EP23: Dreams, The Psyche & the Subconscious Mind

In this episode, Jared & I talk about how to analyze your dreams on a deeper level, instead of trying to look up the meaning of common dream symbols. Dreams are not logical or literal, so it is important to step away from the over-rational way of looking at things. Through this journey, we learn to be compassionate with ourselves and others. Jared is a Jungian Depth Coach who I met on Tik Tok and we have similar goals of spreading the word about healing through dreamwork and other spiritual practices. Jared is the host of Suspending Disbelief Podcast. He also has a 4-day retreat in September in Tulum, Mexico!

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Books mentioned in this episode:
Clare R Johnson: The Art of Lucid Dreaming
The Body Keeps The Score | Bessel van der Kolk, MD.

Intro audio is an original composition by Jared!

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Transcript

My goal isn't to interpret people's dreams, it's to build their own personal relationship with their dream. Right. That's what's important is that you walk away knowing how to connect, how to get into dialogue with your dream. We all have, like you were saying a personal guide, a counselor, as my, as my mentor calls it, the wise counselor who is waiting to help us.

She doesn't really jump in and help. If you don't ask, she's kind of patient. And she's like, no, they'll come to me when they need me. And so I want to teach people how to get into a relationship with that creativity, addiction, all of these things like our entire lives can be affected positively by doing dream work.

So this episode is a collaboration between myself Amina, from the dreamworld podcast and Jared Ray Gilmore from suspending disbelief podcast. Jared helps people build a positive relationship with their intuitions, their demons, and other strange and confusing parts of the psyche that if left unconscious can make life kind of shitty, we're both really into dreams and helping people dive into their dream work practices to fully understand themselves their lives and their dreams.

I honestly, if I could just talk about this stuff all day, every day for the rest of my life, I would, I have like these calls and responses in my dreams where I'll be called to do something. And then when I do it in real life, I get kind of a resolution like, thank you for my dream. And I had one of those last night, which felt really good, and I haven't even voiced it yet.

Right. Like I just wrote it down, but I haven't really even like, thought about it since I want to tell you the original dream. This is, so I work with my dreams just first of all. So I'm Jared and I love. Well, I struggled with hardcore addiction for 10 years, alcohol drugs, anything that could regulate my emotional state, I really did not like feeling things and blah, blah, blah.

I got sober four years ago. And in that process, I got very interested in Carl Young and I got a found like a youngin analysis and got really into dream work. He's a dream sham and he studied dream shamanism in Africa and is when I do a session with them, we just go back into my dream. Right. And he guides me through the dream.

It's very, very interesting. And I've built a very strong relationship with my, with my dream world. Like he Maki L clerk is his name. He's about to release a book called dream guidance and he calls it like the wise counselor. Like we have this wise counselor inside of us. That's ready to answer any question.

If we, if we really want to know, we just have to ask anyway. Doing that, but also studying all of these other things. But this specific dream that I'm going to tell you is like just one aspect of how I've used my dreams, because it's helped me in every aspect. Like I've worked through complexes with nightmares, I've worked through like physical pain, like foot pain and stomach pain.

I've been able to like pinpoint what the issue was based on it, like asking my dream and getting responses from my dream and stuff. And I really, really am fueled by dreams. Like I kind of tap into a source of energy just through my dreams, which I really liked. So this one was kind of like helping me with some unconscious content, some shadow work.

Right. So I had this dream four days ago, maybe where I was in a tree house and I'm like a kid and there's a big Rottweiler, like a scary, loud, sharp teeth, black dog, like big, right? Like almost as big as I am. And he's, we're up in a tree house. And so I'm like super scared and I push him, he's holding onto like this part of the tree house with his teeth, like hanging from the tree house.

And I like push him off and he falls and I, and in the dream I realized like I've been doing this many times where like he keeps getting up there and I keep pushing him off and he falls and I noticed he falls right in front of this security guard. That's like patrolling the base of the tree house. And I'm like, shoot, he's going to come after me.

Cause he has some sort of relationship with this dog. And so I start running and I'm gathering all my stuff. I'm putting all my clothes in like these, this basket. And I run upstairs. Like there's a multiple story Treehouse, which, but I, for some reason I really like tree houses. I don't dream about them often, but it's a very playful, childlike place for me to be.

I made a lot of tree houses when I was a kid. So I run upstairs and then I'm like hiding. He comes around and runs into this, this homeless man. I didn't realize it was also in this tree house, but he's like, Hey, what are you doing here? The security guard is asking the homeless man. He he's like, oh, I live here.

Like, and he's like, where's your stuff. He's like, I don't have any stuff. And then, so then they both are like, oh, well let's find this kid. And so they're like searching for me. I just start running and running and running. And I'm like, the rest of the team is just me running away. Right. Like hiding and hiding, which I don't have that dream very often.

So I woke up kind of like startled at the very end because I, it started to be like my parents' basement and I was just running and running and like practicing, opening the windows to get out of them quickly. Like, I was like all of this preparation to run from things from the security guard. I woke up in the middle of the night, and this is how I worked with my dreams.

I know you do a lot of lucid dreaming, but I actually get so excited when I find out I'm lucid that I wake up and I have such like a good relationship with the way I dream right now that I haven't worked on that yet. I'm, I'm excited to talk. I want to hear more about your relationship because I think it would be fun for me and explorative to develop that.

But anyway, so I wake up and I'm in the real world and I, I realize I'm safe. And then I, at all, I go back into the dream. That's how I work with my dream. Like I will wake up, I sit up, I typically write it down really quickly. And then. Once I feel safe. I will essentially like in that, what you told me, the name of the word I call it hypnagogic but your, you told me that that's the falling from wakeful into sleep.

What's the other word, 

the opposite waking 

up. So I go back into the dream and I, the first thing I do is I turn around. So I go back to where he's chasing me. Right. And I turn around, I just have learned over time that that's where the information is, is in that interaction of being chased. So I turn around and at this point it's like my active imagination, but I am very sleepy still, right.

This is like three, four in the morning and I'm, I'm slipping right back in. So it's like, I let my imagination kind of just take it and go with it. I turn around and I faced the security guard and he like, all of a sudden has this compassionate, almost worried. About me. And I also realized that he just loves the dog.

He really loves the dog and he really wants me to treat the dog with respect. And so he kind of comes towards me and he puts his arm around me, like a father figure kind of, and is like, Hey bud, like, why are you treating the dog so poorly? He's stern, but he's like compassionate. It's really interesting.

And uh, and I'm like, well, he keeps trying to bite me. Like I'm terrified of this dog. Right? Like it's scary. His teeth are super sharp. And he tells me, this is in my active imagination, but the dream character, the security guard tells me the dog doesn't know where he is on the hierarchy. Like he just needs to know that you are in charge and he's just trying to establish that relationship.

And you're running away and not establishing a dominance over this dog. And. And that's causing the dog, not to know how to interact with you. I then had a, um, a flashback memory of my brother who had just met my girlfriend's dog. And like he said, told the doctor sit and he said, it like very, very powerfully.

Right. But I noticed next to him, I was like, oh, he's like full of compassion. My brother. And I was very impressed. I was like, he's like really good at telling a dog to sit, which sounds weird. But I didn't, I never had dogs growing up. I never experienced like a masculine or like a dominant. Relationship with the dog.

I've always kind of just let other people do that anyway. So this dream character literally was telling me like, there's this dog in me that is obviously I kind of reference a lot of how my symbols have showed up in my dreams prior to this. But it's very, very, obviously a instinct, like a low.  instinct than me.

Like for me, it's obvious that it's probably like sexually related or like sexual drive type of things. And, uh, that there's this relationship that I have with that part of me that is unsure of the dynamic. Like whether it's in charge or like my higher consciousness is in charge, which is a very interesting thing, but I grew up Mormon, lots of sexual repression, all of these different things.

Right. So I like hear my brother saying, sit to this dog. And I realized like, that's the relationship I need to have with my own like instinctual sexuality, which is interesting. It's a compassionate, that's the main important part. It wasn't aggressive. It was very compassionate, but telling it like, I'm the boss and like, you need to do you need to sit.

So that was like, really, this is like my dream show up like this, where they're kind of like showing me where I'm not quite aligned and I need to work on these things. And so. I spent the last few days really practicing is this sounds kind of weird now that I'm saying it out loud, I haven't talked to anyone about this, but like, I've been like looking in the mirror and being like sick, but I'm practicing the compassionate part.

Right? Like you could tell some, a doc to sit and be almost like, like rude or toxic or like tyrannical or something. Right. But to like, I watch my brother do it and he did it so compassionately. It was really interesting. I feel like 

the dog feels the energy 

and the compassionate thing. Oh, I don't, I don't know if I told you this, but he had just met this dog, the dog doesn't like people very often, he did that.

And she immediately sat in like, fell in love with them, you know, like it just, it worked really well. And so I was like, wow, like this is, I felt the energy. Cause I was so close to him and, um, I was very impressed with my brother. He's my little brother too. And I ha I don't have that relationship with my, I oversimplify a lot of things.

I know there's more nuance to it, but like, I call it my masculinity, right? Like masculine energy. There's a tyrannical part, a toxic masculinity, but there's also a very positive masculinity. And I saw it come out in him like a dominance. That's very positive in the dream. It's like, Hey, that's the relationship you need inside of yourself towards some of these more instinctual parts of you?

Um, because it's all about trying to get along. Especially in me, I have so many moving parts that are all fighting each other. The last four years is it has been about getting those parts of me to all. Get along. Like I have a voting system now for, I I've personified all the different parts of me using dreamwork.

Right. And been able to give certain ones votes. Like you get a couple of votes, the surfer, Jared doesn't get any votes. Cause all he wants to do is go smoke weed and like, you know, not do anything productive. And so I'm like, I get it dude, like, but we did that for the last 10 years. We're going to give some of the other people more votes.

