Fellow conspiracy realist, thank you for joining us here. On December thirty first, the end of the western calendar year. Now a lot of people will look back on a year, and especially around this time, we'll start thinking about the future. This made us think of a series we did beginning in August of twenty twenty about precognition, about the idea of having a dream that violates linear time.
Right, be it a dream or taking a step further a premonition. I think it's also appropriate in these holiday times, thinking about like Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol and ebeneze rescrewed flying through the various versions of what his life might hold, where he'd to go down certain paths.
Yeah, we got a fresh sign of twelve months on the way. What will they hold you guys more Epstein file.
We dive into the science of dreams, right. I think we were all surprised to learn that modern human science doesn't fully understand what happens when you pass out, you know, for your three to twelve hours every twenty four hours. Thank you, Apaolo, Let's keep it in This is our classic episode. Joined us after this in oh January first, twenty twenty six for have dreams really predicted the future?
Chapter two? For now, let's roll the tape.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of Iheartrading.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Name is Nolah.
They call me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission control decand most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Let's begin today's episode, which gets very strange, with a question Fello listeners, what's the most vivid dream you've ever experienced? You know, for many people this answer will come to your mind immediately in a flash of images, sensations, or emotions that are often almost indistinguishable from experiences in the
waking world. Before the dawn of recorded history, these things called dreams haunted us, They inspired, terrified, and guided our ancestors. And dreams, you know, everyone knows they're often central plot points in ancient myths, and who hasn't, of course, heard the more modern tales of a visionary scientist, an inventor and artist, a writer, or someone receiving inspiration and suddenly solving a problem in a dream and having a real
solution to a problem when they wake up. Long story short, dreams have been pivotal throughout the span of human existence, and we still don't understand them. We still don't completely get what's happening with dreams. We know they tell us about the past, we know they recontextualize the present, but could they also tell us about the future?
Here are the.
Facts, My goodness, you know, I don't want to lose any time here, but I have a reoccurring dream when I'm very stressed out where I am physically jumping across asteroids that are flowing at me, or like moving towards me. You guys, have any like stressed dreams that you've ever had like that or maybe a positive.
Wad, Dude, I have this recurring dream where I'm like I've made it, my band has made it, and we're like playing before you know, the biggest crowd I've ever seen in the entire history of playing music, and I don't know any of the songs. I'm like dreadfully underprepared, or maybe like I'm in the arcade fire cool and I just freeze. I don't know any of the songs I have that dream a lot. What does it mean, guys? What does it mean?
Well, hopefully today we're gonna find out, because we do know what dreams are, or at least we have a pretty good understanding of what they are. A fancy way to phrase it would be something like dreams are patterns of information, specifically something that we have taken in as sensory information, and the dream occurs when the brain is in a resting state and somehow using this information and making essentially a story or at least patterns from it.
And if we want to be a little more blunt about it, dreams are hallucinations. They take every box for everything that's ever been described as a hallucination. And we've talked about it in previous episodes, But if you describe the process of dreaming or even just sleeping to some life form that had never encountered it, it sounds so bizarre.
We've just all sort of accepted that anywhere from four to eight hours out of every twenty four hours, we will we will pass out, our bodies will be useless, we'll go into some weird other world and then we gain control of our body again and everybody acts like nothing happened.
It's odd, right.
And every once in a while we encounter shadow people that want to thwart our plans of living.
Those pesky shadow people always trying to suffocate us in our sleep. That's no fun. But we're talking specifically today about I don't know, Ben, you have this really great analogy for dreams, just the idea of like your brain kind of as at hard drive, sort of like sorting out the bits or like defragging, like kind of cleaning out the cobwebs, I guess of the day and subconsciously
maybe doing some internal problem solving. Even if it's not like you wake up with some kind of aha moment, it is somehow doing some good for you, like in terms of, you know, maybe uncluttering your subconscious Let's say, is that about the span of it, Ben.
Yeah, yeah, Before we jump to, you know, the kind of theories that we have about dreams because we don't know what they are, let's bust one myth really quick. We've all heard that dreams only occur during a specific phase of sleep. Ram great band, the phrase Ram stands for rapid eye movement. It's like the fifth stage of sleep.
That's where the dreams are supposed to happen. However, we know that multiple studies have shown maybe we dream mainly in the RAM phase, but we also dream in other phases. We can't be the dream process cannot be quite as easily categorized as we would like, and that's where the theories come in. So one of those leading theories. There are loads and loads of great research pieces on dreams.
One of those theories is just what you described, that dreams are a part of memory processing, meaning that it helps us consolidate things we've learned while also transferring our short term memory to our long term memory storage. So yes, I think the analogy holds that. To me, it seems like a good description is the brain's defragging the hard drive. But then again, is the brain the hard drive? What's doing the defragging? Is it the software? Is that the consciousness?
This gets very strange, very quickly.
But yeah, in that concept, it's as though all of those connections that your neurons have made, it's solidifying them, right if they're necessary. It's almost like the brain itself is trying to decide what's important. It's really weird. It's weird to think about your brain in its unconscious state doing one of the most important things that you can imagine, figuring out what you actually learned and what you should remember, or or.
