From the Vault: Anthology of Horror, Volume 2

a springboard to talk about science. This was the second one in this series, and we'll be sharing the third one in the series as a vault episode in the weeks ahead, and hey, might even get an all new fourth volume. We'll see what we can put together. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and my name is Robert Gooley Lamb. I am Corrosive Joseph McCormick, and we are here with

our producer death Nicholas Johnson. Yes, and it is that time again. Uh, it's it's been a year since we did Anthology of Horror volume one, and so we're about to assault you with Anthology of Horror volume two, and then guess what the episode after this, He's going to be Anthology of Horror volume three. It's not an anthology unless they're at least three volume exactly. So yeah, I've been looking forward to this all year pretty much, Robert.

I know the back corners of your brain are just full of cobwebs made of old horror anthology TV episodes. Every time we get talking about this, you dredge something up from the void, something you saw on TV as a kid. Am I wrong about this? Pretty much? Because when I was a kid, I watched a lot of television, and of the various joyfully weird things that were on television reruns or syndicated horror and oology shows were one of the best because you never knew exactly what you're

going to get each episode. It's an anthology. So each episode of something like The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery or Outer Limits or Tales from the Crypt, each one is its own thing, its own world. It has its own cast, its own monster or threat or sci fi weirdness, and it's completely encapsulated. I love especially some of these

are really good. Actually, the Twilight Zone I think is even better than a lot of people remember, and I think a lot of times it's because The Twilight Zone was not an hour long show, or I think maybe it was in one of its later seasons which turned out to be disastrous. I mean, you know, this is a type twentysomething minute short story. It's it's a good way not to get bogged down and stuff that doesn't matter with when you're not going into like in depth

character storytelling, but you're like exploring high level premises. Yeah, you know, it's it's more it's more in line with certainly some of the short stories you you know, the classic short stories you think of a say like Philip K. Dick, where it's it's really about rolling out a cool idea, maybe a cool twist or a shock, but mostly about you know, to make you think about something. And uh, yeah, so I I love a really great episode of an

anthology show. Certainly, like you said, some of those Twilight Zones hold up amazingly. Well, we're gonna be talking about one of my favorites of all time today. Yeah, but then also some of the worst examples. I have one show, and this is a show I didn't I don't think I even watched when it came on, but Perversions of Science. It was sci fi sort of spinoff of Tales from the Crypt and uh, I haven't watched fully sleazy, but

very like future smooth. Yeah. Yeah, lots of cursing, some gratuitous nudity, but like a lot of these shows, often tremendous talent packed into each episode, like some great actors, some great directors. Um. So every horror anthology show, I feel like the ones that i've I look back on finally are the ones I haven't even seen yet. Uh, there's so many treasures to ever. I watched so many of these things. It's very specifically on Beach Hotel cable. This is what I remember. Yeah, it was like I

watched Mystery Science Theater three thousand that way. I mean, I guess basically when my family went to the beach, everybody else would be out in the sun and I'd be watching the sci fi channel. But that's how you see reruns of Monsters, which is a show that I had completely forgotten about until you you sent me something about it the other day and I was looking at the images from the opening credits and I was like, oh my god, yes, that's way back in there. Somewhere

deep in the recesses of my mind. This is there. I've seen it before, all right, Well, before we get more properly into into monsters, I just want to tell everybody, like what the basic format here is. If you haven't heard one of our anthority of horror episodes before, or the creepy Pasta episodes that preceded it, the idea is, uh, we're gonna grab a few in in each episode. We're gonna each grab one episode of a horror anthology show.

We're gonna tell you what it's about, remind you what it's about if you've seen it before, and then we're gonna break down some of the ideas involved there, you know, some of the science of the thing, whatever it happens to to be, even if we have to shoehorn it a little bit. And uh, and that's where the fun is exactly. We are nothing if not experts at dragging deep thoughts out of strangely shallow places. Yes. Uh again, We're gonna also go to some I think some rather

deep waters in these twilight zones. Yeah, so let's begin with monsters. Okay. This This ran for three seasons from eight through ninete and I think I only caught it once at like my aunt's house back in the day, and I don't even know if it was in syndication or on the Sci Fi channel after it had finished its run. But today you can find all of it on Amazon Prime. You can find a lot of the episodes, maybe all of them just on YouTube. But but yeah, it's like a lot of these shows, it's a wealth

of talent and weirdness. I was wondering how many people were hoping that this show would have disappeared into history forever, only to have the digital age to revive all of these old things that these actors did. Yeah, yeah, possible. Possibly, Yeah, because there you see some some interesting people show up

in Monsters for instance. Uh, you know you have you have some great authors like Dan Simons shows up tom Noonan shows up writing and directing like a couple of episodes, Tony Shalub shows up, Gina Gershaun, Steve U Simmy in an excellent pig Monster related episode that I won't spoil for anybody. Oh man, we were just talking about pig Monsters. Yeah, and this is a great pig Monster episode. I gotta

dive in. But yeah, this show is kind of a spiritual successor to Tails from the Dark Side, which one eighty eight, which I did see a lot of and

was traumatized to times by as a child. Uh. And the Monsters featured many of the same people, and again an incredible opening sequence, like a lot of these anthologies shows had, in which a humorous family of monsters settled in to watch TV together, I believe, right before they start watching their show, the mother monster shows up with a dish full of something she's been cooking, and the

child monster declares, candied critters, Yeah, it's it's cheesy, it's great. Uh, and then it and then you proceed into some new story that's going to center around a monster. And usually that's like really cool practical effects too. So these episodes it can be a little hokey intentionally, so at times that the music is a little weird, this kind of sense music that I even have trouble loving at times, like synthetic saxophone music. You've got a very open heart

for synth. Yeah, but great cast, cool monster and Uh. The episode I'm going to talk about today is one titled Far Below. And the reason I was so excited I didn't even know they'd covered this, but Far Below is one of my favorite short stories by Robert Barbour Johnson, who lived nineteen o seven through seven. Uh, this is like a Weird Tales era story that I read years and years ago, and I've just I've lived my entire life up until like this week, having no idea that

anybody had ever adapted it. So so I was instantly excited and I and I said, all right, I've got to cover this. So it takes place in the deepest depths of the New York subway system, one of my favorite places anyway, and you have a you have a special segment of city services that wage an endless campaign against the ghouls that burrow up from the depths. It's

