Friendships And Software

We trace how personal change meets inherited scripts, using a vivid dream about disaster-sim software and a tender act of care to explore friendship, loyalty, and seasonality. We hold space for honest limits, curiosity over blame, and the difference between efficiency and presence.

• the seasonal ascent theme and timing of change
• dream imagery of software, auditing and inherited code
• how updates in self ripple through relationships
• curiosity as a debugging stance in conflict
• seasonality of friendship and honest limits
• care as presence rather than optimization
• questions to assess what a relationship asks now

If you found this episode helpful or enlightening, please give me a five-star rating on your podcast app of choice. Also, if you want a little more of my writing and personal works, you can join me on Patreon at patreon.com/cuppa_terrific

🌱 Listener Reflection

• Have you ever made a significant change in your life and noticed your relationships shift in response?
• Which connections adapted with you — and which revealed their limits?
• What patterns or “scripts” might still be running, even though your season has changed?

You don’t need to answer these right away. Just notice what comes up.

🗺️ Season Two: The Seasonal Ascent

This episode is part of Cuppa Terrific’s second season, which follows a symbolic ascent through change, thresholds, support, and discernment — dream by dream, image by image.

☕ About the Podcast

Cuppa Terrific is a podcast about dreams, inner listening, and the symbolic landscapes of everyday life. Each episode invites you to slow down, notice what’s present, and explore what the psyche may be offering — one cup at a time.

Chapters

• 0:33 Welcome And Season Two Frame
• 1:19 The Seasonal Ascent Theme
• 3:20 Dream Setup And Inventory
• 8:15 Software, Scripts, And Inheritance
• 11:32 Debugging Change In Relationships
• 16:27 Care, Presence, And Honest Limits
• 19:24 A Place To Stand And Closing

