Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 210: Stranger Than Fiction

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Kay Smith-Blum ~ https://www.kaysmith-blum.com/

If there were not technical difficulties along the way, it would not be an episode of dreamscapes. Let me tell you. Okay, perfect. Greetings, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today, we have our guest dreamer is Kay Smith Bloom. She's currently out of Carmel, California at a writing convention. She is the debut author of the book, Tangle, winner of as many as 13 awards. and counting very nice uh you can find her at k smith dash bloom dot com link is in the description below

uh 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 um this episode is still as with some of the most recent uh ones brought to you by abc book 18 i now have 18 works of historical dream literature this one is o'neuro chronology volume four prima reliquorum that's latin for the first of the rest or the first of what remains uh you can find that of course at benjamin the dream wizard dot com including downloadable or live streamable mp3s of this very podcast so you may take the wizard with you wherever wander with or without Wi-Fi and last but not least if you'd head on over to benjamin

the dream wizard dot locals dot combe building a community there it's free to join attached to my rumble account and that is more than enough out of me uh k i know we're short on time today we're going to compress it a little bit but i'm glad you were able to be here. Thanks. I look forward to it. Very cool. So we're going to get to your dream, which is actually related to the book, but I probably want to talk a bit about the book and in general. I mean, what is it? What, um, what, um, what are we trying to communicate? It's technically a, it's technically an historical fiction novel. It's, uh, one of only two novels that's been written about the Hanford Nuclear Reserve, but my novel specifically, my novel specifically, uh, centers on

the Cold War years. And my two fictitious protagonist is a dual narrative, dual timeline. Mary, a secretary at the Hanford Nuclear Works, her timeline is between 1947 just after World War II ends through 1951 when she goes missing. And then fast forward, a boy who was like a teenager living next door to Mary and her husband in one of the company built duplexes with his own family, grows up, becomes a scientist. His father was adversely affected by the various exposure to radiation at the Hanford Nuclear Plant as well. And he becomes a doctoral student in Oregon State University in the early 60s. And his narrative is between 1963 and 1964, and during the course of that time, his research turns up links to why Mary disappeared.

Very cool. So does it, the structure of the novel, why? Does it kind of bounce back and forth in time? It goes back and forth between the two timelines and the two narrators. And a mystery is woven through it, many, many, many environmental horrors or woven through it along with a pretty neat love story. that is cool hitting all those that drives the narrative as well very cool that's that's something that uh i think i've been watching a lot of anime lately and and doing uh one of my favorite genres is kind of the time loop right where someone can uh try again a second time and

you know being a kid of a certain age grew up on video games and whatnot and and there's a lot of you know gamers today we're familiar with that concept of well if you can't beat the boss you go back to the last checkpoint you try again so this whole checkpoint concept time loops have become very well this isn't a time loop though This is more synchrist. This is truly two different times and you go back and forth and then they eventually the stories merge and you figure out, oh, that's what happened. Definitely.

Yeah. No, and it's just opening my eyes. I'm really paying attention to the structure and the writing. And I mean, it really makes a difference when there's characters you can care about. And very often that involves a love story. I mean, it's a stake. You're putting something on the line. You want, if you care about the people, you want them to be happy.

You want the lovers to triumph and not end a Shakespearean tragedy. Although that can be a writer, you know, the more you punish your protagonists, the more, you know, empathetic they become. Oh, yeah, the more cathartic when they get their revenge or get their happy ending, absolutely. Well, you just feel so sorry for them, you know, you can't like not turn the next page, hoping that they'll, you know, somebody will give them a break. Oh, yeah. Well, and those are also, I mean, tragedy in. Why do we love literature? It shows, it's holding up a mirror to ourselves.

And it's very often going through adversity that we come out the other side, stronger and better if we approach it and handle it, right? There's some people who are, they're just victimized by circumstance and they don't learn anything from it. And they, and it's just, well, it's tragic with anything, but we want to see the hero overcome. We want to see them hit hard and it hurts, but they get back up. And man, do they persist until they win?

