Jan. 24, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:47:31
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| Time | Text |
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| I can certainly read it if you like. | |
| Alright, so you say, I had an intense dream a couple of days ago. | |
| Earlier that day, I had rejected a girl because she was making too many rapid changes in her life to match my needs in a relationship. | |
| Because of my concern that this is unsustainable for a lifelong relationship, I called it off a couple of days after we started talking. | |
| As I fell asleep, I was considering what I wanted from a relationship outside of a lifelong relationship and to start a family. | |
| I found myself at a convenience store with friends and I noticed a girl down the aisle kept looking at me until eventually I found her just staring at me. | |
| I said hi to dispel the mystery and she began to tell me something that disturbed me, being too explicit about her tragic past and how she wants a family in the future. | |
| I slipped out of the store by pretending to go to the bathroom and I went down the street to where I knew my friends would show up. | |
| The girl finds me again outside and after a scuffle she ends up locked in a clear vessel containing septic waste. | |
| My friends walk up and see the situation and one of them points out a lever that fills and drains the septic tank. | |
| He demonstrates by flooding the tank to the top and draining it again. | |
| I see this and repeatedly fill the tank a number of times, trying to punish the girl until she gives up her affectionate pursuit. | |
| When I drained the tank the final time, because I think she had learned her lesson, she had disappeared! | |
| I shudder and chase after my friends who had continued down the street. | |
| We walk past a clear swimming pool and I notice there's a murky blob near the bottom of the pool and it moves and begins to surface. | |
| I see a two-year-old toddler girl With mottled black skin, and I knew at once she was related to the girl in the septic tank. | |
| I tried to keep my eye on this walking corpse while also sticking with my friends, but eventually my friends slipped out of view. | |
| I then turned around and embraced the two-year-old's cold body, where she vanished. | |
| The soul seemed to merge with me. | |
| I started to weep. Yeah, that's one heck of a dream. | |
| It's really beautiful and terrifying and stimulating and alarming and exciting and all kinds of stuff going on. | |
| I mean, I have a couple of questions, obviously, if there's more that you want to add, I'm thrilled to hear. | |
| No, I mean, if you want to jump straight into questions, if anything comes up, I'll let you know. | |
| Yeah, so tell me a little bit about the girl that you rejected and what happened. | |
| Yeah, so it was sort of like an online meeting. | |
| There was a person through the FDR community that was trying to, I guess, play matchmaker. | |
| And I was like, all right, let me see what this girl that isn't from the community is about. | |
| So there was a bit of vetting from this third party beforehand. | |
| After a couple of conversations, it felt like she would say something, I would mention my opinion, and then she was like, oh yeah, that's totally what I meant. | |
| Whereas almost like a flip of what she just said is like, ah, all of those are really, really strange. | |
| The specific example that jumps to mind was, oh, I want to help my siblings move into a house. | |
| She was trying to save up money for Her siblings to help them move into her house, but she also wanted to start dating to find a husband, and she's 24. | |
| And it's like, well, which is your priority right now? | |
| And she's like, oh, it's totally getting this house for my sibling. | |
| And I was like, well, if you're going to try to take an extra job that only makes you maybe 10, 15% more, and it makes it impossible to have a conversation with a suitor, Because of the time zone differences, then you're not trying to find a husband. | |
| I didn't quite follow how helping her sibling get a house means she can't talk to you? | |
| Because of the work she was doing, she was doing like an all-nighter, which would be the only time that I would be available because of time schedules. | |
| Because she's over in another continent. | |
| Oh, gosh. So she would be asleep when I would be at work. | |
| Another one of those, yeah. | |
| It was more just throwing the bait out there. | |
| Let's see, we have a couple of things in common. | |
| That's probably easier than trying to find someone in our own local pool, but I am beginning to question that now, where it's like, maybe finding someone that shares values and is closer is going to be significantly easier. | |
| Wow. Okay, so she was working a night shift so you and she could talk, but if she took a day shift to help her sibling move into the house, then you wouldn't be able to talk? | |
| Is that right? Because she was working a night shift, there was no way that she would be able to talk to me, but she was making more because it was a night shift. | |
| Oh, so she took a night shift so she couldn't talk to you and she took the night shift to help her sibling buy a house? | |
| Yes. Okay, and what culture did she come from? | |
| Southeastern Asian. Okay. | |
| So you're going different continent, different culture, different time zones. | |
| What? I mean, that's probably why I ended up having part of this dream is like, I don't even know why. | |
| I was thinking about it like, oh, hey, I'm in a convenience store because I'm just trying to find whoever's available, right? | |
| It's not that I'm actually holding myself to any standards, but something that I was... | |
| Well, you didn't find her at all. | |
| Right. Okay. | |
| So, just give me a where are you in the life arc and a little bit about your dating history as a whole and you want to have a family, so what are your plans if you give me sort of that backstory? | |
| Yeah, yeah. So, I've been becoming more Active in dating as I'm in my mid to late 20s now. | |
| And trying to... | |
| My dating history was, I dated a little bit in high school, but then there was a long pause where I was like, red pill, MGTOW, blah, blah, blah, don't get into that nonsense. | |
| And then a couple years ago, I started listening to your material again, and you won me over with the white pill, in a sense. | |
| So it's like, alright, let me get back into this dating market and find out. | |
| Are there people out there now that I've defooded, now that I've pulled out as many toxic people from my life as I can? | |
| Or they see themselves out on me. | |
| So it's been about a year of more active dating after a five or six year pause. | |
| Okay, and how has the dating been going as a whole? | |
| With my skepticism of people, the leftist politics and stuff from the city that I am living in in general, I've been looking more towards online dating or that sort of thing, and it hasn't really been all that successful. | |
| A couple of online relationships that lasted less than a month. | |
| And are you fairly mobile as a young man? | |
| Like, you could live wherever you want? | |
| I could be anywhere. So, if there aren't any women that you are interested around, have you thought of trying to sort of figure out the demographics of Of, I don't know, is there some maybe a conservative college or wherever it is that you'd be looking and sort of try and figure out where to move to to have more access to women? | |
| Yes, that's been the last couple of months is have this freedom right now. | |
| So where can I go? | |
| And that's part of why I had the change in time zones that was sort of messing with my mind because I looked at my laptop. | |
| It's like, oh, yeah, this is starting at three hours earlier, right? | |
| Because apparently the laptop doesn't set itself when it is on a new network. | |
| All right. But yes, I am looking into moving to other places where there is a better dating pool related to conservatism and anarchism and that sort of thing. | |
| Okay, and so you've had a couple of, I guess, not quite relationships because of the online stuff, and then this girl you just knew for a couple of days, and she was interested, is that right? | |
| Yeah, she was interested, it seemed... | |
| It seemed like there was just too many roadblocks that were coming up all at the same time, because you had the immigrations issue, and then you had the communications issue. | |
| I'm sorry, what was the communications issue? | |
| Oh, she was not terribly good to English. | |
| Bro. Yeah. | |
| Oh, come on. Someone set you up with someone on the other side of the world, different culture, different history, and doesn't even speak your language that well? | |
| Yeah. To me, I definitely felt set up. | |
| Oh, that's ridiculous. | |
| To figure that out. Yeah. | |
| I mean, so, okay, so is this someone who claims to know you? | |
| No. So, sorry. | |
| He claims to know her. | |
| Somebody in the philosophy community who set you up, is that right? | |
| Yes. And they thought this was a good idea? | |
| Yeah. I am thinking that he was far more interested in trying to find a suitor for this woman more than anything else. | |
| Because this is an older gentleman. | |
| He's already situated with his relationship and everything. | |
| So he's like, I see this girl and I want to do what I can to benefit her. | |
| Is she a relative of his? | |
| No. It is not a relative per se, but it's like a godfather relationship. | |
| Okay, okay. Got it, got it. | |
| So he's just looking to get her married off? | |
| Yeah. Okay. And how long has this person known you? | |
| I responded to his post because he had publicly posted on one of the freedom... | |
| Oh, that he wanted to... | |
| Yeah. Got it, got it. Okay, okay. | |
| So he didn't know me at all, and... | |
| His main thing was trying to offer the product that was his goddaughter, in a sense. | |
| Got it. Okay, so you responded to this situation, and what was your motivation in responding to this? | |
| I mean, obviously to get a date or whatever it is, but I mean, did you have an idea that this was language barrier, other side of the world, different cultural stuff? | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | |
