Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 181: Breath Work

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

Tim Thomas ~ https://breathworkinbed.com.au/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of dreamscapes. Today we have cats as usual all over my notes. We have our friend Tim Thomas from Brisbane, Australia. He is the founder of Breathwork in Bed. He is on a mission to uplift people and the world through quality sleep with 10 years experience in the hardcore veteran recovery space, bringing a unique lived experience in health, wellness, breathwork, and mental health. He is the author of Fight, Flight, and Feel.

you can find him of course at breathworkinbed.com. And you can search for his app on the app stores with just three keywords, breathwork in bed like breakfast in bed, but breath work in bed. That's, I got to read that out loud because I can't, I can't remember any of that. That's too much.

For my part, would you kindly like, share and subscribe, tell your friends. I play video games Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific. Most nights,

uh, tune in to recent stream. to watch me scream at a video game like an absolute idiot because I get frustrated by my lack of skills. That said, this episode brought to you in part by one of my books. I'm going to put it up on the screen. I can't remember which one it is. It's going to be right over there. Please buy my books. You can find them at Benjamin the Dream Wizard. Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. You can also head on over to Benjamin the Dreamwizard.locals.com building a community there. that's where you find the custom cocktail recipes for the video games and much,

much more best place to reach out to me if you want to be a guest. And that's enough out of me. Tim, thank you for being here. We've already had a great conversation like off, off air. I'm like, we should have been recording most of this. You're absolutely right. But yeah, I'm loving it so far, Ben.

You've got a fantastic energy. And I'm really looking forward to interacting here. And what I find amazing about these podcasts, is when people really get into that zone and they're both authentically sharing, or I like to say you take the clutch out of your jaw and you just flow. No matter how many people are listening, everyone's getting nourished. It's like this amazing thing, like authentic connection. Maybe we just needed a couple of thousand people listening for us to really connect with another human.

Sometimes, or the knowledge of the background that we are speaking to more than just ourselves sometimes makes us consider our words more carefully or at least focus our intent. What am I saying that other people are going to hear and see and how is it going to be of any kind of benefit to them? I've always got that going. Alternatively, you could just go, effort. I can't reach everybody. I can only be myself and you can get really singular, you know. That's true.

Some of my, my best. Yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah. I think it both works too. But there's a, what was it? What am I? So I have, oh, God, this brain all over the place. Sometimes I've got to back up.

I have a great appreciation. for of course Freud and Jung and all the dream interpretation people but I have also great respect for from a clinical practice side of things the humanist psychologist one of them my favorite Carl Rogers Carl Jung and Carl Rogers he said you know there's two things you need to be of benefit to someone else you know or to create a therapeutic space and deliver on that therapy you need number one unconditional positive regard meaning I'm genuinely here to do something helpful for you I I want the best for you. You get a mindset in that, in that direction.

And the other one is genuineness. Just be yourself. And I would actually, it reminds me of a story. I'm going to talk too much already. It reminds me of a story of when I was, when I would train other folks to do what I did inside the inpatient psychiatric. Yeah. And I didn't understand the spirit in which you did it.

Yeah. Well, like my, my purpose was to turn them into people that could, were capable of doing what I do. And I'm like, how do I explain this to people? And one of the key things. was genuineness. I'm like, if you feel overwhelmed, you go to a problem and you don't know how to help them, I want you to say that. I want you to acknowledge it in the moment. I want you to, they're going to dump their problems on you and you're going to go, wow, this is overwhelming and I can't fix it. I don't know what to do. So just tell them that. Say, I am having very strong

feelings that I have sadness, that I want to help you and I don't know what to do, but I'm listening. I mean, maybe we can talk it out, but at least I'm here and I care. And so that would work miracle sometimes. Just just keep it real. If you have an answer, give it. If you don't say, I don't know. That's okay. That's a socratic. If I could speak to what you're saying right now,

because my brain was exploiting too as you're saying that, what you're talking about is the rarest thing, in my observation, the most productive and rare thing on this planet is a true friend. And, you know, I sort of see, well, what is the dynamics of a true friend? and you get to drop your guard and be yourself 100% no filters. Okay. And you get to share a space where that other person has what I call a zero threat environment. And in that zero threat environment, you're free to move and do whatever you want.

And essentially, we always know what we need to do. But if there's blockages in the way of that. And I thought, well, the only way, I can't be a true friend to everybody. but the only way for me to share that space with others is to be 100% sincere. And that doesn't happen on its own. I have to be honest with myself. I have to say, look, how much stuff do I need?

How much money do I need? How much physical activity? How much spiritual connection? How much do I need to play with my dog before I can be in that position of abundance? Because if I feel like I'm inadequate in a certain area of my life, if I feel like I don't have enough money,

I don't have enough sex, if I don't have enough stuff, then that's going to be in that sort of psychic space, call it when I'm interacting with somebody and they're going to sense it. I don't want to articulate it, but they'll sense that I'm trying to control the outcome of the situation. Yeah. You know, so for me to be completely sincere and get rid of any kind of control, I have to be 100% complete within myself, you know, so sincerity happens as a result of completion.

So before I did this podcast today, I was up at 4.30 a.m. I always, it's kind of silly, but it works. I get on the roof of my house and I look at the sunrise. and I'm doing breathwork as that first ray of light comes over the horizon. And a fun fact about that first ray of light is it starts a cascade of chemical interactions through your eyeballs. We've got these light receptors in our eyeballs that create these very powerful neurochemicals. And it basically synchronized, it does a lot of things, but one of which is synchronizes all your circadian rhythms. So you've got like a couple of thousand different clocks running inside of you. and that first light over the horizon synchronizes all of them.

So when people ask me, what's your best tip for sleep? See the sunrise, that first light and stare at it for, you know, five or ten minutes, do some breath work because then at nighttime, all of you are getting completed together. It's not like, you know, you turn off the light and part of you still running around in your head. So what I'm trying to say here is I really wanted to have a good interaction with you, and that started a few hours ago by me filling up my cup and becoming abundant because I don't give of myself anymore, I give of my abundance.

Because when I've worked in the veteran space and I was very successful, heck, my lifetime goal was saving 40 veteran lives from suicide. Because we've lost 40, in Australia, we've lost 40 guys to, you know, bombs and bullets in Afghanistan, but 30 times that amount to suicide. and I thought, I'm going to die happy if I say 40 guys from suicide. That was achieved within a year.

You know, one or two guys a week would say, Tim, do you remember that conversation? That changed everything, right? But what nobody knew and what I didn't even know was that I, and every six weeks in that time, I'd have to hit the bottle really hard for three days because I was giving up myself. I wasn't giving of my abundance, you know? And so now I always worked the first hour or two of the day. so I can be abundant and give of that. So like if it's much easier to, you know,

if I was at 100% and I give 10% away to somebody, I'm like, oh, I'm down to 90%, you better do something with that. Somewhere inside of me, right? But it's the right thing to do, so I'll keep doing it. So sometimes the nastiest people come from initially the most generous people, you know, because they're giving of themselves,

not of their abundance. So now these days, because I invest in myself, I create that abundance, and I'm at 500%. I can give away. I can be generous with 20% and people can love it, hate it, tell me to F off, it doesn't matter. It's a very big switch when you realize

you're connected to something so much more powerful than what can be taken. Yeah. You know, for sure. You've all been taken from. And if you hang up on the 25 cents that's been taken and forget the fact that tomorrow you can make a million dollars, you know,

people spend years chasing that 25 cents and you're missing out on the fact that you could be, you know, an energetic millionaire every single day. Yeah, definitely. there's a couple of things there and kind of working backwards, as I often do. It's amazing to think that the best sleep hygiene doesn't necessarily start a couple hours before bed. It could start as far back, and as you're saying it does, as far back as waking up properly. In a sense, the old cliche, getting up on the right side of the bed.

I'm sure you probably have more to say about that. But before I forget, the other side of things, too, of like, well, I just dropped a bunch of hair. in my face. Oh, it tickles. I wish I'd do a hail on. Well, this is going to continue to recede up on here. I got the old Dracula Widows Peak type of thing there, which will make it, it'll make me even look more wizardly in the future. I'm hoping.

So the thing about pride was the key of it, too. So if you're working inpatient psychiatric, it is a locked unit. We're dealing with some of the most sick people. I'm getting a weird squelch. I think it's me. I think it's me. And I think I'm just going to know. That was me.

My chair moved. Oh, no, no, no. It's actually a, I think it's in my headphones cord. Yep. I unplug it, plugged it back in. What I wanted to make sure is it wasn't coming through on the audio. But no, it was me. It was my headphones.

Long story short, you're working inpatient psychiatric. You are somewhat of a mental health prison guard because there are people out of control. They need containment. It is your job to be in control, not just of other people, but of yourself. primarily, but you can't approach therapeutic interactions trying to control the outcome. You have to actually find a way to be out of control and in control at the same time. And or two at least, whoa, I lost you. Oops.

What do we got there? 11.20. Hello, welcome back. Yeah, sorry, mate. I don't know what happened there. Was that me or you? You know, it could have been the cat. laying on the keyboard or it could have been absolutely nothing i i hesitate to assign in control and out of

control right it's not a perfect example holy shit the you know secreticity is about that's not that right that was amazing i'm just writing a little time timestamp down here so i'm probably you'll leave it in that was so so brief it's a great example no need to i don't know any fancy editing we were talking about this before what you see is what you get a long story short on that there's a there's a right way to be out of control or um yeah we're going to chase the 25 or engage with a million dollars. Exactly, exactly. So when you're in that therapeutic interaction,

you have to be in control of yourself. You have to not do things that are dangerous, bad, harmful, put other people at risk. You need to make sure the client is safe. But after that, you can let go of being right. You can let go of power over another, over the outcome. And it's,

that was one of the things I tried to instill in folks as, as much as, as much as I possibly could is that there's no, there is no therapeutic outcome possible in a power struggle. You have to get out of that completely in order to be of benefit to someone. You know, it's just not helping you. It's not helping them.

It's not helping anybody. It's not going to make the unit safer. It's not going to make their psychosis any less severe. You know, yeah, those are my two cents on that. Yeah, yeah, that's, I get it. I get it. I get it. Yeah.

But I did want to ask you, too. So there was a word or phrasing you used. This is why I'd usually write things down when the cat's not laying on my notes. It was your abundance. And I wanted to focus, focus in just a little bit more on that and explain, explaining it to folks. Because people go like, what does that mean? How do I, how do I conceive of that concept?

How do I know when I'm functioning from, you know, taking from myself or taking from the extra, almost like the profit we've created on top of our, of our. So I don't know if you want to explore that a little bit. Yeah, yeah, no, no. That's a solid point and something that people could really take away from this. is I encourage people to think of their energy like money in the way that how you invest it is how you get it back. And all of us, the way I see humans, Ben, is where this energetic signature wrapped up in meat. Okay?

Yep, yep. And when that meat aligns with what that energetic signature wants to do, whatever that is, and it's quite unique to the individual, you get a massive return on your energy. Okay, it might even be a difficult thing, but you spend, you know, $100 energy, you get $10,000 back. So it shows up very powerfully and obviously in physicality, okay? Everyone's got a physical thing that they do that gives them a lot of energy back. For me, it's breathwork. That's why I do breath work for two hours a day.

That lights me up. Other people, they could have it as walking. They could have it as lifting, running, whatever it is, stretching. And so whatever your body does that lines up with your energetic signature, then you get a massive return. And the idea here is to live as an energetic millionaire. So think of, you know, your shares portfolio. You know, you've got some that are giving a really good return, some that aren't.

And you probably want to have the ones in your life that are giving you a really good return. So wisdom to me is filling your life full of those things, those actions, those actions, those people that give you a massive return on your investment. So, and there are things in your life that do take from you. And there's a process of time. It could be a very long wheel before that energy comes back to you, like working with veterans and, you know, you're working with psychiatric patients.

You know, sometimes you feel like you're giving, giving, giving. And this is where every day, if you're working, can, and this is why I'm such a proponent of sleep, sleep done right charges you up, helps you create that abundance. And unfortunately, one thing that stops people, I mean, there's a number of things, but I'll just speak to the abundance. I believe, if you call it destiny or your calling, we are here to find those energetic investments that we do that gives us a massive return okay so you know you've created a pod

show and you i hope you get a massive return you know you've got cats there's no accident you got cats because they give you a return okay and and you i always try and have have myself in a position of abundance so i've always got more than i need so if my day asks more of me then I can easily be generous. And I've usually found there's two completely different types of people in this world, and they're both you. And in the way that there's the you that's living in energetic abundance, and then there's the you that's living in adequacy, you know,

and the way we live, it's the same world, very different planet to live on. And so I really encourage people, and I've, you know, to, A, find the, feel your life, all of the things that make you abundant. And the first thing you need to do of the day is, is access that abundance from inside yourself. So that's why I'm such a proponent of breathwork in bed. So before your feet hits the floor, you do the right kind of breathwork coming out of bed. You turn that lead, that heavy feeling into gold with breathwork, you know.

and if you can win the first 10 minutes of your day, you're on a really good, a really good chance to win the rest of the day. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, definitely. No, I think, like I was saying earlier, getting up on the right side of the bed, I mean, starting the day right day.

Here's one thing that I am a wizard of dreams. I'm not a wizard of sleep in that sense. So my specialty is not, Ben, how do I get a good night's sleep? I've got some tips and tricks, but not, not anything more than the usual. You know, you want to shut off electronic devices. You don't want too much blue light. You want fewer distractions. You want a solid routine.