Like, you know, you want to cheer for them. I love that. love that and you mentioned earlier when off camera i think harper lee and uh you know and even even in her time that was historical fiction yeah absolutely yeah i i really uh feel very compatible with her you know she wrote this novel it was her very first and her sole novel for decades and uh when tangles started receiving a tremendous amount of recognition i mean it's won best debut novel from the american Fiction Awards. I won a book of the year from the Literary Global Awards. I recently won Best in the West from the National Indie Excellence Awards and Best Historical Fiction

Suspense Mystery from the American Fiction Writers Association Book Fest. I mean, I'm at 13 and counting, so I just feel like how am I ever going to top this? Oh, yeah. No, for sure. And I think I was also saying a bit, and I'll repeat a couple of things, especially about the dreams thing. But I'm in the same ways. Like if I made one successful book

of my own pure authoring and that was it, one and done, I'm perfectly happy with that. Sometimes you just hit the peak and it's like, I'm not going to, because you also think of series that you loved and that went on too long. And the magic just disappeared

and it became a parody of itself. And it's like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to, I'd rather, speaking of watching anime, I'd rather have one amazing season than two sequels that were just crap. And you end up going, oh, you cringe. Why did you do this? Because the inspiration wasn't there or the, it wasn't a planned trilogy from the beginning. So someone said, you know, the publisher said, hey, we made a bunch of money.

We want you to do it again. You know, I guess I can. And a lot of authors have tremendous success. Oh, no, authors, musicians. everything creative types have a tremendous success with their first product because well if it's in my case i've had this idea since i was you know for 30 years in my head and what i would write if i got it to publication is the product of 30 years of thinking about it and and you know with the plot and the characters who are they what do what what's this whole book about and then you know the

publishing house will say uh can you get another one in a year no no i cannot i cannot compress 30 years of thinking about something in a one year and give you another book. That's not going to happen. So I'd rather not try, you know, unless I had a plan to begin with, which I'm actually thinking about a book too. I've never written book one, but anyway, long story. It's not about me. But I was going to mention.

Well, my head is off to authors that can write series and that can, in fact, generate a book a year or a book every year and a half. But I'm working on my second manuscript now, which hopefully will be my second publication and our published novel. And it's completely unrelated. it's another stand-aline story. Good deal. Well, and I think as a fan, I would rather see an author take their time, and I'd rather

wait two or three years for another book from them, even if it's unrelated, you know, but rather than, like I said, with all the accolades, I'm feeling a lot of pressure for that next book to be really good. That's a tough thing, too. And that's going to take some time. I would almost rather have mediocre success than tremendous over the top. Whoa, this is amazing. It's like, calm down.

I can, I'll try. Just lower your ex. Under promise over, deliver, yeah. Yeah. Well, we were mentioning beforehand as well, the idea that this, the idea for this book,

or maybe even, some specific, what am I trying to say? Authors, some authors have. Some specific scene or kind of pivotal moment in the book. Yeah, exactly. That a lot of authors have reported,

like I had this great idea and I just built an entire book around it and it worked. know, and they, and some of them have gotten that from dreams. Specifically, if you read one of my 18 currently available works of historical dream literature, you'll see that many times Robert Lewis Stevenson of Treasure Island fame. Right. He wrote an essay, I can't remember the name, it doesn't matter.

It's in the book, it's in multiple books, where he talked about his inspiration for a lot of his stories came from dreams, wherein he described it as brownies, you know, a mythical fay creatures, would come and act out scenes for him. they would and he would go that's a great idea I'm going to put it in a story he didn't even think the ideas came from him he thought he was getting supernatural visions which is one interpretation of dreams well I can totally relate because I had a very specific dream and I rarely have recurring dreams but this dream occurred three times and during the course of it recurring um I had a series of encounters in daytime life uh

that suddenly I realized it was all related. And so, yeah, and so the dream absolutely found its way into the book, and it's a pivotal moment in the plot. And this book really is driven by that dream. Absolutely. And the idea of dream visions and real life occurrences synchronizing. I mean, we go to Carl Jung's idea of synchronicity, And then we start getting into his concept of the collective unconscious and the idea that, you know, we may be connected to other people and our, in a way, genetic history and to something else that aligns us with certain.