| The way that he described it is, her English is really good, but... | |
| Steph speaks too fast. | |
| It was his argument for why she didn't actually listen to the shows. | |
| But after just a couple of conversations, it's like, okay, yeah, no, that's not going to work. | |
| So it was really maybe in total an hour or two of total talking back and forth before I realized, okay, yeah, that's not going to work. | |
| But that was the same day that the dream happened. | |
| So I felt that was important to mention. | |
| And how is your life going overall? | |
| I've gotten into a solid career. | |
| They don't really have much of a mentorship program at this particular company, though. | |
| So I'll either need to forge a path myself, essentially, or I'll need to find a company that's more into helping people build their careers over time. | |
| But it's a remote position, so I can be anywhere in the world, and it doesn't affect my employment. | |
| Okay. So, career's going okay? | |
| Mm-hmm. Career's going alright. | |
| I'm still trying to find friends after the whole defooing process that ended back in August. | |
| So, about six months ago. | |
| And it's been sort of tough, because even a handful of people in the FDR community, they They're still in progress, in a sense, where it's like, we could be friends sometime in the future, but this is not the year sort of thing. | |
| So, trying to find people that are on the other side of the desert, I suppose, for friendships as well. | |
| So, in general, the social groups that I have are essentially non-existent at this time. | |
| And your level of happiness, enthusiasm, and so on? | |
| It's higher than it has been my entire life, but I would rate it a 5 out of 10 or a 4 out of 10. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it certainly sounds like you're carrying a burden. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Yes, yes, yes. | |
| So what's the burden? | |
| Suppose It's this almost nagging feeling of me too or like the the | |
| the me plus right Where it's like, oh, what values can I provide to friends in the community or potential suitors in the community that would attract them to me? | |
| And then wrestling with that, where it's like, no, no, no, I have internal value by being who I am. | |
| I think that's the heaviest struggle that I'm currently working with is finding people that value me for me instead of the extra personality or persona or something that I put on on top of it. | |
| What do you mean by value you for you? | |
| I suppose it's People that will put me as a priority in their life where I don't need to ask them six or seven times to hang out before they're willing to interact with me. | |
| And why do you think people are reluctant to interact with you? | |
| I suppose it would be from what I can tell it's this sort of Burden of not having any existing friends yet or any existing social structure feels like trying to go from zero to one friends. | |
| I'm trying to think of how to describe that. | |
| Because I'm feeling burdened because I don't have any friends, it's almost like I'm driving away the people that could potentially develop into friends is the belief that I'm holding here. | |
| I'm sorry, I'm not sure I follow. | |
| I think... | |
| I think it's my... | |
| almost like a circular belief of if I don't have friends, I will feel the burden of not having friends which will drive away friends. | |
| Sort of. Sort of thing. | |
| Unless I apply this MePlus. | |
| I'm not sure if that's any more clear. | |
| No, I think I understand. | |
| So, it's funny because the MePlus thing is you don't have to be like a comedian or some sort of manic entertainer in order to have friends. | |
| But some people do translate that into, I just have to be myself and people will value that. | |
| Right, right, right. I think I provide value as a friend. | |
| I have an open-heartedness. | |
| I'm willing to listen to other people's opinions and ideas. | |
| I'm willing to ask them questions on what doesn't make sense to me and see if they can clarify their thinking. | |
| I have some technical skills and some Some personal skills and some social skills. | |
| So I don't think it's that, well, I just need to be here because I'm a living human being, right? | |
| I do think, though, that there's... | |
| I suppose my general demeanor up to this point may be more reserved, more tentative. | |
| It might not advertise the values that I do bring to friendships and relationships. | |
| So the value is listening and helping? | |
| Yeah. Well, providing technical skills and that sort of thing as well, yeah. | |
| Sorry, what do you mean by technical skills? | |
| I suppose I'm a general handyman. | |
| I'm pretty good with networking equipment, setting up laptops, getting... | |
| Oh, like a help desk. Portable friendly help desk. | |
| Okay. Yeah, that's not a thing in a friendship. | |
| I mean it can be helpful but that's not a thing in friendship. | |
| So why do you think you've been unable to get a friend? | |
| Because you don't have a friend. | |
| Which I suppose is another way of saying, what is friendship? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, now that you've mentioned that technical skills may not be prevalent to friendship, I'm wondering what my definition of friendship even is now. | |
| I suppose to me it's always been this idea of Someone that will have your back. | |
| Someone that can keep your secrets. | |
| Someone that can... | |
| Someone that can... | |
| Understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and identify when there's temptation on the horizon for you. | |
| Someone that can... | |
| Someone that can provide a sense of solace in life, especially as things wear down and things get tough. | |
| Like either in your physicality, like if you're growing older and you're needing help with the travels to the hospital or something. | |
| I don't know. It's a wee bit of a comfort to the walking wounded scenario, though. | |
| Comfort to the walking wounded. | |
| Yeah, it's solace and comfort and all of that. | |
| Yeah. Which, you know, implies overburdened with challenges and falling over and getting wounded. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| Yeah, that makes sense. So, what other aspects would go into a friendship? | |
| Well, think of, have you ever played group sports? | |
| Other than dodgeball, which is very much pummeled in solidarity. | |
| I don't... Yeah, that's not much of a team sport. | |
| Right. I don't... | |
| No, no. | |
| Not often. Like, I would do volleyball from time to time in the summer. | |
| Yeah, but nothing particularly organized and structural, right? | |
| Nothing with a coach. Usually people are... | |
| Glory-focused in those teams, usually. | |
| They're not actually trying to be team-based. | |
| Okay, so if you're on a sports team, your relationship with your other players, the relationship with your teammates, is, you know, you're both encouraging and criticizing in your enthusiasm to help each other to the shared goal of victory. | |
| Mm-hmm. To me, that's kind of something to do with friendship. | |
| If you were to say, I'm on a semi-professional volleyball team, we have a coach or whatever, and my goal with my teammates is to help them with their emotional problems and when they get physical injuries, to help them get better or to commiserate with them about the pain of their Yeah. | |
| Yeah. So, I think particularly for men, it's, you know, almost like brothers in arms. | |
| It's almost like, well, we have these goals of victory over, I don't know, evildoers or whatever, and we can help each other, encourage each other, give each other some feedback, but you're teammates, if that makes sense. | |
| Right. Yes. That makes sense. | |
| And I think you have a bit of a walking wounded or maybe a little bit of a feminine approach to friendship. | |
| I can help bind your wounds. | |
| You can help bind my wounds. Yeah, that makes sense. | |
| I can see where I would have come to those beliefs. | |
| So, yeah, so I think... | |
| I mean, of course, yeah, we don't want to be false, right? | |
| We don't want to have the false self and have to feel like we've got to be these manic entertainers in order to provide value to people. | |
| But we have to provide value to people. | |
| Yes. And the value that we have to provide... | |
| Has to be something in the UPB category. | |
| And I don't mean obviously, you know, keeping each other from evil. | |
| But what I mean is that if it's like, I'll bind your wounds, you bind my wounds, then you're just basically handing bandages back and forth. | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| Whereas, you know, great shot or, you know, pay attention or watch the ball is feedback that is part of the exciting process of trying to win the game. | |
| Yeah. Okay, yeah, I can see that. | |
| So, in this circumstance, it would be figuring out, say, the goals that friends inside your life have. | |
| Say they want to reach a certain level in their career, or they want to have a long-term relationship at some point, and it's about Encouraging them and calling out like, whoa, that was a really terrible date that you just went on. | |
| Or like, hey, look out there. | |
| There seems to be potential out there. | |
| That sort of thing. Well, it's, you know, like if you're playing in a video game, you know, look out for the bomb and, you know, like go left and this guy's bearing down on your right. | |
| So it's like the squad of, because, you know, modern dating is a little bit like a hyper-dangerous, hyper-exciting video game. | |
| And I think in that pursuit of the quality woman, that's sort of the team sport, if that makes sense. | |
| Yeah, that makes sense. Because if it's like, you know, I'm a good listener, I'll help you with your trauma, or whatever it is, which I'm sort of paraphrasing a little, you're just kind of inviting the walking wounded in. | |
| I see. Yes. | |
| Yes, yes. And that has been an unfortunate pattern. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I think friendship as a whole is, oh, we have a mutual quest, let's join forces. | |
| Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. | |