So. I was working on this over the last four days. And then this morning I had a dream walking through an alley with a group of friends and coming up on like these big shadow figures that then beat us up, like mugged us. And then I woke up right after that, but not really. I woke up like a false wake up, which I have not actually experienced very often.

And then I went back into the dream. So like from the false wake up, I went back into the dream with a dog, which is really interesting. So I brought Izzy, but the dog from real life back into the alley and she was able to like protect us. And then I false woke up again. And Izzy, the dog came and like hugged me.

It was really actually kind of weird. Like the dog hugged me, like almost a human would hug me is very dream weird. Right. But it was so comforting. Like, I, I was like in an embrace, like she snuggled up to me and it was like this warm embrace of this dog. And that meant a lot to me because I haven't ever had a relationship like that with a dog.

And so. This metaphor of like connecting with the part of me that just needed some like parenting almost, you know what I mean? That's that was my last four days of dreamwork, which it's pretty constant. It's very fun. That's cool. 

I think it's really awesome. How do you have like a good relationship with your dreams where like you understand what it's trying to tell you?

Cause a lot of people, they have these recurring scary situations and they don't have the ability to like tap in and understand like their own language, you know, like you're tapped in it. That's super 

cool. I think people can get really, really, uh, scared of that. I actually was answering a tick-tock the other day because I use a lot of intuition.

I don't know for sure. I'm very like. Tic Tacs, not a very good platform to be like, this is one answer, but it might not be like the full answer. Right. But I was telling someone that false awakenings to me seem somewhat like the unconscious mind, the dream world is really trying to keep you in it because it has something really important to tell you.

So the false awakenings to me are like, no, no, no, like not yet. You know, we got more to work to do here. We really need you to feel this emotion. Like I think of James very much. So. And intelligent part of the psyche, bringing to you what it is you need to become conscious of. Yeah. 

It's definitely, like you said earlier, like your internal therapists, that's such a good way to put it and like the more you tap in like this, like it becomes conversational.

You know, your dreams will show you, but you have to pay attention to it. You know, I know you said you, you know, you kind of wanted to get into lucid dreaming, which is super cool. It opens up a whole new interaction with the dream, but I've always like, just as much as I love lucid dreaming. I love my regular non lucid dreams as well, because when you're lucid and you have control and you know that you're dreaming, you know, you kind of take over the script, you don't really have leave room for the dream to show you what it wants to show you.

So, you know, there's benefits of both, for sure. 

Yeah. I've actually thought a lot about that. I've talked about this on Tik TOK too, where it's like, I feel that lucid dreaming is a certain. The will of my ego into the dream world. And that can be very explorative and fun because I could interact with unconscious characters.

Right. And when I say, I want to be sure to let people know that and to let you know that when I talk about like psychological terms and stuff, like there is a lot of depth to the framework I use, which is young in psychology in it like is very spiritual. So it sounds like I'm like over rationalizing things.

Sometimes I just want to let people know that I'm actually very open to not what I would call irrational, but I would call non rational the other side. Yeah, 

me too, because I mean, I'm a scientist. I have a background in psychology neuroscience as well. I studied that, but I kind of took it further and like, I'm very spiritual as well.

And I just understand that there's so much more to reality than just our physical reality. Our dreams don't really operate on logic and rationality sometimes. So you have to be able to like, look outside the box and like, know that there's so much that we don't know. 

Right. I actually think that fundamentally a sickness that has happened in our culture in the Western culture is a repression of non rationality.

So we over value rationality, and that actually manifests in the lack of interest in the dream world. It's 

crazy how much people value science and evidence a lot, which I do as well. But we have to understand that science and what we consider scientific facts is just what a bunch of people came together and studied.

You know, science only goes as far as what we know as humanity, you know, which is very limited. And so yeah, you have to take that a step further and see the bigger picture, you know, just to be open to it, you know, because yeah. Our dreams have so much to show us. We just can't think of it so rationally or literally sometimes.

Yeah. Right. And going back to the lucid dreaming and like opposing my will into an, a loose the dream. It's really exciting. And theory for me to be able to ask a dream character, like, who are you? Like, what part of you? What part of the unconscious Ari are you in my personal unconscious? Are you some type of, you know, deeper collective being or archetype, but what's like you were saying, what's interesting about not lucid dreaming, letting the dream world dream, the unconscious kind of speak its own language to you.

It feels like I'm participating by setting aside my ear. But I think that there's a applicability or a usefulness to both of those things. Yeah. Because 

when you bring your ego into that space, it kind of becomes a little experiment. Like you already know what you need to work on, what areas you want to address more.

And then you can look deeper into that. Or if you're like you were saying, you're having a recurring nightmare or something. When you're lucid and you become lucid in that recurring nightmare, you can kind of approach it differently because you're not scared anymore. You can experiment. And like, like you were saying, asking dream character stuff and like picking their brains.

I love doing that. It's so fun. And what I've come to realize is that I do feel like there are different types of characters in your dreams. Like there are some, yeah, there are some that are just a projection of our subconscious and our, you know, reiteration of our memories. But there are some that really do feel like they have their own thoughts and their own minds.

And I've had dream characters tell me like, oh yeah, I know what dreamers are. They're kind of annoying because when they become lucid, they do crazy stuff in my town or whatever stuff like that. Or they've told me like, oh, like, don't, you know, don't tell anybody that you're lucid because you know, they'll kick you out.

And they have kicked me out of the dream before. So like, you know, it, it really makes me feel like there's like levels to it. Like you were saying, there's like, you know, energies, beings, entities, whatever you call them. That's kind of like live there and tap into our dream spaces. There's like a collective energy.

There's so many ways to conceptualize it, right? Like you're saying like there's beings are angels, demons, all of the words that we've been using for thousands of years, the archetypes like young would call them the interesting thing about it is that I do believe that our individual experience, like our own ego, let's say will maybe conceptualize, what's the word I'm looking for.

They will visually see, like, let's say me and you went into the deep collective unconscious, and we met the same archetype or angel or whatever. We might actually see it completely differently. Right? Like it might be a different imagery. And that's what people, I don't think understand about the unconscious.

It's a different, I feel like it's a different dimension, right? Like it's outside of time. It's like you can actually experience yesterday and tomorrow. You know, I just finished Carl Young's theory on synchronicity and he, him and Einstein would sit around and talk about relativity and it got young thinking all about the relativity of the psyche specifically to like, time-space very interesting stuff, 

but super cool.

I love that type of stuff. It's, it's so crazy to me. Not, not even crazy, but just so fascinating. It is 

a little crazy, like in a, in the best way I was listening to someone I think is, I think it was Michael meat is his name. He's a psychoanalyst or analytical psychologist different than for. Young man. But he was telling me that the word weird, which I kind of think of crazy and weird as being similar in a sense, but the original Welsh, meaning of weird, meant to have one foot in the dream world and one foot in reality.

Well, I'm weird. I knew it. Yeah. I really liked that. I was like, yeah, I've always felt like I was weird and now I know what I 

live. I tell people all the time that I live in the dream world, part-time, I mean, we spend a third of our lives asleep. That's like a really big chunk, like a third that's 

crazy. No sleep has turned to be a very important part of my life.

Right? Like I will not. Stay up late just to have 

you write your dreams now. 

Yeah, I do. I, most of the time I actually was listening to, I think you were talking about it on one of your podcasts, but you use like an app that then you could reference specific symbols and like do this thing, but I've always done that by him.

The idea, cause I've had to read through my dreams and I had to take a separate sheet and write like every time I see a car, right. And then like I did tallies and I, and it gets I'm. I actually very good at that analysis stuff. So I, uh, was when I heard you say that, I was like, oh, I can have a computer. Do it for me.

You can 

pick emotions, you put objects, characters, and then you can search by keywords. So it's really convenient for me. Cause I always look back if I have a dream and I'll be like, this reminded me of another dream. Or if I have a moment in real life that reminds me of. All like search it and reread it and always brings up like more just information.

Something I don't do enough is go back and reference things that come up. Like just the other day, I had a dream where I haven't smoked marijuana and for years, as well as I'll call and I, I have dreams often didn't realize this until I had this dream the other day and then realized that. Same symbols shows up over and over and over again, which is me loading like a bowl or something and offering it to people and then having them deny it.

But then me never smoking. I've never smoked in my dreams, but I'm always trying to offer it to people. And I, I dropped that and I was like, whoa, I do this all the time in my dreams. Like it was kind of. I still don't really know what it means, but I have also 

like a similar thing. Like you, like, I smoke weed still and I've been trying to cut back, you know, for personal reasons, for green reasons.

But does it affect your dreams a little bit? It does. Like, I can't, I don't dream at all and that sucks, you know, like I love my dreams. And so, um, yeah, it's, you know, THC suppresses your REM sleep and it just knocks you out. Usually. I mean, I have had lucid dreams after I smoked before bed. I have, but it's possible, but it's more difficult, you know?

Exactly. It actually holds you from REM, which is unfortunate because you need that. 

Yeah, exactly. I guess I would also want it to tell you a little bit about what you said earlier about the stabilization when you become lucid, you know, how you were saying that when you realize that you're dreaming, you just wake up immediately or you get excited or whatever.

Yeah. It's very common. That's so common. And like, it happened to me as well when I first started trying to loosen dreams because I used to have spontaneous lucid dreams, like growing up and stuff. But then when I started, they're like, well, I couldn't induce this on. And says, you know, you have to you're in your dream body, right?

You're no longer in your physical body. So the idea of stabilization or stabilizing the lucid dream is to like, you know, stabilize your dream body. So what you can do is focus on your five senses. You know, you have touch, smell, taste, hearing, whatever. So what I do is like, I feel my hands, or like, if there's a texture around me, like, I'll just like, you know, like so vividly admiring it and like really feeling the texture.

And then that makes the dream like immediately more vivid, more stable. You won't wake up because you want to take a deep breath. You know, you already are excited. So you want to stay calm, take a deep breath. And before you like rush to go do things like you were saying before you go insert your ego into the dream, just observe and take it in, you know, like through your senses and also through the, just standing there and just looking around and like literally stabilized.

