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July 26, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:51
832 Drinking and Dreaming Part 2

Listener feedback on my dream analysis

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Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Steph. 1116 a.m.
Thursday, the 26th of July 2007.
See, it's easy when I'm sitting here in front of the computer.
Easy peasy. Well, I just wanted to do a quick follow-up to FDR830, which was the gentleman's dream about vodka shots and lying to his girlfriend.
And he posted something 13 hours and 18 minutes ago on the board, which I thought that I would mention because he seems quite passionate.
So, in the dream analysis...
And this is the girlfriend who's...
Sorry, this is the guy whose girlfriend thought that he thought she was evil when they were having a conversation about hitting children.
So, just a quick recap, refresh.
So, he writes...
Because in my dream analysis, I had said that if he had been drinking on the Saturday night that his girlfriend was drinking minimally, a drink an hour, which, you know, five-hour night, five drinks...
And Christine has corrected me and said guys can metabolize a drink an hour, but women not so much.
He says, I am not a troll, please.
Sorry, I am not a troll. I realize that I'm not good at this philosophy stuff, but I'm really, really trying.
I haven't had the deep conversation with my girlfriend yet because I'm scared.
Really fucking petrified.
And I know that that's a bad thing, and I'm sorry.
Being called a jerk by the one person who I thought was on my side was horrible.
I know you're still on my side, and it's...
And it's trying to help me, but that blow really landed hard.
Not all of us are expert at this stuff first time out.
I feel so horrible right now that I guess that's because I know that I can do better, but I'm giving in to fear.
Wanting to take the easy road is something I have to get over, but I feel that in trying to make a broad appeal, podcast to your more advanced listeners, you neglected my personal feelings somewhat.
Maybe that's just a false self-reaction.
I'm just so torn and confused.
I feel that there's no one else in my life I can talk to about this stuff, but I know that internet anonymity makes things somewhat impersonal.
I guess it's the only reason I feel I can spill my guts here without reprisal because of that anonymity.
So I wrote, I said, I totally apologize about saying that you might have been drinking on Saturday night.
And all I said was that if you had been drinking then...
That was kind of jerky, right?
I didn't call him a jerk. That behavior was.
I mean, if he had been, but he says that he wasn't.
Of course, no reason to disbelieve him.
I said, it didn't seem like a far-out assumption based on the dream content of you doing vodka shots, right?
So the dream that he had the night after he was at this bar was of him doing vodka shots while his girlfriend didn't drink, right?
So I leapt to that conclusion, which was unjust, obviously incorrect.
I said, I never said you were a troll, and of course I don't believe that you are.
I think that you're a very brave man because I know how scary what you're going through is.
It's not a bad thing to be terrified of speaking the truth to those we care about.
It's entirely natural and healthy to be terrified of it because it is a very risky thing to do.
Don't beat yourself up because you gave in to fear.
We all do that. It is a great challenge in philosophy to overcome that fear.
There is great power on the other side of that fear, but it looks like an almost insurmountable mountain at the beginning.
If it feels too intense at the moment, then you can take a step back, of course, at any time.
But the best person to talk to about your fear is your girlfriend.
Do you think that is possible at all?
He said, I don't know.
I don't think I'm cut out for this conversation.
I've been sitting here crying for the past few hours since I listened to the podcast.
What's your failure rate? I assume it's pretty high.
God, even this self-pity crap is pissing me off.
I feel like I'm being ripped apart at the seams.
Edit. Since that dream, I haven't been able to sleep.
It's 3.30am here.
I don't want to take a step back.
How can I push through on my own?
Nathan, someone who's succeeded, can you help me out?
But then I don't deserve anything from anyone because I believe in no positive obligations.
What value am I providing to people?
A negative value. If I was advising others, I'd advise them to defu or defriend from me.
And then I offered to have a chat with him on the...
But he hasn't been online at least since I've seen since last night.
And this is, of course, this is the dark night of the soul.
This is the awakening that philosophy brings to us.
And this is something that is really scary.
And my heart goes out to you, brother.
I mean, it's a really, really tough situation.