| So it's really about being in motion and being excited about the direction and the goal and giving people feedback as you traverse the challenging landscape of modernity or something like that, if that makes sense. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That sounds way more active. | |
| I like that. Well, then you get people who are in motion, who are enthusiastic, who, you know, all of that kind of stuff, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. Okay, so let's get to this earlier. | |
| So you rejected a girl because she was making too many rapid changes in her life. | |
| Yes. That doesn't seem to quite match with what you said to me. | |
| Because, I mean, she didn't speak English very well, and she was on the other side of the world, and you didn't have that much in common culturally, right? | |
| So I'm not sure about the too many rapid changes in her life. | |
| Right, right. The example that I gave was... | |
| She was saying, like, her number one priority was buying this house for a sibling. | |
| And, like, that's... | |
| She will forego all boyfriends until that mission is accomplished. | |
| And then I'm like... Oh, she said that she would forego all boyfriends? | |
| Right. And then I was like, well, what about husband? | |
| They don't just fall out of the sky pre-married, right? | |
| She's like, well, okay. | |
| I would change my job and I would immediately, like... | |
| Try to give you all this time of mine to try to make it work. | |
| Well, I mean, I'm no expert on, you know, Asian culture, and I'm sure it's got a lot of variety, but I would assume that saying she's 100% committed to her family is part of a mating display. | |
| I see. Right, so I'm 100% committed to my family is a way of saying she has intense family loyalties. | |
| And then she says... | |
| And then you say, well, what about your future family? | |
| You say, well, yeah, I'm 100% committed to my future family. | |
| That's part of why I'm talking about my 100% commitment to my existing family. | |
| I see, I see. | |
| I mean, family loyalty and all of that is very important in a lot of cultures, and I think particularly in the East Asian culture, there's a lot of that, right? | |
| So I assume that she's, you know, doing her best to show the aspects of her personality that would be attractive and positive. | |
| Like, you get a woman with 100% loyalty. | |
| Right now, it's on my brother. | |
| In the future, it will be on my husband. | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| I suppose I also felt there's another thing where she was sharing posts where there was a kid that was pretending to be dead or whatever on a couch and their parental figure or older sibling or whatever slaps them across the face and they start giggling and laughing seeing a child physically get hit It's not a great sign to me as well. | |
| I assume it was more in the realm of playful slap though, right? | |
| Yeah, it was right on that boundary of playful slap and someone was actually freaking out that the kid might be harmed, I guess. | |
| So it was right on that boundary where it was like, eh. | |
| I suppose also I found out that she had been living... | |
| In an orphanage of sorts, since her mom had died some 10 or 12 years earlier, and this godfather was sending her money overseas. | |
| So, there's also a bit of trauma there. | |
| A bit of trauma? You mean both her parents were dead and she was raised in a government orphanage? | |
| Yeah. A bit of trauma? | |
| A lot of trauma. A lot of trauma, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. So it was an accumulation of all those things where it's like, alright, that plus the complications of trying to meet up in the future, all of that just seems like too much of a burden to take on. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| Now, before you got in touch with the woman, did you know she was in another location, like another country and culture, continent? | |
| Yes. I knew her location. | |
| And I guess the advertisement, quote-unquote, that was floating around was that she had really good English. | |
| She was fully accepting of the ideas of peaceful parenting. | |
| That sort of thing. | |
| And had a sense, like the beginning senses of philosophy or something like that. | |
| But it's just... | |
| Other than the peaceful parenting thing, it seemed very much like she was also deeply embedded in the culture itself. | |
| Yeah, she would be. | |
| Right. Okay, so... | |
| This was not... | |
| I mean, that's the reason it's a convenience store in your dream, right? | |
| Yes. Which is, it takes the burden off you, I suppose, if someone says, here's the go, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. Okay. So that's passive. | |
| Rather than the active search, if that makes sense. | |
| Right. So... | |
| Would the... | |
| I suppose because it's been 20 plus years since you were in the dating market, this whole online dating thing may be a new dynamic. | |
| But I am starting to suspect that getting into relationships where you've met in person already with, let's say, hobbies or sports or whatnot as you've As you've mentioned, it's going to be a significantly better format for asking people out because you've already vetted their ability to maintain a friendship, if nothing else. I'm sorry, you said hobbies and sports? | |
| Yeah, so like meeting potential single women in like co-ed sports teams or say, I don't know, Business conferences, if they're not too much of a workaholic or something along those lines, right? Okay. I haven't implemented any of that yet. | |
| And that's sort of what I've been going through as I've been on this vacation, is trying to figure out, all right, what is it that I... What actions and steps do I need to take in order to start implementing this into my life? | |
| But I think you need to be less sad. | |
| Yes. Right? | |
| I certainly would like to be. | |
| And I say this with great sympathy and all of that, but I think you need to be less sad. | |
| And find some relief from the burden. | |
| So that you have not an 80-pound backpack, but a jetpack. | |
| Yes, yes. So, are you hoping that somebody else is going to lift that burden or take that burden away or you get to escape that burden if you find someone? | |
| whether it's a friend or a lover. | |
| I am questioning that belief now. | |
| I know Until about a year ago, that was solidly the belief is other people take on their wounded walking as well sort of mentality. | |
| Like, we're all wounded together. | |
| We'll all pull together. | |
| We'll all carry each other's weights. | |
| And I'm having serious skepticism in the last year or so since I started therapy and all about, all right, How do I lift my own burden? | |
| Where does this sadness come from? | |
| I mean, the freshness of the defu definitely leaves its heaviness on me. | |
| I'd like to narrow down where that's coming from. | |
| Well, I mean, it's, I assume it's, you were, if let's say that there was a bad family of origin and you've escaped an abusive situation, then you've broken out of prison, right? | |
| And you were unjustly imprisoned by accident and circumstance in history, and you broke out of prison. | |
| And I'm trying to figure out why I'm not angry at the captors. | |
| My anger has been strangely absent through this whole thing. | |
| There's that question. The other question is, why aren't you drinking deep the heady wine of freedom and being incredibly relieved and happy that you're out of the prison? | |
| Hmm. Still feels like there might be a guard or two around in my life when I'm not on vacation. | |
| I'm not sure. I mean, that's a little bit too abstract for me. | |
| Okay. It's like, you know, like you tunneled out of prison, right? | |
| Yes. And you're out and you're not going back. | |
| Yes. And no one's even after you. | |
| That's true. So, what do you do when you get out of prison? | |
| I mean, it's a big question, right? | |
| What do you do when you get out of prison? | |
| Are you happy? I mean, there's a lot of emotions, of course, right? | |
| But what's the primary one? Yeah. | |
| I think, for you, the primary one, I don't know, but it might be, wait, I thought I'd be happier. | |
| Yeah, sort of strange, like, almost anxiety of I don't know what to do. | |
| I feel shaky under my own feet. | |
| And that's... | |
| I do have anxiety about why I'm not more happy. | |
| you you | |
| Well, then, you're not quite out. | |
| Right? Not quite out of the prison, if that's the case. | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| I mean, it's the old thing, right? | |
| The prison is an analogy, it's the prison of the mind kind of thing, right? | |
| It's the mental aspect is the real challenge, right? | |
| Yes. And now that people are no longer throwing rocks into my backpack burden, now it's about offloading the backpack itself. | |
| Well, it's more like you were doing heavy labor, right? | |
| And you break out of the heavy labor scenario, but now you've got to stop moving rocks on your own. | |
| And to some degree is carrying the wounded walking around inside my mind. | |
| it. | |
| you you | |
| And there's still, like, roommates of mine where I still have this, still have the group of behaviors that I would have had around my family of origin, and I'm needing to break out of that. | |
| So I do recognize that as part of the burden. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I can tell you what I think it is. | |
| I don't know, obviously, but I can tell you what I think it is. | |
| Yeah. You're allowed in society to break out of prison, but you better not be happy. | |
| Right? So society is, in general, a large construct designed to keep people in abusive relationships. | |
| Yes. Now, if you get out of an abusive relationship, particularly with a family of origin, society is like, okay, there's no law against that. | |
| But you better not be happy. | |
| You better not be enthusiastic. | |
| Because that's gonna spread the word. | |
| Right? Society is like, to parents, like, you give us your kids, we'll program your kids. | |
| And in return, part of the programming will be that your kids have to stay with you no matter how crappy you are. | |
| That's the deal, right? And it used to be a bit more on the religious side, now it's a bit more on the status side, of course, right? | |
