Listener Mail: Spin Kick!

and feelings about spinning. Yeah, yeah, I was really pleased with the crop we were able to bring in off this one, and Carney the mail bod has been pleased as well. Carney has been spinning NonStop since these came in, that's true, and I've been quite mesmerized by the undulations of his skirt made out of wires and drive chains. All right, well, he's spinning spinning our way here. Um, I guess I'll go ahead and read this first listener mail that he has for us. This comes to us

from Hannah, Hi, Robert, and Joe. I was so honor that my previous email helped partially inspire such an interesting pair of episodes, like a Circle in the Spiral Parts one and two. It made my day so much brighter. From the minute the episode started, I was waiting eagerly for you to mention spotting. In my personal experience, it makes a huge difference in preventing dizziness while turning, lessening the recovery needed for a long sequence of turns to

maybe a few seconds at worst. However, maybe even more importantly, it helps to maintain balance in pirouettes and other one legged turns. Often the most challenging part of a long turn sequence is trying to stay on balance to not fall out of the movement. Focusing on a single point not only keeps you from getting as busy from the spinning, but but it's also a trick that can be used

in stationary balances to help stabilize. Um. You know this is this is something that is a great point because it does come up in in yoga, for instance, So when you're doing balancing poses, it's often been pointed out to me by yoga teachers that you know, you need to focus on a point to help maintain your balance, and and I was I did that for years, but then another teacher was like, don't just focus on a point while you're doing a uh, you know, a standing

balancing post. Focus on a vertical line, and I found that that seemed to work. I I don't you know, I have no empirical studies here on my part, but that seemed to work even better than focusing on a point. If I could find like a line in some tiles, or a line on a door seal, something like that, it helps me maintain my my balance a lot better, you know, assuming my balance isn't out of whack due

to lack of sleep or something. I wonder if that has anything to do with the one of the rationales for dizziness that we talked about in the first part, which is the nastagma's issue, dizziness caused by the rapid adjustment back and forth of the eyes. Like maybe a vertical line helps keep that forestalled better than a point would. Yeah, alright, so Hannah continues, uh quote. I also had some thoughts

about children spinning and spotting. In my experience teaching dance to children, I found that one of the techniques that it takes the longest for young dancers to grasp is learning to spot. For my youngest students, I would often take something big and bright on the wall to give them an easier place to focus, but mostly it's reminding and encouraging them to slow down and focus on one

part at a time. I mostly chalk up this challenge to a combination of still developing motor skills and coordination, but I think it also has quite a bit to do with the fact that spinning really fast and getting really dizzy is fun, at least for children. Yes, I wanted to end on two quick things. One is a sort of folk tip for recovering from spinning related dizziness. Make your hands into a blade shape and lay your thumb along your nose in between your eyebrows, so your

hand becomes a barrier between your eyes. I don't know exactly why it helps, but my guess is that it maybe helps your eyes recover from the no stagmus. I learned this way back when I was a young dancer just learning to spot. Last, but not least, here's just a YouTube video with a lot of well executed turns. It's a video from Pacific Northwest Ballet of a rehearsal

for Swan Lake. As you may know from the movie Black Swan, Swan Lake has an infamous thirty two foete turn sequences, which is incredibly difficult even for the most talented ballerinas. That that he also has a bonus of some wicked fast p K and Shinna turns near the end, and they include a link for us. But I imagine people can maybe just do a search for Pacific Northwest Ballet Swan Lake and you can get all the spinning you could possibly want. I watched, I watched the video.

