Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 208: Ancestral Advice

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Russell van Brocklen ~ https://dyslexiaclasses.com/

my wife got this for me this um you know which is funny i was talking to another gal earlier and and she uh she was talking about astrology and like she's a amateur uh or or aficionado at least and i told her i was a Pisces and she says you've got the uh the mat for it on you know the mouse pad and my wife found this one it's like three feet wide and two feet long it's a huge mouse pad and i love it and it is the classic japanese painting of the wave nami uh which goes with the Pisces thing and I just think it's fantastic. Greetings, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Dreams games. Today, our guest is Russell Van Brockland from upstate New York.

He is the New York State-funded dyslexia researcher. You can find him at dyslexiaclasses.com. Link will be in the description below, of course, as the cat rubs all of it. Go ahead, sit on it. Go ahead. Oh, now she won't do it. For my part, would you kindly like, share, and subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers and viewers.

You know, why not share it out? I do video game streams most days of the week, Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific. This episode brought to you in part by ABC Book 18, O'Neuro Chronology, volume four, prima reliquorum. That's Latin for the first of what remains everything I couldn't get into the original trilogy. There's all kinds of shorter works of dream literature out there. This one features one article from the 1800s, which is articles they wrote were like novellas.

They were massive, almost its own book. And two other complete books. So you get three books in one with this one for the price of like, I don't know what happens, 13, 14. I'll make a dollar off of these things because I just want them out there. So buy my books, won't you kindly? You can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable or live streamable episodes of this very podcast.

So you may take the wizard with you, wherever you wander, with or without. Wi-Fi. And of course, if you'd head on over to Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, building a community there, it's free to join attached to my Rumble account. And that is more than enough out of me. Russell, thank you for being here. What are you? Thanks for having me. I think she sneezed a giant luggy on my, oh my God, that's a, it's kind of nasty girl. There we go. I think she sneezed a giant luggy on my, right there. We'll just wipe that off. Oh, my goodness. She's always had a little respiratory problem. She's always kind of sneezy and whatnot, but that's, that's just fine. Hi. So, um, what's, what's the deal with the, uh, dyslexia research? That sounds like a fascinating

story. Well, I have the worst case of dyslexia people who've ever heard, um, got involved with it. This wasn't what I was supposed to do with my life. I was going to be a bureaucrat in the state legislature, but what happened is it was a late 90s. I wanted to know how laws worked, um, not some, some course I wanted to know. So I signed up for the New York State Assembly internship program. Problem is I showed up. I said, here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have a first grade reading and writing level.

And the director looked at me and said, this will not work. I mean, with this, no way would this possibly work. So we got a committee together. I mean, it went up to the speakers for goodness psych. And they told me, well, we're going to move you over to the program. council's office of the majority leaders office, which ran the assembly day to day, which was great for me because they only worked with graduate students. Why was I there?

They had three administrative assistants that could help take my horrendous writing and turned it into a memo that I had to do a couple of those a week. And they even went and bought me a $2,000 new computer. So then it came time for the academic portion. and instead of, you know, for my big research project, instead of doing the big paper, I ended up just doing a standard world presentation that was long, with a long Q&A section. At the end, they recommended 15 credits A minus. So this is going to help my GPA out quite a bit.

Because the selectics, yeah, we don't get the best college GPAs typically. Goes back to the Political Science Department at the State University of New York Center at Buffalo. And then you're about to be shocked. They looked at my accommodations, and they said, we don't like these. So here's your 15 credits of F. 15 credits of F instead of A minus. Wow. It's still there today 27 years later.

So I got so sick of the discrimination that I went to my other professors and I said, where can I be forced to learn to read and write in grad school? And they kind of laughed and said, law school. So I went and I signed up to audit a couple of law school classes. And they're like, well, we really weren't serious about sending a guy who can't read or write to law school. I said, oh, I'm going anywhere. And, you know, people tend to find this part interesting. It's the second day of contracts.

I'm there to see Professor Warner, who's a dyslectic law professor for a couple of decades. He calls on me. And when he calls on me, everybody dreads it. Because what they do in law schools, they use the Socratic method. They'll keep asking you questions that you don't know the answer to, kind of to embarrass you to make you conform and to get used to the process as quickly as possible. I found out later for dyslectics, that's not how it works.

We go to grad school, we own the place day one or soon thereafter. So he called on me, start asking me questions, things for the first time in my life, slow down, organized. I could see things in a linear manner from the first time, so I answered him and he called back again and I answered him and he's like wait I'm not putting this kid down okay so he keeps doing this nothing's going on I'm answering him so then he gets a little snarky I get a little snarky back within about a minute I'm leaning forward yelling at him he's leaning forward yelling at me five minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes he finally raised his hand he said

Russell you couldn't be any more correct in the interest of time I got to move on to the next case. Now the rest of my classmates are like, what the hell? We can't do this. What's going on? I said, well, I'm dyslectic. This is easy. This is nothing. I learned to read within a month. I learned to write within a couple of years. And then I just said, you know what? I want to go and show other dyslectics like me in high school so they don't have to go through this discrimination that went through the political science department, you know, so they could get through college. I said, okay, let's bring their writing skills. When I talked to the dyslectic professors, they all said they own grad school day one or soon thereafter.

So I was like, okay, let's do grad school. What's the writing thing for grad school? Graduate records exam, analytical writing assessments. I said, okay, now I'm going to teach dyslectics to do this. So what happened, one class, it took years of prep work and evaluation before New York State sent a fund of me for a multi-year study. we took high school juniors and seniors with seventh eighth grade writing skills and they're highly motivated one class period of day for the school year with their best teacher susan ford they increased the writing to average of entering graduate school students graduate school so they had

the writing skills of a college graduate before they went to college they all graduated grade point averages of 2.5 to 3.6, no accommodations. Costs the state less than 900 bucks a kid compared to the best private school, best private college at the time. We were 3X as successful for less than 1% of the cost. Oh, that's pretty amazing. Yeah. I think a lot of, um, what am I thinking about? I got up early today, but to meet with you, I usually get up at like 10. It was my wake up and my alarms were going off. But, uh, but I, you know, I, give people this with this window uh of time because that that can't be too narrow and then people are like well you can only meet at noon well that would be best but i can't force everyone to do that

long story short so trying with my uh get my hey leave her alone i these cats let me tell you um i think a lot of people what i'm trying to say especially like a bureaucratic or or or state funded different different stuff like public schools especially they're kind of averse to learning new ways of doing things and a lot of they love their systems they love they love people people coming in and doing what is it surface level we've got a new name for the same old stuff we've been doing and let's hype that up but like really fundamental changes of like we're going to try a different method check this out really it can be a struggle to kind of get them to open their eyes to it or give it a try in some way so it's it's nice that you were able

to do um you know get somebody to listen and then develop solid proof and say look I did it here's here's what we got have you if you had success then and get to get implemented getting it broadened out, getting it put into what do they call special education programs or some stuff? Well, the problem with that original program was it was a test case of what to do with the elite students, you know, the super motivated superintelligence. Problem is with those kids is there are very few of them, like extremely few. That's true.