a it's a haunting tale. The positions them as workers in a dark and human place against an inhuman enemy, and they all are on the risk of losing their own humanity in the process. So this season two adaptation of Far Below has a lot going for it. So not only do you have Johnson's short story as the you know, the the inspiration for it. It was adapted for the screen by Michael McDowell, the screenwriter who gave us Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and perhaps to a

lesser extent, Thinner. Two out of three ain't bad. Yeah. Plus it's directed by the legendary producer Deborah Hill, whoa Deborah Hill of like John Carpenter movie fame. Yeah Yeah, longtime collab collaborator and producer of John Carpenter's films such as Halloween, Halloween to the Fog, Halloween three, Season of the Witch, Yes, Escape from New York, Escape from l A. She also produced Clue, The Dead Zone, The Fisher King, and Big Top Peeweek. So, but this was one of

the only two things she ever directed. So I was instantly, you know, intrigued. And then the cast is small but pretty fun. In that veteran actor Barry Nelson places his character Dr. Vernon Rathmore Barry Nelson was he in Planet of the Vampires? Oh, he might have been. Maybe you can do a quick look up on that while I cover some of other things he was in. Uh, you know, he's one of these character actress that was in everything.

A lot of TV work back in the day. A few classic horror anthology shows as well, like Twilight Zone, Suspense and The Alfred Hitchcock hour, but I think most people will probably remember him from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, in which he played Ullman opposite Jack Nicholson in the job interview scene. That's correct that I was also mistaken Planet of the Vampire, says Barry Sullivan. Okay, different bar They were like there are a lot of Berriers back

in the day. Um. So the adaptation itself is pretty fun. It introduces a new twist, and they opted to present the Ghoules, which are not really referred to as such if I remember correctly. They present them much more like the more Locks from the nineteen sixty adaptation of HD Wells The Time Machine, which I think is a fine choice. You know, you need some sort of subterranean humanoid but

in human creature. If you're not gonna go for like what I imagine is the straight up Google or perhaps sort of the dog like love crafty and goul, than I think a Morelock is a solid choice. Now, I want to know more about the the ghouls in the story in the in the segment, are I mean, are they sort of the grave flesh eating scavengers we we

know of as gools? Um? Not so, I mean, there's clearly an inspiration from Pigman's model the Lovecraft story, in which ghoules are bubbling out from the like the underworld, um and uh and potentially corrupting mortal minds. Like, clearly that was part of the inspiration. That's part of the world from which the story emerges. But in in the story itself and in the adaptation, it's more like these

are creatures. They are wandering up from the depths like we've It's kind of a tolken Esque idea of if we've dug too far into the earth, and now these things are coming up, and we have to stop them because they're going to continue to pick off subway workers and you know, vagrants and then eventually other people, and if we don't keep them in check, they will just

overwhelm us. This is funny. I was just reading The Two Towers in the chapter where Gandalf explains what happens after, you know, after he plunged down, after the Balaragi says, they went into the depths of the earth, far below where any you know, the thing that lives above, and it is the abode of slimy things and things that cannot be named yes, and and indeed these are these are some of those nameless things. So on the subject of Google's, we of course have an entire episode in

the Vault about the idea of Google's. We've talked at length as well about life underground and the effects of human life underground, and so I don't want to retread on much of that content. It's it's definitely there and we love it. And if you want more subterranean humans and Googles, go check those episodes out. But I did find a line of the inquiry on this that I

think is pretty solid. So we have an underground war in a great modern metropolis against inhuman enemy that rises from the depths, and yet these more lockesque creatures are drawn up to feed on humans, the humans that have

overpopulated this region. They seem to feast on vagrant and subway workers, and would feast on far more of the populace if not for the efforts of Dr Rathmore and his you know, basically, the premises auditors have come to check him out because his department is seems to be way overfunded, way were armed, and the outsiders asking why do you need all these weapons? Why do you need all this funding, and and then the story is about

presenting exactly why this funding is needed. But basically, in this fight, uh, the fictional characters are far below have much in common with those who battle various organisms that we label pests in the real world. And the most obvious parallel is the rat, the true citizen of the subway tunnels exactly. I mean when you go down there to take a train, they're not in your way or you know, getting into your stuff. You're in their world.

You're just a guest. Yeah. Now, to be sure, a single rat can be a problem even in a you know, a sort of a prehistoric, precity sense of human existence. And the same can be said of same mosquitoes. Uh, you know, they both can spread or help spread pathogens. Uh. The same can be said of something like the locust. But but all these examples of our organisms as well, that can become an even greater problem when they are

imbalanced by human activity. So let's let's think about the rat as biologists Ken Appland put it quoted in the Case for Leaving City Rats Alone by Becca Cudmore for Nautilus. Rats are disruption specialists, so they thrive in disrupted ecosystems, they spill into unbalanced realms and carve out a kingdom for themselves. And he points out that the very few wild animals have done this quite as well as the rats in the human world without undergoing domestication. That's an

interesting point. Yeah, so we we think about organisms that can successfully thrive at the edges of human civilization. You've you've got two main versions. You've got those that become tame and and eventually get bred by humans, like dogs or farm animals or even cats, which are a little

bit wilder versions wilder but still definitely domesticated. Yeah. Then you've got the ones that are just sort of destroyed by our presence, which are i'd say maybe the majority of animals, and like when we change an ecosystem, they suffer. And then yeah, you've got this third category, the ones we think of as unwelcome survivors in our environments. Yeah, because you've disrupted everything. But this is an organism that thrives on disruption. They can go right in there and

find a place for itself. You know, all the rat needs is a is a is a place to borrow fifty grams of calorie rich or moderately calorie rich food per day and some water to drink. Um. And they they're going to find that they're going to find an abundance of that in our environments. I mean in our garbage, in our in our you know, in our refuse, and in the in the leavings of our civilization, and for all of our domesticated minions, for all of our traps

and our poisons. Rats still rule cities like New York City. In previous episodes, I think we've even talked about rats societies in New York City, And yeah, there are sort of separate subcultures of rats within the cities that that they occupy. Yes, and that's gonna that's indeed gonna become very important to or in just a minute. Okay, the rat was already perfectly evolved to do all of this. Uh,