I mean, I know a lot of the psychological basics. Like here's some simple stuff you can do. But I always like to hear from other people who are like, well, here's how to get better sleep. Here's tips and tricks I've learned. Here's a philosophical perspective that can inform how you implement some of those. things. So I'm always trying to tease out, well, what is my lane and how do I stick to it in a way that I don't pretend to be more knowledgeable than I really am? Again, letting go that pride thing.

It's like, I'm not supposed to be the expert in everything. If I was, I would be Benjamin the everything wizard. I'm not. My thing is dreams. So you bring me a dream. I'm good with that. But like, so I didn't know if you wanted to talk generally about sleep, the benefits of it, the way to improve it. Here's the thing. When I had PTSD, there was a thousand, goddam professors coming in saying, here's what PDSD is. After seven years,

we've discovered this, this. And I'm like, good on you, buddy. I already know what it is because I'm living with it. And so is the rest of the veteran community.

Okay, and I'm just speaking on lived experience here. And it's not limited to the veteran community, right? So I said, if I'm ever going to do anything in the public space, it's got to pass a P test. Okay,

so my P test is the three P's, powerful, positive and permanent. So there's a lot of powerful and positive stuff out there, but how permanent is it? How much do people take away a week later, a year later, a decade later? So, you know, there's lots of these powerful and positive people out there going, hey, look at this, and it's a fun, it's good distraction, but a week later, what's changed?

So I withdrew from public life about two years ago, Ben, after I got an email from a very high-ranking army officer. I'd just done a workshop at the army base in front of a couple of hundred corporals and sergeants. And he was sending me an email saying, Tim, these guys are coming to me saying that this was the first good night sleep they had in up to five years. And he actually thought that was great. And I said, that's terrible. They haven't slept in five years, right? But the thing that he said next withdrew me from public space, and that was, I could,

it was good when you were there, but do you have any resources for people when you're not there? And I'm like, holy shit, I've just, I've just failed my own P test. I'm not permanent. You know, I can, I can give talks the rest of my life to these things awesome, right? But then how do I, if I'm really about giving, you know, power to people and connecting to the power, because I'm not powerful. I've just got a connection to it, right? Then I've spent the last year or two, I'm creating the breathwork in bed app where, you know,

you just go in, you say when you want to sleep, when you want to wake up, and then you get these notifications falling out of your phone exactly when you need them, you press a button, and you know, you breathe a certain way to create wonderful peace. And I tell you, it's pretty bloody handy at 3am to have a button you can press to get yourself back to sleep. Oh, yeah. You know, it's, it, I've been there, done that and, and to have that at 3 a.m. when you need it, super powerful.

But also, too, getting out of bed, uh, with breath. So before you even force your feet over the edge, you're doing breath work, body activation. And there's a bunch of bonus stuff in there too, which people can discover. I just, to speak to, you know, the idea of really adding value,

I want it to go, you know, beyond, you know, this conversation. I want to give people easy access to really powerful habits because I can't do what you do, but if I can help you sleep better, then you're going to do what you do better, right? And I'll tell you something funny. In the Special Forces, we used to weaponize sleep. So we would attack the enemy's sleep patterns

because we knew that if we took out their sleep patterns for three days, that would mess them up better than a bullet. You know, so we're all on pretty thin ice. All it takes is three days of no sleep, and you literally, you, both of us would probably be in an insane asylum in a padded cell because we're just, we're just incomprehendous. Oh yeah, anywhere between three and, from what I know, three and seven days, and you're straight into psychosis.

Just hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, lack of ability to concentrate. I mean, yeah, sleep is no joke. And yet we wear it like a freaking badge. I only had three hours sleep last night, harden up. I'm super productive. Not as much as you think. I've had six coffees today. What's your problem?

I mean, oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, and it's, yeah, that's, that's one thing that, you know, from my, my, my, my, my schooling and my training and then up them all of my recent reading, it's like, really brought home to me how important it is that sleep is not optional, that you have a good, consistent, healthy sleep pattern. And not just so you have, you know, dreams that you can bring to me, but so that you have energy and so that you have focus and, and all the kind of things that, uh, you just can't. function well without um what was i going to say about uh ben you think about everything you have yeah i'm just thinking you list everything you have in your life you know your work you play your relationships your responsibilities every and i encourage the listeners to do this and i put it to you consider the possibility of the quality of all those things in your life is absolutely relative to the quality of your sleep and and if you want to destroy somebody destroy their sleep

destroy everything in their life, destroy their sleep. So my favorite saying, and I'm dyslexic, I see things in patterns, sleep is the soil from which everything grows. Okay? And this world that we live in, they talk about health and fitness, but it's really health and beauty. It's visual. You know, you've got to look a certain way, and that's absolutely nothing to do with where

we get our power from. So, you know, let's use the tree analogy. If you don't have a trunk the way you want it to be, there's plenty of people that'll sell you a bunch of stuff. If you don't have the fruit in your life that you want to have, there's plenty of people that'll sell you a bunch of stuff. Someone who really, really knows and understands how to power up growth, they'll go into the soil, they'll go into the unseen. And this is where I get excited because it's not the sleep. Sleep is the first step.

What happens is when you improve that soil that you grow from, all those seeds of uniqueness, all those seeds of greatness, they start growing. They cannot not grow when you've got great soil. So, you know, and the scary thing is we can live our whole lives and die with these seeds laying dormant inside of us. You know, that certainly could have been my path because I lost, when I said I couldn't sleep, I lost six years of my life to pills. You know, I was this zomified pill eater. And, you know, I want others to.

what lights me up is seeing that greatness, that that comes from somebody, because it's all in there. They just need the right soil and it cannot not grow. So yeah, that's what really lights me up is not so much the sleep. It's what happens after that. And you just stand back and watch the show and cheer them on. Oh, for sure. Yeah, definitely. I mean, creating the right environment. I've said this too in terms of things like my conception of magic. Like the guy thinks he's a wizard on the internet. And I really do, uh, based on my understanding of the archetype of the, of the sage in, in that, in that respect, you Gandalf and, and whatnot. Um, or Socrates.

I put them both in wizard categories. A lot of wizards out there. A lot of profits, too. Um, I was going somewhere with that. And then I got the on a tangent. And I cut you off earlier too. I'm sorry. No, no, no, that's okay.

I'd rather hear what you have to say. I mean, my audience is probably heard what I have to say 10 times already on most of the, well, okay, throwing, something just came to mind. Throwing back to what you said. You, you mentioned, you know, the three. peas and suddenly I had a thought that I don't know how well it fits but it made me think that you know so there's positive powerful permanent I love I love that I love I love alliteration I love simplified systems that are functional brilliant little nuggets I love it I want to write a book one day about you know wizard's guide to the aspirational aphorism like small phrases an apple a day

take care of your health you'll be less sick very simple stuff but people don't get it like apples don't make you healthy apples don't scare doctors I'm like that's wow you're literal you're concrete, think about it, think about it. Anyway, I'll get around to that. Now I'm going off on a tangent. Three P's. Oh, yeah. To summarize what you're saying, the micro habits is what makes the power.

Absolutely. We've all done the big stuff, you know, the big challenges and then a week later, nothing changes, right? But if you can, like, so when I'm doing target practice, if we miss a target by 10 centimeters at 100 meters, at 200 meters, it's 20 centimeters, 30 centimeters. Oh, yeah. So as, as time, what the point I'm trying to make is as we move forward and time goes on, it's not the big deviations that make.

the difference because then we come back to normal. It's the small things over time get bigger and bigger and bigger. Absolutely. And, and, you know, I can see what you're trying to imbue to people through those, you know, micro habits. Again, very similar to the way I'm doing it, but we're both bringing gifts to the same sort of point of inflection. For sure. Well, that's another thing just so the three piece. Actually, I'm going to put a pin in that and come back to it. But just like you, I want to have more of an effect on people. Like, I can't talk to everybody. It would be nice if I had more people that I was had to turn down. It's a good problem to have.

But eventually I won't be able to, but what I can do is offer my example. I can show people how I go through the dream interpretation process and they can literally do it for themselves with a friend, with a journal. You know, hopefully that's why I consider my, my material, you know, half education, half entertainment. It's like you should be interested. This should be edutainment. You should be, this is fun to watch and hey, I'm learning something.

So hopefully by going through my process over and over again, people have. have hundreds of examples of here's how you do this thing. So I can have an impact much bigger than what I'm able to directly do with each individual person. Okay, that's number one. Before I forget the other one, um, it made me think of as you were saying, the three piece and I thought, you know what PTSD feels to me like something which is powerful, permanent and not positive in a way.

So there's, there's tweaks to the, now that doesn't mean that it's permanent. You can never get rid of it. It means that it's not going to go away on its own necessarily. Well, when you're in it, it feels like you're going to be in it forever. And that's what it feels permanent. Yeah, well, depression too. And that's how people end up necking themselves because they ask the question, what do I know? I'm in pain.

I can see I'm causing pain to others. And if I genuinely look into the future, it's only going to get worse. And this is where they, and I've got to talk plainly about suicide right now. Because in that state of disconnect, they say, well, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to end the pain to me. I'm going to end the pain to you. I'm doing everyone a favor. I've got a little skipping my step right.

now because I finally got the solution. I'm going to end the pain. Everyone's going to be happier for it. Yeah. And obviously, that's when I stopped and I said, listen, okay, I can't stop you neck and yourself, but what you need to understand is you won't get rid of the pain. You're going to multiply it times 10 to everyone who knows you. So you can kill yourself, but don't think it's going to relieve the pain because it's going to multiply it to so many other people in so many other ways. Oh, yeah. That's why a lot of folks, when they argue against it, they say it's ultimately selfish. You are ending your own pain.

It's absolutely true. No, there's no, there's no lie there. That's true. But you're not ending anyone else's pain. It's not, you know, no matter what pain you're causing. Can I speak to the pain for a second? Please, yeah. Okay, so I mentioned earlier how I was able to create a lifetime goal of saving 40

veteran lives within a year. Because I saw two things that the mainstream medical system didn't see. and I observed, and again, dyslexic power here, I observed that a certain way that pain worked. And Ben, it didn't matter if the pain was a physical pain or an emotional pain. It would get to a certain duration or intensity where it transformed without the person knowing into loneliness. I'm the only person going through it. okay and and we're social mammals we're supposed to you know have each other's back and i put it to you

ben if you knew 100% i had your back 100 freaking percent and and i knew you had my back 100 freaking percent by everything else is a very small detail trust in our fellow mammals is super super potent but and there's nothing we can't do in that space bring it on man bring it on um if we take the opposite of that where I'm all alone disconnected, you know, everything's a threat because everything is a threat. If I drop my guard for a second, something bad's going to happen, it's going to be my fault. And everything is hard because everything is hard. Oh, yeah.

Nothing's every easy. I like that phrase. Yeah. So it's the isolation that is the killer. And that's, that's, that's, that's, once I address the isolation by simply sharing, um, what like us guys especially we've got these unspoken words in our heart and we need another guy who's walked the same path to articulate our journey and our words and once that happens we start saying things like fuck i thought i was the only one you know and and and that breaking of the

isolation um is the first step in in recovery because you you can pour, there's millions of dollars in veteran resources, resources getting poured into veterans, but it's just people don't understand it's water off a duck's back if you are feeling alone and isolated. And this leads me to my next step, which made me successful, and that was being alone for so long, you're very fatigued. So getting people out of fatigue, improving their sleep quality,

was the next step in the journey. Because just like people have 98% of everything they need inside of them. They're just like nature. You know, you create the right environment. It grows. But we die when we're feeling all alone, and we die when we're feeling tired. So if we socially reconnect and we get out of fatigue,

all that awesomeness, I just noticed that these guys, all the shit would fall off their internal compass, And they instinctively know what they needed to do next. But they were in such a state of loneliness, such a state of fatigue. They didn't know what to do next. And they were very vulnerable to suggestion like I was. I lost six years of my life to pills.

Because I was, I'm like, okay, that's the right thing to do is do what the, you know. Because no one at that time was connecting me to breaking my own isolation. And I'm, and I will speak to something because it does tie into. the listeners right now. So in 2011, I think it was April, I was about to kill a man. And the government wasn't paying me to do this. I was going to do this one for free.

I'd reach rock bottom. I'd stuck my hand up for help. And I went to see a psychologist because that's what you're supposed to do, right? And at the end of this, you know, I told him all this shit. I saw in Afghanistan and service. And this guy wasn't just incompetent.

He was apathetic, right? And at the end of it, he's like, oh, so you think it was a problem with your mom and dad? And that's when the second hand on the clock, you know, that little goes tick, tick, tick. I went zoop, and it just stopped. And I immediately looked past him and saw his glass frame psychology degree. And in my state of disconnect, I saw it, it made a lot of sense to grab that and feed it to him because this guy was causing pain to others. Yeah.

You know? So I get out of my chair to do that. And then I feel this hand on my head. chest and I hear these words, red light, Tim, you are the toughest mofo you know and you are struggling in a system that doesn't seem to want to help. How many other people, and I'm on the edge of my chair, I'm about to go grab this glass frame degree, and how many other people are struggling just like you are? And then I sort of sat back down and that's when I saw him, Ben. I saw thousands of people left and right of me saying, Tim, you've got to find a way forward for you so you can find a way forward for us.

You know, and I'm like, shit, it doesn't matter if it takes me a week, a year, a decade. I've got to find a way forward. Because even if it takes me a decade, that's the amount of time I'm going to be able to save all those other people. And if you want to go through the looking glass here, everybody is up against something, you know, everybody is up against something, some problem, some obstacle that they're trying to get through. And the question I ask is,

how many other people are in your, how many other people do you think are in your situation right now up against what you're up against? And you might say dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, even millions. Right? Yeah. Because they're the people left and right of you right now. And they're all saying, we just need another human that is just like us to find a way forward.

