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Nov. 7, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:55
1202 Why Dream Analysis Works

A theory as to why analyzing dreams is both helpful and essential.

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is Thursday, for sure.
6th? 7th?
November? Something like that.
Anyway, I wanted to, and I've been meaning to do this podcast for quite some time, because I've had this question quite repeatedly over the moons, of which there are not a few, since I began to do the Dream Analysis podcast,
which is... Dude, what kind of freaky, astrological, mystical, bong-head, smoking brain are you on when you go from Austrian economics to metaphysics to proofs for God to eviscerations of agnosticism to freaky-deaky dream analysis?
Well, I think there may be more Reason to it then might meet the immediate eye.
So I thought I would go through why I think it's valuable.
I won't go into particularly the approaches that I take.
If anybody's interested, we could talk more about that perhaps another time.
But I did want to have the chance to at least explain the theory behind it.
So if you're completely skeptical, this may help, and it may not.
Anyway. So, the first thing for me, at least that's valuable to understand about the dream analysis stuff, is that it's a layer of conceptual or perceptual processing within the mind that obviously we share with other creatures.
A dog's dream, apparently whales and dolphins dream.
I don't even know mammals, I don't know lizards dream.
But it is something that we share, and so clearly it comes from a more primitive kind of consciousness, or less developed, less complex, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, rational consciousness, conceptual speech, we don't share with any of those.
It's unique to us. But these other modes of processing, dreams and emotions, desires, and of course perceptual touch, the five senses, we share with lots of other creatures.
Let's go through. This is all nonsense, of course.
I can't prove any of this.
This is going to be just a theory, a possible framework for entertainment purposes only.
Do not do this at home.
Do not use this at home unless you fall asleep, and then it's all yours.
And I'm obviously going to skip a few here, but this is the general way that I categorize things, and hopefully it'll make some kind of sense.
So first and foremost, if we look at the level of the protozoa, the amoeba, the single-celled organisms, we do have some sort of perceptual reactions to the outside world.
That we can see, right?
So we have an amoeba that either encloses food if it likes it or rejects food, has absolutely filthy sex with itself and splits.
And so we have a way of a sort of very...
I mean, I don't even think you could call it touch, but an almost binary awareness of the world outside.
It's like neutral food and bad, right?
It recoils from things like that.
So we definitely have that level of processing.
And I don't know what that would approximate to in the human world.
Body, but it would be something similar to touch.
Fire hot, you know, other things not, right?
So, we have that level.
Clearly, that's not really the level that dreams operate, although they operate at.
They do simulate that from time to time.
Sometimes we can touch things in dreams.
Now, next up, I would say, and again, I don't know much about plants.
Maybe there's a whole bunch of stuff in the middle, but this is, again, just a rough sketch.
Next up, we have desire.
And whether this is conscious desire or not, whether there is consciousness or not, it doesn't really matter, but we look at this at The level of not just absorbing what is there, but pursuing what is desired or what is preferred,
right? So plants will strain towards sunlight, plankton will go to the surface of the sea to be eaten by whales, and they sort of gravitate towards light for the photosynthesis and so on.
I guess, no, I guess plankton are going up there to feed on the algae, which in turn are streaming for the light.
You know, trees obviously, for want of better ways of putting it, get thirsty, dig down their roots.
They want sunlight.
They are in hot competition with each other for good tans, green tans, photosynthesis.
So we have that level of preference, or a desire maybe to abstract a term for it, but preference for sure.
And then we have, and that's more preference for the immediate stimuli, and then we have preference for non-immediate stimuli, which would be birds flying south for the winter, right?
Maybe in their bird brains they are following some Aztec flaming phoenix god through the clouds, but my guess is they just have a yearning, salmon going upstream or whatever, right?
But not for the immediate, right?
A lizard will go out of shade into the sun to regulate his temperature, because he's cold-blooded, check it and see, but...
Birds, salmon, other kinds of creatures will follow deep yearnings or instincts or preferences or whatever you want to call them for things which are not immediate, right?
The bemused resignation of salmon is a famous portrait.
So we also have other kinds of Stimuli or other kinds of internal processes which could be called daydreams.
This would be at the level of Image practice, such as you can see a dog and you can sort of get that he's chasing a rabbit in his dream, if you've ever seen dogs who dream like the legs twitch and mouths gape and so on,
right? So there is that kind of internal symbology that begins to arise in more complex forms of consciousness where this kind of consciousness gains a much more adaptive Kind of training or practice to reality,
right? Because something like birds flying south for the winter, that's something which has been refined or developed over many hundreds of thousands or millions of years and is not particularly adaptive, right?
I mean, if you screw up a bird's internal compass, it just flies wherever.
It's kind of programmed, right?
It's not very adaptive. It doesn't learn in real time.