they were stealing from other organisms before us. Most likely, we just continue to offer more and more to steal, creating waste, disruption and hiding places everywhere we go. And of course we went absolutely everywhere, bringing rats in our wake. Becca Cudmore's article, however, deals mostly with the Vancouver rat Project, which points out that some experts identify the potential dangers posed by fighting back against the rat occupation too hard. And part of it comes down to this, to the

disruption of these stable rat colonies. Uh, these these stable areas, these little little pocket civilizations that the rats have established in these disrupted ecosystems. These are some of the key points that have been made. First of all, drive rats out of one home or block and into another home or block, and you might be spreading rat pathogens that

otherwise be quarantined within this stable group. Oh yeah. Plus, urban rats have a garbage based diet, meaning that they absorb a lot of bacteria, and this is often place specific bacteria. It's tied to the building, to the people that live in that particular building. Drive them out and you spread these particular bacteria elsewhere. You're stirring the pot, right, and then rats in one area will wage bloody war

against any stranger rat that arrives. This applies to New York City as well, where I've read and I think we've talked about this before about how a native rat population tends to do a decent job of fighting off rat invasions that come in on ships, etcetera. Um, And so it's a perpetual turf war. But these turf wars, especially when you stir them up by fighting back against the rats too hard, potentially, uh, those turf war wars

spill rat blood. They cause rats to urinate out of fear, and so what we get is a mix of rat blood and rat urine and rat gut contents real which is brew. In fact, Kaylee Buyers of the Vancouver Rat Project points out that these brawls allow bacteria to converge,

to mix and potentially create new disease. It's bacteria that wouldn't otherwise interact with each other, are pooled together, swap genes and form new diseases, such as a methocillin resistant staff or m r S. A. Oh wow, I didn't even think about that as a consequence of another thing we've talked about before, of course, horizontal gene transfer between

single celled organisms like bacteria. You know, if one acquires a useful adaptation and say resisting a certain antibiotic, they can share that gene for that adaptation via a sort of analogy of bacterial sex. It's not sexual reproduction, but they can take part of their genome and just put it in another bacterium. Yeah, so we have a situation

where we disrupted the environment. Organism that thrives and disruption is moved in, and then if we attempt to remove that organism, we bring more this eruption into the scenario, We bring more more chaos. Uh So the idea of of fixing these probably becomes more of a hard problem of dealing with these rat infestations. Uh So. Anyway, not not to say that we shouldn't fight against rats and keep them from living too high on the hog, but we got here through disruption, so we shouldn't be surprised

if there are consequences for disrupting it further totally. And if you're going to fight a secret war against the ghouls, well then perhaps it's worth fighting. Uh you know, at a perpetual stalemate, right White turn a cold war into a hot war, exactly. All Right, I'm gonna have more about the war against rats and potentially ghouls here in a second, but first let's talk go an ad break here. All right, all right, we're back to city rats the

ghouls of the real world. Yeah, and comparing it to that episode of Monsters far Below based on a beloved ghoule short story. Uh. So here's another thing to think about here. Uh. We've talked about how rats spread with human civilization, and there's such a highly successful organism, and yet there are a few areas of the world that have remained essentially rat free, the most notable of which is the Canadian province of Alberta. Uh. It's virtually free

of the Norway rat. Uh. Now, while rats do turn up from time to time, brought in through traditional means, you know, they come in, you know, on a shipment or or so forth, but the province has been very proactive in squashing these flare ups to hold onto that rat free championship that they've that they've earned. You know, I have been to Alberta. Actually, I have been to the city of Calgary and and driven around in there, and I never noticed roving teams of anti rat sorcerers,

rat exorcists of any kind. And so, so what's the secret? Yeah, that's like everybody's next question. How did they get rat free? What they do? What can I do to get that in my city? Well, basically they were just able to heat the rats out before they moved in, which I think lines up rather nicely with the story of far below the idea of keep the ghouls from boiling up into New York City because once they're up, there's no getting rid of them. Announce of prevention is worth a

pound of cure. Yeah. So basically this is how it went went down. The Norway rat arrived in North America and roughly seventeen seventy five keyports cities never had a chance. But from there they gradually spread across the continent, and that took time for certain areas. The rats didn't enter eastern Saskatchewan until the nineteen twenties, and according to Alberta's official website on their history of rat control, the rats continue to spread northwest at a rate of fifteen miles

or twenty four kilometers per year. So they first reached the eastern border of Alberta in nineteen fifty and that's where they stopped them with rat control measures, keeping the province and its cities free of the furry invaders. And

uh and that also includes its largest city, Calgary. Basically, they realized the threat to all levels of human activities, especially agriculture, you know, which there was a lot of, which is why the Department of Agriculture did a lot of the heavy lifting, especially early on, but legislation also mandated control of tests by quote every person and every level of government like county clerks or yeah, well, I mean, I mean essentially, like they basically they've spread the message

to absolutely everyone, and then every municipality had to have a pest control inspector. A control zone was established. And and this is good far below hinges in part in the idea that a bureaucratic outsider, uh, you know, like most of the world has no idea about the Google threat. The whole tale is his education into the reality of the struggle against the ghouls. And Alberta's efforts actually mirrored

this in some to some degree. They had to. They sought to enlist the population against the rap threat, you know, to build up, you know, the public awareness. So they had to educate the pub like about rats. Most people in Alberta had never seen a rat before. It's hard to imagine. Yeah, so Alberta's so Alberta agriculture educators traveled

around with preserved rats specimens to inform the public. There's a fabulous photocolored photographs that the Alberta's website includes of these educators on a farm in Alberta with a bunch of preserved rats, not in a container, just laid out on the grass. There's a child holding one up by the tail, and they're just saying, like, these are rats. This is why you need to be vigilant about. This is what you need to look out for. It's like

teaching New Zealanders about squirrels. Yeah, I guess so, um, and I mean, what better way than the physical thing itself. But on top of that, there were conferences, there were posters, there were pamphlets, you know, some of these like straight up propaganda posters about the terror of the rat. They advocated the use of poisons to fight back, though they also had to bring in outside experts to help them, because again, most Alberta residents had no experience with cats,