And... The important thing is to focus on what it is that you're feeling.
You're feeling a lot of contempt towards yourself, like you're not worth much, that you don't provide any value to people, that people should just stay away from you, and so on.
And that, of course, is not a belief that is possible to be generated by me saying that if you were conspicuously enjoying drinking while your girlfriend was trying to stop, that that would be kind of jerky behavior.
That statement on my part, especially since it was inaccurate, right?
And all I said was that if you were drinking when your girlfriend was trying to quit and conspicuously enjoying it around her, that would be kind of jerky.
But, of course, since that wasn't the case, there would be no logical reason.
Thank you.
For you to have this kind of crisis of identity, right?
I mean, if somebody said, you know, if you regularly mock Christina, that's kind of jerky, I wouldn't have a meltdown because I don't regularly, I continually, no, I don't regularly mock Christina.
I don't do it at all, right? So it wouldn't provoke a crisis of confidence, right?
The crisis of confidence is occurring, if you don't mind me saying so, and I'm sorry that we can't talk about this personally, but the crisis of confidence is occurring.
Because you said, I mean, this is my theory, right?
Let me know what you think. The crisis of confidence that you're experiencing is occurring because of the following.
Because you said to me, the first time that we talked, that your girlfriend was great, she was a great listener, and you'd known her for a long time, you really waited for the right person, and this and that and the other, right?
So you sold me a story.
Nothing wrong with it. I'm not putting you down or anything.
This is the facts of the situation.
So you told me how great she was and so on.
And then you also told me in the post that you had about your dream that you had this wonderful day that you were feeding the ducks and talked about everything and it was magical and it was great and so on.
So you're giving me a story about a relationship, which is that you have this great relationship with your girlfriend, right?
And so what I always say, and this is not particularly original for me, this is all the way from Presocratics forward, what I say is, okay, well, if that's the case, if you have this great relationship, if she's a great person, if she's a great listener, then, well, tell her how you feel.
The way that these crises of confidence occur is that, and I impute no ill intention.
This is not an attack. I impute no ill intention.
This is just how we're taught, and we're taught so terribly badly.
We are taught to invent rather than discover.
We're taught to make up rather than test.
You want to go out with this girl, and so...
You invent the story that she's a great person.
You have a desire, and you invent a justification for it.
And this is not because you're a bad guy.
It's not because you're a malevolent guy.
It wasn't even that you were trying to lie to me or anything like that.
But you want to go out with this girl.
You're lonely. Of course, there's a lot of low self-esteem here, which is not anything to do with me, but comes from your family.
And, of course, you need to figure out in your own heart where these emotions are coming from that you are worth so little.
But of course it's your family and so on, right?
But you want to go out with this girl, right?
And the reason that you're with this girl, while at the same time having this core self-loathing and horror at your own experience and history and emotions, that's why you end up with this girl, right?
So you... Wanted to go out with this girl.
You make up a story that she's a great woman.
You talk to me and you say, oh, she's great, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But you tell me all of these things.
I mean, this is how the truth always spills out, right?
This is why it does so much damage to lie to ourselves.
And again, when I say lie, I don't mean your conscious intent, malevolent, you're not rubbing your invisible mustache like Mr.
Burns' evil twin. What I'm saying is that I see this continually, right?
And I don't mean this to cheapen your experience, but simply to say that you're not alone.
This is a very common phenomenon, right?
That people will say, oh, you know, we had this conversation with the gentleman on the board, right?
We talked about a couple of Sundays ago where he said, oh, I'm very close to my mom.
And then he had a description of his mom that was clearly someone you could never be close to.
So that aspect is continually there.
I see this over and over again.
And so you say, oh, my girlfriend's great.
Well, she's got a bit of a drinking problem and she keeps putting me in these impossible situations and she attacked me for making a mistake in philosophical judgment and she put me down and humiliated me when I was trying to be nice to her.
But she's a great person, right?
And this disconnect between actions and judgment, between behavior and value, is something that we can look at and deal with in a straightforward manner, which is painful, because then we have to deal with all the pain that led us to ignoring this kind of behavior.
