Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 212: Mother of Invention

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Lou Pugliese ~ https://loupuglieseauthor.com/

And then I did put out a book of poetry as well. And of course, that's no shortage of dream type prompts to those. I mean, they just occur from nowhere. Another one of the most famous is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan came from a dream. Yeah, yeah, that's a great story too. It's like when I tell people follow your dreams, they know the way or sleep on it. I mean these things literally. I mean, your dreams will show you things.

And you can, if you pay attention and, um, want to understand, you probably can, and it'll tell you something. There is a message in there, there's an understanding that can be gained from it. Greetings, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today, our guest dreamer is Dr. Lou Paglis, is a former automotive executive and retired professor of organizational development. He's also the author of I said this so smoothly when I was reading it back to you like here what if I say this now I can't for the life of me the author of blame it on the moon and the final or and final exam which is

a prequel to the first one and the forthcoming title the portal will be available soon you can find him at lou paglis author.com and the spelling of that name and the link is in the description below for my part would you kindly like share and subscribe tell your friends always need more volunteer dreamers. I do video game streams most days of the week, Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific. This episode is brought to you in part by ABC Book 18 entitled O'Neuro Chronology, Volume 4, Prima Relequorum, or as Latin for the first of what remains, or the first of the rest. And you can find that, of course, at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable or live streamable audio-only MP3s of this very podcast. And if you'd head

on over to Benjamin the Dreamwizard.locals.com building a community there. It is free to join attached to my Rumble account. That is more than enough out of me. But Lou, thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. Thanks. I appreciate your time as well. Very cool. We're going to have fun talking about dreams. Actually, you'd mentioned right before we like officially started the show like we just did, that the inspiration for one of your books came from a dream. And I mentioned con poem, which you can actually find a version of that on my AI radio channel. I turned it into a song, very cool. I'm going to promote myself too a little bit. But we're going to talk about you. I promise. I promise. I'm so so bad at that. And the idea that Robert Louis Stevenson

has famously wrote a poem, wrote an article or an essay about how he was inspired by his dreams to write some of his, you know, I think maybe Treasure Island. I don't know that one specifically, but he'd say brown brownies little people would come to him in his dreams and act out scenes and he'd be like okay let's write it let's put that in a book um and then you mentioned that you had a dissertation on that as well and that reminded me of another book that i republished uh it's abc book 14 it is uh dreams in homer and greek tragedy and it is the literally the uh the application the dissertation of a guy who is who is applying to join the faculty of philosophy at a university columbia i think but way way back when later 1800s, early 1900s. And it was all about how dreams were represented by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey and how it was also represented in various Greek tragedy plays. And he goes through him and lists and talks about it. And there's a lot of Greek translations in there. And footnotes that take up multiple pages. So I put those in the back. I'm like, footnotes are fantastic, but they should be short. Like, here's this guy and the date of his birth and here's what he's famous for. Let's

move on. But in my opinion, I always add. new footnotes. But I wanted to ask you more about your, um, yours that you said, you know, you can get through the university press, which I think it's a, I don't know, I'm rambling today, but too much coffee probably, but it, it shocks me that some of those books are so expensive. When, when it should be the other way around, it's a, it's a public or even if it's private, but a university, it was like, knowledge should, it should be the cheapest book possibly available through that, because it shouldn't be a profit motive to get education and information out to people. I don't know if you wanted to, let me stop there. We throw it back to

you. And I don't know if you wanted to discuss that dissertation a little bit and what it was about and how it relates to dreams. We can do that. The dissertation was actually not dream related, but it was, it was driven by the dissertation is on the roots of prejudice. Gotcha. It's something called the word is antitativity. And it's, Pretty obscure, probably myself and about seven other people on the planet get deeply into it. I was going to say deeply academic terminology. It is. It gets you in all those.

Yeah, it gets into all those languages we try not to speak. You know, at any right, it's the basic understanding of it is, annotativity is the degree to which we hold are beliefs of others. So when we think of other, some people have low degrees of annotativity, some people have high degrees of annotativity, and it tends to be a trait that carries across. If you have low degrees of annotativity, when you form your stereotypes, because we all need stereotypes. There's too much information in the world. We have to group those things together. When we form our stereotypes, someone with low degrees of negativity is constantly open to new

information and using it to reshape that model all the time. Someone with high degrees of negativity will at some point block out any novel information that does not agree with what they have already decided. Interesting. And at that point, it's prejudice. Yeah, for sure. If you've got a very narrow conception of what someone is because of the category they appear to belong to, or even the category they do belong to, then you're not, yeah, yeah, very interesting. And then they'll apply that category to anyone that they think falls into it. I mean, there's certainly some modern examples of this that are pretty stark. But the there is an instrument that can measure a person's preference for degrees of

antitativity. So I applied this in multiple workplaces that were all union environments. And what I was looking for is I had experienced in working with that environment, what I perceived as prejudice, where there were facts available for discussions, and they were completely blocked out. They were not accepted by some individuals. And it could be both labor and management, either one. And I thought, you know, if this really is a prejudice,

it's different than just being a difficult employee. If this really is a prejudice, how could we understand it and how would we work with that? And so I had the two, I had the instrument that measured the preference for degrees of negativity, and I had an instrument that measured workplace satisfaction that was fairly detailed. And what I was looking for was the person who had high degrees of negativity and was really, really down on the workplace and the environment.

And I thought that might point in a direction. The issue being that if that person happened to be a supervisor or a shop steward, they could be fairly destructive in the overall workplace as far as, you know, getting anything moving forward. A human spanner in the works. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I found, if you measure it on a gross level, there's nothing statistically significant

there. But if you cross-tab it and you look at it at a gross-level, you look at a, individual level, fully 40% of the population had what I was looking for, the piece of concern. So I would submit that that's a strong consideration. And of course, you do diffuse prejudice differently with an individual than you do with that difficult employee. And so that was some of the prescriptive that came out of it. It could probably use further study, as we say, on all educational works. But it is out there for free on George Washington University's site. That's where I'd recommend to get it rather than paying $70 on Amazon. Wow. That's just, yeah, the price is

unbelievable. That's what I'd like education to be. Well, so I price my books like, I make $1, $2 off each one and that's most of that goes to the printing cost and Amazon takes their cut and then I get a little on the back end but uh you know compared to most books you're going to get something fairly substantial for for relatively cheap but if you if you're buying mine so that's the best I can do for you guys out there because I just want them out there I want more people to be educated you know the only difference in the book the book is titled thinking of others and the only difference is I did put in some information on um now I'm trying to think of the has to do with the levels of study.

I can't remember what the term is, but it's something very academic. At any rate, I reflected in the levels of study that some more explanation on how at the population level you don't get the same results as you do at the individual level. And that for this particular study, that was pretty important. But aside from that, it's identical to the dissertation you would pull up from, you would pull up and struggle to read from GW. Yeah, it's very interesting, too. There's a bunch of analysis to do just on the concept involved, but there's two things that struck me immediately. One is that about 90% of psychology is identifying the correct problem.

And that's usually what, you know, and then the last 10% is the patient's got to work on or the client, and you need to have functional methods for implementing. and measuring change, all that good stuff. But a lot of why, you know, therapy takes so long is you've got to talk to people and not jump to conclusion. So there's even like a meta stereotyping that goes involved there. You really got to parse through this. This is why the dream process I do should really be done over multiple sessions, over weeks, months.