How you actually feel about things. Sometimes I mean, like, perhaps my recurring dream about being unprepared is a signal or a symptom of me feeling overwhelmed at certain times. I don't have this dream all the time, but when I do have this dream, I think it's a product of me maybe feeling a little underwater with work or a little bit like I'm out of my depth or something, or like I kind of am a little bit adrift and maybe need a little bit of a course correction.
So they can be interesting when you have these over and over and you're like, oh, maybe this is a signal pointing towards something.
That's really a great observation, because another thing it could be is really just a problem solving activity that your brain goes through a way to go through those difficult, complicated things that you know are more deeply psychological than perhaps you appreciate it in the moment, and to get balance back in a way or to maybe put things in the right perspective for you.
But at the end of the day, it's all just kems, right, Like, it's all just firing neurons and you know, electrical impulses bouncing around.
Yeah, but that's like saying that music is only math for you know what I mean, it's a matter of perspective. I think that's an important theory to bring up as well.
The bit more, I wouldn't say reductionists, but the theory that wants to remove the concept of consciousness from the equation and says that dreams are simply the brain responding to an array of biochemical changes and electrical pulses that impulses that fire as you are asleep, whatever you might be, and the dream then is seen as nothing more than a side effect, right Like sunsets look pretty, but that
wasn't part of some grand plan. This argument says, it's just a very small side effect of graph in orbit. So we have these theories and they all The thing is that none of them, on the outset seem just straight wrong, none of them seem demonstrably incorrect. They just seem like the old adage of the mice describing an elephant, right, you know, different mice see different parts of the elephant. They think it's a bunch of different objects instead of
one large thing. We do, luckily know on numerous levels what happens when we dream. Every dream you have has some of the same guide posts. We tend to be the main characters of our own lives and our dreams. Just as in the waking world, you are in your dreams. Even when you feel like you're watching something happen, you
are in it. Things are happening, You're taking actions. The environment, the reality of the dream is responding to your actions, and in the universe of the dream, those are responses, and those actions they make sense. This is not really the case once you wake up and you think, wow, my, you know, like, my great aunt has been dead for years. She never played the Obo, and I have never been to Portugal.
Right, They're like, yeah, how come when I eat a chocolate covered pretzel in the real world, it's delicious treat. But in a dream, all my teeth fallout and I'm naked in front of a high school gym of my peers and they're all laughing at me. Why are they laughing at me?
Or like in the Far Side. One of the one of the greatest modern American comic strips, the the recurrent fear of showing up to a lecture without one's duck. That's a that's a deep cut for folks. But but yeah, it is true. These things have an internal logic. And if you practice dream journaling, which can be a tremendously useful psychological tool, then what you'll notice when you try to write out the plot points of your dreams is that things change, especially scenery. I didn't I didn't talk
about any of my recurrent dreams because they're weird. They kind of all occur in the same universe, and things that happen in one affect things in the other.
Whoa you have like a Ben Bolen cinematic dream universe.
It's not as cool as it sounds.
Man, that's pretty cool.
I don't know, it's not as cool as it sounds.
But but we all But the thing is, it makes sense when you're in the moment, right Like of course, my teeth falling out that is a tremendously common, uh dream trope, especially in the West. Maybe it's maybe has something to do with dentists. Maybe it has something to do with the rite of passage we experience when our baby teeth fall out. But yeah, yeah, so it's kind of programmed into us. But when we think about it, when we're awake, all of our thoughts have a kind
of familiar logic to them. Right, I did A because I want B or I did see because someone is going to do D later. And our brain, which is hugely underrated in the in the sort of avengers of our body. Our brain is always working through all this internal external stimuli. And your brain, like your heart, once it starts going, it doesn't get a break. It's not
supposed to get a break until you die. If your brain or your heart stop doing what they do, getting down how they get down, then you are very much in trouble. So when you're when you're asleep, your brain.
Is still active.
The brain is like the great white shark of the body. You know, if it stops, then it dies. And that's because of a couple of things. So the brain is divided into segments. As we know, we've got the limbic system in the mid brain, which deals with emotion in both waking and dreaming states. It's interesting there these these parts kind of have shared responsibilities and do similar functions
when you're awake and when you're asleep. And that includes the amygdala, which is particularly active when you're in a dream state.
Right, and then we've got the cortex. The cortex is what if the cortex had a job, If your dreams were a soulist corporation, and the cortex was an employee of your dreams, then it would have the title content creator, which is not a favorite title of mind. So the reason that's important is everything that your cortex does, your cortex rights and directs your dreams right, comes up with the plot lines. Everything you feel, from floating in a vast and knowable ocean to flying to jumping from one
impossible across one impossible chasm to another. All the people you meet, all the monsters that chase you, they all come from your cortex and the visual cortex right there at the back of your brain. If you're human, when you're listening to the this is especially active because we are such, you know, visual creatures, kind of the way that dog that dogs are olfactory creatures.