But... When you gain the ability to dream at night, you gain the ability to adapt your instincts to more current stimuli.
A dog which is used to hunting white rabbits, if they all vanish and are replaced by black rabbits, it can adapt to hunting those through the matching up of The hunting instinct with the new stimuli, the new visual stimuli of a black rabbit, right?
So, dreams fulfill this really amazing function in my mind, which is to allow us to adapt to present stimuli without having to wait a hundred generations or a couple or a thousand generations for things to change.
I mean, I remember when I first was gold panning up north after high school.
I worked for a year, year and a half.
Actually, about a year and a half. And then again, one extra summer in university, I worked as a gold panner.
And when I was learning how to do it, I would dream about it.
And you may have experienced this.
It also happens with video games, where you can actually play a video game.
You can even daydream playing a video game, particularly...
You know, those high-stimulus, immediate response, multiplayer combat games.
You can actually daydream those games.
You can picture playing them before you go to bed, and so there's a kind of combat practice or skill acquisition practice that occurs.
With dreams, and this allows you to adapt to changing stimuli in the present.
It is a kind of evolution that occurs, not intergenerationally, but intraday, overnight, so to speak.
And then, of course, and this we share with lots of other creatures.
And then, of course, what we do is we end up with the highest forms or the most complex forms of consciousness, which really are around Concept formation slash language, right?
I mean, those are the two biggies.
And yes, I hear that some whales have language and Koko the gorilla could rewrite Proust, but the combination of concepts and language is unique to human beings.
Now, of course, each layer, I mean, just look at it evolutionarily, right?
Each layer of the mind or of thought or of consciousness is built upon the previous layer, right?
So you obviously have to have some awareness of your outside surroundings, even at the amoeba level, in order to develop preferences, right?
Because if you can't, as a plant, tell sunlight from shade, you can't develop the preference for sunlight, which is the hallmark of your survival capacities.
And if you don't have preferred states, the sunlight versus shade, I guess mushrooms going for the shade, plants going for the sunlight.
If you don't have preferred states, then you can't have those yearning instincts for, you know, swimming upstream or flying south for the winter or anything like that.
If you don't have emotional yearnings or preferences, then you can't develop the symbology of internal practice, which is represented by dreams.
And if you don't have symbology, then you can't have language, because of course language is simply another form of symbology in the same way that symbols within dreams are a kind of pre-language.
And without language, you can't have concepts.
Or if you have them, we would never know because they would never be spoken or written down.
So each one of these is built upon the previous one.
And... So...
One of the things that's a real challenge with human consciousness, the reason why psychology and philosophy are both so essential and so damn difficult...
Is that, of course, the human mind is not designed to process reality.
Or rather, it is and it isn't.
The human mind is fundamentally ambivalent about reality because The human mind has the capacity to reject reality, which is fantastic.
If you can't reject reality, you can't have science.
I mean, that sounds like a bit of a paradox.
But, I mean, if you can't reject your direct perceptions of reality, you can't ever figure out that the world is round, the sun and the moon are the same size, and, you know, that the earth moves and the sun is relatively stable, the earth goes around the sun, and so on. You simply can't I can't figure those out, right?
Aristotle went near mad trying to figure out the tides, not imagining that something as distant as the moon could have an effect on the oceans of the earth.
So if you can't reject your direct perceptions, you actually can't develop rationality.
You can't develop science. So, our capacity to reject direct perceptions is both our greatest strength and, of course, our greatest weakness.
Because we have the capacity to reject reality, we have the capacity to believe in God's end, possess or create science, right?
So, all of these things are part of the amazing capacity for rejecting reality as part of the human mind.
Now, the reason I say that the human mind is ambivalent About reality, empirical reality, is that, of course, the mind is designed to survive.
And survival throughout history meant two things, two opposing things.
It meant strict adherence to empiricism and an equally strict rejection of empiricism.
And I would say that it is this tension that has Stimulated the development of philosophy and science.
So we both love and need empiricism and we both hate and fear empiricism.
And the reason I say that is to just think of being some Stone Age hunter in some primitive tribe Well, you need to have a steadfast dedication to reality, to empirical reality.
You have to track your prey, you have to fashion the spear, hold the spear, you have to figure out the arc and the landing of the spear, and all of these things.
So you have to have a strict adherence to empirical reality, and then you have to believe in Shamans and gods and evil spirits living in trees and all this kind of stuff, right? So you have to be both scientifically empirical and precise and psychotically delusional and insane, right?
I mean, and both are required for your survival.
This is the root of the ambivalence that we still struggle with, right?
And we'll continue to struggle with until we rule the planet with liberty, truth, and freedom.
So, to survive, you need to bring food back to the tribe, and to not be killed by the tribe, you have to believe in the tribal gods.
So you have to be strictly empirical, and you have to violently and psychotically reject strict empiricism, right?