You can do one dream for session after session. And, you know, in more traditional, say, Jungian psychology, you probably would. And what I'm doing is definitely a truncated entertainment version. of it to show people the concepts and hopefully still get good answers but uh the uh so having a metric that allows you to um here come on come on i have a cat who thinks he's a dog he wants to play fetch with my hair ties he brings me in bed he wakes me up clawing at my cheats to throw it for him and of course he wants to do it in the middle of the show uh i call it value added content i can't even be mad um although if i don't you can see my hand there's heart doesn't show up very well

i'm just covered in scratches he likes it whoops he's a young boy he likes to fight so that's a long story short on that the um the flip side as well is there's there's also um helping the client or or in this case a paper worker a someone who you um have to i guess you could choose to fire someone but then you know then maybe there's potential there maybe then you're gonna retrain someone i mean the idea is not to look for a reason to get rid of somebody but to identify the problem to facilitate the process i think it's a fantastic idea to say you go to someone and you don't you know you don't poke them in the chest and say you you are prejudiced and that's immoral that you don't you put people on the defensive I mean

there's a there's a confrontational approach and there's a partnering approach to things I think it's a more practical use of pragmatic that's not the right answer but more successful method to come to someone and say looks like you might have um an incomplete picture of a certain type of problem. And I think we can work with that to help you get a better understanding of what you're dealing with so that you can respond in a different way. You know, it's like it takes all the sting out of it. Even if you're telling them, wow, you got the wrong idea about people and you're kind of being a jerk. You could say things like that, but it's, you know, a lot of times it gets at the art of diplomacy or whatnot in terms of approaching things. I don't

if you have any comments on those two concepts you know the diffusion of prejudice a lot of a lot of the the research on that comes down to facilitating getting very different people together in a way that they have to interact and allowing them to find the common ground and to learn for themselves. Like, for instance, one of the studies I ran across was a white supremacist and a black power advocate that were in prison who were put together and at some point discovered they both liked fishing. Oh, yeah. And that was enough to open up real human dialogue. And of course, from there, you know, most of us are, you know, a very high percentage interested in the same things in, you know, good of the world. There are very few people who are

just absolutely evil, but they can come across that way when blocked out by their prejudices. So, again, if you can get people to closely and personally investigate common ground, you can kind of diffuse this, especially in a workplace, because there are other things that require people's attention that are common ground, just by the nature of being working together in that environment. Absolutely. I think it's a big deal. It says we, you know, apart from a few.

honestly black and white issues that we can't see to issues right talking about prejudice that we can't there's no compromise on some things but but like most of everything else there is a lot of commonality and the first thing it popped into my head is uh you know you got to say you know a black supremacist and a white supremacist get together and they're like i think my people are the best i agree i think we should live separately i agree just like well look we got common ground already

just that struck me as a funny scene There's actually a guy named Ryan Long, who's like the racists and the woke and how they both agree about a bunch of different things. Yes. That was hilarious. That's fantastic. Do you have some thoughts on that? No, I, but it strikes me that I have a friend who is very, very liberal. And I had another friend who was very, very not liberal.

and I would get the same emails from both. You want to expressing support for their opinion. And I began to believe that it's not a line with liberal on one end and conservative on the other end. It's a circle. And at the extremes, they... I think the meme on the internet is horseshoe theory. The further you get from the center, the more you start coming back together. other and actually can lay the horseshoe over the um uh political compass i don't know if you're

familiar with that as a as a metric it's like where are you on no no authoritarian libertarian left right and that if you kind of start from a center libertarian at the bottom like i don't want to tell anyone what to do do your thing i'm not left i'm not right i got one me i tend to think of myself as one foot on each side straddling the line but solidly i got the all these different opinions but then the further you go towards left and right and then it comes kind of both come back together way near the top is this authoritarian version of their own their own way of doing things.

And that do share a lot of common beliefs. Very interesting. I personally think the political compass needs to be a cube, but I'm not sure what the Z axis is. I've been working on that in my head. Working on, I just let things percolate. I call it.

He's like making coffee. It'll be ready when it's ready. I don't know. I don't know how long it's going to take. That's fascinating too is there's many stories. And this is one of the great things. I kind of built in a way by doing this historical dream literature. I've built my own masterclass in how in dream interpretation and understanding of dreams

because I've just read everything that everyone's ever written up to a certain point. At some point I'm going to need to get into, okay, now post-1920 research because we did learn some new things recently. But the idea that, oh, wow, where was I going with that? Damn. Oh, that happens all the time. the political compass and the conceptual design of uh there we go yes thank you know and well the idea of the the then going meta meta on all that but the idea of um there are many many stories

of people who could not force themselves into an epiphany and and just just discussing that concept where man these things come in their own time and and they've mentioned two things and they related them together which is one i'll bring you back i swear um that it was the concept of take a break if you're if you're frustrated and you're deep in a thing and it's not coming it's not coming together and you're you're trying to force an epiphany get them take a walk and think about something else for a minute it was smell the air listen to the birds watch nature stretchy legs and the number of stories that people have uh you know extolling the virtues of such a process is there's something about inattention there's

something about taking your focus off it that like relieves some pressure that was built up around the possible solution and that allows the solution to kind of filter out and that that's actually what happens in dreams too is a bunch of stories of people who were like it was a guy who invented some some valve or mechanism or something and his the answer to a problem he spent weeks trying to solve he woke up one morning he's like that's it I got it it's his dream solved the problem so when I tell people to sleep on it I don't just mean give it time for you to reconsider I mean literally go to sleep and and I can't tell you the number of times that's happened to me too where I go to bed not having an answer to something that's been bothering me.

And I wake up in the morning. I know exactly what I want to do. And I don't even have a memory of a dream associated with it, but that had to have occurred in my sleep. I didn't go to bed with the answer. I got it in that period of time. That's just fascinating. And that's part of part of the writing process that I've come to trust. So I'm at I, the current book that I'm working on as of a couple of days ago, I've been furthering away at this thing for, gosh, I don't know how many months, maybe a year or more. And I didn't know how to end it. And it didn't worry me because I've got enough experience in my own, the way the writing comes to me. It's more of channeling than grading.

Yeah. And so I know when I, I just know it's going to come. So I don't worry. People ask me about writer's block. And I said, well, I've never had it. I've had times where I've said, I need to trust and I need to sleep and I need to allow this to emerge. And it always has.

It's pretty, pretty interesting process. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I find some of my. best ideas like I've got a I've got an idea for a sci-fi fantasy crossover thing for 30 years it's been in my

head and I know all the characters I know the basic landscape I don't have the bones of the story exactly but what I've been doing is when I'm distracted by something else ideas will pop into my head and I'll just write them down it's it's like I can't sit at a typewriter and just make a story I've never understood that at all but the idea of

at some point you have to sit down and write you got to say okay now let me take all these ideas and put them on paper but just trusting that yeah eventually and also So having a notepad handy, this, this works with the dreams. Do you want a dream journal by your bed? And some people use a recording that you can use your phone. You can speak, speaking into your phone.

It'll turn it into text, that kind of thing. But you can also just have like I do these note, notepads. I keep around. And one of the things I've learned is that the, the muse whispers and only once. It's like if it's gone, it's gone. You'd better get it while I can. So I was going somewhere with that too. But so we should probably talk about how, um, uh, your,

or a dream you had inspired the first book, and then what genre is it into? I didn't ask anything about that yet. Okay, the first book, well, I woke up one morning, and I told my wife, I had been working on the book that became final exam for, oh, I guess, four plus years. And at one point early on in that four plus years, I had, I got excited that I had created a book. I had, you know, 63,000 words of book.

So I started submitting it to agents and thought, well, we're off to the races now. We'll get screenplay and we'll get, you know, everything else that comes with submitting your book to an agent and getting a publisher. And, of course, what I got instead was about 120 rejection letters from agents. But, you know, I didn't know what I didn't know at that point. And I was fortunate enough to have gone to high school with somebody who was married to a very successful author and was willing to get us together for a lunch. And he shared with, his name is John Gilstrap. He has a bunch of successful series, and he shared with me that you've made a change in your life by deciding to go into fiction writing. And here's some things you need to do.