Transcript

Sheree: 0:33

Hello, and welcome back everybody to another episode of Cuppa Terrific. As always, I'm your host, Sheree, and you have made your way back to my podcast where we talk through different dreams that I've had or that my guests have had. And I also like to always start off my episodes talking about what I'm enjoying tonight, which unfortunately I seem to have already finished my iced coffee. So that's that's not necessarily the best, but that's okay. Whatever you guys have brought for today, go ahead and grab your favorite kappa and get settled in. And if you're just joining us, let me just remind you, this season, season two, is a little bit different from the first season. Um, in that season two, I have shaped this around a single through line, which is the seasonal ascent. And this is not an ascent for striving, and it's not uh intended for self-optimization or making yourself the best version of yourself or or some kind of self-help in that way. Um, some some kind of I don't know, some kind of like push yourself really hard kind of thing. More like being guided by intuition and your internal wisdom. This ascent is more about timing. It's about knowing when it's time to leave familiar ground and when it's time to stay and listen. In each episode of this season, it moves us through a landscape of change, dream by dream and image by image, asking what it means to grow without abandoning what's true. Just as a recap, in the first episode, we stood at the foothills, looking up, feeling the pull of something higher, without quite knowing the path yet. In the second episode, we encountered thresholds, that tension of knowing what we want before the world was ready for it. And then in the last episode, episode three, we spent some time with the question of when not to do it alone, how discernment, support, and humility become part of the climb. In today's episode, friendships and software, we move into yet another terrain, something new entirely. This is where personal change begins to interact with the systems around us. Friendships, our histories, our relationships, and the lovely invisible scripts we're all running. It's where growth becomes relational. Before we talk about that in waking language, I want to begin the way we always do by listening to a dream. In the dream, my husband drops me off at work, even though I'm not feeling well. He's very sweet. He carries me to my chair, walks me to the door, and then before leaving, he turns and looks back at me. I give him a tight expression, not angry, not cold, just contained. He nods, like he understands something I didn't say out loud. I turn away and shift my gaze to the terminal. At work, I'm identifying bugs in a software script designed to tear down servers to simulate a disaster. The software behaves like a virus. It replicates itself rapidly, connects to different parts of the environment, and synchronizes failure. Crashing and falling and failing, and then it disappears and falls apart, all coordinated to produce the disaster effect the operator had intended. My job is to provide feedback, front end and back end, to say what needs fixing. I run a script auditor. It produces notations highlighting potential bug points, but the notes are personal and they become too personal. So personal in fact they catch me off guard. Like the software knows more about me than it should. Then I learn that the person who originally wrote the script editor had passed away. He was an old friend of my husband. The dream shifts. Almost like I'm in a memory, but it's not one that belongs to me. I start to see through my husband's eyes like something my husband had experienced years ago. And he's in a hot tub with a few friends. One of them, let's call him Tim, is completely naked. His body is covered in black geometric tattoos. Tim is talking about how he missed out on his family fortune after relatives passed away a few years earlier. But now he says he's living the good life. The men are laughing, relaxed, enjoying being together again. There's warmth there, ease, something unguarded. And as I notice that feeling, I wake up. Okay, before interpreting anything, and before we start connecting any meaning, I want to slow this down. This part right here is the space for the dream inventory. And simply put, this is the listing of elements as they appear and I picked out from the dream. Ready? Husband Care Being Carried. Illness. A terminal software scripts. Disaster simulation. Virus like replication. Auditing feedback. Personal notations. A deceased programmer. An old friend. Inherited code. Male friendship. A hot tub. Nakedness. Black geometric tattoos. Laughter. Ease. Reconnection. That's the end of the list. Okay. So in reflection of this dream, I'm considering where friendships and software are related to each other, and as we rely on them socially today. First objective thought that I had that hit me is that most of us are running on relational scripts that we did not write. These are like patterned into our early life learning. Some are even arguably defaults that are inherited, but are not necessarily true. For example, some people learn all men are pigs. I'm not saying I agree with this statement, I'm just saying it is an inherited script that some people learn. Ways of belonging like this are ideas that once kept us safe. And like old software, these scripts keep running even when the environment has changed. In this dream, I'm not the author of the script. I'm the auditor. As the auditor, they're the one noticing what no longer fits and what's quietly causing harm. And here's the unsettling part too. The script isn't malicious, even though the program executes natural disasters. It's efficient and does exactly what it was designed to do. Second, another thing that I observed objectively. In software, debugging requires a sense of curiosity. What's actually happening here? What assumptions are running? What's outdated? And who wrote this? Sometimes when you're debugging, the author is gone, so you have to figure these things out yourself. And the system? It keeps running anyway. The software? It's not to blame, nor is the author. Because updates and patches are just a necessary part of software maintenance. And what if we gave pause in our relationships with others with ourselves and we led with curiosity when someone felt changes were necessary. Either that's for you or for them. I started to think about the meaning of the dream. And the first thing that came to mind was when you want to make a change of something. So we're we're changing scripts, right? We're making updates in the scripts and we're making improvements. And I'm realizing it by myself. I just wanted to pause and offer this from my waking life. And I want to ask you something. Have you ever tried to make a large change in your life? I mean, like something like where you're changing how you eat. So you start a new diet regimen, or maybe you begin a new exercise routine, or maybe it's a diet slash exercise routine, or even something else. Say you decide to go to school, go to college, pursue a particular degree path, or choosing a path in general that asks more of you, like joining the military, something different from the one that you were on before. And then as you made that change, did you notice what happened to your relationships? Who supported you quietly without needing to understand every detail? Who questioned you, pulled away, teased you? Who became uncomfortable or needed you to stay the same? But this isn't necessarily out of malice, I just want to say, or even a consciousness that this is occurring. Often when we update ourselves, we don't realize how many of these relationships were built around the previous version of ourselves. But this is simply built on this previous version and will always be this way simply because of compatibility. When one part of a system changes, everything else has to respond. So when you make a change in yourself, much like code, when you change the code, things around it need to change. When things around it change, the code needs to change. Some relationships update with us. Others reveal their limits and then show us what those limits were designed to hold. They stay with us for a season. And that doesn't necessarily make them failures of relationships. Maybe we were just supposed to have them for a short period of time in our life. Maybe it was just for a summer. Maybe it was just for a school year. Maybe it was just one marriage. Maybe it was just one lifetime. Maybe it's an entire lifetime. It's all how you frame it. But whatever you call it, it makes them honest. Also, the dream offers a stark contrast. In the beginning, the program simulates a disaster on the screen. It's coordinated, efficient, and personal. And then there's this quiet human gesture of my husband's nod, and where he delicately carries me in and sets me down. There's no fixing or optimizing in this nod. There's just this confirmation that I was safe before he left, so that I could do my work alone. This simple act of presence provided connection and grounding. It reminded me we are close enough that sometimes we can connect like this without words. Perhaps this is why later in the dream I find myself reflecting on a memory of his and friendships that he maintains. As this episode comes to a close, I don't want to offer you a takeaway. I want to offer you a place to stand. Because what this dream keeps returning to us is relationship. Relationship with the parts of ourselves that are changing. And relationship with the people who can walk alongside that change. And relationship with what or who no longer can. The dream doesn't ask for shutdown, but to just take notice. Look at what's running. Feel where it no longer fits. Recognize when old code is shaping the present. And maybe most importantly, it reminds us that real care doesn't look like efficiency. It looks like being carried when we're unwell. It looks like a quiet knot of understanding. It looks like staying present without needing to fix anything. As you look back in your own life, your own relationships and your own changes, I invite you not to ask, how do I make this work? But instead, what is this relationship asking of me now? Honestly, and is it in season? Thank you for joining me today. If you found this episode helpful or enlightening, please give me a five-star rating on your podcast app of choice. Also, if you want a little more of my writing and personal works, you can join me on Patreon at patreon.com /cuppa_ terrific. Your support really does help make this work possible. Join me again next week for another episode where we can continue this ascent together. Until next time, may your cups overflow.