Because what you're up against right now gives you the qualification to speak to those people. And words they probably heard before, but because you've come through it, you've moved that knowledge from their head down into their heart, down into their DNA. And only you can do it because you're the one up against that particular obstacle. And once you get the gravity of that, that's when you break your isolation. So that's when my isolation was broken. Because in isolation, I could self-justify doing all sorts of crazy stuff. I was about to kill a guy.

I'd be in prison right now if I went through that. But when I broke my isolation and I took and I could see that my life is connected, I've got my tribe now. And if you really want to go through the looking glass, if you're getting anything from what I'm saying right now, Ben, you're actually there with me in 2011 willing me on. And if people choose to move forward in this, there's going to be people in your future that are going to say something like this. They're going to say, you know what? We are so glad that back before you met us in 2024, you made certain choices because now you've helped us move forward so much, so much more easily. And we could have never done it for ourselves.

So thank you for making choices before you met us. Absolutely. I think that's a great way to look at it too. It's like in the kind of retrospective immediate support in a way. It's like, yes, you took me back. there in the story. And that's exactly what I was thinking. Make, make a different choice, make a better choice. And to, to, to, to think of it that way of us being there in spirit, in the moment, absolutely. That's everyone who hears that story, like, oh, no, we watch it on a

movie screen. We're like, don't do it. It'll feel good, but it'll mess you up for life. It also reminded me the, uh, one of the concepts in, um, you know, practicing clinical psychology. The idea that sometimes it is the, um, recovered addict that makes the best. drug counselor for other I've been there I've done that let me tell you it is the it is the survivor uh you know the soldier survivor of war who can best tell others look here's how I got through it and I'm not this isn't based on theory is based on experience I've been there I've felt that and that's the same thing with with depression too is like uh you know so what I was saying earlier is um uh based on certain perspectives of looking at these things yes if you are suffering

it is a logical intervention. I'm not saying good or bad, just practical intervention to say if I no longer exist, therefore I experience no suffering. Technically correct, we all sleep when we're dead. You know, it's one of those things like there.

There is an end of the pain eventually in the terms of lived experience. Depends on your interpretation of what happens after life. This is true. No more physical pain, perhaps. If you're, if you're suffering in this world, don't think that you take it to your grave. Everyone who meets you is a part of your suffering.

You pass that suffering on your kids. You pass your unlearned lessons onto your kids. Oh, yeah. You know, so I never think I've had the privilege to take all my unresolved shit to the grave. Because I'll just pay that forward, you know. No, it's true. To others, to my kids, all that sort of stuff. And please continue on.

I'm just, I'm just inflecting on that, on that, you know, the idea that we're at peace, you know. Not exactly. Not exactly. In the, yeah, short, yeah. Yeah, no, no, all I'm saying is I'm given the devil is due in a little bit of a way. It's like it isn't, it isn't that suicidal thinking, suicidal ideation in general is necessarily illogical. There's a logic to it that is internally consistent. Yeah, it makes sense when you're in it.

Yeah. But what I, what I like to tell folks, you know, so caveat to that is depression is a liar. The logic of it is, I am suffering. this suffering is intolerable. It will never stop. Therefore, I must stop it by this extreme action. And that's, I mean, you look at that and go, I mean, sure, under a very specific set of circumstances, that might actually make sense.

But depression is a liar. Depression is what tells you it's what makes the suffering feel worse than it actually is. It's what escalates, elevates, and spreads it. And also the idea that this is in, well, all it lies at all three. points of the of the syllogism. It's it's not as bad as it feels. It's not as intolerable. It can be tolerable under different circumstances or the circumstances might change, which gets to the hopelessness part. This will never end. I, therefore, I must end it. Depression lies at every sense. So if you kind of can debunk each of that, and that's, I mean,

there is no silver bullet, magic pill necessarily. Now there are interventions as treatments and different stuff. But you're in isolation and you can, you can, you've got no out. And this is why a lot of people self-isolate because in our isolation, we can self-justify everything. You know, this is just the way the world is. I can't tolerate someone else's opinion on this. Oh, yeah, for sure. So if you can break out of that trap of lies is basically curing or healing from depression itself. But sometimes it takes a guide through the case.

So I love the wizard archetype because you imagine you're lost in the deep dark forest. And suddenly some old hermit in the radiest, dirtier. his furtious clothes, his beard's scraggly, and it's got bird shit in it, and he's got this funny-looking hat, and he's got a torch, and he's just like, this way, and he leads you out. And, you know, sometimes we, we, we, uh, we never know where we're going to meet that crazy, crazy old guy in the woods, and it can be anybody. It doesn't have to be a man in the woods. He doesn't have to look crazy.

Just it's in a form that you wouldn't otherwise expect. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's where we get a lot of the mythological representations of trickster gods and, and other beneficial benefactors of a supernatural nature coming to heroes in different forms and giving them different clues, even tricking them with reverse psychology into making the right

decision, all kinds of different stories of how these forces work with. Something else you said earlier, I'll just throw this out there because it came back to me. But the idea of, that's exactly how I conceive of what we are is the intersecting point of a meat suit and a spirit. It's like where where the soul connects with the physical reality is in here

somewhere. And it's more than just neurons firing. It is neurons firing, but it's more than that. It's just one of those things where it's like we are this, we are, we are, we are the sum of our parts and more, uh, in a sense. Uh, anyway, that was just. I don't know. I like that and I want to, I want to, I want to add to that because, you know, there's

a saying, whoever has. more will be given and whoever doesn't have what you have gets taken away. Now, I see that as as sort of spiritual energy. You know, when you're in abundance, you're just getting more and more and more, right? So when this, when this bag of meat lines up with your energy signature and you master that, you know, because everyone's got a connection. I don't, I don't like the saying that everyone's special. What everyone has is a startup capital and how you invest that startup capital is how much you get back. Okay, you might start with two cents and you get four cents. Eight. And then, then, then more and more and more.

But if you try and protect what you have, what you have gets taken away. And I lost my fear of what other people thought of me when I realized my life path was, okay, I see people, their energy signatures, they come into this world,

they get covered in meat, and when that energy signature gets returned back to source, you want to have, you want to return it with interest. So my accountability is to, when it goes back to source, I can say, I did everything I can to enhance that signature and it's returned with tenfold

than what it came in with. For sure. So I'm not accountable to you per se. I'm accountable to, you know, the energy that goes back to source from once it came. Yeah. And what you were saying there too, I think it's a biblical phrase. And I can't remember. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can't remember if it's called the Peter principal. It was a parable in the Bible when a king was going away and he gave all his servants gold coins and said, do with what you want. And then when he comes back, a guy who had 10 gold coins said, look, I've made another 10. He says, great, you can be in charge of 10 cities. And a guy says, oh, I've made another five. He says, great, you can be in charge of five cities. And then there was one guy.

He says, look, I just took what you gave me. I buried it. Here it is back. He's like, are you freaking serious? I gave you something as a gift for you to create more. And so take what that guy has and give it to the guy who's got 10. And the servants were like, hang on, he's already got 10. Why are you giving him his?

And that's when he said, whoever has, more will be given, whoever doesn't have what they have gets taken away. Yeah, exactly. So energetically speaking, energetically speaking, that's what it's like. So, you know, if you're focusing on the 25 cents that got taken, you can spend the next seven days trying to chase that. And when I say, you know, energy that's taken, someone that's hurt you, pissed you off, an unhealed wound, a part of you that doesn't have peace, you can, you can chase that in another, you know, to try and get that back,

or you can move forward and create a million dollars each day. So this is where there's, I mentioned earlier, two completely different types of people in this world, and they're both you. Okay. There's you that if you don't invest in yourself, you've only got, say, 50 cents worth of energy. And if someone takes 25 cents, that's half of everything you own, so you can't help but want to get that back. A big part of me in my life was getting revenge on certain things that were taken from me, right? Yeah.

You know, but if I wake up and I create an abundance, let's say I've got a million dollars and someone takes 25 cents, I'm like, okay, stay there, play with it. You've just missed out on the rest of my life. I'm going to make another million dollars tomorrow. You know, so the idea of revenge in a biblical sense is, Lord, make my enemies dust beneath my feet. Yeah. So you don't know you've got dust on your feet because it's so small.

It just doesn't even occur to you. You know, so this helped me lose my sense of wanting to get revenge on people because, you know, if they only took from me because I had nothing. If I try and take from them, I can't get nothing from nothing. I'm just going to end up like them. So I just keep on working on making, you know, myself stronger, making an abundance. and then before you know it, they become very small. So when I'm working with high school students,

I show them a Venus fly trap. And they're quite a small little plant, right? And I say, I ask, does this scare you? And they're like, nah. And I said, well, look, to a fly, this Venus fly trap is absolutely terrifying. Now, this is where we need to start seeing our own unique human abilities. We can improve ourselves. We can develop ourselves.

We can make ourselves stronger, more powerful, more peaceful, more present. Okay, so if this fly had a human ability to develop and strengthen itself, the fly could turn into a bird. The bird could turn into a cat. The cat could turn into a lion. Okay, so imagine that lion walking past that Venus fly trap. It would freaking laugh at itself that ever took that thing seriously. You know, and revenge would just be below it because it's so powerful.

It's living the life of a lion. Oh, yeah. And so this is how I encourage people to come at. It's so great that you've got problems because you're going to turn, you're going to turn yourself from a fly into a lion because you're up against this thing and you're going to outgrow it. You're not going to try and, you know, take from something that's trying to take from you. The idea is to, you know, develop, grow, and then you get to a point where it's like,

yeah, I am the lion now. That's probably one of the best ways to conceive of, you know, because we look at things like that, say, biblical or other, other, um, prohibitions in a way against revenge and it's like well why not because revenge is in a way it's justice or rather that's one method we we would look at and say okay there's a possible avenue for justice and justice is something we should all get if you've been wronged that that should be rectified in some way and it's it's it's a great way to conceive of it is that seeking revenge why is it wrong or bad.

And it's not, not always a moral thing. It's sometimes it's a practical thing. It's like, man, that's just wasted energy. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't get justice for like you've been a victim of a crime. You've had something stolen.

There's different, different things that are, but the don't quite qualifies revenge. Revenge is more of a, an emotional, I want the emotional satisfaction of getting back at someone. But if you look at that and say, you know what,

that's a waste of your precious resources. You're going to chase that 25 cents instead of making a million. You're going to, you're going to waste energy that, that if you put it somewhere else, that problem becomes so far beneath you, you wonder why you even cared at some point. That's great. You're right there, Ben, and people certainly do need to get the impact of their actions on

others. There certainly needs to be justice. But if you think that killing that person is somehow going to put back in what was taken, you'd be sorely mistaken. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because killing that person or doing whatever punishment, you can do a thousand punishment, lock it off for a thousand years. You know, that is not going to put back in what was taken out.

we just have this idea that if we can we the idea is the false idea is if if i can physically punish that person somehow i'll get back what was taken do you know how many pissed off guys are in prison right now um because they actually fulfilled on that they got revenge that they thought would work and they're still pissed off of the person even though they're dead yeah you know there's there's no there's a very um it's a misguided idea of you know it's up to us to put back in what was taken but you know that you're not there's no it's a very um it's a misguided idea of you know it's up to us to put back in what was taken, but yes, of course, justice needs to be, you know, served and they do need to get the impact of their actions. And, yeah, so no, good, good point. I agree with,

with the idea of, we simply, no matter how much you punish the other person, you are not going to put back in what they took from you. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? And look at what it cost you, especially with the folks that went to prison. Are you willing to give up? Are you willing to give up the potential to do so much greater stuff. Your whole, whole life is ahead of you, you know, however much of it is left at any age. Then to say, to throw it away for a momentary emotional satisfaction.

Yeah. No, it's, because you look at some of these things and people go, well, why not? Why shouldn't I take revenge? Don't I deserve it? And it's like, well, a lot of these great thinkers have said maybe it's not a great idea. But then sometimes you get it so simple. It's like purely. cost benefit analysis wasted energy.

Do something better. I can break that down even better because I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, I was one of those angry dudes that was cooking up revenge plans. I'm just going to change my seat out. And then I'm going to sit back down one sec. Sure, sure. Take your time.

I've got one of these, you know, the kneeling chairs. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good bit of kit, especially if you got a bit of a funny back. Yeah, I should get one of those. I should probably lock my chair too so I got some lumbar support. There we go.

Stretching time. So here's how I got rid of my plans for revenge. And you got to remember, I've got a particular skill set. And one of my favorite movies. Yeah. So what I'm trying to say here is I had to do the analysis. And part of a person's desire for revenge is they were put in a position of powerlessness.

Okay. And people who are in positions of power, if they're, or, you know, if they're bad managers, if whatever you want to call them, they get really good at taking energy for others to keep others small. You know? So the way I saw it was like a spreadsheet, right? And that person had power over me and they took from me. Okay, but if you look on the scale of things, their potential is limited to how many victims they can find, okay?

And people that take from others, they usually don't have people staying in their lives because they'll hang around, then they'll, oh, actually this person's no good, then they'll disappear. So they're always rotating the people in their lives because their potential is relative to how many victims they can find, right? Oh, yeah.