It is incredibly impressive, as with all the spinning stuff we've been watching. I'm yeah, I couldn't do that. I have no idea how people do. Hannah closes out by saying, thanks so much for an awesome show. Always look forward to its showing up in my feet. Well that's really interesting. Thanks for getting in touch, Hannah. Okay, so this next message comes from Cassidy. Are you ready? I'm ready, Cassidy says, Hey, guys, I've never really had a reason to write into you

until now. I just listen to the first part of the like a Circle in a Spiral episode and wanted to share my experience. I work in a research lab studying suspected hearing genes using zebra fish as a model organism. This also includes genes affecting the vestibular system. Zebra Fish inner ears are actually very similar to human inner ears. They also have the utricle and the saccule, and I've had to dissect these. We made a crisper mutant that

has progressive vestibular phenotype as juvenile slash adults. Because of the mutations, they can't get their bearings in the water, so they're constantly spinning. The vestibular slash hearing system and fish is very important as it allows them to orient themselves in the water and since vibrations or movements in the water around them. If you'd like a video of the vestibular phenotype and fish, I would be happy to share it with you. I love your podcast. I frequent

listen while I'm working in the lab. It made me so excited to hear something relevant to my work from you. Huge thanks, Cassidy. Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, Cassidy, yep. Please send us more about your research. I'd I'd love to know more about it, all right. This next one comes to us from Jonathan Quote. As a person who has studied the Sufis and their methodology for forty years, I was impressed, as usual by your objective and open

minded take on the whirling dervishes. I think it's important to understand, though, that the jalah udin Rumi, the punative founder of the order, wrote that the practice of spinning was something he prescribed especially for the people of Connie A, Turkey, where he taught for that particular time in history. It's

not a perennial or integral part of Sufi methods of development. Interestingly, Joe is spot on when he discussed the visual effect of the spinning robes, since the Sufis assert that the practice of whirling was as much, if not more, for effect it had on the spectators. In thirteenth century Turkey, there were limited methods of provoking alterations and people's consciousness and viewing and concentrating on the whirling under the right

circumstances was one that was used. Throughout the centuries, the Sufis have continually utilized the methods and terminology of their contemporary environment to project their teachings. I'm confident that they would easily adapt to the terminology that you too often use and say that in one sense, the Sufis aim to establish a voluntary, manual override over the default mode network. That ability provides a person with an additional dimension of freedom, volition,

and understanding in a much wider sense. A good source for anyone interested in the subject is the book The Mind Field by the prominent psychologist Robert Ornstein. I know it's a cliche, but keep up the great work, Jonathan and cliche are not. Yeah, we we love to hear uh. We would love to get that positive reinforcement from from you guys that the listeners. Um, I'd say some of the main place we get positive reinforcement regarding the show.

So so keep it going. It keeps us energized, you know. Uh. But along the same lines, you know, at anytime there's any criticism or correction, we also depend on that as well. Totally alright, Joe, are you ready for some spin kicks because I think Carney's coming in with intention now. Oh, we got several messages about spin kicks, So this first one comes from g G says, Hello, guys, I was pleasantly surprised and excited when you guys touched on fighting

in your Like a Circle episode. Finally something I can contribute to. I compete in M M A and my one knockout just from a spinning sidekick, and he attaches an Instagram link. I went and looked up the video and yes, it it is pretty brutal. G knocked somebody out by a move that includes spinning around once and then. A sidekick is a a pushing motion with the leg as opposed to like a swinging motion, if that makes

any sense. It's like a thrust, a thrust of the foot as opposed to like a you know, a glancing blow or you know, swipe of the foot. Right now, she is responding in part two when we talked about a kick by a fighter named Joaquin Buckley that is a spin kick that was just absolutely brutal, like made the head snap back and uh. He says that his kick is not as cool as Buckley's, but still worth

a watch. Well, I have to say that Ji's kick was still very impressive, and Buckley's kick, though certainly very impressive, also had really nice um like video and audio effects and also some version of a live crowd or at least live crowd noise, so it was very accentuated by the production values, I'd say, while also being still being

a just a ferocious kick. Yeah, okay. She goes on reasons for spinning in combat because we were asking this in the episode right, I was talking about how when I was learning quote taekwondo whatever it is that they were teaching me as a child in Tennessee and calling taekwondo um, I remember thinking like with the spin kicks, like a spinning sidekick, I was like, would this ever actually be useful or is this just more like for

stylistic effect, is this more of a dance move? And we didn't really know if there was a good answer to that, but but she absolutely has some thoughts here. So first of all, she says power space is needed to generate power, and spinning helps to create artificial distance. Spinning can help generate additional rotational power the same way a shot put or would throw a shot uh second speed and efficiency. A few spin kicks are actually misnomers.

