Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 190: Hollywood Capone

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Hollywood Capone ~ https://linktr.ee/HollywoodCapone

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Hollywood Capone from Orange County in SoCal. I've been down there, not lately, but once upon a time in my life. He is an author, musician, and all around just normal guy. You can find him on Instagram at Hollywood Capone. He'll also have a link tree. The stuff will be in the links in the description, of course. He's also got a brand new book, The Ashes.

We're going to talk about that. We'll get right back to him in two seconds for my part, would you kindly like, share and subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. As you can see, I don't release an episode every week because dreams come in their own time and I need people to reach out to me and let me know. I do also video game streams, Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific most days, a lot of times I'm knocking off Thursday or Friday. I finish a game. I wait and I start a new one the following Monday. this episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 5 O'Neuro Chronology, Volume 3.

It is the third and final anthology work collecting shorter pieces of historical dream literature that I did not want to leave out of my catalog, but which do not make their own books long enough for me to sell and feel good about it in that form. Of course, all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable three versions of this very podcast and encyclopedia, links to interviews I've done on other people's podcasts, all kinds of good stuff there. You should check it out. And finally,

last but not least, if you'd head on over to Benjamin the dream wizard.locals.com that is attached to my Rumble account. It is free to join. You can give me money or not, but it's also a great place to reach out and contact me if you have a dream to share. And that is more than enough. Adamie, Hollywood. Thank you for being here. Appreciate

your time. Thanks for having me, man. It's good to be here. And it's a nice day over here. finally we've got some good weather in uh we're both on the on the west coast here and here in america and uh finally we've got some nice weather i mean april in portland is notorious for just being a constant rain showers uh we can't get it's like uh the weather portland's like nine months of rain and three months of of 110 degrees in the shade yeah so i'm not looking forward to the heat but man i'll take 70 degrees in sunny that's not bad at all that's that's good weather that's

what a lot of people love about Southern California more than anything is the weather. It's it, it is amazing down there. You know, my wife and I moved here because of the weather. I mean, we're both older. Our kids moved away. So we sold the house back at the East Coast in Jersey. I looked out here and I saw this thing. It was like a meme posted on Instagram or something like that. It said, you know, Southern California somehow managed to survive another 58 degree South California winter. Yeah. I signed out to them. I'm like, I don't complain about like, oh, it's rain, he's drizzling, but you know what? It's 58 degrees, so it's not so bad.

It's not that bad. You have to put on a light wind breaker. That must have been some culture shock, too, moving from New Jersey to Southern California. I mean, just very different in the way people relate to one another, little different vibes, cultural norms, so to speak. I don't know if that's what I heard a joke once upon a time where, you know, there's a, it was a lady who'd lived on both the East Coast and the West Coast. She said, you know, in, in, in LA, people will, they're very nice, and they will drive,

they'll see you parked on the side of the road because you're, you're fixing a flat tire. They'll drive by and they'll go, oh, that's so terrible. I'm so sorry that's happening to you. I just, I don't have time to help right now, but good luck and they keep driving. Whereas it's a, maybe in New Jersey, you're more likely to get the old guy pull over and go, what are you looking? And this was a female community. You're stupid women drivers.

They don't know. You don't know how to fix it. I'm going to fix it for. Get out of the way. I'll fix your car for you. What do you want from me? And he's not nice about it, but you get your damn flat fixed. They stop to make the time.

I don't know if that's something. That's just a joke. Maybe it's just a joke. I don't know if you noticed that. Well, I'll tell you, they say many a truth that said in jest. There's a lot to that, you know. My wife and I, this is kind of funny because this is the second time we've lived here. We moved here just after we got married in the 90s, and we stayed about five years back then.

And we loved it, but it was a situation where, We already had our daughter. My son was now on the way and every single person we knew, our family and everything, not every, but just about. They were all back on the East Coast and it was just the right thing for us to pack up and head on back. And we raised them and then, you know, sitting around talking about what are we going to do with the last third of our lives? And, you know, we always wanted to come back here.

So here we are and, you know, that whole juxtaposition, East Coast, West Coast thing. There's so much to be said for it. And it gets into so many other things, too. And a big thing for us is food. Oh, yeah. There's food out here. But if you go back to the East Coast, you can go into a corner deli anywhere and get a great sandwich. And it's not too hard to do.

You know, so there's differences in that regard as well. Give and take and one. And you raised a very important thing, too, is that proximity to family. Excuse me. I mean, it's one thing to say, yeah, this is the perfect place, but I don't know anybody here. And it's not like you can't make friends. It's like, I don't. I don't have my people.

Like all the people I grew up with and around leaving a particular, and family, most importantly, especially if it's extended family and you've got, you know, the grandparents are still around or whatever and you've got cousins and you go to a brand new place. It's like it just doesn't feel the same. It just doesn't feel right sometimes

to do that. But it's, so it makes a tremendous amount of sense when your kids are growing up too. It's like here's, I want you to know where you come from and know who your people are and know your extended family. So we're not going to move you away from them. So that's a very big deal. I mean, you can make or break someone's sense of purpose and meaning in their life is whether they're surrounded by family or

isolated, you know. Oh, yeah. And, you know, like with regard to my kids, my kids, they had such as close relationship with their grandparents, my wife's parents, and my mom in particular as well. Not so much my father, because he's, you know, in the world doing his own thing, but just for them to have that relationship and, you know, and take that further into their lives. It's, um, it forms like a cohesion in their, in their lives, you know, and it's, uh, you can't replace that. And, uh, I'm glad we did it, but I'm glad we're back in California. Definitely. Right on. Yeah, I'm more of a, um, uh, isolative person by nature. I'm not, you know, nothing against my family. Great people. I still don't see him very much. I don't see anybody,

but I don't leave this room if I can help it on an average day. Okay. There's plenty of mental activity I'm doing here. Like I said, we're both. We've done our own books and creative endeavors and whatnot. I say all your musical equipment there. I played drums for a long time. And it's been a decade or more since I had them kind of mothballed. And, you know, I took them apart and stacked them the way they all nest inside one another. I got simple cases.

Okay, anyway, long story short on that. I've been thinking about rearranging this play. The problem I have, I would bring that drum kit out here right now and set it up again and just play for fun. I mean, this says body by bacon. I thought it was funny to put on a shirt that was too tight. And it says body by bacon because I'm getting jubby. I was thinking, what a great way to lose weight is. Just sweat my ass off on a drum kit.

Well, I got all these cats. And there, I don't want to terrify them with the noise and the symbols and the, uh, yeah. Yeah. So there, I mean, is that an excuse? Maybe I could let them outside for an hour while I play, but, uh, you know, you could always get one of those, uh, those rolling electronic kits, you know, a tight little like three or four piece and that's true in the corner put the headphones on that's not a bad idea i'm uh i i it doesn't make sense it doesn't it doesn't i mean as a musician you probably know it's

like there's the difference between um uh the kinetic contact of a stick with a skin and i i'm all about that and it's uh the for me the electronic kits never felt right it felt like that was well Well, because I was, it felt like I was hitting plastic. And then I got a sound out of it. But anyways, I'm, I don't know, some people are like foodies to turn their nose up at bar, at, you know, greasy bar food. And like, I'm not that. I'll eat anything.

I love food, but obviously. But for the, I'm a little bit of a, what is the word? What is the word I'm looking for? It's not an elitist, but it's along those lines. It's like, I just think it's better. I just think it's, it's like, I'd rather, I'd rather play nothing than play on something fake. Anyway, that's, I'm not that vehement about. it but look at this one she doesn't want me to write anything she just wants me to

love her yeah yeah this one's baby that one's uh well he's off camera but that black one's name is boba okay story on boba just for the second how does he get all the cats have that she okay she got her name uh because we had a niece and her niece was three or four years old and she loved justin beber this back in the day 10 15 years ago uh she she loved that song baby baby oh and so she walked out in the backyard and saw this guy for the first time as a kitten. She's like, oh, baby.

I'm like, well, that's her name. And then this one over here, he's a rescue. They're all rescues. We just, you know, never bought a pure bread or whatever cat.