So I remember being a victim of this one particular guy and that sense of powerlessness had me feeling like, oh, I've got to take back. Then I realized that that person took from me because they have no power. It's like trying to get money from a zero bank account. You're not going to, I'm just going to waste energy. But that person you have to realize on their scale of potential, It's limited, limited to the amount of victims they can find.

I'm not limited if I invest in myself, invest in myself, invest in myself. And I just keep on getting higher and higher, stronger and stronger, you know, fly to a cat, cat to a lion type stuff. And then you're like, yeah, that person, I feel like the spirit put that person in my life so I can actually upscale and grow. And I'm quite thankful for that person because I never would have upscarled and grew from that, you know, being in that position of powerlessness. So you can see how, you know,

A-holes in this world are an absolute godsend because it shows you that you need to invest in yourself, power up and get past them. Because you only need to outgrow these people once, you know, and then you see them for what they are. You know, it's a bit like, again, this is something I do with high school students. I'll show them a little plant and I'll say, rip a leaf off that

and they'll rip a leaf and that was easy wasn't it? Okay but when this plant grows fully and gets fully big you could run your car into it and come off second best so the people that take in this world want to keep you small, want to keep you scared

they'll rip your leaves off now because that's easy for them to do but if you work on growing growing growing you're going to outgrow these people and you'll become this big tower of strength and they're just, they're still playing the small game and you're untouchable. So that's kind of, that's what dispelled my desire for revenge because I saw that would impact on my potential and I could use it to grow my potential and grow past them,

you know, because I'm, I'm human too. I could have become like that person and learn how to get really good at taking from others. You know, that was very much within me. So seeing that and seeing the benefit to being in a position of powerlessness and then investing in me, investing in me, investing in me, you know, before you know it, you've, just outgrown them. Absolutely. Yeah, that gets to, so two things.

One is, I keep going back to this. I keep seeing this idea of like there was a joke, what was it? Kind of a joke, kind of a riddle. But like if I offered you, you know, $100,000 for a month. month's work or I could pay you a penny on day one, two pennies on day two, four pennies on day three, and it doubles, which would you prefer? And people who don't understand compound interest or exponential growth, doubling every, you know, I think by, what is it, day seven, eight, nine, or 15 or something, you're already well over 100,000. By the end of the month, you got a million.

And it's, it's that kind of comp, it's like a compound interest of the soul, like investing in yourself is very, very much that. But then that also, that ties into another thing of like, I'm always trying to figure out like, what do our stories, mythologies, fairy tales tell us about the world? And it made me think of vampires. I think you said like energy vampire or maybe I thought of it when you said something. Yeah, people that don't have their own life for so they suck it out of others. Yeah. Yeah. Or, well, that there's, um, um, what am I trying to say? If we think of our innate essence, whatever it is, as our investment capital, and then there's the profit we can grow the abundance on top of it. You know, that is one, I think that's the difference between, in some broad strokes, good and evil, is like good people improve themselves, increase their abundance, have lots of energy to share.

And then there's evil, which feeds on the startup capital, the essence of people. I've been hurt, so I'm going to take from others. Yeah, and there's lots of justification. As opposed to, I've been hurt. I'm going to build myself up and build others up. Or I think this path is just easier and I'm lazy and I don't care. I mean, there's a lot of different ways that people fall into the time. Oh, yeah.

I'm owed justice. I'm going to victimize these people because I was a victim. And this is just how the world works. A lot of excuses we tell ourselves. I think that's in it. So it struck me that, you know, in myth. logical terms, it's kind of like a functional explanation of good and evil, how it operates in the world.

They're talking about the dynamics of energy, mythologically speaking. They're talking about things that are, and this is what I was excited about your podcast, because dreams go deeper than words can explain, right? And as much, I'm going to sneeze. Hang on. Oh, I'll go right ahead. That was, that was something I was going to mention earlier. I'll just throw in while you're bringing it up.

that one reason that sleep is so essential is that we need to dream. It's not optional. And if stuff is in interrupting your ability to dream, that can be as bad as not sleeping well. Well, he said, I didn't sleep well. And so you wake up the next day and you're, you're tired still. One of the ways I look at this is, you know, why, where do dreams come from? We have this, this broad, giant subterranean lake of, every thought and feeling and literally every physical sensation we've ever experienced

even the ones that didn't register on our conscious awareness that's why it's so the call it unconscious or the subconscious it's all in there and part of what dreams are is problem solving bringing that stuff up to have a look at it but part of that part of the reason for that is that and I liken it to the to the analogy of defragging a hard drive you've got all this data and the computer just puts it as fast as it can anywhere Every once in a while, you've got to say, let's take all this stuff over here and over here and put it in a smaller pile over here so we can make room for some other stuff. You can defrag that hard drive so you can install new programs, have new thoughts.

And if you don't do that, if you don't let your brain defragment in sleep through the process of dreams, you're in for a world to hurt. So there's one comment I was going to throw in there way, way way back. I don't know, no, totally. Yeah, and as you were saying that something was coming to me. Yes. And something that a lot of psychologists haven't figured out. out yet is that words only go so deep and the trauma goes deeper than words can reach.

You know, it's like, it's like trying to hit a target at 200 meters, but you've got a cap gun that it only shoots two, you know? And, and, and if you think about us as living organisms, you know, before we were sentient, before we putting paintings on rock walls, you know, we were breathing and feeling. This body was always aware of what's going on. Before we were speaking, we were breathing and feeling. And what I see is, you know, is dreams help us access the oldest parts of us and, you know, gets us past our own limited thoughts and words. Definitely. Yeah, no, I think that is it too. And what, the way I've described it in the, in the recent past is, is it appears that what we conceptualize as dreams, that is the,

the experience that makes it out to our conscious observation so we can reflect on it, that experience is actually closer to what our thoughts actually are we we don't tend to think in words as much as we do images sensations emotions then we basically I would say what what the function of consciousness is is to then translate those things into communicable ideas that we could then reflect on on that level and then also tell other people not explaining this very well and I think I'm getting some of it I get I mean I mean If I'm listening to you correctly,

you know, our sentient mind is the new comer on the block. It's still trying to figure stuff out. Our old systems, feelings, breathing, you know, all that really deep stuff.

Oh, yeah. That goes, it's older than our words, it's older than our brain. I'm sure at some point in the distant future, the brain will figure it out and, and will integrate.

But right now, it's like the brain's trying to justify its existence. Yeah. Well, it's almost... Well, they've said this before, and I,

whether it's technically true or merely metaphor, I think it is, it is true. It's like we have three brains and they talk about the lizard brain, the mammal brain, and then the human brain. And that's where we get, you know, the automatic stuff, lizard brain or whatever. The, the mammal brain, which, you know, we think of like lower animals. And then the human brain as a conscious self-awareness, reflection, negotiating with the future,

all kinds of different stuff. So what we, the blessing and the curse of being human is that we have access to the human brain, but we still got to live with the animal brain and the lizard brain and integrate that somehow. And then that is actually where a lot of benefit can be found in the dream analysis process is that it gives your conscious mind access to those deeper levels. So you can. It gives a, I, I see a, a canvas to paint on. Mm-hmm. That's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very good analogy is that when we go to bed at night,

we have a bit of a blank canvas. It's like, well, what am I going to think about today? Now, sometimes we can program that a little bit. And definitely we accidentally program it because we're obsessed or worried or fearful or anticipatory of some specific things. And then because our focus and our emotions are wrapped up in a particular idea because we've been living with it or in anticipation of it, good or bad in our physical waking life, it comes into the dreams and we go, okay, what's going to happen? What do I want to happen? What do I think is most likely to happen? If this were to go badly, how could I prevent it? If I wanted this to go well, what could I do? Do I see, you know, and sometimes our worries are as simple as do I see myself as clearly as I'm. Do I see myself as clearly as I? possibly could. And we just show ourselves little pieces of ourselves. So many different directions, dreams go, how do I pick a direction? I don't know. It's, I have no idea how I do what I do. And I have no

idea if it's always correct. Uh, I like to tell people the answers are not in me, because it's not my dream. I'm, um, the guy you invite into your mind to stand behind your shoulder and shine a flashlight around going, do you see what I see? What if we look at it from a different angle? Uh, and then it's all, and then you are the ultimate authority. I'm just like, I'm just a, Well, I think what you're doing there ultimately is breaking someone's isolation. And once their isolation is broken, all their higher thinking can kick in. It's a big deal. Any psychologist will say 90% of their job is rapport.

Okay? And once someone, once some mammal doesn't feel like they're not alone anymore, executive function kicks in. You know, I remember getting very angry, the point, you know, really angry, when we're about to go into this ambush in Afghanistan. It was a RPG ambush, rocket-propelled grenade ambush. And when this happens, we're in a vehicle convoy, and so all the heavily-armed vehicles go down to the rear of the convoy,

because they're the ones that can take the hit, because it's classically in an ambush situation. The rear vehicles always attack because it's least defended. Okay? And in the shakeout and rush, because it's at nighttime, when this was happening, this armored vehicle cut us off. and we were just in like a four-wheel drive with a roof cut off. And I remember my vehicle commander said,

fellas, if this goes the way I think it will, it's been an honor serving with you. Oh shit. That's good news. And in that state, I was so fucking angry. Because I'd done plenty of ramp ceremonies where you're carrying your mate down the ramp of the airplane with the Australian flag over it. And I saw the picture of me being carried down the,

the, you know, the airplane ramp, wife and kids crying to one side. And I was so angry that, and I couldn't think. I could not think in that state of emotional isolation, you know. Then I asked myself a question which pretty much changed the rest of my life, Ben. I said, Tim, who do you know that has done this before? and I drew another blank. I'm like, I don't know anyone who's done this before. But then I started thinking outside my own timeline.

And in Australia we have a group of men that served in the World War. It's called the Anzaks. And particularly important battle for us was Gallipoli. And these men were dropped on the, you know, at the wrong time on the wrong beach. and they were at the, had everything going against them and they were getting mowed down, but they kept moving forward.

Even though there was an enemy waiting for them, even though they knew that it was certain death, they kept moving forward. And in my state of disconnect, I'm like, wow, yeah, the Anzac, I do know somebody, those Anzac's, you know? And as much as that was over 100 years ago, and most of those guys are dead,

it was like this portal in time opened up. up and they reached through it. And like our saying in Australia, especially on Anzac Day, is lest we forget. There was so much sacrifice, we say lest we forget. It was like these Anzac's came through this portal, poked me in the chest and said, Tim, lest you forget, lest you forget the power inside of you, lest you forget the power of looking after your mates. Yeah, that's pretty powerful too.

That's a powerful thing that we can have from studying history, is realizing that that can help to, what is it, decrease isolation. I'm not the first person that's ever been through this. I probably won't be the last. And some people made it, some people didn't, but this is not, but I'm not alone. You know? If you want to know what immortality is, you keep moving forward through things that are up against you. Because when people think back on it, you don't even have to be in the room, just the thought of you,

just the thought of these guys, they broke my isolation. And then literally at that moment, Ben, it was like the, the, nighttime turned into day, my whole body felt illuminated. And then guess what happened? My higher functioning started kicking in. I'm like, okay, we're about to heal, you know, what do I know right now? RPGs self-destruct at 1,500 meters, so they're probably going to be shooting us between 800 to 1,100 meters.

So, and I worked out the arcs, you know, like, you know, if you're shooting from RPGs, that arc is, you know, if you do the, you know, and I worked out at our speed of going, you know, about 25 to 35Ks now, we're probably going to be in the killbox for between, you know, three to seven minutes, okay? And I'm like, right, oh, well, and then something pretty cool happened. I literally saw my whole circulatory system jump out of my body, and I observed, it's just a bunch of pipes, okay? And I'm like, well, all I need to do to survive the next three to five minutes is keep positive pressure to my brain, because I saw the brain, you know, at the top and all the pipes running down through my legs.

And then I pulled that back inside my body. And I said, look, I can lose an arm. That's fine. I'll just hose clamp it. That'll still keep the positive pressure because I was on the, I was on the 50-cour machine gun. So it was very important for me to keep functioning. And so I put two tourniquets on my chest.

And I'm like, right. And even if I bleed out and die, my mates are going to be able to put a bag of saline into me to get me back in there. So, you know, if you've ever done that trust activity where you fold your hands and and close your eyes and fall back into someone's arms. This was, I was trust in my, you know, the trust in that vehicle, you know, I could fall into the gates of hell and they would hold me back from it. And then once I was sort of with inside myself, I'm like, right,

what do I need to be ready for to help the other guys too? So you can see how my circle of awareness and cerebral power went from, I'm fucking angry and fuck that guy, you know, I'm thinking about my own death, to then, okay, how do I handle me? what's going on here. I understand that. And then I've got to be of service to others in case they get blown out.

And then something really cool, one of the coolest things that ever happened. He said, you know what? They might find my body in five minutes time. But you know what they're not going to find? Magazines full of bullets. I'm emptying all ammunition on this one. And then I'm like, you know, that's not a bad way to live.

You know, my magazines contain simple bullets, but my mind contains ideas, hopes, and dreams. Wouldn't it be a greater pity to die with all those, you know, bullets in your head, not fired? Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, and then I'm like, fucking bring it on. Yeah. And, and, you know, yeah. It was a fantastic, what you described is actually, okay, so I'm going to walk, walk through a little bit. So sometimes people would come to, uh, Carl,

you know, and, you know, as a client. And he would say, you know, do you have any dreams? And they'd say, no, I, I can't remember any. And he'd say, well, let's do, let's create a dream together. Let's, let's make a daydream. Let's talk about stuff and then describe to me the images, the experiences that come to mind naturally. And we'll, we'll analyze that like a dream. So what you had was exactly that kind of experience. It seems like you had an epiphany that came to you visually. You had a vision. appear to you of this circulatory system. You know, and that vision, as many dreams do, came with its own understanding.