and that includes experience fighting them. Uh So they were able to battle the rat infestations along the eastern border and keep them mostly within ten to twenty kilometers of the border, and the program continues today in an altered but still effective form. It's actually illegal to own a pet rat in the province. You've got to be a zoo, a university, or a recognized research institution. Uh there's also a rat hotline where you report rat and flare ups

in case, you know they when they do occur. But one of the problems is that, again most Alberta residents don't have a good eye for rats. Hello, and extremely tiny dog just ran across my kitchen floor. Well, what happens if they end up reporting muskrats, gophers, ground squirrels and other similar organisms and then you know, the rat police come out to check and they're like, oh, those are not rats, those are muskrats. Uh, you know, we

can't really do anything about that. Uh. By the way, to come back to monsters, the anthology series If if you're wondering if there is an episod out of monsters that expressly concerns rats, there is. There's one called Stressed Environment, in which a female scientist who spent twelve years raising rats in a stressed environment, uh, you know, in the hopes of evolving their intelligence, faces to the terrifying results

of your experiment. It stars Carol Linley, and it has stop motion rats that end up using spears against their human captors. Smart rats. Indeed, so this whole thing from far below about this team of bureaucratic professionals who work for the city who have to go underground to fight the uh, the menace coming up from below. Of course, in the story it's ghouls. You've got the analogy to rats, but I can't help but think of the fat bergs.

The people up above are completely oblivious to the fact that there are workers down beneath the streets, in the tunnels, in the darkness, waging battle against a monster that lives down there. And of course the agglomerations of fats, oils, grease and wet wipes and various fibrous substances that clagge kilometers of sewers, especially in places like England and or I guess the UK more broadly, but also in US cities.

It seems like another perfect analogy for the wars being waged on our behalf below our feet that we don't even think about. Yeah, you create this vast, unnatural underworld, and it's going to it it's gonna end up potentially being populated by by opportunistic organisms or you know, they're gonna be situations where things like fat burgs emerge and you need people to go wage war against them. If

you want to learn more about fat Birgs. We have a whole episode about them from earlier this year that you can check out. So that was Monsters. Sub Monsters I think falls more in the you know, the category of fun but often kind of a little bit cheesy when it comes to horror anthology shows. But again, some of the like one of the big names, one of them the classier names in horror anthology is of course

the classic Twilight Zone, right uh. And so there there's so many great episodes of the Twilight Zone that really do pose interesting questions that still remain interesting today. I mean, there are some that also have kind of hokey premises that don't hold up. But I want to talk about one that I really think does hold up and is still more and more mind blowing the more you think about it, and yet at the same time has an

incredibly simple premise. I feel like this is a great example of a story premise getting a lot of bang for its buck. And so this is one of my favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone. Originally aired in nineteen fifty nine, and it's called shadow Play. So in the beginning of this episode of The Twilight Zone, a man named Adam Grant is awaiting the verdict. After being put on trial for murder, the juror's return from deliberation and they proclaim him guilty, and then the judge sentences him

to death by the electric chair. But as he's being sentenced, Grant begins to laugh hysterically, and in a fit of rage and frustration, he runs around the courtroom yelling at people, not again. You can't do it to me again. You'll all die. Uh So in his jail cell, Grant starts talking with his roommates about how this has all happened to him before the trial, the sentencing, the imprisonment, and the execution have all happened to him a thousand times,

but not as reality, always as a nightmare. Grant says, he's in a dream right now, and at the moment of his electrocution, he's going to wake up screaming back in reality. And because it's always been a dream in the past, this time it must be a dream too. So he tells everybody he can, don't let them send me to the chair, because when I die, I'll wake up, and when I wake up, you'll all die because I'll

stop dreaming you. Then there's this newspaper reporter who was present at Grant's trial, and he starts to become a little worried that he is, in fact, maybe only being dreamed by Grant, and if Grant wakes up, he and

everybody else in the world will see to exist. So he gets drunk and he goes to the house of his friend, who's the district attorney who was in the courtroom also who presented the case against Grant, and the newspaper reporter begins to beg the district attorney to stay the execution, and the d A of course, thinks this is preposterous, obviously, but the more his friend talks to him about it, the more doubts begin to creep in, however much he tries to resist them. Doesn't the world

ever feel just not quite real? Isn't it sometimes just too perfect or just too full of too many coincidences? I think most people can actually identify with having this feeling every now and then about their own lives. Yeah, yeah, I mean especially we've talked before about some about coincidence, you know, and how we would do a whole episode to it, I believe, and and how we can over interpret that or at least that there's some vast conspiracy

of foot well. I mean, this is what led like Carl Young to believe in this concept of synchronicity, that there could be that there was a connecting inciple in reality that was not based on physical causation but was based on like, based on meaning. Essentially, that events could be not caused by one another, but connected to one another through meaning. And this is why we have this feeling that there are too many coincidences in our lives now.

But anyway, so after this moment, the District Attorney agrees to go speak to Grant in the prison before the execution takes place. Grant expects him before he arrives, and the d A tries to interrogate Grant on his theory. He tries to convince him that it couldn't be true. It's not possible that you are dreaming all this and we're just in your dream. The d A says, like, what you mean to tell me that my family, my friends, everybody in this city, in this state, everybody in the

world is just living inside your dream. And Grant says, a dream builds its own world, and the d A asks, well, how can I be a part of your dream if I sleep and dream myself every night. And then Grant says, in this great line, you only sleep and dream because I dream you that way. So Grant is then headed to the electric chair at midnight, and the d A is faced with this choice. Should he call the governor to get a stay of execution? But that would be ridiculous,

wouldn't it? But he has doubts. I'm not going to spoil the ending beyond that, but I will say my favorite part of this episode, aside from the great performance by Dennis Weaver as Adam Grant, is is in the middle part of the episode. It's the part where the doubts begin to set in for the reporter and the

d A and the other prisoners on Grant's row. I feel like this story at once raises several of the deepest, most challenging questions at the core of metaphysics, psychology, and the philosophy of mind, questions like how do you know for sure that other people in the outside world are real? And how do you know your current experience is real as opposed to a dream? How do you know you're

not dreaming right now? And then I think that the most mind blowing question from it, of course, is that if you're one of these other people in the story, like the d a or the reporter, how do you know that you're real? Could you, in fact be an imaginary person in somebody else's dream. And of course, with that last question, you may think the answer is just obviously self evidently no. I think it's probably no, but it might not be as cut and dry as we might hope. I want to come back to that in

a minute. Yeah, I watched this episode this morning, and yeah, it's it's really good. It's it's one of the again, a lot of these Twilight Zone episodes, they hold up so well, the shot and like stunning black and white. Uh. These you know, I guess at times the acting might feel a little dated to what you might have today, but it's it's all really solid. Also, this episode was adapted in the revival of The Twilight Zone, starring Peter