His famous example was you're walking down the street thinking, oh, I owe money to Mr. Fishburn. I need to pay him back. And just as you turn around the corner, there's a cat eating a burnt fish that, that, that, that, uh, that a you know chef had thrown out in the trash because it was burnt and like what is happening here that happens to me all the time and I think the more you pay attention to it or you're open to it you'll see synchronicities everywhere and I agree I think it's as much a thing of um letting you know you're on the right path in a way or that something's important that you should pay attention to or pursue and if you do uh I think good things happen but uh yeah I agree well um do you want to say

more about the book, or do you want to jump into the dream thing? I mean, we're short on time and my process can take a minute sometimes. Like I said, the book is a cross genre, so it reads very much like a thriller. It's technically historical because it is set during the Cold War years. It has mystery, suspense elements. There is a mystery that drives the plot because one of the protagonist goes missing. And in the midst of all of this is how you know, the largest environmental disaster in the Western Hemisphere came to be, and that is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which is 320,000 acres in eastern Washington. And it encompasses 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. And they're really not altogether sure how to deal

with much of the waste because it's very high level radioactive waste. And the government has recently daylighted funds that they promised decades ago for the cleanup. But there seems to be an awful lot of challenges around the cleanup itself and how to make the most of that money as long as it stays in the budget. which, as you know, is a crapshoot these days. So we'll see what happens next. But I think one of my big goals in writing the book was to daylight to the readers out there across the nation and across the world that this disaster is something that is fraught with problems and these radioactive isotopes have half-lifes of thousands of years.

years. And so this is not something that can just be like put into a can and buried in the ground. You can't do that. It's much more complicated than that. And I wanted folks to want to know more about that because there's an entire narrative going on about nuclear energy and that it's, quote, green and nothing could be further from the truth because anytime you split the atom, which is what nuclear energy requires, you're creating waste. waste lasts for thousands of years. Yeah, definitely, especially if it gets out of control due to natural disasters. Exactly. It brings to mind. And that's happen. And that's part of what you find out in my book because there was a 100-year flood in 1948 that affected the entire region, including the Hanford Nuclear Plant. And the waste tanks are leaking and fires are growing all across you know the northwest so there are many many ways that this could be you know a critical situation and like I said the the volatleness of the radioactive waste inside these tanks is a real problem definitely and then I think I think a lot of people in the Pacific Northwest we're hypersensitive

to forest fires we get them every year but floods are also a big deal and earthquakes we're probably overdue I mean we're right we are most folks may not understand And we exist in the ring of fire. And it's a whole bunch of volcanoes and whatnot and tectonic plates colliding. And we're pretty much overdue for a big one at some point. It could be another thousand years, but you can't count on that exactly. So whatever we do, we got to take, you know, reasonable measures preventatively. But then also when accidents happen or leaks occur, I mean, you can't just let it go into the environment.

That's not, that's untenable. That's like destroy ourselves. Part of what's happening now. in some of the larger tanks that hold a lot of very volatile waste is the elements inside the tanks react to one another, just like they're in a reactor almost. And one of the byproducts is hydrogen. And so unless the hydrogen is released from those tanks,

those tanks could blow up. So it's been a real tentative situation for well over 15 years once they started identifying what was going on inside the waste tanks. And so now it's really important for them to approach all of these problems in a very methodical and clear way. And those processes and protocols are still being sorted out. So it's important for the public to stay informed about this. Absolutely. I mean, that's another parallel to Harper Lee, bringing, you know, attention to an important issue by through narrative storytelling.