You're taking a second to take a deep breath. Sometimes I'll like lick the floor or something, you know, just to kind of like really feel everything around me. And then that, that 

really helps. That's interesting. Cause I conceptualize that and I'm like, it makes sense. We do that in reality to become more grounded in reality.

Right. But the funny thing is, is that I'm really bad at doing that in reality. And it probably is a big reason why I'm not good at staying in a dream world too, because I, I have a hard time staying in this reality. And it's funny because that's what I'm working on right now is being way more conscious of being in my body.

I've spent the last 30 years of my life. I'm 31 trying to be out of my body. I don't like being in my body. I don't like how strong I feel things, but, uh, I think eventually it will be, uh, some sort of blessing, but yeah, 

definitely. I mean, it's a journey, you know, what I found is being in that lucid body and spending more time lucid, I feel like it'll help you in a new journey within your dreams because you'll still always have your regular lessons within your dreams, but now you have a whole other area of things you can explore while Lewis said, you know, in your dream 

body, like the last time I almost got loose.

I was like walking through some chamber, like, it felt like ancient Greece. And I was walking through like these pillars. And then there was like some, like a group of people, or maybe it was just one guy or something. And he like was like in a hot tub and he's like, come have a bath with me or something.

And I, I was like, whoa, this is a dream. Um, and then I woke up and I was really sad because I was going to go hot tubbing in Greece. It was like very interesting. Yeah. It was very funny. It was very like, very interesting close. You 

were close. So that's still a success. 

Yeah, I haven't really tried since then.

I have the interesting thing is I worked so much with my dream, but I also have a lot of issues with sleeping. I have a lot of anxiety in the nighttime with like restless leg syndrome, which I don't adhere to sin. Like I don't like being diagnosed with things. So part of me is also like, what is that energy trying to get me to do?

Or like, what is it that my. Maybe I'm just sleeping too much and it wants me to get up and right. Cause like I never write, except for in the middle of the night, I was like the only time I will have focus or something inward or inwardly, you know, I 

like how you say that? What is the energy trying to get me to do?

That's a good way to look at it. 

My therapist, mark. Yeah. He's helped me a lot. Like when I first went to him, I was talking about depression. Right. It's like, I don't want to be depressed obviously. And he was like, well, um, does a tree in the winter sit in, try to, will. Leafs onto its branches all winter long.

And we started discussing that concept of like during the winter, a tree actually moves its energy down into its root system and works on grounding itself more than an outward extroversion, if you will. So he's like, well, what if we look at it this way where it's like, your energy is moving, what is it moving to?

What is it trying to get you to do? Right. And a lot of people talk about this with depression, that things become a lot more real. Like there's studies done that people who are experiencing depression actually look at the world in a much more. I want to say practical, it's a little pessimistic maybe, but like grounded where there's less optimism and less, not fantasy, but like, like we move through the world with a lot of big ideas.

If you will, we get very excited about things. We think grand, if we're in a really good place, we're like, we think bigger than what reality is typically, right? Like we, we shoot for the stars and we hit the moon or whatever. But when you're depressed, you can kind of see things how they actually are. If you're moving through these cycles, you can use for me, this is what I do when I'm low.

I use that to make sure that my finances that are getting like my financial needs are getting met, like actually to be like, okay, wait. 'cause when I'm like up in the clouds, I don't pay attention to money. I don't do those things. Sure. You got to do 

the groundwork, you know, stay grounded with your head in the 

clouds.

Right. And usually I'm depressed and it's like, oh man, I don't have enough money. This and that. But that's the funny thing is, is that my attention is redirected towards making sure that I, that I'm financially structured emotionally and. Physically grounded. You know what I mean? It's really interesting.

It's also, I'm not saying that depression is like, not real, but I think there's utility or you can find utility and most energy. 

Yeah. Sometimes it just takes, you know, looking at the bigger picture to pull yourself out of something like that. 

Yeah. Or even letting it naturally cycle out of it. Because I think for me, it's, I fight it a lot and it actually kind of feedback loops and makes me feel worse.

Um, whereas if I, and this is, it's always a struggle to accept where you're at, kind of for me. And, uh, if I'm able to do that, it's almost like I live in Utah. We have all four seasons. And when I'm in winter, I really, I don't like winter. I don't like. Winter. And, uh, if I just try to find pleasant things about it, like the silence after a snow storm, I really liked that.

And just try to remember like the little things and kind of just like, it's not like I'm powering through, but I'm waiting for spring. You know what I mean? Like I want spring. Yeah. 

Life is all about seasons, really and dreams too. Like I've even noticed that like my dreams will have seasons and it's just about tapping into like that.

And like, if I have a lot of nightmares in a row, like I'll just kind of let it pass, figure out, you know, what is trying to tell me, instead of trying to fight back that resistance in the dream world, like makes everything harder lucid or not lucid, you know, you don't want to 

resist. It's interesting though, a lot like psychedelic work.

So like  gins and Iowasca and, uh, psilocybin, but like, I don't want to like spend too much time on that, but I do like making the parallel between working with the unconscious mind through substances and working through through dreams. Right? Like I think it's the same thing with different, like, you introduce a different energy.

Inside a different intelligence, if you will, with a medicine. And like the dream world, I think is the human portal to like the human function. It's like a function in the psyche that the dream is to connect us to that reality. We really don't like going inward as a culture. And so we found ways to get there using extroverted.

Uh, w outer world things like ingesting a mushroom. Right. But I think it brings us to the same place. So if you, I tell, I try to tell people this, you could work with Iowasca, but you could also go to sleep and work with your dream, and it will be very similar and you'll have, uh, except for that, I think dreams bring up more relevant information that your psyche, your ego will be able to handle.

I think the totality of our psyche is very intelligent and it will bring to you what you are ready for it. Right. It won't bring your trauma up. That you're not, you're still not ready to digest like a mushroom trip might do. And so I think people should. Spend time learning to integrate dreamwork. Um, if they want to like really utilize those stronger medicines.

Yeah. I completely agree. I think they're all tools, you know, everything has a tool you don't want to over, you know, overdo it, but a dream is like the best place to start, because like you said, it's like the in-between, you know, between all the dimensions or whatever that we can access every night, it might take longer, you know, but it's easier to digest and even things like meditation and things like that, like these are all tools that we can use to like just elevate our consciousness and like learn more about ourselves.

It's just finding what works for you. 

Yeah. Yeah. And I think I find it really interesting. We're important to work with dreams specifically because. Like we think of becoming healthier and mental health and all of these things in a kind of a strange way. But I really do think that dreams are like a built-in therapist, like we were talking about earlier, but you have these parts of you that are underneath consciousness, right.

That you are not conscious of. And those might be things that you were never conscious of, like dormant from birth or things that you repressed or things that were suppressed by the psyche, because you weren't ready for it and emotion that you couldn't handle or something. We're conscious of the things we're conscious of, but there's a whole, it's like everything you swept under the bed, right?

Like, uh, your room looks really clean, but there's a bunch of shit under the bed. Um, and so dreams are like the thing that like will take whatever's under the bed and kind of like shove it out so that you see it again, and you could shove it right back onto the bed, or you could pick it up and put it where it's supposed to go.

Yeah. 

And that's where the connection comes in. You have to apply it to real life. And you mentioned this earlier, you know, you have to really take the lessons and integrate them. You know, that's where the lucid living comes in, which is what I call it, which is where you take what you learn in your dreams and really like dive deeper into it instead of like hiding 

from it.

Yeah. And, and it can be scary. I've noticed this, this is something that might be the most important thing I've learned about dreams is when I'm terrified of something. Let's say the security guard that's chasing me. If I get back into the dream, either lucid or through active imagination, dreaming, like living the dream on or dream tending or something, there's lots of different words for it.

But going back in and turning around and facing it every time I do that, something magical happens. One time there was a witch at my door and I was terrified, right? Like she was terrifying in the dream. I opened the door and I body slammed her over my knee, which is really brutal. But that's what I did.

But that was an interesting dream because I, I, I opened the door and body slammed her, but I did not ask her what she had for me. Right. And so I went back in and didn't body a slammer this time and asked her like, what are you trying to bring to me? And there was this bubble. That emitted from her, that everything that it touched like flowers and life sprung up from.

So she was like this scary old witch, but she had this aura that was bringing life. And I felt a jolt of like life energy. Once I went back into the dream and these little characters, they have energy, like libidinal psychic energy that if you connect with them, they will share it. So I've like found self-love through dreamwork where I tapped into this, this woman, I was feeding for the triplets or quadruplets babies in my dream.

And I kept on running out of milk for the fourth one. And I was so stressed out. I was like, how am I, this baby's getting skinnier and skinnier. I don't know what to do. And I thought it was about all this symbolism and like the, and all this stuff, which there probably is there. But, but then there was this character watching.

And I went back into the dream and I turned around and I was like, who's this character, right? I, all of a sudden was filled with compassion and love for myself for the effort I was putting in to feed these children. Yeah. That's 

beautiful is, you know, I've heard a lot of people say that and I've experienced that too, where we have the capability to receive this energy that's way greater than the amount of love that we can feel on earth.

Like where we can only feel so much as humans, but our higher self, our spiritual self is capable of like receiving this euphoric amount of like loving compassion. And like, sometimes you get bits of that in your dream. And it's like, whoa, 

it gives me like enough energy to keep going. Sometimes I'll be really low.

Like really depressed. And I'll, I'll like, beg my dream. I, I call my dream bringer my soul, if you will. I call her Ellie. She told me her name was Ellie actually. And I will beg her like, Hey, please fill me with life tonight. Cause I don't have enough energy to keep going and I'll have dreams. Like I had a dream after that once where I went through this temple type thing and got to a room where there was a bunch of my ancestors and my grandmother was.

I told her, uh, life is fucking magical. That's what I told my grandma. And my grandma was very Mormon and very strict, and that would have really offended her in real life. But in the dream, she met me with like a big beaming smile and like the best energy. And I felt this acceptance from my ancestors and I woke up full of like so much energy.