This made me wonder.
I don't have the science on it yet, but I wonder if dogs mainly dream and smell.
Well.
It's interesting too because I never really recall sounds from dreams, and I know that's that's a thing that happens. There's even a story Paul McCartney says that he came up with the melody to I Believe Yesterday in a dream and he woke up and he had this melody, and he said, and being a musical dude, I don't think I've ever dreamt of a melody. I think of it as a very specifically in the realm of visual hallucinatory
kind of state, you know. So I think that's pretty special for Paul to come out of a dream state with that melody. Have you guys ever dreamt sounds or remembered sounds from a dream?
Oh?
Yes, yeah, really happen at all.
I have several highly talkative monsters that inhabit my dreamscape, very talkative and in fascinating uh vocalizations. I highly recommend checking out one of these if you get a chance, one.
Of these mad brands.
Yeah, I'll oh yeah, just hot back there and my oh my underlit jimbae.
Look at that.
Uh So, you know it's fascinating that you're talking about that the cordex been. I think it's You're absolutely right. The cortex is the reason why we're almost It feels a lot of times for me and maybe a lot of others that you're kind of just a passenger in your dreams, like you're moving, you're going places, you're seeing things, things are changing, but you just kind of accept it.
You just kind of go with it. You're just headed in that direction, unless, of course, you've unlocked you know, the ability to locid dream, which is a whole other thing. But one of the reasons that it's that dreams are like that is because these parts of our brain, the lobes that are talked about so frequently, kind of the logic systems, those are the least active parts of your brain when you are dreaming, which it really explains why you know, things don't feel so strange until you wake up.
And maybe it's also one of the main reasons you don't remember too much.
My Great Gods is dead. She never played the Obo, I've never been to Portugal, and you know, and if I don't write it down in twenty three minutes, I'll forget dude.
But that, yeah, that's it, that's right, that's another thing like I've never been a dream journaler, and there's it has to be my dream has to pack such a waile up for me to remember it at all. But when it does, I do, and they stick with me and I remember them for many years. But typically unless you write it down super quick, you're still in that kind of like waking dreaming between state and then you kind of lose it. Right, Are you guys good at remembering dreams?
Uh?
What would you say your odds are or like in terms of like waking up and being able to recall specifics from a dream.
I keeping notes on my phone and it's always right by my bed, and yeah, constantly doing that.
What about you? Ben? Uh?
I I don't know necessarily think it's a good thing, but yes, yeah, okay, pretty I do. Well, it's no secret longtime listeners. I don't like sleep.
I resent it.
I think that science should already be at the point like where, you know, if I can call someone in freaking Bhutan and talk to them in real time with something you know, the size of an open hand, then I shouldn't have to I shouldn't have to sleep. We should have figured some some way around it. Well, then be someone to space. We said people to space.
But then, ben if if you do have to sleep because unfortunately our analog bodies require it for some dang reason. Uh, why not at least record as much as you possibly can. One day we're gonna be able to plug in somehow and just get that stuff like roll on quick time while I'm dreaming. And I can't wait for that.
Too, right, man. There's there's one thing though, to add with that.
You know, I spend a lot of time researching kind of what we talked about with lucid dreams, which is probably a story for another day, but I end up getting a lot of work done in dreams. It feels like I'm doing a lot of work. And then I wake up and I think, oh, I got to write this amazing story down. And then I write it down,
go get some coffee or something. I come back and I'm like, Wow, the most amazing part of this story is that I thought it was good and because my frontal lobes were turned off right, And I think I think we do that a lot. To your point in all about how how we process in dreams, it's unless people have you know, PTSD or some sort of condition that gives them violent, nightmarish, recurrent horrific visions every time
they sleep. Most people would prefer dreams to a dreamless sleep, you know, Otherwise it's really disconcerting to have everything go dark at say, four point fifty three am and then wake up at I don't know, two thirty seven pm.
I just sort of hope nothing important happened.
So, I mean, we probably won't really truly be able to answer definitively like why do a dream? We've got some good theories, but there are experts in mental health that do believe that it's an important part of maintaining some semblance of sanity or like self awareness or understanding of ourselves. But there's you know, not like a definitive like this is what dreams are four But for different people,
there for a lot of things. And like like I said, if you're Paul McCartney, it makes you write a song that's been covered by over three thousand artists and probably one of the most recognizable songs in the history of recorded music. That's just my hot take on yesterday. But it's a thing that came from a dream, So they certainly have value. I mean, so many artists recreate images from their dreams. And to your point, then, whether I think you're selling yourself short with the quality of your
dream stories. But they are things that you've pulled from a dream state that you can then translate into the real world and do something with. They're functional in that way.