Coyote Uh in The Elite. Yeah, I haven't either, but but I looked it up and I was like, oh, yeah, there's Peter Cody. And then of course this episode was written by Charles Beaumont, who is one of like the legendary names of the Twilight Zone. You have a number of killer episodes. Yeah, it's really really good. Uh, it's a really tight, well told story. Um, and I highly recommended, And in fact, I was just I was watching it

on Netflix. So the Twilight Zones all on Netflix right now, so you can go look it up if you've got a subscription, and it's also on Hulu, I believe, if anyone wishes to watch them there. But there's tons of Twilight Zone awaiting you. I always forget just how many episodes of the show they did. I think there's like thirty six episodes in the first season, and not all of them are great, but a striking number of them

are great. Yeah. Yeah, Well, maybe we should take a quick break and when we come back, we can address these questions about dreams and being all right, we awaken you from the dream of advertising and back into the reality of our episode. All right, So I think we should deal with some of the questions I was just posing that are raised by this episode of The Twilight Zone. Uh. And the first one I think would be the most basic question, how do you know that you're entire life

hasn't been a dream? How do you know that the people you interact with aren't just figments of your imagination. I think we all assume that other people are real and independent, or at least you probably should assume that the outside world really exists, will it will continue after I die and so forth. But it's harder than you might expect to prove this with certainty. Uh though, I

think almost nobody actually holds this view. If you actually were to believe that your mind is the only thing that exists, and the rest of the outside world and all the people of it, they're just merely products of your imagination or your dream or whatever, this is known as sollipsism, and to be more specific, I think it would be metaphysical solipsism, metaphysical meaning this is how the world is, as opposed to something like methodological solipsism, which

you might say is one of the tools of Saint Descartes, who I'll talk about in a minute, which would just mean like solipsism might be a useful philosophical tool for a moment. And by the way, listeners who are fans of the excellence sitcom The Good Play will recognize this is one of the philosophies that is currently being explored in season three. Oh yeah, yeah, I haven't gotten there yet. I think I only did season one. Does it stay good? Oh yeah, it it just gets better. They do a

really good job of mixing it up and defying expectations. Uh. Yeah, but I do want to stress I think solipsis um is one of those points of view that especially can be frustrating to normal people because you can point out that it's really hard to disprove, and that can create the false impression that, like, some philosophers actually believe this.

I don't think any philosophers actually believe in solipsism, but it's one of those weird edge cases, right that everybody just sort of accepts that you have to leap over it with an axiomatic assumption. I can't prove it. I'll just assume the outside world is real and other people are conscious, right, because if you give you if you were to believe this, like things get pointless or silly

or dangerous really quickly. Right. Yeah, of course, I mean it's not a disprove But there's a funny implication of instability that follows from the assumption of metaphysical solipsis um. Uh. And it would go like this, if you're actually a metaphysical solipsist. You believe nothing that you experience as real. None of the other people actually exist, Uh, they're just figments of your imagination or something like that. What would be the point of telling anybody about it? Just like

for your own amusement? Like would any of the imaginary people you interact with benefit from you explaining why you think that solipsism is true? Now for me, I guess the two reasons to tell people come to mind, though, though neither is really grounded in the reality of living within a dream. On one hand, you know, what better way to dismiss the stressors in your life than to tell them they're but figments of your imagination, right to

go to full Scrooge on them. But you'd also have to tell that to all the people you like and love, and and that though is actually more attractive than one might think. I mean, this is essentially an exercise of detachment. Buddhist and Hindu teaching speak to the importance of freeing ourselves from the chains attachment. Both chains of iron, you know, chains to two things that are less desirable, but also chains of gold. Uh, change to the things in life that we love or or or give us, you know,

stability and peace. We have to free ourselves from our hates and our loves and connect with the true underlying reality of Brahmin and uh and and so you know, that feels a little on par with what we're talking about here. So I think some of the incarnations of this philosophy has realized in like Hinduism. I think especially I recall them being even more radical than sollipsism, actually and saying not only is the not only is all of the sense data of the outside world potentially an illusion,

but also the self is potentially an illusion. So it's not it's not that I am the only thing that exists, but maybe even I don't exist. Yeah, and I think we're going to get into even more of this continue. But then again, since almost nobody who thinks about it seriously is tempted to believe in sollipsism, I think we can just like use the axiomatic pole vault and jump

over the question. Yeah, I mean, I guess we don't even really follow into full blown solop sisum via social media, in which we all have, like you know, we have a carefully maintained version of ourselves, an unreal version of ourselves that interacts with unreal versions of other people, like it's just a bunch of masks, and uh, you know, I think if anything we're going to lead us to like this full blown solipsism, it would be that. Yeah. Well, I mean there's there are plenty of ways the word

salop sisum is used that aren't exactly the same. I mean, I think one thing you're getting on there is like people often do behave very solipsistic lee on on social media. But that's more in the sense of not necessarily not believing that other minds exist or that the outside worlds exists, but just acting as if you only care about yourselves. True. Yeah, yeah, So it's it's beyond that. It's not just I'm the only one that matters, or that everybody is that everybody

else only matters insofar as their attention to me. It's that they are not real. They are all figments of my mind. They are all but a dream. All right. So we're gonna jump over this question. If somebody actually holds metaphysical solipsism, I can't disprove them. I'm just gonna push them in a ditch. Um, So we go onto the next thing. Which is maybe a more vexing problem, which is the problem with Cartesian skepticism. How do you know that your experience right now, in this very moment

is real and not a dream? In shadow Play, Grant repeatedly explores this question. He's looking for clues in the opposite direction, trying to notice details about his environment that would tell him he's in a dream. He'll point out, Hey, this thing doesn't make sense. That must mean I'm in a dream. They wouldn't put that right there. They wouldn't let you have this in there. They wouldn't you know, this wouldn't be scheduled in this way. Why am I?