to get people invested in the idea of caring about something that's, I think, for a lot of folks outside of their day-to-day. I mean, it's not top of mind for a lot of people, but to say, this book is really good. Even in the Tri-Cities, Benjamin, the Tri-Cities ring the southwest to southeast border of the reservation of the Hanford Reservation, right? And I was doing a book signing in Kennewick earlier in the year because the novel just came out in December. So I'm rolling up towards my book birthday here. And I talk with so many people at that book signing that had lived in the area almost their entire lives. And I encouraged them all to reach back out to me, you know, after they bought the book, after they had finished reading. I've heard from dozens of readers that grew up in the Tri-City saying, oh, my gosh, we never knew any of these

things happened. So it's really eye-opening how we got here. And I think it makes all of them want to be not just more aware, but to be an advocate for cleaning it up and doing it the right way. And that really was my big goal. Absolutely. I think it's a great, it's a great way to get that message across. And then also to have it be an entertaining story. I mean, that's also one of the exactly you know and that's why i wrote a novel as opposed to another nonfiction narrative there's been a dozen terrific nonfiction books written about hampered but mine's the first novel there's one other novel but it's it's very dissimilar so gotcha that is very cool um well do you feel like you're ready to transition into talking about the dream that inspired you got the novel

let me do let me write this down here always do that okay so uh as per my usual process i'm just going to shut up and listen. Our friend Kay here is going to describe her dream like a narrative and then we're going to talk about it in relation to her real life and other things going on. So I'm ready when you are. Benjamin the dream wizard wants to

help you hear 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 visual. New Dreamscape's episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks exploring the psychological principles which inform our dream experience and much, much more.

To join The Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature. available on Amazon, documenting the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. The sleeper has awakened. Okay, great. So I had the dream in the latter part of the summer in 2023. And at first, it was just a very, it was almost like a little short clip, right?

I, it was towards early morning hours, and I, I was looking over at a body of water, and the water was very dark, but on top of the water was this mass of red hair. And I looked at it and said out loud in my dream, but it's not wet. and I woke up and I thought, okay, that's bizarre. And I ended up going back to sleep in the next morning, even though I keep a dream journal, a poet friend of mine advised me years ago to keep a dream journal, by the next morning, I kind of was busy and forgot to write it all down, whatever.

And then that afternoon, I ran into a friend who had been born and raised in Pasco, which is one of the Tri-Cities that rings the hand for nuclear reserve. And she, her mother had been suffering from breast cancer. And so I was asking after her mom. And she said, well, she had to have a double mastectomy. But prognosis is okay. And I could tell she was still really worried about her mom. And I was expressing how sorry I was that she and her mother and her family had

had to go through this. And she said, well, you know, that's what happens when you live near the area. And I said, the area, what's the area? And she said, you know, Hanford. And I did know about Hanford because when I ran for the Seattle School Board in 2009, I ran in the same election cycle with Jerry Pollitt, who is now the 46th Washington State legislator. And Jerry was running specifically because of the issues around the cleanup. And he had organized an initiative to put that on the ballot to hold the Department of Energy's feet to the fire around the cleanup. And he was running for state legislature to be

able to codify a lot of that agreement with the feds and the state of Washington and the state of Oregon, which borders the Columbia River and is affected greatly by Hanford, to stick to these specific protocols around the cleanup, because this is a very dangerous process. So Jerry educated me while we were both running for office. And so I kind of tucked my friend's comment in the back of my head and went on with my day. And the next morning, really close to me normally waking up, because I break up early as a writer, I had the dream again. But this time, it was much longer.

I was clearly holding on to the railing of a pier hence you can see my book cover behind me a pier stretching across the water and I was gripping the railing and looking over into the deep side of the pier, the ocean and I saw the red hair again

but this time there was enough light under the water for me to see a life female figure but again the hair was not wet. And I said, she can't be real. The hair is not wet. And then I woke up. And this time, I wrote it all down, right down to the fact that it was a small life figure. It was probably a child, not an adult, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then fast forward to that afternoon. I'm a lap swimmer. I was walking to my athletic club, and I ran into a guy who I've known for a long time,

and he's in real estate. And we were talking about the state of real estate in the Seattle market, and he made the comparison to Seattle's, you know, slowed down a bit. But boy, in my hometown, it hasn't slowed down at all. It's nothing but growth. And I said, where are you from again? and he said, Richland, Washington, born and raised. And I said, wait, you grew up in the company built town, the government built town for Hanford? He said, yeah, it was a Richland bomber. And I said, oh, my gosh, did you ever call Hanford the area?