You need to learn the craft. You need to join the associations. You need to participate. You need to go to the conventions. You need to make the connections. And so over a number the next three years or so of doing that, at one point, I woke. up, and I told my wife, I had a drink. And it's, I know it's significant. For one reason, I remember it very vividly. And that's really unusual. I dream a lot, but I don't remember

things. By the time I have been to the restroom and back, it's pretty much gone. It's fog. that this dream I had. And so the first thing I did that morning was sat at my laptop and typed it out, typed out all the details I could remember of it. And then I left it alone. And when I came back to it, I had some more thoughts based on that. And ultimately, that became 83,000 words of blame it on the moon. So the book I had been working on for years,

that wasn't necessarily ready for prime time, I sort of shifted to the side and I went full time and to blame it on the moon. And through that process, there were several times where I was stopped and I didn't know how the pieces were going to fit together. But I said to my life, I said, you know, I'll wake up in the morning and I'll have dreamt it or during a nap. I'd get enough little pieces that helped fill in eventually I had a complete book and it was a book that was worthy of publishing so I did I put it out there I self-published it and that's partially because of my age

I'm too old at this point to go through the get the agent get the editor get the publisher get the four or five years later you have a book yeah and then you just start the process all over again. Well, I'm, you know, at that rate, I might get two books out before I'm dead. And I have, I know I want more. So I self-published the book. It had a pretty good release. Within a couple of weeks, I had sold more books than a self-published author is supposed to sell in a lifetime, which is 250 books, is what they say. You might sell

in a lifetime. So at any rate, then I went back to final exam because one of the characters in Blame It on the Moon was the most significant, was actually the protagonist for final exam. And by writing Blame It on the Moon, and the character became something so solid to me that it changed the first book,

and it changed it into a one, way that was ultimately marketable. Now, both books still have some scenes that are a little disturbing for some readers. Both of them have either something sexual or something very descriptive graphic murder-type scene. For the most part, they've both been received very well. But every once in a while, I'll get that, that my most recent review, which was from an international source, was pure rubbish. They really stopped at one of the courts or murder scenes, and I get that, and I understand that those aren't for everyone, but there were reasons why I felt they were important to leave somewhat as is.

So that's the kind of quote I would put on the back of the book, Pure rubbish says this, I'd be like, I would wear that like a badge of honor. That's fantastic. I am sort of proud of that because it's, you know, it's like, though you are not the reader that I was looking for or that I was hoping to entertain in this way. but yeah so the first book it totally emerged from a dream the the process of relying on dreams

to go somewhere um and then the the impact that grew out of that to fix the other book and to inform the coming book all of it goes back to that one dream that started the process and got me actually into publishing my own fiction. Very cool. And so before we started, I was like, I think I'm forgetting something. I completely forgot to ask how you wanted to do the dream thing when we shift into it. Did you want to discuss that dream in particular and try and see, do what I call a stump the wizard section where you, you don't tell me too much.

You let me ask questions and then see if I can get, suggest something that's close to your understanding of it or did you have a completely different dream that we're going to do for the interpretation section and then we can actually get into that dream and how it influenced the publication of the book i don't know how you want to approach it well no i don't know i suppose i could i mean one may might be to read the chapter of the book that was the finished interpretation on my end of the dream although that's very much just a

description of a scene I don't know if that helps or maybe there's a lot of different ways to approach it because as we're saying Robert Louis Stevenson he would just have his dreams weren't he didn't treat them as interpretable personal psychology type of

he felt that they were acting out scenes that he would then put into a book it sounds like that's more on the side of things that you are not. Now, you're, that dream may also have a personal meaning, but then also you say, well, that's just a cool scene. And I'm so I'm going to put it in the book. It's always good to do the most recent or most fresh dream that has, as relation to your current life, things that are going on. Because then we get interesting or unique insights and it may be more personally useful.

And then that also allows us to say, talk about the other dream with some spoilers in a way that makes it a more interesting discussion about how that relates to the book. I don't know. Do you have a dream that's, that's more recent? I do. Okay. Let's do that one for the interpretation. That lets us... Go ahead. I have a very recent one that was quite vivid, and I felt compelled to write down. In fact, I've got pages and pages of every one of these. Because once I, once I had the original one and did the book, I'm like, I'm not going to lose another one of those. yeah so every time i have a vivid vivid enough dream i i don't know where it fits but i i record

it and i you know i write down the details that i can remember absolutely so i have dog barking in the background i hope your filter covers that oh yeah no i couldn't hear it at all no no worries okay yeah yeah definitely because my dog may join in here shortly you're right he by the way is featured in the book in the first book very nice i'll probably have cats somewhere and one of my books someday and i'm definitely doing the self uh self published thing too because i just i just want to get them out there and i and i don't want to deal with the hassle of publishing houses i think that's actually kind of dying down there used to be a lot more gatekeeping so that means there's going to be a lot more garbage out there to sort through and it's going to be tough made

even tougher for a new new author to break through but i'm also thinking of doing it in a little different way there's um uh i watch i think um um japanese anime is some of the best modern storytelling that available hands down and a lot of those, a lot of them more than I even realized were adaptations of what are called Japanese

light novels and they're usually published as chapter books but novellas, a series of novellas that all add up to something. That's and you know now that I'm thinking about it I'm like that's probably what I've been waiting 30 years for is a concept of how to tell

the story that I've got in my head who these characters are. There's a lot I'm working on. I'm probably a few years off from even starting. But I think that's what I'm going to do. And then almost imagining it like writing, writing to the idea of an anime adaptation. And then if I'm lucky, maybe someone, you know,

it'll be popular and someone will go, this should be a cartoon and they'll make it. But just that episodic nature of it. And then there's a little less pressure on, you know, coming up with a Lord of the Rings trilogy, where it's epic. And each book is a thousand, you know, thousand pages or whatever but right getting off of me but but talking back to you so it sounds

like what you experienced um i don't know if you're familiar with how uh george lucas came to write get star wars made and the origins of that story well this uh basically the same thing that happened to you he wanted to film i think it was the um originally the title for his story in the series he wanted to do was you know it's like the the adventures of luke star killer And they're like, well, let's change killer to, how about Skywalker instead? That's interesting. It's a more, more spiritual journey type of type of sound. Anyway, that was a suggestion someone made to him.

And he wanted to start with the prequels that we didn't get until, you know, until 25 years after the original came out. So his process was helped along by the studio saying, this stuff's kind of boring. But you know where it gets interesting, chapter four with Star Wars of what's called Star Wars. and then he got to make that movie even though he had spent years working on the actual story which was the prequels and you kind of have a similar thing going on with you

but I think that was probably necessary to his process of like he could not have gotten to Star Wars and made it what it was as successful as it was without having that backstory in mind and then just like here's where all the characters came from here's who they are and what they what they've done and now

let's show them in conflict and bam now you got a story and then he can go back and tell the the story later, which was interesting. It was more political intrigue and the, the ramping up to war or to the, to the action in Star Wars. So I just want to throw out, you're in good company with that one. Oh, good. Yeah. I think that's probably where I'm headed to is like, I need a, I need a, I need a, I need a, I need to, in almost Robert, you know, Robert Lewis Stevenson's Brownies style, I think I need these characters to act on their own. I just need to put them in a scenario and then they're going to tell me what they're going to do based on who they are.

And I don't think I have a solid conception of that. I'm also working on the idea of AI tools being a thing. Now, not only can I do graphics. That's a big thing with the Japanese light novels is they're not comics. They're not full panels of graphics. Like, that's, that's manga. That's an actual thing. But it's written words on a page.

But every so often they've got the characters in an image on the page. It's usually drawn anime style. But it'll show you, here's the, you know, main characters around a table. Here's them in combat. and here's here's some moment when the the hero confesses his love you know that kind of thing um i was going somewhere with all that too damn wow i do that to myself like my brain this this is actually part of my process too and why i'm completely spontaneous we're talking about where inspiration comes from and this is how i do the dream interpretation thing too is like i don't i don't

prepare i can't that's that's the wrong i the wrong approach what i do is i open myself to up to what i call the spirit of being useful to someone else. And whatever comes through, whatever hits my brain, I say it. I just, but then, of course, it makes me a terrible interviewer. And I don't ask, that's right. This is not actually an interview show. We're just two people chatting about, it's like a conversation we'd have over, you know, over breakfast and a cup of coffee or, you know, having beers at the bar or something.

That's kind of how, that's kind of how I run the show, whatever's on my mind. Yeah, the important part is not to pick up a cell phone and actually try and fact check any of it because it doesn't matter. It's the process. No, that's true. Well, that just reminded me is, okay, so now we got AI in, because I have no artistic skill in that way. I couldn't draw, I barely draw a stick figure. But I can tell an AI to do this scene with this character. But not only that, what I want is I'm going to start using it, not have an AI write the book, but have the AI build the character and not decide what the character is, but have a reference to, like if I forgot something, like what happened with this thing.

And I don't want to dig through my notes. So I'll just ask my, but so I want these characters, actually, I want to build, and the technology might not be there yet, but I want to build local character profiles and, and personality traits. And then I will maybe query it. I was like, what would you do in this scenario and have it tell me? And either I like it or I don't, but be able to ping that off that and then say, okay, what's your reasoning for that? Why did that character decide to act that way?