Why am I getting executed the same day I got sentence? That doesn't make any sense. I must be in a dream. Why are steaks being cooked in the oven? That sort of thing. That's a good one. No, I think that's just the nine But yeah, nineteen fifties culinary culture in America, it might be a largely bad dream. Uh so uh.

The seventeenth century French philosopher, scientists mathematician Renee des Card, of course, was famously concerned with this question in a lot of his philosophical works, such as his meditations on first philosophy, uh, having doubts about philosophy that gave primacy to the evidence of our senses. So like, if I assume is a starting point that I'm sitting in a chair in a studio talking into a microphone, I could turn out to be completely wrong, because I already know.

There have been thousands of times in my life when I was a hundred percent convinced that I was really physically in my elementary school lunchline next to Foghorn Leghorn, or on a boat headed to Greenland wearing a I don't know, a Superman cape or something, only to wake up and realize that I was actually asleep in my

bed dreaming. And I was totally convinced in the moment. Yeah, I mean, granted, it's it's it's west version of us to a certain extent, Like we there are things that we're not picking up on that we would otherwise pick up on a lot of the times, but within the context of the dream, we buy it as our reality. Well, yeah, that's one of the things. So you say that, and I agree with you. There is a textural difference to dreams. Dreams, you know, are waking reality. Doesn't feel like a dream, right.

Dreams are hazy and ethereal and and absurd in ways that we don't notice in the moment. And my surroundings right now feel very lucid and solid, right, And it feels like there's a qualitative difference, right, of course, until we start really looking at how we observe the world right exactly, Yes, there does seem to be a qualitative difference, But maybe dreams only seem hazy and ethereal in comparison in retrospect, because in the moment, doesn't a dream often

feel exactly as solid and lucid as real life. I've actually had a number of dreams I recall that almost became a lucid dream, and the sequence goes pretty much like this. Every time in the dream, I think, wait a second, I'm dreaming, aren't I? And then I look around and I test my surroundings. Doesn't this seem like a dream? Doesn't anything seem out of place? Can I fly that kind of thing? And whenever this happens, I conclude, oh no, everything around me is normal. I can't fly

totally real and lucid. This must be real and not a dream. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, mine is similar. But what happens with me is I'll realize it's a dream, and I'll be like this annoying, And generally it's an annoying dream. It's something that's it's not a full blown nightmare, but it's like it's annoying. I realize it's a dream, and then I just fall back into it anyway, like like as if it's just I don't know that, and that in itself is frustrating.

It's like, I I woke from the dream, I could have why didn't I go lucid at that point? Now? Instead I just kind of shrugged and went right back into the same old crap. Well, this is one of the things that the studies of dreams have found is that our critical reasoning abilities are extremely limited in dreams.

Dreams suppress certain kinds of brain function, especially the types of brain function that cause us to question our surroundings and think critically about sense data, which of course inherently makes us very prone to thinking dreams are reality even I don't know. I mean, it's hard to know how real they really seem in the moment, except for the fact that we feel like they're real right, like well, like one bit of sort of folk wisdom is often

thrown around. It's like, oh, well, letters are backwards and dreams you can't read text in dreams or you know, something like that. I don't think that's true. I don't think so either. But I have had situations where I've been reading something in a dream and it's difficult. But my experience and then that is like, this is difficult to read. I must be dreaming. It's more, this is difficult to read. What's wrong? You know? I don't think about it about the dream answer being the solution, right.

And so this whole dream problem is one way of getting to the position sometimes known as Cartesian skepticism, named after Descartes, and also affecting our our mail about Carnie Uh. Since dreams and also hallucinations such as the kind generated by a this figure, Decard imagines this evil demon who wants to deceive him with false visions of the world. Since they demonstrate that it's possible for us to be totally convinced of perceptions about the outside world while also

being ad percent wrong. Descartes thinks, you know, we should doubt all of our perceptions unless we justify them in a logically airtight way, And of course, descartes ultimate justification for the evidence of his of his senses, invokes a benevolent God who wouldn't trick him. But is there any non theological way to get around this? And he tells

or tests to separate dreaming life from waking life. There have been philosophers who have looked into this and tried to come up with here's how you tell the difference. The English philosopher John Locke thought he had one. He had one that was pain. Right. Blocke said, you can't feel pain in a dream like you can in waking life, and that's your easy way to tell the difference. Right.

So maybe if you think you're in a dream, I don't know, poke your finger with a needle and see if it actually hurts, and if it does, you're awake, and if it doesn't, you're in a dream. But twentieth century psychology research has found this is not true. This is this before we get the whole pinch me situation. Oh yeah, I think it may very well be. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, pinch me. See if I'm dreaming. I think this would not actually

due to the research though. I think this would not actually be a full proof test, because people do, in fact sometimes report the impression that they have felt pain in dreams. Just one example is a nine study in the journal Sleep by Nielsen at all uh and to read a couple of quotes from them, uh quote. Some studies indicate that pain is rare and it may be

beyond the representational capability of dreaming. However, the present study describes experiences of dreamed pain that were reported incidentally in experiments on the effects of somato since restimulation administered during rapid eye movement sleep. The results indicate that although pain is rare in dreams, it is nevertheless compatible with the representational code of dreaming advantage Freddy Krueger, Right. And this

actually comes out comes through in shadow play. Right. There's a part where uh, where Grant talks about going to the electric chair and how he doesn't want to be sent there to die again, and somebody's arguing with them. They say, if you're just dreaming, you won't feel it, but he says, no, Wait, I mean when you dream something bad, doesn't it doesn't it terrify you. Doesn't it

hurt when it happens in the dream? Yeah? I mean I'm struggling to think of examples from my own remembered dreams in which I experienced physical pain, But but yeah, it sounds completely possible. I'd be interested to hear from any listeners who have had dreams in which they have felt pain. Yeah. They also acknowledged that it might not be very common, but it does appear to happen. So