They just show up in her backyard and we keep him. We found him in a bush when he was a little kitten. And he was so hungry that he wouldn't even let my wife finish tearing open the little chicken packet to give him some chicken. And he cut his lip on the plastic. And, you know, we go,

we go, always like Bubba Gump from the movie. Like the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. So we called him Bub and this is his lips all healed up now, but he's our little Bubba, Bubba boy. Oh, he knows his name. Look at that. He turned around and me out at me.

You got to love cats. I call it value added content. It's like, the people that don't want to hear me talk, maybe they'll tune in for the cat. There he goes. Maybe they'll tune in for the cats. Well, we've, uh, we got a book to talk about. I don't, I don't want to forget that. That's, I've made these notes for a reason.

I see it there leaning up on the, on the guitar. The ashes. It's right back there. Yeah. Yeah. Why? And you can hold it up and let everyone see it nice and close. Yeah.

You held it up before, but now it's, now we're actually recording. So there you go. Now is this, well, what is it? Is it a memoir, biography? It's a story about a friend of mine that I've known forever. And he died suddenly some time ago. And it was the whole sequence of that happening that caused me to write the book. because it was troubling to me.

And look, you know, everybody's got people that pass on in our lives and not to take away anything from anybody else. Everybody's got to deal with that. I'm not unique in any way. I've lost very important people to me. My sister passed on a number of years ago, and that was a big hit for me. But this was something a little bit different.

It was not just him passing on, but it was somebody I knew for so long that the reasoning behind the book was that really big chunk of me went with him. And that was a hard thing that I was having a real, I was having a very difficult time with that because I've known him since the fifth grade. You know, we would hang out at his house on the porch drinking beers up until recently, you know. And, you know, whenever I would complain about my life, like I want, you know, bigger, better, faster, more of, you know, those things.

that drive everybody. He would just look at me straight in the face and like, homie, he's like, don't you remember where you came from? And he'd be absolutely right. He would kind of talk me down from the ledge of that, yeah, I deserve more in life when, in fact, I have everything that I could possibly ever want it. And the reason that he would do that is because he knew who I am

from every single stage of that life, the good, the bad, the ugly, every bit of it. And he's like the last person that knew every aspect of me. And with him gone, there's that younger guy that I used to be went with him. No, for sure. Yeah. There's a, what am I trying to say here? There's a way where the physical and the metaphysical exist together.

And this is how I do things. I get an idea and I got to tease it out. I guess it's not fully formed. I'm going somewhere. promise, but it's a, and it makes sense, and I know it, but I don't have the right words. So there is a way we interact with other people that we only can interact with that one other person. And it's unique to, now we, we, we are fully ourselves or, or not, but with, with a lot of different people. And we, we show a lot of, say, strangers or acquaintances or professional contacts, a certain

side of ourselves and and that can be consistent across multiple types of people but then there's people in our lives that as you say they know us so well that we we have a unique we are unique in relationship to them and that is a piece of ourselves or a part of ourselves or an experience of ourselves that can only be had in interaction with that one person and when they're absent just physically just gone for the day just doing something that's just not here at the moment we're not able to access that part of ourselves. And then if they go away entirely, it's as if that part of ourselves also dies with them,

that we will never again have experience that, experience ourselves that way that was able to be unlocked by interaction with that person. Said way too many words, but I think you probably get a little bit of where I'm coming from. Maybe you can put it a better or different way. Oh, no, it's actually perfect. I mean, it makes perfect sense.

It's the way of the world and it's, you know, and it's unique to every person and that relationship, you know. And it's just, it's, it's the other side of what makes life so precious. You know, you don't want to lose that person, and you don't want to lose that piece of you either. And it's just what makes us humanity, you know. It's what separates us from the beasts, I think, or at least likely. And there you have it.

No, no, for sure. And that's, yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at, too, that idea of, I guess leaning into thinking of this through the lens of the grief process. And one is we're not only mourning the loss of them and how we feel when we're, when we're with them and the love we have for them and all the things that make them unique. We're also mourning the loss of a piece of ourselves that was unique to that interaction. So I think some people don't think of it from that angle or don't see that perspective on it as much. And then some of them feel guilty because they're mourning.

They feel selfish to acknowledge that. And I think it's no. It's perfectly valid. It's not anything you have to be, you know, feel ashamed of or anything to also mourn what, you know, you're not just mourning them. You're not just mourning them, you're mourning what you've lost in relation, in relationship with them. So the book The Ashes, it tells a little bit of the story of your relationship with this best friend. Or is it more about your experience of his passing? How would you characterize it?

It's all about the experience of his passing. The closeness of us in the relationship comes through in the way I tell the story. Because it's pretty easy to get because whenever. it happened. You know, I got, I got a phone call from his mom on his phone. Oh, boy. Yeah. She told me what it happened. And I went to the hospital to see him, and it just didn't look good from the get-go, you know. And, but I kind of go through that whole sequence of events where, you know, his mom called me my trips to the hospital, because I was going to see him, you know, pretty often, like every other day. And my father knew him well, too, because, you know, Alan and I grew up in the,

we knew each other since the fifth grade. Later in life, you know, you'd all be going out for beers and things like that. It was just, you know, we were part of a cohesive unit. And I'd take my father to see him at one point as well, too. So I kind of go over all that stuff in the book, but the way I wrote it was basically in two scenes going on at the same time. One was the reality of what was actually happening, you know, the fall, the visits to the hospital,

the things that were going on there. And another was this backstory, this dream story, where this is all happening, but it's all happening in a dream in the abstract. It has nothing to do with being in a hospital, but has everything to do with him, you know, with him, you know, being captured by this giant snake of fire and eventually destroyed by that

as part of the dream explanation of what really happened to him. Wow. So was the, Are these dreams you actually had, or is this more of a literary device of helping to explore the situation metaphorically? Maybe some of the above, maybe all the above. I mean, it was, I've been writing poetry and music and things like that for my whole life. So there's always this creativity that I have. And sometimes it's my best friend and sometimes it's a terrible foe.

but you know sometimes it worked out for me and in this particular regard it was I was having a hard time with this and it wasn't like everybody else to do I was having a hard time with it because I kind of just kept it all to myself but I was having a real hard time with it and and I sat down in front the computer one day I said well let me just write a paragraph so I can tell myself what it is that I'm thinking or feeling and so I did that and then that paragraph turned into a chapter and then so on and so on. The next thing I know, I was well on my way to writing the story. And I got to be honest with you.

I mean, most of the time I would come home from work. I would, you know, write out an hour or two in front of the computer. And it was almost like I was just kind of along for the ride. It was, I don't want to say it was easy. And make no mistake, you know, it's not some literary masterpiece. It's not some work of Hemingway. But it's a cool story. And that's just kind of how it's.

just kind of how it started. These guys are going to turn off the recording on accident. You can move this mouse. Make sure everything is still good. Okay, there you go. I love them, and they're all up in my business, and then they get their nose, their hair in my nose, and it drives me crazy.

I was listening, though, and I had things to say, too. There's a couple of things about that, which I find fascinating to explore. The idea that it's been said, I don't remember by who, but that the process of writing is indistinguishable from the process of thinking. That if we sit down to think through a problem, the first thing we do is take, you know, our conceptual imagery and sensations, our motivations and desired outcomes and whatnot. And we try to phrase them in ways that are intelligible and then therefore actionable to us. So if you want to think your way through a problem, sitting down to write it out, is, actually a fantastic idea. Most people probably need to use that physical tool to get things

more clarify, even just putting together a to-do list. The average human being can hold maybe between four and seven ideas or tasks, or just as simple as going to the store, a shopping list. You can remember about between four and seven things and then you start, things start falling off as you try to add new stuff. Long story short on that is sometimes, if we don't sit down to write it out or if we can't for whatever reason there's no time or we've tried and it doesn't really work and we're not able to kind of think our way through a problem dreams will come to us to do that to finish the process or to move us in the direction of of better understanding but then what a dreams do is dreams are basically what the process

of thinking is actually like when we're not conscious when we're not the active observer observing the process, when we're a passive observer, just observing versus directing. So very often, you know, I tell people if they don't have an answer to something, sleep on it. And not just because, oh, give it. Oh, there's your kitty. Oh, look at that.