So I went and I presented this in 06 to New York City and they said, what about normal kids? Well, this work, I said, no, absolutely not. so what I did is I was told to go make this work for normal kids so I went back this is the top book in my field it's called Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shawitz from Yale medical doctor that's dyslexia so the back part of the dyslectic brain is like almost no neuroactivity that part of a typical brain is massive neuroactivity but the front part of the dyslectic brain is about two and a half times overactive all right so to move that to typically kids, what I did initially is the graduate records exam analytical writing assessment, analytical. The front part of the dyslectic brain according to EO's articulation followed by word analysis, articulation, analytical to me about the same thing. That was the breakthrough. But to work with normal kids, I had to swap that out to word analysis followed by articulation, okay? But then I couldn't get the kids to do anything. So then I remember, wait, in Los

I did real well because I loved that. I was really good at it. Just that was my speciality. Talk to other professors. They did not do K through college very well. When they went to grad school, owned it day one or soon thereafter. Why? They were in their specialty. So then I went and to figure out, what's a speciality for a kid? We tell them it's a Saturday morning you can do whatever you want. Go anywhere you want. And they will tell you what the speciality is. We focus on a book that takes them in that area, all right, that they're really interested in. And then the next step is we get an audiobook and a printed book for that. That's usually hopefully a grade level or two ahead of where they're supposed to be

so they can grow into it. Then we focus, here's the major thing. I've got this from senior dyslectic professors. During the intervention period, while the kids getting ready to get to grade level, you cannot ask a dyslectic this question, a general tool specific, such as what affected Martin Luther King's famous I have a dream speech have on the American Civil Rights Movement?

It's like us grabbing fog, nothing. But if we ask a specific to a general question, what personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? You grab onto that, and now we can then answer that question. That answer gives us another question, and we just keep doing that,

that forces the brain to organize itself, by using writing as a measurable output. So if you ask you to select it in your speciality, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed, but with little to no organization? They're going to say yes. So what we do is we focus on the kids' speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability.

We teach them from the specific to the general using word analysis, followed by articulation. Now, how successful is that? The book that I'm writing is about Kimberly and Reed. It's going to be titled Literacy and Reading, I'm sorry, Literacy and Reading Dyslexia Turnaround. I met Kimberly in December 27th and 2024. She just spent $700 to have the state of Ohio tester kids. She's a homeschooling mom.

Reed was reading and writing at the beginning of third grade level. So about a year and a half behind, if he was in public school, he was supposed to increase by 1.86 points. but that didn't happen. He increased by 20 points under Kimberly, not double the rate of learning in public school, not triple 11 times. And Kimberly wasn't working him like crazy. It was three half-hour sessions a week.

Most parents through 10 to 15 minutes a night. I worked with her for half an hour a week. Here's why it's so important. In the last summer of 2025, Reid's friends came to him and said, We want you in public school with us for social reasons. See you at lunch. See you in class. If he tried that in January, he would have been in special ed away from his friends,

very unhappy kid. But since his mom did what every parent dreams of, he started sixth grade. They retested him. And they found out his reading and writing was end of fifth grade, beginning sixth grade. This is about a week in the sixth grade at this point. And he's doing absolutely fine. he's mainstreamed he's doing absolutely fine he's with his friends because his mom did what the school systems generally can't do yeah there's there is a big problem i mean i haven't been a big fan of

public public education but my entire life basically based on my experience of it uh i did not enjoy school until i went to college and it was very much along those so i've got a autism diagnosis now I was diagnosed late in life, but it explained so many things to me about how I approach learning and social relationships. I'm like, oh, wow, okay, actually, now this all kind of makes sense to me. But yeah, I, where was I going with that? The idea that it's not, it is so tepid in a way that it's not, I was thinking of an analogy to water, the idea of it's, you know, it's not useful because it's cold and you could

a, you know, like a refrigeration temperature. And it's not useful because it's hot, boiling, you know, that makes spaghetti or whatever. It's so tepid so that it's useful to nobody. And you barely get anything out of it in a lot of ways. And a lot of kids just go through it because they have to. And well, you get to see my friends and fine, I'll do some homework. And maybe they pick up some reading and some math along the way and maybe some, you know, historical facts and whatnot. But it's not ideal along the lines of it's,

not focused on the individual. Like one, one big thing I'm making a couple notes as we go along. You know, number one, uh, the idea that some or maybe most people get the idea of a disability and they say, well, that means I'm a failure. I can't do anything about it. And then, but there's actually, there's a lot of things you can do about you tailor, you tailor the approach to create the maximum success possible. Well, they don't, they don't do that. Another thing is, is dealing with the motivation. I just didn't care. I got like, bees, mostly bees. Because I just did, I just whatever. I just wrote whatever and handed it in. And it wasn't great and it wasn't terrible it's got to be uh but when i was motivated when i

really cared about the subject i would know everything i could talk for hours on something that's part of the the aspy autistic side of things like get me talking about something i care about or i'm interested in and man i know everything like this with the dream specialty is like i've got so much information uh it's hard to hard to fit it all in sometimes but yeah so public schools are failing i think on those two metrics of like tailoring learning to the individual and their individual abilities and their individual motivations. And I think if we could do more than that, we would produce a hundred times as many geniuses.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that subject in general. You know, if you, the one thing that I get, you know, when I get about the school system is that people ask, why is it so, especially when we get to geniuses, I'd like to look at that from two points. First of all, when you look at, again, I'm just going to go back, I want to focus on the science on this. So again, let me just get back to the brains.

You see that massive overactivity in the back part of the brain? Yeah, and I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about what those areas do in general. Yeah, well, I'm just, I'm going to keep it very, I way oversimplify advanced neuroscience so people can get something useful. I was just asking for my own curiosity because I did the studying of it, but it's been a long time, so I don't remember. I know this is all the motor cortex is up front, that kind of stuff. Right, but just to keep it, just to keep it simple so we can actually use it.

And again, I'm way over simplifying advanced neuroscience. Why the system is set up the way it is, is because 80 plus percent of the students are not dyslectic ADD or ADHD or on the spectrum or neurodiverse in any way. the system if so if you take those 80 plus percent of the population if the student has a natural intelligence a natural ability and then all they have to do and i know this is this is kind of feels a little condescending all they have to do is work really really freaking hard and they'll be successful okay if they have the intent the native intelligence and the work ethic they will be all the school has to do is figure out which kids have the natural ability and then

which one how do we motivate them and then they're brilliant in the academic sense then you got researchers like me who when we get to let's say you know how do i change a light bulb or something i am natively exceedingly unintelligent i am horrible at this but then you got the kids who were really good at what i like to call head and hands oh yeah okay and they focus they we get them through a community college, you know, the basic, you know, the basic stuff you need for community college, because now electricians, advanced manufacturing requires a two-year associate's degree. It's applied because things are so advanced now. All right. So we focus on that ability. And as far as dyslectics are concerned, you know, we have to follow on that overactive front part of the brain that we really need to really focus on. the ability to analyze words, the ability to then discuss it intelligently. What I'm really just trying to sum up is our educational system, the way it's designed now, is going to make sure that we're going to have a lot of literate unemployed people going forward.

Because what the shift has been is now that artificial intelligence is able to do the grunt work. People seem to be in the belief that, oh, AI will just go and do it all on. So, no, it won't. Or AI is not going to affect us. It will. What you need to understand about what AI is, is it's really good at taking care of the intellectual grunt work. Okay? So we have to have people learn how to use AI.

And to give you an example of how effective this can be, using things created way before artificial intelligence was even really thought of. There's a book that came out in 1995 called The Craft of Research from the University of Chicago. It was because their Ph.D. students didn't know how to write research papers. So it's based on context, get everybody on the same page, problem, state a problem statement, and then come up with a solution so advanced that the reader learned something substantial. And if you can't do that, don't bother writing the paper. I dropped context to eight, nine-year-olds.