You've been trained to ignore this kind of behavior, to call bad behavior good behavior, or to call the behavior of bad people, sorry, to call people who do bad things good people.
You, of course, have been trained in that by your family and your school and your state and all these kinds of things, right?
But this is what you've been trained to do, right?
Because it's a whole lot easier to bully kids into calling you good than to actually be a good person, right?
I mean, it's the fundamental problem of the modern world is that people will bully others into convincing, will bully them into believing that they're good rather than actually try to be good, right?
So you're just automatically used to portraying people in your life as good people if you want to or have to spend time with them, right?
But then the behavior that you describe is not the behavior of somebody who is doing good things.
I don't know about the core or the essence or whatever, right?
So what happens is that you then, and again, this is continual.
This is not to cheapen your experience, but just to remind you that you're not alone.
People will continually do this for me or to me when they talk to me.
They will give a mythology.
They will provide a story about their relationship.
Oh, I'm close to my mother. Oh, my girlfriend's so great.
Oh, my dad is a really great guy and blah, blah, blah.
Right? That's the mythology.
That's the story. Right?
And then they go on to describe behaviors that are ignoble, corrupt, monstrous, evil, decadent, destructive, betraying, non-virtuous, I mean, horrible in many ways, right?
And so I get the story.
Right? And then I get the evidence.
And the story is, with your girlfriend, I have a good girlfriend.
She's a nice person. I've waited for a long time.
I've known her for a long time.
I've waited for the right person.
She's a great person, right?
That's the story. Or I guess you could say that's the conclusion.
And then what happens is I get the evidence.
And the evidence completely contradicts the story.
If you want to think about it in more abstract terms, we see this with...
Democracy, right? Politics, right?
Democracy is voluntary participation.
Democracy is cooperation.
Democracy is everyone pulling together.
Democracy is highly virtuous.
That's the story, right?
And then the evidence comes along.
The evidence is, if I don't agree with the leaders, they shoot me.
Dealing with evidence is really hard, because evidence...
Like, when you can't just make up stuff about people, it's really tough.
You go through a really tough period, and that's what you're going through, right?
What I'm doing by saying, by accepting the premise of your story, by accepting the premise of your story about your girlfriend, the way that you find out if a theory is true or false, accept that it's true and then act as if it's true.
So if your girlfriend is a great person who really cares about you and is sensitive, it doesn't mean that this conversation is going to be automatically easy.
Christina loves and cares about me, but sometimes the conversations that we have to have are not easy.
But she'll stick with it, she'll stick in it, and so on.
And this is all that I'm saying.
I'm saying, okay, I'm going to accept that your story is true.
About your girlfriend, your mother, your father, your government, your God, whatever.
I'm going to accept that this is true.
And so now, you need to talk to this person about how you feel.
My girlfriend is a good listener, somebody will say.
I say, but I have this problem with her.
And I'll say, okay, well, so she's a good listener.
You can talk to her about the problem that you have with her.
I'm just going with what people tell me.
If you say my girlfriend is good and I know nothing about her, I've got a great girlfriend, I know she's wonderful, I don't have anything to say about that.
But when you give me completely contradictory evidence, then I can't say...
That your girlfriend does not seem to be as good as you think, and here's why, and here's why, and here's why.
That's not going to mean anything to you, because you can just make up another story about that.
Well, yes, she has some problems in this area, but she's had a tough time, and I'm trying to help her through it.
It all stays in the land of abstract.
It's all basically in the world of Platonic forms, not Aristotelian empiricism, if that means anything.
The way that we break out of our mythologies...
Is by acting on them.
Right? If you believe that democracy is voluntary participation, try not participating.
Try acting on your fairy tale.
If you believe that your girlfriend is a good listener, then talk to her.
Right? But the reason that you're having a crisis of confidence is that you know that it's not true.
You know that it's not true.
So I'm saying, let's act as if your story is real and you have a crisis of confidence, right?