Now, maybe I should be relying more on myself and, like, think that through myself, but I think that's a way to grease the wheels of the process in terms of so I'm looking for that technology anyway I just thought that was a fascinating use of it you know not to have the AI write the book that's don't do that that's terrible idea go go ahead but a couple of things you've said character wise are things that I've learned a lot about once I hunkered down to learn the craft

and to talk to the other authors and to join the associations and get involved one piece of it was a trust on my part to my characters because my characters do write the book at some point. I have no idea in the after the first, maybe third of the book where it's actually going to end up. And sometimes I'll start writing and a character will take me someplace that is totally different. And it opens up a whole new research string and it, you know, and then it's got to relate to because these books are are standalones, but they're also a series. So there are pieces for the writer who wants to read the whole series that they'll discover throughout and get

answers to different things. So I trust the characters. What I don't do, I have a friend who there's two types of writers, just plotters and pansters. I'm very much a panster. I am comfortable to let the characters in the book take me where they want to take me. The plotters are the ones who might as well be writing a dissertation. Things have to follow. The chapters have to be known. The end has to be known. The milestones have to be known. And they do kind of what you're referring to, a character Bible. So I have this one plotter friend who has like a five page set of questions about every character she knows their preferred chewing gum you know the color of their eyes what they might watch on tv if they were to watch tv um you know just agonizing agonizing

details places they've lived things they've done which are all interesting and 90% of them she admits she'll never use never going in the book yeah yeah right but she has that level of development of that person. And I told my wife, I said, gosh, I have this one character, Audrey. I don't even know what color or eyes are. It's never come up. It hasn't. It hasn't mattered. But now that troubles me a little bit. But it is interesting because I went to a book club who had read Blame it on the moon. And one of the women in the book club said, I knew who the bad guy was, almost right from the start. And I said, well, that amazes me

because I did not know until about four or fifths of the way. Interesting. I had no idea. And it turned out the rest of the readers in that particular group didn't know either. Gotcha. So I think it's

you know, one person's intuition is, you know, you put it out for the reader and they take it wherever they want and that's fine. Well, when you just go, go ahead, sorry. No, you finish it.

I was going to say when you when you described you know pants are and plotter I was thinking fly by the seed of your pants right is that the illusion yeah yeah and then plotter and I'm like is you're describing like I think I'm a little more of a plotter when it comes to that because what takes me out of a story a lot of times is when there's there's a couple of things is characters acting out of character they wouldn't do that that's completely wrong for them that's not something they would say like how did that even make and it it smacks to me of like inattention to or not knowing who they're character is they just said that because that was something they needed to do to advance the plot it's like they would they wouldn't react that way in that situation not if they're consistent so i worry about that idea like i don't want to be that guy who makes that mistake so i think maybe i'm overthinking i have two different ways of i i'm highly disorganized and i overplan and probably they're related because i'm trying to be less disorganized unless the disorganization and spontaneity works for me which in certain like with the dream stuff it usually works um but the other thing is uh a lax

a lack of well i guess maybe there's three there's so the the character acting out of character the lack of subtle foreshadowing that most people it's designed so that most people miss it unless you know maybe the one percent will see it coming but by the time you get to the end you'll look back and go oh i should have known that all along i love that moment when you're like not only is this in character it was flagged way back when and here we are in the third book it's paying off from the first book. And that's the kind of experience I want to build because that's what I enjoy. Like if I'm not going to, if I wouldn't watch this anime or read this book, no one will.

You know, it doesn't entertain me if it isn't interesting to me, which is another struggle I have of like, I've sat down to write this couple times in the past and I got bored by the process. I'm like, I'm not interested in anything that's happening. What is, what is this? And maybe that was a good reason to stop. Like I wasn't ready. Like I said, I started conceptualizing this, this idea of 30 years ago.

So maybe it'll come to fruition. and then what was the other one it was uh well yeah where it seems like it just goes nowhere in a way it just goes like a series that doesn't know when to end and then eventually you end it but so i want a payoff and i want it to be you know all the all the good stuff of a good story it's like it's cathartic it makes sense that the the the the downfall of the villain is was in the seeds of his own insanity or something you know some things like that where and the hero's really challenged and there aren't Deiasex Machina tropes that come along. Another thing is like when it comes to, say, sci-fi and fantasy stuff,

a lot of it is how does the technology work? How does the magic work? And we were people who appreciate those genres, one, an interesting and consistent and coherent magical system. So if you have a hero that's, he's got a certain range of powers, and all of a sudden, in one situation, he just throws up a magic shield and some projectile bounces off. It's like, where did that power come from?

He never had that power. Why would you suddenly do that? that well because he i couldn't think of anything else to do i don't know it's just bad writing in that so i don't want to be that guy where people go oh god this is trash i mean they really mean it like fans of the genre who know it know the tropes are like oh this is just boring it's been there done that so maybe i'm overthinking it because of that too i don't want to fail at something that i'm actually excited about and i don't want i don't want the audience to go this wasn't very good you know but you need the elements of both blotter and panster i think so

ultimately so so where i'm comfortable when the character goes somewhere and i'm like while that doesn't feel like that character, I'm comfortable to allow them to go a little bit. But I also do a lot of continuity reading where I'll go back. I might be 200 pages into the book and I'll go back and reread the whole book and see where I need to,

I need that subtle red herring or I need that. You can always put it in later. A little piece of foreshadowing to strengthen it. Um, so you have to do both. I guess it's the, uh, the horseshoe again. Yeah. Yeah. You're back to, you have to be open, I think, to both. And in fact, I did recently, I do, uh, for Florida Writers Association, I host a writers meeting monthly in Clay County, Florida. And so I

bring in different, uh, people for different topics, subject matter experts every month. And my most recent one was my anal plotter friend and a very successful writer that's a panster friend and he's a panster to the point that he wrote a whole series of books based on somebody gave him the cover images and that was all he had to start the books and he just wrote him out but those two contrasting you know what ultimately they needed from each other's style neither one was um um um neither one would be complete without elements of both so it's uh it's an interesting process but yeah well and i think that's the golden mean and a lot of things is like if you if it has no

structure it's it's a mess and if it's overly organized to get nowhere and and you wait too long And it probably like me where it's like, maybe I never pulled the trigger because I'm waiting for it to all click. And it'll never be done until I sit down and start working on. And that's, that's something I've understood about myself, too, is that sometimes my process involves, you know, I can't fully conceptualize what I'm doing until I start. And then what it's missing, the piece is missing become glaringly obviously. Oh, I didn't even know that was a problem I needed to solve. Let's fix that because now I'm doing the thing. And that happens with a lot of, you know, yard projects, woodworking and different things I'm into.

uh it's really that's why i always over budget time as well too i'm like okay i think this will take two hours we're giving it eight just in grace and i'll probably continue tomorrow because this is just the way i am yeah you can't you can't be so loosey-goosey that nothing gets done it can't be so rigid that you never take a step so that's very true uh nothing wrong with the horseshoe especially on a horse a little pithy little pithy things like that um well i don't know if you want to say can you talk about the dream a little uh without giving away to spoilers for the book or is it better to just refer people to the chapter and you can tell them which one it is and we'll leave it at that.

I don't know how you want to approach it. Well, let's step away from Blame It on the Moon and just go to this most recent dream. Okay. Because it's not tied to anything. It has nothing to do with any of the books. Gotcha. It wasn't a solution to any problem. It was just a bizarre experience.

Those are the best, yeah. And it was pretty striking to me. So I captured in about six or seven lines what I saw and what I remembered. All right. So we're going to shift gears into the actual interpretation stuff. I'm going to write down the timestamp here. Yeah, as per my usual process, number one, best advice I could give to anyone on almost anything. Step one, shut up and listen.

And then step two, we're going to go back over it. And between the two of us, put together. They're kind of build a kind of collaborative understanding of what symbolism might mean. And then we'll wrap up the show and that's how we do the thing. So I'm ready when you are. Benjamin the Dream Wizard wants to help you. Here's the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his Dreamscapes program features real dreamers gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions.