That's what we worked with Reed on. It was just context. All right. Now, once I get a student through all those three levels, an example, I had a student last year. He graduated from college. He practiced the craft of research all through college. And then he got a job where his boss loved AI.

Well, my former student detested it. And he contacts me because he said, I have to use AI. I have to come up with something. something original for the office. They want to see if we can do anything, come up with anything. And I said, I trained you in how to do this in high school. You practiced this for four years.

So what happened? I said, go and do context. Check an AI model. Talk to a type of it. I don't care. Figure it out. It comes back a couple of days later. Okay, I did that.

I said, great. Now, go do it for problem. He comes back. I hate this. I said, welcome to the adult world. Yeah, right? I said, go do problem. I'm sorry, solution. He turns in his work. It's a standard five paragraph essay I taught him. Boss is flipping through, nothing, nothing comes to his. We can use this. It was a small problem they'd had forever. They never put the resources into solving it. He solved it.

Within a week, he's teaching artificial intelligence to his peers. Wow. He said, this is just what works for me. So what you need to understand with our educational system now, Teaching the same thing that we've been teaching the same general way since the end of World War II is not going to work anymore. The students need to be much more autonomous and they need to figure out where their real gifts are, be it head and hands community college kids in the future or if they're going to go on to college. If they are, they're going to be going to a master's degree for the vast majority of them. and they have to get used to working with advanced artificial intelligence so that when they get in, they can be immediately effective in whatever they're applying for. And currently, they need to become senior really fast, typically within about six months.

So now employers are expecting these kids to have the skill of somebody that's been doing this for five, ten, 15 years within six months if you're really lucky a year those who can do that are going to go and be very do very well make a lot of money a lot more money those who can't it's not going to be good yeah well a lot of folks uh who could have had the potential to do more end up working below their capacity in in in in areas that are you know it's it's you're you got to have a job, but you just not, you just don't care, is the cash and, you know, just working for the paycheck type of thing. And, um, you know, along these, these lines, I was thinking some as you were talking and hearkening back to, you know, before we started

recording. And, uh, you did an interesting thing, which I think is, is related to your, to your process here is you found something I said, I was interested in the specific context of it. And then you started, uh, educating in a way of like, well, here's different tools or approaches you could use to maximize potential in this area. And I think that's, Because, okay, so autism is not dyslexia. A lot of people out there may not know, but that's, it's a different, it's a different thing. So it requires different approaches, but there's something I think may, may be similar. But, you know, for me, like what is, what happens with, generally with higher functioning?

So you have the, what I call the rocking and squawking type of autistic that basically nonverbal, maybe a little, but, and they're never going to be intellectual and write college papers and that's severe dysfunction. And there's higher functioning where mine's, you know, technically in the executive function area, I can do just about anything. It just takes me a long time. I just don't make, I make good decisions and I think deeply, not quickly. This is the way I describe it. But also, if I don't care, it's extremely difficult to learn anything for me. And if I do care, I will learn everything. And I will learn it for fun. And I will, I will research and write and do all kinds of different stuff to, fill myself with this give me more give me more information um i was going somewhere with that damn no no well i think what you're saying is this is when i'm working with dyslectic kids yeah yeah okay uh if let me give you an example of just how important this is with the most motivating this will shock parents i would what i want to do is to explain to you my most successful case okay um and her name is casey so she was i just so everybody knows i never saw this before i will never ever see this again all right this is a one-off to illustrate your point about

wanting to do it or not wanting to do it casey i met her when she was 10 years old at the end of fifth grade she turned 11 over the summertime and she was reading and writing at about the second great level. But she was really interested in Theater Roosevelt, like extraordinarily interested. So I said, okay, Casey, here's your book. The Rise of Theater Roosevelt, all 900 pages of it, won the Pulitzer. All right, people are like, why are you giving that book to a 10-year-old? She wanted the best, that's the best. Casey then said she wanted to do reading first instead of writing, which I never do, because if you can write a word, you can read it. And they said, no, I want to do it. I said, okay, I'm going to modify the process a little bit.

I said, there's no way you're doing this. And she said, she would. Heaven behold, the kid was locking herself in a room two to three hours a night, six, seven days a week, most of the days on during the summer of a break. All right. Going through this tedious as heck process, because I said, it's not that hard to teach reading. It's just the process is just tedious. It's easier to do writing first. Six months later, she gets called. She's in silent reading class. You know, the kids come over, pick up her book. They're like, what's that massive book? You know, they're reading Harry Potter, Twilight or whatever. She's like, that's my book for an outside reading class. None of them could get past the first paragraph. With Casey, you could do this. Here's the book. Let's just pick a page.

random pick that word she would tell you the dictionary definition like literally exactly and she could do that for the entire book after about six months so her teacher calls her mom she said i thought that you were your daughter was dyslectic i thought she had she was really behind in reading she's the best reader in the class by grade levels what's going on so her mom calls me i said what do you think she's been doing in her room for two to three hours a night oh and i said yeah because i worked with her for 15 minutes a week that's it because that's that's what her family could afford and then maybe one or two you know occasional one minute phone calls when she's stuck and this was essentially on her own then after she did that i said let's see what happens so i gave her a book this is my most popular

book by far. Walt Disney The Triumph of the American imagination, thousand pages designed for 17 year olds. Give it to Casey. I spent, I had to spend quite a bit of time on. She says, I hate this damn thing. Her motivation, the most

motivated kid I ever worked with is down like 50%. All right. She did the work, no interest. So then I tested that with similar, with other kids, giving things they don't like. Motivation down 75, 80%.

So what parents need to understand is you take these dyslected kids and you're I mean, you are literally, you do what the school district does, which is, you know, you remember high school, college, you know, you did five,

10 books a year or semester. Okay? I'll have kids on one of those books for two, three years because I have to teach you the right. All right. And it's so different i said you you pull them out of their speciality they're they're going off the cliff now once they go ahead and they get to grade level they're done with their intervention program like

reed you can put them in and they will do the work they will initially fight you like what reed did in math class he didn't like writing in math class because he's a little slower than his classmates always will be he can think he can think a lot faster so he started to get a to throw a little bit of a temper tantrum. His mom said, you're doing the work. The teacher said, you're doing the work. He's like, okay, then he does the work. He tested the, he tested the seat,

he could get away with it, and he ran into a brick wall. All right. And like any well-raised child, that happens all the time. They test boundaries a lot until they realize that it's not worth testing because it's not going to happen. But that gives you an illustration of just

if you don't really like it, you're just way down motivationally. And this is for everybody. So what we need to do in our educational system is to move to having kids learn what they're really interested in and then have the lessons follow that. And given the level of technology we have today, we can do that. We really can. And I think I finally remembered my connection. It was like instead of trying to motivate people by threats or promise.

as a future stuff find what they're interested in is a very big that's that was my example as well as like so and then i remember remember the connections i'm going to read this off of here just because i wrote it down exactly it's like uh you know um educate people within their interest uh well wow wow by something of novel jesus i can't read my okay so if you told you told me ben we're going to sit down we're going to learn a lesson on metallurgy i'd be like you're just going to talk to me about metal. and the different kinds and we're going to I'm going to be that's of no interest to me I don't want to learn metallurgy I don't want to learn quote unquote science and science class but if I as I was

saying with for my novel I conceive in my brain a cyborg a robot body with a human brain in it and I need to know the physical capabilities of that thing and then I go and I and because I'm motivated I do the research and I start learning about here's the melting point of different metals here's the tensile strength and when they break and and can they be stretched uh Can they survive a certain kind of impact? How fast could they run? And all of a sudden, I'm getting all the science stuff. And then you get a little further down the road and you start throwing math into it.

