The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Stealing Forbidden Dreams by Edward L Alban

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Stealing Forbidden Dreams by Edward L Alban https://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Forbidden-Dreams-Edward-Alban/dp/1962931005 Maria Diaz, originally from Ecuador, teaches math in a Miami high school. She is intellectual, loves poetry and likes music-from classical to Andean, to tangos-and suffers from insomnia. Sleep intrigues her. She does the math and figures that over a sixty-year span we sleep the staggering sum of twenty years. Where does all that time go? Is it a waste? Or does it have a hidden redeeming value? Finding answers to these questions becomes her quest. She reads extensively about the brain’s activity during sleep, she keeps a log of the few brief dreams that she remembers and manages to intertwine her conscious hours with her subconscious hours into a helix-like braid of her life, which she presents in the form of a novel. Her sleeping mind opens its doors and reveals her sleeping world. She meets her inner self: her id, libido, ego, alter egos, muses, and oracles. They all come alive as colorful human characters, vying for control of her life and her destiny. Maria’s Libido is a sexy look-alike who thinks it’s high time for Maria to lose her virginity. Her sassy Literary Muse advocates career change from teaching and mathematics. Her oracles are alter egos personified as older gentlemen who guide her in matters of philosophy. Every night, Maria is at the center of this seemingly schizophrenic reality filled with laughter, tears, adulation, and scorn. It is a wonderful world that she comes to love, but, as with all humans, Maria can’t remember her dream world when she is awake. Day after day, Maria’s parallel world is wiped away upon awakening. The only exceptions are wisps of dreams and little snippets that are still fresh when she awakens. But the bulk of her sleeping hours is off limits. This is where her treasures, her “forbidden dreams” are held by oblivion. And she intends to get them, if she has to steal them. It took her ten years to do it. The result is this work. Maria comes of age in many ways, she matures philosophically, she becomes sure of her convictions, and she lives her life by her own precepts. She shares with us how the mind at night interphases with the conscious world. We do relive our daytime life by night, and our night hours in turn do influence the decisions we make in the real world. But it happens so subtly, it is almost imperceptible. This is what we learn from her experiences.

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and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's non-endorsement or review of any kind. Today's featured author comes to us from books to lifemarketing.co.uk. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book's success. Today, an amazing young man on the show with us, we're going to be talking to him about his book called Stealing Forbidden Dreams out November 10th, 2023.

Edward L. Albin joins us on the show. We're going to be talking about his insights and everything else and talking about what goes into this, I believe it's a novel. And so we'll get into that. And as we do that, we're going to find out some of his things that he's done with his life. He was born in Ecuador in 1938. What? In the U.S., he's been since 1952, and he's retired professor of economics, married to Joanne. She only has a first name, evidently, since 1965 and two children. And to give you a context of how long he's been married, I was born in 1968. So I'm

58 now plus three. Congratulations. Is that 60 plus years there, married? 65. 65. Holy crap. Wait, I'm sorry, 60, 60. I'm sorry. 60. 60? Yeah, just 6.0.

6.0. Well, that's, that's a long time. I'm about two years away from it. So, so give us, Edward, your dot-coms or any website, social media, any place you want people to find out more about you on the internet? My web page is really easy. Edwardalban.com. Mm-hmm. And so give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your novel? Stealing Forbidden Dreams. Well, it is a lot about asleep and about dreams. No question about that. But it is about a character that is from Equilver that has a lot of

my problems or my my talents my pre-elections my faults she's an insomiac so that led to the business of of sleep and dreams which I had to research because I'm not a doctor and not a neurologist but I was fascinated by the by the topic by sleep and and so it started out by describing her my character Maria who is from Ecuador also, who likes tangos, who likes, anyway, she's a language. She's in a transition. She doesn't know whether to go for mathematics, they get a PhD, or whether to change gears altogether and go into something else,

for the writing, literature. And so those are the conflicts within her that come out in the novel. That's part of it. Okay. What inspired you to write this novel? Well, it was in my bucket list. That's honest. I had written a few things, essays, short stories, poems.

And so the next thing is the big, the Mount Everest, and that is for writers, which is to write a novel. And so, like I said, it was in my bucket list. It was something I had to do one way or another. I had to come up with something. and then Maria came up, my character, and then Sleep and Dreams. Oh, wow. The business of the sleep is because, like I said, she was an insomiac.