It was, here's the meaning. The meaning is present in the thing itself is I'm worried I'm going to die. Well, what does it mean to die? It means the blood stops go into my brain. Now, wait a minute. I can take practical steps. I, boom, I see my circulatory system. And all of this in a way coping with the fear of death.

and but also getting out of fear and into the practicality of like what does it mean to die it means physically blood stops flowing to the brain you have a vision of your circulatory system and this vision informs your not informs but but represents an epiphany in a way of like look there's things I can do to mitigate this but then also radical acceptance at the same time of like I might not make it but there's but there's other definitions of wind condition like you're probably you're familiar with that phrase. And folks in the audience, you know, what is our wind condition for this operation? How do we know we've done the job and we can get the hell out?

Well, for you, the wind condition was I'm going to survive as long as I can. I'm going to empty all my goddamn ammo, fighting as hard as I can to stay alive and to keep my friends alive. And if my friends are still alive, they can save me. But even if they don't, they're still alive. And I fought as hard as I could. All of that, bam, in this moment and just evaporates the, uh, uh, the, uh, the, yeah. the, let's see, fight, fight, flight and feel.

Was your book there too? So I think that probably came out of this experience in part, or was that the genesis? I know, very much so. Yeah. But also, you know, post-service, you know, but if, if I, you just said something there that I wanted to speak to, because you think as a, as a soldier, I'd get used to fear. And the fact was, I never did. Not exactly.

But being exposed to it so often, you got a really good understanding of the inner work of fear. And what I discovered, and I just want to offer this, is I discovered fear actually has a goal. And fear's goal isn't to scare you, it's actually to make you immobile to stop you even trying, to stop, you might think you might want to do something, but fear goes, no, I'm not even going to take any actions. Okay, so when you understand that the ultimate goal of fear is inaction, you counter fear, not. with love, you counterfear with action. Taking action dispels fear. You know, and the way I explain it, there is a, you know, a fear-shaped footprint filled with water, okay? And the second you step in that

is a second the fear disappears. You can, you can justifiably say beforehand, yes, that's real, but the second you take that action is the second it disappears. And so that's why before you do anything, there's an amount of nerves, there's a part of you trying to talk you out of it, because, and what fear does is saying, if you are to move forward into this situation, you are going to die. And that's actually a truthful statement because part of you does have to die for you to step into action. You know, all those parts of you that are restricting you, they scream the loudest before they die.

And so taking actions is what I found to absolutely counter fear. Now, one action that I used to take that used to dispel my fear was, singing. You know, so when we're going through this ambush alley and I'm like, we're going to get fucked up right now, I would start singing because singing is an action and it's also a breathwork technique. Oh, for sure. Bust out some rousing, uh, waltzing Matilda, right?

Why not? Anything. The sillier, the better sometimes. But, well, look, and the point was those, those, once you understand that is ultimate goal is immobilization, then it's the taking actions that is going to, all of a sudden just disappears. And then you start using those, that as an inner compass. So if there's a part of you saying, no, don't do that.

That's terrible. That's your system knowing that taking that action, something very powerful is going to happen. something very powerful is going to happen because when you become powerful, all those doubts they die. And they scream the loudest before they die. So, you know, before, you know, I've been doing, you know, fitness for 30 plus years before I do some physical activity, there's always a part of me going, no, don't do it, put it off.

But I'm like, ah, there's a part of me that knows that I'm about to be powerful and they're trying to fight for their survival right now. See how that works? Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the greatest, formulations I've heard in in recent years is, you know, someone explain the idea that, well, ideas, that we can let our ideas die instead of ourselves. We can think through problems or we can let pieces of ourselves die to save the rest of us or so the rest of us can,

the rest of what we are can thrive. That's, there's something really powerful in that, in that, well, then that's the human part of the brain that developed most recently, that idea that, wow, I can imagine a bunch of scenarios. I don't have to test each one. I can just use my logic to say, that looks like it's a bad idea. That looks like it might work, but I need this element to it. And what we have to do is get rid of all the, let all the things that are wrong or inaccurate or unhelpful die in order to make progress. Otherwise, it may be lots of metaphors.

You got the idea of a ball and chain dragging you back. It's like, well, I mean, you can put the effort into dragging it or you can put the effort into cutting yourself loose from it. So you don't have to drag it anymore and let it leave it behind. We are, I knew we were going to talk for a long time. time. We are well over an hour of interview portion, but I want to get to the dream stuff so we don't cheat, you know,

uh, cheat you out of, of the full, full experience for that. Um, because we've been going so long, I don't know, let me just dose up on my, uh, cacao here. Actually, no, that's perfect. Do you mind if we take, uh, and I'll cut it out. We'll take like maybe a 10 minute break and I'll, uh, I'll go let the cat out and stretch my legs. Uh, Benjamin the dream wizard wants to help you. Here's the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the

history of dreams. Every episode of his dreamscapes program features real dreamers, gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New dreamscapes episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks, exploring the psychological principles which inform our dream experience, and much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms. forms 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 thedreamwizard.com. Hey, my man. Hey, oh, I see you. I hear you. Sorry to keep you waiting. Are we waiting long? Oh, no, a couple of minutes. I was playing fetch with the cat, of course. Oh, nice. That would be, uh, what was, I was playing fetch with the, actually. I took my dog for a quick walk, actually. Oh, there you go.

Yeah, I stepped down. I took myself for a walk, stretch my legs. I'm going to get a deep vein thrombosis one of these days. Spent too much time sitting here, editing books, editing videos, doing interviews, uh, playing video games. A lot of sedentary work. Well, let me show you something. A good bit of kit.

Sure. See these things? Oh, yeah. That's a, that's a carth guard. So they return the blood a whole lot more easily because your foot's basically an S-Bend for your circulatory system. So these things here, good bit of kit. Nice.

Equivalent of like compression socks? Yeah, compression socks pretty much. Nice. Yeah. But I was just outside. You know, you played medieval computer games. Oh, yeah. You recognize that?

Um, your screen's a little grainy, but it looks to me, it's either a cutlass or a mace. I can't tell. Yeah, well done. Well, good pick. It is a mace. Okay, okay. Good, well, good pick. Yeah, so that's, that's, you know, everyone's heard of kettlebells.

Well, this is, this is like a kettlebell on stick and you throw it around the place. Oh, yeah. I think I've seen. I've seen that. The best full body workout you'll ever do. Oh, yeah, engages the core. Let me tell you, because you're swinging that thing around. You've got to keep yourself balanced and stable.

Yeah, so I've got this little timer on my, on my bench. It beeps every 20 or 30 minutes. And so then I'll take myself away from my desk, do a few little bits of activity, and then sit back down. That's good. I should do that more often. I am much wiser than my will allows in terms of like, oh, I know I should be doing all kinds of things. I just don't.

And I laugh at myself. because otherwise I'd be like I would have to be, I would have to feel bad that I don't do it. But I'm feeling more and more inclined lately like, I got to get up, move around more. It's just do. I just need to. So I'm going to make it happen. And you really don't need to do much. And this is, this is, you know, in 30 years of fitness, the best advice I can give people is,

um, think of what you want to do. You don't have to do much. You just need to do it regularly, right? So even if you just, the bell goes off, you know, every 20 minutes and you just stand up and do, you know, five squats and then sit back down. Oh, yeah. So in an hour, you're doing 15 squats over, over eight hours, you know, and then you just, you slowly work with what comfortable. Absolutely. And we can do what's comfortable and easy a lot longer than we can do what's, you know, hard and uncomfortable.

Now this guy's making lovey eyes at me. He's like, you're going to pet me, right? I'm like, no, no, not right now. Now you've got to move. Well, I don't want to, like I was saying earlier, I don't want to cheat you out of the dream experience. I'm actually running out of time myself. I've got just less than an hour. I don't know if it's going to take us the full time to get through the dream, but I don't want to run you out of time. So as per my usual process, I just shut up and listen.

Step one, always shut up and listen. Our friend, Tim, here's going to tell us his dream as he experienced it beginning to end like a story. And then we're going to talk about it and see if we can. figure it out. So I am ready when you are. Sure. No, so this was a, I mean, I guess possibly all dreams are interesting, but I hadn't dreamt about this particular guy in a long time. So this guy was closer to me than a brother. He became very successful in business. Then he started sort of, I guess one would say, betraying the trust of those people closest to him.

And I spent a lot of time and resources sort of helping him as a friend. But then he just, within one email, he just burnt me, right? And I had a dream about him recently. And the dream was interesting. There was a race down, he, you know, He lives about an hour away from where I lived. And there was a race, like a Formula One race on down in his part of the area. And when, and I was putting two cars into that race, two Formula One cars.

And he was putting two Formula One cars into that race. And I had a bit of sort of heated discussion with my team about the, the, the, the, the, the, the, stickers and the colors on my Formula One race cars. And it was two of them, right? And then the race comes, and I was supposed to be driving one of the two race cars, and so was my friend, but we were just sort of not arguing, but just nitpicking each other as we watch these cars race around the track. and the cars, when they took a corner really fast,

it was, again, when they took the corner really fast, I could see Tupperware and Lego just falling out of them when they took the corners. And the track was getting filled up with this Tupperware and Lego. That's, that's, that's, that's the length and depth of that dream. Fantastic. That's, look at, look, he, he found the one area I wasn't writing on, or I got to the very bottom of my, I'm making little,

notes and he's like, I can lay on all the rest of it. No, no, you can't. You got to get it. And then I get them, you can see a most, or maybe you can't. There's like a, there's a blanket here. I put a blanket out for him. Lay on the blanket, buddy. Watch it. He won't stay. He won't stay there. He won't stay there. You're killing me. Here, how about, how about this? Come lay over here. Lay on everything but the note, note taking part. Okay, so that is step one. Shut up and listen. Get, get those details. I wrote down some key phrases that I'm probably not going to be able to remember well. So what is my process? Well, it varies each time.

Sometimes I get a clearer picture and I've got some ideas right away. I had some ideas, but I want to tease them out as we go and confirm them. I'm always trying to refine my process. So enough talking about the process to do the process. Step two is we just go back through it again. And we start helping me see it through your eyes a little bit better. Um, so you're at a racetrack in his geographical area. Geographical area.

Yep. And so we've got, let me do this first. Um, we've got characters, objects, settings, behaviors. We've got all this kind of stuff going on. And that, that's consistent to, to any story we tell where, where is it? Who does it involve? What's the action? It's very interesting how our dreams like to tell a story.

And it's almost universal that they do. I mean, there's, sometimes it's no more than just a thought process. And we identify the thoughts through the process to their conclusion. But very often, most often, almost universally, it's a story. There's something happening. There's some drama. So you've got you and your friend. You've got not one race car each.

You've got four. two on each you've got a team with you you were meant to be driving one of the cars this was some the action as was your friend but neither one of you were actually driving you were distance and observing there's uh the racetrack is a is an object or setting the location where your friend lives being a set a setting um the results of the race the the the corner of the corner of the cornering and then the expulsion or or how would you describe what adjective or word would it would just it would just naturally fall out of these cars and I'm like it's just cluttering up the track you know with all this Tupperware and Lego gotcha and so then we've got the

the action of the of the falling out of the of the which is an interesting let's let's put let's put that in because that's it's an interesting turner phrase too that that we have a falling out with friends in a way or partners. We, we've, it's a universal term, not universal necessarily, but a very, uh, turn of phrase for, for the end of a friendship in a way. Well, we had a falling out. Very interesting. Does that mean anything?

I don't know. But those were the words. So we, we, we put that on the table. Um, and the idea that the, uh, so the, the, the action of the falling out, the specific objects that were falling out. And then as you just said there, and I think that's fantastic, it, it ended up cluttering the track. It's like it wasn't it wasn't inconsequential. It was actually something negative detrimental to the process. I'll just write that down real quick on the other

page. It's something that's not supposed to happen and it didn't make any sense. Yeah. Well, dreams are often like that. There's there's two different ways that things like this is why this process takes all. I have all these thoughts and I like to explain them as we go because it helps clarify my thoughts. It's a very common occurrence that no matter how bizarre a dream is, we could wake up from it and often do with the experience that while we were dreaming, none of that was strange at all. And then sometimes we experience the feeling of events in a dream being strange.

And when that does occur, that means something different from the, being unaware of how bizarre something is in a dream. If we just accept it as normal, it means one thing. But if we identify it in the dream, if we have the dream, the kind of in-dream experience of something being strange, then that means something else. That's a shade of...

It definitely seemed like it was... It didn't seem strange. It was just something that I observed happening. It was just... I'm observing Tupperware and Lego falling out of the... Okay. Out of the... Yeah.

So in the dream, it didn't feel strange. necessarily, but afterwards, you look back on it going, well, that doesn't make any sense. Like, okay. Well, yeah, because I try to figure it out with my own conscious thoughts. I'm like, yeah, well. Of course. Why, you know, the cars weren't made of Legos, not that you knew of and Tupperware? What does, what does that even mean?

Well, those two things are very, uh, what, what came to my mind immediately with those. Well, we're going to get there. We haven't even started in a way. This is all like pre preconceptualizing. Um, Tupperware tends to be where we store things. And Legos is what we build things out of. So it's shedding. Shetting can,

who's going to go chase my pen. I have more pens. He can have that one. Here we go. Go get it. No, he doesn't. Now he wants the new pen. You know, you said, oh, I can kind of see that.