They're technically turning kicks, such as the buckley ko. Certain techniques like the sidekick think Bruce Lee's kick are easier to throw from a spin or turn. Imagine you're standing in a bladed slash split stance meaning left leg in front torso turned slightly to the right, and want to throw a sidekick with your rear meaning right leg facing your opponent, you would need to bring your right leg in front and to the left, chambering your leg before

extending it to kick. A better option would be to turn to your right, temporarily exposing your back, but the chamber and extension of your leg is faster and we'll have additional momentum from the turn or spin. These are the more general, easier to explain reasons you would spin in combat, but there are many others, such as ring slash, cage general ship. I don't know what that means, psychology, angles,

and impressing judges. Uh so, so that one last one maybe does sound like it's like the stylistic dance move thing too, which shouldn't be totally discounted from M M A. I suppose I think ring cage general ship. I think that refers to like being at what they called like a ring general or a cage general like, which I believe just means like just being totally in command and having an air of of command over your space. Could be wrong on that, but I think that's what they

mean the spinning cage boss. Spinning attacks can be higher risk, but if you're in a fight, everything you do could potentially be a bad idea. If you are aware of how your opponent can counter your attacks, you can pick appropriate moments to execute your techniques or even take advantage of probable counters. Thanks for all your great work, Looking

forward to the next episode. G very cool. I I suspected we had some some folks out there listening to the show that had thrown some spin kicks, or at least had washed enough spin kicks uh to to to speak to it. So I was very impressed with this. And here's another short one. This is from Charlie. Charlie says, recently, you guys wondered if there were wrestlers turned dancers. Look into Lady Beard. He was an Australian wrestler I think

Australian turned Japanese pop star. He definitely dances a lot now. He has a more recent project than Lady Beard, but I don't remember the name. Hope you guys have fun with this, l O L. Charlie Well, I had to look up Lady Beard, but it looks like they they they do or or have wrestled for D D D Pro Wrestling. That's what a Dramatic Dream Team, which is a Japanese pro wrestling promotion that goes so basically, let me just back up and say that with Japanese pro

wrestling you kind of have different extremes. On one hand, there's stuff that's very technical and serious and athletic um minded, and some stuff in the past has even been very uh you know, semi shoot or shoot oriented, where it's supposed to resemble authentic fighting as real as possible, and

you still see that like kind of energy there. D DT goes in the entirely different direction and has this very just ridiculous um at times have a very very great matches nothing you know, not nothing bad about the performers or anything. But they also have some just really silly stuff like inanimate objects winning championships, um. Even to where at one point an inanimate champions ship one itself,

I believe. So there's a lot of a lot of crazy stuff going on there, perfectly the right promotion for somebody with a name like Lady Beard. All right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Brett. Hello, Rob and Joe. I hope this note finds you both doing well and staying healthy. Just a personal comment on spinning Rob might be able to relate as a spell of vertico occurred while I was practicing yoga a few

years ago. Everything goes going well until the instructor had us go into a humble warrior position with eyes open. I chose a spot on the ground and started to move down towards it. But when I wanted to stop, my head felt felt like I was still in motion. Thus I tipped over, not sure what I was what was going on, I decided to research what could be a possible cause for this lack of balance. I determined it was a case of b P p V, a type of benign vertico where the calcium carbonate had moved

in the inner ear on the left side. There was suggest tis that I had found and tried at home, and the vertico type experience stopped. This experience taught me how much we rely on small crystals to help determine our position in space without and without them, I'm not sure where we would be symptom free for years now. It is amazing the things we can learn about our body and how so many impulses can control our everyday well being. Also, I am not advocating that everyone's self diagnosed.