There we go. And not just in the, in the broader sense of, oh, give it time. Yeah, you need time, but you also need sleep. You also, you know, because a lot of these answers, I can't tell you. how many times I've woke up in the morning after trying to think my way through a problem. I couldn't come to an answer. Woke up the next day knowing exactly what it was and what I wanted to do about it. It's unbelievable.

And that for having no memory of dreaming at all, which is a point of contention sometimes. Like what we think of as dreaming is, well, I remember some visual experience during sleep. And I carry it with me out of there. I think dreams are actually just the never-ending thought process. The lungs breathe, the heart beats, and the brain thinks, and it thinks whether you're conscious or not. And then that unconscious thinking is when we remember it. That's what we call dreams. Anyway, went on and on there.

So it would not surprise me. And in fact, does not that you've had some dreams during that period of time, which probably spoke to what you were going through and, you know, allowed you to get better understanding of your internal state. and settle some things emotionally or provide you a direction of expression. You know, if you were thinking of, what do I do about this? How do I interact with this process or this, you know, how do I properly express what I'm thinking to someone that's important to me and have them get the right message, that kind of a thing. I'm going to stop there for a second.

Yeah. You know, it's, with regard to the story and the way it unfolded, the story itself, you know, take me out of the equation. If you looked at the story in the way that it went down, it was just a set of circumstances that you know started

kind of in a whacked out way and then went the path that they went on. You know, his parents were completely devastated by this because, you know, what parent wouldn't be. But his parents are older. They're like my parents age, you know. And my father's

you know, just past mid 80s right now. So they, you know, they were older. And so they wanted this resolved quickly. And it got resolved quickly. And they wound up cremating them and there was no, there was no mass or anything like that. So that really tends to what the 10, it's signified by a part in this story where my friend gets consumed by this giant snake of fire and winds up in, you know, being teleported into nothingness because that, in the reality sense of it, is actually what happened. You know, there was like, that's it.

And it wasn't just me. We grew up in a small community, so there was a lot of people that were, you know, the same frame of mind. They're like, that's it. Because if you knew this guy, he was, It wasn't perfect. I don't want to lie in Eisen or anything like that, but he was interesting, incredibly interesting, and he was involved in all kinds of things, and everybody knew him. And he was friend to most. You know, I mean, he had his flaws like everybody does, but he would start a conversation with anybody. He wouldn't have any problem. You walk into a party and, you know, whatever your segment of society is, you know, black, red, weed, red, white, green, you know, Republican, Democrat. It didn't matter to him. He would be in there and be like, hey, how are you doing?

And he would find something to talk about, you know. And because of that, it seemed like everybody knew it. And so then when this whole thing came to pass, it was, there was just this big, that's it. And that part of the story as well. That's crazy. The fire is a fantastically flexible metaphor in a lot of ways. I mean, if we start just with the idea that it, It is one of the four states of matter.

A lot of people think, you know, solid liquid gas, but they forget plasma. And it's a transformative. Fire has always been transformative. It's what happens when wood, you know, becomes heat and light. And, oh, no, no, not the lip. She's going to grab my lip with her claws. Jesus.

And fire, you know, fire can cleanse. You can boil water to make it safe to drink. Fire can, you know, can cook food, as I said. But a fire also consumes. And we think of, you know, the death of someone or perhaps, you know, we metaphorically say, you know, he had a, he torched his business to the ground. He made bad decisions and burnt it all down. We didn't literally, you know, commit arson.

But, you know, and the consumption of fire in, in a literal sense in the cremation of someone, you know, their body just gone, gone to the fire. But then we also think of it in other ways of like, you know, the, when someone passes or, you know, we say their light has gone out. You know, they were like a flickering candle extinguished. And it's a wonderful metaphor for just being alive itself because a fire only exists while it burns. And it doesn't exist before it burns and it doesn't exist after it burns just while it's burning. And it's it's almost the yeah, that's why that plasma state, that idea of that's temporary vibrant, uh, experiential type of thing going on there. So and it is crazy when when you think of people that were in your life and were a big part of your life or or at least a big presence. in your life and then suddenly gone.

It just leaves this giant vacuum. And it's so that that emptiness afterwards is so quiet in that way it's just the loudest silence in some ways that you've ever heard. I don't know if this is all speaking to your experience or what you think of the metaphorical stuff. I mean, it seems like you were trying to work some of that in and to best describe the feelings. Yeah.

I mean, especially too. Like once you're no longer a kid. sooner or later, you're going to come face to face with, you know, grief, loss, things like that. And, you know, depending on your circumstances, you may see more of it than others. You know what I mean? I don't think my grief to happiness ratio is any different than anybody else's. You know what I mean? And it's a funny thing, too, as you get older, because I'm in my 50s now.

You know, it keeps getting closer and closer and closer. That's true. Yeah, I'm getting there myself pushing 50s. It's just, you know, people pass. away, you know, or even like, you know, famous people pass away, you know, and you hear about that I'll do this. Like, that's weird. A couple of weeks ago, a Val Kilmer passed away, you know?

Yeah. I mean, that guy wasn't much older than me. You know what I mean? And I look at that. I look at the troubles he had. You had throat catch. You had all this other stuff going on and that kind of contributed to the end for him. And I think he died he was like 64.

I'm not that far away from that. Yeah. So you look at that too as you get older. And there's, for me anyway, it. gives me a reason to reflect. Very much so. Yeah. And it'll start coming faster and faster too.

And then pretty soon you'll be like, I think my grandfather, like, he was one of the last folks in his friend group or whatever that was still alive, you know, from a lot of folks he knew from World War II and whatnot, that kind of thing. And then, yeah, what, it's good. Well, it's good and bad, but it's good in a way to like to stop and reflect and say, well, what am I going to do with the rest of the time I've got?

If I know it's necessarily limited. And I've been pondering that myself too. I think, yeah, you hit the most men and women, too, I suppose. But you hit about 40 and you're like, what? That's where they get the trope of the midlife crisis. Am I going to continue doing what I've been doing so far? Is that working for me? Is that taking me somewhere?

Or do I need to change it up? Because I've hit, I only got half a life left. Am I going to do the same thing? Maybe I am. Maybe what I've been doing is exactly what I've always wanted to do. Maybe I need to change some things up and have some experiences. wanted her. It's time to start getting around of that bucket list, that kind of thing. And then especially losing, you know, losing a friend who's around your same age, like, yeah,

that could have been me. Like, it could be my time to go tomorrow. And what have I done? What am I doing? What do I want my legacy to be or my, what do I want my final experiences to be? If I don't have much, much time left. So these are all good things to consider. I think a lot of people maybe don't. We get forced to confront our mortality, but I'm not sure. maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I've got the wrong idea in my head of, you know, the idea that maybe most people don't think about these kind of things.

Maybe they do in their own way. So sometimes in this world, I feel like I'm surrounded by a lot of NPCs that are kind of going on programming and I'm not sure how much self-awareness or reflection some people have. No, I agree with you. Anyway.

There's a lot of people just go through life, man, every day. And, you know, they don't pause to think about it or maybe they choose not to think about it, you know? And, but there's a good percentage of the population that, you know, they're, they're just on their own path. And wherever that path takes them is wherever it takes them. You know? Yeah. That's true.

Maybe that's a little bit nonsensical for me to say, oh, midlife crisis is a trope. And then I wonder if people have them. Well, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I'll just withdraw that. Give it some further consideration. I've been in the car business most of my life

and you can pretty much see midlife crisis on almost any poor vet owner and the same thing bad about poor vets because I love them dearly and the owners are great but you know stereotypes are sometimes for the reason and that's

one of the stereotypes I just you see it and you're like yeah yeah uh uh that's you know

It's interesting too because the different way. So that's a classic one. That's the, that's the, you know, he, perhaps a man who's locked in because he's got responsibility. He's got a family. There's only so many things he can do. He can't drop everything and move to Thailand. He's got a wife and kids and they're in school and all that kind of stuff.

Some people can if they don't have those anchors. But the guys that do, it's like, oh, I can get a car or a motorcycle. Wife probably tell them motorcycles are too dangerous. That's part of why they're fun. But for me, I mean, maybe. I did something similar. You know, a few years back, I decided I didn't want to work inpatient psychiatric care anymore. So I became a dream wizard.