It was really cool. Super 

cool. Yeah. Two things you said there that I really thought was cool. Like how you were asking Ellie, your, your dream died or whatever, for the dreams. Like when I talk about setting an intention, like, you know, you can, everybody has like guides and dream guides or whatever, spear guides, you know, you can ask them like, Hey, can you show me this in my dream?

Can I dream about this? Like, show me how to resolve this. You know, you can ask the question and like, it really is powerful. Like they can really make a big difference. You know, the fact that you're like breaking and like breaking through uncovered things that maybe your grandma, when she was on earth, like wasn't able to do, you know, but from the other side, she's helping you understanding.

Yeah, it felt very much. And I went and I talked to my two brothers after which both of them are very rational. They're introverted thinkers. I'm like a feeler, I'm a feeling type. I don't, they're both very rational, but both of them were like, wow. It's like you had this inner feeling of not being accepted by your ancestors, your grandma, and a.

Had this feeling of being fully accepted for who you are by your grandmother and whether or not that spiritual, whether or not my grandmother was in my dream, it doesn't matter because I healed that part of me. I also want to dimension, I just thought of this, like, it's so interesting. I had this really bad taste in my mouth for the word spirit guide for so long, because it sounds so woo.

And I'm like, I have a really hard time if I can't approach something from some small rational door, but I realized like, what I really like is Carl Young is like this rational doorway for me, but he always was trying to explain things scientifically, but that was like really rough for him. Like he, I think he much would have much rather been just a spiritual person, but he felt so much obligation to try to get it to be accepted by.

Uh, the academic world, but he would explain this bringer of dreams, this part of the psyche of function in the psyche called the anima or the animus, which was like the animating part of the psyche, or he called it the soul. And I think it's really interesting because we talk about spirit guides and. It really is the exact same thing where you're going in, where you're meeting a part of your own psyche and when, and psyche is way different than like a part of your brain.

Like the psyche is, has depth into dimensions, right? Like that's, what's so weird. It's a well of none. I'm thinking about it's like the psyche itself is like a little white hole or black hole. The one that things spew out of, and, uh, our realities are created by all these little white holes, which are our psyche or something like that.

I'm very explorative with thoughts. I've never thought of it like this. And so I'm kind of in the midst of exploring a new idea with you, but that a spewing out from the ether, from like a different dimension into our reality, there's the guides between the two, it's like a train that connects the inner world and the outer world.

I met her and I met her on a train in my dream, which was really funny. And we were going on a journey. And we were going to hit all of these hauntings is what she called them, which I have translated to complexes, which is interesting, but I asked her her name and she's like, I'm Ali. And she told me like, all of these myths, like my dream world has its own myths, which is really interesting.

So I've been looking at it as like Ellie is my animal. My, the animating part of my psyche, but really she's, it's the same thing as saying she's my dream guide. That was a very long-winded way to say. I think anima and dream guidance, anima, animus, and dream guide are the same thing. 

Yeah, I, I think so too.

I'm going to look more into that 

as well. Yeah. I it's interesting because it was very polarized, masculine, feminine in Young's day. And I think nowadays a post young man would talk about anima animus as showing up none gendered, essentially. But like he talks a lot about how like an anima is what a male would have an animus females in our day and age.

I think the psyche is evolving in some ways. Uh, the polarization of energy embodied in people is changing the animating function. The dream guides, they show up very differently. I think. 

Yeah, it makes sense. And like, you know, young, his, like, I love his, where he was well, but he was working with what he knew at the time and the same way he took Freud's work and, you know, which was very clinical base and took that to a new level, you know, and now we are taking Young's then taking that to a new level based on what we know now.

So I feel like it's all connected for sure. 

No, that's a good, I like that. That's a good point. And speaking of that, I think the biggest difference. In my practice of dreamwork. And I, and I noticed this with people are like, they'll comment on a tick-tock. I was like, what does this dream mean? And I think a lot of people think like, when I say I can help you analyze your dream or whatever, I like the idea of being like, well, this is a symbol that could mean this, this and this and this and this.

Um, and maybe because I was in the tree house, it's referencing like a childhood behavior that had been doing since then and blah, blah, blah. But there's so there's importance to that. But the reality of it is that the biggest growth leverage, like the most growth is in embodying. The emotion that is brought to you in the dream.

Yes. For sure. The emotion tells you so much and just like the overall vibe of the 

dream, right. You don't even need to analyze it. You can literally go back in and just feel it. 

Exactly. And the thing about like dream objects and stuff and finding out what does this mean? What does that mean? Like your perspective of what a dog means might be completely different than what a dog means to me, you know?

So like to, when I help people like analyze their dreams, it's more about like, I can tell you what type of questions to ask and how to approach the dream. Like what to look at instead of telling you like, oh, a dog means this because I can't tell you what your dream is trying to tell you. Like, you have your own personal dream language with your dreams.

And so, you know, it's about helping people like tap into that feeling of like, what is my dream sign to tell me, like, what is my subconscious 

language? You know? Yeah. And I think young saw patterns and it was like, well, you could generalize it at a specific level, but, but it's still. More dangerous. I think to tell people what their dreams mean too.

Then what you're saying is like help them guide them into understanding what their dream means themselves. 

Yeah, exactly. And there's this dream interview theory of process by Gail Delaney. If anybody's interested in looking it up and the way she approaches it is, she literally asks all the questions.

Like if I were to like, for example, your dog dream, if I were to explain what a dog is to you it's as if you had never, ever seen a dog before, like, what is a dog? What is its personality? What does it do? Like, what does it look like? What does it feel like? Like if you were explaining it to like an alien, you know, and it sounds kind of silly, but those kinds of questions can really help you figure out like, oh, okay, well, a dog is something like scary or a dog is something, you know, depending on what it is to you.

And those questions can kind of open up the conversation of like, oh, well maybe that's what that feeling is. You know, 

you're diving into. And correct me if I'm wrong, but into what symbolism really is, which is it's like this dog is a dog, but if we were to break down in all of the different ways that my understanding of a dog is it gets very abstract, right?

Like it gets into, I guess, not like a four legged mammal. It's like, it can get into like the evolution of the Wolf into the dog and like this taming of the wildness and a beast. Right. Or, you know, there's so many different abstract. Relationships for me, whereas someone that grew up with the dog, I mean like the most comfortable thing in the world, for me, it's like a, almost a wild animal that might attack me.

Yeah, yeah, 

yeah. It's cool. We're all different, you know, and dream work is such a personal journey, but it's fascinating to just like, have these conversations to like, just encourage people to start writing their dreams down. Like that's the very first step, even if you don't know what a dream means, write it down.

Cause you might figure it out later. 

Yes. I've come back to dreams very often. Very, very often. Speaking of like, I am going to do a retreat in September in Tulum, Mexico, and I'm, I'm bringing like I have 10 spots and I'm going to be teaching like how to work with your dreams and taro as well. I don't know if you're into terrible, but taro to me is a very, very similar, it's very similar to dreamwork where you're kind of just projecting the unconscious mind onto symbolism rather than letting it.

He create the symbolism. You're using more, archetipal universal symbolism to, to interact with your unconscious. But, but like my goal is to start doing more and more of these retreats to really help people with what I'm calling integration tools, right? Like we're trying to integrate that non rational, unconscious mind into our consciousness.

And, uh, you can call that like, I think the relativization of the ego, we're trying to make sure that we know that the rational mind isn't everything that there is. There's a whole nother world. There's a whole nother half to our reality. We spend all of our time over in this other half. And when you polarized like that, that's where sickness comes from essentially.

So I'm a personal coach. I'm a depth coach. I don't just work with dreams. I work, I do use young in concepts, but I've been studying a lot of width, post youngins, and I do so. Yeah, one-on-one work with people. I am moving into doing retreats, like traveling to beautiful places, to connect to the soul, to connect to the unconscious through sort of detaching from our reality, like from not our reality, but like the habitual newness of your own daily life and going somewhere beautiful learning, dream tools, learning Theriault tools, my goal isn't to interpret people's dreams, it's to build their own personal relationship with their dream.

Right. That's what's important is that you walk away. Knowing how to connect, how to get into dialogue with your dreams. We all have, like you were saying a personal guide, a counselor, as my, as my mentor calls it, the wise counselor who is waiting to help us. She doesn't really jump in and help. If you don't ask, she's kind of patient.

And she's like, no, they'll come to me when they need me. And so I want to teach people how to get into relationship with that creativity, addiction, all of these things. Like our entire life can be affected positively by doing dream work, your relationship to money, right? Like I'm using dreams to help fix really old complexes around.

And when I say complexes, I mean just strong beliefs about money that I'm unconscious of, that I only can get money if I'm doing something I don't like doing. That's like a very common belief that is unconscious in most people anyway. So I do one-on-one work with people. You can find me through, take talk Instagram.

There's always going to be a link in my bio where you can book a free session with me, not a full session, like 15, 20 minutes where we can talk. I also love guiding people into two resources. So like, let's say you don't want to work one-on-one with me. I know other coaches, I know podcasts that you can listen to books.

You could read, you know, all of the things. So I just like talking to people, um, that gives me energy and I love doing it. They can do that. I also have a link in that bio to that retreat. I'm going to be doing more retreats next year. And potentially the idea is that I am bringing more and more experts and less and less me, like I learned from a bunch of people.

Right. I would love to be able to bring those people in to help teach. I like the idea of me being more of a curator and a, and an energetic, like, exciting mixer. Um, so if people want to come to, to learn with me, that's in September, you can book a spot. Like reserve your spot for like three 50, uh, $350 and pay it in increments.

I'm very excited about that. It's going to be super intimate and then I have that podcast. I call it suspending this belief it's on iTunes and podcasts and, uh, Spotify. Whatever. Yeah. I'm very curious with, people's like on-ramp to working with dreams, like how did you really commit to it? I suppose. 

So basically I've always been fascinated by dreams since I was a child.