Thank you all for what you do and now with more content. Yeah, lots of content now. Happy holidays and looking forward to hearing more from the both of you. Cheers Brett in Colorado. Thanks Brett. Do you know anything about this kind of experience, rob Um? I well, I mean aside from I mean you anytime you practice yoga and you're doing any any anything really on your feet, I think it's it's always a chance to check in with your body, seeing how you're you're doing in multiple ways.

You know, like you know, how how limber you're feeling, how you're hustles are feeling, and also how your balance is feeling um and so you you do get that kind of regular check in vibe where you're like, well, today my balance is definitely a little off because I can't go as far into this pose as I normally can, or I can't hold it as well. So I feel like,

you know, that's that's certainly very helpful. It's sort of like a little check up, a little bit of self diagnosis that you can do every time you hit the yoga mat. You know, you're you're seeing where am I today, what is my body feeling like? What am I doing? Um? As opposed to you know, benign vertigo and all. I haven't experienced any of that, but I think I have in the past had some teachers speak to it, like tell people you know what's to look out for, that

sort of thing. Okay, you ready for this message from Lee? Bring it on, more spending, more spin kicking here, Lee Lee says, Hi, guys, love the podcast. I was thing to you discuss spinning in martial arts and wanted to offer my own experience on the matter. I've practiced Chinese Kenpo karate for fifteen years. It's primarily directed at self defense. The consensus among people I trained with is no spinning in a self defense scenario, as you never want your

back turned to your opponent. The biggest risk is a strike to the back of the head, the second being someone getting your back putting them in a strongly advantageous position.

I don't know if that means grabbing you from behind or I'm not quite sure that that's what it sounds like to me, because I mean, basically, yeah, there are all sorts of grapples you could do from behind that would give you an advantage I imagine, right, I mean, I guess this makes me think about comparing the feedback we got from g versus what Lee is saying here. It makes me wonder if a major difference in whether or not it makes sense to do spin kicks is

the question of are their rules in this fight? Yeah, yeah, that's true, Whereas in in a there's plenty of room for you, even brutal injury, but there are rules in place. There is a referee if you're using it for self defense. Uh, you know, just out in the world there's not a referee usually. But anyway, back to Lee's message. While training, we do practice spinning kicks and back fists. This is primarily to build coordination and balance, but we also do

it because it's fun. We also spar in a kickboxing style. There the consensus is that there are limited situations where you might break out a spinning move. Sparring is about trying to work out your opponent's patterns and not getting stuck in any of your own. The time to break out a spinning kick or backfist is when you think you've lolled your opponent into thinking they see a pattern in your movements, and it can be a deceptive way

to break the pattern. We also use roundhouse kicks quite heavily. In the event that you miss a roundhouse kick that you have thrown at full speed and power, it is faster and easier for your body to continue their rotation and spin through the kick, resetting to your stance after turning fully around. Keep the great episodes coming, Lee, That's

great once again. Great to hear from someone who has a lot of experience with what we're talking about and can can speak to the the strategy of deploying a spin chick spin kick and why you might want to think twice about it and given the given certain scenarios. Totally thanks Lee. Al Right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Ryan. Dear Robert and Joe. First of all, I love the show. I used to listen very regularly a few years ago, but had to stop

after being consumed by grad school. Since I graduated and because of the pandemic, I have had to practice the chance to pick up on the show again. In your recent second episode on spinning in Circles. I'm pretty sure the movie Joe was thinking of is Interstellar, where Matthew McConaughey is landing in a spaceship on a high gravity planet near a black hole. Where they had to quote come in hot to minimize the amount of gravity dilated

time they spent there. He asked their friendly rectangular robot to assume control if when he blacks out from the G forces. I have to note that describing that scene out of context makes it sound truly ridiculous. That film might have been a bit of a mess when looking at all of its scientific and fantastic elements, but it

