Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 193: Rise Above The Script

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Albert Bramante ~ https://albertbramante.com/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of dreamscapes. Today's guest dreamer is Albert Bramante from Union County, New Jersey. He is a talent agent, a psychology PhD college professor and author of Rise Above the script, confronting self-doubt and mastering self-sabotage for performing artists. So we're going to get into all that and more. You can find him at Albertbramante.com, link in the description, of course. For my part, would you kindly like, share, and subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers.

I do video game streams Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific most days of the week. This episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 8, the literature and curiosity of dreams part one, part of a two volume set out of 1865 by Frank Seafield, collecting various curious tales of sleep and dreams, as well as references to dreams in classic. literature. It's great, great stuff. Of course, you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable MP3 versions of ThisBerry podcast. So you may take the Wizard with you, wherever you wander with or without Wi-Fi. I love alliteration. And of course, last but not least, if you'd head on over to Benjamin the Dream Wizard.

Dot locals.com. It's free to join attached to my Rumble account. One of the best ways to reach out to me if you have a dream to share. You don't have to be an author or a PhD professor. I'll talk to anybody. So that is enough out of me. Albert, thank you for being here. Appreciate your time.

Thank you for having, Benjamin. I'm really happy to be here. Good deal again. And I'm happy to have the opportunity to pick your brain as well. But we'll get to the, we'll kind of transition into the dream talk maybe in a minute, unless you wanted to start somewhere. I figured we'd start with your book and you can tell me a little bit about why you wrote it or what's what the purpose of it is, that kind of thing.

Sure, I'll go that briefly. So I work with actors. I've been doing this for about 21 years. And when I first started working with actors, I kept running into an issue where they were telling me how much you wanted to work. And one hand, and the other hand, their actions were telling me another story. They were coming with excuses. They would sometimes be late to auditions, no show on auditions.

And it's something I really couldn't understand in the beginning. You know, I couldn't really wrap my head around why there was such a, strong disconnect from their words versus their actions. So when I was going from my PhD, we had to do something called dissertation, which is like the culmination of, it's like a full one to two years worth a full time work. It's like writing a book in a sense, it's only a book. So for my dissertation, we had to solve, you know, our instruction before to, to try to solve a real world problem.

And my real world problem is why were these actors self-sabotaging? my, you know, Dissufficient Commission, the University loved it. So I went ahead and did that. And then several years later, I decided, you know, why don't I turn this into a readable book? Oh, yeah. You already did most of the work. You just got to kind of,

you know, finish, finish it. Although, although for writers, they say, you know, the writing or the success of writing is in the editing afterwards. What would you just on to the paper? Then you got to make it make sense. Yeah. And for a while, I sat and I did, you know, two hours a day, like in 2023, I sat down and, you know, disciplined myself two hours a day of writing. And then when it was done about two months later, I said, you know, I'm going to go through editing.

And I went through two, I went through two rounds of editors editing with two different editors, just to kind of like really give it the best. So, you know, that was, that took a lot of time. And I do, I'm a big proponent. I think that editing is very important. Absolutely. I mean, that's basically what I do with my books. You know, none of these are original yet. I'm taking older works.

And actually, just to throw this out there in terms of turning a PhD dissertation into a book, that's, I believe it's ABC Book 14 is Dreams in Homer and Greek Tragedy. And it is the PhD or, you know, profess professorial submission back in the 1800s, I think, of a guy who was studying Greek literature to find references to sleep and dreams. tease them out, you know, like the Greeks had, what, eight words for love? Well, they had like five or six words for dream and what it means to dream and different types of dreams. And are we talking dream the experience or dream the Greek God? And they all capitalized and small, lowercase and used different words.

It's fascinating stuff. I did a whole lot of Greek translation for that, which I never thought I'd do. And who knows what you can do until you just kind of try. So, okay, back to you, though. Sorry, I will talk about me all the time if we don't bring me back. Did you find some common themes in actors specifically where this type of person, because of their proclivities, tendencies, personality tends to delay or self-sabotage for certain reasons that might be different than others, or is it more common human experience or both? I would say it's common both. What usually comes up and even my research has found this out was fear.

Fear was a big driver. And also lack of discipline. So if you have like the, you know, high amount of fear and low discipline, that's like the perfect storm, you know, for self-abotage in a sense. So that was the biggest thing I kind of found out in my research was there was like a link or relationship between those two things. And so, you know, I talk in my book a lot about, you know, you know, we talk about fear of failure but also there's another fear that is often

not talked about enough and that's fear of success and that is something that can be a you know something you can hold an actor back or anybody back or paralyze you if you have that fear of success

yeah that makes me I mean we commonly commonly conceptualize or refer to these things as two separate things. A fear of failure is one kind of the embarrassment or, you know, lots of stuff tied up in that. If you're a fear of success as well. But sometimes I wonder if they're two different sides of the same coin.