And now I do this. I'll take it. That's, yeah, that was my shift, shift to focus. I don't want to work on an office job anymore. I want to work from home. So that's, you know, and I honestly, happier. I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change a thing. I wouldn't go back to what I was doing.

But when we do this? We've been. And you got your friends around too. Right? And I get to hang out with Cats all day. Yeah. Some of the best people. Oh, we were talking earlier.

about the idea of animals and self-awareness and what and they do they have a certain degree they have almost an imitation or a pale reflection of a full human self-awareness in that so they can they can experience grief and loss in some way it's not i think it's as intense and certainly they don't understand their own mortality in the same way we do um i had a whole tangent ages ago that i was going to go on down that down that road but uh i think i've cried more over pets i had to say goodbye to than people. That's very weird for me. So maybe I just don't. I'm an odd duck anyway. I mean, it says not, not, not, not, not everybody can be a wizard. We're strange, we're strange breed. So, uh, but there are more wizards out there than people know. And I take it very seriously.

That's this idea of them in an archetypal sense. Uh, just like there are saviors and fools. There are wizards and heroes. Uh, these, these, these people walk among us. Uh, and sometimes we step into a role and we step out of it later when the times, there's a, there's a, what is it the idea that people go through you know they go through the oh he's got a hair tie he brings he brings my hair ties to me and then he wants to chase him this is the first cat I've ever had that will play fetch he will go and get it and he will bring it back to me I swear he's like a dog let go go get it look he's going to pick it up and bring it back that's crazy cat's playing fetch look at him here he is I'm just good I just need to prove this he really he really

brought it back he really does he really really does play fetch go I was going somewhere with all that I forget about it the wizards and whatnot now we get cats playing fetch what do we do this what do we transition into doing the dream thing you feel you feel like you're about ready for that I would love to uh vundaba bundaba Benjamin the dream wizard wants to help you here's the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams every episode of his dreamscape's gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New DreamScape's episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms,

as well as free audiobooks exploring the psychological principles which inform our dream experience, and much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms, and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature available on Amazon, documenting the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. One of the things that appealed to me with this podcast because not that I live my life around dreams,

but dreams are a big part of it, you know, and I sometimes, like, when I wake up and I write them down, like in that haziness asleep there, just because I'm so blown away by what just happened. It doesn't happen every day. It doesn't happen every week. Maybe it's, you know, I might get one a month and sometimes two,

but maybe not another one for two months after that, you know? Every once in a while, it all comes together, and I wake up and I'm like, oh, my God, that was crazy, you know? And write it down so I don't forget about it. And look at it later. It's like, yeah, it was crazy, you know? Oh, yeah. And it's always weird, too.

So when we wake up, we reflect on the experience we had. We look back at the memory, even right away. And it seems so bizarre. Now that we've engaged our rational, analytical, conscious mind. But when we're in it, we have almost kind of radical acceptance of things. It's very rare that people have an experience where they're in a dream. And they go, that doesn't make any sense. Why is this happening?

Now, sometimes that does pop up as a feature of the dream. but it isn't like, ah, what am I trying to say? It's the experience of disbelief or bizarreness, an unsettling feeling sometimes, but it's not the actual logical analysis type of thing. It's very rare that we're, it happens with lucid dreamers sometimes where they will stop and realize they're dreaming because something nonsensical happened. And then it kind of shocks them out of the flow of the experience. and then they're able to almost have a dual mind

where they're the experiencer and the analyzer at the same time and then they can kind of direct what's going on. But most of us, no matter how weird it is, we just roll with it. Like, of course I'm in a spaceship heading to Jupiter. Why wouldn't I be? Yeah, yeah, it doesn't.

No idea how we got there, it doesn't matter. Never occurs to us to think about it. Well, you said you had a couple of dreams to choose from and we can talk about how to pick the one you want to look at. Well, since you mentioned a spaceship on the way to Jupiter, let me read you this first one because it kind of bounces right off what you just said. All right, let's do it, yeah. All right, I'm just going to read it off the sheet, okay?

Absolutely. You just tell it like a story. I shut up and listen, and then we'll talk about it. All right, here it is. I was with dad. He hijacked a space station and we were above the earth. I threw a cardboard box out of the waist shoot and he got mad at me. I thought the authorities were going to shoot us down,

but somehow we landed on a little pilot and I managed to escape on foot. Okay. I just finished writing threw a cardboard box out of the waist shoot. Dad got mad at me. If you could pick it up there and tell me that last little bit again, I threw a cardboard box out, dad got mad at me. I thought you thought we were going to get arrested? I threw a cardboard box out of the waist shoot, and he, my dad, got mad at me.

I thought the authorities were going to shoot us down, but somehow we landed on autopilot, and I managed to escape on foot. Okay. All right. I'm such a slow writer there. That is, that is fantastic. That is enough of a section of a dream to do something with. And you guys are going to have to move.

So I can so I can read my notes here at the same time. So when you think back on this dream, do you have enough recall of it to see the environment you were in? I mean, what, uh, you were in the, you were in a cockpit, uh, of a small thing. You were on a large, like, what's the nature of the space station itself? Um, you know, I don't remember so much of the detail, really as much as the emotion. It's weird with me because the details of it are just the scene.

You know what I mean? But it's the emotion in it that really is the thing that I take most away from it. And then in that dream, it was, you know, my father and I were, you know, goofing around. And, you know, I did something that was a little over the top and he got mad at me for it. But somehow we got out of it and it all worked out in the end. then and that was really the takeaway of it, you know, in the abstract for for me. Gotcha. For sure.

Do you happen to know if, or have you ever heard of the Myers-Briggs personality types? No. I believe I am an I-N-T-J and it stands for like intuitive, perceiving, thinking, judging. I think that's what I-N-T-J? What was the N? Intuitive. Because N doesn't actually stand for N. it's something else so that because they already had the same word or a letter letter of the

thing but um so there's a there's a thinking feeling is one uh dimension axis something like that's its own category and you so instead of so some people are i n f j versus i n t j now i've never brought this up before and i'm not a big you know some people say oh that's just a a, what do they call it? It's, uh, oh, that's just a, uh, horoscope for men, this, this, this whole Myers-Briggs thing. But it, but it does speak to how we process things. And so for, for me, I would analyze something thinking on side of things to determine what, um, what it is. And for the, the person who is my opposite would say, well, I, how does this make me feel? If it makes me feel bad, I don't want to be

involved in it. If it makes me feel good, then I'm attracted to it that way. And then we still use our rational mind to say, well, I might be attracted to some things that might make me feel good. But, hey, it might not be good for me. Someone is going to, you know, we're not, we're not purely creatures of, you know, Vulcan logic or, or out of control emotion. You know, it's just, just more of a tendency of how we, how we approach things and what motive, what motivates us. So I wondered if you happen to know your type. Most people don't.

And that's, we're not going to, we're not going to waste too much time on it. But that is a good landmark or, what do they call it, a key, a key on a map. You know, it's like when these dots, these, these plot points are relevant to you mostly because there's an emotion attached to them. And that's not uncommon in dreams. But, but again, it's personal to the individual. So the first thing is you're in space on a space station. and you're with your dad.

Now, counterfactuals, you are not on the earth. You are not in a tank and you are not alone. Those kind of things. So there's each of those elements. Like there's a reason your brain chose to set up the scenario this way. A good thing to do might be to ask if you have thoughts associated with the idea of space station. What does it mean to be in space on a space station? Why might that have come to your mind as a setting that says something about the broader question you're looking at or addressing?

Do you have any thoughts on when you think Space Station what comes to mind? Well, I mean, it could touch base on a lot of things. And none of this is, you know, based on anything I would call fact. But my father was an engineer for IBM. So there's a real technical guy. Okay. He started off as a mechanic with his own shops and then went back to college and became an engineer and wound up working for IBM until he retired. And so he was really a guy, you know, and but he was also, and this is a whacked side of it, but, you know, he was always, you know, into, I guess, space because in 1977 when Star Wars came out, right?