was certainly a beautiful mess. I think this is picking up on There was a moment towards the very end of that episode where I was trying to remember what movie it was, where there's a scene where a pilot uh knows that they are going to blackout from G forces, and they're they're calculating in like their time to recover

before crashing. Yeah. I do have to mention I remember when I was talking one of the times we got to interview Brian Green, the physicist UH, he did mention Interstellar as being a film in which he liked the black holes. He liked the movie's treatment of black holes. I mean they Yeah, they went to a lot of links to get many things about the science right and and stay stay pretty hard science plaus bowl with a

few exceptions. Yeah, all right, Ryan continues. This leads me to a suggestion for an episode topic g forces in space travel. You could explore the real life examples of how humans have grappled with the crushing effects of G forces on the human body, as well as sci fi and fantasy treatments. It might be fun for you to to discuss fictional works that have tackled G forces in space travel to some extent, like the Expanse and some

other fiction that doesn't bother with it at all. Basically any fiction with hyper drive or ridiculous acceleration deceleration Kim Stanley Robinson's novel twelve comes to mind, where careful budgeting of G forces comes into play with railgun like launch pads and the gradual slowing before they reach their destinations while traveling the Solar System. I'm certainly no expert on the subject matter, just a big old nerd when it comes to stuff like that, so I would love to

hear your patented fun education will take on that. Thanks for all of the great content you offer, including the inaugural short form artifact episode on the fake tooth best Ryan, Well, you know, we did a couple episodes a while back, didn't we Joe Um on artificial gravity and space and the idea of using of generating gravity through spinning but also through just acceleration. Yeah, yeah, we talked about that,

uh we. I mean that was mostly about the idea of trying to create artificial gravity in occupied habitats in space and not about like the extremes of G forces. So I think we could absolutely come back and explore the extremes of G forces. That might be really interesting, like some of the physiological differences. Like I remember reading UM, there's an interesting question about what causes some of the direct experience that people have during different types of G force,

like the the red out phenomenon. What actually makes the vision go red when you're reading out that? Apparently that's an interesting question about the eyes and the brain and blood pressure and all that. Yeah, we may have to come back to G forces in the future. UM. And as far as the expanse goes, I'm loving that series. It's about to come back on Amazon Prime, so I'm excited for that. But also the books are quite good. I only read the first one, but but really enjoyed it.

I thought I had some great science in it um. And then I think you've read Kim Stanley or Robinson, haven't you, Joe, and I misremember love Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm actually just starting a new Kim Stanley Kim Stanley Robinson book right now called The Ministry for the Future.

I have not read twelve, but I want to. Oh. And but I will say, uh, Ryan, I do not think that is the scene I had in mind, because actually I think I was partially misremembering the circumstances of the scene, and I think this next listener nailed exactly what it was that I was half remembering. So this message comes from Bentley. Bentley says, when you mentioned a fighter pilot knowing that they were going to black out

and having to recover before crashing. The first type of situation that popped into my head is from the first Iron Man movie with Robert Downey Jr. At the end where Obadiah Stain, the Ironmonger, had an upgraded version of the Mark one. So in the premise of the movie, the villain also builds like his own Iron Man type suit, but it's bigger and bulkier and different. Going on h Robert Downey Jr. Takes him to the upper stratosphere to

make the Mark one ice up. Then as they fall out of the sky because of the lack of oxygen and cold, Robert Downey Jr. Has to recover. Not specifically G force related, but I am sure there was there was a G force element as well. Love the pod Bentley, Bentley, I think you're exactly correct. I think this is the scene I had in mind where he knows he's going to black out and hopes he recovers in time to you know, pilot himself before he hits the ground. Yeah.