I think it looks like the scientific research disproved lock here. Now, there was another test I came across, and it was that the American philosop of for Norman Malcolm wrote a couple of influential works about dreaming in the nineteen fifties in which he argued that dreams could be put to the test of quote a principle of coherence. So the ideas, do the events of your present circumstances connect logically with

the preceding events and the rest of your life? So if you are currently having a sword fight with Christoph Lambert, why are you having that sword fight? How did you get there? Does the sequence of events make sense to you? Uh? And this is kind of similar to the test used in the movie Inception, when you ask how did I get here? Right, the characters do that there to see

if they're dreaming. If you find you can't recall how you got where you are, this allows you to realize that the present moment does not connect coherently with the rest of your past, and thus you're probably dreaming. But then again, I'm not sure this is a full proof test. It might be a sort of helpful test, but it doesn't get you to the right answer all the time. We know that the dreaming mind state, again, as we were saying earlier, greatly reduces critical reasoning capacity is and

it often seems to short circuit logical inquiries with false answers. Right, So you might ask a question that would be a good question if you could really think it through to get to the bottom of whether you're dreaming or not. But in your dreaming state, you don't think it through very well, right, You don't have full control of your critical thinking. So that's a self reflective question like that might not be helpful. Right, So, as far as I can tell, no one has introduced an airtight test to

tell the difference between a dream and reality. Waking life of course seems real enough. It doesn't feel the way dreams feel in retrospect and our memories of them, but that still doesn't help us achieve certainty in the moment. And then this year gets us to one final thing, which I think is the weirdest place we might go about dreams. This is the crazy part of shadow play.

Grant tells people around him that if he's sent to the electric chair, he's going to wake up from his nightmare, and if he wakes up, everybody in the world will die, because this entire world is nothing more than his dream. And this is my favorite part of the episode. So on one hand, you might think, well, what would it matter. You know the people that you imagine in your dream

are not conscious. Of course, there are many different ways to fear death, but one common neurosis here is the anxiety of being snuffed out right, of no longer existing, of their being a permanent end your conscious experience. And if the people in Grants dream are not conscious, there's nothing for them to be afraid of, no experience to exist in the first place, and thus nothing to come to an end. But in the story they do seem afraid. The ones who start to doubt their reality. They don't

want to be snuffed out. And this story seems to imply that they actually do have minds that they want to live on. They don't want to be blinked out of existence by alterations in Grant's brain activity. And this is also the only part of the story that's actually fantastical, because otherwise the story isn't even fantasy or science fiction, Like, it's just perfectly plausible, right that a man has the

same night or over and over. Uh. And I want to take this idea seriously for just a moment, could you the conscious entity with a mind, the person you are now actually be a person in someone else's dream to spare some similarities to the simulation argument that we've discussed on the show in the past. Yeah, yeah, the idea that that the reality we're experiencing now is a simulation created by a far future society that's currently just really excited about the idea of the right um that

we really want to simulate nineteen again. Oh thank god for that. Well, look at I mean, look at our cycles of nostalgia, right, I mean, look at some of our video games simulated worlds that we get into going back to you know, like an Old West setting or a hard boiled detective world or the nineteen eighties, etcetera. So it's it's not impossible. But but just as Grant argues that the perfection of one's life is an argument for simulation, like this is too perfect, it's it's too

you know, there's something wrong here. I believe there was a character in one of I. N. N. Banks culture novels who observed that the world is just too full of viciousness to be a simulation. That this must be the base reality, because who would dream it up otherwise. Now, I suppose that's kind of interesting, uh, to to think though, that these are the thoughts attributed to a character within a fictional sci fi novel. But still I think it's

an interesting point. Right. But then again, like what kind of frame of reference do we have if we have no memory or no understanding of the world outside of the simulation? Right? But I mean thinking about one way to think about the idea of being a simulation in a computer program is that you are being dreamed by the computer. Uh. Now, one hurdle to the simulation argument has always been is it possible for a computer to generate and host conscious minds. We don't know. It's impossible.

It's often assumed to be possible, but we just don't really know. The only thing we can be relative of least certain works to generate and host consciousness is a brain. We know for sure they can do that, because your brain is doing it right now, right. But here's where, in some respects, the possibility of living in someone else's stream becomes more plausible, maybe than living in a computer simulation. We know a brain can generate at least one conscious mind.

Who says it can't generate more than one. There have been a number of experiments in fact and observations and neuroscience too, especially throughout the twentieth century, that have led some experts to believe it might be possible to have at least two distinct conscious minds occupying the same brain. One big example, of of course, is something we've covered on the show in the past. We did I think a two part episode about it that you can look up,

and it's the split brain experiments. These were the originally experiments done by Roger's Ferry and Michael Gazaniga in the middle of the twentieth century, and they dealt with epilepsy patients of people who suffered really intense seizures and no other treatment worked, and so the treatment that they eventually went in for was known as a total corpus callistotomy, a severing of the corpus colossum, which is a bundle of nerve fiber that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.

And the procedure apparently worked pretty well. When you sever that the corpus colosum, it does help to stave off these these horrible seizures. But there were a lot of interesting side effects that made the people who underwent this

procedure very valuable to neuroscience research. For example, to give a very short version, you could show in some experiments that the part of the brain that talks, which appears to be primarily in most people, the left hemisphere of the brain, which is capable of speech, could not explain

what the right hemisphere was doing. And so if you show an image to only the part of the visual field that can next to the right hemisphere of the brain and controls only one of the hands, the hand controlled mostly by that hemisphere of the brain could do things like select an object that was associated with the

image displayed in that part of the visual field. But then the person talking against speech is thought to be mostly generated by the left hemisphere, couldn't explain in a logical way why that object was chosen, and that in many experiments like it led some researchers to an obvious question. Is it possible that both hemispheres in split brain patients are conscious but separately conscious within the same skull In

some sense, could there be two conscious minds within one brain? Yeah, it's one of the This is a total like real life Twilight Zone scenario we've we've thought about before on the show, Like maybe by virtue of once being one, like there's still like each one still thinks they are the one, but they are too. Yeah. Well, and another thing that would be very creepy is, again because of the localization of speech function in the brain, maybe only one of these can really talk to the outside world