He said, oh, yeah, nobody ever called it Hanford. And they used to pick up my dad's urine in a milk bottle off the front porch. And I was like, what? And I raised home to discover that the Hanford Instrument Division, which was the health division for Hanford, because they monitored everything from the very beginning. They monitored the soil, the animals, livestock, and wildlife. They monitored workers' urine. They did whole body counts on farm families and children that were in, that were downwind from the stacks, etc. So they monitored everything.

And that took me down a further rabbit hole of trying to figure out, well, when did people know that they were being exposed to this radiation? And I discovered that they didn't know for almost six decades. The government kept it classified that long. They never warned anybody that they were releasing high levels of radioactive isotopes out of the stacks. They never told anybody that they were dumping the affluent from the control rods that was full of radioactivity and radioactive byproducts into the Columbia Riverbed. They never told anybody that some of the waste tanks, which were in those days just single shell concrete tanks, were leaking and going into the bedrock. And in two cases, contaminating aquifers, which were drinking water for the region. And they kept all of this hush, hush, and classified until the 1980s when the Freedom of Information Act came along.

And they were forced to release some of the documents. So then I thought, okay, I got to talk to Jerry. And we had, like, he was the legislator. And we had, like, a three and a half hour Zoom. And then he gave me a long list of people to talk to and oral histories to listen to from Hamford workers. back during World War II and during the Cold War that live on the Hanford History Project site. And then I had the dream again and the child in the water had pulled herself up on the side of a dingy and there was a little boy in the boat.

And then I never had the dream again after that. but let me just say that the little girl and the boy in the boat are pivotal in my tail okay that that is interesting so broad strokes uh without analyzing the specific dream it's interesting to see the structure of the recurrence so very often recurring dreams happen they'll have small differences along the way, but they will repeat a basic formula of, and it's unique to the dream, to the, to the dreamer. And this takes me back to one, or many, many, but one in particular. A combat veteran had a dream where he was entering a house, and it was always the same. He enters the house. He moves around the perimeter of a room full of people who are there

for a party or something. Right. This cat's going to just stop it. I love you. It was my fingers if you need to. He's playing with my mouse. Anyway, but it always followed the same form and structure and repeat it almost exactly the same. There might be a couple of different people or there might be, you know, small, small details. But this one actually had kind of a building progression. Yeah. Yeah. The first two times, it was basically the same dream, but just it was as if I got a longer look, right, at the water. And then it was the third time. and maybe, you know, I've had writer friends say to me, you dreamed him into existence. You were already thinking she had like someone, right?

So I don't know. But the third time when the day he showed up, it was like, wait, what the heck? Yeah, no, that is very interesting. Well, if, um, so what is, what are recurring dreams? I, I, what are dreams in general? The way I phrase it is, um, the lungs breathe, the heart beats. and the brain thinks. And it does it nonstop for the moment it comes into existence

and whether we're asleep or awake. And I think what dreams are is more of our raw, unfiltered stream of consciousness flow. And, you know, during the day, we have, you could call them fantasies, daydreams. The idea of we start thinking about something and we even daydream about actual historical events. We go back in time to view our memories.

Or we start, you know, theorizing different ways of conceptualizing things. And our brain actually thinks in symbols. And then we translate that through conscious attention into language. That's why symbols are more universal. We all kind of understand certain things. Right. And what happens with recurring dreams is very often a certain conceptual symbol comes to represent an idea.

And it keeps coming back until we fully processed it or understood it. But this, again, this is fascinating. I love talking to two different people to get there because there's so many unique experiences that fit within categories, but they're completely anomalous in some ways. And this is one of them where you may have been contemplating something. And it may have even been subconscious contemplation in terms of, you know, this is something bugging you. You're not even sure what it is.