Science aside though that that was a really fun sequence in that film, and and clearly drew inspiration from both RoboCop two and the film Robot Jocks, which, uh, I think by the time this listener mail comes out, will we will have already put out an episode of Weird How Cinema on? Can we live? It's the question everybody's asking. Uh, we'll address that in our Robot Jocks episode. Okay, do you want to finish off with one or two more

messages here? Yeah, let's have some more spinning. Bring it on. This one comes to us from Silas, Robert and Joe. I enjoyed your look at dizziness and had an interesting bit of synchronicity and dealing with a different kind of motion sickness. I got my wife a VR headset for the holidays to help with our feeling cooped up from the pandemic, and having listened to these episodes helped me to understand that we just need to keep training with it to overcome the nausea from the apparent motion not

matching the input from our vestibular systems. I know it's it is fairly different, but I but it was a useful parallel for me that I felt I should share. Love the podcast. Thanks for your hard work. You know I didn't. I didn't even think of this. But this is another issue of disneys because I have friends who have tried or or use VR headsets and have mentioned some issues with dizziness, and uh, yeah, it would be

interesting to know a little bit more about this. And I know we have some other listeners out there who are also experimenting with VR, I mean some really going in there deep. So I would be interested to hear what other listeners have to say about this. Oh, I would love to hear from from longtime listener Peter about vietic dizziness. Yeah, yeah, I was definitely thinking about Peter with this. I'll have to ask him about it, uh on the side, and maybe he can write in a

listener mail as well. All Right, it looks like Carnie's spinning is beginning to come to a close here. But there's one more listener mail for today's session. Alright. This one is from Voda and it ties together spinning with lucid dreaming. I was intrigued by the idea here, so voter Rights Joe and Robert. I became interested in lucid dreaming after watching the movie Inception, and spent a few years during college actively training to increase their frequency and duration.

I guess of lucid dreams. To increase frequency requires writing down one's dreams to improve recall, as well as a practice called reality checking. These checks test whether certain areas of the brain are offline during R E M sleep and must be performed often enough to become habit in waking life, at which point the habit will be performed while dreaming and fail spectacularly confirming and beginning the lucid dream.

My favorite reality check is to simply count my fingers on one hand, as it is discreet and always at hand In dreams, I reliably have more or fewer than five fingers per hand, and my brain will rush an attempted explanation, like a foggy memory of some accident or birth defect, that quickly dissipate into a consistently surreal realization

that I'm inside a dream. This realization that one is dreaming is often quite startling and even scary, as it literally destabilizes your conception of the world you find yourself in. It's common for people to wake up within seconds of realizing they're in a dream, or to attempt some fantastic activity like flight and excite themselves awake. Thus, a few

methods of stabilizing lucid dreams have been developed. I write mostly to provide you with this fascinating piece on dream stabilization, written by the modern godfather of lucid dreaming, the Stanford researcher Stephen Leberge, who cites sources that may be a further interest, and so the quote from Laberge begins here. The earliest method for stabilizing lucid dreams was described by Harold Van Moore's mesmer in Night. He was the first to propose the technique of looking at the ground in

order to stabilize the dream. He discusses Carlos Castaneda's famous technique of looking at his hands while dreaming to induce and stabilize lucid dreams, and argues that the dreamer's body provides one of the most unchanging elements in the dream, which can help to stabilize the dreamer's otherwise feeble identity in the face of a rapidly changing dream. However, as he points out, the body isn't the only relatively stable reference point in the dream. Another is the ground beneath

the dreamer's feet. A problem with using vision to stabilize a lucid dream is the fact that when a dream ends, the visual sense fades first. Other senses may persist longer, with touch being among the last to go. The first sign that a lucid dream is about to end is usually a loss of color and realism. In visual imagery, the dream may lose visual detail and begin to take on a cartoon like or washed out appearance. This may

all happen very fast. Within a few seconds, the dream can fade to black leaving nothing visual to focus on. For this reason, one might speculate that focus on sensory modalities other than vision may be more useful to stabilize dreams. Why should dream spinning decrease the likelihood of awakening. Several

factors are probably involved. One of these may be neurophysiological Information about head and body movement monitored by the vestibular system of the inner ear, which helps you to keep your balance, is closely integrated with visual information by the brain to produce an optimally stable picture of the world. Because of this integration of information, the world doesn't appear to move whenever you move your head, even though the