And the novel opens in January 1999. And that, by the way, is very significant because the whole novel takes place in 1999. Oh, really? For various reasons. But anyway, she is with so many people during New Year's, with the New Year's, resolutions, but she's not overweight. She is in good shape. She doesn't smoke. She doesn't do drugs. So why is she there running with everybody? And it is because he wants to get control of her life. During college years, when you have such chaotic life, I mean, you take courses in the morning

and then you sleep all night and, you know, that got completely messed up. She has a teaching job. And now she's just like a square peg in a round hole. She just doesn't fit. And so that's, I mean, we're talking about she goes to bed after 3.30 and she has to get up at 6.30. So we're three hours sleep. Oh, wow. You can do that for a few days. And I know that from experience, of course.

You can do it Monday. You can do it Wednesday. But by Wednesday, the deprivation starts taking its storm. And so you make up for it on the weekend. You sleep your heart's content. So anyway, that was one of the issues that triggered it, and especially the issue about sleep. So I had to do a lot of research on sleep and just found it so fascinating.

The things that I could tell you about sleep are just mind-boggling. One particular has to do with memory, sleep memory. sleep memory. We don't realize, we think we have one memory and memory works the same for everything, but it doesn't.

There is a very distinct difference between sleep memory and conscious memory. They're really as different as night and day. Sleep memory is very limited and is very stingy.

You only get about three or four minutes of memory. And it's usually the ones that you, the things that you remember when you first wake up. Now, conscious memory, you start building on that from kindergarten on. You go through high school, you go through college, through graduate school, you can stick four or five languages in there. And you can keep loading things into your conscious memory for years and years, up until their 70s or I guess, but not sleep memory. Sleep memory is so mysterious because who can remember what they

dream, what they dreamed about at eight o'clock. I mean, when they go wake up at eight, what they dream at $3.50 in the morning. Yeah. That is gone. That is gone. Who can remember what you, what you dreamt last week or five years ago? So it's, it's incredible. But, it's just a it seems to be a big waste yeah i mean i've i've had some dreams that sometimes they get done after they're over and i'm just like what kind of wild-ass crazy shit was that you know they'll be in the future or something and you're like what the hell and uh yeah there's all sorts of weird shit that goes on in your dreams now but there are ways in fact the question arises if you can't remember her dreams how that's

you write and because by the way the novel was written by her so how does she remember her world at night and there are ways to cheat one way is of course you could take a tape recorded right by your bed and when you first wake up just record or you can have a notebook and just jot down the things which he did by the way so over a period of 10 years you do get a pallor that you can you can And the dreams that really are impactful, the ones that really make quite an impact on you, you're able to put those into long-term memory. And so you're able to salvage some of it. But most of it just vanishes with this daylight.

Oh. It just vanishes with the daylight. So in the book, you talk a lot about this character. Of course, they go through their things. How did Maria meet the constituents of her psyche? What does that mean, too? Give us an established kind of maybe a storyline on what that means. All of us are made up of constituents of our soul, of our, of our psyche.

We have libido, for one thing. We have a conscience. And in Maria's case, she had, of course, the libido, she had a conscience, but she also had muses. Her muses were her influences in mathematics, influences in literature. And then she also had oracles, respected old gentleman, that sort of tutor her.

And so she has, it's a world. Her dream world was really a world, which she visited night after night. And so there was, but the bad thing is, of course, she could remember them. It was only during the night,

that, you know, they lived. The minute she woke up, they disappeared. But to answer your question about how she got to meet them and how she got to actually see them, because when she, at first they were just shadows, there were voices that spoke to her, as we all hear our constants from time to time speak to us. But this was more than that. They actually personify themselves. The libido, for example, was really kind of a twing of herself, just a little bit plumbed.

her a little bit more filled out than Maria was, sex tears, you might say, from being the libido. And then, but the other ones were not necessarily twins, but just female young women like her. And first she, she couldn't see them, but what brought them out was that something happened in her life. She had a next door neighbor,

and the next door neighbor always tried to get her to go on a blind date with her. And Maria didn't like that. She had very experience with that. So she tried to encourage her and go, don't do that. You could get into trouble. But the other one said,

oh, no, no. She thought it was a win-win situation. It was a way to meet men and have a good time and have them pay for going to the bar and so forth. She went out on the date and turned out to be bad. She got riots and off, which is one of these date rape. drugs.

Oh, no. She pans out. And Maria had to help her out, take her to the hospital and everything, because she called her the next morning at home naked and said, Maria, come help. So she took her to the hospital and so forth. And sure enough, she was raped and so forth. Well, that brought out the gals in her dreams. They all wanted to know what happened and how they could get involved with that.

