brought together. It's human wisdom.

That's how I look at the Bible and the Tao Te Ching and a lot of other things. It's like these are collections of ancient human wisdom, things we've learned through, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. So I'm, you know, I'm one person who thinks, and God said, let there be evolution. So I'm like, I don't think there's any discrepancy between the two. I think we were, there's a point in time at which we became human as we are today, about 350,000 years ago. This is my opinion. You can agree, disagree, it doesn't matter. That's how I see it.

But, and we've been learning about ourselves for longer than that. And then eventually we became what we are today and gathered those stories together from our experiences. And they became crystallized down to tortoise and the hair, fox and the sour grapes, that kind of stuff. But then a lot of other stories. And I think that's going to be first I have to complete my education, my self-chosen, you know, master mastery of the dream space. And then I can move on to, okay, now what am I going to say about this, this other stuff? So, yeah, that was the other thing that was, you talked about feeling your calling. That's what I was, you know, I'm looking at like, do I want to do what I'm doing for the rest of my life?

I was working inpatient psychiatric care. And then at some point, I'm like, you know, I just would rather talk about dreams and read about dreams. and get into that space and actually try to teach people how to do their own dream analysis by example. Like, let me just talk to people. I think I have a little bit of a little bit of a knack for this. And it turned into what I'm doing now and 17 books and five or six more to go. And then I started thinking about that whole yeah, wizard's guide thing too. So it's like I think you're right.

You're right. It's very much you've got to be inspired to this. You can't really force it. And that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's tough to accept it. It can be.

And it just, it just, you know, some things do appear as a calling. And it's so different to any other feeling, you know. And, and, and, and in a calling, you know, there's an invitation to respond, you know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can ignore it too. It's like you couldn't, you can say I'm not, you can feel I'm not up to that task.

You can say that's not. I have other responsibilities. You can rationalize it away and say, you know, there's other things I feel I should be doing. There's a lot of reasons people, I'd say don't follow their calling. Yeah. I mean, myself included, I remember in one of the poems that I wrote right towards the end of a series of poetry that I wrote called, As Above So Below the Book of Prophecy, there was one poem that basically said flat out, you know, flat out, you know, I would display the sign of Jonah or something like that, running away,

right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Running away, you know, and hiding and being spat back out by that way. Exactly. That's a great story, too. I mean, the people, I think, take too literally of like, oh, no one got actually swallowed by a whale. Like, well, it's more of the idea of, and I don't think, I don't think.

Yeah, that sort of stuff happens all the time. It does. And so I separate out the idea of did that literally happen versus is it true? Like, is it true or is a real? And I separate those things, those things out. A lot of things that are real are also true, but a lot of things that are true were not real. They never physically happen. But what does it mean to be swallowed by a great fish in the ocean?

Like, they never say a whale specifically, I think, you know, but the idea of, yeah, if you run away from something you know you need to do in your, in your, in your gut, you're like, this is necessary. This is, I mean, that's just the truth of it. Like, there's no doubt, but I'm scared, but I don't want to suffer the consequences, but et cetera, et cetera. The whole point of the stories, it's, you're going to suffer either way. If you run away from it, if you don't do something, you know you are called to do,

there's going to be consequences. And for this one, it's like the way out of those consequences was ultimately to accept his fate and say, look, I'll go do the hard thing that I know I need to do. And that, you know, they give you a little bit of hope at the end. like that's that worked out okay for him but it was the running away was like yeah if you avoid responsibilities it's gonna bite you in the ass just that very basic thing just didn't just explain that to people like oh that's the point of that story really yeah it's it's not about being swallow you know god being a meany and making people get swallowed by fish it's like it's a little different

a little different oh yeah but yeah well that's that's what i want to bring to the whole well and actually um i've been making this offer to almost every guest like i would like to have guest authors publish under my label in a way of like if you have an idea for a wizard's guide to you name it and pitch it to me and I'll edit it and put it up put it up for sale and share the profits you know that thing or design the cover do the editing and you put it up as a book in my series and then you can you know give me a piece of the action on the back end or something I don't know how to work no one's taking me up on it yet and I haven't even started right in the series but it's wide open and it reminds you know.

reminds me of another series I loved, oh, from the 90s. It was called Philosophy and. We've ever heard of those, philosophy and baseball, philosophy and sign. Philosophy and the Simpsons. Philosophy and the Sopranos. Philosophy and the Undead, Chicken Soup for the Undead Soul. That is a great series where it talks about, yeah, that was actually one of my favorites talking about, I told you this was going to go anywhere, nowhere, I just talked about

whatever comes into my mind. One of my favorites was Philosophy and the Undead. It's like, why have these iconic representations seized our imagination such that they became movie monsters, the vampire, the werewolf. Where did these stories come from and why did they persist? The zombie. And I think one of the Romero zombie movies had captured that,

you know, it was a people trapped in a mall with zombies. And, you know, of course there's the action and metaphor of the action of, we have to fight zombies and survive, but it's also blind consumerism. Like, are we not surrounded by people who behave as if zombies, mindless, programmed, consuming, consuming to the point that they're consuming other people,

that they harm people in the process of this consumption. There's a strong metaphor to consumerism there. And for vampires, there's the idea of, I think we've got the more recent current phrase or pop culture idea of a psychic vampire. sociopathic people that feed on our energy and just take take take and give nothing back and that's very understandable and that's been been you know mythologized in a form of well they literally drain the life blood from us you know and then what was it on at wherewolves the

idea is you know within every man is a beast and that beast we have to be careful not to let it out and if we do we hurt people you know and that man man and woman you know either either way kind in general, that there is an animal nature to us that is potentially dangerous and we should be very careful about it. I find that stuff so interesting because especially the zombie analogy, I remember that there's a line from Heraclitus, you know of Heraclitus. You know, and this guy, he said something like those unmindful when they hear may be likened unto now I don't know whether he said the waking or the walking dead okay now but either way

he's making an analogy to kind of say like well you know going back to rocker he says what truly makes an individual discernment intentionality presence discernment intentionality and presence I really like that definition but if you think about it you know okay how many people today are just not discerning, not present, have no guiding intentionality to their life, drifting along. Yeah. But not only that, on a very real visceral level, the zombie motif is 100% coming true, especially here in California. I'm telling you, any downtown area, any, you know, suburban area here, like you walk

outside at night, and it's so sad, but you are going to see people who, who have no home, who have through this current culture and system been kind of spit out the bottom end, whether it's through drug addiction, opioids, whatever it is. And they are walking around the streets and the appearance and the sounds and the way that they come off is one, you would think that you're in a zombie movie. And I heard people know that I say this with no, that there's no, oh, isn't this interesting? It's, it is interesting and it is incredible. incredibly sad, but that motif has totally come true. Absolutely.

No, the same thing here in Portland, Oregon. Go, go to our downtown, and there's people moving around. And you don't, I think I'm picking up what you're putting down as far as like, you're not looking at it going, oh, these people, we shouldn't care about them or we should harm them because they look zombieish. It's not like, oh, zombies, therefore destroy. It's like, it's sad. It is sad.

And it's people. Look at where we're at as a culture. It's just happening. Ultimately been reduced to something less than human by an involuntary thing, drug addiction or mental health issues or like the top thing. So you get people, well, and then we get the current, I don't know if it's internet based or, but it fits the pop culture phrasing of a fentanyl zombie. And we've got people who are, they're just not there.

I mean, the zombie is something you can't communicate with. It's something where the brain is, the body's moving, but the brain ain't there. That kind of a thing. And you got folks who are just gone there, you know, in a heroin coma or a fentanyl stupor or stooped over literally. And yeah, no, no, I think you're very much right. Well, this brings me around to another thing I'd written down at the idea of prophecy. I think, and that's part of actually what a wizard or a sage does as well. It's like not only speaks magic words, but can also see the future, like scrying in a crystal ball type of thing.

And at the very base level of it, I consider it like you've lived long enough to see patterns of cause and effect. You know how things are going to turn out based on the trajectory and whatnot. And so I think there's a lot. There's a lot of the phrasing I use on Twitter. Don't follow me on Twitter. As I say a ton of crazy stuff. But anyway, a phrasing I've used before was, prophets yet walk among us in these latter days.

And that's actually a phrasing I've gotten from some of these older books. I think I stole that line specifically. I couldn't tell you where from. But I consider certainly George Orwell, Aldous Huxley. and Frank Herbert in the 60s as being examples of modern day prophets where they said, hey, here's the trajectory we're on.

Here's how I see it turning out. And there's, you know, so I'll say, you know, every time someone says, hey, look at all this surveillance state going on. And I'm like, Orwell was a prophet. Yep. He knew what was coming.

He warned us. And that's a great thing too. It's like prophecy can be avoided. It's all, you know, your fate can be avoided if you understand it. If you say, you know, someone, says, hey, if you slam on the accelerator and drive straight towards that cliff, you're going off it.

Well, we look at that and go, duh, that's just physics. I'm like, well, now make that metaphorical. Someone's warning you, if you continue down this path, there will be bad things at the end of it. I consider that prophecy every bit as much as biblical stuff, you know, whether it's fulfilled or not, because sometimes the fulfillment is you avoided that fate because you listened. you didn't do what you were warned not to do hey great now the bible is full of uh and other other tales tragic tales of uh hey they didn't listen they were warned and here's here's the consequences uh and it was like yeah everybody other than them could see the results they saw it coming and the person

just would not take it to heart would not listen and that's i think that speaks to your point too is like you've got to really have that discernment intentionality and presence to uh take advantage of realistic warnings. And then you've got folks that don't, unfortunately. He's like, ah, how do you open their eyes? I don't know. Hopefully I'm doing my part here with this type of a show. It's like, oh, yeah, you make sense.