You know, my father was an up-and-coming engineer for IBM. He was going to work every day with a suit and tie on as opposed to, you know, only just a few years earlier being a mechanic. And he was just, he was poised. He was anticipating the way that the world was going to embrace computers. And he was, he was just so enthused by it. And, you know, but in an early age, I mean, you know, when he started working for IBM, I was very young. So the time Star Wars came out, I think I was like 10. you know so a 10-year-old's take on this is like

yeah okay that's cool whatever man going outside of playing with my friends you know but he was just so interesting he had these little name tags and they would say like droid technician and he would go to work you know IBM and he was doing his thing and he had a name tag on it's a droid technician

so he was really into that I think some of that is absolutely oh yeah yeah no and that's so I say what what do you what what do you think of? What thoughts or feelings are associated with Space Station?

And I just zoop. And you talk for like three minutes about your dad. And no, and that's exactly how these things work in the dream. So that one location to set it there. You didn't set it in his office at IBM where he actually worked. You could have. That could have been a representation.

But this is this is taking him and what motivated him and inspired him, what made him enthusiastic when he dedicated his life to and raising it up to that level of, you know, this is where it was all going. This is, this is everything my, my father helped make possible what he aspired to. I'm in a space station.

And not only that, I'm with him in this space station. And so there's, um, the question or consideration packed into this dream is going to have something to do with that. And that's just literally the first iconic image of the dream is I'm on a space station. Okay, now it means all these things.

And yeah, yeah. So it's, it's his accomplishments, his life's work. It's his enthusiasm and motivation. You're looking at that from that angle. And then we have the drama unfold, so to speak. Where, do you remember a scene change for, and he's going to. sit right on my notes. Of course he is. Every time.

Every time. I used to put bait boxes on the desk and sometimes they would sit at them and then sometimes no, they want to lay on the paper right in front of me. Okay. What was there, to your recollection, a scene change between the very beginning. I know I am on

a space station with my dad too. Now I'm in the place where I'm throwing the box out the shoot. Or was it, were you always in that room with the shoot and the box? And you just know, okay, this smaller setting is in the context of a larger thing that's going on. I'm with my dad on the space station. Yeah, I don't necessarily think it had anything to do with the shoot in the box other

than the fact that they were, you know, the mechanism. You know, I think that, you know, hey, look, you know, I was young. My father was, you know, a young guy at one point now I'm old. And my father's an old guy. But, you know, there were many times where, you know, as being young, you know, my father and I would do things together. And eventually, because I was young, you know, I would cross the line. But I think, you know, in the back of his mind, while he was, you know, reprimanding me or whatever, the other side of his, you know, he'd be snicker and out the other side of his mouth. Like, holy shit, I can't believe you did that.

Just that kind of stuff. You know what I mean? I think that was like a moment that had something to do with something. like that, you know, because it wasn't, it wasn't a big blowup and he wasn't terribly angry with me. He's just, he's like, oh, man, he's doing that out of the garbage shoot, you know, now what, you know? And it was a, I think you specifically said more of like a cardboard box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was about what size relative to yourself, a very small or kind of a big one? Was it empty? Was it heavy? I don't even remember. Be honest with me. I mean, it's probably,

it was probably a folded up, cut up cardboard box because I do a lot of that here. I'm in Southern California, so we got to recycle. And there's all these stuff coming to the door from Amazon. So, man, I'm outside with a racing. Slicing up boxes and making them fit. So it could have had something to do with that. This is how it works. We just talk about, now I'm also going to, as I did, ask a bunch of questions or, as I say,

rattle doorknobs that don't come open. Perfectly fine. That's how we get. We started eliminating, it was a process of elimination on this kind of things. But it's very interesting that brought out. So your current life now has a lot of. dealing with the need to dispose of delivery packages in a way. And the context of it, so he wasn't mad at you.

He wasn't like, this is, you know, I'm going to disown you. You're no son of mine. What's not that's not? No, absolutely not. It's not that level. Then I do also what I call counterfactuals. What is it not? What is narrow down to what it is?

Then again, you're on, so you're on this space station that ostensibly, we could say he built or his aspiration made possible in a way. So it's in that sense, it's like he's the master of that domain. You're within his specialty in that area. Go ahead. I don't know so much about that because him and I hijacked the space station. That's right. No, that's what I didn't write down. It was hijacked. Jeez. I do I did write it down. I forgot. Any idea of how that. Okay, that's fantastic. Thank you for bringing that back. Always correct me. Uh, you hijacked it. Any idea who from or what it was originally purposed for?

Any of that coming, coming to you? I have no idea. I just, we were in it and I, I don't even think it was explained. I just, I just remember knowing that,

you know, yeah. Just what we did. You're like, holy shit, here we are, you know what I mean? Yeah.

And then the dream's kind of going where it goes. Oh, yeah. Well, I think that's, you know, none of these elements are unimportant. So there's a,

there is kind of a thing. your father never ended up actually working on a space station. Like in like physically there or even designing one. He wasn't a part of that process. Even though he might, you can imagine he might have wanted to be. He might be that would be a little, you know,

a pin on his lapel. He would be proud of that. So there's a, what does it mean that something is, is hijacked? It's like you're, you know, we think of hijacking planes and we think,

well, whatever, terrorist and they're, you know, Yeah, yeah, take this play to Cuba, that kind of a thing. That's the old school style before the towers. But hijacking kind of means it means to take something that was defined for one purpose and put it to another use, perhaps. But also, it's a sign or a descriptor for being in a place that isn't yours.

Sometimes on a place you're not supposed to be, but not necessarily. It's more like this belongs to someone else. and now we're occupying it. So there's something, I don't know if any of that description is bringing anything up. There's something there. I'm shining my little narrow flashlight beam around in the dark here,

looking for some landmark to tell us, maybe we put a pin in that and leave it alone. It's meaningful that you're in a place that is specifically, you know, that you know has been repurposed without the permission of the people. people created it. And there was something about performing a normal and even necessary function of processing

garbage, sorting through things you don't need to get rid of stuff you don't need. There's something about executing that process that then drew the attention of the authorities. It alerted external forces to the idea that you were not supposed to be there. And then your dad is saying, hey, that's a mistake. And he's not yelling at you, as you were saying, he's not, you know, beating the hell out of your disowning you. And he might have even been doing it with a smirk of like, oh, here we go again. You're getting into trouble.

Don't do that. You know, boys will be boys, but hey, this is a hassle type of thing. I don't know if I phrase it like all of that if anything comes to mind. Yeah. What do you think? What my father, it's, you know, without getting into the, you know, know, a whole relationship of it. There's, my father was always, he always liked to have fun, you know what I mean?

And, you know, more so than a lot of the other parents that were, you know, raising their kids in that time that I was growing up. You know, my father would like to do stuff, you know, he'd like to go camping and we would take dune buggies with us, you know what I mean? We would just do all the kinds of things that, you know, a lot of kids didn't get a chance to do. and the old man wasn't against taking chances. You know what I mean?

And that's, I mean, that's, that's part of one of the reasons I am the way that I am. You know, I'm different than him in many ways, but some of those ways I'm not so different. And, you know, I enjoy taking chances. I enjoy seeing if I can make it happen. You know what I mean? I enjoy jumping into the water and seeing if I can swim. You know what I mean? And, you know, he's at the tail end of his life.

life now. But that's a part of me that when I look back at him and I remember him through his years, it's one of the better times that I go to because he was just, you know, he was up for almost anything, you know, as long as it was going to be a good time and, you know what I mean, and you can pull it off and not get killed, you know? Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. So there's, what I was writing down there, too, is hijing shenanigans. I don't know, that that came to my mind with the idea of maybe this seems like a harmless thing. I mean, you didn't imagine yourself doing anything to the space station or using it for any nefarious purpose. But it's exactly as you're describing here, it's a little bit of an experience of maybe we're getting into some trouble.

It's not too much. We're not, you know, we're not out to hurt anybody and we're not going to let it get out of control. But let's take this chance. Let's go, let's go on the spaceship. Let's go, let's go check this out. Let's go do something adventurous. and fun. And then there's that connection to,

maybe it's not a connection. Maybe it's a disconnect. Maybe what he was more upset about is that here you are in this adventure of a lifetime. We're on a damn hijack space station and you're sorting garbage. And not only that, you're doing something unnecessary to the primary goal of just having a good time, just enjoy this hijacked space station.