Okay, if they threw a rock and they can throw it 500 yards, what's the arc? Can they get it over a castle wall and hit a specific target on the inside? And then you're like, well, what's the distance? How many yards? What's the parabola? You know, all this kind of stuff. You find, if you can find something I'm interested in, I will learn everything about it, up to an including beyond math I've ever learned beyond science I've ever heard of before.

and I'll do it all for fun for free because I want to know and no one told me I had to and I think if we could do that more in public education find out what kids are if you find out a kid wants to is really interested in something

and you're like hey this is an opportunity to work a little math and this is an opportunity to teach a little science within this interest I think that's a gold mine of educational potential

that's that was my point I remembered I'm very proud of myself I don't know if that is that what you're speaking to am I on the right page or is that the injunction? Yeah, you're on the right track because, again,

what you're interested in is what you're good at, okay? I can't overemphasize that enough. And this works for the gen ed kids as well. I've worked with a lot of brothers and sisters of my clients, and a lot of them were fighting to be valedictorian or were valedictorians. And when it comes time, what happens when I go through my process

is they just fly through it at warp speed. And they're like, wow, that was helpful. But then when their younger sibling gets up to the really complicated part, so like, wow, they're really creative. Can you show me how to do that? I said, not really. What? I'm the academic superstar. And I'm like, okay, let's go and look at the neuroscience.

You see the back part of the brain again? See all that vast neuroscience you have in the back part? They're like, yeah, I got that. I said, that's why I'm so good at school. I said, yeah. Now, let's look at the front part of the brain. You see how you've got almost, you got a lot less going on? Your younger sibling has two and a half times.

Yeah? I said, well, that's because they're really good at this part. And I can show them to be amazing. And then I give them a test. This is going to sound really weird. I give them this test. It's on post-war Japanese history. people like

what's going on are you smoking something that used to be illegal i said no when i was studying in japan i was i took post-war japanese sister because i was interested the professor they had a the professor they had there was supposed to was going to maternity leave so they literally had they found a phd student who was the

who taught all the courses for the editor of this from harvard and they curailed her into teaching the class. So we go through the first essay. It's on Professor Dower on post-war Japanese history. Why am I spending so much time on this? Because Professor Dower won the Pulitzer, won the National Book Award. I thought that writing, that 30 pages, was the easiest thing I ever read in my life.

It was so simple because he would say more in a paragraph than literally people did in books. but none of my classmates could get past the first paragraph. I'm like, what the heck? I'm the dyslectic one. All right. It turned them dyslectic. So then I said, okay, when I started presenting a major conference,

so I said, yeah, what the hell? I went down in a room full of reading specialist. So I said, okay, here it is. Over half of them couldn't get past the first paragraph. The other half thought it was a joke. It was so easy to read. And what I found out with that, As I said, there's a thing called full brains and half brains.

I'm a, you know, I'm dyslectic. I'm a half a brain. I'm in front. Other people are half brains there and back. The people that can do both that can read this advanced material can think deeply like a dyslectic and then they can go ahead and read like AP English kids. In other words, the dear typical university professor. And I said, ah, there we, and they couldn't understand why the other people couldn't read it

because Professor Dower said, you should be able to read this from 10th grade to second year in college. If you're a college graduate, you can't read that. Go back to your university, get a refund, and have your diploma taken away. He said, I don't know what you were doing there for four years, but you weren't getting an education. He was ticked. All right.

And I would give that an example to like accountants, consultants. And I said, if they can read that and understand it, hire them. If they can't, don't. And one company said, we actually tried that. out the ones that could read it and did well they're they're phenomenal employees the ones that couldn't we had to let them go within six months 100% accuracy rate he's like i can't believe this we're using post-war japanese history as an as a screening tool yep definitely well it's i can be that touches on another subject that i that i'm frustrated with about the

education so you know it's i don't want to say i'm special or better than anyone i don't think that i am and I definitely have the ASP, you know, disability side of things as far as like limiting the way I can engage with the world. And, you know, like I said, thinking deeply, but not quickly. Well, I actually, I was so sick of high school. I had basically stopped going or I would just sleep in class. I just did not, just couldn't be bothered to care. Just all of this was such a waste of time. And so I challenged it.

And I did in what in California at the time was called the California high school proficiency exam. And it's just like, here's the final test that's equivalent. to a to a diploma or a gd or whatever and if you can pass this you can leave you don't have to come to class anymore i'm like sign me up went and took the test at 16 years old i'm like i'm out of here i knew i knew i didn't need it i knew i was wasting my time there that sounds very grandiose and whatnot but then i got to college and as i was saying i was more excited i finally get to study my specialty well two problems presented themselves one of them was why am i in english classes again why am i in math classes again didn't i learn everything i need to know now that's different than

probability and statistics and whatnot but like that that's that's a specialty for for science uh for the science of psychology you know so yeah they didn't teach that in high school but you know english classes and what i'm like so i think there's a lot of filler in college that is unnecessary because you should have learned that by now and i had to it was not uh it was not optional in in a way you had to take a certain number of these kind of classes was mandatory it's general ed but general ed should have been out of the way i should be in my specialty and not only that they ran out of psychology classes i took them all literally i went to my my counselor uh you know student to student counselor there at the time and i said hey i'm having a problem here i can't find any new psychology classes and they're like that can't be right that's not possible and she went and looked just like you literally took them all like well that's what i'm here for that's it should be 100% psychology classes all day every day for four solid years it's not It's like two years of general ed again. And they're like, well, we want to create well, round it.

Why don't you take some other? Because I took a golf, took a golf class, took a pottery class. It took an appreciation of art. So I'll filler, filler to give them more money. I'm like, I think that's what's happened to the education system too, especially. So we've not properly educated kids up to 12th grade. And then by the time you get the collars, they're trying to fix the remedial stuff that they didn't teach them.

And that just pads that out further. And then on top of that, we've had that, you know, degree inflation problem of like, okay, and you used to be able to get a decent job with just a high school degree. Well, not, and then after a while, well, you need a bachelor's. And then after a while, you need a master's. And that's well, now you need a PhD. No, no, no, it's not going to get to the PhD. So what they're generally trying, yeah, what they're trying to generally say is,

because people aren't writing well, okay? It is ridiculous that people get to a university and they're not. writing well. They're doing horribly. Yeah. All right. So they're trying to fix that. They're trying to make you well-rounded before you specialize. But even when you think it, they get, you know, they're an AP English kid in high school. They get a 401 in their English classes in college when I was auditing law classes and I were doing legal research and writing. So when I was studying at the SUNY Center at Buffalo's law school, I was able to go and take their best writing professor.

and she had all these kids who killed it in English class, phenomenal writers. And she said, you don't know how to write. And they learned to write with her after they've done really well in college. So what's happening is it's always the optimum degree for serious intellectual work has always been a master's degree for decades. Why? I want you to think about a teacher. So you got an undergrad degree in education. So what?

So you wrote a senior thesis. So what? When you take the master's degree, you're in there with much more serious people because it's much harder to get into. And they are training you to literally master that craft. Think of what a teacher does. She starts off with 20, 30, 35 kids. And at the end of the year, they have to get to a certain skill level.