You heard something and it's stuck and you don't know what to do with it. And it isn't important enough to occupy your daily mind or your, or your, until it came to you in this form of like, okay, there's, there's something, dreams have a way of being emotionally impactful. in a way. So this intellectually impactful, but we usually talk about I woke up feeling a certain way, not I woke up thinking a certain thing. So for this one, you probably after that first dream were, you felt strongly enough about it

to write it down and be like, whoa, this happened. This was and I imagine there was a disturbing quality to it or I don't know, how would you describe it? The first time it was just like the shock that I was seeing this mass of red hair. And it was so short and I woke up in the middle of the night and I had a really long day the day before and I thought I've got to go back to sleep and so I didn't write it down the first time the second time is when you know which happened the very next night and it was the exact same dream except for I could I could see more detail you know yes there was the mass of red hair

but now I'm seeing that there's like this light figure under the mass of red hair and that was probably there the first time. You know how you, if you don't write something down, you don't really remember what you saw, I feel like the first and second time it was the exact same snapshot. I just, I just let it linger a little more. And then I also had it later in the night. So it was almost time for me to wake up anyway, because I get up early as a writer. And so when I had it, the second time the next night, I, I woke up and.

wrote everything down that I could remember about that. Yeah, so it wouldn't have, what am I trying to say? It's, there's something about that first experience that grabbed your attention and imagination in a way that even though you didn't write it down, that shock, that idea of the shocking imagery, the shock of the imagery stuck with you. And so there's a, there's a case to be made that it came back again because you're like, why did this affect me so strongly? Like you probably devoted a little bit of attention during the daytime to it and probably

multiple came back to it multiple times to then have it again that night where this was, this was impactful enough that there's something here I need to understand. I need to, I need to work through or conceptualize or wrap my brain around. Right. So, and very often I think we can do that with dreams. Now, do I know how to do? Can I give you a formula? No.

But we, I think it just happens very often that we will come back to certain concepts. And that's not, you know, what you're saying about I related to it in some way. I remember having the conscious thought, um, the first, the first time I had the dream, but didn't run anything down. And it's like, wait, was that, am I remembering something? Because as a child, I had read Auburn here. Um, and it was long.

And we used to go. You know, to the lakes, the Highland Lakes, I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. And we used to go up on the lake and I'd be swimming. And, you know, so, you know, I thought, okay, wait, is this me? You know, and then when it recurred the next night, I thought, it's not me. Okay. And there's something about it that's not me, but is it maybe like I have a granddaughter that looks a lot like me. And she has long hair.

And it's not red red, but it has an Auburn cast to it. And I thought, you know, is it her? You know, and so I remember making some notes about that on my dream journal that, you know, who is, who is this little girl? Yeah. No, I think definitely that's a significant factor. Like why this, why a girl and not a boy? Why at a certain age versus that? And thinking of her future in terms of this broader scope of, like, say, environmental concerns.

Like, you don't want to leave a dirty, polluted poison planet to your child or to your grandchildren. So even if it wasn't her exactly in the dream, probably her as a model, a stand in, in a sense, an iconic vague shape of grandchildren, the children of the future. definitely in that one and then seeing her floating in the lake but her hair is not wet that is very interesting too it's like there's something

there's something in there we probably need more time to tease it apart a little bit but I don't know if you did you give that any thought of like why not wet oh yeah what did you come to that helped me develop her character but I'm not going to tell you exactly what

because that would be a spoiler okay let's not let's not spoil yeah good good That helped me develop her storyline. She's a minor character in the book. Gotcha. Okay, very cool. Yeah.

Well, in terms in broader strokes of educated the audience on dream interpretation, these are the kind of questions that you want to ask yourself or discuss with some, I think verbalizing it, taking our thoughts and images and whatnot and putting them into word, trying to compose our thoughts in partnership with, in a dialogue with someone else really helps. And then they're going to give you a different perspective that two heads are better than one type of thing. So, and then to have. have have it come back and have that expand a little bit. It's like that was it, that CSI meme. Enhance. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Because you want to look at it again. What's happening? Yeah. Show me that

again. Let me look at it. And once I, you know, and once I realized that I was on a pier on the ocean, not on a lake, not a pond somewhere close by, right? But a pier on the ocean, then I thought, okay, whatever this is is connected to the ocean and and then as i was doing my research i stumbled upon really like months into research i stumbled upon i was on j store which is a terrific you know a place for authors to go and find historical documents classified non classified whatever educate yourself on just about anything you don't know because it's going to be a right exactly and i literally had just gone into J-Store and done a find for Hanford, nuclear, right? And this peer-reviewed paper