I don't know if you found that or if you, am I on the right track with anything? Like, I just have these ideas and I'm not sure. Yeah. Play out. It's still a fear, you know, regardless. True. And a lot of fears are heavily related. Mm-hmm.

Gotcha. Yeah. What I was writing down there while I was listening to, I got to take Bill Trump, I can remember anything. It's Swiss cheese brain, as I say. I stole that from Quantum Leap back in the day. Remember that show? Quantum Leap, Dr. Sam?

I've heard, I didn't see it, but I do remember hearing about it. I haven't watched it in a while, and it's probably hokey. And, you know, it blew my mind as a kid. And I'll go back and watch it, and it won't. The nostalgia might carry me through and it might not. But when I was younger, it was one of the best series ever. like this is theorizing he could travel within his own lifetime. Dr. Sam Beckett steps into the machine and then he got Al the hologram. Oh, like, it's so, so good. Um, well, I got that line from

that show. It's leaping through time into different people's, by his consciousness into different people's bodies. He describes himself as having Swiss cheese brand. That stuck with me for life. 30, 35 years later, 40 years later. Um, anyway, that complete tangent. Um, what I wrote down was, there's, there's kind of a process to, to dealing with these things and, you know, people out there might not know and feel free to correct me of course if i've got some step wrong i'm describing it incorrectly but first you got to figure out what is true you do the research you say okay what are people experiencing by their own self-report or by observation then you want to understand how it works what's happening so what is it how does it work then you then a critical step comes there as well as

like in therapy it's like uh the therapeutic interaction is not like other process flow charts where there's kind of a predetermined goal in the beginning. After you figure out what it is, after you figure out how it works, then you got to figure out, well, what do you want? Do you want this to change? Are you okay with it? Did you just need to understand it? And that's, that's it.

Does the process stop there? And then after that comes, okay, now what do we do? What intervention do we put on it? Do I have those seem like those are properly in order? Okay. That's, yeah, feel free. Like I said, feel, feel free to correct me. I just have these ideas and I write them now.

I'm like, I think this is how it works. Um, yeah, then the two things you highlighted there, the fear of either failure or success and poor discipline. That is a, that has got to be a killer combo. And that's, that's kind of where you know, okay, so what is true? It looks like you have a fear of failure. It looks like you have poor discipline. Now, let's look at how that instantiates itself in your life specifically. And then you can decide what do you want to do it.

Do you even want to be an actor? Maybe you don't. Maybe at this point in the process, you've got to, you go, you know, I'm not at, actually putting my heart and soul into it because I'd rather make donuts. But, but, you know, I feel like that's not enough. I feel a pressure to perform higher than that. But I just want to, it's time to make the donuts. I just want to be that guy.

And that happens. So sometimes people go into, you know, wanting to be an actor. And we do it for a couple of years and then, you know, realize that, you know, it's not for them and they change and go into, you know, go into another profession. Um, especially people who, maybe they've never really done it before and they're like, they have an idea of what it's going to be inside their head. And then they get there and they're like, this is terrible. I don't enjoy this process.

I don't really want to be doing this. Um, that doesn't surprise me at all. I thought I wanted to be an actor at one point. I thought I wanted to be a lot of things. But when I was, I was in a play just once at 17 and I was terrible. And I realized this is not for me. I can't do this well. So I took a different path.

I actually also wanted to get into, again, making it about me, sorry. I wanted to get into philosophy. I actually wanted to be a philosophy professor. I'm like, I love this,

just thinking about ideas and opening people's mind to stuff. Then I realized I hated school and academia in general. So that's why I bailed with the, you know, with the bachelor's. I'm like, that's far enough.

I can get a job and just, you know, talk to people about stuff and try and help them. and that worked out pretty well, I'd imagine, until deciding I'd rather be a, what is it, abandoned academia, embrace wizardry. That was my motto. Let's do this. Let's do this differently.

Well, I don't know if there were any other points about the book you wanted to relate or highlight or if you wanted to switch gears and maybe talk more about the psychology of dreams in that sense. I mean the book I'll say really quickly about the book is that it's so it's geared towards actors you know because in the title of performing artists anybody can benefit from it so whether you know any any profession

because we all deal with self-doubt you know that comes up a lot of actual strategy that can be universal to anybody in the book so I definitely recommend you know checking it out for sure yeah and that's so it seems like the um it's it's tough so here's uh here's a here's a thing with me is like uh

i lack motivation to exercise more i just do i don't enjoy it i don't want to be mobile i love sedentary pursuits i love talking to people i love working at my computer i got to really force myself to get out there and get moving and i just don't so that i have poor discipline in that regard um but i don't have the um concomitant co-comitant co-boise morbidity, so to speak, of the fear of fail. I've been healthier in the past and I just don't. So that's a big one, that discipline thing. So in, you know, step one, you give yourself permission to fail and to succeed.