And they all can't do it really well for some reason. They have to find out what that some reason is. And they get the vast majority of them through. They learned that in graduate school. The other reason why the master's is usually the terminal degree is because when you get to a Ph.D., you are the world expert in that really narrowly focused area, which is not really employable for most people, all right?

So you're a history PhD in some arcane spot of one part of the battle of the Civil War. That's not really economically viable for most things. all right but a master's degree is specific enough but still broad enough like for example for business the university of chicago where i studied for the summer of 1999 with professor schreger of new venture strategies they don't have an undergraduate business school all right because they don't think you can teach business to undergraduates goes in one year out the other they will take an undergrad degree in philosophy

give them you know have them work for four or five years and they'll come in and say okay this situation happened they're like yeah I remember that and then somebody from India will say how they handle it somebody from Japan will say how they handled it you get that around the room then the professor tells you here's what the theory

says you remember all of this because you lived it they will show in one year of graduate school more about business than somebody with a four year undergrad degree in business from Harvard because of that work experience difference. So that's why you generally find that the master's is in the terminal thing, but they keep doing

the writing because the kids can't write worth anything. It's horrible. And I think especially today, too, a lot of kids are, they don't read anymore either. They do. Books are still popular, but not as much. There's been an explosion of different media types. I mean, the availability of, used to be, I don't know, you. You and me are men of a certain age.

We remember way back when, you know, before the internet, before cell phones, all that good stuff. Yes. Once upon a time, there were like, you know, if you didn't have cable, they were like three, five maybe channels you could watch. And otherwise, you're outside riding bikes or playing with friends or reading a book. And there were, so the proliferation of media types out there and then the, the quantity of it all. And then the different choices, make it really easy to entertain yourself without having to read a word. You know, the basic reading of like, well, can I find the video I'm looking for, that kind of stuff. So it's kind of fallen by the wayside.

I remember, I think probably one of the reasons I have the ability that I do in the realm of reading and writing and whatnot and speaking in general, although I'm not a good example of this episode fumbling around all over the place, but is that I read voraciously because I was interested in the topics and I was reading the sci-fi and the fantasy and lots of choose your own adventure books, all kinds of different stuff. And I would, and it was the, you know, the whole. whole the old Japanese thing of, you know, if you want to master something, do it 10,000 times. And I probably read, you know, 10,000 times 10,000 words over and over again. And, and I would come across new words all the time. And because I wanted to understand what was going on in the book, they hit up a dictionary and go, what the hell is that word? Or I'd ask my parents, my mom would always say, look it up, you know? Just wanted to teach me that you can find these answers yourself.

And it's usually better. I think if you put some effort into it, you actually do remember it more. But, yeah, and I don't think that's happening as much as much these days. Oh, yeah, no, they just came out with a study. Like 20 years ago, it was about 40% of people read for pleasure. Now it's down to like around 15. Yeah, it's a big problem. Yeah, they've gotten so bad that some tech podcast I listened to,

the parents said we failed our kids because they pulled their kids' phones because they found there was a movie they wanted to watch and they couldn't sit still for 90 minutes with a movie they wanted to watch. So they finally took their phones away. And their kid said after, you know, six months of howling at the moon, that, you know, being teased because they don't have their iPhones anymore, they gave them these old, you know, like the phones we had back in the late 90s, you know.

Oh, yeah. They said, yeah, I'm still horrifically addicted to it, but it really was doing me harm. They said at least don't give your kids' phones until 16, preferably 18. Yeah. Yeah, I think the longer you can delay it until it becomes a necessity of some kind, which there's always the question, is it ever a necessity?

But I do like, I do think useful tools is what it is. It's like if I have a question, I can answer it immediately. I can look it up somewhere. So just having the world's information. Now, the flip side to that is, do I use it for that the majority of the time? No, no, not even close. but it's there and I do and I actually do you know like I need to who was that guy in that movie I can look at it you know that kind of thing but also what is the answer to this like I keep going back to this example but what is you know what is the uh I need to know some things about metallurgy because I want because I'm very curious and I'm also the kind of guy where like if I can't get it answered right away I'm gonna forget it down I'll lose the note I mean I really need instant gratification in that sense now he's gonna eat my fingers as we talk that's he wants to play oh do you want to get to the dream thing we know we better do that you yeah yeah we're we're running out of time um we i get the feeling we could keep going on on this

stuff and that's it usually with me that's how it is the most guess i'm genuinely interested in what they have to say i've got my own thoughts on the subject but uh okay so we're going to do let me write down the time here 40 um okay so as per my usual process uh number one i'm going to shut up and listen our friend uh russell's going to tell us his dream and then we're going to try and figure out what it means together so i am ready when you are Dream Wizard wants to help you hearse 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 Dreamwizard.com. Okay. Well, this was back when I was trying to figure out, this was after my presentation, originally in 2006, when they told me to go and have somebody figure out how to work this with typical students.

I was like, how the hell am I going to do that one? I had no idea. So I kept having this dream that I kept coming back to until I eventually had the solution, which was so incredibly simplistic, flip it to word analysis followed by articulation. That was the big breakthrough. I was like, now I look back in it. Why did it take years to do this? Kept having this dream. I, it was, just in some of my family history, I had two relatives on the Mayflower.

one was their religious leader and the other one was the biggest troublemaker of the colony okay it's a wonderful combination yeah so it it reminded me and because of this dream on the day that the pilgrims landed for the first time in america in provincetown harbor at the end of Cape Cod, the 400th anniversary. I was there that day. And I was expecting, it was in the middle of COVID. I was expecting, you know, a big band, a big thing right at the spots. And there was nothing.

There's a couple of guys working. I said, this is the 400th anniversary. And like, yeah, so what? Put your mask on. I was like, my side. You know. Anyway. So I remember, I kept going back to that spot and to Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Because in my dream, it was my relatives that came to me and I'm trying to explain to them how to do things. And my religious relative is trying to keep me very somber, throwing all. all these religious quotes at me and my other relative who's the big troublemaker Hopkins is doing all this weird crap to get me in trouble all right

and it was just like this is just weird and we I kept bouncing around between where they landed on Plymouth when they first got there and Plymouth Plantation

and it really what tended to wake me up at night is when hawkins my relative who was just a real big troublemaker the weird stuff he was trying to have me do like oh there's the indian corn steal it all right now what can we say about and just coming up with all these completely absurd ideas of what to do and then i'd go i'd go down those rabbit holes like steal this guy's corn and you know so you have and the plant in the summertime, and then we're going down like this rabbit hole and the corn's turning into all these just completely weird things about the pilgrims.

All right. Their hats are coming out. And then Indian money, Wampum's coming out. And it's just this completely random stuff. And I think that had to deal with the fact that I'm dyslectic and then when I let it go, my brain thinks really fast with little to no organization. All right.

And we just kept doing, and then like something like when the corn turned into Wampum, then it's just turning into like all these monster things. All right. Just this really, just this really like evil crazy Halloween stuff. And then I woke up. All right. And then when this dream, this wasn't one that just happened every once in a while it happened until i eventually saw

things so then when i went and it was my other relative brewster who was the religious leader you know he's trying to tell me well you have to do you have to go on the straight and narrow and then i have all these bible these bible verses flying at me and then the bible verses are turning into these, like, good things. Like, you see kids in that, like then it flashes back to modern times. You know, the kids doing really well and getting awarded what they really like.