New 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 two thousand years that's benjamin the dream wizard on youtube and at benjamin the dream wizard.com okay well the first thing when i wrote down my memories the first thing i wrote was a head on the wall and what had happened somebody i knew was in this small room and i entered the small room it was um the room had a glass front there was a cot in the room it was only about a maybe an 8 by 12 room closed up and on the wall was a woman's head that was like hanging

through a hole in the wall face up and I envision that possibly she didn't look well and I envision envisioned that possibly on the other side of that wall, she was in some sort of a life support machine. And so I had that image, and then later, I was outside walking with her as a standing, talking, coherent, somewhat normal human. being but we returned to that same building and i went one way and she slipped away and when i returned to that room there she was again just the head on the wall looking not well sometimes she would look dead um other times she would have some minor animation but she

She never smiled. And then I had one last note. Does it matter that the building had steps down to an apparent garage area? Because when she and I walked to the building together, I went down these steps to this other area. And when I came back, discovered she was the head on the wall again. but side note it is not uncommon when I'm dreaming to recognize that I need a rest stop and that in my dream I will head off to the restroom now for some reason in my dreams

the restroom is never available the toilets are broken and this is like a recurring event in almost all of my dreams. The restrooms aren't available, but at some point, things are urgent enough that it's enough to wake me up and tell me, go to the bathroom, dummy. And that's very common. But the head on the wall was interesting to me. She resembled, almost resembled my mother in some way,

which is probably an important. important piece the head did when she was a body she didn't so that's that's everything i captured from that experience that that is interesting and that is definitely one of the questions that i would ask during the process like did you recognize the woman did she have features you would associate with anyone in particular um another thing too the idea of physical sensations experienced during sleep a French researcher I think he was French in the mid-late 1800s

I think he did things where he would have an assistant do different things to him while he was sleeping one was tickle his nose with a feather another was put a warm water bottle on his feet just different things and he would report sensations The warm water bottle on his feet, he said he had a vision, you know, dream about, he was a, his house had been broken into and there were criminals who were torturing him by putting hot irons against his feet. So literally, sensations experienced during slightly bodily sensations internally and externally can absolutely influence dreams. So if you're, I'm sure there's folks out in the audience, if you're a man of a certain age,

you know that the trips to the bathroom here become more frequent it just happens and especially during during sleep you know that's if that's a sensation you have and it's strong enough to wake you up that'll recur in dreams and it also becomes the thing where it could have been a one-off and it never happened again and you would probably forgotten about it but because it's recurrent it seems to be i would not to dismiss it but i would chalk it up primarily to physical sensations especially if it's confirmed by it was bad enough to wake me up and i did go to the bathroom so i don't I don't know if I'd add too much more interpretation of that portion, but I don't know, it could be.

And it could have started as something else. And sometimes we get pathways in the brain that if they fire off multiple times over a long enough period of time, it becomes more easily triggered in the future. So the idea of recurrent features of like, almost like, you know, behavioral ticks in a sense. And definitely patterns of thinking, patterns of response. responding to certain situations, behaviorally, those become ingrained neural pathways that like to, like to, like as if it had its own consciousness. But I think you give what I'm saying.

I'm not going to find a better way to express it. Yeah, I think that that piece, I think I would put aside because like I said, it is very common. And, you know, in my dreams, I will search. for this restroom. And it's interesting how detailed the search can be and how visual and how going through different rooms and different places and different buildings. And some of those places and rooms and buildings are recur as well in that thing.

But I think what it's ultimately telling me is there is no bathroom available in this dream. You need to get up and use a bathroom. I don't know what would happen if in the dream I actually had a functioning bathroom to use that might wake up damp. Yeah. Now that you mention it, I had a relatively similar experience that I dreamed

or I was having a dream. It's one of those things where I was on the verge of waking up anyway. It was very close. It was in the morning. I was close to when I would have awakened anyway. But I dreamed that I needed to go to the bathroom. And I did. I did need to go

it turned out in real life I didn't go but I had the dream that I was going that I found the bathroom and I had let go and then I realized I'm still in bed and that shocked me out of the dream and I was like checking my sheets and I was fine so there's a there's a high likelihood it's not gonna that if you did

it would be a more an indicator of sleepwalking somnambulism and that's a more but that's a more chronic condition where you would have had indications of talking in your sleep laughing in your sleep getting up and moving around, doing other things, getting out of bed with no memory of it, going to the kitchen and make a midnight snack, you know, full on BLT, all the, all the fixings on a sandwich and no memory of it. And you ate it, all of that. You only found out because you left the mayo

and the crumbs on the counter, and you're like, what happened here? And, you know, and then you go and you look and, oh, all these sentiments are disturbed and I must have done a thing. So anyway, I think it's unlikely, not impossible, but unlikely that you're going to have a dream where you release the bowels and it actually occurs. That's probably unlikely. But it is a funny thing to contemplate. Like, well, if it happens, you know, and be like, oh, well, shit, that good times. It reminds me of a recent cartoon I saw where it was the Golden Age Dating Institute.

And the woman at the desk was interviewing somebody who wanted to join the dating thing. And she said to her, now I note here that you said that it was important that your partner have regular bowel movements. Does it matter if they're involuntary? That's great. That could be a selling point. I mean, people are into all kinds of things. You never know.

No, it just needs to be on command. Oh, that's fantastic. now we got this point this is how my hands are covered in scratches he wants to play it's not time it's not time bubba we're going to put you down we're going to put you down yeah my dog just came for a scratch as well yep this is yeah and he's going to stop the recording like an idiot i need to be able to write on my paper okay you eat that hand give me this hand so okay we got the uh the beginning of the dream and uh the first thing you remember is being in the room that's kind of where the dream starts yeah i entered the room because somebody i knew was

i think having a conversation with the head okay and when you entered the room was there another person there or that's you you um that person was there but it seemed like um they were quickly gone and i was alone with the head although I did not have a conversation with the head at that point. I was just observing the, you know, trying to figure out why there was a head on the wall. Okay, so that's interesting. It was, your attention was brought to it because someone else was having a conversation. Then, oh, there's blood.

Yep, he got me. I got, it was finally enough to get the compressed air out. That's one of the things I like to do so I don't spray my notes. But I was just kind of trying to seal that wound. it's fascinating things so that's like the concept i'm getting or that it reminds me of and the way this works is i'm going to say a bunch of shit i'm going to rattle a bunch of doorknobs and if you don't feel like it makes any sense tell me no that's not it and i'm happy to be wrong but the impression i get is the idea of watching someone else doing something and then

an imitation of it or your attention brought to something by someone else you you observe an interaction or have knowledge and seeing something in your dream hearing something is the same as knowing something. None of it's actually happening physically. So if even if you just had knowledge that a person was in the room having a conversation with a lady whose head was stuck through the wall and her body was on the other side. And that knowledge of a prior conversation is what prompted you to enter and investigate in a way. So there's, there's some, something like that going on. Or what do you think about that, the general concept in the beginning?

Yeah. Yeah, that works. Yeah. So, I mean, what to make of that? I'm not sure, of course, but, um, something like alerted by others actions. Something, something like that. I was going to make a note of that. I don't know what to do with that.

Um, and then you go and then you enter the room and you get the lay of the land and you get that it's a small room, it's like 8 by 12. And what I wrote down was someone I knew. And it turns out, you know, the head through the wall has features or resemblance or evokes the thoughts of your mother. But was the person who was in the room previously also someone you knew? I knew it was someone that I knew, but I could not identify. them in any way.

Okay. They, they were almost immediately not there once I entered the room. Yeah. Once I entered the room, I was alone with the person, and I was trying to understand the existence of the room. It had a glass front on it. It had a cot, and it had a head on the wall. And a glass front on, I mean, one of the walls was completely like a large glass window,

basically, like, meant, meant for observation? it was like, well, no, because it was a frosted glass. So from the outside, it was just a wall of frosted glass. Okay. From the inside, I recognized that it was a glass enclosure, felt like a sealed enclosure. So the whole thing was made of a frosted glass in a way? Just the front wall. Just the side walls, the back walls were all solid.

and a very dark color I don't know what the color was it was just dark gotcha that might meet something it might not we might not figure it out I'm not sure and the only thing in there was a small

cut there was no table no chairs no other you know no pictures on the wall just the hole and the cut right okay yeah it was off against the right wall okay yeah and relative to the um doorway to the room um you said so the the is the doorway the front

in a way so that the doorway is in the frosted glass or was that another another wall doorways in the frosted glass okay gotcha and that's interesting too why not a solid wall i like to consider those counterfactuals it's like you know it was definitely not it was opaque but so there's a um this this feels like it might relate to the idea of knowing there was something in there of interest in a way like not only did you have knowledge that someone else had been in there and had a conversation with this person but that but there was something about the there's something about the nature of an opaque glass where it's like you know there's something on the other side of it even and it's more you know in a way that a solid wall

doesn't allow you to know that like you can even see shadows through opaque frosted glass so there would it's like um all of these things are are are pointing it towards, towards giving reasons or justification for entering the room. Like, why would I go in there? What do I want out of this? How did I even know was a thing? Well, you, you're racking up little, little clues, pieces of evidence that say there's something to be gained or at least something of interest to see by entering this space. So, yeah, yeah, that's very interesting too. So, and you said the, what was the position of the, of the head on the wall? I mean, it was near the ceiling, down to the floor, exactly in the middle.