| But that's the deal. You hand over your kids, we'll program them, and part of the programming will be that they have to provide you resources and you don't have to be a good parent. | |
| Now, if you... | |
| I mean, what's the unforgivable thing? | |
| Okay, so it's like, okay, well, fine, fine. | |
| You cannot see your parents, but you better be miserable. | |
| Yes. Because if you don't see abusive parents and you're happy, that's going to scotch the whole deal. | |
| That's the whole deal that society runs on is going to be challenged, right? | |
| Yes. So, I mean, I don't want to make this about me, but the example would be something like, okay, Steph, well, you had a really bad childhood, and then you separated from your family of origin. | |
| Okay, but you then should be an advertisement as to how miserable that makes people. | |
| But what if I'm also happy? | |
| And I'm not wearing the mantle of... | |
| Which is kind of like, in order to, it's sort of like, you're in North Korea, and if you break out of prison, you then have to join the ordinary miserable people, otherwise you're going to stand out. | |
| Right, yeah. Right, so you're like, okay, fine. | |
| Society's like, okay, fine, you can not see them, but you better be miserable, right? | |
| You better fulfill that, because society has that curse, right? | |
| If you don't see your parents, then you're going to regret that for the rest of your life, and it's cold, and it's mean, and they did the best they could. | |
| You cannot see them, but you better be cursed. | |
| You can take the gold from the mummy's tomb, but you're going to be cursed. | |
| Yes. Because if you get out of abusive relationships, and you're happy, and it's positive, and you're enthusiastic, and all of these things are happening, well, that's, man, that's blowing the whole scheme. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, if you allow yourself to be happy... | |
| I mean, the modern world is a pretty miserable place, right? | |
| And if you've seen these videos of, like, high school in the 1990s, you know, everyone seems, like, otherworldly positive and happy and all that kind of stuff, and it just seems bizarre. | |
| It is very bizarre. | |
| And so people are miserable, they're frightened. | |
| I mean, I wrote this whole novel about the present, right? | |
| People are miserable and tense and frightened and all of that. | |
| And, you know, I mean, Rachel says to her boyfriend, what's the purpose of your life? | |
| He says to hide out, to hide. | |
| Big, big predators walking the earth, right? | |
| Yeah. That's a pretty, pretty wretched way to live, so. | |
| That's exactly my mindset right now. | |
| Right. Who's going to cancel me? | |
| Yeah. Right. So if you, well, of course, you know, canceling is supposed to make you miserable as well, right? | |
| No, it's not the easiest thing in the world, I'm not going to lie about that, but I'm actually happier. | |
| So, if society's curses keep bouncing off you, it can be dangerous, right? | |
| If all the magic voodoo of misery just bounces off you, you know, if you're like that Neo guy, stop the bullets or whatever, turn them, they just fall to the ground, that's pretty tough on society. | |
| And it causes, you know, a certain amount of... | |
| So you just may be... | |
| Well, I can't be happy. | |
| Because if I'm happy, I'm going to get targeted. | |
| If I'm happy and enthusiastic, then bad things will happen. | |
| And listen, I totally understand that perspective, right? | |
| You're allowed to break from society's conventions, but you bloody well better not be happy doing it, too. | |
| Right. So for this... | |
| Do I... Is it like a confidence that I can weather the storm, or... | |
| I feel myself trying to grab for grab-back answers, and I'm trying to figure out, okay, hold on. | |
| Where's the root of it, though? | |
| Well, I mean, you're trying to go from experience to answers, which is... | |
| Everybody does it, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. I have an insight. | |
| What's the answer? Well, the answer is to accept the insight, right? | |
| So let's go back to your screen. | |
| Okay. All right. | |
| In a convenience store with friends, you turned and said hi to dispel the mystery. | |
| What do you mean by dispel the mystery? | |
| I suppose it's... | |
| I don't necessarily see myself as an obviously attractive person. | |
| So women, so usually when they're looking at me, it becomes this question of, well, why are they singling me out from friends that might be taller or far more attractive or... | |
| Oh, so your contempt for women is that they can only be motivated by looks. | |
| So your view is that women are just shallow creatures that only care about looks, is that right? | |
| That's the... explanation for the mystery. | |
| I'm still, like, I feel that I'm pulling up those beliefs and trying to figure out why... | |
| No, it just means that you don't want to get married. | |
| Because if women are basically shallow creatures driven only by a man's looks or height or whatever, then why would you want a woman? | |
| Right. Okay, so dispel the mystery. | |
| I'm not sure exactly, but I know that's your interpretation of the dream, but all right. | |
| I said hi to dispel the mystery, and she began to tell me something that disturbed me, being too explicit about her tragic past and how she wants a family in the future. | |
| I slipped out of the store by pretending to go to the bathroom and went down the street to where I knew my friends would show up. | |
| Alright, so the question is, why does she burden you with all of these tragic facts? | |
| She's just staring at you. | |
| You say hi to dispel the mystery. | |
| Yeah. Again, I'm still not sure what that means. | |
| But did you find her attractive in the dream? | |
| I thought she had nice hair, pretty face. | |
| Didn't seem like she was terribly overweight. | |
| And I suppose I... I found her physically attractive, yes. | |
| But it doesn't... | |
| It was good enough to return the attention that she was giving to me. | |
| So you found her attractive? | |
| Yes. Okay. | |
| So you say hi to dispel the mystery... | |
| I still don't, what does that mean? | |
| Does that mean, I still don't know what that means, to dispel the mystery. | |
| I think it's important, but I don't know what it means. | |
| Yeah, I suppose it's like, almost to answer the contradiction of why would a girl so attractive be paying attention to me, instead of my friends that are all around. | |
| Oh, okay, so your friends are more attractive than you? | |
| In this dream, at least, right. | |
| Okay, so a woman who singles you out must be pathological. | |
| I... | |
| There must be something wrong with her that she would single you out, right? | |
| Right. I know exactly where that comes from in my past. | |
| And my parents, where my dad essentially, with the way that he believed his value to sit, he thought that being with any woman was better than not having any woman at all. | |
| And that's That's something I haven't been... | |
| Well, that's why we're all here, right? | |
| I mean, how many people get to date the queen of the high school, right? | |
| Whoever the queen bee is, right? | |
| How many people get to date the queen of the high school? | |
| Well, almost nobody. So everybody settles, right? | |
| I mean, at least as far as physical attractiveness goes, people settle in terms of personality. | |
| So, I mean, if our ancestors hadn't settled, nobody would be here. | |
| Right. So... | |
| Oh, so dispel the mystery means she's deluded about your level of attractiveness. | |
| Yeah. And so to dispel the mystery is like, she looks at you and she has a projection or a fantasy about who you are. | |
| You say hi to dispel that fantasy. | |
| The other way around, to dispel my fantasy, that because she's super attractive, she'll be... | |
| Wait, she's super attractive? | |
| Which is fine. Earlier you just said she had a kind of pretty face and her head was nice. | |
| I would describe her as an 8 or a 9 and I would have been a 7. | |
| And I, in real life, would describe myself as a 7. | |
| So is this like, okay, so what burden is she carrying that she's looking at someone that's not as attractive? | |
| And that was immediately dispelled by her... | |
| Immediately dumping her travel past. | |
| Oh, to dispel the mystery of her. | |
| Her attractiveness. Yes. | |
| Okay, so she has to be disturbed or weird in some way to be attracted to you. | |
| Got it. Okay. Well, that's where the conjuring of the mystery was, was like, wait a minute, if you're so attractive, then why wouldn't you go for someone that's about your looks range? | |
| And you know that there are some women who don't particularly care about looks. | |
| I mean, do you really know that? | |
| I don't think I've ever seen that in... | |
| That's really sad. | |
| I've never seen that personally in relationships. | |
| Okay. There are women who don't care about looks. | |
| I mean, there are. | |
| And it's good that there are, of course, women who care about looks, and you as a man, you say she's attractive, but only because she's physically attractive, right? | |
| Right. I mean, this is just straight up projection, which is you care about looks, so you assume that only women care about looks. | |
| Women only care about looks. | |
| Does that make sense? Like, you focus on a woman's looks, and therefore you assume that, and this is the price you pay for focusing on a woman's looks, is then you, you know, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. | |
| If you focus on a woman's looks, then you assume she's going to focus on your looks, and you're going to come up short. | |
| Right, so the solution to that is to stop judging women solely by looks, right? | |
| Well, so for... | |
| Approaching them to say hi, how would you know anything else about a woman? | |
| Body language, body posture, a glint in the eye, a light in the eye, a sense of good humor, maybe laughter, anything, right? | |
| But there's so much more than just DNA, right? | |
| I've seen those in real life. | |
| It's just in this dream, that was the thing that was focused on. | |
| We're here talking about the dream, so excuse me for talking about the dream. | |
| All right. I slipped out of the store by pretending to go to the bathroom. | |
| So, you are false in the interaction on both sides. | |