You got to say, hey, I might not be good at this and that's okay. Yeah. But also to succeed and not feel like a pretender. Like, hey, other people tell me they like what I do, but I feel like I'm not good enough at it. That's also completely normal. Most, what, like a pretender syndrome. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a pretender or imposter syndrome. Yeah, that's right. And I would say that that's normal, you know, to feel that way, you know, occasionally that things will come up. And one of the things that you would talk about in the book, the same year is no searching of failure, only feedback. So even if you mess up, whether it's, you know, doing a presentation, going on an audition, take whatever lesson you learn and don't, you know, don't beat yourself up over it,

but learn from it. What can you do next time differently? I like that I'm actually writing that down to no such thing as failure, only feedback. That's true. Yeah. That's true. If you didn't, you know, and that's, I know, some people get pedantic and they're like, well, if you didn't do it right or if you didn't do it to a certain standard, then you failed.

It's like, I mean, fair enough, but that's not the point. That's actually some original books I want to get down to. One of them is like a wizard's guide to the aspirational aphorism. It's like, yes, there's exceptions to the rule, but this is how things work mostly. And here's how to an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Doctors are not afraid of apples like veils. Empires are afraid of crosses. That's idiotic. People dismiss these things.

No, but if you eat healthy food, you're less likely to need a doctor. And I mean, most people grasp that, but some people are just, it's mostly written for the internet crowd of today where they're looking for something to argue about it. Let me tell you what these things really mean. And some of them are a little less easy to understand, but I want to start with an easy one. I'll do an alphabetical list. I'll do 26 chapters, each one. And then for Z, it'll just be, you know, oh, it'll be the one about, um,

When you think, when you hear hooves, you think horse. You don't think zebra. That's another good one. I love these pithy phrases that are, uh, anyway, that's a, that's a thing for another. If I ever get around to writing actual books, I've got so many ideas. That's got to be another thing too. It's like people who, people like me whose brains are just, you got so many ideas and just zero follow through with 90% of them.

I'd rather just troll people on Twitter half the day and, you know, maybe, maybe mow my lawn and do a little woodworking or something. I guess like, what am I doing as a profession? Well, I do enjoy this. This is fun. Talking to people, it stimulates my brain. This is what I've chosen to do with my life. And now my latter years, like I said earlier, I've got a 807 dream interpretations to go before I become a real wizard.

And I, for me, that actually means something. I'm trying to live up to the metaphor, to the archetypal presentation. I tend to think we are, you become what you do in that way. So if you perform wizardry, genuinely, you are. a wizard, even if you can't conjure a fireball. It's, well, I kind of can. If you go to Benjamin the dream wizard.orgas.com, there's a recipe for the dream wizard's fireball cider.

A delicious beverage. So I can technically conjure to fireball. I can claim that one. Anyway, we're not talking about you. Enough. Let me get, let me get back to that. I don't know if you want to jump straight into your dream thing because we are, you know, we're short on time today.

We got maybe, maybe a half an hour left, yes, or a little more. We are. We can jump right in that. Okay. You know, I heard you if you want to follow me on social media and we'll talk further if you want to know about my book. You know, I'll be happy to. For sure. Absolutely.

We're going to plug that again at the end. And definitely check out the link in the description. Everybody out there listening. So my usual process is I shut up and listen, step one. And then you'll tell us your dream and then we'll talk about it afterwards. So I'm ready when you are. Benjamin the Dream Wizard wants to help you. Here's the veil of.

night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his dreamscapes program features real dreamers gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New dreamscapes episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks exploring the psychological principles which inform our dream experience, much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the Wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature available on Amazon, documenting the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years.

That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. Okay, where to go. So I've always, you know, as I said in the, you know, to you previously that I have vivid dreams. And a lot of, some of my dreams are on the absurd side that, you know, should, you know, that sometimes you wonder when I wake up. I'm like, did I really tell anybody about this? So maybe I should give this myself. So one particularly dream I had, which I would. wanted when I was um came you know across your podcast I had a dream where I died okay and I didn't go

to heaven I went to hell you know or what they call hell and in it there was a a another girl and we were in a dungeon locked in the dungeon it was a It was a beautiful dungeon, actually. And what came out was the devil, or what you call Lucifer or Satan, was a woman. I think she was almost like a reminder, I got the vibe of Ethiopian woman and beautiful. And not at all mean. She said, you know, I assumed it was hell because I was, she said, she said, you're not in heaven. right now.