So it means at least those top level understandings of what those objects are, resonates with you to some degree. Now, why we don't know yet. But like that's like I said, we're going to get. get there. Um, a lot of times the, the, uh, the, well, almost always the, the, the setting in which something is, occurs is meaningful to the, to the thing. So this wasn't a race to so counterfactuals. This wasn't a race track in France. And you had both traveled a long distance to get there. You put and this was not a racetrack in your neighborhood. It's a racetrack in his neighborhood.

So we're starting. And not only that, uh, the things you said about him was that, um, you know, this was someone you were very close to. It was like more than a brother to you. And the, the, in a way, falling out. If we, if we keep circulating that idea a little bit that you had with him was, was he ended up demonstrating, you know, some act of betrayal. He turned against people that were, you know, we were talking about revenge and justice earlier. Like, this is an unjust situation.

He had no reason to do this to people. This was purely. some fault or failure of his character. So you've brought him back into your dream as an icon of that type of person or situation, if that makes sense. Yep, yep. Yeah. I mean, I've done the work to, you know, reconcile and get the healing,

so I'm no longer, you know, hanging on to anything. And that process of healing was a process of its. owns, but I could confidently say like, um, uh, the old thing of just investing in me. For years, I'm like, this is unfair. This is unfair. You know, you know, for this to happen. But now it's like, well, you know, I don't want to say dust beneath my feet. Like, I don't like the person or send him hate, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

it's, it's, it's, it's, I'm playing a much bigger game than, than, than anything that was lost at the time. so it's it's interesting that it just sort of popped up so when I mentioned the guy's name and I give the backstory I didn't give the front story of you know it it did create that time of healing and you know getting my my power back as well. Definitely yeah so there's a lot of different angles that this could be coming from there's so very typically we look at I keep saying that but whatever this guy I got my I got my words on loop today.

We, it's very common that we have a dream of a particular type with a particular person, particular actions, because there's something in our waking life that reminds us of that. It's like, oh, am I experiencing this again? And maybe we are, maybe we aren't, but there's enough similarity or, or resonance between some current event and some past event that that past event comes back to memory. You know, we, we smell. I'll walk into a friend's house and we go, oh, smells like my grandmother's kitchen. And then, whoa, suddenly you're thinking about your grandmother and then a particular Christmas

dinner you had the last time you saw her and all these thoughts cast. So it happens that way with, okay, I'm dealing with the situation. What does this remind me of? Oh, why am I thinking of this friend that was really close and committed perhaps the worst defense, you know, betrayal of people that were closest to him and, you know, burned me in an email and, you know, was not good people. Why, why, why am I thinking of, of someone in that context, um, what's going on in my life that that brings that back?

Now, usually that's a question we get down to at the very end, but I can throw it out at any time saying that's generally what I'm angling towards. So if you think of the, uh, time frame that this dream occurred, does anything come to mind in terms of a situation you were going through where you needed to consider whether you could trust someone, or you'd just been through a betrayal that was very obvious, and you're like, God, here we go again. Well, I guess one could say that I'm mobilizing my team to perform. And there is a specter of the people that I'm going to be interacting with,

potentially taking advantage of that, because I felt like I was taking advantage of, when I first interacted with this person. And now I'm in a position where I've built myself back up. I'm in a position of abundance and I'm ready to be generous with the world again. You know, hence, you know, breathwork in bed app company, breathing, blah, blah, blah. And so, yeah, now that I look at it, yeah, there's that specter of the last time I put myself out there that it was taken advantage of by people who play that game very well. Gotcha, good deal.

So we're definitely on to something looking at it from that perspective. It brings to mind. So what do we got here? What I don't want to do, okay, I'm going to back up. I start six sentences and then I realize I need to go back and start over again. You're downloading quicker than your mouth can keep up. I'm just going to get my share. No, no, please go ahead.

Do anything you need to. What some people might bring to me is a concern that Ben, I had a dream. And in this dream, I stabbed my dog. Yes, that's my real life dog. Yes, I love that dog. And I would never hurt it. And in the dream, I felt terrible. What does it mean?

And I say the number one thing it does not mean is that in real life, you desire to stab your dog. You absolutely do not. So that's not what this dream. is about. It's it's it's it's very rarely that direct. So why am I saying that you may have been well okay what do I think is most likely. Um, I don't know or don't believe or would not necessarily suggest that you were looking at any particular individual wondering can I trust him. Maybe that's the case, but I would look at it as what it seems to be is is more along the ideas of I am about to

make myself vulnerable, what happens when someone is vulnerable they could be taken advantage of. I'm going to compare that or this calls to mind the last time I made myself vulnerable in a way that was taken advantage of. And then so that forms like, and that's just the beginning of the dream. Why this friend, why in his neighborhood, kind of where he lives. When we think of that as, why would you set something where someone lives? Because it says something about them. It's their neighborhood. It's their sphere of influence.

It's, you know, it's like in the dream, you didn't, you know, What, you know, his, his sphere of influence is very successful, you know, and I'm wanting to to play on the same track as successful, you know, businesses. Yeah. Not only that, but it's also, there's a, there's an advantage to home turf in a way. you're going to race on his ground. And that's a very, stop me any time, say that does or does not resonate.

No, no, I could be giving away my power in the way that, you know, I have to, I could be giving away my power in the way that it's not something I own. It's something I need acceptance from others to be able to own. Very well, it very well could be. This could be, and that's fantastic. If you have those thoughts, blurt them out and interrupt me. I just ramble till something clear.

and you, if we run with that a little bit, there is something to the concept. So you may not, what am I trying to say? Sometimes we think of, okay, I'm decided this is exactly what it is. Now I'm going to play out a what if meant thought experiment. Sometimes we're not sure what it is. So we give ourselves a what if to consider that is not based on a clear decision. It's just based on a what if. If that makes sense, there's a certainty or an uncertainty to things. So two ways of looking at it here is there's something metaphorically true about entering a playing field where someone else has demonstrated past competence as attending the racetrack in their neighborhood. But it can also be more metaphorical of saying,

I'm attempting to do a category of behavior in which other people have demonstrated dominant or competence, and I'm wondering if I'm going to be able to compete. I know that's, that that drops because it's not just someone else's it's the lack of like, I'm the only person in my family that is wanting to be successful below, I guess, minimum wage. And not to speak poorly of, you know, my parents or my upbringing. My folks worked in some very low socioeconomic circumstances. They worked with the Australian aboriginals, and, you know, they would help and be generous,

and they almost associated, you know, having more money than minimum wage or something bad, you know. And there was a real scarcity around finances for them. And so for me to step into a realm that shatters the, you know, the patriarchal mold of, you know, making more money than minimum wage, creating successful business. You know, I grew up seeing my parents always, always, always, always, always, being of service to others, you know, really humble and, you know, really sacrificing too. So the idea of being successful and high speed, potentially, is not something I've ever physically experienced in a financial sense before.

Absolutely, yeah. And that's good to, there's a constellation of thoughts or ideas that we could attribute or link to the idea of, say, Formula One, racing or even, even, you know, stock car, funny car, but just any kind of racing. There's a, there's, um, let's say, what am I trying to say? Counterfactuals. It's different than we were playing a game of dice or dominoes. It's different than we were running a foot race. It's different than we were sailing around the globe.

Each of those says something a little bit different. Yeah, this is the top of the, top of the line performance vehicle. Yeah. And, uh, as they get a lot of it. So what are, what are we trying to teach? out. We're trying to say something about the nature of needing to see yourself in this process is, resonates with the idea of, uh, that you have about car racing specifically. And if, and someone else's neighborhood, not my own. Someone else's neighborhood. Yeah. But the idea that,

you know, these cars are, they drive very fast and it can be very dangerous. And they are high performance machines. They need to, they need to work well, consistent. at a high quality for many, many laps. And part of it is the stress test of it all as well. These are hundreds of laps around this race. And the smallest of mechanical failures or driver error can cause a wreck, or at least it causes you to fall behind in the pack. And so there's all these racing metaphors with it.

Go ahead. Well, the other thing that stood out to me, Ben, was, you've got these performance vehicles about to head down the coast. and I'm arguing about what kind of stickers need to be on them, you know. And, and, and I've, you know, when I've created the Breath Working Bed app, I freak the hell out when a particular window doesn't open up or the customer journeys a little bit out. You know, like I'm thinking this is like a critical error, you know.

I mean, you know, the creation of the breathworking bed app it works, but like any car, you've built it, then when you take it out on the track, you find these little faults. I'm sort of catastrophizing about all these. I'm currently catastrophizing about all these little things that I think are like huge, but they may or may not be that impactful. They're just up in my head, not actually impacting the performance of the, of the, of the intention. Yeah, yeah.

And then there's, you know, what's falling out around the turns is, is this Tupperware and Legos. So we want to keep that idea in mind. I'm not sure if we're there yet in terms. of saying what those really mean, but what came to my mind while you were describing the, the, you're obsessing over stickers, you say, and the word that came in to my mind was cosmetics.

And that is to say, not that cosmetics isn't important, but there's, there's two ways to look at it. One is you don't want something that's ugly. You want it to be visually appealing. And, you know, and not even just visually,

aesthetically, like, like all the different sensations, the sound, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, smell, touch, taste. I could be more worried about what other people perceive me as. And that's the other thing, too, is exterior appearance. And that's, yeah, sometimes we go, oh, don't worry, don't sweat that small stuff necessarily. But if you're making, you know, so, okay, I went from stickers to cosmetics and I thought, okay, apps, apps need an icon. An icon should be representative, but of, of, of the application itself, but it should also be visually appealing.

It should make people want to click on it. It should be easy to find in. in your list of apps on your saved on your phone or your tablet there's a lot of practical considerations where you as a designer of a product cannot ignore aesthetics because it matters to the customer so there is there is validity so this is where I was saying before it's like a lot of people poo-poo and like oh who cares what it why get hung up over appearances well sometimes they matter sometimes they do sometimes they don't sometimes they do uh and and and And to a customer, appearance is going to matter to a certain degree.

So that's not an invalid concern. You know, it might be a less valid concern if you're worried about the judgment of others in a different context where maybe their opinion doesn't matter. Okay, now the cosmetics are less of an issue. But this is more, you've got, you've got something you care about. You've got a goal you want to accomplish. And so you put thought based on, you know, the desired goal. You know, it's, you're treating, if you take it seriously, you have to put the right amount of effort in to make it successful. What the hell are you doing?

Why are you bothering if you're not going to take it seriously? It's like, if you'd rather just fail, then just don't. Why, why even waste the effort, you know? So all this to say, I'm validating the idea that maybe, maybe we don't want to look at arguing over the stickers on the car as something that is not important. But, but almost, it's hard to say how important is it. But in some ways, it can be as important as does the car. It's important as how much energy I'm wasting on it as well. That's true.

If you put, see, that could be the thing, too, is like, you can't ignore aesthetics. You can't put too much emphasis on it either because that's also a waste of time. So there, there is that element going there. But, um, okay, we haven't even like really gone through there. Still, we're going through discrete elements. None of this is wrong. None of this is, uh, uh, out of order, because there is no order with this. is just how we do it.

We just talk and things fall into place. But what I was thinking is we haven't even really gone through the dream in terms of like step by step. So you're at this racetrack. And in terms of the sequence of the dream, like the cars weren't racing initially, you were having a different experience. You were there discussing with your team and you were observing that there were two sets of two cars, you know, each. Well, I didn't observe it. We were planning the trip to bring these cars down the coast. And I was discussing, you know, the stickers and the colors.

And I was aware that there was two cars being entered into from a previous friend. Then once, you know, we went down the coast, I sort of suddenly appeared. And this race course, and I was in the, the track was around. the outside and I was actually underneath the building. You know, underneath the building, you got those foundations coming down. We're in this under area with this building on top of us,

all these sort of pillars around us. And I could see the cars racing around the outside as, you know, the Lego and Tupperware was falling out. And I'm talking to my previous friend and we're like, weren't you supposed to be driving? weren't you supposed to be driving? You know, and we're just sort of sort of nitpicking each other a bit. Interesting.

So the more we discuss it, I'm getting a better vision. I didn't have any. What I saw was a almost a, the one racetrack that's like an oval, almost where there's nothing but grass in the middle and the pits are off to the side. But you've actually got a different experience of this dream. So this is why. Yeah, so there's plenty of wines in it. And I could see one section of it.

But it was, yeah, I was standing underneath this. It's like when they have the racetrack going through a city. You know, like some places have races and they've got to close the city down or whatever or that particular part so they can use it. It was like that. And we were underneath a building as part of the city and the race cars were zipping around in that space. So you had your private garage, so to speak, almost in like in an underground parking garage in a way. Yeah, yeah. Very interesting, very interesting.

There no sense of what the building was. It was just like an office building stacked on top of us. And it was just like those generic thick pylons that come down into the car park. For sure. And you could sort of see, you know, through there when the cars were going past and all that as well. Yeah. That's an interesting metaphorical symbolism perhaps for a startup company. He's like, well, where do you start?

You begin at the beginning. You start in the basement. You start at the bottom level, the ground floor in a way, and you work your way up. So you're underneath the building trying to get these cars racing. But before I forget about it, there were actually, it seemed like at least two sections of the dream. One perhaps shorter than the other. But initially there was, you weren't just at the racetrack. That actually came second.

there was the planning and the preparation and the travel. You're going down the coast with the cars and you're having this discussion with your team en route. Yeah, yeah, before we went down there. So we're in my current location before we drove an hour down the coast. We were, you know, had the cars ready. I was sort of nitpicking about the stickers and the colors on them. And then, you know, you blink and then.