So when I was a kid, the favorite thing I liked to do is to go to Walt's hot dog stand. It's not bad. It's something that's been around for 40 years at that time. And I liked their little mini hot dogs. And if I did really well on a test, you know my parents would go and I could get you know whatever I wanted

I'd get like you know my mom I'd get like three or four of them then when I became a teenager my dad said I'd get whatever you want I said really I said okay I'll take a dozen or I'll take 20 all right yeah but then the hot dogs would just pop up and they would take a form of like kids that I know just kind of like in this weird and they were like then just trying to to say like these positive things and then i'll jump back to my other relative you know hopkins the troublemaker and the trouble that guy got me into uh it was a mess but that that's generally how

they just kept repeating itself nice nice so we're on the uh well you've just proven one of one of my assertions or theories is that you know why do specific dreams reoccur they keep coming back because you got a problem you're trying to solve or something you're you're trying to understand. And once you get it, they stop or they change. They become something else because now you're able to move past that blockage. And that's how I conceptualize dreams is it's just, you know, the lungs breathe, the heart beats, and the brain thinks.

And it does it, whether you're awake or asleep. And when you're asleep is when it's most free to explore creative possibilities. And you're sorting through all these, in a way, you can oppose yourself a thought experiment. And, okay, let's follow this out. Let's see what happens. Where do I think this line of logic leads? and the answers we get are very often very strange you get things as you were saying that you know the the religious relative and then okay so we've got layers layers to this stuff

or different branching you got you get two different perspectives on the world perhaps a more straight and narrow as you said it and then I'm more mischievous and we could even we can even broadly class those as chaos and order um I'm just going to write that down too and and the way And if that makes sense, okay, so the way this works is, if I say something, you're like, I don't know, I'm not feeling it. Then that's the wrong answer. No, chaos. No, that's pretty much what it is because Hopkins was chaos.

I mean, he actually led a mutiny on another ship in America. And for some reason, he wanted to come back. Well, and that's why you're going to bring him. You learned about a relative. He encapsulated, he gripped your imagination as a certain icon. And you put him in your dream as opposed. to this other guy to represent these so the way i was saying is i kind of saw it there for a minute when you were like a chaos and over that makes sense uh that's the feeling we're looking for

when i'm offering suggestions i tell people uh okay he he he tore me up pretty good i'm bleeding uh but he cannot do that to her so i'm gonna stop them no i'm hey wow he's a he's a real funeral bastard this morning that's okay he'll figure it out um but so So, broadly speaking, chaos and order, how do humans in general conceptualize those things? So chaos is very often creativity. Let me think of new or different, interesting ways. And order is functional, practical implementation of the settling, the selection among, you know, creativity is brainstorming or chaos is brainstorming order is picking the relevant topics out

of, so there's no wrong answers until you need to find the right answer. Then all the other ones are wrong. but there's different needs for for each process um and that's like i said broadly broadly speaking so you've got um and you're assigning different qualities to to to each of these people or you're you've picked them because of the qualities now you're showing yourself the fruits of what they do so if you're stealing the indian corn um there's the mischievous thing but it's also a um leaning into the idea of uh what is it borrowing things from other it's educating yourself in a way it's taking ideas and it's a funny

thing is you can physically steal corn but you can't actually steal the idea of planting corn that is just a concept that's out there you can't take that away from they don't lose it when you take it it's shared it becomes multiplied in that sense and what's coming out of it in a very literal sense was why did the um pilgrims survive they they were they uh survived because they were taught how to plant the corn and so what you've got growing out of the corn is more pilgrims or or the symbols of pilgrims the hat um but even that also you know because it still belonged to the to the indians as well you've got the idea of wampum coming out of as well but then further down for the the wampum you said

became like scary evil kind of Halloween looking stuff. And what, what that said to me was, um, you know that down the road because these two peoples were still coexisting in the same environment, well, they didn't always get along. And eventually we were fighting wars with the Indians too over territory and whatnot. So that became a scary evil monster. Either the settlers, or the, or the, the, uh, native savages that they had to fight to conquer the land might have been the scary monster in your mind in that sense. I don't if we're heading in the right direction with any of those descriptions. Yeah, it is because that took an interesting historical twist because

Ed Winslow was one of Bradford, Govering Bradford's primary AIDS. He wouldn't literally save the life and nurse back, the Indian leader, Massasoit. And they told their kids, be the best of friends. and their kids hated each other as much as humanly possible is to hate and that led to what was called King Phillips War which devastated this country and there was a greater loss of life

as percentage of the population than the Civil War okay and I think part of the horrific things that I saw with the monsters were really the horrific things that happened from that war which was entirely preventable and was basically because the descendants of the pilgrims.

The pilgrims went to Plymouth to have a town on a brook where they could work on their religion and focus on the next life. But their children said, wow, back then land was wealth. And they had all this land. They were property, which could not. almost never happened in England and they pushed the Indians to the point where they had no land left and the war was inevitable didn't have to be that way yeah now that is that is a shame too

and then so you're bringing this history this knowledge of history into into the dream with you to explain things through these symbols um then you've got the uh religious order representing side of thing and he's um you know it's it can be rigid but but uh but the way bones are rigid like muscles have to have something to pull against or you can't walk i like the analogy of a human body is a perfect blending of order in chaos um you know we we need both the rigidity of bones and the flexibility of muscles and joints and stuff and to create the function that we have where we are a walking yin yang in our physically i i love that type of stuff um so on his side he's a little more straight and narrow uh and you said he was like giving you

Bible quotes and that those quotes were turning into things. Did I write that downright or was it something else? Yeah, the Bible quote, Brewster was their religious leader. He was, he was an elder of the church, not an ordained minister. And he would run, you know, Sunday school and church for them, which was, which was incredibly important. They just didn't go to church once. They went a couple times a day. All right. And the Bible, they turned into just about everything but it was positive okay they would turn into various forms of you know some students like I taught my original program they would come up and say yes this worked for me but what what about the you know these other kids where just nothing was working all right and I would

start getting ideas on what to try and you know nothing worked I would wake up so many times and say, oh, here's an idea. I kept trying, but his stuff was too much on the straight and arrow. There wasn't much creativity there. Now with Hopkins, wow, I would get into so much trouble try all this weird stuff. But that's where I eventually came with the flip. was through his side of things.

That makes any sense. No, absolutely. And it can very well be, because you're trying to balance these two opposites. Well, let me do this too because I wrote this down. So the flip was putting something before the other. And you've said it several times and I just have never written it down. Yeah.

So what I did was, you know, the final solution was the front part of the brain is two and half times overactive and that's articulation followed by word analysis. The big solution was flipping that to, word analysis followed by articulation, then I could, I start seeing a lot more success. Okay. Then I could, I could get typical kids to do the work. So eventually, I figured that out in a dream with Hopkins, all right? And we're just doing all this completely off the wall crazy stuff.