| You're false getting in. | |
| Because you don't say hi to her because you're interested in her or think she's great or want to get to know her better. | |
| You say hi to her in order to dispel her attraction to you or your attraction to her or something like that, right? | |
| Right. So this is, I mean, it's not direct. | |
| It's kind of manipulative, even just to say hi, right? | |
| Yes. And so if you start a relationship with manipulation... | |
| It's founded on dishonesty, lack of directness, and then she is going to unburden herself, and then you're not even direct in disengaging, right? | |
| You pretend to go to the bathroom. | |
| So you're not direct in approaching her and you're not direct in disconnecting from her. | |
| from her. | |
| Yes. So there's this lack of boundaries, lack of directness, lack of honesty, right? | |
| So you're not there. | |
| You're not in the relationship. | |
| And in a way you draw the bad aspect of her past out of her by being indirect and dishonest. | |
| Right. Because if you say, there's got to be something wrong with you if you're attracted to me, and then she responds to that by showing that there's something wrong with her. | |
| In a sense, you're fishing for dysfunction, and you get it. | |
| I see. Got to be something wrong with you. | |
| Okay, here you go. Now, she's, of course, unconscious as well, too, but... | |
| Okay, so then you say, the girl finds me again outside, and after a scuffle... | |
| Well, what is the scuffle? | |
| I... I didn't know any better way to describe it, because it sort of just skips forward in time, where suddenly she's in a clear vessel, but it was an interaction between the two of us, like maybe I grabbed her wrists or something. | |
| But that was very... | |
| It was an unclear part of the dream. | |
| Okay, so you pretend to go to the bathroom, and you are not direct with her. | |
| Okay, so what would it be if you had a dream about directness and honesty and the girl stares at you in the convenience | |
| store and You do interact with her. What would be the most honest | |
| thing you could say? | |
| I noticed that you have been staring at me for a while and I | |
| plan. | |
| you I'm trying to dispel that mystery or trying to understand what it is that I can help with. | |
| I would give that a 3 out of 10. | |
| Okay. Oh, if it was direct. | |
| If you're direct and honest. | |
| I'm feeling concerned with you staring at me. | |
| Well, that's four. | |
| I think you're very attractive, but I find it completely weird that you would be staring at me rather than my friends who are taller and more attractive. | |
| Yes. Okay. | |
| And I want to talk to you so that you realize that I'm not actually that attractive or my friends are more of a catch or whatever, right? | |
| That has a completely different feel, and I like that. | |
| But that's as honest as you could be, right? | |
| Right. I mean, obviously, maybe that's a seven, because I don't know all that was going on in your head. | |
| But that would be as honest as you could be, right? | |
| Yes. And is that kind of incomprehensible in the real world? | |
| That sort of blows me away, yeah. | |
| But that's honesty, isn't it? | |
| It is, yes. So you're not honest. | |
| And also, let's say that for some reason this woman was dumping on you all of this stuff, right? | |
| What's the most honest thing that you could say in response? | |
| I'm feeling disturbed that you're dumping all this tragic past and desire for a family on me when we've just met. | |
| Yeah, listen, you know, best of luck with all of that stuff, but this is not, you know, I barely know you. | |
| And we don't have a relationship, so, you know, maybe talk to a therapist, maybe talk to friends, but this is not something that I'm comfortable with or want to engage in. | |
| Like, I don't want to engage with this level of kind of intimacy with somebody I've just met. | |
| So, listen, best of luck, but this is not for me. | |
| Yes. Right, but you're not honest that way either. | |
| Right. These... | |
| So the dream is trying to tell you what are the consequences of dishonesty? | |
| What are the consequences of not being direct and honest? | |
| Right. It's... | |
| People will... | |
| misunderstand what I'm trying to communicate. | |
| No. You're a liar. | |
| People will misunderstand what I'm trying to communicate. | |
| You're lying. You're faking. | |
| Oh, I have to go to the bathroom rather than this is not right for me. | |
| And you don't even have to give all of this information. | |
| You don't owe her any big detailed explanation. | |
| You can just say, you know, hey, it's been interesting talking to you. | |
| I have to go. My friends have left. | |
| Yes. As opposed to, like, so indirect that you've got a fake going to the bathroom. | |
| You have to hide in the bathroom. | |
| And she's not dangerous, she's not scary, but because you're pathologically and compulsively lying here, right? | |
| And you see, you don't have to talk to the girl at all. | |
| You can look at her, trust your instincts and say, there's something off with this woman and not talk to her. | |
| Does that make sense? That's honest too. | |
| Yeah, that makes sense. | |
| But you get drawn in. | |
| This, this weirdo woman is staring at you and then you engage and then you falsify everything. | |
| It's like I want to get tremor. | |
| Well, hold on. That wasn't me. | |
| That was some other part trying to come out there. | |
| That's what my inner mom wants. | |
| Because I don't... | |
| I don't yet... | |
| I'm still trying to dispel this curse that I can't... | |
| Find quality women without the help of my mom. | |
| Yeah, right. Okay. | |
| So, the girl finds you outside after a scuffle. | |
| She ends up locked in a clear vessel containing septic waste. | |
| Now, is this like a big giant... | |
| I get an image of a big giant vertical test tube or something like that. | |
| Is it something else? Beaker? | |
| Horizontal test tube, in a sense. | |
| So she's lying on her side, is that right? | |
| Or she's on her back? It's large enough that she can stand upright. | |
| It's like a very, very large... | |
| Like a big swimming pool, almost size? | |
| I guess imagine one of the propane tanks at a gas station, but so big that somehow she can look up through the glass... | |
| Lid, I don't know. | |
| Okay, got it, got it. | |
| Okay, so there's a lever that fills and drains the septic tank. | |
| The septic tank being the same as the clear vessel. | |
| Yeah, yeah, I get that, I get that. | |
| So you repeatedly fill the tank a number of times, trying to punish the girl until she gives up her affectionate pursuit. | |
| Right. So, I mean, this is sadistic, right? | |
| Yeah. No, it's absolutely sadistic. | |
| And your friends are participating in all of this? | |
| Yeah, they demonstrated it. | |
| They demonstrated it, right? Right. | |
| Okay. So, what are your friends' views of women? | |
| Like in the real world? | |
| or your roommates or whoever, right? | |
| I assume that they don't have very positive views of women. | |
| No, no. Either they're complete Madonna moms that you can't question at all, or they're just emotional basket cases, would be the way that they describe them. | |
| And if your career is going all right, why do you have roommates who are dysfunctional? | |
| Because I haven't chosen to find a place that I'm somehow obsessed with saving money without actually saving money. | |
| It's sort of like your advice to people, don't live with your parents if you're saving money, because you're not saving money, you're just taking on that amount of trouble. | |
| I plan on moving out in the next few months. | |
| I was just wondering about that. | |
| So, you put the girl, is that right? | |
| I mean, you don't know for sure. | |
| After a scuffle, she ends up locked in a clear vessel containing septic waste. | |
| So, she's literally buried in shit, right? | |
| Right. Okay, so, she dumps all of this shit on you about her past and her trauma, right? | |
| And then you try to seal her up, in a sense, in shit, right? | |
| So this is anger. | |
| So she frightens you to the point where you have to hide in the bathroom, and then she continues to pursue you, and you get so angry, you lock her up almost in her own shit, right? | |
| I mean, let me ask you this. | |
| Is the tank connected to anything else, or is it self-contained? | |
| It looks like there's pipes flowing from, like, a nearby building. | |
| Okay, all right. So you're like, if you dump your shit on me, I'll dump you right | |
| back in the shit. | |
| And to some degree it felt like it was my shit, not just from the building or | |
| anything. | |
| Right, so you were locking her up. | |
| So she dumps her shit on you and you dump her in your shit, right? | |
| Okay, so then you accrual to her and in a way that she wasn't to you because she just said stuff. | |
| Whereas you're actually putting her in a vat of shit, right? | |
| So this is, because you are dishonest, you become cruel. | |
| Because you can't have rational boundaries, because you engage with a crazy woman in a crazy way, right? | |
| Or you engage with a disturbed woman in a dissociated way. | |
| You end up angry with her because you're externalizing your responsibility for the matter. | |
| You never had to talk to her at all. | |
| Right. So you engage, pretend to be victimized, and then aggress. | |
| You pretend to be a victim so you become an abuser. | |
| Right. And your friends are like, go for it, man. | |
| Yeah, let me help you. Here's how you do it. | |
| Yikes, man. So rather than say, I punked out and hid in the bathroom, not even like a coward, as a coward, so I engaged with this woman who was disturbed. | |
| I was kind of angry at her for pretending to like me or whatever and then I play the victim and then my friends and | |
| I participate in torturing her. | |
| So then, she disappears. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Right? So you fill and empty the tank with shit a number of times to train her away from you. | |
| You think she's learned her lessons but she has disappeared. | |
| Because the shit wasn't actually about getting rid of... | |
| It's about almost breaking her down to accept it. | |
| She had disappeared. | |