Well, I think I certainly, and with you there that, you know, prophets walk among us, you know. And when people hear the word profit, they immediately have some sort of version in their mind of what they think it is. And, you know, some guy standing on a hill telling you, you know, the end is coming, you know. Tablets and burning bush, yeah. Yeah, but on a very real sense, you know, I think that some people are just born with a kind of sense they can pick up to a finer degree the movements of a culture. And, you know, maybe through their genetics and then through their upbringing and the experiences of their life, they. And honestly, I've felt this. And a lot of it comes through in my poetry.

know, it's just this, it's this deep sense of, you know, warning, warning, warning. Yeah, yeah. Look around you and especially if you have a kind of sense of the old ways, you know, the places we have been. And, and you kind of, yeah, you get, you get this deep sense and this kind of calling to, you know, hey, speak up a little bit. And it makes sense that there would be people within communities who are just naturally, you know, there doesn't have to be any sort of, you know, talk of a divine appointment or anything like that. It could just be like, hey, naturally, there's going to be somebody in your community who's a little bit more sensitive, you know, to those underlying movements, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's an interesting thing, man. It surely is. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's, so I'm more on the agnostic side of things. You know, it's weird. I'd say my religiosity, if you put it that way, is more along the deist realm, where I think there is, you know, I did not create the universe.

Nothing like me did, not any other person. So there's something above all of us that is responsible for that. What is it? I think we can only come to know it through observing the natural. world and that includes drawing conclusions that we collect into stories and and that appear in major religious texts and mythology throughout human history some of which more or less true depending on where you're coming from but so all of that to say I it's I try to speak the language of the person I'm talking to and but but if I'm also but I'm also divorced from the idea of results

when I speak truth in a way, which is, I think, what prophets have to do. Again, it's going to sound self-agrary. Do I think I'm a prophet? Sometimes I probably have been. I absolutely did predict some things in certain contexts with people. And it came to pass. And I'm like, well, to me, it was kind of obvious

and they wouldn't believe it. So it looks magical. Like, how did you know that? I'm like, I just pay attention. I just had a seed of truth. And I put so, so if I say things like that or like what I'm about to say in terms of communication from the divine, I think if you speak a true prophecy, if you see something true and you say it, that is literally coming from that divine source.

I mean, that's kind of what it means. And I look at my dream interpretation that way too, is like, I don't know how I do what I do. I can't explain it. Where does inspiration come from? Where do I get these ideas? You know, and I chalk it up to the muses or I chuck it up to my autism, squirly brain, go, go. in a bunch of different directions, but ultimately, I, I kind of unreservedly open myself to the possibility of speaking truth and being useful to the person that I'm talking to. And then whatever

comes into me or works through me, I'm not responsible for that. Like, I don't take credit for what I'm doing in that way. I think I may be uniquely blessed with a certain set of skills or, you know, it's kind of like those, you know, the football players. They run for a touchdown, get down on one knee and point the sky. It's like, it's not me. It's God. God did it. There's a humbleness necessary to that where it's like, none of the answers are in me.

They just come through me in a way I can't explain. And I could not force to happen for the life of me, you know. You know, it's not as simple as flipping a switch and saying, I can turn it on and off. It's like, and I think that's, I think that's, I think we have to interpret those. experiences or those processes as divine in a way as magical, spiritual, mystical, um, because, you know, you, you can ask the, uh, most experienced and well researched neuroscientist show me the area in the brain where an idea happens.

And we can watch it as it happens with like a functional MRI. Oh, look at all this area is lighting up. And there's certain language processing centers that light up, but like, like, really, can you make an idea happen? Okay, now make that happen on purpose. Nobody can do that. We can set up the preconditions and then cross our fingers. And there's always that crossing our fingers at the end.

I hope I become inspired. So, you know, last last things, I've been rambling for a long time, but the idea of Archimedes and water displacement in the bath and then he runs down the street naked shouting, Eureka, Eureka, I have it. Eureka, that Eureka moment is, I think, a divine inspiration. That's how I look at it. It's something coming to us from somewhere else. And then we're hopefully able to communicate it to other people.

I'm going to stop there. It's a lot of stuff. That's my perspective. You got some good stuff that. I mean, to your point of kind of like pointing up to the sky, I started a master of divinity a while ago. I stopped after the first couple of semesters for multiple reasons, one of which I was moving here to the United States and had so much to set up. and also I was, you know, really getting just fantastic instruction and mentorship from people I greatly respected that was really of higher quality than what I was receiving it. Now, but there was one particular teacher who was just very beautiful and meaningful and the Hebrew teacher actually.

And she ran a class on the ancient prophets. we were supposed to do an assignment where it was, I think it was supposed to be like a 1,500 word essay exploring some, you know, the prophecies, you know, some element of the ancient prophets in the Old Testament. I ended up giving her like something like a 4,000 word essay, 50 poems in a series and a whole album. And, but one of one of the conclusions I came to

my explorations was the one of the things that really was a sign of these ancient prophets was that they would always say some sort of something that meant hey listen all I can do right here is tell you the truth that God is speaking through me you know and you don't have to take it right but I know that this is the truth that God's speaking through me take it or leave you're either going to go in this direction or that direction right so there is there's always that element of, this is not mine. You know, this is not my message to share. This is, this is God's message to share.

Which is, yeah, it's, and then when, you know, and you'll know this as well, it's like when you have that artistic experience of having some original work flow through you, and you feel like you're being moved, you're not moving, right? you start to really you have a certain reverence or just less cynicism around the way that we used to see the world and these sorts of archetypes of people, you know, like a prophet, like a seer, like a revelator, you know. Absolutely. And a lot of the folks who were chosen, I guess, to be prophets or to do other great things. in history, to move history in some way through their words or their actions.

They were not always good people. I mean, this didn't come to them necessarily because they had, they were a saint and, and lived a perfect life. But, you know, and that's a great thing, too, is like, you don't have to be the highest quality of person to have something useful or true to contribute. I think that's one of the lessons that we get out of those, those ancient stories. I think what is it? You know, one of them like, was it King David?

I think he had one someone's someone put to death so he could marry their wife. But like, but he's still a mover and a shaker. He was still a great man in history. And that did other things that were necessary or beneficial to others. So it's one of those things where it's like, but then we do look at stories of say the saints. And it's like, well, their life was lived in a lived in a way that we should emulate because. of the way they lived their life. It was their choices and stuff that made them.

And then some people like it came from being a terrible person to then, sainthood. It's like showing us you can reform. You can you can turn, turn away from certain paths. But speaking of like models and exemplars, I was going to say when you were writing, you know,

the poet and the sage, did you have your friend or mentor Rocco in mind? Is that the visual image that came to you? You know, the very funny thing is I met Rocco after I had written the poet. and very deep into my poetic journey. And he had me on his podcast, funnily enough. And I remember very distinctly the end of that conversation, we both kind of just looked at each other.

We were like, you know, we know what this means. You know, this is when the, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I love that. Yeah, yeah. Exactly what it was. And. Well, the student realizes the teacher was there the whole time. You couldn't see him because you weren't ready.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, Rocco. this beautiful human being, you know, so many times I have fallen short of being that student who should be ready. And I have, you know, he always jokes. It's like the hardest thing to like just get me on the same page and like doing the same thing. Because I'm always so busy and I'm doing this and I'm doing that and then I'm trying to figure this out. but man this guy like not a single day has he given me the impression that he's not completely

locked in with me and with me until until you know until that teaching is done you know um and so he yeah for all those reasons he he is a great friend a great mentor but yeah he he came after yeah that is a wonderful piece of synchronicity too i mean yeah you write the poet and the sage and it is your poetry you are the poet and then the sage appears to complete the story to become to bring it to life in a way so then you have this real life example of you and this other person and it was the process of of getting that out on paper that kind of brought it all together it made it made you ready yeah that's uh and and the funny thing is there's also in the story there is a seer right and uh the poet

goes to the seer and basically says, you know, hey, take these works and, you know, make sure that they get where they need to go, you know. But now the seer, it's funny. I do in many ways see how the mythology, the narrative, plays out in my life as well. You know, there is that synchronicity. And when I think of the archetype of the seer, I do think of my friend Sharon, you know, she is the person who, I took that original dream too. And I said, what is it? Because I so trust Sharon with any sort of original art, original poetry,

anything that is vulnerable, I trust her with it. And I go to her because I know that she will see it. And I know that she will take great care, you know. So I've been very seriously, Benjamin, I've been so blessed throughout my life with being introduced to beautiful. people who, you know, we just lock in, you know, and we get what's going on. And, and Sharon's one of those people. So, very nice. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just one of those things, again, that is very strange about the poetic journey. You kind of,

Rocco always says, you know, you're stepping into your own myth, you know, for sure. Yeah, and we can do that. It's kind of what's happened. Well, and that's great too with the idea of a, of a seer. That's, again, in the architecture. type of the wizard or the sage. But it's there's there's two meanings to that. You know, the idea of a seer is, you know, to, to prophecy maybe. I mean, that's one shade of meaning is this is a person who sees perhaps the future. But it's also someone who sees accurately what is present, what is before them.

So it's, you know, and I think that's all part of the process. Like if you're going to be, perform the function of a seer for some, one to give them what they need. First, you have to see them. First, you have to see who they are and the truth of their situation. Then you can look to the future and say, okay, on this path that you're on currently, what's the likely result? And again, that thing, part of it is purely rational, cause and effect from experience.

And part of it, oh, this is your boy. He wakes up from a nap to hawk up a luggy. Funny guy. These cats. But the other half of it is, so that's the preparation. Then the other half of it is the inspiration, that divine inspiration of, okay, now that I've seen this person accurately, now that I've applied my rationality to it, what do I get in terms of offering them something useful about what do I see now and in the future for you? What's the complete picture? I was going somewhere with all that.

Maybe that was it. I just want to get that out there. The two senses of the word seer that come together in one. It so resonates with my experience with Sharon because she, she's a human being who really sees people 100%. You know, she takes the time. She's careful with their words. She's thoughtful.