So that brought them out. And then Maria made the proposition since I can't see you when I wake up anyway. What's the point of not being able to see you now? And they say, well, you've got a point there. And so they did. Oh. So that gives us a rundown on that and ideas what goes on there. At first, in the book, you talk about Maria where there were these shadows that only she could hear and they reveal themselves.

Can you tell us a little bit about the shadow? without blowing the plot of the book? Well, the person that I just finished telling you about, the conscience for one, then the muses in mathematics, the music and literature, her professors, the people,

the doctors had tutor her in, not in philosophy, for example. Another thing about Maria is she is the budding atheist. So she's having issues with God and religion. And so she has this oracles, this respected, wiser old men that are part of her psych too. And they help her mature and grow philosophically. So they help her mature and understand what's going on.

And let's see, why is the novel set in 1999? Well, I was alive in 1999. It was a very significant, to be able to say that you lived at the turn of the century. At the time when we went, we changed one decade, one century, and one millennium to boot. So it was a big, momentous thing. And, you know, if you're going to write a novel, write about your times, write about what went through you, your world. Yeah. That's one of the, I think one of the pluses of the novel that in years to come, people can look, read at that and find out so many things that happen.

And I had to work a lot about that. I had to have a calendar and actually go day by day so that what happened in her dreams and coincided with what happened in the real world. So, for example, you remember the Columbine Massacre in Littleton, Colorado. that was in April 20, 1999, 23 people, I think, were killed and so forth. Anyway, that place in her life. And then there were other things that happened. JFK Jr. died in July of that year. Oh, yeah, I remember that.

And then there was a little boy that escaped Cuba with his mother. His mother perished at sea. But the little kid somehow managed to make. get to the shores in Florida. And so that made quite a, you know, quite a lot of news. But the news it made was not just the survival in this situation, the mother dying, but the fact that there were relatives, I think, in Miami that wanted to keep the child. But the problem arose because the father in Cuba demanded him back.

the time the Attorney General was Janet Reno. She had to make a decision about that, whether you keep the child with the family is here or return it to the father. And Janet Reno, by the way, is, where I forgot to tell you a while I go about the conscience. The conscience is the only one of all her characters that is amorphous, that changes from day to day.

One day, she's Abraham Lincoln. Another day, she's Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the U.S. So she changes constantly. But for a good part of the novel, Janer Reno is the personification of her conscience. Wow. So she's into all this stuff.

The first chapter you entitled, Know Thyself, did Maria achieve that in the book, I suppose, maybe? Absolutely, yes. That was the early on in that chapter. She was taking stock of life, human existence. And she came, time, by the way, plays so much of a role in the novel in various aspects,

but in particular in this one, the length of our lifetime. Before you're born, the world had been going on for thousands and thousands of years. What? After you die, it will go on for, we hope, for thousands more. Your life is just like a little spark between eternities. And that bothered her, you know, why are the gods so stingy that they just give us 70, 75 years, or at the most say 100. Yeah, what's up with that? Yeah.

Even 100 years is nothing compared to the millenniums that you have before and after death. So she wondered Now the people Who believe in an afterlife Do have something to look forward to The heavens supposedly and so forth But she wasn't sure she believed that And so by

But you ask the question Does she resolve that? Oh yes By the end of the novel She has found herself She knows exactly what she believes And she Yes, she doesn't believe in the afterlife But she can live with it

She matures into. Sometimes we believe things, but we don't mature into them. Ah. And you kind of mature into stuff. I think I've seen that over the course of my lifetime. Now, so you've got to find the book, folks, to find out how this turns out and how it works out, right? In the book, you know, you talk about how dreams affect life in the real world. What are your thoughts on that?

And how do you play that out, I guess, in the book? Well, there are just several things, maybe three or four that you can name right off the bat. There is something called proprioception. It has to do with the fact that while we're sleep, the brain, by the way, is always on. At least some parts of it are on. Some parts turn off because you don't need your eyes, for example, to see while your eyes are closed. But for other things, the brain has to be. on and it's always on.

And what is remarkable, and it has been corroborated by anecdotal accounts and but also by the science, that you go to bed with a problem. Let's say you lose a key or you lose something, a document, and you can't find it, you don't know where you put it. You will search and search all day for it, and then defeat it, you go to bed at night, and you know, the next morning you wake up and there's a big egg,

telling you it's right there. So what was going on that gave you? In other words, you sometimes say the saying, sleep over it. And we sleep over it and it does us good. The brain continues to work trying to find a damn thing. Then you wake up, but it could also be a problem. You're working on a film in mathematics and you can't solve it.