And she said, so we started having an in-depth conversation in a dream. And in the dream, she was telling me how, telling us how she's the Bible and everybody misunderstands how. That it's not the polar opposite of heaven, but a rehabilitation center.

And that, her and whatever you want to say is God are partners not adversaries. I don't know, remember too much after that, but it was just, that was the gist of, of the dream. Okay. So slow. Okay. Got it. That's a lot.

I love that one. I love them all, honestly, but that one's truly, truly fascinating. I mean, if I were to just stop and say, okay, what resonates? with me out of that and maybe because I'm always trying to say um you know the the broader concept of um transference and counter transference what I don't want to do is insert myself into your dream and say okay if this was my dream how would I feel about it so to avoid that I have to acknowledge that maybe right off the start so what resonates with me about that is I think that's literally true I don't can you know if I were to just wax philosophical for two seconds hell isn't punishment so much as it is

absence of God, just like darkness is absence of light. So, and, and I tend to believe personally that we create our own hell. We do things in this, in this world where when we're clothed in this numbing flesh, it's like it's a buffer. It makes us feel things in this physical world, but I think it buffers us from seeing the truth. And when we get out of the flesh and we can look back and we go, oh, God, did I do that? It's like watching a video of yourself from 10 years ago and you're embarrassed and I can't believe I did that and you're regretful. So hell is what we carry with us, the regrets we carry with us. And then we have to rehab it.

We got to dissipate it. We got to. And I think even in the Christian tradition in a way, there's, there's Jesus dies on the cross. He's resurrected and he ascends. But first, before actually going to heaven, he goes to harrow hell. He goes to hell too to show us that we show us the way. You got to go through hell to get to heaven in that sense. You've got to dissipate this, the evil in your, in your heart or whatever it was to get.

So, okay, so I'm like, I just think you had a prophetic dream telling you the way the universe works. That would be one answer. That would be the initial impression that I would see, though, like, there's something here, more to this here. Because it wasn't scary. And, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not a religious person. I'm not, you know, I don't consider myself religion. But I always had, and I'm not. I don't know we're left to get into this too much here, but I always had some questions about the traditional teachings.

Mm-hmm. You know, about, you know, heaven and hell. I had a lot of questions because a lot of stuff wasn't adding up, you know, in my head. Well, you know, logically. So, but I, and maybe that was part of my projection, too, into this dream, too, was the fact that, you know, the traditional teachings weren't not adding up for me. but again and I say that for me because I don't I don't want to appear to be dogmatic or you know or pushing my beliefs down on anyone's throat but it was just for me I was having I've always had some issues with traditional doctrine like that so again that was my own way of um of confronting

you know confronting that too absolutely and that is I think one valid answer we don't have to stop there, but we could if you're satisfied. I mean, that's, I'm not recommending we do. You were going to say, I cut you off, sorry. Yeah, no, I mean, and this was not the first religious dream I, or crazy, you know, vainly grim I had about religion. Um, you know, that, that stood out for me. So, you know, and, and, you know, maybe you could even argue with the psychology that had a little bit of religious anxiety. Maybe, who knows, um, you know, because the, first time, and I don't know when I hear about this, but

I had a nightmare about religion. And it was enough to jolt me out of an when I took a nap, I jolted out of it. Oh, those are good. Those are good ones.

The bad ones are the good ones sometimes. And I also come from my psychology's background also believe that nightmares are really valuable. Oh, yeah. That's what I mean by a good one. It's like if something is really troubling you enough that it's going to express itself

in the dreams and really show you how terrifying it is to you, there's something there you probably want to have a look at. I think that's very true. Yeah. So this stream about, we haven't even got into the content. We're going to do that for sure, but just talking around it. So that was telling you my story and my perspective was also kind of to open the door a little bit to this is this is definitely every dream is personal it's not in my head it's in yours so

but to let you know where i was coming from so we can tease that out but also to say um to suggest that that's a possibility and and i think there's probably a reason why it would resonate with me similar as it as it did to you so there's that's probably a layer of it maybe or a vertical layer and there's others i don't know i need to figure out how to explain this stuff with diagrams people need to see it uh but first i need to understand it so We're going to work on that. Did you, at the time this dream was happening, have reason to be seriously contemplating

broad categories of consequences, punishment, redemption? Was there something going on related to that at the time? I'm looking for themes. Not quite, but I've always been a very deep, you know, person when it comes to like, you know, death, meaning of life. I mean, I've, you know, I even taught a college class, you know,

a couple of times on death and dying. So I think that I've always been a very, that towards a gravitation nature very deep, you know, I tend to be very deep person. So I think maybe that, I don't quite rethink anything specifically what's going on at that moment. But I've always, I have always, you know, do have, you know, questions about, you know, existential, you know, questions about, like, the unknown.