Right, and again, this is not to impute any ill will or ill motives, but a metaphor or an analogy would be, if you're a counterfeiter and you know that the bank has excellent counterfeiter detection whenever if you're a counterfeiter and you know that the bank has excellent counterfeiter detection whenever you deposit money, you're Oh, my money is so good and it's great and blah, blah, blah, right?
You want to pay me with your counterfeit money and you say, oh, this is great.
I hear there are counterfeiters around.
I'd never be one of them. I think that's totally wrong.
And then I say, okay, great.
So if your money is so good, let's go to the bank and deposit it together.
But then you're going to have a crisis of confidence.
I'm not saying that you have conscious motives in the way that a counterfeiter would.
But if you're trying to pass off your girlfriend to somebody who's different or better than who she is, And then I say, okay, well, let's act on this, right?
Let's cash in this story.
Let's act as if this story were true.
Then you're going to have a crisis, right?
Because you're kind of caught out. And what happens is...
I mean, the false self is what generates all this mythology.
The false self is... Conformist and frightened and bullying and always wants to take the easy way and would rather invent a story than achieve a good.
Would rather daydream than achieve.
And so what happens is, when I say to your false self, okay, great, so this story that you're telling me about how good your girlfriend is, let's say that it's true.
So go talk to her about how you feel.
Because you know if you can't talk to somebody that you claim to care about and who claims to care about you, if you can't talk to them about how you feel, if you can't be vulnerable, if you can't be honest and you can't be open, then the relationship sucks.
It's not a relationship. Right?
And you needed, you wanted me to tell you this.
I guarantee you. I guarantee you wanted me to tell you this.
The unconscious communication that was going on for you was, to me, quite powerful.
quite simple and quite powerful so your false self said Your true self then told me all the stuff about her that was not great.
Right? And I said, so, go tell her that you think these things are a problem.
And then your false self blanked out after that, right?
You didn't have this conversation, but you also didn't feel the fear.
Right? You just, you zoned out, right?
You spaced out. You dissociated.
You hit your happy trails.
Right? And you went to a disco, and then you went to feed some ducks, and you completely ignored the core of what it is that we were talking about.
But once the true self connects with somebody else's true self, it gets really fucking hungry for contact, for truth, for reality, for freedom, for illusion, for mythology.
So your false self contacted my false self with the evidence.
Sorry, your true self contacted my true self with the evidence.
And then your false self took over and you became a good, dutiful, happy, happy couple again.
But the issue had not been dealt with, right?
So what happens? Well, your true self wants to contact my true self again.
So A, it gives you the dream.
And B, it makes you want to post the dream.
And it gets past the false self by saying, we're not going to discuss that earlier stuff.
We're just going to put this dream out there and get some opinions back.
Don't worry. The true self always has to smuggle stuff past the false self when the false self is dominant.
Sorry if these terms don't mean anything to you.
You can look these up in the podcast series.
So you post this dream. And in the dream you say, you've got the dream content, which we've already talked about.
But then what you say is, well, I went out to these horrible, shallow, false people.
My girlfriend's friends, right?
I know what that means and so does your true self.
That if she has friends like that, well, the man is judged by the company he keeps and so is a girlfriend.
And then your false self tries to put another story out there which says, then we had a wonderful time and it was just the two of us together.
We talked, we fed the ducks, we had a wonderful time, right?
The false self gets the final word.
But the true self knows, because it knows my true self is going to see it.
Sorry this all sounds so convoluted, but really there's a lot of unconscious communication that goes on in these kinds of situations.
Your false self puts the end bit on, which is another piece of mythology about your girlfriend.
She had this wonderful time at the park and this and that.
But then, what happens?
Well, I can completely see that you had a very large criticism of your girlfriend's social circle and then spent the next day not talking about it with her at all.
Not talking about it with her at all.
I can see that, right?
So this is the way that your true self is communicating and saying, look, I can't talk about this.
False self ain't letting me talk to the girlfriend because false self knows she's going to hit the road and hit the roof.
In a weird kind of way, the false self is trying to protect you from the feelings that you're going through right now, the really horrible and unpleasant feelings.
I totally understand that. I mean, in a weird kind of way, it's trying to protect you, but it's actually not in the long run.