She's contemplative. She's done a great deal of study, you know, much study throughout her life of, of ancient philosophies, Eastern philosophies, religious texts. and such. And, um, but it's one of the reasons why I trust her with any of my art. It's like, because I know that she sees me and I know that she'll see the thing that I'm putting out there, you know, and, and she's just one of those people, you know. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's very interesting how these archetypes show up, you know, but

they do. Yeah. And there's a, uh, there's a modern trend in, you have spoken to some folks who, who are like I got out of school, uh, you know, 20 years ago or more. So my education stopped there. And there's a new trend. They've gotten away, or some people advocate for getting away from archetypes. And they call it more schema and say, okay,

these are conceptual frameworks through which we, you know, paradigms in a way. And I think it's everything old is new again. They're just labeling things, the fancy, fashionable term. But I think the,

you know, archetypes of like, you know, the hero and, and, you know, the wizard, et cetera,

et cetera, the fool. I think these are all true. I think they, you know, so if you'd go, perhaps archetypes are nested under the broader concept, but now they're calling schema. Sure. It's a particular way of looking at the world,

a particular set of behaviors and mode, a mode of being that, you know, and I don't think the idea of archetypes was meant to be comprehensive. And there's like, and there's almost in a tarot card sense, there's major and minor arcana as far as archetypes go, you know, things that are more important, less important. And a lot of them were drawn from exactly like the fool, the, you know, the, the sorceress

or whatever from, from taro. I think that's how young got some of his stuff because he was a big mystic too. I mean, he had a, he had a whole waking dream thing. He would go through where he would seek his inner sage, the part of himself that was the, the wise old man, even when he was an old man. And he called it Philemon, I think, was the name that came to him. And he would have these long conversations with him. He wrote books about it.

I went inside to consult Philimon, and this is what he said about these different things. And, you know, sometimes food for thought, sometimes absolute seer-like or, or wizardly scrying of the future, the different paths. I think that's what we all do, too. And I think most people, most people don't put these things into words and explain them. And in a way that, in a sense that they don't, they aren't, they aren't even aware of these processes going on in their lives, but they go through the roles. anyway, they embody different different archetypes, whether they know it or not.

And then sometimes, again, to come out of that idea of being, you know, discerning and present, you know, the more we can see ourselves accurately and understand the role we're playing in a story, a narrative that's playing out that we are, you know, we are all actors on the stage in a way, the more control will have over that process, the more we can, we can lean in to, an archetype or lean away from it. If like we're acting a role in a tragedy, we go, uh-oh, maybe I don't want to do this. Maybe this was always a bad idea.

First we have to see ourselves accurately and then have that, um, um, in a way, courage to sometimes say, hey, this is, I'm on the wrong path. And maybe this isn't working for me or definitely lean into it like, okay, this is hard, but necessary. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. I think that's, that's what I do with the dream thing is, is I try and give people more.

I try to help them see themselves more clearly. And whatever we get out of that is what we get out of it. And it's a beautiful service because, you know, but people like myself, you know, it's like you get thrust into this completely new world, right? And you're wondering, you know, what do all these symbols me? I remember thinking when I wrote the poet and the sage, it took me about six months to pull it all together. It'll take me the rest of my life to figure out what the hell happened.

what it all means and what it all means right and and that's really I feel like right now I'm at the stage where I'm you know and I've been saying this for quite some time but I do feel this now I really want to go back to everything that I wrote

that is just now in scribbles and notebooks you know start piecing through it and seeing how it all relates and what it all means and you know pulling the lessons in archetypes and mythology and mysticism that I'm learning at the moment and and maybe seeing it with new eyes you know absolutely yeah and and lean leaning into this stuff too is it can be a bit maddening and and make you look like a crazy person and I know that firsthand as a guy who

thinks he's a wizard on the internet the analogy that just just popped into my head is like sometimes i feel like richard dryfus in close encounters and he's sculpting the mashed potato tower and his family's looking at him like, you are, this is, what the, what is going on here? Why are you obsessed with the shape? What does it mean? He's like, I don't know. I don't know. But he was having these visions of this place he needed to go and a thing he needed to do. Now, we're assumed, or, what is it? We're, I guess, expected to understand, well, the aliens were putting out a signal and he picked up, he was one of the people who picked up on the signal. So it was put there by a source, come to the place. And then they met him there. So, you know, full circle. But there's, there's, there's,

There's moments, I would say, in everyone's life where we look like Richard Dreyf is building a building a mashed potato mountain. We just look absolutely out of our damn minds to other people. And we feel out of our damn minds to ourselves because we don't know why we're doing what we're doing. It's just this compulsion to communicate something that. And sometimes you don't understand it until way later, until you walk down that path. You go, okay, I'm just going to trust this.

I'm just going to go with it and see what happens. And then, bam, you meet aliens. Like, whoa. I love that. That just popped into my head, that analogy. I love that, too. No, it's, it's perfect. And honestly, Rocco and I have spoken about this a lot together

because it's also, it's just a very difficult path to try and fully step into that, that new path that you're being called on, right? And you feel so deeply, oh my gosh, I feel like I need to go along along with this. It's difficult to step into that. It's also difficult to do that while you're also trying to, let's say, have a family have the rest of the responsibilities that the average citizen will go through, have a job, have a family. So what we're trying to do is to build a life where we can do the things that we love

and bring us great meaning, but also follow our calling. And it's so difficult. I will say I feel very, very fortunate at the moment. And so this space that I'm sitting in really is the accumulation of much dreaming and much work along this journey. I'm actually, I've just received the certificate of occupancy and business license to open this beautiful studio here in downtown Santa Ana in Orange County. And the studio is called the sanctuary studio for the arts and humanities. and it's really my creative space where I'm going to be creating a whole lot of poetry and music and a lot of it's taking what I've already written and putting it together with other things.

But the idea of this space is let's create a space that I feel comfortable to create in, but I also want to welcome others in here and explore all the ways that the arts and humanities, these crafts and disciplines can help us to better understand ourselves, to contribute to our families, to our communities, to awaken the soul, and just to unlock human expression in a way that is not, you know, of the classroom or kind of prescriptive or anything like that, but in a way that just really welcomes people to unlock who they are, you know. So this is what's happening at the moment. It's kind of like the building up of a lot of things happening in my life.

But I'm so excited to see where this goes, you know. Very cool. Yeah. Well, let's see. There's a suggestion for a book for you. It's like a wizard's guide to monetize your calling. Something like that. Here's how you do it. Because we've got, we've all got those practical concerns. It's like, I got to live. We got to make a living. But, you know, and not everyone who's, that's a tough thing too. It's like not everyone. Sometimes your calling is going to be a hobby. You're going to have to make, because you can't monetize it. It's not always possible. Certainly if you're, you know, you're called to. charity, let's say. Well, that's, you know, it's hard to, unless you're, I guess you could start a nonprofit organization, but those can be, you know, then you get government grants or solicit private donations and that can't always be possible. But you can do things like that way. Okay, so I work at nine to five and I do a thing and it's useful and it makes a living. And then my free time,

I do this other thing that is important to me. I think, I think it's hard to live. It's hard to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. If you are not doing so for a good reason. If you're not motivated by something meaningful, it can be really, really tough. So way back when I said, we'll probably be talking for an hour and then I'll try and watch the clock. It's been almost an hour. We should we should probably do the dream thing before I run us, run us out of time with just random conversation. Let me make a little note of the time here. I just recently got smart and realized I needed to do timestamps that my life would be easier. Where was that in the video? Oh, shit. Yeah. So, okay, this, uh,

The process, super simple. First, I shut up and listen. Our friend Simon here's going to tell me about his dream beginning to end, whatever he saw, experienced. And then we're going to talk about it and see if we can figure it out together. So I am 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 Dreams 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. Okay.

Well, look, I mean, I was thinking, so I had the two options. The one is the dream that's in this book. Now, I don't remember it perfectly. I haven't read it from start to finish that chapter in. in a few months now. And so I don't remember the dream perfectly. I can try to recall the basic details. Otherwise, I have an actual dream, like a sleeping dream that I had that has been sitting

with me for quite some time. And I find it to be really interesting. And I think you will too. I think I'm actually going to recall that one. I'd say we go with that one. That one seems like it feels there's something important. there you, you know, if it sticks with you, as I say, dreams self-select for importance. If you wake up feeling like, whoa, that was something.

And it doesn't just fade away. It stays with you. There's probably something there you want to try to understand. So I would, yeah, definitely go with that one. And this is, it is one of those dreams. I work up from this dream thinking, I have to catch this immediately. This is so important. Yeah.

And it just gave that sense. Those are the best. So do you want me to tell you start to finish or do you want me to go piece by piece? Yeah, start to finish it. I'll let you know if I'm falling behind too much with my notes because I try and write it all down. Go for it. What's the first thing you remember? So as far as I recall, I entered the dream in a location that actually landscape-wise was very much the same as the beach town that I was living in in Australia at that time.

It's called Malulibah. now so you've got this beautiful strip of beach you've got like a promenade that has all the shops along it and then you've got the kind of suburban areas that go behind the promenade except the the location had been transformed into a kind of carnival and so I kept on walking around and around this carnival going around and around and the vibe was it was as you'd expect, like the dark side of a carnival, you know, people trying to pick pocket you. It was nighttime, you know, it felt very kind of underbelly, you know, somebody stole something from my pocket. I remember also going outside of the carnival, so going through one gate

and around and back in through another location. and so it was this kind of in and out dark nighttime yeah it was a very very strange and uneasy feeling right now it gets to a certain point where I'm walking along the beach side and I go to the edge of the beach and there's a location in Malulibah where there's a whole bunch of rocks at the edge of the beach that go into the edge of the beach and I go into the edge of the beach and I go into the edge of the beach and I go into the beach. ocean and you can kind of stand on the edge of them and I went to this place and I stood on the edge of the rock and I looked out across the ocean and as I looked out across the ocean a giant silver beam started to extend across the ocean and this beam almost like a bridge you see you see this motif in Disney movies where they they need to get across a canyon and they have that faith finally to take that leap and they don't fall into the canyon because these little pieces come up from the canyon and help them to run across right it was kind of like that where all of a sudden

this giant beam started to extend across the ocean and then go up almost like the Sydney Harbor bridge that kind of goes up in that curving motion all the way up into the sky and so I began to walk on this beam and I walked all the way up and what happened at the top of that beam was the heavens open, the clouds parted, and I was looking up into the hole that was created by the clouds. And even though I was looking up, the vision that I saw appeared as if I was looking down into it. So I was looking up, the vision that I was seeing was down, and what the vision was was looking over the top of a rainforest, a garden, this kind of paradisal sort of, you imagery. And so that dream just stuck with me for solo. That was the journey, you know,

uneasy carnival, pickpocketing, very kind of sleazy vibes in and out of the carnival, heading to the edge of the ocean, looking over, seeing that beam extend and take me up into the clouds, heaven's opening, looking up towards a vision that is actually down into a paradise of God and, you know, and that, that's the dream. Very cool. I love it. That's a fantastic dream. Lots of great imagery there and lots, lots to work with too. So my process has evolved or always was. You know, I shut up and listen. And then there's a kind of a phase two where we, we'd go back through it again so I can see it through your eyes a little bit better. And that's where we start pulling out a little bit of the ideas come to you to describe these things as I as I ask you

as I ask question so when you first appear in the dream what's the scene you're seeing in front of you was it was it always a carnival or was it the actual landscape and then you realize you approach it and and there's a carnival ahead of you or you appear inside the carnival I guess the first thing that you know if I'm trying to recall now, the first thing that is apparent is the location and its similarity to my home, you know, my hometown. Then as I'm walking around, it becomes more apparent that the feeling is uneasy, that it is a carnival-like environment, you know, that there is a darkness there. So my question would be, do you see a...