For sure. You know, what happens when, you know, you know, and I've always said, you know, I don't, again, I don't know if I believe the traditional doctrines of heaven and hell. But I kind of am more convinced that this is not it, you know, like, like when we die, there's got to be another dimension. And I'm convinced of that. what it looks like, I don't know. You know, and I don't look, we're meant to know. You know, exactly. So I just have a, you know, a really strong thing against just saying that we're,

we just go into nothingness. Yeah. I mean, that I've always thought that was possible, but it seemed unlikely. That's kind of where I'm at it. Like, you know, 60, 40 type of thing where it's probably more likely, whatever we are is energy, rhythm, vibration. and it continues to vibrate after the physical form is no longer necessary or present. Here come the cats, right?

I love it. On the paperwork. Hi, buddy. You can't have that. No, you can't let. He loves to lay on my mouse pad when I'm using it. He only wants to lay on my notepad when I'm using it. Yeah.

Come here. Come over here. Go over there. Or get up here. I don't care. Whatever you're going to do. He's going to do. Come on, buddy.

Come on. we don't know, ain't nobody got time for this. There we go. What do we got here? So there's other elements too. There's a lot of, what am I trying to say?

So I asked that question very specifically, you know, is there a reason you can think of? You can't. Maybe there was. Maybe there was something in the environment that sparked a random thought at, you know, 11.03 in the morning one day.

And it was gone from your head by 11.03 and three seconds. And then that popped up in your dream later because you wanted to explore it further, of course. So it could just be. I mean, I always listen to like the radio or watch TV. So who knows that something could have slash, you know, beyond my conscious awareness that triggered that thing. Who knows, you know, something. But it wasn't tied to a specific event where you had reason to think, okay, how do I understand what happened to me or what I experienced?

And then how do I feel about it? what do we want to do about it. So, yeah, no, I get a lot of things like that going through my head, too, is why am I thinking about this right now? I don't know what sparked it, but this is the kind of thing I think about all the time. Definitely. So it's more of an ongoing pondering about the nature of the universe and whatnot. It is then, of course, it's always interesting, but what elements you chose to show yourself

this, what you think is likely or how you're at least, theorizing or conceptualizing something. So you've got, I wrote this down and left it on its own line. I died. That is uncommon in most dreams. Most people do not die, especially the falling dreams.

Look at this guy. He just wants to be held like a baby. I'm busy. I'm so busy and you've got to be like this. You can't help but love them. So a dream that starts with death is highly unusual. And that's fantastic, I think, too. But it's also reasonable in the same.

sense that if you're going to explore this and have a have a dream experience that takes you to seeing and experiencing what happens after death, you have to start with, okay, you're dead and now you're somewhere else. You only knew you were in hell after they said that or after the devil lady told you? Yeah. Or did you? Well, she said that it's called. hell that it's not supposed to be that way.

It's not a place full of torture devices or is it? Are there? So that was the other thing too is to get a better look at it. You were, now I could have only been in my, of course, it was my version of it. I don't know. Everybody else's version may be different.

But I didn't see, I see more of a self-imposed torture that comes into it. Yeah. That's why it resonated with me so much. It's like, what are you trying to get out of this experience? Well, you wanted to comment. conversation. You wanted understanding. You weren't looking, you weren't a person who thought you needed to be punished or probably that would have shown up there. Yeah. Yeah. Let me see here. So you're,

you described it originally as locked in a dungeon. So was there now it may have been a very beautiful, well appointed, you know, clean, nice a dungeon, but it was the typical kind of medieval stone walls. Yes. So you knew it was a dungeon, how? What makes it a dungeon versus a throne room or a bedroom? It was black and there was stuck by the snow wall. And the other person was in chain. Okay. So that was another question I was going to tease out was there was a female there, but then the devil showed up. So there were three characters total. Yeah. Okay. And this other person you mentioned them, but never again. So you didn't describe them. You did not interact with them. I didn't really get to see things. I just saw a young girl visibly upset and distraught.

And she was talking to the devil, the female, was talking to both of us. Gotcha. So where was this? How were you situated in the room, like sitting in a chair, standing on the table? I think I was just sitting on the ground. I wasn't restrained, though, but I was sitting on the ground. So you not in chains, but then a girl next to you, also on the ground? Across from me on the ground.

Across from you, like facing towards you? or yeah okay yeah and she was chained to the wall to the floor change to the wall but in a way that where she could sit down and you know where arms up yeah she was she was distraught I could see that she was did she appear to be harmed anyway or no more more mentally distraught like anguish gotcha interesting if what pops into my head and you can tell me if this resonates at all rules rules for this stuff the answers are not in my head. I'm telling the audience now.