Yeah, I mean, evolution is a brutal editor. So we know that dreams exist for some purpose, right, and it's probably not a vestigial leaving of our earlier arboreal ancestors. But we do know to your point, even if we can't fully answer the question why when it comes to dreams, we know they do inform the waking world. I mean, we have examples, Like, just to rattle off a few examples, one of my favorites, there's a guy named Dimitri mend Leave, the guy who made the periodic table. He's got an
element named after him. He's legit his story. His claim, which is very difficult to prove about how he figured out the periodic table is that he was going mad looking at all these mismatched cards. Kind of picture his version of index cards, where he wrote down everything he knew about an element, and he's like having his Charlie Day conspiracy theory thing. He's trying to have his beautiful
mind moment, it doesn't make sense. The guy passes out on top of these cards, and then in a dream he watches them sort of get up and dance around, and then they put themselves in order of their atomic weight, and he wakes up and he goes, Eureka.
What a satisfying feeling. That must have been, just the idea of making order out of chaos and then waking up and having an actual concrete idea from that. That's awesome.
There's a I don't have the exact story here, but you can look it up.
This will be an.
Adventure for everyone watching. There's a dream about a scientist who is attempting to work on dogs, performing surgery on dogs. I don't know exactly what his end goal was, but he had this dream about a specific surgery that he wasn't planning on doing, and then he wrote down all of the information from his dream, attempted the surgery, and he ended up discovering insulin is pretty insane. Thank goodness that he did so, and that he had a wonderful dream.
Yeah, that's amazing, right. This is this leads us to this is a tangent. I don't know if we should delve into it, but it leads to one of the questions that I know a lot of us will have listening to this today, which is, is it possible to oh spoilers. Okay, no, let's save it for the end. We have to practice linear time for this. So I have questions for you guys that are haught. Yeah, so we'll get our questions in at the end. We know we've painted.
A pretty good picture here. Right.
Evolutionary theory suggests that basically dreams function as a safe way to learn maybe right, so I can I can figure out things without physically harming myself the way that I could be in danger in the real world. So, if you think about it, we all kind of have this hollow deck in our head and we just run scenarios until we wake.
Up physically harm yourself or maybe burn a bridge, you know, with a colleague. Maybe you have a dream where you get to yell at somebody that you're dealing with some resentment towards, and then you wake up and you feel like you've worked that out, sort of like a simulation where you've gotten to beat the crap out of a you know, like a doll with this person's face on it, and then you feel better so that you don't actually do it in real life. You know?
Is that a thing people do?
Do you putn't know. I just came up with it. It should be Why shouldn't it be?
I guess it is better than hitting a person. You get to do you get a different doll every time?
Or do you just switch the face.
It's just got a sleeve, like a face shaped sleeve, or you to slide in a new picture, you know, and you can dress it up and the types of clothes that person might wear. You know, it's a commitment, but it's.
You know, yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah, except in places where really swell gels, like Norway. But Norway is I'll clean up this background here, but I'm in the process of fixing some stuff up, and I realize that currently the place I record is not as nice as a Norwegian prison, but a lot of places where people live in the US are not to your point, nol, I'm gonna think about that. I'm gonna think about, like,
what kind of doll? Is it less creepy if you catch someone with the real doll and they say, no, this is not for sexual purposes. I put other people's faces on it because I dislike other people and I just want to beat something that feels like I'm realistically beating something right now.
It's not a sex thing. I think this safe way to get around that is just to use those Remember those WWF slam dolls that were like, you know, the Ultimate Warrior and hul Cogin and they were a little small kind of body pillow things and you can slam them around or whatever. There's a name for them, but maybe keep them like not life size. That would probably keep people from looking as scance at you. We're not talking about stuff that happens in the ru We are
a little bit the real world. We're talking about working things out in your brain while you're not fully awake, and that could involve working things out that are like either too painful or just too like weird to get into when you're awake. Maybe you have a hard time wrapping your brain around it. But you need to process these things, whatever they might be. And so this is your brain's way of like forcing you to address some of these things that maybe you're not equipped to do
so mentally. When you're awake.
Yeah, and this is strange because we can also see that dreams do have the capability to warn us of things, and maybe not in the way that we might initially suspect. There was a twenty ten study in the journal Neurology which shows that some violent dreams may actually be very very early warning signs of growing brain disorders, the very
dangerous ones like dementia or Parkinson's. And when we say early warning signs here the study, the study appears to indicate that certain frequencies of violent dreams may be predicting a brain disorder malfunction up to a decade out, which is nuts. And also, I think that's kind of dangerous. That's the kind of thing that you know, you look up on WebMD after you've had a nightmare and you think, oh, I'm gonna die. At least this time it wasn't cancer, because as we know WebMD, it's cancer.
It's cancer. The answer.
Yeah, yeah, No.
I mean, like, I have violent dreams occasionally, but I also watched a lot of horror movies and occasionally eat spicy foods before bed. So I do think when I saw that stat Ben, it did give me pause. But is this specifically violence, you doing violence, or just any form of violent imagery in your dreams?
Well, think about like physically thrashing, for instance, where you know your brain body connection hasn't completely switched off, which is also you know, something that happens with sleep paralysis. I see, yeah, But I would say also that is that is a fascinating study, but it's.
Not hard proof.
So just because you're having nightmares does not mean that you have cognitive woes in the future.
No more so than the average person.