and the other one just can't really. It can still act with the body, but it can't generate complex sentences or anything, which would be an obvious asymmetry in which one of the conscious minds within the brain gets represented to the outside world. One of them has no mouth and cannot scream now. I definitely want to acknowledge that I think our picture of this has been somewhat complicated by more recent research. I think we do talk about the center split brain episodes if you want to go

revisit those and and see more detail. But our picture on how information might or might not be shared between brain brain hemispheres, even in the cases of a full corpus calisotomy, seems to have been complicated by recent studies. I remember there was one we talked about by researcher named I think a Ya or Pinto who uh did research undercutting the idea that there could be two conscious

minds within the same brain. Um. I feel like this is an issue that that's not fully settled and is still full of like weird mysteries that we don't know exactly what's going on. Another example from neuroscience case history that has been taken as possible evidence that there could be multiple conscious minds within the same brain, as the the idea of alien hand syndrome, where you know, hands may interfere with one another's behaviors as if they're guided

by different wills. So one hand tries to button up a shirt, the other hand, tries to unbutton the shirt. Now, I want to stress that there is by no means proof or even necessarily strong evidence that there are multiple consciousness is within the same brain, because again, you can't know for sure that there's consciousness anywhere unless somebody tells you that they have consciousness. Right, I mean, that's the inherent problem leading back to the solve sism issue to

begin with. Right. But but again I also have to to throw in, you know, we we have to be careful about the idea of thinking about like the unity of self for the yes, yes, yes, is it? Is it? I think the more you look at it, this idea that there is one central unchanging you in there is a fallacy and one that we we still have a lot of trouble with when it seems like the more reasonable explanation is that first of all, you're an entity of perfessional change, but also there is kind of a

chorus of of of of yourself in there. Yeah. And one interpretation that that brings together a lot of the sceneroscience is the interpreter theory and interpretation is the interpreter theory.

The interpreter theory of Michael Kazaniga, one of the researchers involved in in the split brain experiments, where he's got this idea that there's sort of a region of your brain that's associated with the speech production parts of your brain that is there to unify brain phenomena you know, that are disparate in the beginning, and it's sort of its job is to tell one unified, coherent story to

you about what's happening throughout your brain. So it takes all these disparate plot threads and says, here's how I'll finish up the story. Uh, and then and that creates the sense of you. Your sense of self is generated by this sort of like a concatenation process in the interpreter part of the brain. But to come back to the idea of multiple consciousness is in the same head and maybe the idea of being someone else's dream. I've

had this idea before. Again, this is not something that I would argue is strongly indicated by evidence, just a very strange possibility that seems hard to rule out on the basis of any evidence I'm aware of. What if the process of imagining the workings of other minds involves

the low resolution simulation of separate conscious minds. What if when you're trying to understand somebody else's behavior, you trying to understand, you know, why did Jeff say what he said, and so you imagine his thought processes, Or when you're trying to write dialogue for a fictional character. What if, in cases like this you're practicing theory of mind, the brain temporarily carves out a bit of its consciousness potential to devote to this imagined person in order to better

simulate their behavior. Interesting, Yeah, yeah, I mean in many cases it would, especially if it's a perceived enemy. Right, It's probably gonna be a rather simple model. You know, it's you're you're reducing them to like, you know, cartoon villain levels of of impulse and desire. But I mean there's no limiting it just two enemies. I mean, in any case, whenever you try to imagine somebody, you don't know exactly everything your brain is doing to create that

simulation of them within you. Right, Like even the people we know they the best in our lives. For instance, our you know, our our you know, uh, you know life partners, you know or you know, loved ones, family members, really close friends, we might have a more robust simulation of them in our theory VR theory of mind, but it is still just a model of how their mind works and what they want and how they think. Yeah, it's our best guess, it's our I mean, it's not

their brain, it's our brain trying to do it. And if this were the case, you could be, in some sense creating separate conscious people in your head whenever you try to analyze a friend's behavior, or write a scene for a character in a story, or dream about a district attorney sitting across from you in a prison cell. Now you might say, well, if they're all generated by your brain, they're all you. I mean, anatomically, they are

all you. They're all made by your body. The other side of this, too, is like when you read a novel, yeah exactly, I mean, in any time you imagine a person. I wonder if this is possible, if there's any validity to some of these alternative theories of dual consciousness. For example,

you know, uh, Michael Gazzaniga's left brain interpreter theory. Perhaps the part of your brain that talks and interprets and seems to be in charge makes meaning of the self is not aware that the same brain is also generating little conscious simulations of people partitioned from the interpreter and the rest of the self. Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes me think. For instance, I've read a fair amount of Carl Sagan. I love picking up a Carl Sagan

book and reading it. Uh, you know, it gives me comfort. And as as such, I do kind of have like a tiny Carl Sagan in my brain, like an idea of Sagan that is kind of walking around in there or maybe summoned. But the really mind blowing idea is what if that little Carl Sagan has an experience? What if there's something that it's like to be that simulated Carl Sagan. What if he gets into an argument with

the little Terence McKenna in my head? Right, I mean, it's still your brain, it's still all the tissue in your head. But what if there's something in there that's a little Carl Sagan simulated by your mind sometimes that has its own wants, the desires, experiences. Now, again, I recognize that this is way out there and aculative territory, and I do not claim that there is strong evidence for this, but it is one of those strange things that I'm trying to think of reasons to rule it out,

and I can't. Uh So, if this seemingly weird scenario were the case, would there be any way to know for sure that you weren't a conscious, low resolution simulation of a mind inside a brain ruled by the tyrannical dictator mind that could blink you in and out of existence by the whims of a dream or imagination. Well, that sounds like a theological model there. Yeah. Fortunately, again, I don't think there's any strong evidence this is the case.

Sleep tight. All right, Well, there you have it. That is uh Anthology of Horror volume two, And if you loved it, you don't have to wait an entire year. You just have to wait a couple of days for the next installment, because we're gonna be back with Anthology of Horror Volume three, in which show will look at an episode of The Outer Limits and an episode of

the Simpson's Treehouse of Horror. I can't wait. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Bow your Mind, heading it over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you will find them. And oh see, what else can you do? You can find the show wherever you find podcasts, rate, interview, subscribe. That's a great way to help check out our other show, Invention. Uh it's an Invention pod dot com and is that

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