You're stumped. The next morning you wake up, Bingo, there's the answer. That kind of thing happens. And then there's the, what I told you, while I go about the propriception, it has to do with the synchronization of the brain and the muscles, their muscles.

And it has to do with, they also call it a sixth sense. So you're asleep, but your brain is conscious of your situation. And if you start to fall off a bed, you'll wake up. now I understand that babies in little kids don't have that and so that's why cribs has to have fences around them so they don't fall off

yeah I need one around me hasn't been developed I need one around me most of the time so I don't fall out of bed yeah yeah but there are other things that are a little bit more complicated and more mysterious actually Like, you, for example, you have sometimes a debate with your colleagues or with your friends about something, and you take a position. You will not do this. You will not do that. That's your position relative to the others.

Then when the times, when you're awake, comes up for you to make the decision, you change your mind and you realize that the others were right. And the point is you don't remember what they say. You don't even remember them because it was a dream that was forgotten. But something in that dream told you, no, they were right. And so when it came time for you to make the decision, you did it based on what you are at earth. Well, that makes for great plots for building into movies and stuff, huh? Well, I hope so, yeah. And there are other other things that, like, for the, okay, if I can tell you another,

one, examples of this and she was. There was a student that she had because she taught math in high school. She taught algebra and trigonometry. And there was a student who was a loser. Just Stelling was not his game. He was a punk. But he had dreams about her. Actually, lost, She lost full dreams, actually. But in the dream, she got control of him. And that's the thing that really ticked him off because even in his dreams, she had so much presence and so much control over his mind that he woke up and he decided that he would change his ways.

She would change. And she changed him. She wasn't even aware that she had done that. But he did. He decided, you know, I don't want to be. a hamburger flipper all my life. And so I realized that education was the light, was the beacon that you know, and he followed it.

So things like that, the influences that's come to you through dreams, including dreams that you don't remember. And here's another one, the last one that I will throw in, because this is hypothetical, it's just what I suspect. You have people that are so talented,

They're great in sports. They're great, they have great singers or they're great dancers. Where did they get that from? You know, that gift of, gift of gab, gift of voice, gift of the talent. And if I told you that it happened in a dream, a muse or a fairy godmother came and put that in you, but you don't remember the dream. that's as good an explanation as you could come up with for something that is real, which is the talent that different people have.

What an interesting spin, a way to write a novel and all that good stuff. Is there any future novels coming out on this? Any future stuff that maybe a continuance or sequels to these books? Yeah, I'm working on it. I mostly do short stories now, but novels are major, major works. I mean, this thing took me 10 years to do. So I don't know that I got 10 years left. But, yeah, I continue to write all the time.

But shorter things that I can manage and that I can finish. Okay. Yeah. Any anticipated timeline coming out that these things would be it? Well, yeah, short stories and poems are always coming out. I got the, on the works. I've finished some of them or others about to be. In the rounds to get publishers.

What's the thing that you want people to come away with when they read the book? Well, of course, that they enjoy it, that they like it. But because they learn something too. I think the idea that is expressed in the book is this. They has 24 hours. Under 24 hours, we sleep eight, more or less, on the average, eight, six, five, you know, somewhere in there. That happens to be a third of 24. If we, on average, sleep a third of each day.

We don't care about the fact that we don't remember it. Oh, well, it's just eight hours. But when you do the arithmetic over a long span of time, like, say, 60 years and you add it up, It comes up to 20 years of the 60 that are a waste. Where did they go? What did you do?

Where did they go? Exactly. That is what Maria wanted to say that all those dreams, all that world, if I could just bring it alive, you would realize that sleep is not a waste. Ah.

Well, I like sleep. Sleep is really important. Oh, me too. It's into my, I'm into it. That's my thing on is sleep. I like sleep. So as we go out, give people your final pitch out to pick up the book and any dot coms where they can find you on the interwebs.

The, I had, well, the latest web page is Edward Alba. Edward Alvin, my name, dot com. That's it. This is it. And by the way, it has all my publications. It has all my biographical, my years. as a teacher and married and how many children we have to. So anyway, all the personal particulars are there.

And also everything I've written, the poetry, the short stories, and so forth. All the poetry and all that stuff. So you love writing. It'll be interesting to see how this develops and all that good stuff. Thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

And thanks for us for tuning in. Order of the book where Refined Books are sold. It's entitled Stealing Forbidden Dreams out November 10th, 2023 by Edward L. Alvin. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortresschusch, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortess, Chris Foss 1 on the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet, be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning. Consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast

can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed. All right,

Edward, great show.