It was about midway. In a way where, where would that put the head in relation to you standing? Were you able to look at the face, or was the face above you looking at the ceiling? It was about even. Okay. So, yes, I was able to see the face. That speaks to the idea, perhaps, of, you know, how, not realistic but possible i suppose it is to have communication with it to to see an expression

um you know in the position of it too is it above you is it below is like it's near the floor that's weird you're looking way down on something you're not on the level with but at this one you're it's like seems like the ideal height for communication in a way you can see the face you can you can have a conversation and uh when you first said this is like head on the wall okay trophy uh severed uh what we got what was going on here but no it's person and what popped in my head was the idea of an iron lung where just just yeah just did you have that impression when you woke up or during the dream yeah yes during the dream and after i woke up i get my that was my sense of what was possibly on the other side of the wall

that would leave only the head yeah and that certainly also speaks to the idea of her being you know sick sickly ill with something and that you know there was a purpose behind the whole uh it wasn't frivolous it wasn't um torture you know it was like this is this is actually something that's necessary for good for her in a way or or necessary to keep her alive uh even if she spends brief periods of time out she has to return to it some some recuperative or um um life sustaining process is going on there got it and um and you did mention yeah yeah like as if on the other side of the wall some life support machine um and then so did you begin to have any kind of conversation with her or

the interaction didn't actually occur until you were outside the interaction didn't occur until we were outside and then we were walking together in a open park like area on a nice day and having you know i think we had some conversation but it was um there was no substance to it it was just like killing time conversation and when I got back and I went one way she kind of drifted off and when I got back

to where she was the head on the wall again my sense was that my time with her as a walking, standing, talking human being maybe never really happened or that it was more of a paranormal-like experience than a

real happening that maybe she had still always been on the wall that whole time Okay Do you have any sense of You said it was just a more frivolous or killing time Or what do you call it when it's superficial small talk Is the word I was looking for

Yeah small talk Did you have the sense uh or or any indication of what the small talk was any topics that came up even it was just the weather i mean it could have could have been anything but but nothing really just this impression of walking with her right and it was definitely you and was definitely her yes okay you weren't it wasn't a vision of as if you were someone else did you see anyone else in the park or well you know what kind of a part was mostly grass mostly trees no lake just just two people walking along gotcha gotcha okay um any sense of how she was dressed like you can only see the head through

the wall in the room but uh you know yeah she was dressed in um i want to say like just uh slacks on a blouse okay nothing distinctive any colors pop to mind um no okay now again dark but dark clothing not black but dark tone yeah yeah almost like a dark purple or something fair enough and uh was it during this section of the dream that the impression came to you that she reminded you of your mother no actually i think it was after that when i saw her on the wall again that I thought you know

the hair in particular made be think of a picture of my mother okay Okay. Yeah, because when you mentioned walking the park, I mean, the first thing I think of is, like, I'm going to take a walk with a girl in a park,

and I rather like a slightly longish sun dresses. So, like, that came to my mind. And actually, this is why I asked these questions. She was like, it's not my dream. I'm not having these visions. I got to have you show me what you're seeing or at least tell me so I can see it as well as I could. so but you know and rather dark colored so there may be a connection with the dark colored room

dark colored clothing there's um you know what is it to to put paint on a wall it's it's a decoration clothing in a sense it could be any it could be any color we choose the decorative nature of our own self display in that sense too but the idea of uh you know slacks on a blouse uh was that how your mother used to dress in a way was she kind of a pants gal or more of a dress gal or variable or any connection there at all variable but no real connection from that gotcha okay fair enough it just might it might not mean anything but uh in in terms of um your mother's personality uh tended towards the i don't want to say dark thoughts for us but some people are just naturally bubbly and positive and some people are a little more uh you know

we'd say pessimistic but they would just say realistic well i'd say my mother um my mother was My biggest influence on my writing, because she took interest in my reading and my writing when I was quite young. Yeah, and I'm glad I'm glad you did mention, I don't want to harp on it too much, but, you know, there's obviously a connection. Why would you remind you of her? But it, but it wasn't her. And that's the all, that's another thing, too. It's like there's the quality to this woman, or specifically to the hair, perhaps, that evoked that feeling. I'm kind of probing around that a little bit to see how far that connection goes.

It might not go much further than that. It might just be exactly that idea of, you know, let's say I've listened to a podcaster, and he reminds me of a friend of mine. And a lot of it is just in the way he speaks, his delivery of certain phrases and whatnot. But otherwise he's very different. I mean, they're not the same person. person. And it's not like, oh, my God, the twins separated at birth. But just every time I listen to him, like, yeah, that's, that's, you know, that's how Bob would have said that. That's the kind of laugh he would have given at that moment in the story. But it doesn't look at anything like him, doesn't have anything else in common with them. But just evoking that, that message. And that, where the, where the comparison is matters as well as where it's not. So that may be something to do with it. But there was a, there was a return to the room in a parting of ways and during that was also this detour you made to the to the parking garage right so it's not like you both went into the room and then went separate ways it was as you were walking back returning from the trip to the park yeah and i went one way and i don't know what happened to

her, but the next time I saw her, when I came back from where I was, she was the head on the wall again. Can you recall any prompting or scenery around you during the parting or scenery around you during the parting ways, portion of the park trip what i mean is like did you get to a certain point in a path was there any topic of conversation that came up was there any discussion well we better head back anything like that any any other details about how you got to the point of going separate ways you would imagine no way to the same place but you took different paths to get there that's interesting yeah we we had arrived at the building and i went down one hallway in the other

building and she just you know I don't know where she went got you and it was um you kind of walked away from her to go on a side side mission gotcha it wasn't like you actually you know approached the hallway and took different well maybe that is kind of what it was but it was more of like you just moved on in a different direction and no actually no knowledge of what she did or where she went so exactly so yeah yeah yeah And it, because counterfactual, it could have been the other way around. You both entered a space and suddenly she walked away from you. But it was you.

You detoured. You left. Yeah. So just to get that down as a sequence of events, might mean something, might not. It's hard to tell with some of these things. Sometimes we do elements of the story. I'm sure they all mean something in some ways. But some of them are minor in a point like, we may never get it and it may not mean

anything that much. But I think there is something to that, to that idea of, you know, you ending the experience by physically walking away. There's something there in terms of where it brought you back around to and this concept that none of that may have happened at all, that it might have been a shared mental projection in a way or some other kind of experience, a vision that you were shown by the person or by the circumstance itself. Very interesting with that kind of could have been a daydream in the middle of it.

Like what would it be like if this person could get up and walk around and take a walk with me, even if we talked about nothing, even if it was just a walk. in the park and we and we just made small talk and uh you know and then at some point it has to end and in the reason you detoured do you remember that before you went or it was for the bathroom trip you're like well i better go find a bathroom trip there's an interesting thing there too of like a pleasant experience interrupted by practical concerns a necessity of that kind um i have that i have the same to some of the same issues because i'm always my mouth is chronically dry I'd probably drink 10 of these a day of it,

way more than I should probably. Because I'm always, I'm always looking for a bathroom too. And you got back to the room. She was back, back in the hole in the wall, even possibly never having left. Any further happenings or interactions

other than just return. turning to the room and seeing that she's in the same place? Well, I did, I think that I had kind of popped in there several times just to look at her, and that's where sometimes she seemed completely dead.