specific images that are iconic of carnivals like a booth where you do the, you know, throw the darts at the balloons or do you see a Ferris wheel? Like, is it, is it a physical carnival that appears around you? Or is it that you're in your hometown? Everything looks the same, but it has a dark carnival vibe to the normal landscape. See, I actually think it's the latter. I think it's more like, you know, imagine you've got a beach town and they kind of fence off a large area for a carnival celebration or like a New Year's Eve celebration,

they would actually do that in Malulibah. They'd fence off the whole promenade and inside that area would be no alcohol and it's like family friendly. But this time, yeah, you're walking around it. You know, all the locations are kind of similar, you know, but there is that just darkness to it, you know. Okay, gotcha. So there's no, so you're not seeing the trappings of a car.

carnival. You're not seeing an actual carnival, but that, but there's a vibe of that kind of space to the typical landscape. So you're actually seeing your hometown and, um, it, in its, uh, normal form, it's same building, same beach, same rocks. Uh, there's no actual Ferris wheel. None of that. So yeah, it's all, it's all, it's all. Everything is dark. It's, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Gotcha. Now, that's interesting too, because it would be, I like to do counterfactuals. I mean, it would be something completely different to. I walk down. the promenade and enter a carnival, an actual carnival. But you did, you did say there was an area sectioned off as if for a celebration.

That's right. And because you mentioned going in through one gate or out through another or, um, so, so when you appeared in the dream where you were already inside this area or you approached in. I believe so. Okay. Start. Because that would also be a different thing too of like you, what would the experience be of viewing

this thing and choosing to enter or, you know, why? Why did you go in and not just view it from the outside? But actually in the dream, you place yourself there. I'm already in the middle of this. Whatever this is that's happening around me, I am in it. So what we're doing a lot is thought experiments. Like, okay, let's imagine I can fly. What does that look like?

And bam, you know, I would be in the sky. I would have wings. I would be Superman. You know, whatever it is. And so a lot of times we just, okay, bam, premise and whatever follows from it. So you've got this idea of being in your home. town and it is set up for a festival and you are already in the middle of it and go kind of thing it's like the starting of the dream is like it's the initial the initial setup of the thought

experiment um you were there with other people just me oh you know there are other people around but i'm kind of just walking around yeah well that was okay good good good addition i didn't uh even think to ask, were you with someone? But was there any other people there? Because it very well could have been, no, this place was deserted. Okay, so there are other people there. You're not alone. But you were not there with anyone.

This is you experiencing it alone. Because again, I remember turning around and, you know, having the impression of somebody trying to take something out of my pocket and turning around, somebody's there, you know, kind of, you know, get out of here, you know, that kind of thing, you know. Okay. Yeah, that was going to be my next question too, is like what, if any, interactions did you have with people like just to see it a little bit better I mean when you say it was set up as if for a festival or a carnival or some some kind of celebratory event how did you know

that's what it was I mean was it a feeling or was it visual visual cues there a stage where there are tables food vendors any anything that pops up to say okay this isn't this is the type of thing you would find there therefore I know where I am yeah you know what's coming to me is it's not necessarily the vendors or the rides or anything like that but it's you know the material the kind of canvas material that gets hung over let's say you know festival pop up booths and things like that it's this kind of like canvas material that they'll use bright colors and such you know a lot of that is coming through and also just the idea of it being a fenced off area and there's a gate where you have to go through and it's kind of like this well you know

now you're in and now you're out you know it's and it's something that they would only do if if there was a special kind of event going on and the funny thing is I so I grew up on a farm and we had all these animals and we'd con you know we'd always be going to these agricultural shows and at the agricultural shows there would always be a little carnival section with all these rides and everything so you know we from a very young age were introduced to that idea of the kind of carnival. And then you've got all these, you know, very rough types of people who are working at the carnival. You know, I remember once we were on a ride and guy looks at us, he's just got like a hole in the middle of his tooth straight.

If somebody just drill the hole straight straight through, he just like smiles us with this creepy smile, you know, it's just this kind of like weird kind of dark energy, you know. Yeah, yeah. There's always been, at least the trope of, you know, you know, the, uh, seedy carnies, uh, that idea of all they're like traveling folk. They don't really have roots. Oh, we can trust them around here. Of course, you know, the carnival comes to down and, uh, certain things start to go missing or there's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, crimes or, you know, Miss, Miss Smith's, uh, apple pie disappeared

from her wind sill. Who knows. That's good. That goes back. That goes back. What are we in the 20s? Right. For sure.

That's got to what it all started, I think. Well, even before that, even they were traveling carnivals or fairs or, uh, you know, back in the middle ages. Well, and I think even in. you know ancient Greek times like a lot of theater theater troops would travel and perform in different cities so yeah ancient ancient tradition of this you know like uh during special celebrations people who aren't usually in your city show up to do things and there's so there's a bit of a thing there it's like they would not that they're all bad people but naturally you would say

you suspect the outsider like this wasn't happening before these people showed up long story short what was the nature of your behavior or interaction with the environment like did you become aware of yourself as if you had just entered through one gate and you're, you know, like seeing down a row of booths with a canvas over the top or are you removed from it observing that in the distance or at some distance? Very much in it. Okay. Yeah, walking around, experiencing the, you know, the sights and the sounds and, uh, and the, the uneasy feeling of, you know, firstly like, you know, what am I doing here? I'm just kind of walking around in and out. you know and and it's always seems to be a problem you know and just like the the darkness the dark energy

the people you know kind of you know trying trying to try to try to get things you know like like pick pocketers and things like that it was just it was very much in it walking in and in and around um see i would i would come through the through the gate which was let's say behind the promenade towards the land right and then be walking up to the promenade and then walking along the beach um and then back around uh you know so it's kind of like going closer to the land closer to the ocean in and out yeah that was going to be kind of my next question too is like so you as you're there you realize you're there you become aware of being there you get this vibe this sense um the the pickpocketing thing or the person behind you that sense of it that was after you'd left

returned at some point or was that it happened multiple times i remember there's one time where i actually went into like a pub right okay and similar kind of vibe in the in the pub but it was it was almost as far as i remember it was almost a bit of respite almost looking at the windows you know and just kind of you know uh sensing what was going on but uh yeah though there were a few times where the the motif of the pickpocket, you know, kind of came into it. Gotcha. Is it possible to do like a very condensed, very brief order of operations of, of that kind of thing? Like, I left once, I came back once, I had an encounter, I left again, I stood on the beach, I came back around.

I mean, if you do that, like, it's just a kind of condensed. I don't know if I have that specific, but let's see here. It's whatever you can do. You know, it's a. And a lot of this stuff can be vague. It's like, I don't know. I just had the feeling I'd left and returned multiple times. But sometimes there's a-

Sorry, I should have prepared this beforehand, but I think I think I wrote it down in my notes. And I wonder if I can find that kind of little transcript there, because it might be helpful. Sure, you might have it on your computer. You're trying to look it up. Yeah, yeah, take your time. Let's see here.

Okay. Excuse me. In the meantime, I will, I'll just say, it's like, why is this important? because, well, everything is in a sense. The order of events, it tends to be the connection of ideas. So if one thing happens before another, it's giving you a sense of, okay, here's one thing. And here's a, here's a behavior or a connecting link to another thing.

And it's like, okay, why those two things in a row? And then maybe a third thing. Okay, well, that's the results or the conclusion of a type of thing. It's like, now, if that were not possible, if it were the idea of, of, I don't know, I just had a vague sense of coming and going multiple times. We would distill that down and say, okay, that was, that was the specifics of it. The specifics were vague, probably on purpose in the sense of like there was no connecting tissue. It was one meta level above.

It's the idea of coming and going that's more important. The idea of being in and out, in and out, in and out. What is that? I would say it's that. Yeah. And I couldn't find it there, but I don't remember having a very specific sense of, Like here's the order of events. Gotcha.

The general feeling. Except, and this is where it becomes more important, you very clearly had a final exit at some point that took you to the beach. Now that's a very clear from one space behavior. Moving, leaving, walking to another where you had a different kind of experience. So, okay, good. Well, that's, I rattle a lot of doorknobs. They don't come open.

Give me an order of events. I don't have one. Fair enough, that is the answer. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, no, you have to have one. What do I know? That's like, kids do their own thing. They have their own logic.

Did you have a sense of why you walked out and why you chose to walk back in? Because you know what happened multiple times. So there was some motivation. Like, were you trying to, I don't feel comfortable here. I'm going to leave. But then you were drawn back in for some reason. Like, it was something you needed to do or see or. Um, if you look at it from that perspective, having something that I needed to do or see.