I never really paid attention to it or thought that there was, you know, this was something that I could like work with deeper, but I always thought it was cool. You know, I kind of had lucid dreams as a kid. Um, but then in college or I started studying psychology and neuroscience and stuff like that, and I kind of started to open it up.

Really. It was kind of like my spiritual awakening journey, which was a result of, you know, some difficult times in life, like everybody, you know, and also some psychedelic stuff, you know? Um, so that kind of opened up a world of like, okay, there's more out here, but like, where do I fit in? Right. And then I think it was just a period of like really depression.

Like I kind of started to use my dreams. It was like an escape. Like I started to induce lucid dreams because I just started to do some research and I found out like, oh, like, Have more lucid dreams on purpose. Like that's cool. So I kind of just started to do it for fun. It's like an escape from reality and it ended up making me appreciate my life more because I started to just realize like all the potential there.

Um, and so I started keeping a dream journal like three years ago, and that was my biggest, the biggest thing for me, you know, once you start keeping a dream journal, I committed and I'm not saying I was always super consistent with it, but I started to care about my dreams about starting a podcast or just teaching about it.

It was just a regular dream, which kind of gave me the idea, which is kind of funny. So 

wait, the dream gave you an idea to do a dream podcast. 

Yeah, it did. Or a podcast. I didn't know it was going to be about dreams. I just had like a dream where I was like podcasting or whatever, and I hadn't ever thought of a podcast ever.

So I thought that was cool. But before that was like a year before I ever started the podcast. So for like a year, from like 20. 19 to 2020. I had this idea in my head, like I want to do a podcast, but I don't know why, just because I had all this trippy cool stuff to talk about and I wanted to talk about it.

That's basically what it was, you know, I just wanted to talk about cool stuff. Um, and then after COVID I had joined just randomly off of finding some people on Reddit, like a group chat about dreamers and stuff. And when I joined that group chat, it just really inspired me more because when you connect with like a community of like people who are into this, you know, same type of dream stuff, it just opened up like a whole new level.

I learned so much, you know, like I started to talking to them all the time and then I was like, Hey guys, you know, maybe I should, then it just kind of clicked to me one day, like, oh, I could do my podcast about dreams, you know? And then I just was like, okay, I'll call it the dream world. Right. And everybody in the group chat was like, yeah, cool.

Like, I'll help you. Like, I'll go on it. Like, you know, cause I was like, They want to be, want to be on it. And they were like, yeah. So like, one of my friends from there was like my first guest or a couple of them were like my first guests. And then it just kind of honestly took off from there. I started doing more podcasting.

I started getting into the clubhouse. I just started like opening up this conversation and it just started to flow in. And then I did my master's thesis on dreams. And so now I'm here and then I started Tik TOK, which was going pretty good, but you know, I'm just kind of doing it for fun, but I'm just starting to like use all these platforms to get my message out there and just see where it takes me.

Like, I don't really have a plan or like a specific end goal, but it's something that I learned to love and I feel like there's benefit. Like you said, there's so much benefit in it for everybody. So that's kind of how I started. 

Yeah. Very cool. I, a few things that stuck out to me is like this. That you sort of pivoted in life based off of your relationship to dreams, especially like this idea of like podcasting coming from your dream.

I think that that's actually really common for people that have gotten really into dream work is that it will actually point you in a direction that fills you with life, right? Like that's the point for me, is getting connected to that dream world will help you understand what it is to be filled full of life, fullness of spirit.

If you will. I often ask it to help guide me towards what's going to fill me with energy in life. Right? Like it makes me feel young again, essentially. Not that I'm that old, but relatively, I suppose I also noticed the relationship to dreams is almost defined by the willingness to journal the dreams. And I.

I noticed this often that people want to work with their dreams and they'll work with, when they remembered from a few days ago, they don't write it down. They don't keep record of it. And I found that the only way to tell the dream that you're really carrying is if you 

write it down, I agree. I tell people that all the time, like, you know, you could try any message.

You can do it any way you want, but writing it down is like pretty key. Like it's pretty important because yeah, you're telling your brain, I care about this and I want to know more and it builds your report. And then you remember 

more, right? I think that's like the most common question I get on Tik TOK.

You'll probably run into the same thing, which is like, how do I remember dreams? Right. And, uh, extra that's where we met was on a, a question of how do you 

remember? Yeah. I found you responded. And I was like, oh, I like his response. 

Yeah. It's very, very common to hear that question. For me, it's literally just about the intention.

It's I think that the response is that you have to tell your rational, mind your ego. You have to say, Hey, I know you don't like non rational, non non-linear chaotic soup, but I want you to not dismiss this immediately when I wake up. 

Yeah. And writing it down. When you first wake up is important, because you will notice like five minutes, 10 minutes after it'll start to fade and then the details fade away.

But, um, another thing too, is your body position. If you stay in the same position, when you wake up, like you said, wake up slowly and just take a second to like, let the dream come back to you. Actually, this morning, I had a false awakening where I wrote down my dream, pretend in my dream. And then I woke up like, oh crap.

I have to write it down for real now. But the false awakening helped me remember it. 

That's kind of, yeah, that's kind of funny, like doing double the work almost. Uh, I don't like writing my dreams down. I think this is important for people to know that I don't take a cold shower every morning. Cause. I do it because of the, the long effects that I have noticed.

I really appreciate it. The same thing with journaling. I don't actually enjoy journaling. Every time I sit up in the middle of the night, am I get my journal or I get my phone and I write it. I'm like, I don't want to do this, but I meet it's building a relationship. You can't rely on a friend that you only check in when you need something from it.

You have to maintain a healthy relationship with a friend by caring really. 

Consistency, you know, and I see a lot of people to give up, like when it comes to the lucid dreaming, they're like, oh, I tried for like a week and it didn't work. So screw that, you know, but it's an ongoing thing. It's like a lifelong journey.

You can't just give up on it after like a week, you know, it's consistency. Yeah. 

I've been dreaming. I've been doing dream work for four years. Pretty consistently, also dreams do come and go, right? Like it's, I can't will the dream. So I have dry spells with the three, four weeks. I won't have any dreams or like, I don't remember any important dreams or I just stopped writing them down.

For some reason and then they kind of disappear. Yeah. And then I'll have like a really loud dream right. Where I'm like, terrified. I actually love having nightmares. Is that weird? 

No, I kind of do too. Honestly. I like love we'll wake up so grateful. Like the feeling when I wake up, like if I have a really bad nightmare, I'm like, oh my God, I'm so glad.

That's not real 

interesting. I wake up excited. Like I'll have these really intense dreams. A lot of my nightmares are kind of like alien or fourth dimension stuff where I'll get sucked into a different dimension. Like these hauntings, I called them or my dreamworld called them. They were like these glitches.

So like, I would be like sucked into a wall and be stuck like in between a wall, um, is almost like a quantum misfunction or whatever. Right. And, uh, but then I'll wake up. After, like falling into blackness. And, uh, and it's like, whoa, I'm like, I have all this electrical energy moving up and down my body. And I love it.

I don't know what it is. And I also will often feel like there's characters in my room when I wake up where I'm like, like there's people in here 

really weird. Yeah. That happens to me too. And it's pretty common. Um, I responded to a comment about this too, and also it can happen when you're falling asleep.

You know, when we have sleep paralysis and we feel all this stuff like, you know, for people that don't know listening to this, like sleep paralysis just happens every night, your body paralyzes itself. And then, you know, as like a defense mechanism, so we don't sleep walk or act out our dreams. But if you're consciously aware and you become mentally awake as your body's doing this, you know, you experienced sleep paralysis.

Some people will experience like vibrations. It sounds like ringing sounds, or like you were saying just like energy shooting through your body. And in my metaphysical explanation is like, we're literally moving through dimensions, you know? And like we are chemical beings. So like we experienced these like different sensations, different energies.

And like, sometimes it might, you might have here. So you're like, oh, this is like something bad. That's like trying to hurt me, but it might not necessarily be that it might just be you projecting that fear onto it. 

Right. A lot of times the things I'm very terrified in my room. Unconscious characters of my own.

So like my own personal unconscious being projected in the world visually, like I will see my dream characters in the outer world when I'm in that hypnagogic. But when I'm in that world, I feel like the psyche expands. I was the, I did an explanation of this too recently. I think my perspective of seeing dream characters when you're waking up or like, if you have sleep paralysis and there's the, which are like the thing that's coming at you or sitting on your chest, there are these different things.

There's this process of. Switching, like you're saying kind of switching dimensions, switching world, that our psyche is actually not just in our brain. It's a, it's a magnetic aura, probably something like this, like a magnetic field and the perception field. We can perceive our own psyche within a radius around us.

So like, you can actually project your inner content into the outer world, and it's not necessarily hallucinating. You're interacting with your psyche and like, External way. It's really actually hard to explain. I'm not quite good at explaining it yet because I don't fully understand it. But what's interesting about that.

Is that the personal unconscious? Yeah, that makes sense. Where it's like, I have these repressed parts of me and I might see them outside of me as evil men trying to kill me or something. Like when I wake up, I will see this little girl in a pig mask sometimes. And she's like staring at me from my closet.

Right. And I feel like she's part of me, my personal unconscious, but there is the deeper part of that world where like, you know, maybe a character that shows up for me can also show up for you. And we could actually see this character outside of us. Like there's people that have shared experiences and stuff like 

that.

It's very strange. The shared dreaming is something that has always fascinated me, but I, I don't know enough about it to, you know, say this is facts, this is facts. And I don't think anybody really does, but I have heard stories like where people say, okay, I was lucid and I had a dream about my friend and maybe they weren't lucid, but they had a dream about that person the same night.

And it was a similar dream. Like this happened to my brother and his girlfriend. And they had the same plot of the dream. Like, like weren't exactly the same. Like they went somewhere in a car and they got out of the car, whatever. I don't know exactly what happened in the dream, but they both said like they had the same dream and I think he was lucid.