But everybody, everybody knows that may have felt a bit like a beta switch on our part, because when we say dreams might warn you of things, what are we really talking about? What is the elephant in the room that so many ice are confusing for five different forms of life?
It is this.
You or someone you know, regardless of whether they consider themselves a skeptic or a quote unquote true believer, has at some point in their life had a dream that they could not explain. A vision that, for instance, inspired someone to take a different route to work on the morning of a horrific traffic accident, or a simple compulsion to react to a trigger. Something as elementary as I go inside immediately when I see the woman with the
red hat, and then boom, you go inside. And just as you go inside, I don't know, we're making stuff up, so wishes or horses here, Just as you go inside, a gigantic piano slams down from the second floor of that building, and you would have been standing in the spot where it hits. It's a fascinating slippery slope. Are these warnings from a mental process we don't fully understand? Is it just coincidence? Is there something more to the story. Can dreams predict the future? Well, we'll do our best
to look at this. After a word from our sponsor, here's where it gets crazy.
Yeah, So, I mean, for most of modern history there's been this kind of notion of psychic abilities, precognition, being able to see the future, tell people's fortunes, all of that. You know, from that explainable kind of huckster side of things. There's fiction, the realm of ghost stories and sci fi. And then there's of course the religious or even separate from religious, just spiritual side of it. All that.
Yeah, and you know, science essentially looks at things like this where we don't fully understand yet they look at it as there is a mundane reason for this to occur. Just because we don't know what it is doesn't mean it's supernatural, doesn't mean that our brains are connecting into a time slip somewhere or a stream of whatever. It just means that we don't know what's happening yet, And that's all.
That's all that it means.
And science, when it is done well, is able to admit when it's wrong. Science is able to learn from itself, like the best of human beings are able to do as individuals. Science, like history, is one long, ongoing conversation. It refers back to earlier points. Do we orbit the sun? Does the Sun orbit us? It challenges these points, and often it disproves itself unapologetically at a future date.
How could this rock possibly injure me from way over way over I'm waste, I'm standing way over here and this rock is way over here. How is that thing causing me cancer?
Right? Oh right, exactly? Radiation?
Yes, Oh, I thought she just meant, like, you know, how does it injure you when someone like throws it at your head?
Oh?
That too? Propulsion?
It's just a rock with like a bad vibe. It's a downer rock, you know what I mean. It's like emotionally an abusive rock to see.
Well, speaking of speaking of downers, we we should probably get the downer version of this explanation kind of out of the way, right, Yeah.
Yeah, you're right, Noel.
Let's let's go to the ones that the probably the first two that people think of and should think of. The first is the C word for today's show, coincidence. There are a ton of people living on Earth right now.
It's a longtime tradition. On this show, we're pulling up the current world population, which is seven billion, eight hundred and six million, seventy one, nine hundred and fifty nine sixty nine sixty five nine sixty Like, Look, there are a lot of people, that's what we're saying, and the vast majority of those people they all dream, most of them in one way or another. Most people, also, by the way, do not dream in black and white. That
is another myth to bust. There are also tons and tons of people who lived and died before we ever recorded this podcast, before podcast worthing before I don't know, before hula hoops worthing. There are a ton of yes, there's so many dead people that precede our stories in the world in which we live today, and all of those people, or at least the vast majority, experienced a dream, right, experience multiple.
Dreams every night, every single night. So think, well, yeah, I mean, but like, you know, I was watching a YouTube video of I forget the guy's name, but he's a lucid dreaming guy, and this was sort of his whole point. He had the world population ticking away on the screen and was just talking about how he's like, let's do a more conservative estimate. Let's count out everyone that has insomnia, you know, or like kids that maybe
aren't interpreting their dreams correctly or whatever. And you know, you could maybe lower that number, it was still, you know, a massive, massive number. And so it starts to become like dice rolls, right, Like every time someone's dreaming, it's the roll of the dice. And a lot of stuff happens, a lot of news, a lot of bad news, a lot of things that we are worried about, that we
think about, that we commiserate over. What will happen? Will there be a tanker accident, will there be a horrible plane crash, and sometimes those things align.
Right, Yeah, And you know, I think the focus can can get pretty sharp there when you talk about let's say, an important factory to the town where you live, right, you know, maybe you're thinking about a lot. Maybe your family has worked at that factory for a long time, maybe you work there, and then something bad occurs at that factory because there's a ton of mechanical equipment and
something goes wrong. It may make you feel though you had a precognitive vision of something, even if it even if your dream occurred months ago before the accident, you still might remember it. But you know, that's that's at least the way science would would put a wet blanket on.
Yeah, and you prize the details, right, The things that are relevant are the things you remember. The things that are irrelevant are cast aside. And then you you every time you remember this, just like Kinner episodes on Deceptive breed, the narrative, the story, the details of your memory alter ever so slightly to fall increasingly in line with what you think happened. And time it doesn't matter, right, there's no there's no methodology.