Yeah. I do just remember that that uneasy feeling in the question of like, why, why am I doing this? You know, like, like, uh, you know, kind of keep on just going out and in, you know, in the dream I was questioning that what, you know, what's going on here. When you were questioning what's going on here, were you questioning your own motivations? Like, why am I, why do I keep coming back? Why do I keep leaving? Or was it more like, you were trying to understand. what was going on around you

rather than yourself? Perhaps more of a general sense of it feels dark and kind of superfluous. Like what's the what's, oh man. And you know, I remember when I walked out,

you know, I remember walking past like a like a candy store. I don't remember much about what what happened there. I remember cars driving. around. I remember. I don't know if there was something I had forgotten. Yeah, that part of it is a little elusive to me. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. And that may be, there may be something there you're not remembering. That's fine. But it also might be showing yourself in a sense that you don't

know why you were doing what you were doing. Like if there is no answer to it. If I ask you specifically, why did you come and go so often? It's like, I don't even know. I don't even know. Why would I, like why would I leave number one why leave at all why do that behavior and on top of that well you left why come back why do that multiple times in a row uh you know and there's there's easy connections we can make of like we could assume you get this dark uneasy vibe well i don't like that so i'm going to leave but then why come back like if you've left that and then you leave once that makes sense but you return to it and um you said there was a general sense of what is and then you kind of lost or what popped into my head and I didn't want to cut you off or put ideas in your head

if you had somewhere else you were going with it. But like there was, there does seem to be coming from you a sense of a desire to understand. What am I trying to say? What's the meaning of this? What's the reason or the purpose for this? What's going on here? So I don't know if that resonates with you in the sense of like explaining why you might be driven away by the dark feeling and be

simultaneously at once repulsed and attracted to the mystery of it to solving it of like what what is going on here I want to understand I don't know if those are if I am completely often you're like I don't feel that at all forget it we'll go somewhere else but if that speaks to you at all well it does I you know I came to this much much later actually but I somebody whose work I've really

enjoyed as Jonathan Pajot. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you've probably dive deep into his work. A little bit. Lots of conversations with Jordan Peterson. I get some of my, you know, explanations of the biblical stories from Peterson. Well, I just, I love, so Pajot will talk about the motif of the carnival, you know. Oh, yeah.

And about the, I guess, the Christian symbolism. There was a reason for it. Back in the day. My favorite thing is where he talked about how there was. a cathedral in Europe where they actually put a giant slippery slide in the middle of it to symbolize, hey, we're in a time of carnival. And much of my work, my poetry and the people I speak with, it does wrestle with that question of like, yeah, we are in a time of carnival. And I'm very interested in how we came to that time, what that means. And, you know, the world that we

will end up in once we're off this slippery slide, you know. Yeah, yeah. One thing I didn't ask was when, the timeframe of this dream, how recent was it? Yeah, this was, this was, uh, I know this was not recent. It was back in Australia. So it must have been 2021, somewhere between 2020 and 2021. Okay, gotcha. So I mean, literally it wasn't yesterday or last week.

This was a little while ago. And, and that, you know, the time frame almost always, is. almost always relevant because it's you're going to dream about present questions or concerns or thought experiments, whatever's going. Now, sometimes it's an interesting thing because sometimes presently you can be concerned with eternal questions. And then we get a dream that's disconnected from the specific place and time, but it was always motivated by a thought process you're going through in your waking life or some unresolved question or, uh, that you're trying to work through. And sometimes it's more specific to experiences.

Like you're trying to process, well, you know, Tuesday, I got fired. Man, that night I had a dream and it was, it was powerful. I woke up the next morning thinking, I need to do something very specific. And like, what does that mean? Where did that come from? So that happens too. So dreams can be very specific to a time and place or they can be very general to eternal questions, but also inspired by true events, so to speak.

But it's interesting, too, that you've got these, well it's all interesting of course you've got some specific things you did I mean you remember leaving past a candy store at one point and you remember being in a pub and you remember seeing cars so there are there's probably

and you probably saw different things each time you left the carnival and there might be an order of order of events to that too in terms of like well I remember leaving once and not seeing anything I remember leaving once and seeing the candy store.

I left once and then I saw the cars. I left once or I was going to leave but I stopped at a pub before leaving. Am I describing those accurately or correct me to tell the actual story? Yeah. And again, I should have come better prepared. I should have found that text

that I wrote down directly afterwards because that would be... It's perfectly fine. We're going to get, we get out of current. I don't remember a specific order. But I just, I remember vague image.

you know, what it was like. Yeah. No, no, no, that's perfectly. And a lot of times, that is all there is. We're, we're elaborating these things after the fact. So what you may have experienced is, again, this vague sense of coming and going multiple times. And then separate from that, this vague sense of, I know there was also a candy store. There was also cars and there was also a pub.

Now, you did mention them in that, I think in that order. So that may be relevant and it may not, but they also, they're going to represent, okay, why any of that imagery? Why didn't you see a snail? Why didn't you, you know, get pooped on by a bird? Well, those would mean different things. They weren't necessarily relevant. I love, love the counterfactuals. I just make up crazy shit.

So do, when you think of the idea of passing by a candy store, was it inside or just outside the carnival? Just outside. just outside and you didn't stop in there or did you have any thoughts as you're passing by it I don't think I stopped by I just remember seeing you didn't stop it just remember seeing it what comes to mind when you think of a candy store I mean what is a candy store or do you have a sweet tooth in real life or did you have a lot of cavities as a kid oh yeah don't get me started yeah and when I think of like a good candy store I think of your classic like small town boutique candy store you know they've got the whole, you know, very colorful looking and it's, you know, they've got all the

interesting candies that they've got, in Australia, we'd call them lolly, you know, so really I saw a lolly shop, you know. For sure. And, yeah, yeah, that's kind of what it is to me. It's very classic sort of boutiquey, yeah. And you don't recall having a temptation to, to walk in or participate or, you know, and no one came running out to hand you a lolly. one of those giant oversized bigger than your head.

So something you'd very much have a positive association with. So the outside the carnival is positive things, possibly, you know. Perhaps. What am I, what am I trying to say? It's like you find something positive outside. It's because you very well could have come outside and saw that outside the carnival is one of the worst things that you hate the most in your entire life. You saw, you know, people being. cruel to children immediately after he left.

But, but this has a different meaning. It's like, okay, you leave this space where you felt uncomfortable and you see outside of it, there's things with, with which I have a positive association throughout my life. You know, it's very, you know, what is it? I drive past, I drive past cows, grazing in a field. I just smile. Like, oh, I got a thing. I like farm.

animals and whatnot. Oh, look at the cows. Probably very much for you with the cow, oh, candy shop. Hey, I'm happy suddenly, positive emotions. It was very much like that in terms of the positive association. See, I don't remember feeling positive. I just remember it being there, right? Gotcha.

And a lot of this dream, the carnival part of it was just, I just remember being there and feeling the darkness. And even outside, you know, walking around. It was still very much. know people kind of walking around as a very it was still a kind of dark even outside gotcha okay yeah that's a that's a good thing i'm glad we got around to so this this actual feeling was um it was not contained to the carnival it's uh and whether or not we would say the carnival was the source of it but that whatever was in there it's it's other places

too so you've got maybe perhaps um to give you the the trappings the the icon of of the emotion itself bam here's a carnival and if you but then also to say but wait a minute this feeling persists it isn't contained to this area it's outside and it even perhaps in a way taints things that would have a positive association that you would just oh look cows you know you would smile at the candy shop and you're like no i you know even looking at things that i enjoy or that i have a positive association with that feeling hasn't left me i've left i've left the carnival but the carnival is spreading or the carnival hasn't left me it's coming to with me. It's everywhere. It's not contained by this space. But you

mentioned cars driving, was there anything relevant to that in terms of, well, I approached a street and I was waiting to cross and there were cars. I mean, is it that simple or were the cars doing anything? Were they racing? Were they going anywhere? I don't think they were racing. I just know that outside there were cars, you know, inside was fenced off. So it was, you know, only people for the carnival. And we're looking at like a street fare type of thing where if, If it wasn't fenced off, you would be on the road and there would be cars inside. Yeah, that's right.

Gotcha. Okay. So that's interesting. Delineate's an area. I mean, cars, and I can ask your, this is where I get you half. I don't do half. I almost entirely dismiss the idea of dream dictionaries. But there is the idea of cars being an icon for travel, you know,

a golden bow of light being representative of a bridge. There's there's just things like this that can pop up across dreams. But I don't know if you have a particular association with cars in terms of, you've never owned one, actually. Some people never did. Or you remember working on cars with your dad as a kid and one of these cars looked like that. I mean, when you think of what these cars were doing, Was it just generic street scene?

Oh, I leave the carnival and, of course, there's cars. Or is it anything more specific? Anything we can pull out of that? I think it's pretty generic. Yeah. Yeah. That leads me more towards the idea of, so we would get generic concepts of like, okay, well, there's travel necessarily or, but also just the normality of a busy urban street

in a way of like, here's people living and going about their lives. They've got, they're going somewhere. So that's why we work in the travel thing of like, here's other people that they're not stopping it. They're not driving to the carnival. They're not fleeing for their lives. They're going about their business independent of anything else. And it shows a very clear distinction too between,

okay, here's the boundary of this artificial space that's been set up. And other people's lives going on about their business, independent of whatever's going on in this other area. Did you still have the same feeling that, that that negative or, you know, dark, dark doom-like feeling was with you when you were looking at the cars? Yeah, I did. You know, I still had the same feeling. It's almost like, you know, outside a carnival at the gate that's going to be a little bustle, you know, hustle and bustle.

You know, in the same way that you go to Disneyland and there's people lined up to get in. You know, it's that kind of, I didn't necessarily see a lot of people lined up to get in. but it was that same kind of energy. Okay, gotcha. The third set of images, unless there's more, was at some point you stopped into a pub. Now, was the pub inside the carnival grounds? Inside.

It was inside. But you had a different feeling in there. You said it almost felt like a respite. So you were looking out the window. Yeah, because I remember looking out, you know, it was, yeah, almost like a let me just pause in here for a second, you know. Did you sit down and have a beer or do anything? But you remember, even if you don't remember walking in, you remember looking out from a puppy.

Yes. So it's an interesting thing where this is the one space where the dark carnival feeling was absent. That it was a respite from that feeling. I would say so. Yeah, yeah. But it was inside the carnival grounds, which is very interesting. It's like, why a pub? Why was it not something else?

And I never grew up going to pubs or, you know, it was never a thing. You know, I grew up as a Mormon, you know, it wasn't exactly our place of respite. Exactly. So that wouldn't be necessarily a matter of personal history. So there's some association with pubs in general and maybe how you view them, how you view how other people interact with that space that would remove it from the dark carnival vibe. And I'm still dark in there. You go into the pub and it's not as if there's a whole bunch of lights on it. Everybody's drinking and having a good time.