We're not, we don't mean no harm. We're not supposed to be here, but we're going to do it anyway because why the hell not? And then what's going to get you caught is this obsession with not obsession. That's maybe it's the wrong word, but finding yourself naturally inclined to sorting cardboard and making sure the garbage, the recycling gets sorted and put out properly. So there's a, am I going somewhere that makes sense to you, this disconnect between having fun and taking care of business?

A funny thing about these dreams. And one of the reasons that I write them down. as often as I can is because I mean to me they they really don't make any sense you know I mean I mean there's there's a common connection you know what I mean I usually know the subjects that are in the dreams of me sometimes not but you know sometimes I know the places you know I mean and I just I'm just I'm fascinated by how the human mind works and the places that it takes you know even you know even sometimes like what you're just talking to a friend or something like and out of the blue, something pops in your head that's not related to anything that you're talking about.

But it's because of some sort of trigger in that conversation that you're having that touched on something and press the button inside your heads. Absolutely. Here's this, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, our dreaming thought process, as I was saying earlier, is more of what our actual thought process is. And then what we think of as our thought process is our conscious mind observing ourselves thinking.

At the same time, it's trying to direct thinking. So there's a, there's a more authentic layer to it in the dreaming sense where it is more pure connections without direction at its own direction. But it's really weird. It's like a domino. It's almost a, one domino hits another. And we, in our, in our conscious waking. state, we can stop, we can stop the dominoes from falling. We can pull one out and say, no, no, we're going this way. We're going to do it. But when, uh, but it's more automatic and

unfiltered is, is a lot of what I'm talking about with dreams. So you've got this scenario going on here where, um, even though something you did screwed up the mission in a way, it, it alerted the authorities that you were in someplace you shouldn't be. And you thought the consequences were going to be severe. They were going to shoot us down. We're going to die. This whole station's coming down. But somehow you managed to land.

So it's a space station that could land. Yeah. Well, why not? I mean, uh, maybe it is. Maybe it was a, maybe a space station could be shaped like a, any idea of the shape of it. No,

no, that's okay. That's okay. I just, I just remember being in it. And like I said, a lot of my dreams like, I don't remember a lot of details. I just remember the feelings of it.

Broad strokes. Maybe I should be asking you about that more often. It would feel to be inside of a space station. You know, it's a lot of technical stuff, you know, a lot of light switches. I would imagine very weird tasting air because they're processing. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, lack of gravity unless it was artificial. These are a lot of details I didn't get into asking you of like, were you floating?

Was it like you were walking? and around. Most people think of like Star Trek style where yeah, they're in space, but they got artificial gravity. So we don't have to try and film everyone floating around all the time, kind of a thing. So yeah, so that process then it went to, you know, you were discovered, but the, the catastrophic effect that you were concerned could be the worst possible outcome. We get shot down. Turns out, no, we just had to land it and then we got away. And at some point in the story, it seemed like your dad disappeared. You were there with him and he was there to scold you about the trash shoot, but then the landing and the escape, he's not mentioned in the rest of that.

Was he absent from the end of the dream or you actually did escape with him? No, you know, I don't even remember that end of it. I think I went up getting away on my own. So I'm not really sure, you know, what happened to him. Yeah. But that feeling of like, oh okay I didn't get caught or ah I got away with it or whatever that you know what I mean that that that relief of uh absolutely lived a fight enough a day kind of thing so what what uh what I try to do is I try to then kind of compose a narrative of like what is happening here so you've got you got you got this story you're telling yourself or a scenario you're you're imagining and a lot of we do this all the time when we're awake too we do thought experiments what if I was in a

particular situation, how would I respond? Or what if I was confronted with a specific problem? How would I solve it? Um, so it seems like you're thinking of your dad and what motivated him and what caused, in a way, what caused his success was his passion for this type of thing. And the ultimate culmination of that would have been that he was, that he was on a space station representing the, in a way, the highest points. Dreams love puns. So the pinnacle It's not just a mountain top, it's a space station. It's like it's higher than the highest mountain. You've made it all the way up.

And some behavior of yours deviates from his mission in a specific way. And that causes the experience to end or takes you away from that. To the point where you have to bring the space station back down to Earth in order to get away. because the alternative consequence was, you know, maybe having to blown up. You had to escape somehow, escape the serious negative consequence. So my next question you would be related to,

you know, when about did this dream occur? Are we talking months ago, years ago? What do you think? This is probably a year ago, somewhere thereabouts. It was, like I take a lot of notes in my act, right?

And I usually name the dreams, you know, dream and then the date. So this, I forgot to look at the date of this particular one, but I remember scrolling through a bunch before I saw it. So it's got to be probably about a year or so on, somewhere in that ballpark. Fair enough.

And then the purpose of asking when is now that we've detailed the experience, you know, or expanded, expounded on the experience. Teased it apart a little bit to look at some of the components and what the overall flow is. Were you going through anything at the time that would cause you to reflect on your career, your life goals, your motivations? What was happening about a year ago that might have inspired this dream now that we're looking at it in that way? Any gut connection pop up? I mean, I don't know of anything in particular.

you know, the last couple of, the last two years or so, well, I got to go back a little waves now. Maybe the last, about seven years ago, my father had a heart attack, right? And he survived it. But, you know, they had to do a contumple bypass on him. There was this whole big to do. He's older, so not really a lot of people went to see him when he was in the hospital. I was really the only consistent face, you know.

And the doctors kind of, you know, gave me the whole, guess what? Here's what we're doing. And, you know, we're kind of 50-50 on the success. It might work out. It might not. So, you know, before we do this, maybe if you have anything to say, you know, they want to get that done. And that kind of started this whole thing.

Like, holy shit, you know, my whole life gets up to here. And this is, you know, this is where he's going to depart. And it was a, you know, a reflection. kind of thing on me. And, uh, but then he survived it, which I was like, that's so him. You know what I mean? Yeah. As if I should have had any doubt, you know, and, uh, so it was just this thing.

It was like, I was kind of scratching my head. Like, were you really thinking there would be another outcome, you know? Yeah. Fair enough. And some people really do. That's why we look at some folks when we say, man, they've lived the charmed life. It's like, how did they, how did they roll the dice that many times? it always came up in their favor.

Like, what is even happening here? Some people have that, what is it? We do statistics or, what do they call stats in, in Dungeons and Dragons. And we look at, you want to be strong, you want to be flexible, good dexterity, you want good stamina and charisma and all these things. But a lot of us don't realize luck. Luck is a pretty big one.

So lately I've been thinking, like, if I ever get into a game where there's luck, I'm putting everything in the luck and I want to see what happens. No strength, no stamp, no charisma, no, no, no skills. Just luck. Well, how does this game play out? And I think life is actually like that a lot. Just the idea of like, why did, you know, why did I do something? And my friend did the exact same thing, but I got in trouble for it.

And he didn't. It's just luck of the draw that particular instance. Not even at the same time, not like we were together doing the thing, but we did the same kind of thing. And he got away with it and I didn't. So you look, and then a lot of people get resentful about that too. Um, but of course, when it, it's your father beating the odds to stay alive, which is not resentful about that.

Like, but then also to reflect on it and to say, wow, this is, this is pretty part of the course for him. He just, he just tends to things tend to go his way. He's had a good life. Um, so that, that was more than a year ago. You were talking about with your dad, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, about a year ago, that's where I was going with that.

Yes. That's all right. about a year ago, my brother and I started kind of talking about, you know, where dad's at now and what's happening, because he's, he's in the throes of, like, early onset of dementia. He's got some things where he was making some really bad decisions and relationship decisions. He had married again and he was married to my stepmother.

And the whole thing was going south and hurried. And it was another side of that. too, she was just stealing from him blatantly, but there wasn't really anything my brother and I could do about it. You know what I mean? It was just a horror show of stuff. And but you know, if you talk to him, if you met him on the street, you would say,

wow, this is a bright, lucid guy, this, you know, because he shows very well. But behind that, you know, the decision making process is beginning the degree. I mean, fast forward, you know, a few months ago, my brother and I wound up putting him in an assisted care facility because he needs that. But this was really the first big, something's not right here, and we're going to have to talk this through and figure out where we're going with this,

you know. Gotcha. Well, it is, it is interesting that discussing this dream has brought us to that point of what was happening at the time. I don't know that we've got a direct one-to-one connection. Something stand out a little more, but there's definitely something, I mean, the fact that it's your father in there and not your brother on the spaceship. That, you know, so it means it is directly related to him.