It's the heroin for your toothache.
The rot goes deeper. Right?
So the meta-narrative, the story...
Both in the dream and in your description of the next day, the transition between the night at the disco or the party at the bar, and then the next day at the park, is still haven't talked to her.
Still haven't talked to her.
Your true self can handle this pain.
Your false self can't, right? Your true self, your deep and real being can totally handle this pain.
And needs to. And needs to.
It's not pain I'm inflicting on you.
Right? I'm just taking you off the drug of mythology.
That's all I'm doing.
Just taking you off the drug of mythology.
By saying, if this is true, then act on it.
But you know it's not true. You know exactly what's going to happen when you go and talk to your girlfriend about this stuff.
You know exactly what's going to happen if you say, I haven't been able to sleep for two nights because I've been terrified to talk to you about something.
You know exactly what's going to happen.
And that's why. I'm just taking you off the drug of mythology and saying, if what you're saying is true, then act on it.
And now you're caught. And you're in an impossible situation.
You already are. That's why your girlfriend is able to do this sort of stuff to you.
And your family, of course. The originators of this problem.
So now you have an opportunity for growth, and it hurts like hell, and I know that.
You can take it. You can absolutely take it.
You've got to go and talk to your girlfriend.
You've got to find the truth there. Because the mythology called, I'm not alone, when you are in fact alone, you can lose decades of your life to this nonsense.
But there is a danger.
Right? So the false self has been beaten down, has been exposed, right?
And has collapsed, which is causing you all of this pain.
But the false self, it's not like a knockout.
There's no knockout blow for the false self, right?
At all. Oh, I think my book has arrived.
Anyway, I'm just looking out the window.
There's no knockout blow for the false self.
False self will come back. The false self will come back, and the false self will start whispering this story into your ear.
And this story is this.
Everything was fine until you started listening to philosophy, you know?
Everything was fine. You had this great relationship with this great woman.
Yeah, there were some problems, but there were problems in every relationship.
You start listening to the Steph guy, you start listening to this guy on the internet, everything goes in the shitter.
You start to have real problems with your girlfriend.
You start to feel like crap.
You have panic attacks.
This stuff is bad for you.
This stuff is hurting us.
This philosophy is hurting us.
This guy called you a jerk openly and in public on the internet after you exposed yourself and revealed your dreams and you were publicly humiliated by this asshole who calls himself a philosopher.
He's going to hurt you. He's going to tear you down.
He's going to make you end up alone.
This guy is causing you all of this pain.
And who the hell is he?
Just some guy on the internet. And you're going to get this whole worm tongue whispering in your ear.
The false self is going to attempt to portray me as the enemy, as the source and cause of your pain, get you to disconnect from philosophy, and go back into the box where it doesn't hurt anymore.
So that's your risk. That's your danger, right?
Of course, you don't have to talk to me ever again.
You don't even have to listen to any more podcasting or read other philosophy books if you want, the ones that have value and meaning and truth in them.
But the reality is, of course, that that is going to be the response of the false self, is to start whispering in your ear that Steph is a bad guy who is a hypocrite.
I mean, I'm not saying you're this.
This is the risk, right? This is what happens to all the trolls, right?
They get exposed, they get humiliated, their vanity gets wounded, and instead of saying, holy crap, why is Steph hitting such a nerve?
Where did this nerve come from? They say, Steph didn't hit a nerve, Steph's just stabbing a nerve.
He didn't hit a nerve like he's innocent.
He knows exactly where to slip the shiv in and he's an asshole, and then they get all angry, and the false self then just reestablishes its control by attacking the healer, right?
So that's, I mean, frankly, that's the risk that you're going to face, right?
Your false self is going to try and translate this agony into, Steph caused it, Steph did it, Steph is hurting you, get away from him, he's dangerous, he's bad, and all this kind of stuff, right?
And of course, it's absolutely up to you what you do, right?
My suggestion would be try and get a counselor to a therapist, right?
A good, competent therapist.
But I hope that this helps.
I hope that you'll stay in the conversation.
I wish you the best. Really, you know, gather your courage.
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