Of course, It's like a form of confirmation bias, right, you just highlight the bits that support your thesis. You know, you need to explain something, and you have this little inkling of a dream, of a piece of a dream, of a fragment of a dream. God knows how much of it you're actually even remembering. It just happens to line up with that detail, and you're like, ah, yes, I predicted this, this was meant to be, This was destined or something, you know.
And then that means that what we see is precognition is just sort of a magic trick we're playing on ourselves.
Hey, if you're watching the.
Video, you're doing something like this, but you think it really is your finger, And now.
How are you doing that? I don't I don't understand what I'm looking at.
But then how did you can you do the one where it's like.
This finger becomes too Yeah, that's that's the class.
I like it. I like it, witchcraft son.
I show my son that after you did it for me. It's one of his favorite things.
It's a cool move. It's a super cool move. Can I can I really quickly ask you guys opinion about something like this that that did happen to me really quickly? It's very strange. Nothing significant, nothing like a factory explosion or a plane crash or anything. But I used to intern at this recording studio in Athens, Georgia, and there was this woman, a young woman who also worked there, and I never actually met her, but I always heard
her name because it was a really cool. Her name was Bennett Moon, and I just love that name, and I thought it was just really memorable to me. And I hadn't thought about Bennett Moon in a long long time for whatever reason. And I had this very specific dream where I met Bennett Moon was who was a person that I'd never actually met, but I was aware,
like I'm the periphery of this person. And literally the next day I'm listening to Wait, Wait, don't tell me on NPR and they have the call in thing at the end, and who's the call in person but Bennett Moon from Athens, Georgia, And it's it's the same person. It is this person, no question about it. Never heard her voice in my life, never actually met her, just knew of her that she kind of she had the shared experience that was we never actually crossed, Pasa. Isn't
that weird? That is very weird? But I mean, at the end of the day, I can chalk that up to coincidence. It's not like it was predicting anything exactly, but it's a pretty interesting game of odds there, you know. And if this is our brain just kind of playing a trick on ourselves and in party, meaning that was
a pretty pretty bit one. It wasn't like I was like blown away or felt like I was seeing the hand of God or anything, but I did feel like I was experiencing something, you know what I mean, I don't know.
Yeah, there's a there's another it's still kind of a downer, but it's a little bit less of a downer. That may help explain that. Let's call it playing the probability game.
So we're all.
Familiar with Yeah, we're all familiar with Carl Young, we're all familiar with archetypes, these ideas of the super consciousness and so on, but we don't really need that yet to talk about dreams in this way. So if coincidence is a lottery, then the probability game is kind of kind of your your brain playing clue in a couple of ways. So this may apply to your anecdote there, Noel, because Carl Jung makes a great point about the perceived
precognitive capacity of some dreams. We didn't want to paraphrased demand, so we just pulled the quote. It sounds smart because he wrote it.
That's right, Yeah, Matt, you want to give it to us. Oh.
Yes, the occurrence of prospective dreams cannot be denied. It would be wrong to call them prophetic because at bottom, they are no more prophetic than a medical diagnosis or a weather forecast. They are merely an anticipatory combination of probabilities which may coincide with the actual behavior of things, but need not necessarily agree in every detail.
Confirmation.
Okay, so what's so? Can we unpack like the difference or the distinction between prospective and prophetic.
Sure, yeah, the prospective dream would be the the sum of your sensory information, your memory, often short term, sometimes long term, your fleeting ephemeral impressions, all mash together, like that horrible stuff called neutral loaf that they used to feed prisoners in the US and maybe still do.
Or freud kick you know, if you want like a slightly more pleasant.
Sure or salad if you want something healthier as well. So this is all, this is all mixed up, and from this our subconscious, which doesn't function with some of the same socially imposed constraints or ego imposed constraints that our consciousness functions with. Our subconscious is able to aggregate these things and make an analysis a guestimate. So a prospective dream is the subconscious saying this, this, and this are crazy connected. Therefore, I think here's the realm that this road.
Leads us to. So that's the idea.
The idea there is that for young a dream may only be prophetic if every detail of the dream matches every detail of the bit, the scene, the event in the waking world.
Wait, so is he acknowledging that this is possible or is he just setting up a standard that's like impossible to meet.
That's a good question. He is primarily implying, at least the way that I interpret it, that we are underestimating the intelligence of our subconsciousness, because you know, we are very unappreciative of our brains. I had to cut a line out here at some point.
But it's like, the brain works so hard.
You're asleep and you're still breathing. That's amazing, and the brain is doing that. But that's what he's saying. He's saying that we're kind of short changing our own mental abilities, our own pattern recognition, really, and that we only notice this amazing ability when we get something super weirdly specifically correct, and then we're like, whoa, oh, maybe I have superpowers.
I have superpowers, and they are entirely related to my ability to know which song I'm going to hear on the radio two days from now, which is a tremendously common thing, especially with music, or.
Your ability to all of a sudden recognize Bennett Moon. Yeah, hi Bennett by the way.
Yeah, seriously, I hope I hope she listens to the show. I gotta say that that was one of those moments that I was like, is this real? Like I really had to kind of do a double take, like a spit take, where I was like, how to understand what I'm experiencing right now? And there are some other examples of this throughout history that I think would cause even the most skeptical person to ask that very same question.