So he remembered more details of it because his consciousness was there and she was not lucid. So she maybe remembered it more blurry or didn't remember all the details, but that that's happened a lot. It's crazy. 

Yeah. It's very interesting. I, I think of it like a flower pot or like a flower. And you have individual sunflowers, right?

And let me, and you are two separate sunflowers. And, uh, we kind of see each other as separate, but if you go down into the stem, like we're still in the personal unconscious, but if you go all the way into the root system, we're actually all connected into that same dirt and there's creatures in the dirt.

There's like worms and there's all these different things, but they're the worm that is in the dirt is the same worm that you see in this, the same worm that I see. Like you can go down into the collective unconscious and actually meet the same creatures. But in that connectedness of our roots, I think dreams kind of stem up from there.

The deeper, the dream or the deeper into the unconscious, you go, the more likely you're sharing it with somebody. So like, I think you could have collective dreams. I've had dreams that I was like, this is a myth. Like, this is a, this is an archetype of human behavior that I'm experiencing in my dream. And other people, like, I w I, I felt like this is a real thing, right?

Like this is, I bet other people dream about the same thing. Uh, it's very interesting. 

Yeah. That's, that's cool. It's definitely, that's a good way to put it. And I can tell sometimes when I have dreams and I'm like trying to figure out what they mean. Like, sometimes it's a very personal thing, but sometimes, like, we do have dreams about like the collective and the message is more like for a bigger picture, you know, messages for the collective.

We all have. We're all experiencing all this crazy bullshit in the world. You know, a lot of people are having like apocalyptic theme dreams or like COVID dreams. There was a whole thing about COVID dreams. So like we're all experiencing this. And like, I feel like that dream, our dreams definitely tap into like similar themes.

I've had 

a lot of, I love apocalyptic apocalyptical dreams 

for some reason. Yeah, I do too. And I'm usually pretty lucid in them because I'm like, oh, this is not real. 

Yeah. I feel like I'm actually pretty lucid in mine too. Not fully, like I don't control it, but I was very vivid and I remember them very well.

I remember this one where I, I just, there was a meteors just destroying everything. And I took a friend and I was like, we're just going to go watch how beautiful this is. And we walked up the mountain and we sat and watched like the world get destroyed. It was really interesting. That is 

interesting.

Yeah. It's definitely like a lot of perspectives there. Um, and yeah, you can be semi lucid where you like, know you're dreaming maybe, or it's very vivid, but you can't necessarily control it. 

But it's hard for me to pinpoint. Cause time is weird in dreams. And so it's hard for me to pinpoint at what point I became aware that I was dreaming because it could have been right when I woke up, but it kind of can be displaced in time that actually realization.

Yeah. 

Yeah, for 

sure. For sure. I want to know what your thesis, what was your master's thesis? 

So, um, it was focused on creative dreaming. So my dreams are a big source of inspiration for my creativity. Like whether I'm conscious or, you know, lucid or not. So I talked about lucid dreaming and how different artists, you know, like Salvador Dali and modern artists as well, like use their dreams for creative inspiration and they, you know, specific techniques you can do to like push you forward in that way.

Like whether it's your career or whatever. So, um, yeah, it was really interesting. And I interviewed like some artists who do 

it and yeah, that's awesome. I love that. That's a, there's this woman, Claire R Johnson. She wrote the art of lucid dreaming, but she, I think was the first person in the world to do.

PhD thesis on using lucid dreaming for creativity. She's really awesome. I love her energy. I think she has some courses on young platform, which I'm an ambassador for. I point people into some cool courses from some cool people and I've taken a bunch of their courses too. I really like center for information, but, um, like I've heard stories about create I've used it creatively too, but I think what's interesting is even though.

Context of which scientists have used dreams to have huge insights. 

Yes. So many like big inventions come from dreams like, um, maybe you know, about the periodic table. So like men to leave the scientists, he was working on the periodic table for a while. So he was already working on it, but he was stuck because he couldn't figure out like the order of the elements for some reason.

And then he had a little, he had a dream, we took a nap or whatever, and he had a dream. And then in the dream, I guess he was thinking about it so much. And you know, the phrase sleep on, it comes from somewhere because you know, our brains are so active trying to solve the problems of our waking life. So in the dream, all the elements just kind of shifted together into place of the periodic table that we now know.

And he saw it and he like looked at it and memorize it in his dream. He woke up and immediately wrote it down. And that's how he arranged the 

elements. The double helix for the DNA strand also came from a dream. I think like the actual form of it. But I can't remember the name of the guy that did it or had the dream, but I love this because I've been thinking a lot about the intelligence of the unconscious mind, right?

You have a, what we consider intelligence of rationality, or like the, almost the computing, like the computer aspect of our cognition, but you take all of this information and you sh you kind of like put it into the unconscious. For instance, with music, I learned all of this theory, cognitively didn't do me any good until it sunk into my unconscious mind and then the unconscious mind started using it.

And so when I write music, I'm a composer. I do classical piano, like romantic style, classical piano. I. Step aside. And the unconscious uses the tools that I learned and it writes music. It's really weird. Cause I don't think about theory anymore. Like I don't use the theory, but my unconscious mind does. So I step aside, Jared steps aside, a music experience happens where I watch a song or out of me.

Yes. The school. Yeah. You know what? That's fascinating. And I, a lot of my friends that are like musical creatives say something similar and I don't know if you've ever seen the movie soul Disney soul. Oh my God. It's so good. You have to watch it. You have to like it. Yeah. So like, yeah, they have that. They literally described that what you're explaining so well where like the musician gets into this vibe and they literally go to like the spiritual dimension where they're creating music and they're like, like you said, their physical steps aside and they're like in the zone.

That's cool. Yeah. It's really interesting. It's very similar to dreams where it's not very linear. And when, I mean, what I mean by that is like, we listened to songs with the start, the chorus verse, chorus, bridge, whatever. Right. Or even with classical music, it's much more like there's all these different parts, but there's climaxes.

And then there's like the, the start, the climax and the end of a song. Right. But when I step aside and it happens, it's not linear like that. It's a moment in time. That is endless. It's kind of weird. And so the song happens, but I don't capture it then. And I have to then invite my ego back to decipher, to use the building blocks.

I was just given to then put into a song it's really weird. So then, so it's like this dual process where it's like, I let this unconscious mind spew out this soup of melody and harmony and chords and beautiful things happening. And I get to experience that like a third person, right? Like I'm like, wow, this is amazing.

It's not me. It's beautiful. Uh, and then I have to be like, okay, let's put this into a concrete finished project. And that is my least favorite part. I hate that. But I definitely think being forced to learn theory has helped, but like, I don't use it. I've never consciously thought like, oh, I'm going to do a four chord into a two chord.

And then, uh, whatever I don't think about, I don't even know what an augmented chord is anymore, which like I studied piano. At least 12 years, like hardcore and I don't remember it like anything I probably would if I just actually, yeah, it's 

probably hidden in that subconscious, you know, you just know what sounds good and you just make it happen.

Exactly. That's awesome. That's super cool. Yeah. Sometimes I'll even use it as a tool to see how I feel, which is interesting. So there's the thing where I step aside and I experienced a moment. Right. And then there's also where I will sit down from Jared, like from my ego and I'll play and whatever I hear is like how I feel.

And so it's this extroverted way for me to go inward and see what my inner world looks like, because I have a hard time slowing down and going inward, unless I'm dreaming. I can check how I'm feeling based on what kind of music I play on the piano. So I'll sit down and some days I'll just like bang on my piano super loud.

And like, I call it like jester, like gesture music, like it's very playful and almost annoying in a way, like a gesture would kind of bounce around kind of prodding and annoying people maybe. And then other days it'll be so gentle and soft or sometimes it would be very sad and I will be able to be like, oh, I'm feeling sad, which is, yeah, that's so 

cool.

No, it really does come through that. I have that with my art too. And even my handwriting, like when I look back at my journals, I'm like, I know I was depressed that day because my 

handwriting interesting. Yeah. My handwriting's just chicken, chicken scratches all the time. I can't read my drink. Right. My dreams I've been doing it on my phone for years, but I just started doing it in my journal because I feel there's this physical, a computer phone still feels like it's in a different dimension to me, whereas this really pulls it into this dimension, you know?

True. 

Yeah. One thing I look, I always like have this paranoia that like, oh, the internet can shut down or with this app just decides that, you know, what, if they just abandoned the app, you know, like, I don't want to lose my dreams. So I like, they have this feature where I can export it. So like once a month or every couple of whenever I'll export it to PDF and then I could, I could print it out if I wanted to.

And that'll kind of give it some physicality, but there's just something like I do value the handwritten notes. Like I've gotten, I don't know. I don't have the patience anymore, but there's something about writing it down with your hands. That like, it does make a difference. Like it's a connect, it's like a mind body connection.

You 

know, I also think the stimulation from a screen when I wake up in the mill. Yeah, 

it does. Yeah. Sometimes I'll voice record and then write it later. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it does wake you up. The blue light wakes you up 

for sure. Oh, with the music. I also have used dreams to fuel sounds right.

Like I had a dream once that I, I fell in love with this pianist in my dream, this beautiful, well, here's, what's interesting. She had a piano, so I met her piano first and her piano was this big piano. And it had like a, it had like a roof to it. And. Beautifully carved this beautiful. I don't know what you would call it.

It doesn't exist. Like I've never seen this on a real piano. Right. But it was almost like this beautiful home. And I was like, whose piano is this? It's so beautiful. And like, these people were like, don't touch it. You know, like don't touch that piano. And then the director, the musical director was like, you can touch it.

She won't care. Like, go ahead and. It's really interesting. And then eventually I met her and I fell in love with her and the rest of the dream. We like ended up in a cottage in the woods and like, we're married for eternity. It was really weird. I don't dream like that very often, but I captured, like there was a feeling right, like of love and of like normal human level.