I don't even remember seeing anybody else in there. It was still dark in there, but just it was almost like you find a little place to hide, to look out. And then you come back out. Fair enough. Yeah. So my thought is that it could have been anything. Could have been any place anywhere. It could have been, you duck around the corner between two tents that have been set up.

And you felt briefly safe because you're obscure. and look at it. For some reason, you put yourself in a pub on purpose. And one way to look at it is, I mean, what is, what happens at a pub? What's the vibe of a pub?

I mean, what comes, and of course I'm asking you, but what comes to my mind is it's a place people go specifically to have positive interactions with each other, to socialize, to make merry. But there's also, and a lot of this depends on culture, too.

So if you ask, you know, what is a Japanese person versus a, say, a British or Scottish person, like what is a pub? And a lot of it is, say, if we go to the British interpretation, someone might say, that's the place we would go not just for camaraderie, but also to let go of arguments. Like we had a contentious interaction, and you know what? We're going to set that aside and go have drinks together and laugh. So it's a place of healing relationships as well, too. So that's the kind of thing I'm asking you to, if you have an association,

with that in terms of the way you think of that space and how it's what it's typically used for. Yeah, yeah. I think just generally in Australia, we did have the idea it's a place, you know, of, yeah, just what's the word joviality? You know, I just, you know, you'd go in there and you'd find, you know, three old codgers sitting at the bar, you know, just having a drink together. nobody's really saying anything but you know they're happy drinking you know yeah absolutely i i've done a lot of sales work throughout my life for my parents company traveling all over all over australia and you know we would always go into uh pubs like that you know like classic country town pub it's on the corner you know you go in there it's not uh not a lot is happening in

there especially during the day you know maybe at nighttime it gets a little bit more lively but I don't, I didn't grow up with a positive association. I've never really felt super comfortable in pubs. And I don't really, you know, I don't really drink, you know, only from time to time, you know. So, yeah, it's funny. I get the Australian idea of a pub very much. It was in my soul.

But outside of that, it was not a place I would ever go to for, for restaurants. but gotcha okay so then that is that's also what's the what's the word for it um it has its own type of you know revelatory status in terms of this is not a place you would typically go it's not a place you have positive associations with personally but more of the type of place um a place of you say joviality a place where you know good good times and fun you know it you what you did not mention is, as I said, like a personal experience with, hey, I was walking past a pub once and a drunk guy got thrown out and knocked me down and it was horrible. And, you know, so it's, uh, it's more conceptual on those levels.

We remove things from personal experience sometimes and what we get is our idea of a place. So there's something to the idea of I step in to a place where there's usually good times and fun, joviality, you know, happy people socializing. and I'm able to reflect on this other space that I'm inside of, and it felt like a brief respite from the dark carnivalness vibe outside. So there's something to that. You've got the nested levels, too. You've got the city you grew up in,

but then you've got this carnival space, but then inside the carnival space is even somewhat of a safe, an atypical safe place for you specifically. You wouldn't normally find yourself here, but, and you don't remember passing by and going, oh, a pub, I need to get in there because that will make me feel better. You just showed yourself in a place that did briefly make you feel better about the environment you were in. Yeah, I think that's it. Very interesting there. And we can just leave, let that float.

I mean, sometimes it might connect to something else or not. A lot of this is, so there's something you're considering and you're coming and going, you're returning to the topic frequently. It's a disturbing place that you don't just leave. You come back to, but it's a dangerous place. It's a place where things might be stolen from you. And you did have that experience. We try to explain to ourselves, what is the, what is the reason for the vibe? What is dangerous about this place?

Why do I feel like this is dark and not bright? Why do I show it to myself as dangerous versus welcoming and uplifting? So yeah, there's, definitely this, like, dark carnival vibe that draws you back, whether out of curiosity or, or, um, it could be a life cycle where you keep finding yourself in different places that you don't want to be. And you're like, why am I, how do I understand this place better? Because I keep finding myself here over and over again. So since I can't avoid it, I have to deal with it. I have to have to understand it. Um, and you may be funny. As we're talking about this,

I'm also remembering that there's, there's like a third location at the, the end of the dream that goes beyond the place at the top. Oh yeah. What do you get? Yeah. Yeah. That's how that's how it happens. We just talk until until things click. Yeah. You go you go up the beam, the bridge across the ocean, right up to that, that vision of the clouds opening in the paradise or garden. I remember I don't know if I flew down or the beam went down, but if you can think of kind of like a bay and on this side, is the carnival area, but then it took me to the other side of the bay. And that area, as far as I remember, it was much more suburbia, it was much more home kind of feeling.

It was much more, what I can remember is it feels like arriving home to family, you know, much more peaceful, you know, calm. Um, you know, and perhaps, perhaps light. Light, very much light as opposed to the darkness of the carnival. Yeah, yeah. And the night and the nighttime, um, the fact this is all happening at night. So night has, again, not, not to go with the dream dictionary thing too much, you know, night doesn't mean all things to, to all people. But it all very often suggests hidden and mysterious things.

It's, you know, it's harder to see at night. Um, sometimes it can represent, um, going through periods of change. It's very interesting that you get things like, say, in the Greek, not Greek, but Egyptian mythology. And this relates to, say, modern politics in a way because they have the, you know, the Pepe frog stuff on the internet. You heard about that.

Well, that got associated with the Egyptian god Keck, which was the god of darkness and chaos, the chaos of night. And in the Ogdwad, his, the male god Keck, the frog god, bizarre synchronicity. His counterpart was Hecate goddess of the dawn and the day. So after the chaos of change, transformation comes the dawning of a new day,

the establishment of a new order. And, you know, so chaos always proceeds order. And order can only devolve into chaos if it doesn't become, you know, stultifying and rigid. And sometimes actually becoming too rigid causes it to collapse into chaos, which is necessary change to improve or fix. fix something that's gone wrong or progress towards towards some goal. Anyway, so there's, there's broad conceptions with that.

So you, and actually you do see that motif, breaking down a little bit. So you've got opposites. And there's a bay. There's a, there's a, set of water.

And there's a bridge. Okay, this is all very interesting, too. You've got this feeling of circular returning to an area that is dark and dangerous. And why? And so you've given yourself the imagery of dark and danger with, why is it dark and dangerous? well, there's pickpockets.

There's things that are important to me that might be stolen by individuals who mean me harm. They mean to take advantage of me, get something from me in a way that leaves me without what I might need, what belongs to me, what is good for me. You show yourself different representations. Well, beyond this place is say a candy shop, that's good stuff. Beyond this place is life, is people going about their business in the rest of the city. completely disconnected from this area. So it's like, you know, whatever it is, this isn't the entire world. This is a subset of the world taking place in a specific, specific place in time.

Yeah. Yeah. Even if it bleeds out. Like you do get the sense that these things. And even, so you're showing yourself what it is I'm dealing with is not, it's not everywhere, but it does bleed out. Like just beyond the boundaries, I still get the sense that I'm in the danger zone. Even when I'm seeing positive things, even when I'm considering other people, just going about their lives. But then again,

flip side, also there are places inside where you feel, at least the ability to be comfortable, I'd like to say, okay, I can take a breath

and just look out the window at what's going on. I don't have to be in it, even though I am within it. I can be separate from it and yet observing it. There's something going on there.

And from a place of, very interesting, you chose a pub and it wasn't, you know, you didn't put the candy shop inside. So there's a, there's a hedonistic, you know, I'm just going to feed my sweet tooth

type of thing that you could have you could have very much put that in there but what you put in there was, yeah, alcohol, but alcohol is never important to be. The iconic representation is the camaraderie, the joviality. There's a positive human connection vibe. So from, in a sense,

it's almost like looking at the darkness of this carnival from within a perspective of more positive human emotions gives you that sense of respite and distance from what you see. going on there. But then you decide to leave entirely. And it's interesting that you could have put the entrance and the exit anywhere, but you put the entrance on the land side and the exit towards the ocean, which ended up being a bay, which then had a bridge that took you over to a different area.

Did you have any sense of your thought process or motivation as you were? we're leaving for that final time to head down towards the ocean. Any idea of motivation, like, I'm done with this place, or I need to get out of here once and for all. Was there any sense of reason? I don't think there was any sort of, I think it was more like coming to that edge and then, okay, here it is. You know, it was more of like an arriving at the edge of the ocean of that particular

place and then just seeing this beam go out in front of me, you know. and taking that opportunity to step onto it and rise up to the clouds. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and we don't always get a sense of motivation of, of, but that's why I ask. So it's like, okay, you did or you didn't. But there was, what you did show yourself was leaving for what ended up being in the dream the final time. So you had many, many, or perhaps just a few, a handful, whatever, but leavings and

returning to this idea. And then there was a final leaving in the context of the dream. And the reason I asked about motivation is something like, did you feel compelled to go there or pulled to it or, or, what am I trying to say? It's like you very well could, okay, again, counterfactual, you very well could have had the experience of I am, I need to escape this, this place for the final time or I need to seek something better or I'm just tired of this. I don't want to do it anymore. It may be indicative of something and probably is that you don't know why you ended up on the beach. It may be the fact that it was almost something that happened to you. Suddenly I find myself in a particular place. I don't know if that feels more correct.

I mean, I certainly felt all throughout that first section, just this, you know, the uneasy feeling that like, you know, kind of, you know, you don't want to be there. You want, you want not to be circling around through this carnival. And you're, you're very cautious and you're watching around, you know, very suspicious of everything, you know. And then it just appeared as very natural, you know, okay this beam is opening up and you know you're just at the edge you know i i don't remember

having a sort of motivation like uh you know time to get out you know it was more just here it is this is this is what's happening now okay maybe maybe there's something to that in terms of um that there are experiences we have in life where we suddenly become aware of new options like I just, I've never seen that before. And there it is. So maybe this is something like that of like, because nothing, it, what am I trying to say? It's not, again, counterfactuals.

You're, you did not describe the dream in terms of every time I left, I saw the ocean and I decided to go back in anyway. You didn't see this particular thing until you were in it, until it was happening. Yeah. So at some point. the cycle of leaving and returning ended in a way

what feels like on its own and now you are somewhere else nearby but but that but you have left behind this cycle of of leaving and entering and where that puts you is on the edge of the water and that's again these ideas of um you know almost

collective unconscious uh water's always connected with um source of life or or depth of possibilities like we do we don't know what's below the surface there's this this whole endless potential type of thing to the horizon uh that that we get um and water being like water of life they say you know like we need to drink water and we get food from the sea and all all these kind of things go together um but the idea that it's also that it ends up being a bay so these these things are actually connected it's all part of one thing one one piece of land one area dark one area more light.