I make a suggestion, you tell me whether it resonates or not. You should feel a zing head to heart or head to gut. If it doesn't, I'm wrong. I rattled the doorknob that did not come open. Don't ever feel any pressure to validate the wizard. I'm here for you. It's not the other way around.

Okay. What popped into my head when we were talking about this, and now, again, to remind me, is the Jung's work of the animus and the anima. And the, so they're making. Maybe if we go with that, the suggestion might be that the girl on the wall in chains is your female half, the feminine, divine feminine? I didn't think of that, but that makes sense because I love young. You know, so, you know, and I think that that's very powerful.

So it could have been that, you know, now. You know, and then, you know, because I do happen to sometimes be intense, you know, experience intense emotions. You got to get up my arms tired. Oh, cats. They want so much love and attention. I know. And my thought, okay, building on that, first check in and you're like, it could be, could be. Okay, fair enough.

Now, what is it about you or the way you're composed, what you think, you know, why is. you know, why is your, if she's your female half, so to speak, or the divine feminine within you, in you, why is she in chains? Why does she, why is she suffering in a way that you're not? So that, um, rather than just asking you, I'm going to suggest as well that there may be, um, being in chains and being in hell suggests you're, you've, you've, you've, you've, restrained your, uh, feminine energy and that it may be, uh, uh, necessary. It would, And then, okay, why is a different question, but it may be necessary because she's a little bit, has a tendency to be a little bit out of control, be a little bit overly emotional. And you've got to keep that in check. So, you know, in the broader scope of things to, to reverse it, if I was talking to, you know, if you were a woman instead, if she had her masculine side chain to the wall, then she's restraining that for what, for her own reasons, whatever that would be. So you could say, wow, actually, let me stop making suggestions and say, based on what I've said so far, what do you think about that? And can you build on it? Is there more to say?

Oh, I think, you know, that definitely makes a lot of sense, you know, projecting, you know, the animal, the internal state. Now, I've always been, you know, one thing I've gotten, you know, overcome a lot of this stuff. but I was always very sensitive even as a child and as a adult and I would go sometimes being intense to sometimes you know subject to intense movies swings you know I'd say especially when I was younger so I might you we could even argue that that could have been not only the the animal but even my younger self there representation sure there just again in a female form. Definitely.

I won't let him. I won't let him get on my shoulder again, so he's biting my finger. Okay, we'll play. And that's an interesting thing, too, because it's a matter that the devil goes on to explain. You know, the Bible's got it wrong. Of course, you got to address that's the most common understanding

of how these things work. It's not punishment. It's rehab. And, you know, and then she's partners with God. And this isn't, so there's a, what is it the rather than you looking at the anima and saying this is what i think it could be the anima talking to say this is how i feel this is my i am and then you're looking at that you're looking at you unrestrained and i'm thinking dispassionate rational conversation you're

you know meeting of the minds with this with this devil figure um that you're looking at the alternative way to understand the situation, you know, this, this, this devil or Satan or whatever is telling you, this doesn't have to be punishment. This is what you bring to it. And then you're looking at someone who brought pain and suffering with them and put themselves in chains. Like, they don't have to be like that probably that person on the wall there could release themselves and say, you know, so that's two different ways of looking at. I mean, sometimes you do need to restrain the negative shadow side, whatever, of those, uh, there's, you know, shadow to the both the divine masculine and feminine.

Um, so maybe it's proper that it be restrained, uh, because it's necessary. And maybe there's some restraint there that is causing misery that it's put itself in restraint. That's how it feels to that half. I don't know if you know where I'm going with that or if I don't think I'm articulating very clearly. Yeah. There's a lot, a lot of, a lot of different layers to that.

It's also interesting that you would, um, and, Maybe, maybe, maybe, what am I trying to say? There's a lot of the yin yang holdness of opposites come, coming into this thing. Definitely the idea that God and the devil are not opponents, but partners in a process. That's a yin-yang. We're fitting the light and the dark. We've got the male and the female that we've got in chains. We've got him, we've got free.

We've got a dungeon that's not a dungeon. You know, we've got the place that is supposedly filled with pain and suffering and infliction of torture, but it's not. have a nice little chat. And then you've also got the idea of the iconic image of God that most of us the Christian world would say is an old white man with a robe and a beard. And that's one, that's God. But then the opposite is his counterpart would be black female. Ethiopens are notoriously short or small, thin, et cetera. I don't think many of them get very tall. It's maybe I'm wrong. So that That's another balance of the opposites there.