It's a bit of a tension, to say the least, right?
And the societies in the past, I mean, talking before, let's say...
I mean, up to and probably including the Egyptian civilization, so 5,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago.
If people got too psychotic, they would die.
They'll run off cliffs or they'd all burn.
Like those comet guys who cut their nuts off and go and join the comet.
If you have too great a focus on the psychotic delusion side of things, then it dies out, right?
On the other hand, if you don't believe in and adhere to your tribe and obey them, then you have problems with tribal cohesion during a time of near-universal war, right?
Or let's just say intense competition for resources.
So pacifism in primitive times and psychoticism in primitive times both led to To death, right?
So you have to have both.
And it's this tension, right?
And we're still fighting this, of course, right?
And in many ways, it's not a whole lot better.
And in many ways, it's a whole lot worse because of the endless propaganda and the amount of training.
Because we have enough resources to train our children for 15 years in delusions, right?
Or 18 years or whatever. Whereas a primitive tribe wouldn't have those kinds of resources, the kind of living hand to mouth.
A quick, horrible ritual and off to hunting with you, right?
So when you look at the Obama victory and Obama cheers and so on, this is a psychotic delusion of a messiah complex and external salvation, group collective fantasy, all this kind of stuff.
So in many ways, it's actually even worse now than it was in the past because we have enough of a devotion to empiricism through capitalism and science to have generated such an excess of wealth that we can invest even more In the propagandizing of our young folk, Right.
So it's it's even tougher to to break through that now in many ways as it was in the past.
But that, of course, is the tension.
Right.
That we are saying, look, empirically the government is forced.
Concepts or collectives don't exist.
So we're bringing the scientific realm into direct...
Conflict with this psychotic realm, which of course is designed for survival.
And it's been relatively recently, very recently in terms of human history, it's a tiny slice of human history wherein it was possible to disagree with the delusions of the tribe and survive, right?
I mean, that's been pretty new, right?
If you've seen Religious...
Bill, the mayor, stops off at a trucker's church, a little lean-to, basically, in the parking lot.
And he starts questioning, and this big, chunky, fat, burly, frightening fellow basically says, hey, you got a problem, my God, you got a problem with me, right?
And you just know that he would actually go to violence if he could.
And, of course, there are still very many cultures, and the South of the U.S., particularly the rural South, would be one which I've noticed, still has this, right?
To agree with the tribe or be severely punished, right?
I mean, under the point of death, right?
This is what lynching is, and also what the child abuse that's very common to the South is in terms of beatings inside the military culture.
And so we are attempting to To resolve this ambivalence in favor of empiricism and rationality, but when we do that, as I talk about in How Not to Achieve Freedom, the recent free book, it's tough because people get really scared and angry, right? Because we're really threatening their survival and so on, which throughout history we would be, right?
The priest is just a man, blasphemer, burned, killed, right?
The pharaoh is just a man, blasphemer, killed, right?
In the same way, Thomas Jefferson is just a man.
Anyway, the Founding Fathers are just dudes.
The Constitution is just a piece of paper.
These things will still get you shunned, as I have found in the modern world.
God, it's just a delusion, a projection.
These things will still get you shunned, but shunning doesn't equal death, which is very, very recent, and it's going to take a while for our emotional apparatus to come to bear, right?
And the only way that we can really solve this problem is to have resolved it within ourselves and to...
I mean, we do flourish.
The fewer contradictions we have, the greater we flourish, right?
And statism, of course, is nothing more than the accumulation of philosophical contradictions, right?
Multiple opposing UPBs.
Force for you is bad. Force for me is good.
Force collectively is good.
Force collectively is good.
Individually is bad. I mean, war, murder is good versus murder is bad.
I mean, the introduction of Contradictions weakens and debilitates a society, which is why anarchism, which is a contradiction-free theory in society, just like in terms of its organization, just like UPB and the ethics that we talk about here.
But a statism, of course, is a proliferation of weaselly contradictions in the same way that agnosticism, determinism and nihilism and these other ridiculous nonsense quote philosophies are.
So, We really are aiming to eliminate these contradictions and to show that the fewer the contradictions, the happier the person, right?
I mean, that's fundamental.
To resolve ambivalence releases energy.
Not in the short run, because it's painful and it's scary, but it does release energy and creates happiness and consistency, right?
So, we are aiming to resolve these contradictions on the side of reason and empiricism, but that provokes a lot of anxiety and hostility in people.
So, in many ways, we can also look at the dreams of human beings, right?
The dreams that we have, which is really all we can talk about.
I don't know what... The science of dreams is for cats and dogs, but I'm pretty sure we don't have them in Cinescope or Technicolor as yet.