But again, that I noticed she never smiled. And I don't recall having any actual conversational exchange with her when she was ahead on the wall. Okay. The distinct impression that maybe, you know, in a different environment, there was communication, even if it was frivolous or small talk. Communication nonetheless, but none when she's in that.

state of being in the room and in the hole in the wall um and sometimes looking unwell up unto wondering if she's dead at least or looking like she's dead and uh never never a smile certainly uh unhappy about her condition or um unmoved to to to mirth or uh that that kind of thing um yeah some circumstances where it's just you don't feel like smiling so you don't and that's appropriate to the situation too it's like this is a this is miserable i think i'll frown or at least i'm just tired of everything this is a neutral neutral exhaustion in a way interesting so there's a there's your your observation leading to catching your attention that there's something to see here there's this

this um opaque glass in a sense where it's like what is it reminds me that phrase you know through a glass see through a glass darkly um and sometimes that's the best we can get unless we part in more metaphors part the veil and go beyond to to step in and look at what's going on there and then your your attention was called to this thing and um you know by observing someone else you find a very strange circumstance and there are reasons that it makes sense like okay so she's she looks ill therefore this must be related to her illness and And, but, and her response to it is very reasonable as well. Like, this is miserable.

She doesn't smile. Sometimes she's so sick. She looks dead. But when you got the, got the lay of the land, you went, you went beyond that dark glass and got a, got a firsthand look at it. What occurred then was this, at least a vision or a fantasy of the ability to take a walk and communicate with her in just, in just a normal spending time with you. kind of kind of thing um and that eventually ended on its own there's a there's a circuit

to a walk you go out you got to come back sometime and there's this deviation for practical concerns which you had to pursue and and there was no sense of a discussion of like well I'll see you in the room after I'm done it was I just got to go I got to something I got to take care of um and it's interesting that it was a parking garage Uh, did you ever find a bathroom or, um, you know, what's that? I don't think it worked. Yeah. You have a looking, looking, I did find one, but it was, but it was probably not working as

they often are in my dreams. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then yeah, yeah, just plugging that back in of like, oh, here's this again, um, but you know, so we look at that as, as, you know, why wasn't it, um, you know, you, you went into a, another section of an office building and there were desks. I mean, why wasn't it, you went back to the park because you remember there was supposed to be a bathroom there or it's like, why a parking garage?

What does that mean to you? I'm not sure if you have any associations come to mind with that type of a space. Well, I have had pretty much a lifelong hobby with cars and motorcycles and owning a number of hobby cars. I don't know if that's, and some of the other stray dreams I've had have had to do with garages as well. Okay. But this one, I guess what I think of the parking garage is that it's got the slowly escalating ramp that goes up stacked upon each other and there's rows and rows of cars and you find it

in an urban area where there's, you know, you have to have vertical parking because, or was it some, a different kind of garage? it was just a large open garage there were a couple of steps down to it and then it was just a bunch of parking spaces inside interesting i don't i don't believe it was a multi-level okay okay well that's why i asked yeah that's that's a little different so yeah possibly a reference to distracted by a hobby in a way or there's other As much as it is good to, say, visit with a friend or whoever, you know, have pleasant conversation on a walk through the park. There's also this poll or a need to show yourself the vision of a related to a hobby or a personal interest. So there's an interest in the circumstances of other people. And then here's an icon of a personal interest in a way. Here's my hobby.

Here's what makes me happy or things like that. That's interesting. I'm not sure what to make of that. um but then this experience ends whatever it was and the idea that was was that even real who knows and there's there's an interesting thing there too i'm saying interesting that's my verbal tick today apparently um what was i going to say i had it i guess not commenting on my own thoughts i get i get i get sidetrances in general like there's reasons to say be curious but uh relationships in general

like there's reasons to say be curious about someone and that there's natural curiosity about their circumstances and especially people who are struggling with things that they look like they're not doing well and there's something in there maybe of like um speaking to the theme of someone who's struggling with something and showing it to yourself as a you know well that something is as serious as if you know it isn't that literally you know someone who's in an iron lung and this was dream was about them but but there's ideas of being um trapped in a space where this idea of the head pokey why wasn't why wasn't she completely behind glass in a hospital bed i mean why this this representation of it there's something about the idea of sticking a head

through the wall where it appears that they're available for interaction but only from the neck up and really most of them is inaccessible and in a way they're also kind of on display uh in a sense but but then also you didn't really have any communication with them there it wasn't until you got them out of that environment where it was possible to have that or at least the desire is if i could get them away if we could take a walk in the park maybe we could have just a pleasant conversation doesn't even have to be out about anything important just the act of communicating itself um and then to be diverted by personal personal there's there's examining and and looking at someone else's life and their struggles

but also you know i've got my own interest too i mean how invested am i in this well invested enough to come back then and to check in multiple times and reassess there's this this idea of um you didn't just come back once have an interaction and leave but you checked in multiple times and you and you were almost like um testing for uh what what is it running multiple instances of a of a scientific experiment to say okay if i check now does it look the same what if i check now what if i check now is it changing over time um and sometimes they looked like they were doing much worse until you ask are they dead so there there were some very very dire circumstances um and uh but even when they didn't look dead ish they still never smiled so this person's suffering with this

they're finding no amusement and no reason to to to feel good about life or positive um in that regard that that probably translates to the dark tones i mean someone who's suffering or in a dark place literally in a dark place a room with dark walls that's in a dark place um and wearing dark clothes even if you get them out there they're so bringing that darkness whatever they're experiencing with them you know they're still going to be the same person in a different environment um what was i going with that uh okay haven't said all of that stuff and given some impressions and um suggestions when when did this dream happen exactly um or do you you know, not exactly like to the minute, but, you know, two weeks ago yesterday.

It was, um, you think what today is, is a week and a half ago. Okay. Now that we've kind of discussed around some of the themes that seem to be there, can you think of anything that you've been contemplating during that time or experiencing, I mean, have you dealt with someone in your life who's struggling and you're not sure how to help them or you miss spending time with them, but, you know, you can't be someone's soul, emotional support. You've got your own hobbies and interests as well. You get your car things to do sometimes because that makes you happy.

I don't know if anything like that comes to mind. Well, yeah, and honestly, from your questions... Whenever I have a dream, I try to figure out what happened in my life to trigger the pieces that made that dream happen. That's what we're looking for. And based on your questions, I think I have every single piece of everything that triggered this dream and what it probably meant. And I think your analysis is probably almost spot on to what it meant. Wow. So the circumstances were, at the time I had the dream, I was traveling on a book tour.

So I was at Bridgewater College in Virginia. and during that time I talked to several classes and I did some public readings and so my mind would have been on writing and I was alone. My wife, the dog, weren't traveling with me. I was alone in a hotel room. And three days after I got back from that trip, I got back from that trip, immediately went on another trip, which was a writing trip as well.

But then I had a, it occurred to me, it was October 20th, which is the anniversary of my mother's death. my mom died in 1989 so it was the 36th anniversary of her death so so i'm traveling alone i have this dream books are on my mind mom was the biggest influence on my reading and writing um and i'm on the eve of her passing so i could see where and she passed and she passed passed slowly. She passed over several years. It was a long. So I could explain that in that sense of, well, there's mom. I can't always get to her, you know, but she's struggling and she's my biggest influence. But, oh, by the way, I have other influences and other things that I do.

But I want to check in on her, and I want to walk with her. I want to have a conversation with her. I want to, but, you know, it really can't happen in any consequential way. So I could explain all that. And then what strikes me is funny. When I'm sitting here looking at my picture, I have heads on the wall behind me. Yeah. It's true.

These were an artist friend who recently moved, and she was clearing out some of her inventory, so she didn't have to move it. And she gifted me these heads. But they're always present when I'm writing. Where I'm sitting right now is where I do all my writing. So I don't know if that could have – I don't know. I mean, I can back into all those explanations. and say, you know, what, what you laid out, I can explain now fully in things that happened in real life during that time.

Yeah. That may have totally created that experience. No, the way you describe it, I mean, yeah, strong feelings motivate most things, most of our thoughts, most of our, you know, actions. We're, it's no one of the Greeks conceived of love and war as gods, because, they drive the impetus towards those things drives our behavior and you know described us as the playthings of gods they just put these feelings at us and make us do things cursing gods that kind of thing so um there's always going to be some kind of a question or a feeling or something

that's going on a lot of i describe dreams as a thought experiments a lot of times sometimes they're you're just contemplating a thing what is that what does that look like how does that work and then we show ourselves but also how am i feeling what it was what is going on in my life right now that, that is important to me. Anniversaries are a big deal. And I think there's an interesting quality to it as well of like, at the very least, her hair made you think of your mom. So it didn't even have to be her, but the concept of what she represents in your life.