| She can't disappear, right? | |
| I mean, physically. No. | |
| So your dream is saying something that is impossible has happened, which means it's psychological, right? | |
| So she had disappeared. | |
| So she's not dead. | |
| Otherwise she'd just be dead in the tank, right? | |
| She had disappeared. | |
| So what that to me indicates is that she was never there in the first place. | |
| Because dreams have a real logic to them, right? | |
| So it means that she was never real in the first place. | |
| All the way into the convenience store? | |
| Yeah, yeah, right. All the very beginning. | |
| Like, this is like a fight club kind of stuff, right? | |
| Because if she can just disappear, and again, dreams have a logic. | |
| So, if a dream has someone disappear, it means they were never real in the first place. | |
| Okay. Now, the indication that she is real is that your friends say, Now, do your friends say, here's how to torture her, or here's how to empty and fill the septic tank with shit? | |
| They just say how to fill the septic tank with shit. | |
| They just see the situation of me standing next to the septic tank. | |
| I don't think they necessarily know that she's in there. | |
| So they don't refer to the girl? | |
| No. So it confirms that it was just in the Well, it's somewhere, but it's not in the real world. | |
| You say, I shudder and chase after my friends who had continued down the street. | |
| We walk past a clear swimming pool, and I notice there's a murky blob near the bottom of the pool, and it moves and begins to surface. | |
| Okay, so, I mean, the opposite of a swimming pool is a swimming pool is designed either through salt water or chlorine to clear fecal matter, right? | |
| To not have shit, to deal with shit. | |
| And it is a form of entertainment, not a form of torture. | |
| I mean, a sewage tank is designed to take liquids away from you, or a sewage system, whereas a pool is designed to keep liquids close to you so that you can enjoy the swim or the splash or whatever, right? | |
| So, I notice there's a murky blob near the bottom of the pool and it moves and begins to surface. | |
| I see a two-year-old toddler girl with mottled black skin and I knew at once she was related to the girl in the septic tank, right? | |
| I try to keep my eye on this walking corpse while also... | |
| So, how is it walking if it's in the swimming pool? | |
| So, it's like climbed out on like the steps on the corner of the pool. | |
| Okay, so the toddler climbs out. | |
| I try to keep my eye on this walking corpse while also sticking with my friends, but eventually my friends slipped out of view. | |
| I then turned around to embrace the two-year-old's cold body when she vanished. | |
| The soul seemed to merge with me. | |
| I started to weep. Hmm, that's a wild transition. | |
| Do you have any history with swimming or swimming pools that's vivid psychologically? | |
| The main one was at a summer camp that I had. | |
| I tried to do a front flip and overestimated and landed on my back and felt myself almost paralyzed for a second because I had landed right on my spine as I was sinking to the bottom of the pool and then shocking myself awake and swimming to the surface. | |
| And do you have a pool at home at all? | |
| No. My friends had it when I was growing up, but it's mainly about summer camp and being out away from my family. | |
| It's what I associate pools with, usually. | |
| Okay. So, let's see here. | |
| So she is telling you about her childhood, and you punish her. | |
| But then when she is a leprous child, you hug her. | |
| Yes. But then she vanishes. | |
| The souls seem to merge with me. | |
| It's like she went incorporeal almost, right? | |
| Like she almost became coast-like. | |
| Right. | |
| This has to be inner mom. | |
| Not sure if I got that. | |
| What did you say? I'm sorry. | |
| I was saying this has to be inner mom. | |
| Oh, in her mom. I heard in her mom, and I'm like... | |
| Okay. | |
| Has to be in her mom, because it's not a real person in the world. | |
| It is obviously a psychological phenomenon, because it's changing ages, it's changing locations without transition. | |
| There's no pipe that goes from the sewage to the swimming pool. | |
| Obviously, it's a completely self-contained item, right? | |
| Yes. And your friends don't see any of this. | |
| No. I mean, they were already leaving me behind. | |
| it didn't seem like they cared that they had left me to my own devices. | |
| Okay, I'm just going to say I have a two-year-old toddler girl with mothles black skin. | |
| Yeah. What does that remind you of? | |
| of? What have you seen that's like that? I think the only time I've ever seen | |
| corpses of any kind have been from like TV shows. | |
| you All right, I'll tell you what I think. | |
| This doesn't mean, obviously, that I'm right. | |
| It's your dream, right? I'll tell you what I think. | |
| I think your dream is telling you that your mother was broken so early that even if you'd given her affection when she was two years old, it wouldn't have helped. | |
| It wouldn't have fixed her. | |
| It's trying to give you relief from the burden of trying to fix your mother or feeling there's something you could have done with your mother. | |
| Because she was wrecked already by two years old. | |
| Unrecoverable. Because, look, isn't the fantasy if we have dysfunctional parents the fantasy that, boy, you know, if I could just love them enough or the right way or maybe even have a time machine to give them hugs in the past or something like that? | |
| Yes. That I could have fixed them. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. | |
| And I assume that when you were a teenager, and obviously if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. | |
| It's totally fine if I am. | |
| I assume that you had a fair amount of conflict with your mom as a teenager? | |
| Yeah. Yeah, I know. | |
| To the point where I defood her almost a decade before everyone else. | |
| Sorry, I thought your defood was just recent, and now you're saying 10 years back. | |
| Oh, so from her in particular, I removed myself from her existence. | |
| Before everyone else. | |
| And that was accomplished because she... | |
| My dad had divorced her as well that same year. | |
| So she had been pushed out of the family, so it was easy enough for me to also push her out of my life. | |
| So, yeah, we had... | |
| It's your father and stepmother that you separated with six months ago? | |
| My dad never remarried, but him and my siblings, yeah. | |
| Okay, got it, got it. Okay, so did your mother tell you about her childhood when you knew her? | |
| And did she talk about the horrors of her childhood? | |
| Yeah. Okay, so that's the woman in the convenience store, and family is convenience, right? | |
| Because it's a relationship that you just have by breathing, right? | |
| Yes. So, your mother... | |
| Oh, and all of my male friends were my brothers and my dad through my childhood. | |
| Okay. Right. So, convenience store is you just get these relationships by being in a family. | |
| And then your mother dumps on you and you are helpless to escape, so you have to make up excuses. | |
| And this would be the case Of course, when you're in a family, you can't set up boundaries in a family with people who have no boundaries. | |
| Like, you can't do it, because they'll just escalate aggression. | |
| So, she... | |
| It's interesting because it's like you're meeting... | |
| How old was the girl in the convenience store and how old were you in the dream? | |
| Just roughly. I think I might have been 17, 18. | |
| She seemed 15. And when did you separate from your mother? | |
| How old were you? 19. | |
| Right. So you're going back to a time... | |
| And saying, okay, if I met my mother in her teenage years, could I fix her? | |
| And you try to escape, she pursues you, you get a scuffle, and then you try to punish her, which would be fighting with your mother as a teenager. | |
| Right. Okay, so me listening has not helped, right? | |
| So as a little kid, you just had to listen, right? | |
| Because you're trapped in the convenience store, which is the family. | |
| So you couldn't establish any boundaries. | |
| You couldn't ignore her and you had to make up stories. | |
| So as a little kid, she could just dump all her emotional shit on you and you couldn't get away. | |
| Does that ring true? So then, you get out of the convenience store, which is hitting your teens, right? | |
| So you have some separation from the family, right? | |
| I mean, I don't mean that you moved out, but you have some independence. | |
| You can be with friends, right? | |
| Yes. And then you fight with the woman, right? | |
| Now, at the end of your fighting... | |
| She has disappeared, which is your defu with your mother in your teens. | |
| Right. Does that make sense? | |
| Yes. So, letting her dump on you doesn't help, doesn't work, builds resentment and anger. | |
| Fighting with her, she doesn't submit, she doesn't change, she doesn't, it doesn't work, and she vanishes. | |
| Now, did you... Sorry, go ahead. | |
| With this translation, I think it would have been my dad that was showing the lever that you can fill and empty the septic tank. | |
| I assume that your dad fought with her too. | |
| Yes, and that's why they divorced or one of the reasons right? | |
| So she disappears years. | |
| And then you chase after your friends. | |
| But you're still lying. | |
| And again, I'm not calling you a liar, right? | |
| Or saying that there's some sort of conscious big... | |
| But you're still lying. | |
| Because, of course, if you or I were in the real world walking down streets and we saw possibly a toddler at the bottom of a pool, what would we say? | |
| Oh, my God. Let's jump the fence. | |
| Let's help this kid, right? Yeah. | |
| But you don't. The two-year-old toddler girl, that would have been my sister. | |
| So she would have been two when I was 12, 13. | |
| Or possibly. | |
| No. I think that's an important thing to note, though, that the two-year-old girl would have been right around the age of my little sister as well. | |
| And I... Oh, related to the girl in the septic tank, like her daughter, right? | |
| Possibly, yeah. I don't know. | |
| It might have been a reincarnation or something along those lines. | |