So it's something, something along the lines of you reflecting on him, his life, how he's lived it, his goals and aspirations, what brought him to success. And you've placed yourself in there, taking care of business in a way that's just very practical and mundane. I have to throw out cardboard. you know that's that's iconic of taking care of business it's like it's something just has to be done um you know it could have been anything it could have been you know i was writing i was paying the bills i was walking the dog you know um and that that ends up in a way ruining the good time and that's that's true that there's a there's a practical side of things where it's like you just

can't you can't party and play all the time eventually you guys you're You got to wake up the next day and have a hangover. It's just going to happen. And you got to, you know, it's a, you can party like there's no tomorrow until tomorrow gets here. And then you're going to feel it and you got to pick up the pieces. So there's probably something along those lines going on. And in a way, it does, you know, to think of practical concerns, I got to, I got to stop drinking now and start pounding water because in a couple hours I got to drive everybody home. I don't need to be sober.

There's a, there's a taking care of business that literally ends your good times. You can't just party with wild abandon. You've got to take care of business. That kind of thing. So there's, and the, you know, the successfully landing it and escaping, meaning, you know, the consequence that could have attended has been successfully avoided as well. It's like it's not like you can just avoid taking care of business, but you also don't want to have that ruin something else.

Yeah, and it's, it's probably not directly related to the conversation you were having with your brother necessarily just because he wasn't in the dream at all. There's no thought of him at all. This is more about, I think, you're about more about your relationship with your father and how you view him and yourself in relation to him and your life in comparison to his or to his way of doing things, if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, my father, my brother and I, at least the guys of the chance. family. You know, we all have similarities because we're all from similar genes, but we all have differences too, you know. And that's, I guess that's family. You know, I mean, there were times in life where, you know, all of us were together and, you know, everything's firing on all late. We're just having a good time. And there's, you know, other family times where maybe not so much, you know what I mean? And that's, I think that's just, it's not really unique. I think everybody has that in some capacity if they, you know, have siblings and parents and things like that.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, and there's also definitely something in there about your, I mean, dreams are always about us, even when we're not even in them, and they're not, and they're completely about other people or just scenery we're observing. It's always about us trying to understand some experience or process some question that we don't have an answer to or that we're not sure. how we feel about a particular kind of thing. Yeah, that's where I was going with that.

So, yeah, I mean, sometimes that's as close as we can get is we, we find an angle to look at it and describe the pieces in ways that make sense to you or the dreamer. And then get as close as we can to saying, here's, we may not have an answer. We may not have a story that like nails it, but here's a direction to continue. you thinking along that, you know, there's a reason this dream stuck with you, that you looked at it and said, yeah, maybe I should talk about that one. That one seems most interesting to me. Or, you know, however, however, we came to that place, that place together. So I would say this one probably does, I think, I would say if you continue thinking about it over the next, you know, weeks or months or or something like that, it'll probably start to become clearer to you what this was fully about.

I think there's possibly maybe elements of it you're not it's weird to say not ready to address but that can't become any clearer at the moment that they have to become clearer later. It's a weird way to say that too

but there's just, you know, it's aligning of the stars or so to speak. You've got to get to a certain point to you got to get over the hill before you can see what's on the other side, that kind of a thing. You'll get there and you'll see it. Yeah, I was going to say something else. I was rambling a little bit there because it was something else that came to mind and I didn't uh I'm not remembering it no I think I got nothing well are there um any elements of it that you would want to take a closer look at or uh you

you feel like we've got we've done as well as we can with the material and the yeah yeah like and again it's you know with me like I have this not to change the topic but I'll tell you there's recurring dream might have sure let's do that I had this since I was a little kid. And probably, like, since I was six or seven. And I have it maybe once a year or so now, but it's still there. It pops up every once in a while. And I grew up in this little town where, like, back when I was a kid, that age,

we still had, like, a milk man. Like, the milk would come and we'd put on the porch, you know, in the, you know, the icebox thing that was out there. And we had, like, a chip guy that would come. We would deliver potato chips and pretzels and stuff like that. that would show up at the house, you know, regularly. And another regular thing that would happen is the garbage truck would come, right? And the garbage truck would come out front.

And my chore when I was younger was to bring the garbage cans out to the street, right? And I just remember this dream has me bringing the can out to the street, but I get out by the mailbox and I trip and I fall into the street. And the truck's coming from down the street. And I can hear it stopping at each of the individual house. But once I fall to the street, I'm parallel. I can't move. My limbs feel like they're, you know,

100 pounds apiece. And I'm trying to get out of the street to get back on the curb, to crawl back onto the grass so the truck doesn't run me over. And it gets to the point where it goes from house to house to house. I'm struggling to get out of the road. And it gets right up on top of me. And as it just gets on top of me, I somehow managed to roll out of the web.

And, man, I've been having that dream for 50 years. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a very, I mean, did you remember yourself being a little frightened of those large, loud machines when you were young? Maybe. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know, like a lot of other kids in the neighborhood, too, I thought it was the coolest job in the world. Like, yeah, those guys get to hang on the back of the garbage stuff.

Right? And they drive around, but that looks like it's so cool, you know. Oh, yeah. I saw a video recently, which was a no-look shot of a garbage man. he just threw the giant bag over his shoulder right in there. I'm like, are you kid? That's amazing. You know, that was pretty cool. Well, yeah, that's the first thing that occurred to my mind is, you know, let's say,

depending on your age, um, if you're relatively small and it's a big, there's a, there's an experience we have as humans where we are simultaneously fascinated by and terrified by the same thing at the same time. And part of the reason we're fascinated by it is because it's terrifying. And part of the reason we are terrified by it can also be that fascination of like, I'm drawn to. this thing that could kill me.

And then that all right in the face, sorry, girl, that translates to many other things in our life. Situations we've encountered, you know, we're drawn to do things to push ourselves maybe beyond limit to have our grasp, exceed our reach in a way. In situations where failure is death, literally, or failure is metaphorical death of like, well, if I fail, I got to leave this job. I can't do the job. I really wanted to.

So it translates into a lot of different things. So you've got a job that you're being, you've been tasked with confronting this beast, this fascinating, terrifying creature in the form of the, form of the truck. And what happens is you're executing the task and you fail in a way that renders you vulnerable and puts you in the path of destruction.

That this, you've crossed that line from, I'm fascinated but safe. and terrified to I'm actually under threat. And then this is also of the kind of dreams that are very similar. Boogieman dreams where I'm about to be harmed or I'm being chased by something. There's a monster of some kind and I am unable to move. I can't move fast enough. My limbs have no strength.

That's very, very common type of dream. So in a own category of typical dream. But rather than, And I fully expected you to say, and just as it was about to run me over, I woke up. Very common. But for you, you actually managed to roll out of the way. You do save yourself at the last minute. And somehow that experience has become crystallized so that whenever you experience something similar, that dream comes back to remind you, oh, yeah, I'm having this experience again.

There's something that may be I'm drawn to, but it scares me or some task I have to do that has an inherent risk to it. It might put me in a vulnerable position. I would look in that direction. I don't know if anything comes to mind immediately or just general advice to look in that direction the next time the dream comes back and say, what am I going through? What am I, what am I experiencing that kind of fits that idea? I don't know. I don't know if you have any thoughts. No. I mean, again, that's like that's a weird dream for me because it's the only recurring dream I have. I don't have any other recurring dreams. You know, but that one, it's, just so, it's like in the dream, I'm a little kid again. I'm not my age. Yeah. Yeah. In my pajamas.

You know what I mean? And I'm just going through it. And it happens, you know, it happens so many times over the course of my life that when I'm in the dream, I recognize it for the dream. I'm like, oh, it's this dream again. I'm like, but somehow I'm caught up in it and I, you know, I can't escape except by going through it the way that it always. winds up going through it. And I mean, to me, that's the most fascinating part about it is it just, it happens so identically to the same way it happened the time before

and the time before and the time before. And now, you know, I'm actually conscious of it happening. I'm still fearful of death. You know, I'm still afraid of the machine. It's not like I'm in the dream going, well, I know how this ends. I'm not going to worry about anything. It's not that it's, it's,

It's all the anxiety and all the, you know, the angst about it is identical. And when I wake up from now, I'm just like, geez, man. You know, I'm not having to have been happy. It's a little kid. For sure. That fascinates me right there. Oh, no, no, definitely. Me too.