But when we're talking about human beings, we have a lot of complexity and ambivalence in our relationship to reality, because reality, as I said, we have to objectively assess and understand and pursue the deer, but If we take those same principles and apply it to the lord, the shaman, the ruler, the princeling, the president, then we are shunned and attacked, which, of course, was a death sentence throughout most of human history.
So, when it comes to language, we have a real problem, because our perceptual experience, our empiricism of the world, which we need as a hunter, gatherer, farmer, whatever, right?
Even soldier. The empiricism that we experience in the flesh is at odds with many of the language concepts that we live in, right?
King, society, collectivism, democracy, Obama-mania, whatever you want to say.
And so from that standpoint, our dreams become very complex.
In my experience.
Because we are training ourselves in two different directions through our dream states.
Remember, dreams are ways of adapting to more current circumstances.
So, you know, Christians will dream about Jesus and Buddhists will dream about Shiva or whatever.
Not Shiva. The Buddha, right?
Hindus will dream about Shiva, goddess of war, whatever they have over there.
And... So, there is the adaptation to empirical reality, which occurs in nightly dreams, but there is also the adaptation to social reality, which occurs nightly in our dreams, right? I mean, it's hard to talk someone into an emotional state or out of an emotional state.
In fact, it's almost impossible. The emotional states that we actually possess, and if you think of an Islamic or other kinds of heavily aggressive and theological society, those kinds of societies, you know, have all of these terrifying stories, hell and apostasy and all that kind of stuff.
And so we dream about those because we're struggling to adapt our psychosis to match The local psychotic conditions, right?
And so, but at the same time, we also have to train ourselves to match reality, right?
So, for instance, if you are beaten for not kneeling in a mosque, then you have to adapt your emotional instincts to kneel in a mosque and to want to and to feel fear and anger at anyone who doesn't, which is adapting to the local conditions of psychosis.
But you also have to adapt to the local conditions of reality to know that you're in a mosque, right?
So, for instance, in the Islamic theological position is you cannot make a picture of anything in the world.
That's why they all have these mosaic tiles and patterns.
Because only God creates an image of things, right?
So, you have to emotionally train yourself, or rather your dreams will do it for you, by reproducing the punishment which you're not supposed to experience in real life, right?
And if you get lashes for, I don't know, drawing a goat...
Then in your dreams, your dreams will attempt to help you avoid the lashes by giving you dreams of being lashed for drawing a goat, or lashing someone else for drawing a goat, or being frightened of a goat.
It will try and adapt you to the local psychotic conditions by repeating these crazy ass things.
Which is of course why human beings everywhere adapt almost seamlessly, or virtually seamlessly, to Their local cultural conditions, whether they are countrywide, like Islamic, or even more locally, like my family and all their friends are Democrats or Satanists.
It doesn't really matter what it is. But human beings will adapt because the symbology of adaptation to local psychotic conditions is replayed over and over every night, right?
To the point where then, if you even think of...
That's a loud play. If you even think of making a picture of a goat, You will feel fear and anxiety if you see, right?
So if you think of these Dutch cartoons about Muhammad that certain Islamic clerics and adherents went nuts over, well, of course, they have been trying to avoid the savage punishment they are so willing to inflict on others by training fear, horror, rage, anxiety, the full fight-or-flight repertoire.
And this has been occurring nightly.
This has been occurring in their dreams.
Because obviously, making a picture of a goat is not an objective threat like a saber-toothed tiger or a boulder rolling down a hill at you is.
So you have to train your fight-or-flight mechanism to react to these psychotic sillinesses as if they were genuine dangers.
And that's why you get this emotional eruption.
And the same thing occurs with other religions, right?
Like history or democracy.
So people have this religious view of history.
America was unprovokedly attacked in Pearl Harbor, Japanese day of infamy.
And you question that, or you oppose that, and they get angry, because they have trained themselves to have an emotional response to...
To perceive any questioning of the local psychosis as an act of aggression that must be punished, right?
All it means is that they punish themselves in their dreams to avoid being punished in reality, right?
We train ourselves away from these kinds of things.
And it's certainly been the case for me as well, as I mentioned earlier, but when I start new tasks, I'm trying to learn new things.
It's really... I dream about it a lot.
I started to dream about podcasting a lot when I first started because I was trying to train myself into, hopefully not, a Volvo-based rolling psychosis.
So, dreams are really about training ourselves both to accurately process empirical reality so we can function within it, and to Quote, accurately create the cause and effect stimulus and punishment response or praise response in our local cultural psychoses.
And this, of course, creates a lot of tension and ambivalence.
The tension between these two things, right?
People who have true psychotic breaks don't function anymore, right?
Where they just, you know, like a helium balloon, they let go.
They just pop off into some sort of inner crazy-ass reality and can't Function, right?
They don't wash themselves. They wander into traffic, all these kinds of things.
So those people, you know, if you lose the empirical thing, that's great for not living.