I mean, completely insane. That, so since this dream, and you already kind of gave it. it away, but that's fantastic. So I'm looking at it retroactively through that lens a little bit of trying to fit in, you know, what was it about going through this process and conceptualizing it this way in terms of a historical period you found naturally interesting and related to your family and whatnot. So probably the, well, we know the problem is being conceptualized this way, but I'm trying to assign parts. And I don't know that either one of them necessarily, represents, unless it does

to you, does, do you feel like one person represents articulation and the other one word analysis? I think it's much more simpler than that. I think that Brewster, the minister guy, church elder who played minister, he represented good

and order. Okay. Hopkins, the exact opposite. Mischief and chaos. all right and what i found that as a dyslectic is when you need to connect when you need to make a connection you got to let things just fly okay uh like like to give you an example with read oh yeah he's writing basic body paragraphs and everything who cares you know it's fifth grade sixth grade stuff but then i had to figure out how do i do problem how do i go ahead

and bring this up to a whole new level. And I'm playing around with Chad GPT5 Pro on this. And then I just let my mind go. And I was like, oh, wait a second. If we went instead of having one quotes, if we had two, one from the beginning, one to an end. And then I took a warrant, which is a thing, it's PhD level stuff on the craft of research,

which kind of helps you take your facts in a paragraph and analyze them in a coherent way and just bringing everything together and I apply two of those. Then I just had to add a couple other steps. Now this is senior year of high school. Okay, and Reed's working on that now. The ability just to say,

well, forget what the AI is saying, let's try, this looks like this might make sense. And then I have it come up with some scenarios and like, okay, that was it. Major breakthrough. Okay? And where I think this represents in the dream is when I'm working with Hopkins. You know, I'm with him doing all this weird mischief stuff and it's complete chaos.

Is that you can take these two completely far out, wacko things, bring them together. And occasionally they work. So I think that's really what hit me. Gotcha. Yeah. I can't tell you the number of times I've, you know, woken up in the morning not remembering a dream, but having an answer to a question that I either had just recently learned

how to, you know, formulate properly or had been thinking about for a long time. And suddenly something clicks. And yeah, it's this thought process of going through that. So definitely the idea of, uh, that I know my brainstorming keeps popping in my head. It's like, what you need to do is you're trying to figure out an answer to it doesn't exist yet because you haven't thought of it. haven't formulated it.

So you got to throw a bunch of different combinations of things together and see what you get out of it and see what makes sense working together. And then, well, like I was saying with this other guy, order the Brewster fella, the identification of the answer, what clicks is probably in the realm of being represented by him of like, you know, and this depends on how you. conceptualize the Bible too is like a lot of folks think of it and I think it's you know true broadly even if I'm not a Christian but the idea that it represents things that have been solutions that have been time tested in a way like here's yeah okay as long as you agree

then that that that would would inform your dream even if you're wrong it's one of those things like if you get told an inaccurate historical fact and it shows up in your dream it's true as far as you know so it doesn't doesn't really matter if it actually ever happened or or whatnot but Um, so you've got, and in the dream, you're spending time with both people. You're not, you're not shunning one for the, oh, I pushed away the religious guy, but you're, so there's definitely something you need to learn from both of them. You need the creative process and the practical answer selection implementation side. You actually need to learn from both of those, uh, broadly speaking sources. Um, so. what was interesting too is you were talking about like and I I I caught most of it but I my notes

were just that was like what you were getting was the Bible quotes turned into hot dogs and then the hot dogs turned into kids yes well kind of like kind of like a not just a kid but a hot dog that was like the kid they were kind of like an amalgamation of the two okay so you got a blend you got a blending of right a hot dog child creature? Yes. Yeah.

And they were kind of, they're kind of representing different parts of this. So when I was going with Brewster, they were always very positive, but also very stoic, very limited, kind of like stay on the,

the appropriate path. When I was doing things with Brewster, they would just go completely crazy. And they tended to get quite negative, Like, a lot of times, like, the dark places that we would end up, which would wake me up, I think that really did have to deal with the conflict. Like, for example, I remember reading about it. There was this kid.

I mean, the Indians were, the Native Americans were going and like maybe burning houses, maybe killing livestock, but they didn't hurt a settlement yet. But then to protect their property, this 11-year-old kid, and I think it said about 11, he went and he shot an Indian who passed away. And then after that they started attacking. He's like, well, they're just Indians. They're just Native Americans. So what?

Well, the next couple of days they're both. He and his father were both dead. Oh, yeah. Okay. And that kind of horror just kind of turned into nasty kind of like preacher sort of things. And that's when I would wake up. Yeah. Definitely.

So what we, what we've done is a little different than my, I'm going to say normal process, although I've been trying to broaden that horizon as well a little bit too. And I'm just kind of go with it. Okay, well, this is what we got. So what I typically do with this kind of thing is if we're going to talk about a recurring dream, I'll do, I'll focus on one dream. And we'll try to analyze that one pretty well. But you did what most people do. And I said, okay, let's, let's go with that. Let's see what happens. What most people do is that, they'll tell you, here's what was similar across all the different dreams. And then throw in, here's, this dream was different

and this dream had that or the other. So, okay, let's go with that. Let's start looking at what, what are those recurring elements? Usually I do it, if we're talking about flipping things around, I usually do it the other way around. Let's, let's try and identify elements from one dream, and then we'll look for a pattern across both of them. And the reason I did that with you specifically is because you kind of identified, well, here, I think I know what this dream was for. And a lot of the folks come to me with recurring dreams, they haven't figured it out yet. They're still experiencing them.

So to have someone then talk about their dream and say, um, uh, Here's what this series of recurring dreams allowed me to discover. And as given by proof, when I had the answer, they stopped because I didn't need them anymore. Now we can actually retroactively go back and say, okay, well, how did that, how did that lead to that conclusion? So that's, okay, all of that to just settle in my mind of like, this is what I'm looking for out of this is how does that dream, how did having those images presented in that way give you the answer you were looking for? Um, and it's, I mean, just, just, uh, I don't know, tangentially, but to be pop back into my head, the idea of having this, uh, blending of hot dog kids come out of Bible quotes. That is, when you talk about weird?

That's like, yeah. Okay, what does that mean? Uh, and now the hot dog thing, you were explaining that's something from your childhood, specifically. Um, so it could have, they could have just stayed hot dogs. It could have just been the Bible quotes turned into a positive experience from your childhood, but it was also children. and not just creatures.

You didn't just say creatures. They're young creatures or children. And I mean, that generally might suggest, well, they have blended human qualities, but also the potential to grow. Like, they haven't reached full maturity. They've just been, they're almost like new ideas that are just beginning to grow in some ways. I don't know if you're having any specific thoughts about that imagery of the hot dog child. Well, yeah, because I think what happened is it kept bringing me back for when I did. really well in school or something,

I could go and get my favorite mini hot dog. And these weren't full hot dogs. These were mini ones. And I just again remember, I just knew when my mother wasn't going to buy that many. But when I went with my father, I remember one time I did something really

well in school, he said, okay, go ahead. Now remember, these things were like 39 cents. And he's like, how many do you want? I said, ah, 20. And my father just looked to me and goes, I opened my self up for it. I said, yeah, Dad, but you notice that I'm not pulling this stuff like there was another restaurant that I really like going to. It was very expensive and I would order the cheapest thing on the menu. My father's like, hey, do you want some of this other stuff?

I said, yeah, but I can't ask you to spend, you know, 30 bucks, you know, when this was back when McDonald's was, you know, $2.99 for a Big Mac extra value me. Right. Now it's like, you know, 12, 13 bucks. So you triple that. Yeah, I got quadruple that. So it's like, You know, I'm dead. I'm not going to have you spend, like, currently 150 bucks on me. That's ridiculous. All right. So it was just, that was a very positive experience.