| I just knew there's something shared here. | |
| Right. But you don't say anything to your friends, right? | |
| So, you try and keep an eye while sticking with my friends. | |
| Now, I get a little confused about this. | |
| She's at the bottom of the pool. You're walking down the street with your friends. | |
| She gets out of the pool, but you're still at the pool. | |
| So, at some point, you split from your friends, right? | |
| And you stay with the girl? Yes. | |
| They, like, slip around the corner because I'm trying to go the speed of adults and the speed of a toddler, right? | |
| Right. So, you turn back from your friends. | |
| And your friends don't notice. They don't say anything. | |
| And you don't say to your friends, I got something to deal with here, right? | |
| Why? Do you have any thought in the dream that you want to tell your friends or not? | |
| I almost think I'm punishing them. | |
| If they're not paying attention to me, why do I pay attention to them? | |
| What was your mother's relationship to self-pity? | |
| She was allowed to feel it. | |
| No one else was. So, she was a victim, she could play the victim, she could be hard done by, but nobody else could feel that, right? | |
| I mean, other than sympathy for her, they couldn't feel that for themselves, is that right? | |
| Right, right. As soon as they were no toddlers, essentially as soon as they had learned language, she no longer connected with them. | |
| Right. So, if the toddler could have been saved, the dream would have told you that. | |
| So, listening to your mother doesn't help. | |
| Fighting with your mother doesn't help. | |
| So, then you go against every instinct you have, and you hug a toddler and With a horrible disease or it's undead or like something crazy, right? | |
| Like the mottled black skin is either leprosy or it's dead and is a corpse. | |
| So you try the sixth sense thing where you turn and hug the ghost or like that which is most repellent and repulsive and terrifying you try to give affection to, right? | |
| Yeah. Does that make sense? | |
| Well, it's the last person I can connect with in the dream since my friends had gone. | |
| But you can't connect with her. | |
| Because she disappears. | |
| Now, if the dream was saying, look, if you had given affection to your inner mother, you would have healed her, right? | |
| Then the two-year-old baby, you would have hugged her, and her skin would have healed, and she would have hugged you back, and her hair would have turned golden, or whatever. | |
| Like, it would have given you some, you could have fixed this, right? | |
| So you listen, you fight, you leave, you try to establish boundaries, none of it works. | |
| and then you try giving affection to the broken child and that doesn't work either. | |
| So even if you had been your mother's parent when she was two years old you could not have fixed her. | |
| You could not have fixed her. | |
| Thanks. | |
| And maybe this is also wrapped up with your sisters and whether you can fix them. | |
| The dream, I think, is about humility. | |
| Because we have, all of us, every single one of us, has the main character vanity issue. | |
| You know, I was talking about this on a live stream last night, and people come in, hey, what did I miss? | |
| It's like, that's main character syndrome, right? | |
| So, you have the main character syndrome. | |
| Now, in the main character syndrome, we're omnipotent. | |
| Because we see all these movies where the heroes are, for all intents and purposes, omnipotent. | |
| Yes. Right? | |
| I mean, Tom Cruise can ride motorcycles off canyons and be fine, and, you know, Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones can, you know, dodge bullets and all kinds of... | |
| The functionally, it's all a massive main character infection of a kind of megalomania or grandiosity, right? | |
| Yes, yes. Because if we could fix our parents, but we didn't, we would feel, I think, somewhat bad about that. | |
| Now, part of the curse that society puts on the victims of child abuse is, just fix them. | |
| Love them, forgive them, be the beggar person, be the better person, right? | |
| Yeah. I mean, I remember reading this in the Globe and Mail, Canada newspaper, A Canadian newspaper, they used to have these essays on the back about a variety of subjects. | |
| And I remember one woman was like, yeah, my dad was really cold and hard and so on. | |
| But, you know, when he was dying, I taught him how to hug and eventually he melted and gave me a hug and all this kind of stuff, right? | |
| So it's her job to provide affection and to melt through his defenses and so on, right? | |
| Right. And that probably only happened because he was suffering dementia and thought it was someone else, right? | |
| Well, I mean, he was drugged or, you know, but who knows? | |
| I mean, who knows what happens to people's defenses when they're dying? | |
| It's kind of like what, like, defenses are there to protect you in the future, and if you don't have much of a future, what's the point of the defenses? | |
| I mean, it's like, saving money is like, how much do people save money when they're on their deathbed, right? | |
| And they say, well, I can't order this Diet Coke because I've got to save money. | |
| It's like, no, you're dying. The money's not going with you, right? | |
| It's like, oh, no, I'm not going to smoke this cigarette. | |
| It's like, you're on a... | |
| And who knows if any of this is even true, right? | |
| This could just be some sentimental stuff, right? | |
| Yes. But anyway, so the idea is that, because, you know, we want to fix our parents, both out of self-protection and care for them. | |
| We want to save and fix our parents. | |
| And so you listened to your mother when she talked about her terrible childhood or dumped her emotions out, and you listened. | |
| And, I mean, partly that was being trapped in the convenience store, and partly that was out of, you know, maybe this will help, right? | |
| And then, but you couldn't establish any boundaries with her because she was crazy. | |
| So then, you establish boundaries through aggression, through fighting, right? | |
| But that doesn't work either. And then, you try affection. | |
| You try turning, gritting your teeth, and hugging that which is horrifying. | |
| Now, of course, in the sentimental view of the universe, you hugging the tormented child who is your mother heals her. | |
| But it doesn't. She vanishes again. | |
| Now, the soul seems to merge with me. | |
| We'll get to that. But she vanishes again. | |
| So all she's doing is disappearing. | |
| Which I think is to say, or the dream is telling you, that your mother was not ever there. | |
| In other words, she was just a bunch of defenses, NPC, programming, automatic responses, self-justifications, that she was never there as a vital living thinking person who could connect with others. | |
| and that it happened before she was two years old. | |
| And no amount of affection Now, we can say, I mean, we don't know the answer to this. | |
| Maybe it's somewhere buried in the dream. | |
| Now, the answer is, was your mother doomed because she was just so traumatized when she was a baby and a toddler? | |
| Or was she doomed because she just never made the choice for healing? | |
| We'll never know the answer to that. | |
| Like there's absolutely no way to ever, because the only person who would know for sure would be your mother and she | |
| can't tell the truth. | |
| So the soul seemed to merge with me. | |
| Thank you. | |
| you So the soul, so affection, she vanishes. | |
| Her body vanishes. | |
| Her soul seems to merge with me, which means that your mother was dead before you even knew her. | |
| And there was no resurrection possible. | |
| You had no power to help her, to fix her. | |
| And I think your dream is saying that everything that happened to you had nothing to do with you. | |
| Everything that happened to you was programming. | |
| That makes sense, yes. | |
| And I think it's trying to liberate you from the burden. | |
| I mean, obviously, if our parents are very unhappy, it makes sense for us to wonder if we could have helped them or fixed them or done something or given them comfort. | |
| Because what do they do? They demand comfort. | |
| They demand comfort from us. | |
| And of course, evolutionarily speaking, we have to provide it or we're doomed, right? | |
| They demand comfort from us and letting go of that demand for comfort is really tough. | |
| Letting go of the delusion that we can fix people who were already dead too is really tough. | |
| To say to the people who raised us, This had nothing to do with me. | |
| It feels almost like crazy, right? | |
| What do you mean it had nothing to do with me? | |
| They're my parents. Right. | |
| I suppose it's sort of like you were saying in a live stream, I think a week ago, well, what does that have to do with me? | |
| Right? Yeah. What choices did I make that led to it? | |
| Did any of those choices actually influence the outcome? | |
| Not likely. Well, but we had to believe that when we were younger. | |
| We had to believe that there was something we could do. | |
| Like, you know, primitive societies forced to live at the base of a volcano have to come up with a whole bunch of magical rituals by which they keep the volcano god content so he doesn't rain lava on their asses, right? | |
| So we have to come up with all of these rituals that we believe control the uncontrollable. | |
| And your rituals are... | |
| Your rituals are... | |
| Saying hi to dispel the mystery. | |
| Listening, listening, listening. | |
| Slipping out. Pretending to go to the bathroom. | |
| Locking her in septic waste. | |
| Punishing her. Hugging her. | |
| Right, so you try listening, fighting, hugging, affection, distance. | |
| And it's all fundamentally isolating because you can't tell anyone about anything. | |
| Or you choose not to. | |
| And it's saying that it... | |
| There was nothing you could do. | |
| There's nothing that I could do. | |
| It's just stop isolating. Well, I don't know. | |
| See, again, you want to jump to the conclusions, which is a way of avoiding the feelings. | |
| I don't know what it means. But I think it means that your friends, you don't go to your friends for help because your friends won't help you. | |