It's bad for living and you die.
And if you lose your connection or your emotional response to the local psychoses, then you're also toast.
You'll be killed as a blasphemer or somebody who contradicts the local mafia leader or religious mafia leader.
Same sort of thing, right?
So to me, that's sort of the function of dreams.
Now, The one thing that's very true about survival in a prehistoric or a primitive society is that speed is of the essence, right?
The first guy to throw the spear is the one who brings down the deer, so to speak.
In a battle, the guy who hesitates the least tends to win.
So the guy who has completely demonized the other, the enemy, and who has no hesitation as a result of nasty, icky compassion, is the one who wins.
If you look at the Spanish Inquisition, those who ferret out or are most angry towards the witches are probably the ones who are going to survive the Inquisition.
So the women who go and ferret out all the other witches are probably the ones who are going to be viewed as John Proctor-ish kinds of saints, right?
So speed is of the essence, right?
If you're the one who most quickly denounces somebody who's blaspheming, it's not going to spread.
You're not going to be tempted. You're not going to be tricked by somebody pretending to blaspheme to get you to confess to blasphemous thoughts or whatever, right?
So speed is really, really important.
And as we know from this Blink book, we have this amazing capacity to process an enormous amount of information very rapidly.
And that's adaptive.
Right? That is adaptive.
I mean, just think of the emotional reaction you have to hearing your mother's and father's voice.
That's not, obviously, biological.
It's not instinctual. It's not multi-generational.
It's based on your experience, right?
So, speed is very important.
Now, when it comes to acting either on psychotic social, quote, reality or empirical actual reality, We process things more rapidly in terms of symbols and emotions than we do in terms of empirical reality.
And we all know this, right?
Because we all debate this, right?
So we know for sure that...
When we bring up the concept of taxation equals force, people clench, they get tense, they get emotional.
Rapidly, instantaneous. People aren't ever surprised and then covered up.
It happens with blinding rapidity.
And that speed of processing is what you need as a hunter-gatherer and also as somebody who's trying to survive within a psychotic or deluded social environment.
You need that speed of response, right?
And you can only get that speed of response Through emotions and symbols, right?
So people will respond with that warm patriotic glow to an American flag who've never read the Constitution, who know almost nothing about the history.
But you get that flag unfurled.
And you get that stirring music, and you get the stern, weeping marine guards, and you get the flag-draped coffins, and you get whatever bullshit they're coming up with to draw you into this psychotic social delusion, collective delusion.
So you can get people to have those emotional responses, and if you look at...
What occurs in terms of the image.
That's why I was saying that it's even tougher now than it was before because we have a way of reproducing dreams, right?
Through movies, through music, through plays, whatever, right?
So we can produce waking dreams to create these emotional...
That's why patriotism and the media have kind of gone up, right?
I mean, in World War I, 300,000 Americans dodged the draft, right?
Because there wasn't much media. It's a lot tougher to do that when you've got all this patriotic crap blaring all the time.
So, we have this capacity now, and we've seen this, right, that if you've gone through this kind of upbringing, and this of course occurs when you go into the semi-trance state, when you have droning music, and you're looking at Christ, and everyone around you is emotional.
This is the infection of the social psychosis, right?
And so what people are trying to do in order to control you is to mold your emotional responses to symbology, to symbols, right?
The seal of the United States, a man behind a podium, a man in a suit, right?
Soldiers versus the mafia, right?
Same damn thing, but the uniform is a desire or is designed to attach your emotions of reverence and loyalty and sympathy to a symbol called a uniform, right?
And these symbols vary widely from country to country.
But the entire purpose is to bypass your rational faculty by wiring together the symbols and the emotions, because those are irresistible for most people, and they are incredibly rapid.
Ways of processing things.
As we saw from Blink, right?
You can get a five-second response that intellectually will take you months or weeks or days to figure out, right?
I mean, a lot of reasonable people under certain circumstances abhor murder, right?
We're skeptical of theories that promote murder, again, not war, but within society.
If I said we should all kill each other, people would react to that like, whoa, right?
And we, of course, now have reverence for, a lot of us have reverence for babies, cute and treasure and precious and so on.
Which, you know, if you were totally cynical, you could say, well, it's because we're underbreeding for our political masters.
Shoot us full of baby happy juice to make us breed more.
I don't think it's necessarily that.
But there is those kinds of associations.
In the past, babies were annoying, irritants, and loud, and an unfortunate byproduct of the sex that people wanted, killed regularly, sacrificed, and left to die.
Athens, you just leave them out in the wilderness to die, eaten apart by wolves, and so on.
So, this unification of symbol and emotion is a way of programming you to adapt, to efficiently adapt, instantaneously adapt, and reproduce the local psychosis, which is why everybody stands with a tear in their eye when the national anthem is played, although it's different for each country, everybody does the same thing, because they've all adapted to their local psychosis, right?