I don't know, maybe I'll just stop there and get your feedback on that, too, the idea of all these different balances and opposites. Yeah, I know. It's very interesting that you didn't say the opposite. They didn't really think of that, you know, the Yan Yang portion of it. I mean, I did get powerful. I didn't, like I said, with her, the devil representation wasn't scary at all. She wasn't scary. But the fact, I felt really calm, you know, calm and comfortable.

comfortable around her. Yeah. And she was very, you know, very like rest, you know, like in to the nines almost. Like, you know, really, really beautiful, you know, in a sense. And really articulate in their speech. So, but yeah, I mean, the yin-yang thing, because, you know, the push-pull, I feel makes a lot of sense. You know, and, and even Because even if you look at traditional, you know, doctrine, you know, heaven and hell is a big, the definite yin-yang, push-fold.

And, you know, Satan and God are push-fold. You know, if you, again, if you want to that. But again, as I said, I've always had struggles with that my entire life, wrapping my head around that, the traditional teachings. Oh, yeah. So, you know, I don't know if this is just my also my way working through it. very well could be yeah like epiphanies come in their own time i say this all the time and uh you know i had this conversation with a fella yesterday which would have been last week by the time people people see this um we were talking about the ideas of oh wow is it gone no no no no we was

talking to them about balance opposites heaven hell oh jesus i got lost it what were we even talking about oh the yin yang and it's that yin yang balance damn i had a brilliant point. Let's just pretend I said something amazing and we'll forget about it. What I was writing down as you were talking was that it's, I love analyzing these things across so many different dimensions because there's also a cultural expectation that has its roots in, you could call it evolutionary psychology, but it's like human behavior in general. There's an expectation that men will restrain the emotional feminine because men have, you know, have a greater capacity for violence.

And if we lose our shit, people get hurt. We get hurt. Other people get things get destroyed. Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. So there's a, there's a good reason for it. Go ahead. Yeah, no, what you're describing is Darwinian evolutionary psychology.

Absolutely. Yeah. But a Darwinian perspective. And that is the fact that men are, you know, some of the beat protectors and redwinter's. And if that falls apart, you know, the whole family is going to fall apart. And this could explain why, you know, most the ideal man profile of a man is always the alpha. Absolutely.

Yeah. Or as some folks have said recently, you want to have the capacity to be an absolute monster and then control it. Because it's not the same thing to be harmless, to be incapable of violence. So you're just, it's not the same thing. But then the flip side of that, again, trying to pair all these opposites, women are expected to master their aggression. So the emotional feminine is men have to suppress in a way. And the aggressive,

I wrote that word down like, that's not the right word. Do you have a different concept of that? What is it that, what masculine element are women expected to restrain to perform their function best or to best succeed? Again, dominance, social dominance. Maybe that's what I'm, yeah.

Dominance. and that's a better word for it too to to and it's very interesting because that leads into that um there's there's an element of that in this dream too you know if even if the devil and god are partners she is the submissive one in a sense which you have to be a female in hell because he sets the rules he decides who gets into heaven and she's just here to help you rehab rehab your soul so that you can become worthy there's an interesting uh dynamic of that too. I don't know if that's going anywhere or I just it just popped into my head that thought there was no further interaction with a woman on the wall or a girl you said yeah she was young

did she have any distinguishing characteristics was there anything about her that uh stands out to you yeah she's black white tall short she was black she was black um and but she you know I really couldn't see her face that much because she just got she was It was like she was, she was trying to bury her head into the wall. Mm-hmm. I try not to be seen, you know, in a sense. Gotcha. Embarrassed to be observed in her predicament.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. And that's interesting too. So we've got white man, your internal opposite would be younger black woman. That's, that's great too, is also with that balance. What else might stand out here?

It's trying to give you as much as I can from. as many different angles. I always describe this as, you know, I tell people, of course, as I did, the answers are not in me either. And you, what you do is the dreamer is invite me into your head to stand behind your shoulder and shine a flashlight around saying, hey, what do we see over here? And then hopefully we get something. But do any elements of the dream stand out to you as in most puzzling or incomprehensible?

Any, I don't know how to ask that better. I mean, well, we kind of already touched upon. I think, like I said, the old thing is. like, well, this is kind of a rant. I'd want to be a random dream. Yeah. Let's see. But I think that was pretty much it.

And again, I think what makes me, you know, I mean, this is my first time I'm really really sharing it publicly. But I think, you know, also part of the reason why I was, I might have been a little subconscious sharing it with other people, again, you know, the whole religion aspect of it. Sure. Yeah. I'm with you on the, I am not, I am not explicitly a Christian. I have tremendous respect for the, for the traditions and wisdom in the Bible, as I do with a lot of other, what I refer to as mythologies,

sorry, Christians, you know, but, you know, I consider myself an agnostic atheist, deist, which is really, I know it's weird. People say, that's impossible, that's stupid. Like, well, each of those words mean something to me. I'm, uh, I'm an agnostic. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not I'm not sure. I'm not, I'm not trying to tell you the way the universe works. I got ideas, but I'm not a prophet,

you know. Atheist, meaning I don't subscribe to a particular religion in total. I'm not a Christian. I'm not a Buddhist. I'm not Muslim or anything else. And then deist,

I think there is a God, I think as conceptualized by the idea of a creator of the universe that is outside of time and space, you know, that God said, let there be the Big Bang, and then we had evolution. That's how man, that's how he made mankind.