image of the world on your retina moves. Since the sensations of movement during dream spinning are as vivid as those during actual physical movements, it is likely that the same brain systems are activated to a similar degree in both cases. And intriguing possibility is that the spinning technique, by stimulating the system of the brain that integrates vestibular activity detected in the middle ear, facilitates the activity of

the nearby components of the rim sleeps system. Neuroscientists have obtained evidence of the involvement of the vestibular system and the production of the rapid eye movement bursts in rem sleep. Another possible reason why spinning may help postpone awakening comes from the fact that when you imagine perceiving something with one sense, your sensitivity to external stimulation of that sense decreases. Moreover,

and this is probably the most important factor. If the brain is fully engaged in producing the vivid internally generated sensory experience of spinning, it will be more difficult for it to construct a contradictory sensation i e. Lying motionless in bed based on external sensory input. When presented with two contradictory interpretations of the state of our body in the world, our consciousness chooses one or the other, but

not both models. Uh And then Voter goes on to say that Lebourge goes on to describe an experiment in which a number of small, regular lucid dreamers were instructed in the spinning technique as well as rubbing their hands together. Both of these techniques were significantly more likely to prolong the dream. Hope, the message wasn't too long winded, thank you for the show, as it is a constant source of insight and wonder looking forward to the next thousand

episodes photo. Yeah, the next thousand episodes, which I think we already did the math in this they're they're all coming out in the next month now, Rob, I think you've actually done episodes on lucid dreaming before. I've never gotten super deep into this topic, so I don't know, do you have any thoughts on this, um? I mean, it all sounds very interesting and and does match up with with what we we talked about in those episodes. I think I did those episodes of Christian back several

years ago. But yeah, I find that lucid dreaming is one of those those topics that one of the big stumbling blocks for me is that I've never really applied myself towards it myself. And even though I'll have these occasional just spots of lucidity and dreaming, I uh, you know, I just feel completely helpless in my dreams. You know. It's like I'll wake up for a second within the dream, you know, I'm I'll realize I'm dreaming and then lose

control almost immediately. But then again, like I said, I've never really applied myself and tried to do much with it.

I'd say that my current association with dreams kind of lines up with what David Eagelman uh told me in that interview we did earlier this year, that that he considers it to be the night blender, where you just stick your head in the night blender and then you just end up with a bunch of nonsense, and then the content of the dreams is not really important or insightful, and that you know it, you know, probably has some you know, very important reasons otherwise, but it's mostly just

an unpleasant distraction. Uh. This is probably too I don't know, psychologically revealing in some unflattering way. And I may have said this on the show before, but I find almost every time in a dream where I start to inquire within the dream am about whether I'm dreaming or not, I end up concluding, no, this is real, uh, And then I just further go on to explore some some ways in which I failed. Yeah. So I don't know, Uh, you know, maybe we just we both need to apply

ourselves more to lucid dreaming. But I don't know. On the other hand, I wake up and then I usually forget about my dreams rather quickly and move on to all the things I need to do in the waking world without getting into tasks that I'm assigning myself in the dream world. All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and call it there. This is gonna be it for this edition of Stuff to Blow Your Mind listener Mail. But we would love to hear from all of you.

We we have some other listener mail tidbits that we weren't able to get to today. We'll get to those in future installments. But yeah, continue to write in with your feedback on recent episodes, older episodes that you've rediscovered, episodes you would like to hear in the future, or just kind of general general insight. You you know, you think we might be interested it in. You know, we're

we're open to all of that. We're doing these listener mails on a more regular basis now, and so the idea is that, you know, it can be more of a conversation, more of a back and forth, since we're not just doing it every month or so totally. In the meantime, if you want to check in with Stuff to Blow Your Mind, if you want to listen to more episodes of us, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. Just rate, review and subscribe. It is a great way to support

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