Again, not everybody does this, and we certainly have more scope to not do it now, but that is the reality.
So, dreams, to me, are protective mechanisms designed to wire you up to either the acquisition of an objective and empirical skill, like hunting or whatever, which is why we dream about video games and so on,
or They are ways of adapting us to survival in the local psychosis, which of course has no empirical evidence and is actually completely counter to the empirical evidence that we receive in our practical, empirical waking life. Let me use the word empirical.
No, actually I think I'm out. So, working out UPB took me like 20 years, or even more, 25 years.
20 years, let's say. But we all kind of get a gut sense that murder is wrong.
So this is the difference, right? Reasoning takes forever, and reasoning from first principles is highly destructive because it overturns the local psychosis, which will get you killed.
Question the access that the Pope has to the infinite sky buddy.
So, reasoning from first principles is really tough.
It's really tough. At least I find it really tough.
And so, how do we operate?
We operate by uniting the symbols with emotions.
And that is, you know, a tired Catholic listening to Ave Maria is going to feel sweet and weepy and so on, right?
Because there's that unity of symbols.
And emotions, which is very rapid.
It bypasses the rational faculty, and it is designed to help train us in empirical skills and also to adapt us to the local psychosis.
And so, I think we've sort of made that case perhaps one time too many.
many, I do apologize.
And I will work to continue.
So dreams are really good at ferreting out social psychosis, right?
Because the dreams...
Substitute the social psychosis for empirical reality.
It knows the difference, right? Our unconscious knows the difference between fantasy and reality, between collective psychosis and empirical rational metaphysics.
Because otherwise it wouldn't substitute, adroitly substitute the two, right?
So it wouldn't train you to adapt emotionally and through symbology to the local psychosis if it didn't know the difference between.
So it's really kind of like a trinity.
So there's empiricism, there's social psychosis, social metaphysics, and then down at the bottom there's the unconscious, which nimbly moves between the two.
It knows the difference between the two and adapts us between the two and so on.
So we look at a picture that a Muslim kid has drawn of a goat, And we perceive that through empirical reality, through the senses, and then we instantly flip over to the social psychosis and feel the rage and the fear and the need for punishment and the blaspheme or whatever, you beat the kid or whatever, right?
So these two are co-joined within the mind and dreams train you for both, right?
If you've ever been involved in something heavily athletic or training for something, you dream about it.
I mean, when I was a swimmer or when I was a water polo person, when I played a lot of tennis, I played squash, soccer, whatever, I would dream about these things quite a lot.
And I think we've all had that experience at one time or another.
People, of course, dream about FDR when their brains are being...
Smoothed out, when this ambivalence is being crossed over.
And we're saying we identify, because you can't identify the social psychosis as psychosis, right?
That's part of the split within the personality.
As soon as you say it's insane, then you're screwed, right?
Because you'll hesitate, and you'll feel the humiliation of conformity rather than the adulation of symbol worship.
And so once you question this, and now a part of your brain does know that it's false, which is why it gives you dreams to conform to it, but a part of you also knows Also believes that it's true.
These are all the splits, right?
This is all the schisms and the splitting that occurs within the personality, the ambivalence, the chasing-your-own-tail nonsense that occurs, and which you've heard me debate on numerous times with people, or have these debates where you just go round and round in circles, right?
It's because we're bouncing back and forth between these different modalities, right?
It's an illusion. It's not an illusion.
It's true. Oh, but it's not the same as empirical reality.
Therefore, I'm going to reject empirical reality, but I can't use that without using empirical reality.
So empirical reality must be true, which means my social psychosis is a psychosis, but it can't be a psychosis because I feel so strongly emotionally attached to it, and because if I say that I'm dead, so it's not a psychosis.
Just go round and round, right?
This is people bouncing around this trinity of reality, psychosis, And the knowledge of the difference, right?
So we all have had that experience, and this is what this philosophical conversation is really designed to help us iron out and smooth out and, as much as we can, eliminate these ridiculous self-attacking, fundamentally inconsistencies.
So, I don't really have people who You know, call me up and say, Steph, I've just started taking up skiing and I keep dreaming about skiing.
I need help. I guess that's all clear, right?
We all understand that that's the body attempting to train the muscles to have a free training session without having to get dressed up and face plant in the powder.
So those aren't problematic for people.
The dreams that are problematic for people are the dreams which are confusing and frightening and so on.
And they tend to People tend to embark upon philosophy, and then they start to get bad dreams, right?
At least I've not really had someone who's come, at least that I can recall, who's come into FDR and said, I have no idea about philosophy, but I'm having these bad dreams which I want to sort out.
Usually it's you've had some exposure to some kind of new way of thinking that challenges your social psychosis, and then...