We're underneath this office building with these cars going around the outside, really sharp turns and all that sort of stuff. You know, very much a city sort of metropolitan kind of feel to it. Gotcha. Do you remember what you were saying in terms of the stickers or appearance and what the response was? No, I just remember getting a bit shitty. that it could be better. Which is kind of my feeling with my current sort of creation of the app. It could be better.

Gotcha. Not that it doesn't work, not that it's not powerful, not that people are, you know, people already using it, sending me messages saying how incredible it is, but I'm kind of hung up on, it's almost like I need something to be pissed off about. you know maybe well there's a part of me there's a part of me looking for something that I can complain about potentially fair enough well that's that's one type of possibility what

was I going to say as the other you know so there's your um there may be a personality component of like what am i trying to say needing needing to feel upset about something It's not the right way to put it. But then there's a different way to look at it, which is the businessman mindset of what could I do to improve this? In what way is it not good enough? I'm very much a maximizer. Even if a Formula 1 car is going 100 miles an hour, I'll say, how can we make you do 110? Or even 100.01.

That's a little bit faster. That's a little bit faster than the other guy. I'm obsessing about the point I won not the not the hundred yeah and there's um you know in a way it's a we would say the torture genius which you know both of us are just about to pat ourselves on the back of course right but the idea of like what drives some what does it mean to be driven and there's there's a certain mindset which is you know never quite satisfied you know and that actually kind of leads people to put extra effort in to think about things harder longer to, you know, put in that extra effort that makes it that much better.

Because there never quite always trying to. Who would I be if I wasn't being satisfied? You know, would I, would everything just stop if I finally found peace and satisfaction? Right. In some ways, I don't know, that's a great, so this is completely off topic, but a great philosophical question of, you know, what would we do if we got everything we ever wanted? Well, the answer would probably be nothing. what because there would be no more reason to do anything so in some ways the the satisfaction of life

is chasing things that you don't already have and if you look at that practically you you you know as soon as you finish a project you feel the satisfaction you bask in the glow you take a much deserved break and then you start looking for something else to do because sitting around doing nothing is boring and there are different degrees of different levels that people fall at in terms of what they consider to be boring you know i like things nice and peaceful and quiet there's some people who can't spend a week at home without planning their next vacation, that kind of thing. I mean, I never want to leave my house. So we're to each their own in that regard.

But, uh, so just, just to try to can, you know, I like to put a positive spin on as, as many things as possible because why be negative? Um, but so what is the, the benefit of being someone who is a little bit, always a little bit unsatisfied. Well, you're always looking for something that could be a little bit better. So that can work for you. As long as it doesn't get out of control. If it gets out of control, then we want to,

to start looking at, is this adding to your life or taking away from it? Maybe if you calm down a little bit. So, but in this regard, you're having a, and you said this is, in real life, related to you're launching a project with a team. So you are as the, you know, race car, you know, drive. I'm not driving these cars. We're not driving. We just, we've just made them.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the dream, you're not, but you might, but you were supposed to be a driver in a And you were commenting to that, like, aren't we both supposed to be driving one of these? Oh, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Aren't you supposed to drive? Aren't you supposed to be driving?

Yep, yep. And you guys were competitors, not on the same team or were you actually members of the same team? No, no, we were competitors. We weren't. We're not on the same team. He had two vehicles from his team. I had two vehicles from mine. And instead of driving, we were just bickering in the, from the sidelines.

Gotcha. That, what came to my mind when you said that, and I, I, want to say it before I forget it again is that there's there may be a link between not being the driver and objects falling off the vehicle around the turns that if you give up control something's going to go wrong that's that might be a little too superficial but that immediately popped in my head and I didn't know if it resonated with you um oh no I'm I'm very much like the person who likes it to be in control um and you know I sometimes had this uh image of, you know, I'm driving my car and in the back seat is a guy that looks just like me

saying, hey, Tim, if you just did this, life would be better. If you just did this, life would be better, right? And so I asked the question, Tim, what would your life be like if that guy was no longer in the back seat? And you could actually just drive the way you want to drive and be who you are? And then it's like, well, who the fuck are you? Yeah. You know, I haven't asked that question. I've been so busy, you know, doing something that I think I'm supposed to be doing, like somehow my peace and happiness is attached to it. So the idea of, you know, potentially projecting my sense of lack or sense of always needing to be better, you know, like these Formula One race cars, the fastest cars in the world. And I'm like, can't we get the stickers right? You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Well, that's why I made sure to emphasize earlier that it's not, it's not necessarily superficial. Not necessarily. Maybe it is. Maybe it is. Maybe that's a little bit of a nudge to yourself like, is that really what you want to be worried about here? But there was a, it seems significant to me that you were surprised by the idea that you were not in the car.

It's like I was supposed to be driving it. But instead, I'm outside of the experience observing. Not only that, bickering with the icon of betrayal that I've brought with me to compete against. So it could have meant something different if you were on the same team with them. Then you'd be wondering, okay, am I doing something to make myself like this other person? But instead, what it seems to be is that you're putting yourself as a competitor to that person saying, well, who's best capable of winning this race? you know, in one aspect, you don't want to be that guy because you know what he did was wrong. You don't treat people like that.

Just one second. Just one second. Please. Did you have some background noise? Hey, come me, Bob. Come on. Oh, you got a puppy? Come on in.

Who's your good boy? Let me just quickly introduce you to. Sure. Come here. Come in. We love the amin. Oh, look at that big boy. Hey, he's a...

Wait a minute. Did you just say his name is Bubba? Yeah, Bubba. His name is Bubba. This cat, no way. Synchronicity is all over the place today. That is fantastic. Well, we got ours from...

Go ahead. You know what synchronous, though? My daughter named him, right? Yeah. And I never said this, but Bubba was the name of my imaginary friend growing up. Wow. No shit. That's another good one.

Yeah. We got his, his isn't quite as heartwarming and magical. We just got it from Bubba Gump, shrimp company. Everyone, everyone thinks that's where we get that one. Well, I mean, two seconds. The story of this guy was we found him. My wife did. She's, the cat distribution system likes my wife because she gets out more than I do.

So she found him in the bushes crying, brought him home. He was so hungry. He couldn't wait for us to get the little packet of, you know, fish open. And he started chewing on the plastic. And he cut his own lip, and he had a piece of his lip hang on. And we thought, oh, God, is he he'd have no lip for the rest of his life? And then it healed, but it was swollen. Yeah.

And so we thought, like, oh, he's like the big lip, Boba Gump. That's what we call him. He's a great name. He's my Bobo boy. Bobo. He's sleeping. That's okay. What's the saying?

Oh, so competitor versus teammate. Um, so in one sense, it's very obvious that you don't want to be that guy. Uh, you look at this as an icon of like, you know, you know, you know how you felt and how you were treated and you're like, well, I'm not going to do that to other people. On the other side of it, you do perhaps still admire him as a competitor in terms of, well, how much of his personality as, as an iconic. Oh, yeah, there was a lot of powerful attributes that this guy had. Like he could, he could, he could, um, generate something out of nothing. He could make, you know, millions of dollars, um, you know, um, and, and, and he was, he could, he could really kick ass in that field, you know, but, um, and that happens a lot with our,

say, even our worst enemies. We, we have a grudging respect for the, well, they're not, they're good at some things. And they're very good at some things. Yeah, yeah. Um, no, for sure. So that's, yeah. So it seems, you know, the fact that you put yourself in a race. and a race as a winner or a loser,

it's a direct competition versus this guy. And he's not on your team. So this is not imagining yourself becoming more like him. But can I compete with him? And probably there's an implicit question in there too. Can I compete with him without becoming like him, without developing negative personality traits that I don't want to display, you know, if I...

Hey, damn, fair cop, mate. Yeah, yeah. Good insight. Now, what did you think of or feel when I, when I mentioned that? No, no, no, that really dropped in because there is a, I have a certain fear of success because part of me thinks there is a part of me that is selfish and can be self-contained. And if I, if I do happen to, you know, become successful, would those parts of me start running the show?

Definitely. Yeah. No, I think there's a very, there's an omnipresent. risk of that. I'm almost afraid of my own success as well because there's been periods in my life where I get a little bit of a big head and I start thinking I can do no wrong and that is never the case and I have to remind myself, oh, I've screwed up plenty and I've taken chances I shouldn't have or treated people poorly and I should remember that about myself no matter how. So I'm almost glad to be a relatively small YouTuber in this, you know, in this big.

But I mean, therein lies the thing, though, like, are we playing small to sort of avoid our greatness and our fear of stepping into something? Oh, yeah. It's entirely possible. Like, what I should do is aim for greatness and become better at not getting a big head. And instead of avoiding greatness as a solution. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, you're picking up what's being put down there. and there's, you know, if you're looking at this as there's no coincidences, we both probably need to have this conversation. You know, who are we helping by playing small? Yeah, not as many people as we could. Yeah. And then it just becomes that trick of, well, you know, I need to learn how to balance better. I need to learn how to walk that.

And let's go back to what we spoke about earlier. How many other people are in the situation where they're fearing, becoming a certain thing because of success and they're not doing it? Yeah. I was put numbers to that, thousands if not millions, you know. So if we can be the one that can do it for us, we can do it for them. You know, we can maintain our integrity. We can, you know, so something just dropped in there for me.

Yeah. Ben. If we can, if we can be successful and still be the people we want to be, bringing our gifts in and not and not and having mastery over those parts of us that we know are there. you know, then we can we can show it's possible to other people that are in that same restrained position. I think so too. I mean, I think both of us want to be a beneficial guide of some kind.

We want to show others how to grow, how to be better than they are, how to fulfill more of their innate potential. I think we're both very similar in that regard. It's both of both of us. Yeah. And how can we actually do that if we're not fulfilling our own potential? Exactly. Ben.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. That dropped in with me too. We just, the goddamn distraction. There's plenty of distracting noises out there. Do we want to be those people that actually play the bigger game, show people it's possible? And then I've usually found when you're in that space, there's that energetic signature that people can pick up on that's unspoken,

that goes down past words can reach. You know, just like you spoke about, you know, the best counselors are the ones that have come out of, you know, their addiction. Yeah, for sure. And then the best people to guide someone to a better place as someone who's been there and learn the path and can, you know, is just just overcome their own fears. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So what are, what are the things we're kind of missing a little bit here is why were you not in the car and why are Legos and Tupperware falling out of it?

So you seemed in the, in the dream experience to be. if I had this correct, and tell me, tell me if I've got it out of sequence, but it was, you found yourself bickering with this competitor, and then realized you weren't,

either one of you was in the vehicle. You were, where you were supposed to be, perhaps. Okay, so if it happened in a different sequence, of events, it would mean something else.

So I wanted to get that, that the order correct. That's got to be, I mean, what it says to me, and I can't say it's got to be, but what it suggests right off right off the bat is the idea of being distracted with the wrong focus and missing the start of the race or there's some some connection there realizing that that

focusing on the wrong thing has put you not in control as perhaps you had intended to be although we also looked at it from a different angle earlier which is you know the idea of that it might be a good thing to surrender a little more control but sometimes we accidentally surrender control because we don't focus on, you know, we're bickering on the sidelines when we should have been driving. So I don't know which way feels. In the perspective, I saw it, it was like these cars were driving themselves. I didn't actually see or have a sense that anyone was in them. They were just driving around.

Fair enough. Like automated. Yeah. So it may not be, what am I trying to say? It may not be some catastrophe that you're not in there. But it may still be a surprise that, wow, the cars drive themselves. like this, in some ways, when you've created a product, an app and released it to the wild, it drives itself in a lot of ways.

It does what you told it to do for the people it's intended to serve. So I can imagine, like I say in dreams, it doesn't matter how bizarre something is. We usually, it doesn't seem strange in the dream. So the idea that I was supposed to be driving the car, but it seems to be operating itself. It was going somewhere with that and I lost it. I don't know if that brings any thoughts to your mind or I'll try. and go a different direction. Hmm.

I don't know. Maybe I've said everything. I seem to be less focused on the track and more focused on sort of nitpicking with a mate. That's true. With the former mate. Do you have, that's one thing I haven't asked is, is what the nature of your bickering was about? So it was, it was, it was more, we were just discussing the events of the day and how, you know, we said,

aren't you supposed to drive? Aren't you supposed to be driving? You know? And it was sort of like we were just, we were sharing that space. We weren't. And it was like we wouldn't be, we would not have been together if it wasn't for that event.

You know, not someone I'd normally be around. But then, but then it was like, we're looking at the race cars and we're just going, aren't you supposed to be? Well, aren't you supposed to be? You know what I mean?

Like as much as we weren't there to argue, there was a certain amount of pushback when the questions were asked. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. So I'm struggling to put it into words a little bit about what is the dynamic that's going on there. It was almost as if,

do you know the internet meme where it's two, two Spider-Man's and they're each pointing at each other? It was you. And it's like, that's meant to be, what is that meme? supposed to say. It's like, these are, it's the pot, in the way the pot calling the kettle black, it's like two people who are both the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Choosing each other of being the thing, not realizing, you are also the thing. Because earlier in my journey, I could have definitely been that guy.

I could have definitely been the guy that betrayed trust that didn't see the importance of connection to others, how I, you know, deceitful, taking advantage. You know, if I'm being completely honest, I could have completely been that guy, you know, but, um, Um, you know, for potentially lack of success, um, I never was able to isolate and then protect that part of me. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, I had another thought too. Uh, what is it? There was, there's an interesting idea that there's an equivalence to. It's not like you found yourself on the sidelines and he was driving the car. So you're missing out on something. You're taking, there's a, um, a similarity in your approach or your circumstances. That's not the right way to put it either.