And what I've found in my experience is that, as I said, these things get crystallized so that it becomes an iconic representation of the other thing, of a category of things. So what you'll probably find is that, as I was saying, the next time this dream comes back, there's something going on in your life where you're, we're having a similar circumstance metaphorically, situationally. And that from training and reading and specifically from my practice in here, I've spoken to people that when we've gotten close to a good understanding that provides, you know, an answer, a solution to the kind of experience you're having. The next instance of that dream might actually be different. It might actually be, uh, you were going to lose your balance and fall into the street as usual, but you caught yourself this time. You put your hand on the mailbox and you steadied yourself. And now there's no fear. Now you're actually able to step back and go, whoa. So understanding

what triggers the dream to reoccur can change the nature that either it stops entirely or changes the nature of the dream itself because there's um why do these things come back uh very often they come back because we haven't fully processed the lesson that we haven't resolved the question in our own mind as to what am i experiencing and why or how do i how do i handle this particular kind of experience or how do i feel about it what do i want out of this experience um do i want to be, do I want to stop being fascinated by terrifying things? Do I want to stop having the responsibility to approach dangerous things? Because I have a job to do. Do I want to handle the responsibility better in a way that I don't trip and put myself at risk? I mean,

there's so many different layers, points of turning points in the, in the experience that could change the next time you have that dream because now it's been more consciously analyzed. It's been more thoroughly thought through. And you can probably if it comes back, I'm going to, I'm going to guess you're going to have a different experience of it. Who knows? I'd love to hear. I can just be talking pure theory and it doesn't apply to you for reasons I don't understand yet. I'm new to being a wizard. I mean, I still need to get a thousand, a thousand dream interpretations under my belt. And then I will actually be a real wizard. But right now I'm just in training. But anyway, that's, uh, did you have more dreams you want to talk about?

Did you want to talk about, uh, anything else in particular? You know, it's, it's just like a, a pulpery. I mean, I don't know if there's anything, you know, significant in these. And we don't, and we don't have to. I usually do one per episode, but, uh, we're, we're just talking. So, I mean, I don't want you. I don't want to cheat you out of a full experience here. I mean, we've talked long enough, too.

It's that we can stop any time, but, uh, you know, I. I wouldn't even think of it as a cheat, because I'd be honest with you, talking about these and getting your perspective on it is really a, it's a cool kind of thing because I don't walk through the world saying, hey, guess what I dreamed last night? I might say something like that to my wife.

Like, oh my God, baby, I just fucked up dream, you know? And, you know, tell her about it. But, I mean, that's really as far as it goes, you know. but to kind of think them through and look a little deeper into it you know whether it hits the mark or it doesn't hit the market it's a very interesting thing to do

and it's an eye-opening perspective on it and that's yeah again it's I didn't expect this with the show and I'm appreciative for that it's nice I'm enjoying the conversation it really is me too yeah and these dreams are all fascinating to me. I'm like, oh, we got a mystery here. We got a puzzle. I like to think of

myself as a Dr. House type who's less of an asshole and not as addicted to as many strong narcotics. I love that guy. That was one of the great shows. No, no, I love this too. And the idea of helping someone kind of see things that maybe they couldn't quite, it's hard to step outside of our own head and look at the back of our own head from a third. person perspective and watch ourselves do things in the world almost need a mirror but sometimes that mirror is a person and that's all i'm doing is throwing it up and saying hey do you see what i see and very often yeah we come up with something very interesting some new way of looking at ourselves that just never occurred to us before no i did this weird thing this going back like probably

like 15 years ago i uh that dream happens in in front of this house that my parents had bought it was their second house that they had bought and it was it was brand new it was small it was in a you know a small town it was wasn't some big expensive house but it was brand new and that was a big thing for them you know they're like what a brand new house you know and um you know that dream has been happening to me since forever right and uh i was on my motorcycle one day and i was out for a ride and this town was probably 30 or so miles from where i was living at the time but I was just out and about, and I realized at some point, I'm like, I'm not really far from the old house. Let me take a swing by and, you know, just see what the neighborhood looks like, you know.

And it was a coldestack, a really long cul-de-sac down by this lake. And I took the bike down there and there was a for-sale sign in front of the house. It was for sale, but also they were having an open house. Oh, wow. I'm like, no. I'm like, I got to do this, right? So I roll up in front of the house on my bike, park my bike, and I go. inside and I do the open house thing, you know, meet the realtor. How are you doing?

And it was so weird for me because a lot of the things in the house were different because my parents had sold this place in 77 and then we moved to Ramsey after that. But a lot of the things were the same. Like it was the 70s and we had this like orange for mica countertop. Oh yeah. It was either orange or avocado green, right? Yeah. going to the avocado green now that it was like there was like a facia

on the stove it was a I can't remember but that facia was like an avocado green too just this whole I walked in there I was like wow

like that kind of hit home right off the bat I was like that is exactly how it was I I can't believe somebody's own this place for 30 years and they haven't you know change anything

it didn't change the countertime But, you know what I mean? So it was just a... That's amazing. I wouldn't be able to resist telling, you know, the realtor or whatever. I used to live here when I was a kid. This is crazy. I would be, I would be telling that story.

Now, that made me want to go back to a house. I lived at when I was like four or five years old. And I could still take you there in my head. I can see the road and the house. And I just want to go there and knock on the door. Like, hey, can I come in and look around? I'm not going to do that. But it makes me want to just to go, I remember this place.

I remember being here. so weird so weird I love that oh weird men of a certain age getting old looking back I remember when we're such cliches that's fantastic and nothing wrong with cliches sometimes being a cliche is the most honest and authentic thing you can be because it's just it's cliche for a reason this is what human go through repeatedly enough enough that it's become a pattern and if you recognize it you got to own it that's oh for sure that's the that's the whole key the life right there is just owning it. You know what I mean?

Whatever it is you do, whoever it is you are, you know, you've got to be comfortable in your skin and, you know, this is, this is what you get. Absolutely. Well, that's probably a good place to wrap it up. If you feel good, we got the best we can do with the analysis. I, like I said, again, I appreciate you have me on and I appreciate this perspective. and, you know, the way I live my life is, you know, we all have to work. We all have to make money, but I, I'm always constantly trying to improve this person that I am.

And sometimes it's incremental and sometimes it's in big chunks, but I take them where I can get them. And I, this conversation here helped improve me a little bit. So I thank you for having me all. Very nice. Well, that is always my goal is, uh, I open myself to what I think of as the spirit of, as the spirit of being beneficial to the person I'm talking to. I want to give you something useful, interesting, something you didn't have before. Leave you leave you as a person better off for having this conversation.

I always appreciate it when many guests volunteer that. They said, this was great. I learned stuff and I enjoyed the process. Like, I don't get any better than that. That's an episode. That's how we do it. So, well, let me do this then. Let's tell the audience, this has been our guest, Dreamer Hollywood Capone out of Orange

County, SoCal. He's an author and a musician, all around normal guy, as you can tell. We're just a couple of normal guys here. You can find him on Instagram at Hollywood Compone. He's also got a link tree and a book, The Ashes. You can see it there on his guitar. All links in the description, of course. For my part, would you kindly like, share and subscribe? Always need more volunteer dreamers. I do video games Monday through Friday 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific Time. new one coming up tonight, although this episode will air on a Saturday, so it's not actually tonight. We're recording this on a month. Forget I said anything. I'm not going to cut that out. We're leaving it.

We're doing it live. This episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 5, Oneurochronology of Volume 3. It's a bunch of confusing numbers, but you can find all this and more at Benjamin the dreamwizard.com. Click on the books tab. Scroll down to the volume. You want to purchase, follow the Amazon link. Very easy there.

that and head on over to Benjamin the Dream Wizard. Dot locals.com where you can become a member. It's free to join attached to my Rumble account, and that is enough. Mr. Capone or Hollywood, thank you for being here. I appreciate your time.

Man, I really appreciate being on, and thanks again for having me, and I'll see you on the other side. And everybody out there, I've got to get the cat. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.