So I think what was happening is when they turned into these, like, mini hot dog things, it kind of just kept me on that same very positive way. But what I found out is I just really couldn't create much out of the positiveness stuff. I just couldn't do it. Mm-hmm. So that's what kind of got. You'd open yourself up to the chaos. And, you know, in broad terms as well, there's the way we conceptualize good ideas and bad

ideas. And bad ideas are often catastrophic that, you know, you make the wrong decision, bad things happen. So you've got these stories in your head of like why there was conflict between these people. And it's a tragedy, too, didn't have to happen. Just people's prides or egos. or, you know, let their emotions get away with them. But that's part of the process of, what is it,

the larger heroes narrative type of thing. The deep, dark forest is scary and dangerous, but that's where the answers are. And there's going to be a lot of danger in there in terms. And danger isn't always physical danger. We represented as the hero fighting monsters and whatnot to get to the treasure. But the danger can also be the hero believes in and acts upon bad ideas

and fails because of that. So a lot of this is metaphorical in that sense, too. So you got the idea of you're exposing yourself to the monstrous by entertaining or seeking new information or answers that have not existed. And most of them you're going to defeat or or brush aside because they're the wrong answer. There's usually one right answer or a range of directionally correct answers. And it's like picking a point on the compass. You are rejecting every other point on the compass to go that way. way. Um, so there's the, uh, the side, what am I trying to say, uh, the side, uh, the idea of assigning

to bad ideas or wrong answers, the status of monsters that are to be defeated or avoided, um, something along those lines. And, and, and then also the idea of, um, in terms of the right answer, it was coming from this, you know, it was eventually selected, but, because you have to go through the chaos or at least engage with the chaos to win a, um, you know, window it down to what the what are then the the right direction to go and that becomes or and i love this uh i don't know if you're familiar with a internet meme culture and the uh the idea of the pepe frog and the the god keck the god of chaos out of the any of that sound familiar um uh i'm not i'm not good with that sort of stuff i have to literally see it well it turns out uh the egyptians

had a frog god named keck and his uh counterpart was hecken goddess of the of the dawn and heck was the chaos of night heck at the new order of of day as as the light shines and you got to go through the chaotic dark night but it always you know at the end of the chaos you choose a path and that becomes the new order until the next night comes and you re-evaluate and that gets a cyclical fascinating stuff um what you're also trying to do in this process is your overall goal was i need an answer It's probably because I'm trying to help these kids. And so you thought back to a time when you were a kid and you had done, you had performed well and you got a reward out of it.

And so you're conceptualizing it in those. That's all of that to get around at that point. So I think that maybe kind of explains the hot dog kids is, you know, you're thinking of yourself as a kid. You're thinking of the kids you're trying to help and merging this idea of, uh, um, the reward banquet you were able to have with these many hot dogs. and the idea that you're trying to pass this along to a new generation of kids to help them succeed. I don't know if I'm going anywhere with that.

That makes any sense. Yeah, no, you know, that's making a lot of sense because what happened there is the hot dogs really did a huge thing with trying to get me to succeed. Okay. And I think what happened is when I was looking at, things is that it really was trying to pull me in that direction of success, it just never produced anything that I could use.

And that was the frustrating part because I would stay in that part of the dream, like, on and off the entire night. And I'd wake up well rested, but I didn't have anything to show for it. But when I'm dealing with the crazy Hopkins guy, I'm dealing with some really weird stuff that you know when it got to those monsters things it would wake me up like almost every time when i drifted in that direction but i started getting good ideas i could actually use that makes any sort of sense no it very much does and it yeah it opens us up to the danger of of of wrong answers and so that is probably the scariest thing to someone who's looking for the right answer is you know

what if i what if i choose a monster and bring it out into the world with me you know and and and teach it to these kids. And it's completely wrong. It's probably the worst, worst thing for someone who hopes to be a useful educator of a kind is, is spreading misinformation in a way, spreading wrong answers. So no,

no wonder it would be represented as monstrous things. And there may be, um, certain elements to it where your, your conception, you're having the conclusion in your dream of here's a monster. appears because you've allowed yourself to consider brainstorming style a bad idea just to get to the idea of okay is this a monster that one's a monster that one's a failure that one's not the right not the

correct answer and it actually became a little so scary that it woke you up but good because sometimes you got to go through a whole lot of bad ideas to get to the right answer and I think this is yeah well over what period of time did you have this series of dreams um it was years okay it took me literally years um to kind of just get past this and then i finally woke up one day and it just came to me and said just flip that word analysis followed by articulation and you know that was it i mean and then i pretty much thought that i haven't had the dream since do you remember any how do i describe it i guess you just say any imagery

your experience from the dream the night before that now in retrospect it looks like it might have been related to that discovery um you know was the last dream with the brewster religious character and he oh no no it was it was it was with my chaotic uh gotcha my chaotic crazy uh hopkins guy and then i finally it just finally just it just the word that just kept flipping in my head my was switch so i switched it and it weren't just great there you go yeah you might have been on the on the cusp of that eureka moment uh all the way along and it just took that that dream to find the right terminology that the switch switch switch places turn it around flip it yeah oh that's great i love that too well i don't know if you

have more questions about i think i might have given all the commentary i can on the experience it's uh no i i think i think that just about covers it yeah that's good well hopefully i was able to bring a little bit of a new perspective to it and uh give give a little more explanation of why it may have been useful to you? Yeah, I would say that I would say that I think that's pretty good. All right. One thing you could probably do in the future is, you know, now knowing that it was useful to you, you can be like, what else could I get out of dreams?

What other problems could I consider that might give me an answer? And it could be a little more deliberate. I don't have any programs or methodology to recommend specifically for what they call dream programming. There's a lot of people find different things work better for them, but, you know, for you and for the audience in general, you actually can pose yourself questions, a little hit and miss on whether a dream is going to come to you that you're going to remember and it's going to give you the answer. But you be, I am constantly amazed how many times I go to bed thinking about a problem that remains unresolved and I got an answer in the morning. It just, for me, it just happens. If I could explain it better, I would. But I think you can, you can do that. You can meditate. on things and carry them with you in the back of your mind and you know an answer will come to you

I think so that's a maybe it'll happen again I don't know it's hard I think it will I think it happens more often than we know than people are consciously aware of which is probably maybe for the best maybe we don't need to be consciously aware of everything but okay if you feel satisfied by her discussion of the dream we'll wrap it up yeah I think that I think that that um I think he did a really a good job putting in perspective. I actually learn quite a bit from this. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think the more people can understand what they're experiencing, the more they can make sense of it in a way that is then hopefully useful. I, you know, I hate to, you know, I'm just some crazy person who thinks he's a wizard, but I also have the temerity, to call myself

a wizard and to pretend to teach things as much as I'm also trying to be humble. about it at the same time and like i hope i have something to share i hope it was useful and it's oh no that that that absolutely was useful well thank you it's always nice always nice to hear that so yeah i mean um yeah it was absolutely useful so um very cool i appreciate it yeah uh i look forward yeah uh unfortunately i got to get ready for my next podcast um oh yeah i'm just going to is it okay to do a little little outro um sure yeah go ahead no no this is like two minutes this has been our guest russell van brockland from upstate new york he is a new york state funded dyslexia researcher you can find him at dyslexia classes.com for my part would you kindly like share and

subscribe always need more volunteer dreamers i do video game streams monday through friday 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. pacific most news of the week the book most recent book uh number 18 onero chronology volume for prima reliquorum you can find all this and more at benjamin the dream wizard.com and if you'd head on over to Benjamin thedreamwizard.locals.com building a community there for you to join, et cetera, et cetera. And once again, Russell, thank you for being here. It's been an interesting discussion. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. And everybody out there, thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. Thank you.