Your unconscious starts to try and knit these two things together.
Empirical reality and social psychosis doesn't work, and so you go through a period of intense rewiring, which results in all of these confused dreams, right?
And the stressful dreams.
Now, it's really hard to get emotional about a pure abstraction, right?
Which is why When you are trying to indoctrinate someone in patriotism, for instance, it could be anything, you don't just put the three letters USA up and play all the stirring music, right?
Because otherwise people would just attach to the letters.
So you have to attach emotionally to something that is tangible, right?
A strong, noble, clean-cut marine or, you know, the guys putting the flag up on Iwo Jima or whatever.
It could be anything, right? And so, dreams have to give you something tangible to attach the emotion to.
Otherwise, the emotion has no...
If you have to have...
If it's a bird, you have a desire.
It has to be to fly south. It can't just be a desire that's free-floating, unattached to anything.
So, our emotions have to have some sensual or perceptual object to attach to, which is why, since there is no such thing as a country, we have to substitute flags and lapel pins and soldiers and...
Confetti. And I guess there is no such thing as a country.
So we have to invent these symbols which people emotionally attach to, right?
That don't represent anything.
What is a flag? It's a piece of paper.
It's a piece of cloth, right? We have to invent these things which we can emotionally attach to.
Now, in the same way, when we have dreams, we are inventing things and circumstances which we can emotionally attach to.
And those things and circumstances either, right, the happenings in the dream, whatever's going on, they either represent tangible empirical reality, I'm learning how to ski, I've got to practice skiing in my sleep, or they represent some sort of social reality, right? They represent some sort of social reality, right?
Stripped free of conscious defenses, right?
Because remember, the unconscious knows the difference between empirical reality and social psychosis.
It knows the difference, right?
Because when it no longer knows the difference, you're psychotic, right?
So it is a juggling act, right?
So in dreams, when we begin to go down the road of philosophy, right, and the unconscious says, oh, shit, really?
That's what we're doing. That's where we're heading.
We're trying to reconcile empirical reality and social psychosis.
Holy shit. Really?
Are you sure we want to do this?
Because, man, this is going to get us killed, I'm telling you.
And if we continue down, if we hold on to our courage and we continue down that road, then the unconscious will begin to tell us the truth.
It's like, shit, sure you want this red pill?
Are you sure you want this pill?
Because I know the difference between social psychosis and empirical reality.
And if you're saying we're going to go with empirical reality, I will tell you the truth about the social psychosis, but it's not going to be pretty, right?
And this, of course, is the birth of science and empiricism and philosophy, fundamentally.
And it's scary as hell, right?
Before I broke with my mother, I began to have terrifying dreams about my mother.
Why? Because I was committed to discovering the truth, and I was hurling myself full forward into the truth, or rather the truth was hitting me full around the chops with no let-up.
So I began to have these terrible dreams about my mother, right?
Which makes sense, because the unconscious was like, oh shit, we're doing the truth?
Fine, here you go, this is the truth, she's evil.
She's a monster. She's wretched.
Same thing with my brother.
I would have these terrible dreams about being tortured mentally and physically by my brother.
It's like, oh, this is the truth. It's what the unconscious knows.
Because it's the obvious that's avoided.
If you can dance through a crowded minefield without setting off a mine, it's clear that you know where the mines are, even if you don't know consciously.
So, when we...
have the commitment to truth the unconscious like oh okay well let's start looking at the truth we know right and so these dreams these bad dreams uh begin to afflict us right so um i guess before fdr a couple years before fdr christine and i were going to go visit ireland we can stop by my dad's place But Christina had this absolutely terrifying dream about my father.
He was a mossy green zombie, right?
Emerald Isle and rotting and so on, undead.
And we were unaware of the danger that we were in a hotel and this guy was lurking around, but we were packing slowly to leave, so we were not aware of the danger.
And then she got pinned behind a door with this guy staring around with no expression on his mossy rotted face, right?
So, it's like, okay, you want the truth.
Well, this is the truth about the guy, which I've been keeping from you, right?
But if we're actually going to go, and you're actually committed to the truth, then this is what we're going to see, right?
This rotted emerald zombie.
And I'm sure that you can look at all of this yourself, but when you go down the path of truth, when you attempt to heal this split between social psychosis and empirical reality, a lot of scary shit comes up, right?
Right? Which has been adroitly repressed by your unconscious, which is trying to help you at all times.
It's trying to help you from getting killed.
It's trying to help you not get killed by juggling empirical reality, which you need to survive in, and social psychosis, which you need to survive in for fear of either starving to death if you don't hunt properly or being killed by a bunch of lunatics if you question their psychosis.
So, dreams...
Have these potent layers of empiricism, right?
Because we don't dream usually about reading a script.
We dream in what appears to be empirical, tangible reality.