You know what I mean? It's like this really deep spiritual thing. And, uh, I pulled that into a song or I sat at the piano with that feeling and played what came to me. And that is one of my favorite songs. It's so simple. Like most of my time I'm like overdoing everything. I like, because I like to show off.

I'm like all of these runs and stuff have very fast fingers and whatever. And this song was just so simple. Now it's one of my favorite songs ever because it had this dream energy behind it. 

Cool. Do you ever like hear like the melody or something in your dream that you really like? And then you're like, oh, I could make that.

I rarely do my melodies come from feelings. It sounds really weird, but feelings and melodies are the same thing where it, so I can just embody a feeling. And then the melody, my hands do it. I don't actually hear, I don't hear any music in my head hardly ever. I spent a long time making sure I built up a, a tool to not allow music, to settle into my mind because it influences me so much.

If I have something stuck in my head where like, I can't get away from like a lyric or a Mo like a melodic cadence that will just keep going over and over and over again, this is probably something like I would be diagnosed with OCD or something like that. Like, it gets very, very disruptive. So I just have gotten really good at not thinking about music.

So it was really a very unconscious process for me. I think I've always wanted to dream of music, but it just doesn't happen. I had a dream few a month ago, probably where my mom was singing a song to a baby. It was me. And the song she was singing was like, I actually woke up and I recorded the melody. I haven't done anything with it, but it was, uh, it was interesting.

Cause then I went back into the dream and I comforted my mother because I felt that she was terrified of taking care of this baby. And so I was able to comfort my mother who was terrified of comforting me or like 

that's a cool trippy loop. Yeah. Yeah. I had a dream kind of like that, where I saw myself as a child and I was lucid.

Actually I did it on purpose. I thought it would be cool. I was like, I want to see myself as a child. Like I just want to tell myself things that I would've wanted to hear you. And that was a very quiet, shy child, but I saw myself in my dream or I, I intentionally went unlimited for myself and I found a child.

So in the dream I was like, it must be me, but it looked different than what I looked like. Not too different, but, you know, but I it's still like, felt like, oh, this is me as a child. And then I just started talking to myself and like asking myself questions, like, what do you want to be when you grow up?

And, you know, the little version of me was saying the same things I used to say as a child. So it was, 

it was cool. Yeah. That's awesome. Were you. Did you have to comfort her or anything? Or was it literally just like a conversation? 

Both? Like, she was very quiet. Like she didn't say much, which I was as a child that was very shy.

Um, but I was like, you know, me being me, I was comforting myself and like just giving myself like words of affirmation and like just positivity that I would have needed in. And she seemed to have responded well. 

Yeah. Like validating her experience a little bit maybe. Yeah, exactly. I think that's what we all need.

I need that. I need that. I need to go back to little Jared and like, Hey bud. It's okay. Like everything you're feeling is normal. Cause I, I just realized like so much of my childhood I held in because I thought if people knew about it, I would be rejected from my community. I was very shy as well, but I had so much going on in my inner.

Yeah. 

Yeah, same. I was very, very shy, but, but I was thinking like, I remember being a child and having all these existential questions. Like that's how I know that I was just destined to do this, you know? Woo, woo. Dream stuff or whatever people see it as, because like I remember as a child being like, what am I like, am I human?

Am I in a coma? And this is all fake. Like I used to have these types of thoughts as like a premiere old. I used to think I was like, is this real, you know, like crazy existential thoughts 

that scare you? Or was it more fascinating? 

It was fascinating. It didn't scare me. Like, I've never been scared of death.

Like, I don't know why. Like then I've always been like, you know, I grew up like, you know, Catholic and stuff, going to church, all this stuff. So like, I just always kind of felt like, you know, this, like, there's more for me to understand and I was never scared of it. Cause I had scary dreams. I had lucid dreams.

So I just felt like I wanted to explore my consciousness, you know? And I didn't know how, like I would spin around and make myself busy, you know, stuff like 

that. Oh yeah. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely meet. It's interesting because I think people can be like that as kids. And we either find an inward outlet to that, a desire for exploration or an outward one.

And that typically turns into the drug use, I think, exploring a psyche through manipulating it. Yeah. 

True. And I did, like when I did discover psychedelics, like I've never really, you know, abused any, any drug or anything, but, you know, it did like make me want to do it more and discover more, but then I just kind of found like, it kind of stops doing something for me after a while.

Like it has to be at the right time. So then I learned very quickly, like when it comes to psychedelics or mushrooms specifically, you know, I just let it come to me when I need it. When the universe tells me like, Hey, you know, I have something to show you. I just let that happen. Naturally. I don't, you know, go looking for it or trying to find this, you know, escape from reality anymore.

Yeah. That's huge. I think everyone I've ever met who has a positive relationship to mushrooms says the same exact thing. Let it come to you. Don't go looking for it. It will happen. Which referring back to the conversation earlier where I was saying dreams are nice because it will present you what you need.

Mushrooms are the same way, as long as you're taking them at appropriate times. Like when you're called to it. 

Exactly. You can't just use it with a certain expectation or to try to like escape reality because it's, and it can be a scary, bad trip if you're not using it. Right. You know, 

it can be a scary trip even if you're using it.

Right. Yeah. A lot of times it's terrifying for me, but, um, As long as you don't fight it, it's a good experience that fighting of trying to get away from what you are experiencing, which is so metaphorical for, I mean, it's not even a metaphor. That's exactly what we suffer from in this world is fighting.

What is, yeah. And 

also the environment, like same thing in life, like being around people when you're doing something like that, who support you and love you and are compassionate to your trip experiences, you know, makes a huge difference. 

I can imagine. Like I've always been hyper-aware I love what you just said, because about keeping people around you that are supportive of the experience and understand what your intentions are and how you said that's just like in real life.

Because I think that that is huge. I think. One of the biggest changes I made when I went from being a miserable alcoholic person to being the most happy I've ever been in my life. And freed from addiction was changing, who I surrounded myself with, which was so hard because, you know, I had been, I love my friends still, but I can only see them every six months because I can't, they don't support my reality.

Not because they don't love me. You know, it's not because it's just, we're very, we have very different values. We have very different type. I'm like super into cognitive function and like, um, personality, like psychological personality types. And in fact, I actually dream in it now, so I can, I have different characters show up as specific functions, uh, which is really interesting.

So I can, like the dream world speaks to me very, very clearly a lot of the times because I've developed a framework that both my conscious mind and my unconscious mind can meet with. Um, very cool. I love it. But. You have to start, like, what we're talking about is a very, we're talking about intuitive things.

Some people just don't actually like the dream world, the unconscious mind, they want verifiable concrete data or sensate data. Although the dream where like you were saying earlier, you can actually have all of that, but like, I'll get laughed at, by some of my friends, if I talk about experiences that I had, you know, where I just want to explore ideas with people, I don't know what's going on.

I don't know anything, but they'll laugh at me. Like, I think I know what's going on or something like that, you know? And so I just had to get myself with people that were like-minded and supportive and then. Yeah, 

exactly. Like I was telling you earlier when I started meeting people who are into dreams as well, when I found that community, like it really just, it made me feel like, you know, like I belong, like I'm less crazy.

Like I can explore these things that I don't know. And just like, you know, like we're talking about just like, what does this mean? What could this be? Like when you really start to just open that up with people that aren't like, oh, that's weird. That's crazy. You know, it becomes way better. 

Yeah. And I think it like, so my podcast is called suspending disbelief.

And I think a lot of that is this idea that being open to not understanding, like not knowing is really important to experience new things, right? There's this openness that is needed to become more conscious to gain more consciousness. If you're constantly being met with this belief like, oh, Tara was bullshit.

That's how I was for years. This is like, why, how could a card game create more consciousness in my psyche or whatever. But when I finally was able to experience it with an open mind in a rational way, I used it like, you know, like the Rorschach inkblot test, where they would show ink blots, and you project your unconscious mind onto it, same way you could do taro.

But then I started having weird experiences. Right. But in synchronicities, in. Then I was like, oh, there's weighers to this just like there's layers to the dreamworld. 

Yeah, for sure. And we don't even know what we don't know, you know, when people are so resistant to something it's because they don't know.

And that's like usually scary, you know, to them. Um, but yeah, th there's so much there and I've never really fully got into like doing Carol myself, but I, I always knew that for the people that get into it, that there's so much there for it to tell you, and I've had Cara readings and stuff. Yeah. It's cool.

And even with like science and stuff like that changes all the time, like people need to understand that just because something is research and science doesn't mean that's the end goal. Like we literally until recently, well, the human genome for example, was only figured out like in the late, late nineties, like we just figured that out like 20 years ago, our DNA, you know, so it's like, and we used to think up until like five years ago that we can only dream in REM sleep.

Now we know that that's not true. These things change all the time. We have to be open for like adapting instead of being so like, you know, digging our feet into what we think it can be true by like limiting ourselves with like, you know, rationality. 

Well, that's, what's so interesting about the pop science world is that like pop media.

Pushes science with an agenda. So it's like just hardcore confirmation bias, right? Where people are doing studies to confirm their bias. And that's exactly the opposite of what science is. And so we actually have a misconception of what science is in our pop mainstream. It's not about studies. Sure. There could be tons of peer reviewed studies that prove something.

But, but what science is about is disproving your hypothesis. 

Yeah, I get a lot of like comments on two times, like, oh, let me see a study for this. Let me see a source for this. And I'm like, okay, I'll show you, but don't rely on that to tell you, because I also, we have people eat to realize like, all the answers are within us.

Like they are, we know everything deep down, like maybe not your conscious ego self, but deep down we do. I, although I love science, like I don't rely on that to give me all the answers. 

Yeah. And it's only one part of the world. There's many, many parts of it. I'm sure you agree. Like it's a, it's a really awesome way of understanding the world.

It's just, we need to understand that it's not the only way of understanding the world from a rational perspective. You're probably more scientific than I am even. I, I have a hard time with science. So for instance, like peer reviewed studies, because I could pull up like 15 studies that prove one thing and then pull up 15 more that prove of the exact 

opposite.