And the way you get there is this, and light is very often, uh, uh, in, in the sense of illumination. So you've got you're leaving a dark area and a literal bridge of light, of shining light comes to you to connect. Uh, there's like this idea of, you know, of epiphany of opening, unfolding possibilities, um, you know, inspiration. All the things we were talking about earlier, uh, seem to come to mind. Um, what, what?

What was your experience of seeing that happen? So you walk out there and you're by these rocks. And does it seem like the light comes from an infinite horizon? Or does it look like it's coming from a piece of land somewhere else? So I don't remember seeing necessarily a whole lot of light. I more remember that silver beam going out across the ocean and up to the clouds. And then the clouds opening and looking up. into a very bright and beautiful,

luscious rainforest, you know. And then the more light place was really like that sense of home, that sense of being comfortable, you know, going back down to the other side of that bay. But, yeah, I don't recall having the kind of light moment until I'm down the other side of the bay, you know, aside from, of course, the kind of paradisal vision, you know. Sure.

So I'm trying to see it a little bit better in my own mind. When you say you see the silvery beam, does it appear as one piece? Suddenly you see it and there it is. No, it extends out. It extends out. It creates itself. But it moves away from you and up into the sky. It doesn't come from another place and connect to you.

It actually moves away from you. That's interesting too. So you go to, you leave the seemingly endless cycle of returning to the dark carnival and you end up on the edge of what we might say is, you know, iconic of potential, endless potential, the distant horizon in front of you. And what comes of standing there. observing that or opening yourself to it is from you, a connection to another place is formed in the image of a, you know, glowing or bright silvery bridge. And now what I'm seeing is,

is the idea of a, and this is why I ask for clarifications because what I'm envisioning may not be anything like what you're saying is, can you describe a little bit better how this silvery beam looks like? I mean, does it look like a flat bridge you can walk on or does it look like, I don't know.

Imagine, okay, I'm gonna tell you this and then I have to rush off to the bathroom. Oh, sure, sure, sure. I'm gonna get out of a state of flow state here. I'm just gonna be thinking about my bladder. I know if you're bouncing around on the seat. We can take a break for sure. But it is, it's, um, it appears just like,

like a giant beam that you might see that makes a building, you know, like the kind of, like a capital eye with the line at the top line at the bottom and, you know, line in between. Okay. But it's, it's like flat and it's not like a bridge, you know, it's not like big enough to have as a walking bridge, but it's, you know, it's kind of, you know, let's say you've got like a standard MacBook, you know, maybe it's that wide. Sure, sure. You know, and it extends out.

And I don't climb up it. I kind of like just float. Okay. And with that, I'm gonna go to the bathroom. I'll be right back. Yeah, yeah.

I'm gonna take a break too, stretch my legs. We'll do like at least five minutes. Sure. Okay. Take your time. Okay. Hey,

oh, that was perfect. I had to P2. Yeah, good. It came back in my hair is even more wild. A little windy out there. Um, you know, I feel like I'm forgetting something.

Probably not. I was, uh, it was good to take a break too. Well, okay, things happened for their own reasons. I'm out there thinking,

Uh, wow, it's so many thoughts. Um, okay, we haven't gotten there yet. Let me, let me put a pin in that. I'll come back around to it. I'll remember because that's like we're getting a narrative out of this. I'm glad you explain that. Um, oh, I should do the time here. 150.

Time stamps. Time stamps. Okay. I'm glad you explained it to because what I saw was a beam of light as if a search light, as if a beam of light. But you're like, it was a silvery beam. Ah, okay. An actual beam like a metal beam.

that is very different. And so did it appear to extend from, did it grow out of a rock? Did it come out of the ocean? Was it floating in midair? What do you see? It kind of just came as if at the same level as the ground. Let's say you've got a rocky outcrop going over the ocean, right? And then there's a space where you might be able to jump off that rock into the ocean.

Well, this would just be the same level as the ground rock, right? extending out like a bridge and then just moving up to the sky Okay interesting so it uh it actually it appeared to curve It did yes okay very interesting and just what appeared to me and you know knowing from your I say Mormon background be familiar with the Bible the beam in your own eye versus the moat in your brothers I don't know if that I don't know if that sparks an epiphany or resonates whoa It doesn't only because that that would be more like I would

I would think of timber, you know, I would think of wood. Fair enough. Yeah. What it does. It's more construction material, you said. You know, like a building, like a skyscraper. Yeah. What it does bring up for me is there's the story.

Oh, I can't really remember it very well. But, you know, we were taught it as kids, this idea of like an iron beam that you hold on to as you go through the darkness, you know, that carries you forward to. basically it's the beam that you hold on to to to to stay straight you know stay on that path right and it's even when you're blindfolded and it's a being say very narrow too as well so it's not it's not a wide beam it's not a safe a safe thing you have to actually pay attention if you're going to traverse it and you have to make be sure to hold onto it on purpose not to lose your guide in a way it's a like a handrail in a way through through through the dark yeah very interesting

And it is a connection point. It's a, I mean, thinking of it as a, as like a steel beam, but it's made of, but silvery. And when you, when you say silvery, definitely glowy, reflective, you see it as something that has a somewhat. But that wasn't a characteristic that I really thought about. Okay. Or that seemed very present. It didn't seem to be like very glowing, you know, but it was, you know, very present. So, and the distinct impression you have is that it was as if made of literally silver.

Yeah, well, well, metal, you know, silver as the color, you know, but I didn't have the distinct impression that it was made of silver, yeah. Almost silvery as if chrome or stainless steel, something along those lines. Okay, well, interesting counterfactuals, it wasn't made of wood. It wasn't made of clouds. It wasn't made of ice. You know, there's something there about the material being very much metal. and then the association you have with this, this is a guide or a direction

that if you follow it, it will take you somewhere you want to go because that's the purpose of it. And what it does is the first thing it shows you as you, and the experience you had of traversing the beam was not balancing precariously, threatening to fall into the ocean or clinging to it as you crawl forward.

It was very much floating along it, up into the sky. as if what am I trying to say and you don't have a distinct impression of say choosing to follow it

almost the appearance of the beam and then you're floating because of course you're going to follow it yeah it was sort of one action yeah okay yeah I guess what I'm

what I'm getting at there too is the idea of there wasn't there was no again sense of motivation it was more of a a passive experience of, you know, beam appears, I am floating. Yeah. You know, so there was, there was no conscious choice to follow it in that sense,

not not as a dream experience. Yeah, I don't believe so. Yeah. Yeah. And then. It was like a natural exit. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And then where it took you was as if up into the clouds. So there's a, again, collective unconscious idea of, you know, things up, being good, down, being bad. or we climb the mountain for wisdom. We look to the sky above us because those, you know, things that are above us are better or, or, you know, full of wisdom or, you know, the answers are up there, out there with God in the heavens, so to speak. Long, long, long human history of that looking up in the sky for how we, you know, curse, curse the heavens for our faith, that kind of thing, too.

Yeah. Yeah. There is that. But what it shows you is then it opens up or, now that's, that's another thing, too. was it solid clouds that opened as you appeared or there was always as you're approaching you notice there is a hole it's already present and you can see through it when you get claved they opened as I appeared okay yeah that's that's its own unique thing too because if you okay counterfactual if you could see that there was something there as a that you would what is it sometimes we can see the reason for going in a particular direction because there's something that we want to see this one was you you follow the beam because it's the beam. And what you then show yourself is, of course, naturally at the end of the beam is something. There's a purpose to the beam.

And what it was is a vision through it of, and you mentioned up, you know, like a paradise will garden. And then the second time you said it kind of almost looked rainforest like. So there's some kind of pristine nature, natural environment. And when I say pristine, Like if you look at the rainforest from you know 30,000 feet, oh, it's beautiful, lush and green. Get down on the ground floor and there's bugs and dirt and all kinds of stuff. But we think of it as pristine because untouched by the hand of man in its natural state. There's associations we have with that kind of stuff.

Again, I'm throwing out my associations. If you're like, no, no, that's not what it felt like. Cut me off anytime and say that's something, something different. Speaking of cutting me off, we're, you needed to go no later than two o'clock, absolutely. We got like 10 minutes. I would say. Yeah, I would say. We're going to wrap it up.

for sure. No problem. Yeah. But I want to give you a full because we're almost there. I think we're almost to the end. Yeah. Yeah. And just on the garden. Yeah. It did appear and like it presented itself to me as paradise. You know, it presented itself as like a very, very positive awakening moment. Wow. You know. And then for some reason, it seems very important to me that I was looking up into the clouds and it appeared at a different angle as though I was. looking down into it. You know, it's like this kind of very strange paradoxical feeling. Yeah, I think there's no, there's absolutely something to explore there. You did mention, as we were talking earlier, the idea of as above so below. I don't know if when you think about that, does that resonate in terms of that image? It might be completely, if it doesn't, forget it, we'll go a different direction. I don't know if back then it would have been as prominent.

I'm sure it's a phrase you'd heard throughout your life. Yeah, yeah. But if I mention that right now and you don't get a zing, I'm on the wrong track. I don't know if I get a zing there. No, no, that's fine. That's fine. That just means it's wrong. So we close off one option.

Rattle a doorknob doesn't come open. So there was something else going on there. Perhaps it's more along the lines of, you know, ascending to towards the heavenly, towards the up, towards the good. And, of course, what you see there is paradiseal garden through the clouds. You see, you get a vantage or vista of something different. And you're looking up. And it's very interesting too, because what popped into my head with the idea of looking up to see down is if you turn your gaze towards the higher, what is above you, what you'll actually end up seeing through it in this sense, in a very literal sense is is a vision of what's beneath you or around you, the place that you're in, in a sense.

but it's not a place that you're in because the place you're in is actually different, but it's, it's, if you, let's like, what am I trying to say? You see what is down around you better by looking up to understand it. I don't know if that's resonating to or something along those lines. I'm getting to, there's a reason for the up and down simultaneously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do think that, like, that's an interesting thought of having to look up in, in order to understand what is down.