The, you know, there's also an interesting thing as you were talking, I got to stop using that word. As you were saying that, you know, you're returning from this walk and you want your separate ways and you don't know what happened to her. and there was a moment when she, you know, at least a time when she died, and it's not like you weren't there, but at some point in your journey, suddenly she wasn't there anymore, even though you kept going. And you, in your mind at least, also return to thinking about her frequently, or at least frequently is not the right way to put it, but periodically. It's a

recurrent thought of, you know, and I'm sure that's going to happen to me. My parents are probably probably, I don't have many years left either, but hopefully many, many more. But, you know, you know, at some point they, you know, I will outlive them. And I think I'll think of them from time to time as well and what they meant to me and how they encouraged me. One thing we never really, again, I completely forgot until just a minute ago, but the idea of the cot in the room. And I guess maybe that could have symbolized, the general idea of, as you were saying,

traveling hotel rooms, like these beds aren't any better than a cot in a room. I just need a place to sleep. even stronger than that the last more than a year life she was in northern virginia and all the rest of the family was in northern virginia i lived in pennsylvania at the time i was working uh my corporate job um but she was at home but somebody needed to be with her her all the time. A cot by the bedside. And so the family took that responsibility during the week, and I came down every weekend

and spent the entire weekend with her by her bedside. So I don't know. Maybe that was my cot. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that makes me think I've worked in hospital settings before as part of my 20 years in psychology. and very often when people are you know if they're in the hospital at end of life

family will be allowed to sleep at the bedside and then what they had though was these chairs that were like they would convert into a little you know right in a way a lounger and it would just lay flat and then it would be a makeshift bed but in the days before that it would be a cot you know that that kind of a thing um yeah for sure and in thinking of you know someone who's in a stage of their life where they're physically deteriorating because that's what it's like it you know as you're dying um it can be as what it's it there's an analogy to the idea of being in an iron lung it's like you know this person is um severely limited in their abilities to move around and and it's it's an illness that feels as severe as being trapped

in that kind of a condition um yeah and then i can imagine most people are not very happy with their body falling apart and the idea that they might not wake up again tomorrow you never know how soon that that kind of thing happens and when we could communicate before we got closer to the end her biggest fear was that she would not be able to communicate

but that her mind would still be active and that she would just be trapped and not be able to interact but just trapped in the body and so yeah now that that speaks to that whole head head through the wall type of thing and not not any communication there and then at the very least having a um that that fantasy of fulfilling and desire to then have to take take a walk and have a conversation about nothing nothing important just spending time together i think the lack of content is important to that experience as well. Right.

You know, the idea is we weren't talking to, but she wasn't giving me her secret recipes, or we weren't to solving the world's philosophical problems or just, just chilling, spending time together. I had another thought. No, it's gone. That's okay.

Well, I mean, yeah, if you, if the process brought that out to you, okay, this is where I was going with it. Just the last thing, I guess. um there what do you think it was your travels and being away from home that then led you to feeling homesick and led you to feeling missing your mother more you think that's the connection that maybe brought the dream on i think it was probably the uh because the travels and away from home isn't all that unusual but the and some people don't get homesick i don't i don't think i do

in general i'm like i just i would rather be home but it's not like i'm homesick that's i think It's a different experience. Yeah. But in my conversations with the students and talking about the books, I strongly cover my mother's influence on that. Gotcha. So that brought it to mine. Okay.

Yeah. And then the fact that I was only days away from the anniversary of her death probably heightened that. in without me being aware of any of it yeah until we're having this conversation thinking wow that'll then suddenly it makes sense yeah yeah yeah well that's that's why i think my well that's the assessment i have of my own process which i don't understand it i'm going to write a book about it someday when i do understand it i just started doing to this and asking questions like like i do and trying to see it as well as clearly as i can and say what do you think about this

idea um i think that's why it works is it it puts people back in that state of mind and then they can kind of go oh all these connections to this to this these real so sometimes dreams are going to be they're going to be problem solving they're going to be clarifying and sometimes they're in in a sense just wish fulfillment in in a way or um uh so it can be the different types types of dream experiences it seems like this one is not something you're going to get a grand revelation from it's just the acknowledgement of an experience and and crystallizing it in a way in this in this form um and then the reason it would stick with you is not because the answer was important to some task you had to do or the uh or anything like that but just

to say these are really strong feelings that i had and these are the regrets that i have it's not like regretted you miss someone without regretting it you didn't do anything wrong there's nothing you could have changed necessarily um other than you just wish you was still here you just i miss my mom yeah and sometimes sometimes that can be the emotional content that really makes a dream stick out and makes it worth looking at it. So at least you can go, I don't have to worry about this in terms of, am I missing something? Getting an analysis of it doesn't accomplish anything more than settling your mind on it a little bit.

Okay, now it's not a mystery anymore. I don't have to worry about it. Well, if you feel satisfied, I think that was a fantastic discussion about the topic. And I always appreciate it when people, give me a little pat on the head and say, you know, Ben, this was not a waste of my time i that's all i'm doing this for you honestly no i i enjoyed the process and it really did um i mean that the dream hadn't been troubling me but it was significant enough i had to record it yeah and in the conversation i think i have like i said i do try and figure out when i have a dream how it relates to circumstances and that's why

like the one that drove the book was so striking to me because it didn't relate to anything. It was a different time period. It was different geographical. It related to absolutely nothing, but it gave me a book. Yeah. And it gave me a book that gave me a second and a third book. And I don't know. but there is some some paranormal elements in the

layman on the moon book um yeah it didn't ask the genre you know sci-fi you know alternate history it's a haunted house mystery got you okay with some supernatural stuff but it's placed in the house was a field hospital during the civil war okay so there's a lot of the civil war history that comes into it as well and particularly some medical history. Living in Virginia,

you're just steeped in it, right? It's all over. Right. For sure. Well, it struck me that this, you could turn this dream into a part of the book. And I immediately went to psychic powers sci-fi type of stuff where the main character has to visit someone who knows something.

And she is in this condition, unable to communicate. However, she can reach out and have a conversation in his mind. And where does she talk to him? She takes him on a walk in the park. in his head and that's where she communicates and he gets his wisdom or or direction from that is like she's a witch in the wilderness in a way yeah yeah oh i love that that's the first thing i thought

of when you're like uh relating it to a book in supernatural so anyway well i might i'm still working on that third book and uh starting on the fourth so i won't steal your idea even though i really want to maybe i'll stick uh maybe i'll stick mom in there somehow sublimately maybe that's what this was about is like you know she can in a way live on put her in your book and she'll be there forever she will be immortalized that might actually be a really that'd be a great tribute that might really um honor her and honor your feelings for her in that way i would i would probably encourage that as like something you i guarantee you will not regret do up doing that so um okay well if you're satisfied by what we got we don't have to drag it out too long uh unless you

have any additional questions anything we missed anything you think was important no this was great. I had no expectations of what we were going to do or where we going to go. And I totally enjoyed the conversation. I really did. Nice. And appreciate you having me. That is when I really shine when people have no expectations. Then I can dazzle. Well, on that note, let's do the outro here. This has been, oh boy, I can't, I can't read. This has been our guest, dreamer, Dr. Lou Paglis, he is a former automotive exec and retired professor of organizational development. He is an author of Blame It on the Moon, the prequel final exam, and the forthcoming title, The Portal. You can find him at Lou Pagliceauthor.com, and that link will be in the

description below. For my part, very quickly, would you kindly like, share, and subscribe? Always need more volunteer dreamers. I do video game streams Monday through Fridays, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific most days. This episode specifically brought to you by in part by ABC book 18 O'Neuro Chronology, Volume 4, Prima, Relicorum. And you can find, of course, all this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. And if you'd head on over to Benjamin the Dream Wizard. Dot locals.com, it's free to join attached to my Rumble account, building a community there. One of the best places to reach out to me.

And just once again, Lou, thank you for being here. I have enjoyed talking to you as well, of course. Thank you. Thank you, Benjamin. Good deal. And everybody out there, thank you for listening. And we hope to see you next time. Take care.