That's how I look at it. Which means that, deists are famous for, you know, God's kind of hands off. So I'm not really sure Bible miracles and talking to people, but I think God does talk to us in a sense. If God is the way the truth and the life or whatever is Jesus said, every time you have a true epiphany, every time you discover a true fact about the natural world, that is, in my estimation, literally God talking you. And I hope that's actually part of what I do as well is I open myself up to the spirit of being beneficial to the person I'm talking to and things come through that are useful. How did those ideas happen? Where did they come from? I don't know. That might as well be

God. You know, so if I can be a little self-aggrandizing there. But I think that's how it works for everybody. So I'll stop there for a second if you have feedback or comments. No, and that's true, too. Because I, you know, I couldn't tell you where that idea came from. You know, nothing in my breaking life. I wasn't even thinking about that for a while. But again, you said something, I could have subliminally heard something on the TV, a radio that I left on. I just triggered that reaction or my mind against. I'm prophetic. We know that. Yeah. Definitely. Well, I'm a, you know, if we accept that epiphanies are communication from God. If we have, you know, broad strokes, then true dreams that tell you true things about yourself or help you see yourself

or understand the world better is also God talking in your dreams. I think it's a great. There's a long tradition of that. ABC book two, The Mystery of Dreams is a big old sermon I've reproduced from 1535 England where he talks about how to tell dreams sent by God to inform, to inspire, and delusions sent by the devil to lead you astray to to feed into your lust and bad habits and all that different stuff. Great, great work. I love these books. I love them. I love them so much. That's why it's a joy to produce them. But we are just about at your time limit. I don't know if you wanted to talk about anything else real quick or we'll wrap it up either way. Yeah, I mean, I'm always open. I mean, you know, and I think, you know, part of me is I was, I'm a right brain

type person so I tend to really have very vivid dream sometimes we're almost like movies like picture quality nice I'm jealous I don't I hardly ever remember my dreams so I don't have them that often you know well I mean there's no one said we dream every night we just don't remember them 100% yeah yeah so I mean the ones I do remember are like you know right there sometimes I'll have you know if I don't write it down sometimes I'll wake up our know i had a dream but then you know 10 minutes later i completely forgot it like kicking myself because that could have been a great idea that ephemeral quality it's like

trying to catch a catch a cloud in a little little bell jar so hard uh yeah well let's let's get you out of here on time this doesn't have to go on for i've gone as long as four and a half hours but that's not happening today where you know i really appreciate that thank you well and then also that be the last thing i would ask and i want an honest answer we can cut it out if you don't want say it's it's or or whatever or you can give me private feedback and then I'll delete it if you don't want don't want it out there um being that you are an education level above me and I'm you know or two rather masters PhD um I think I did is is my process does it seem legit do I feel like I'm approaching it well performing it well just a little uh you know pat on the head

or I just looking for feedback it's not not not a not failure just feedback yeah now I I really appreciate this it was a very very easy slow um you ask great questions i really self uh connected and you know he had some great insights and i think the common interest we have in psychology i mean i really you know i didn't even think of like young a and aspects you know you know um and you brought that up and you know like i'm i'm i you know i love to work with all young but it was now that makes total sense very cool well not to put you on the spot but i'll take it i that's 100 percent i appreciate it always looking to do it better but I'll take the praise too that's that's good well let me do this let's

get you out of here this has been our guest dreamer albert bramante from union county out in new jersey he is a uh uh psychology phd college professor a talent agent working with of course actors and he is the author of rise above the script confronting self-doubt and mastering self-sabotage for the performing artist um you can find him at albert bramante dot com that link is in the description below. For my part, would you kindly like, share, and subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. I do video game streams Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific, roughly most days of the week. This episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 8, the Literature and Curiosity of Dreams, Volume 1, part of a two-volume set by Frank Seafield out of, I think, 1865.

He was writing books on Dreams when we were just finishing up in the middle of the Civil War. It's crazy, crazy to think what people were doing. Um, anyway, you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable ampie threes of this very podcast. And if you'd head on over to Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, that's where you'll find, um, uh, the one of the best ways to contact me. It's free to join attached to my Rumble account. That is enough. Uh, Albert, good talk. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. All right. Well, thank you again for having, Benjamin. I'm really happy to be here. Wonderful. Good times. And I love the praise. So that's not, it doesn't hurt my feelings at all. Okay. Everybody out there, thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.