that had been published in Nature magazine in September of 63 came up. And it was about a whale that had been harpooned off the Oregon coast. And when they brought the whale in bio-products, which was a company at that time in Warrington, Oregon had hired the whaling crew. And they brought the whale to the dock for bioproducts and bioproducts, you know, whaling was was legal then in the early 60s. And they harvested, you know, all the organs and various parts and pieces of the whale for health products and beauty products, et cetera, et cetera. They fed the meat of the whale to the mink farmers or sold it to the mink farmers. And so, you know, this really happened. And when they opened up the whale, they realized that something was very wrong. There were

certain things that were deformed inside the whale. And they realized very quickly that there was a high level of zinc and additionally radioactive isotopes. And so they called in a team of scientists who analyzed the whale and determined that every organ in the whale, was full of radioactive isotopes, but not just any, isotopes that were absolutely only created as a byproduct of plutonium production, which meant that in Warrington, Oregon, 275 miles down river from the tri-cities of Washington, that radioactive isotopes from the Hanford nuclear plant were finding their way into the plankton, plankton at the mouth of the bay. And that's what the whales had fed on. And in this paper,

in this paper, they tied their findings to Hanford. And they put it in writing that this this radioactive fallout came from Hanford. And then the very next sentence was, but we see no danger to human health. Interesting. And that just pissed me off. So I made it the opening scene for Luke in 1963. So did you have that knowledge before the dream or after? You went looking for it after. This is, I didn't start doing any research on Hamford until I had the dream twice. Okay. So my theory would be that somewhere in your mind you made this connection, that there's obviously there's downstream effects we literally use that as a as a metaphor for things because there's a river nearby so probably someone in your mind you put that together and you're

like this is going to hit the ocean and this is going to cause problems and it's going to hurt people even even before you found other people who said the same thing and who proved it you know through through research through dissecting a whale now either that or so there's other guests I would have who'd said well this is obviously more supernatural I've been directed in this realm. And I don't tend to lean in that direction just because I can't explain it. I can't tell you what is or isn't supernatural. But, you know, it seems like this is a broadly a passion of yours in general. And then it's become more specific as you've known people who've lived in the area. And, and then you connect this to your concern for the future

and grandchildren. And bam, you get this, this sequence of dreams that, you know, I was going to mention this too. I forgot. Probably the most famous instance of a dream inspiring a work of art is Samuel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan. He woke up from a dream with like the entire poem in his head and it's as fast as he could write. You know, he got it. And then it faded away so quickly. He lost the rest of it. But he had so much more than we will ever know. So this is, you know, it's a fantastic thing. This is one of the reasons I tell people to, you know, follow your dreams. They know the way. your passions in life but the idea of literally your dreams they're talking to you they're saying you're saying something to yourself pulling from resources inside your own head that you don't have conscious control over necessarily but what what bubbles up is usually something relevant to your life uh to to to to something that's important to you that you want to pursue or the message you want to communicate to others uh so definitely we we are up against the clock though so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna help you get out of here okay okay good i wish you had more time this is

fascinating. This is probably so much more we could say. This cat, there is, eat my fingers. Go ahead. Go ahead. Don't eat my paper. All right. By way of wrapping up, let's say, once again, this has been our guest dreamer K. Smith Bloom, currently out of Carmel, California, at a writer's convention. She is the debut author of the book, Tangle, winner of 13 awards and counting. You can find her, of course, at k-smith-bloom.com. Link is in the description below. For my part, would you kindly, like, share, and subscribe. Always need more volunteer dreamers. I play video games 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 18, O'Neuro Chronology Volume 4, Prima, Rolla Quorum, another anthology compilation supplementing the original trivium. Of course, you can find all this and more at Benjamin the Dreamwizard.com, and if you'd

had on over to Benjaminthreamwizard.locals.com, building a community there. Free to join attached to my Rumble account. And the last thing to say is once again, Kay, thank you. for being here. Thank you so much. I really enjoy the chat. Yeah, me too. Fascinating dream and just the concept of recurring dreams in general. So, uh, and on that note, everybody out there, thank you for watching. Hope to see you next time.