Oh yeah, you, I mean, you could go on other channels on YouTube and find lists of these kinds of things. Shout out to Matthew Santoro, So I see you man. He gave a great example of Abraham Lincoln that I had never heard about before, so headed over to History dot com just to learn a little more about it. Allegedly, this is the way the story goes. Just a couple of days before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he told his wife Mary Todd and his friend Ward Hill Lamon about
this dream that he had just had. And in this dream, he's I believe he's there at the White House and the oval officer near there, and he is he sees all of these mourners. He sees a casket. He sees like important members of his like inner circle, and they're all mourning the death of the president. But he says, according to the story, he didn't recognize himself in in the casket. It wasn't him, so he wasn't worried about it.
He didn't believe that he was having some kind of prophetic dream or precognitive dream that was going to foretell his death. But he did get assassinated, if you, I think it was very soon after.
I heard another version of the story where like he was telling this to his bodyguard and like saying.
That Laman is was his part time bodyguard his friend, right, but he would say like usually he would say good night, Laman or whatever, but this time he said goodbye.
And he told him like, I've had this dream and I'm worried something's gonna happen in the theater to night. And he was like, well, you shouldn't go, mister president, and he said, but I'm meeting my wife there and I don't want to disappoint her, so I must go. And then like he he said goodbye for the first time ever instead of you know, good night, which whatever. It's it's an interesting detail.
Here's why it's a little weird because Lamon is the guy who told this story. So Link was assassinated April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five. And this concept that there was a dream that was told to Mary Todd and Lamon didn't come out for at least fifteen years wow, if not longer. And it was allegedly told by Lamon based on notes that he took in eighteen sixty five, So who knows if it's real or not. But there's another interesting fact.
The cabinet that worked with Abraham Lincoln were aware that he did seem to put a lot of importance on his dreams that he would have. Can you tell him about it?
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We'll be back soon, and we're back with more on pre cognitive dreams.
Like a lot of us, I grew up reading these sorts of stories often in time life books. This point was just make him a sponsor. But these stories have grains of truth, which I think you've done a fantastic job of outlining. And then they also get carried over and embellished, you know, in television series Gunsolved, Mysteries or anything on the History Channel after about ten PM back
in the day. And the thing that's interesting about that is it's often used that tendency is often used by skeptics as a way to entirely discredit the anecdote, right, or keep raising the bar of proof until proof is something that can never be attained. But it's almost enough for an entire episode on its own. The other worldly
quote unquote psychic experiences of world leaders. Churchill said that he heard a golden voice since he was a child, and said later that it saved his life until actually until.
Even around World.
War two or so, until the World War two years, it was incredibly common for Western leaders to be pretty open about what they saw as a connection with some sort of other side, and it faded.
Now.
It's a bit in the duldrums now because I imagine that a lot of people feel they would not be taken seriously if they said, hey, I am from a family that has precognitive dreams. I have precognitive dreams. Also I should be in charge of nuclear weapons. It doesn't track right. It's seen as a blow to credibility rather than just a part of someone's individual human experience. But we know it's not. These people who are recounting these
things are not chumps. They're not unintelligent people. I think you had another example, Matt, also an American and also a pretty smart guy. You love them or hate them?
Yeah.
I found a story about Samuel Clemens just rifling through the internet, and it comes from Life on the Mississippi, which is Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain's autobiography. It's fascinating.
So he was.
Sam Sam I don't like calling that. Mark Twain was working on a steamboat called the Pennsylvania, and he had arranged for his younger brother a guy named Henry to also get a job there. He was going to I think what did they call it. It's a really interesting job a mud clerk on the Pennsylvania, which is the steamboat. And there's this whole situation where the captain insulted Henry for some reason and Mark Twain heard about it. There was a whole fight that resulted in Mark Twain just
being banned from this boat where his brother was working. Right, So, out of just this set of circumstances, Mark Twain got kicked off of this boat that he was on and his brother is still there. So then at some point Mark Twain lays down, he has a dream, and inside this dream he sees his brother Henry in a coffin, and there are a lot of specifics about it. I've heard that he was wearing one of Mark Twain's own suits.
But one of the most important things about this dream was that there was a specific set of white flowers laid down on to Henry's coffin where he.
Was laying, and with a single red flower in the middle.
Right, That's exactly what it is, So a very strong image that was left on Mark Twain even after he awoke, and obviously you know that kind of dream, a dream about a loved one who dies that's going to be affecting in some way or another.
And so there were there were different details here which would be of interest to anyone agreeing with the beliefs of Carl Jung or the beliefs as laid out in today's episode. He had some specific details that appeared to be correct, things that were unusual, like metallic often. This is also for anyone else who read the incredibly unedited autobiography of Mark Twain, where some of this is pulled from. I just want to let you know I'm right there
with you in solidarity. Even great writers need editors, even just good editors. It's a very very long book. He's dictating it on his deathbed. And the reason I'm bringing that up is because he may have fallen victim to something known as retrospective conviction, which is what we're talking about earlier, when we alter our own memories by remembering those memories. However, like you said, Matt, he says he had never had any doubts since he'd had that dream
that it was predictive. He can remember everything very, very vividly.