| And maybe this is to say as your family, when you were younger, your brothers, your father. | |
| And those roommates, yeah. | |
| And roommates and people, right? | |
| Right. So you are isolated in... | |
| The possibilities of these alternate realities where you can fix your mom or you can fix your parents or you don't have to go through this or you can find some switch or some lever that will have people... | |
| Right, so in a sense, I think the dream is saying... | |
| You're trying to almost generate empathy in the girl. | |
| I know this is crazy because it sounds so cruel, and it is cruel, but it seems to me like, well, you're putting me in shit, so I'm going to put you in shit, and that way you'll understand what it's like for me. | |
| Yeah. Which is what fighting with crazy people is the illusion, right? | |
| So we fight with crazy people and we get mad at them and we yell at them and, you know, whatever, right? | |
| Because we want them to feel what we felt when they were doing that to us when we were younger, particularly mothers, right, or fathers. | |
| Right. Trying to generate. | |
| Yeah, I'm going to recreate my experience when I was young with you. | |
| And then we hope that somehow they're going to be like, oh, wow, you know, when you fight with me, I've really been thinking about how I lauded it over you when you were a kid, right? | |
| But it never happens. | |
| It never works. And if your mother wasn't... | |
| A living consciousness even before you were born, then you had no chance of resurrection. | |
| you had no chance. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And when you let go of the possibility, you let go of the responsibility, | |
| which means you let go of the shame and the burden. | |
| You know, my grandmother died before I was born. | |
| on. | |
| you More than 20 years before I was born. | |
| My grandmother was killed in the bombing raid of Dresden. | |
| More than 20 years before I was born. | |
| How guilty do I feel for her death? | |
| It would be incomprehensible if you did. | |
| So that's what the dream is saying. | |
| That your mother was in a sense dead before you were even born. | |
| So you have as much responsibility for her dysfunction as I have for my grandmother's | |
| death. | |
| She was already drowned when she was two. | |
| . | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| No, you're exactly right. | |
| There was a time where she, as a two-year-old, fell down in a kiddie pool and the mom only found her after like a minute and pulled her up. | |
| Really? Yeah. | |
| You're telling me this at an hour 40 in? | |
| It didn't dawn on me until just now. | |
| No, that's fine. That's fine. | |
| That's fine. Right, so I think your dream is saying she basically never came out of that pool. | |
| I see. Well, I'm glad we tied the mom thing in, because that was a slightly shaky theory, but I think it fits better now. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, yeah. | |
| So when you say the soul seems to merge with me, that sounds almost like an infection of craziness, but what I think is it's an acceptance of death. | |
| Yeah. I feel that. | |
| I feel that it was a release of burden and I can I could finally | |
| grieve the the childhood that I had thought was was my own. | |
| So if that is a relief of burden then you can start to look at friendships as | |
| boon companions in the challenging battles of life rather than the home for | |
| the incurable's walking wounded bandage fest. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| Was your mother focused on her looks? | |
| No. | |
| you It was more of the looks of her home, the looks of her... | |
| Appearances as a whole, right? | |
| Yeah, that's the baddest. Absolutely. | |
| Yeah, so I mean that would be a clue or a tip, right? | |
| Women who are focused on, and men too, right? | |
| But women who are focused on status and looks do so because they don't have qualities of character to offer. | |
| And I'm not saying that, like, virtuous women are slovenly or unattractive or don't care but don't wash their hair. | |
| I'm not saying anything like that, but women who are significantly focused on appearance | |
| are covering up something. | |
| So, I guess the last two sentences, the soul seems to merge with me and I started to weep. | |
| That is the acceptance that I didn't have responsibility for someone that was already long gone. | |
| Right. It's recognizing that the funeral service happened long before you were born. | |
| As with my grandmother, the funeral service for her happened 20 years before I was born. | |
| And so, it's not that you're weeping because of the funeral service. | |
| The death is the death of responsibility. | |
| You're weeping because you had no agency in the dysfunction of your mother and your father | |
| and your sisters. | |
| There is no magic in the healing of others. | |
| Either they want to do it, in which case maybe you can assist, or they don't want to do it, in which case there's precisely and absolutely nothing you can do. | |
| If you have a friend who's overweight and your friend keeps eating, there's absolutely nothing you can do. | |
| Now that helplessness is painful, particularly if we have a dedication and facility with our own selves to try and improve. | |
| But recognizing that limitation is the only fundamental way that we can stay safe. | |
| Right? So the dream is about the past, but the dream is really about the future. | |
| Because there are going to be crazy people who are going to invite you in. | |
| And if they're physically attractive, and you've heard this a million times in call-in shows, right? | |
| If the women are physically attractive, you'll say, okay, well, she's pretty, she's hot, she's cute, she's sexy, whatever, right? | |
| And I can fix her. And you can't. | |
| And so, in terms of staying safe, you can't fix people. | |
| You maybe can give them some help if they're already in motion. | |
| I mean, a coach can maybe help someone who's constantly dedicated and exercising and working hard to improve their sport. | |
| But a coach can't turn a 300-pound person into an elite tennis player if they don't even want to show up to practice. | |
| They can't do it. We can drag them off the couch, put a tennis racket in their arm, swing their arm for them. | |
| Like, this can't happen. Right. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, you know, people have to have their own momentum first. | |
| It's giving people your free will. | |
| And giving them pure free will means diminishing your authority in the matter. | |
| Giving people pure free will. | |
| And giving myself free will as well. | |
| Because trying to get other people, sorry. | |
| If you think you can change people, it's kind of vagablanical, right? | |
| Because you're thinking, I can substitute my will for theirs. | |
| I can possess them. | |
| So your mother's dead toddler soul submerges with you, but you are trying to elbow other people out of their own minds and take over their bodies for them and make them better, which is to say, they are puppets and you are the person with choice. | |
| But the safety in life is recognizing that if people aren't in the process of deeply committing to self-knowledge and growth and wisdom, there's nothing you can do. | |
| Now, you have... | |
| I mean, that's the wisdom. | |
| Of course, you have your balls and your loins and your hormones and, you know, she's hot, she's pretty, whatever, right? | |
| So we have all of that, and I understand all of that. | |
| But I think the dream is saying... | |
| that you are never going to be safe if you make decisions based upon attraction. | |
| Because the reason you engaged with this woman was because she was pretty. | |
| you And then you kept engaging with her, kept engaging with her, kept engaging with her, all because she was pretty. | |
| It's not so much that, why would you ever be attracted to me? | |
| It's like, if you're this messed up, you can't see my virtues. | |
| So I think your dream is also saying, look, if some unstable woman is attracted to you, and she's pretty, that's the grave danger. | |
| That's the greatest danger that men face outside of war, and maybe even more dangerous than war, is a messed up woman who's attractive to you and attracted to you. | |
| Yeah. And the dream is saying, She can't see your virtues if she doesn't have virtues. | |
| If she's crazy, she can't see and respect your sanity, so all she'll try and do is engage with your narcissism, engage with your main character syndrome, engage with your megalomania, that you can fix her, that you can... | |
| Yeah, she can't see my virtues behind my Stanley Cup. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. | |
| Yeah, so she will say how dysfunctional she is, With the invitation that you come in and fix her. | |
| And so she all she has to offer is to feed your narcissism by pretending that you can | |
| Substitute your will for hers I feel a deep appreciation for this | |
| I think it's helpful, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. Makes sense that it would come up when I'm suddenly pointing to the idea of what do I really want from a relationship. | |
| Well, I mean, you... | |
| Because it's like, well, this is what you have been doing. | |
| Yeah, you set up a boundary with the woman from Asia and you recognize that she's not the one for you. | |
| And then, of course, your unconscious is like, oh, are we doing this thing where we define our own relationships now? | |
| Okay, let's get to the root. | |
| Cranes always sort of boggle my mind. | |
| Oh, they're fantastic. Such a cool mechanic. | |
| Yeah, it's wild. It's wild. | |
| Okay, so I probably should get some lunch in me. | |
| I haven't eaten it yet today. But so is that a good enough place to stop here? | |
| Yeah. No, it's given me plenty to think about. | |
| And I will certainly give it a couple of listens to. | |
| Absolutely. Well, I really, really appreciate that. | |
| It's nice to do a dream, which we haven't done for a while. | |
| So I appreciate that and keep me posted about how it's going. | |
| Absolutely. I will keep you posted as always. | |
| Thanks, man. All the best. Bye. Take care. |
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