The only thing it was it was a paradise image, you know, looking through. Because you weren't looking back at the carnival. No. You were looking at somewhere else. So it wasn't in direct connection to that. It's, there's an inversion to. I mean, now that I mentioned as above so below, it makes me think of that movie. Literally, I think it was called As Above So Below.

where they were they went into the Paris catacombs as a lark these video streamers or whatever and they get trapped in hell and in order to get out they make uh what is it they make a um an assumption that in order to get out they have to go down and you would think don't go down down is further into hell but you know spoilers turn turn the soft for 30 seconds if you don't want to hear it but they end up coming to the final hole and they have to go through it and like they know this is the end this is this is either out or were trapped forever. And they go through it and they pop out of a manhole in Paris and they're out. They did. Going down was the right option. Going as deep as you could through hell pops you out the other side. So what came to my mind is there's kind of an inversion there, you know, going up as far as you can. At some point, it reminded me of the looping through the carnival multiple times.

It brings, there's something there between those two images that kind of connect of like in through the out. door in a way. I don't know. Maybe I'm failing to get what I'm capturing here or to inspire anything in you in terms of an explanation. At what point did the beam or the vision change and you ended up in the third section across the bay? How did that happen?

Yeah. As far as I recall, it was a very, it wasn't, it was. It was almost like going up there experiencing that very, very joyous, beautiful, inspiring, and then kind of, you know, hovering back down to the other side, you know, of the bay. And then, again, it was this kind of like, now I didn't grow up in suburbia, but it was a kind of suburban area, probably pretty characteristic of what that area would have been in Australia. if I think about the location of the bay and everything. But just arriving at a home and feeling very much relieved, you know.

Did you grow up more urban or rural? Rural, yeah. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. But then you also had experience in the cities. And probably the cities always felt like, you know, a bit chaotic and dangerous places.

But then there was the middle ground of like suburbia where it's like, okay, here's people living closer. than they do in rural areas, but still with a sense of home, a feeling of comfort and safety. And so also just visual image-wise, the beam curves up and shows you the image, but then the beam doesn't continue to the other side.

You actually float down from the beam to land on the other side. I believe the beam continued down. Okay. So it actually did a curve in a way. It took you up and then it took you back down again. That's it. Okay.

So, okay, bringing it all. together. I've got an idea of the kind of story arc, and this is what I was thinking about before you've got this back in you said 2020, 2020, 2021, you've got something going on in your life where you feel stuck in a loop

of dealing with, were you, had you moved from the countryside into the city at that point? Were you living in more of a... Yeah, you know, we had moved from like the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast down to like a little beach town, you know. We'd been there for a couple of years, but

by that point at least. And I had lived, yeah, actually, no, that was really my first time living outside of either, you know, a farm or a cruise ship. I did a stint with my band. And when you were living in the city there, you had more of that press of people, dark energy, worried, more worried about your safety. So maybe living in the- Less worried about my safety. It was a very safe place. You know, I felt very comfortable there.

You did. And felt very comfortable in Malulibah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I'm getting the thought, whether it's true or not, that the idea of, you know, there's very much a culture shock moving from rural farm life to city life. And even if it isn't a major metropolitan city where you're like skyscrapers crush of people type of, you know, you can't walk across the street unless you're,

walking with 30 other people because they were all waiting for the light too. It was very, very much like New York City type of vibe. Um, but this is maybe a smaller city, but still a culture shock from, from the country. So maybe there was something about what I'm, what I'm getting at is the idea of evaluating how do I feel here? Am I comfortable here? Is this is living in a city like this dark carnival that I, that I'm, that I keep, you know, and you keep maybe coming back to the idea of evaluating, how do I feel about this city life? How do I feel about living here? And, and, And perhaps part of it is, okay, well, what would it be like if I left? What would it be like to approach the horizon, the open possibility of a body of water?

And while we need some kind of guide, and hopefully that guide would take me to something better, it would be more paradisal than the dark carnival. And eventually, you know, it shows you your ideal, perhaps, or what it seems most pleasing to you, which was very interesting. wasn't a glimpse into the rural country. You didn't see a barn and cows and so you saw like a pristine rainforest. It's like the very opposite of a city. City swarm of people concrete buildings was the opposite. Untouched pristine garden, paradiseal landscape,

uncorrupted by, by the, you know, because what is a carnival? You can't have a carnival without people and specifically a dark carnival is like, you know, maybe it's not all the best kind of people,

people who might be a little, they might, they might seek to take advantage of you. and there's this sense of like, okay, I've shown myself two opposites. What's in between them? What's across the bay? What's at the end of this rainbow in a way? What's the other side of the ocean of possibility?

The bay is a more suburban landscape where I've got a little bit of the benefit of living in a city, but I've got a little more connection to nature and the ideal paradise untouched spoiledness of it. Maybe that's, and what you got when you landed there or when you entered that, space was this feels more like home this feels more safe comfortable this is um so did you just out of curiosity i mean did you end up moving to a lower population density suburban areas are where you're at right now right now much higher population much higher yeah yeah yeah and the funny thing is i've never i've never felt interested in living in like suburb like suburbs right got you gotcha i i love being

a farm, you know. And to be honest, we visited New York City very recently. You know, firsthand, the press of people. Yeah, yeah, but even that, you know, I find I'm much more drawn to places that have great soul. And so I could live in New York City. I could totally live there. Fair enough. Or I could live on a farm, you know, as long as it has a lot of soul to it, you know, and feels connected in that way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what do you think of the story I was drawing there, whether it is absolutely correct, did it resonate with you and what elements of it would you change in terms of explaining your experience? What do you think? Yeah, I think the way that it comes off to me is very symbolic of, because to me the carnival has very strong symbolism, right? For sure.

an upside down world, you know, a world of kind of underlying darkness or chaos. The garden then has that kind of paradisal imagery. And I don't know how much of it is related to my feelings of suburb or city or things like that. I just, I know that at the time, you know, I was undergoing just a lot of changes in the way that I saw the world writing so much poetry, you know, really connected on that level and thinking deeply about my, my purpose in relation to this newfound, you know, craft. And I was playing with a lot of this kind of symbolism of, so for example, like my first original music that I created was called Paradiza Suite, you know,

this kind of garden imagery. And so, yeah, it's interesting, man. You've, you've definitely captured like the narrative of the dream. And then I don't know how much of it relates to where I, you know, where I want to live. And maybe I'm getting that wrong in what you're saying that. No, I think so maybe I needed to explain it poorly and be completely wrong. So we take it up one layer of abstraction and it's maybe more about metaphorical of striking a balance, the proper balance between a place you feel very much not comfortable and you keep trying to leave

but you feel stuck in perhaps you keep returning to involuntarily And the other extreme is okay, well what's what's pristine perfection and striking the balance is okay well what's halfway between the jungle and the city is suburbia Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's so rather than saying, oh this means I actually want to live in suburbia. It's more like the concept of striking the balance between opposites and hitting your sweet spot. Where would you feel comfortable? It's as if I don't, I can't take either of these extremes. I'm never going to live in paradise.

I need other people. That's, reinforce is empty. I don't feel comfortable in the city. Therefore, suburbia would strike the balance. But then you're looking at, this could have related to relationship balance or work life balance or how much time

am I spending doing poetry versus music. A lot of times we're just conceiving. of those things in our mind of like, you know, what's, where is my, where's my sweet spot? So that might, that might be the purpose of this one here. I don't know if it makes sense. Oh, certainly. No, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, this idea of, of balance of what, um, yeah, even, even the idea of, uh, like we discussed before, how do you, how do you, um, connect with a calling whilst also being in the world, you know? Yeah. And, uh, how do you, how do you live the path of, of say the artist or the poet or the mystic, something like that,

but also be grounded, you know, in a world that is a carnival, you know, like. Yeah, yeah. Living in reality is very much a dark carnival in a lot of ways. We are not in paradise here as much as we try to make it for ourselves if we can. Well, I'm looking at the clock and you are right up against it. So if you feel we've got at least some useful insights and maybe a narrative that makes sense to you, Well, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's fascinating to see your whole process because your questions are dead on.

It's like, you know, hang on, hang on. Pause that. You know, like there's some sort of motif coming through. Yeah. And then the question. Forget all the times I was wrong. Oh, no, no, no. Well, I think we have to do that to get where we're going, honestly.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, 100%. I'm happy to be wrong. If it opens a new, different door, that's, yeah. Yeah. No, Benjamin. It's been a pleasure and enjoyment. Like, I love what you're doing.

I'm glad it was fun for you. And I love this idea of bringing people on, you know. you know and just saying like what's the dream let's go like let's do the thing that we do in our sessions right now absolutely i don't have any other way i couldn't do i couldn't uh i couldn't make this happen if i tried i just have to let it be what it is so um yeah definitely well and what it is is i got to respect your time we got to get you out of here uh so we'll do the uh we'll do the uh wrapping it up stuff sure and i have to read my notes because my memory is terrible this has been our friend uh and guest dreamer simon drew originally out of australia you might detect a slight uh

lingering accent. Now out of Orange County in Southern California. He is a philosopher, poet musician, podcaster. His latest book is The Poet and the Sage. You can find that at Simon J.E. Drew.com. A link in the description, of course. For my part, would you kindly like, share, and subscribe, tell your friends to join us for the next episode

and share their dreams with me. I broadcast live stream video games Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific. on YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, and X. So you can find me just about anywhere you want to watch, want to watch that stuff. This episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 9, the Literature and Curiosity of Dreams,

Volume 2, part of a two-volume set. Of course, you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable MP3 versions of this very podcast. Also, if you'd head on over to Benjamin the Dreamwizard.locals.com. It's attached to my Rumble account, free to join. You can donate money or not, but that's probably the best place to reach out to me if you have a dream to share, and I would like to hear from you. So once again, as we're as we're

wrapping up here, Simon, great talk. I appreciate you coming on to share that with us. Yeah, thank you, Benjamin. It's been a pleasure, man. Absolutely. Yeah. And let's do it again sometime, you know, we'll keep the conversation going. Love to have you back. And everybody out there, thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.