So Mark Twain has to leave the boat. His brother is still on it, and later on he gets word that a boiler has in fact exploded on this steamboat and his brother inhaled a bunch of steam and it actually burned his lungs and he's he's in the hospital. So Mark Twain, you know, obviously makes his He stops what he's doing. He makes his way to the hospital where his brother is. It's in Memphis, Tennessee. And when Sam gets there, the doctors tell him that his brother
is in absolutely terrible pain. But he's going to be fine. He just scalded his lungs a little bit. He's going to recover. Don't worry about it, Sam. They wouldn't have called him Mark Twain. They didn't know that name.
Listen here, Mark Twain, your brother's going to be just fine.
Yeah. But Sam, you know, a caring brother, says, well, there must be something you can do to make him feel a little better.
Look at him.
He's obviously in pain. You know, he's in pain. Let's do something about it. And according to Sam himself, he convinces the doctor to give his brother a shot of morphine. And the doctor is supposedly inexperienced with this type of drug and overdoses Henry, and Henry unfortunately passes away.
I thought he died from the blast. I didn't realize that. That's that's extra tragic and unexpected.
Wow. Yeah, and you know again, According to Sammy never forgave himself for this fact. But the strangest part is that at the actual funeral of his brother Henry, he noticed some things that reminded him of the dream he had had, where what the what the coffin looked like, the suit that his brother was wearing, and the most important fact, or the most important similarity perhaps were a bouquet of white flowers with a single red rose in the center that was laid down onto his brother Henry's It's.
Like the end of a ghost story. It's like a twist ending dude. And then it took the ribbon off and her head fell off. It's like that, and there was a single red rose. Burr. I don't like that.
He also told this story around seventy or eighty times by his own admission, and when he was performing this story at the Monday Evening Club as was called in eighteen eighty four, the incident, I believe if I'm thinking of the right one without pulling out that brick.
Of a book.
I believe it.
He was telling this story several years later, and someone called Reverend Burton or reverend doctor Burton, just for extra accolades, asked Twain if he had told it multiple times. He said, yeah, seventy or eighty, and Burton pointed out that it is likely, or it's very possible for someone with the best of intention to embellish a story over the years. Twain stuck to his guns. I don't think any of it is embroidery, he had replied. I think it is all just as
I've stated it, detail by detail. Yes, the man wrote fiction, and wrote an enormous amount of fiction, so he's no stranger to spinning a tale. However, in the case of Mark Twain, I would point out that he appears to have predicted his own death without taking his own hand. He was born on November thirtieth, eighteen thirty five, two weeks after Haley's comment reached the prillion where it's the
point nearest to the sun. This is a plot point in an awesome claymation film with some very disturbing depictions of the devil. I recommend checking it out on YouTube. In his autobiography in nineteen oh nine, he said, I came in with Haley's comment at eighteen thirty five. It's coming again next year. I expect to go out with it. It'll be the great disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Haley's comment.
So it went on about it.
So that's a little different because is that precognition or is that just him being very stubborn and saying I want to go out with the power move. But to your point, Matt, yes, it is tremendously. I think it's I think it would surprise people to learn how common it is for people that you would associate with great success, people that you would associate with great power, to believe in predictive, precognitive or even prophetic dreams. Maybe they don't talk about it as much.
Now, you know.
Maybe they are not recounting the strange stories of their family or their personal experience, and if so, there's probably a reason. It's because they feel like they will be resigned to the rubbish heap of the current day. And that's a real valid concern. But I would imagine, you know, world leaders listening in the audience today that yeah, that you two have had a dream or four or a Baker's dozen or nineteen that you yourself cannot explain to
this day. It is a very common thing. It is a very common thing.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's true. Uh And I mean I don't know up to this point in the in the show, I hope it doesn't sound like we're poo pooing any of these things. I think we've all acknowledged the whole way that the brain is a very under understood that's a redundant. But I'm still going to go with the thing.
I have.
I have not poof pooed this. I'm just setting up. I'm building a case that unfortunately we're not getting.
That trying to get to in a very ham fisted way. This is one of those ones where we like just look at the clock, are like, man, we've got so much more left to go and some really good, amazing, juicy science based stuff. But I think we're going to save that for a part too, because there's really enough there to give you another really substantial episode out of this topic.
Yes, so you will have to stay tuned, but for now, why don't you write to us, tell us about your dreams, tell us about something maybe you've predicted, or a strange thing that's happened within your family or a friend or a loved one. You can find us on Facebook and on Twitter, where we are a conspiracy stuff show.
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You can give us a call. Our number is one eight three three s T d wy TK.
If you don't like social media, if you don't like if you don't cottonto calling on the phone, but you have a story to tell us, and I expect many of us in the audience do have a.
Story to share today.
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