Sometimes it's like a super-reality where there's more detail than there is in the real world.
But dreams have these layers of desire, they have these layers of empiricism, and they have this Revealing true emotional attachments, right?
True emotional attachments.
So, if you think you love your family, but they've been bad to you, and you start going down the path, right?
I mean, the unconscious is an unbelievably powerful superhero servant, right?
He's like, well... If it's not safe for us to question the social psychosis, I will keep you unconscious of it, right?
And I will fill you with the emotional attachments to symbols which will get you through, which will help you survive.
And then if you start saying, no, no, no, no, we're going to go for the truth, the unconscious is like, okay, hey, if you're sure, absolutely.
As your faithful servant, as your genie, I will provide you what you want, though you may not actually want it when you finally get a hold of it.
So, That's why I think, that's why I found that the analyzing of dream symbols is so absolutely essential.
Because we work with incredible rapidity in the realm of emotions and symbols.
And that's where a lot of the truth, not so much about empirical reality, but a lot of the truth about dreams are.
In many ways...
Ah, no, forget that.
That's going to take too long to go into that.
We'll have to talk about that another time.
So that's why I think it's so important...
To examine dreams, particularly during times of psychological stressors.
It's really, really, really important to examine dreams and to figure out what is the emotional symbology that is revealing the truth about your life.
How are these emotional symbols, or the emotions that are produced by these symbols, which is how social psychosis is maintained, right?
How social psychos...
Like, if you're dreaming about skiing, you're not dreaming about being a tiny guy skiing down your mother's back.
You're just dreaming about skiing.
When I've had dreams about video games, they're kind of like the video games.
Now, occasionally, people from my family will pop up, which simply would indicate that combat and family is what's being processed.
It's what's coming to the surface. It's what the kindly unconscious is delivering to my request.
But when we begin to delve into and unplug our emotional relationships to social psychoses, then we get a whole load of wild symbols and emotional attachments and emotional fears of and emotional desires for seemingly random symbols.
But what they are, of course, is the deprogramming, the social psychosis.
And that's why it's so important to examine these things to get the truth of what's really going on.
And this, of course, is my basic theory of dreams.
I don't think that they're just wish fulfillments, like Freud said, or if they are, they're the wish fulfillments of wanting to stay alive in the midst of social psychosis.
I don't think that they're expressions of the collective unconscious in the way that Jung would say, but certainly they are collective abilities, the unity of emotion and Abstract symbol...
I mean...
Sorry, the emotion...
We finished the thought for once.
The unity of emotion is an abstract symbol that is common to social psychosis, right?
Because we never dream more vividly than when we are struggling to wake up, right?
Because, really, this is what our unconscious is trying to say to us, right?
If we accept the terrifying and exhilarating challenge Of examining and trying to unravel and reconcile reality with the social psychosis.
Then our unconscious says, well, you think that you're looking for truth in your dreams, but the truth is that you are dreaming.
That your life is a waking dream, a waking fantasy, that you are deeply embedded in the social psychosis, right?
I mean, again, not to pick on Obama, but it's just so recent that it's something we can refer to, and for those in the future, and this is just because I'm sure you can still see the images of people weeping and wailing and laughing and cheering about, you know, some guy being given abstract control over the gun at their throats, right?
Well, they're actually in a dream.
Right? And if we...
I mean, when I was younger and I thought that giving money to my mother and having lunch with my mother and going to dances with my mother, that this all was virtuous, being a good son and forgiving for the sins of the past, rising above and all this sort of shit that is shoveled about like endless sewage in our culture.
Well, that was all a dream, because it wasn't UPB, right?
So, we often will go into our dreams trying to find the truth, right?
And the truth is, almost always, that we live in a dream, that we live in a collective dream called the social psychosis, the cultural bigotries, the madness that is blended into invisibility through near-universal conformity,
right? And that's why when you are going down the path of self-knowledge, self-examination, the examination of truth, reasoning from first principles, when you go down that road, there is a time where your inner life is far more vivid than your outer life,
right? Where your dreams and your impulses and your thoughts and your reveries and your daydreams and your Impulses and your fantasies, all of those rise up to eclipse the real world, right?
But that's actually reality coming to you, right?
You need your deepest instincts to overpower what you perceive of as reality, because what you perceive of as reality, governments, churches, gods, culture, politicians, soldiers, it's all a fantasy.
It's all a projection. It's all madness.
It's all a social psychosis.
And to overpower that, you need your deepest instincts, which knows the difference between empiricism and fantasy, to rise up.
And you need to get in touch with your inner life to burrow back down through the shallow symbols you were infected with as a child to get to the true self, which is always down there, has been orchestrating for your survival and deeply wishes to rise like a whale to the surface and break into the world where our real power lies.
So I hope this has been helpful.
I look forward to your donations.
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