It's like you are both, neither one of you is driving. It isn't like one is and one isn't. There's neither one of you has the advantage. You're both on the same level in terms of racing the race. The cars are driving. Neither one of you is driving. So there's things beyond your control or there's, there's a certain, as dissimilar as you are, there's a certain similarity of circumstances to the fact that you're both out there.

and both in the same boat in terms of, aren't you supposed to be driving? Well, perhaps both of you were, but neither of you are. So that says something. And the race was still happening. Yeah. It's all happening without our input.

They're still flying around the track. For sure. And there's probably a similarity there, too. So if you find even the most reprehensible person has some redeeming quality, and you could say, well, I would like to be more like that one redeeming quality. So in a sense of, business competition or successful business implementation, there is a certain, you know, if you're the leader, you can't always lead from the vanguard.

Sometimes you got to stand up on the hill and watch the battle and direct the troops. You can't always be in the thing. Yeah, you can't. So sometimes you get to be on the sidelines. And I'm not, I'm not the driver anymore. Now I hire the driver or the car drives itself or something along those lines. You're in a different equivalent position. Um, yeah, it would mean something.

It would, it would be a different understanding of your circumstance. If you pictured yourself in the car and drove past him on the sideline, you'd be like, okay, now this means something. This means I'm approaching this problem differently for better or worse. But, but instead, you said, no, it's, it's the same. But what's happening to the cars now, were both cars shedding or falling out, uh, had the items falling out? Or was it just yours or just his or both?

No, it was, it just, it was all of them. And there was, okay, that's the other thing I didn't ask. There was more than just... I didn't see any other vehicles other than my two and his two on the track. Okay, but all four of them were shedding parts or pieces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the more they went around, the more parts they shed. Gotcha, gotcha.

So you realize it is a kind of a progressive problem, a problem that would get worse the longer it went on. It was almost like when they powered up, this stuff would fall out of them. So when they're coming out of the corner and they're powering up, this stuff would fall out. Like when you put your foot down on the accelerator, it would throw out the Tupperware and the Lego. Those are two fantastic icons, too.

I mean, I have, those are both things that I are strongly from my childhood. So I think of like my mom had Tupper. She had the Tupperware that was the old, thick, ridge top 1970s. She had that stuff for years. And now we've got like the thin, plastic container.

You step on them, they're broke. Yeah, or you microwave them too many times and they melt through or something. It's just not the same quality. Excuse me. So that was one question I was going to ask is when you see this Tupper in your mind, is it the old stuff or the new stuff? How do you can see that? You know what? I'm pretty sure it's the old stuff.

Yeah, the ridge lid type stuff. Yeah. That's actually exactly what I saw in my head when you described it. but I wanted to make sure. And then the Legos is just random deconstructed pieces, not... Yeah, like individual singular pieces, not the ones. Like, you know how you've got, you know, one rivet, two rivet, three rivet sort of amounts, like just the single rivets, you know, sometimes flat, sometimes square, but just singular.

There was no joining parts. It was just like the very basic, basic building blocks. Yeah. It's not like an entire space shuttle fell off and smashed on the ground into a million. No, no, no, it was literally in just, just like if you look in any kids, you know, play cabinet, you'd see a little box of Lego little bits and pieces that make no sense. At one stage, there might have been a space shuttle, but not anymore. The old bucket O Legos.

Yeah, yeah, got you. Okay, so individual little pieces. Yeah, and that's interesting, too, because I wonder how many people might store Legos in a very large old Tupperware. That might be a thing. But definitely there's an icon of storage and preservation and an icon of... There was food in the Tupperware containers. Oh, there was a cabbage. Okay.

I think there was like a cabbage in, it was like a burnt orange container with that ridge lid. Yeah. It had a cabbage. Yeah. Very cool. Well, that was the next thing I was going to ask is way ahead of me there. Was there anything in the Tupperware? And the one thing you do remember was a cabbage.

So I don't know if you. dwell on the idea of like Tupperware, cabbage, what's going on with that? Does that take you back to anything in the past? Does that mean something to you? Well, you know what? That my, I call her my then-wife, not my ex-wife, because I stand for a positive, you know, future for her. And I notice when I say ex-wife, there's a lot of attraction to that.

And if you say it, people tend to jump on it, right? So I always say then-wife. my then wife used to have um abidges in that same tupperware container yeah okay so now that i think about it shit never even saw that right yeah oh that's why that's why whatever this is it works because we just talk about it and then bam new connections come up so there's something about there's something about the process of that vehicle as i power as as it powered up all this stuff fell out yeah you know so you know shedding shedding the past to to to move because I'm you know because it's powering forward very very well could be yeah yeah so that

it could be an icon of her in specifically that regard of like well she was a part of my past so letting that go legos could be an icon of these are toys I played with as a kid and I set those aside for building with other materials building a company building something more meaningful than just a you know there's a you do the same type of thing but one is just a toy and the other's more serious. So, but they're, anyway, but so Legos, but then again, um, it can go a bunch of different directions. It depends on what, what resonates, but man, you had a moment there where it's like, you know, shedding the past. Uh, if you're going to hit the accelerator, you know, another metaphor that comes, comes to mind is, like, leaving things in the rearview mirror and the, and you hit the

gas to get away from the stuff in the past faster. So there's, there's a little bit of that that feels, feels, feels right to me. Um, well, it was like, it was like the top of where with the cabbage in got extruded from the vehicle. You know, when it, when it was powering out of that corner, it was just, it was just naturally going out a bit like, a bit like, you know, when you get those, those stress balls that you squeeze and then it pops out in different areas and all that sort of stuff through your hand, that's what it was like. So it was like the stuff just popping out the side of the car as it sort of powered up.

Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I'm glad you said that too, because I was like, was it, uh, forgot to ask, was it falling out of the trunk? Was it falling out of an open side door? Was it falling out from the undercarriage? No, it actually kind of popped off almost like a grumbling.

It popped off of the vehicle itself. It was very, very interesting. I think I might have to meditate on that for a while longer. I don't know what to, I don't know what to make of that method, that specific method. That's fantastic. Now, just checking, can you guys hear Baba snoring right now? Or is it, is that a problem at all? Do you hear him?

no no i mean i i have not up to this up up to this moment uh so no no no no oh good oh good i can discord's got a pretty good noise suppression uh thing so anyway it's it's one of the reasons i like to use it as a as a recording as recording device well it seems like we've got um we've got a pretty interesting arc to the to this dream i mean you wake up from it and i was at a racetrack and i was arguing over stickers and this guy i don't remember and now we've got this This story related to your, if we try to put it together into a narrative, you're, you're launching a company. You've got employees. You're trying to build something for yourself.

You're in a competitive market. And what you imagine is, you know, I'm bringing my team to a competition. There was, you know, I've got an icon of a successful businessman that wasn't maybe the best person. And I want to be both. I want to be better. I want to be as successful, but a better person than he was. in that regard, treat people well. I'm on the sidelines.

A better person than I could be, yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. Or then I am currently. One, what do they say? Judge yourself not in comparison to others, but who you were yesterday. I love that turn, turn of phrase too. So, yeah, so you're looking through this, like,

what is my, what am I trying to say? How do I approach becoming more successful? What is it going to take? to get there. What is it like? What is the analogy that, you know, it's like I'm going to, to a race and I'm competing against other people that many of whom in these spaces are going to be like this guy. They're going to be not the most scrupulous good people, but, but, you know, very, very capable. And that part of the process means you're going to have to shed some of the past to allow yourself to accelerate forward or the process of leaning into the curve, coming out of the

curve and hitting the gas is going to shake loose some of these things that you don't need anymore that are extraneous to the process perhaps. Yeah, I think we got we got something interesting there. Did you have more specific? No, that's super cool. And I really hope the listeners are getting a lot from this as well. Oh, for sure. And that's the whole point, too, is like what is, you know, for the listener, for me, solving

the puzzle, it's fantastic too. but then really the point is for you to have these moments of epiphany like either way I'm just feeling something something's clicked in for me um because now you can look at that and go okay the the dream itself was meant to focus my attention on some concerns I have about how to do what I'm doing well or better and what the pitfalls might be and and what I want to be aware of in the process and what I want to avoid as an outcome. And then when we get it all dialed in, now, hopefully, the, the best possible outcome is that you will now be able to go forward in that awareness, making better decisions, avoiding the pitfalls you don't want, to the, to the, to the, to shedding the things you don't want, you know, all the things the dream is trying to say, you can do it now you can do it consciously. Now you can focus yourself and choose, choose your own destiny in that regard. Yeah, no, no, I get that. And that removes some of the fear.

I have around, oh, maybe I will become like that person that I, that I hate, but I really admire as well. Yeah. At least. Not hate, but someone, you know, I used to hate, but also really admire it. No, for sure. And I think the dream highlights that you know you have a choice and that you don't have to be like that guy. You can compete, even if it feels scary, even if that fear is present of like, I don't know if this is going to be good enough. but I think you at some level do know that you can do it and you don't have to go that route.

Was it a Jedi Sith? You know, you don't have to embrace the dark side. I think it's, you know, if we go off the analogy, the ultimate goal of fear is to immobilize you. There's a part of me wanting to immobilize me with fear, but when I take that action, it's going to be dispelled. Yeah. And it's an interesting thing too, because, okay, so if we bring that additional layer to the dream, you brought a team with you and that team put the car on the racetrack to the degree that you suddenly discovered you weren't driving

but the race is still happening so it's one of those things where it's like if you construct the situation properly if you've got the right team in place you can you can afford to be the guy who worries about the stickers because the car runs they're going to put it on the track you don't even have to drive it there's all these additional layers of, I think, reinforcing the idea that you're on the right track. That's the, your brain loves, your brain, your brain loves puns. It does. And that's why it'll, it'll tell you, it'll tell you these things. And, you know, without doing this process of talking it through, I wouldn't have gotten to that pun as a likely truism for this, for this

dream. I, you know, just because you're on a racetrack doesn't mean you're on the right track. But I think this, I think this particular dream does say that, that you have, the part of you that is accurately assessing your own competence is telling you things are better than they appear. And some of the stuff you're worried about, you don't have to be worried about. And some of the things that seem superficial like stickers and appearance might be more important than you think. But that is the luxury of the position you've put yourself in is I can be the guy that says, how do we make the app? icon a little more attractive so people want to click on it. You can afford to work on that because you've got a team that's getting the car up and running and you didn't get to drive it. That's,

I think it's a very positive, you know, self-assessment that you got going on there. That's my diagnosis. No, no, I like it because, you know,

ambushes aren't a problem if you know they're coming. Exactly. You know, yeah. If you don't know they're coming, then you're always on hyper-alert. like when, when, how. And if they do happen, you're often very exhausted because you've been hyper alert.

So to me, this has alerted myself to, you know, a potential, you know, hazard that now that I'm aware of, I'm like, I'm aware of it now. I don't have to fear an unseen attack, you know. Absolutely. So there's a great reduction in anxiety now that I could speak now that my subconscious, has given the images to express itself and we could articulate that so it actually goes up to the upper part of the brain, I suppose. For sure.

Yeah. To then, you know, to integrate that consciously. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, if you feel like we've gotten as much as we can out of this, we'll wrap it up. This has been awesome. And I can only hope that, you know, the people listening has gotten, you know, just as much as we have. It's been absolutely awesome.

You know, having this, it just felt like it's flowed very easily. Right. It's accredited to your craftsmanship, Ben. Who would have thought we'd go in two and a half hours? I thought we'd, yeah, I'd get 90 minutes or so, but that's, it's just, this always happens when I'm talking to someone that's got genuine ideas and they're just being real and sharing their thoughts. It always goes longer than, than I expect. No, no shade thrown at the people who got to keep it tight.

I know, no, not everybody has two and a half hours. So that's, but what I'm going to say, we'll do the, we'll do the outro here. This has been our friend Tim Thomas from Brisbane, Australia, the founder of Breathwork in Bed. And reading back my own notes, if I can, he is on a mission to uplift people and the world through quality sleep with 10 years of experience in the hardcore, or in the, well, hardcore veteran recovery space, bringing a unique lived experience in health, wellness, breathwork, and mental health. He's also the author of Fight, Flight, Feel. you can find him at breathworkinbed.com.a.u.u. And you can look for the app under the keywords, Breathwork in bed. The cat's eating the paper. Go ahead. Take it. It's all yours now.

Watch now. Yeah, just a bit of a call to action. When people subscribe to the breathwork in bed, I send them a bunch of free stuff. The spamming laws in Australia is pretty tight, so you do have to confirm you're not a robot. And once you confirm your email address, that's when I'll send you a bunch of free stuff that it'll set you up. very powerfully. Very cool. I encourage you all to go and take a look. And then I'll try and keep this short.

Let's see if I can do it in under 60 seconds. For my part, would you kindly like, share and subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. I do video game streams most Monday through Fridays, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific.

I can't remember which book I've got over here that I'm showing you all. But go to Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. You can find that title, downloadable MP3 version. versions of this very podcast and encyclopedia, custom cocktails, all kinds of neat stuff. Check it out. Also, if you had head on over to Benjamin the Dream Wizard.locals.com, building a community there

attached to my Rumble account, free to join. That's enough out of me. Tim, thank you for being here. It was a great talk. It was unbelievable. It was an absolute dream. We love the puns. And everybody out there, thank you for listening.