Exactly. I was going to say that too, like science is only as good as the person conducting the experiment, you know? Like, and like we're all just humans with the same amount of knowledge of what's going on on earth. Like when it comes to the laws of physics and stuff like that, the laws of physics are based on our physical reality, like the rules of our physical reality.

And like, I think you mentioned earlier, our dreams have different rules. Like there's different laws, you know, they don't operate off of the laws of physics. So when we're talking about dreams, like it doesn't necessarily help to focus on science because it doesn't relate to science earth, you know, it's different.

It's 

not the science exactly. Like you, you studied. Yeah. 

So, um, in my undergrad, I did, I just always really loved psychology and science. And to be honest, I only did that because my mom wanted me to go be a doctor or whatever. Like, you know, my mom's a doctor, so there was like a lot of pressure there. I did not want to do it at all, but I kind of settled for like psychology.

Cause I thought it was cool. You know, it was like a major, I took some cool classes and it did like lead me towards this path, which I'm on now. So, you know, it worked out, but I, I knew that I did not want to do medicine or 

anything like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I thought so many times going to school for psychology and every time I almost do it, I realized that I don't actually.

Like the academic approach to psychology is very different than what I'm interested in. Exactly. 

Yeah. Same. I definitely had to branch out, you know, and do my own thing, but he gave me a good basis, but 

I'm reading, uh, the body keeps the count right 

now. Oh, I love that one. I have to read it again. I keep saying 

it's intense, but it's helping me a lot.

Like, I've always looked at things from a very spiritual, energetic level and I like this because it's the opposite approach, but he's saying the exact same things, right? Like I've always been like, okay. The solution to my problem is to build a better relationship with the present. Because if I'm in the future, I'm into my anxiety.

If I'm in the past, I'm in regret. So if I can be present, that's where God quote unquote is right. That's where the kingdom of heaven is within you. Is what my boy, Jesus Christ said, I grew up Mormon and I would, I'm very not religious, but I love the symbolism of Christianity anyway. So the present moment was always my issue, right?

Where. I drank alcohol to get pulled into the present moment. It made me comfortable in the present moment. So it was my relationship to the present moment that I needed to fix. And, uh, I always looked at that from like a spiritual perspective of like with the trauma, like I've been in fight or flight my entire life.

And so I really don't like being in my body. So it's really hard for me to be present, but because the body is what's in the present moment, the mind, it can go all sorts to places, which is interesting actually in context to the psyche being relative to time. But that's besides the point. So the body being stuck in the present moment at all times, if I can get into my body, then I'm present, but I need to fix my relationship to my body so that I enjoy being in the present.

Definitely a good lesson to 

the truth is, is that I think it's human to struggle with all that stuff. Like I always wish I could be perfect so that when I'm working with people. I'm like, yeah, you have me to look forward to like, you get to be just like 

we learning by teaching. Like you learn, you know, I've noticed that too.

Like you were always learning, you know, and the more you teach, the more you learn from others. So it's like, it's, that's what we're here for. I don't think it's possible to just be perfect. 

No, no. That's the thing about the ego too, is as we learn new things, it also dismisses other things back into the unconscious.

So we're kind of constantly. Becoming conscious of certain things at an unconscious, but other things I think you could get better and better at holding paradox in your mind. So like things that are simultaneously true, even though they seem like, yeah, 

two things can definitely be true at once. That's the thing I've learned and that's really hard for the human mind to wrap your head around it.

It's really a perspective thing. Like it's a relative. 

Yeah. It's interesting. I was just listening to a podcast called personality, hacker. They do cognitive function stuff. They're very, very intelligent. I really like their stuff, but they're essentially talking about uncertainty and how one of the core axioms of like the human experiences to try and get as certain as possible about as much as many things as you can.

And so when we hold two seemingly opposite things, In consciousness at once that's holding uncertainty, right? Like we're not, there's no certainty about the fact that this is truth or this is truth. It's like, no, both of them are true. So like, there's this desire for certainty that then we'll dismiss one of those in lower, I say lower consciousness, but that sounds almost rude in a sense.

It's, that's just what being in like a very dualistic reality is, is that you'll dismiss opposites polarities, like the right and the left or right. Like government, they utilize that polarity. Two 

separate people. Yeah. That's a big one. And then when you really get deep into your spiritual awakening, which I noticed recently, you realize that they're both the same, like are the same people on the other side of the veil, they're just picking aside based on what they think will win or control people.

And they have become so detached from politics. And I'm trying not to, because I know it's important to like, know what's going on, but it just, all, it seems so fake to me that I just, I can't, 

yeah. I have a hard time with it too. The only reason I pay attention is because I feel social pressure to, but I honestly don't think we have a lot of say in.

We don't really get mad at me for saying it's true. 

You're voting. I'm sorry. I don't think my vote matters. I just don't. They're going to do what they want to do, regardless. It's all a part of the control make you think, like you have to vote for one or the other blue or red, but really it's the same people.

All they all, they're all the same. And they all say, yeah, 

I do believe in more localized, uh, participation on my part. It's still hard for me to do the local stuff. I'll be honest with you. We'll stick to our, 

uh, 

yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. That duality of well, that certainty and uncertainty is I actually think that people don't like dreams because they are not grounded in any type of concrete certainty.

Like the ego really likes. I say this a lot on my text, likes limp, linearity. It likes rationality, but it wants to be grounded in certainty, which is why people love. Dogmatic religion. That's why people love dogmatic science 

because it makes them certainly. Exactly. That's true. And like, yeah, like we always just want to know the answer and that takes us away from the present moment too.

Like you were saying, like always wanting to know the answer. Yeah. It's crazy. And even the whole thing about religion, it just, it gives us a framework of something that takes us away from the whole purpose of what Jesus was even talking about to begin with. I don't think he would be about everything that's going on.

Literally his whole point was like, stop paying attention to these, the church literally. 

And he was just an ascended master who he was not even Christian. He was Jewish. Yeah. It's funny how. How we've twisted it so much. 

Yeah. Will turn into a very, very powerful, powerful government essentially. Yeah. I live in salt lake city, Utah.

Our government is Mormon. It's the Mormon church. It's very interesting here, which isn't supposed to happen, but it did very strange. It's slowly changing because more and more out of state people are moving. But I was going to say, yeah, I don't know. Religion's interesting. Cause there's so much truth there that is utilized to manipulate, which is the worst kind of manipulation.

And I think, yes, 

it's true. It's utilized for control and to divide people because the crazy thing is all these religions and all these theories thought schools of thoughts, they all have truths to them. They all have their own perspective based on their cultures and where it emerged from, you know, perspectives of real events.

But we've distorted the image just to, they use it through manipulation. It's, it's sad even, and now it's even evolved to this new age spirituality thing. And I feel like I can just see the evolution of that becoming something. And I don't know where it's going to go, but 

yeah, that's a really good point.

I think I don't, uh, there's like a big spiritual community that meets next door all the time and I don't feel like I belong there, which is really interesting. And I think a lot of it has to do with is being able to. Hold space for people using a different framework, wearing different colored glasses to see the same thing.

So it's like, we might, we're talking about dreams and I think we both have a different approach, but we are talking about the same things. Right. And I think that's really important to remember that the human experience actually is very, very similar from one person to the next. Um, and we just try to find language to explain it.

That's why I really don't like music critique, which is interesting because I'm like, no, they're just expressing their, their experience. There's other types of music was very egoic music and I can, I can get behind critiquing that. I don't know. But when it's like, someone's spirit bearing their soul and then you're like, oh no, that's shitty.

It's like, no, it's their subjective experience. Like there's no judgment to be made. Yeah. And 

music case, or so relative to like how you grew up, you know, 

I'm also not saying you can't dislike or like music, but to tell someone that they need to change the way they express themselves. It's interesting.

Yeah. Agreed. I'm not about that. 

I mean, I could talk about lots of different things, but, um, I want to tell you that I'm very interested in participating in anything. I don't ha I have a hard time creating community. I think I'll 

look you up. I have a really, really great community. So I have a WhatsApp group with 200 people in it and I'm an admin in it, but I barely, honestly, I barely contribute.

They always, it just does it. So that's really cool. And then, like I was telling you about the clubhouse thing we could totally do. Like I do twice a week on clubhouse. And sometimes like, if I meet someone like you, who wants to say, Hey, let's do a clubhouse room. I have a clubhouse group again, it's kind of like a podcast, but like interactive.

And you can save the audio too and use it as a podcast episode. Um, and you can open up the stage and people come on and like, oh, I love what you're talking about. I have a question or I have something to share, you know? So it's kind of like what we're doing, but with like 20 people, you know? Yeah. And it's, it's really cool, but you know, and I'm all about like lifting people up with me, especially people that come on the podcast with me, like, 

yeah.

And I've talked to a lot of people. I've met a lot of people and take time, but I feel like. Perspectives align a lot more than usual with people. I talk to, like, I love talking to everyone, but it's, it's nice to kind of share a very similar perspective or approach. I really like doing live stuff because lots of magic happens.

Yeah. And I know the tick talk algorithm likes it, like when you go live too. So, 

uh, my, for the two hours that I was alive, I got like tons of people liking cons of my videos. I was like, oh yeah, Tik, TOK pushes my stuff. If I'm live. Cause they wants me on the, on the app Tuesdays. 

I do. Um, I host it with my friend Martin, who I told you about who I did my first clubhouse with.

I met him in the WhatsApp group. He, um, he studied lucid dreaming and like Buddhist temples with monks and stuff. And he has a really cool background. So we do specifically rooms on about dreams and we just, you know, open up conversation and stuff and you would totally fit right in. So that's that. But yeah.

Doing other topics too, because I always focus on dream topics, but now I'm like, we can do, you know, some like young stuff we can open up and talk about anything. And then usually on clubhouse, people would just take it and run with it. And it's a really good community. It's a lot of like-minded people.

Cool. Yeah. I'm down. I'll join. And whether I participate or not is up to the 

foil. Right, right.