Science of Pet Peeves

Well yeah, no, really, I mean think about it, Like, all of a sudden, five minutes into it, you've got, you know, a hundred people crammed in this space. Stinky air is happening. It's true. They're they're they're rooting around for stuff. Some of them have brought on outside food. Yeah, person, next you may have a pizza that they're pulling out of a satchel to to chomp down on. And then a lot of it's all out of your control too.

I mean, that's that's a huge thing too. You step on the plane and it's definite plane rules, step out of line. Somebody's going to escort you away and like shackle you to a seat somewhere and they will by

the way, Yeah, just so you now, did that happen? No? Okay, But there are other elements going on, right, I mean that really the five senses are engaged here and and most notably the h your your ears, because there's just that they're being assaulted, right, Because inevitably when you get on that plane, there is going to be a baby crying or a toddler whining. This is just the law of airplane travel. Ye. Generally the dogs are going to

be tranked, so you don't really have to worry about those. No. No, I've heard I've heard of people flying though where they're encountering cats, uh, cats and little boxes on the seat next to them, cats catterwalling, Yeah, I guess. I mean that's what they're going to do for the duration of a flight. If they do it for an entire drive across the town to to the vet, uh, I think it's guaranteed um transoceanic flight. Well, unless they get a

mother's little helper, you know what I'm saying. But but I mean, okay, so sound is a big deal on the plane. Now, obviously, Eventually there's going to be an airplane engine and some nice sort of white noise to sort of help. Eventually you're going to be able to turn on your iPod or other listening to music device without being yelled at and hopefully drown out some of

the sound. But there's there's gonna be some time there where you're gonna have to deal with the crying baby, the dude that is coughing and sniffling, um, the person who's like shuffling papers, the person who won't stop fidgeting with their seatbelt. Oh, and the cell phone talker. Well, luckily that'll well I don't know, can you talk on a cell phone on UM? I think some transatlantic ones you can. I can't recall remember seeing a news item

about it and sort of cringing inwardly. But certainly everybody tries to finish up their conversations before the before they take off, before the in the right after they get that that weird call where you're getting arranging. Generally, it's just like a ranging pickup, like I'm here, this plane

is awful, Um, I'll be out in ten minutes. But but when you first got on the plane, there's no telling what it's going to be some snippet of some some conversation that is just amazingly irritating or way too personal, and you're like, what, I can't believe they're having this discussion, uh, because some people just have blinders on when they're when they're having these these discussions with with somebody, and you're like, WHOA, that is way too much detail to just be shoveling

out into the island on the airplane. And it's the worst because you know you're only hearing half of it, and the half of it that you are hearing sometimes is so like you say, horrendous. You're like, really, you don't need to be airing your dirty laundry. And I only knew half of what you're talking about. So obviously what we're talking about today is sort of the science

of pet peeves. Why we react the way that we do, yes, because inevitably some scientists, researcher, neuroscientist has been on a plane, put up with this stuff, and then they've decided that's it. I'm going back. I'm getting funding, I'm gonna research this, gonna get a test group together, I'm gonna figure this out. My next flight is going to be far less annoying, right, we hope right, or at least we've we've uncovered the

reasons why we're annoyed. According to an article on Wired by Alex Vincent, there is one sound more annoying than nails on a blackboard or even sirens, and that is the whining child. Yes, the whining child. Not just the crying child, but the whining specifically the whining child. And and that sort of catterwauling actually peaks between the ages

of two and four. In case you're wondering this, This this frequency that toddlers seemed to cultivate and and just resonate their out in the universe, the moment I that kind of yeah, yeah, you got it. Um, Yeah that um. And it doesn't matter if you're a parent or not.

It affects everybody equally, bothers everyone. Um. In a study published in the journal Social Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, participants were asked to do subtraction problems while listening to an infinct crying, also a regular speech silence, whining in a high pitched table saw and mother ease, mother ease? Now can you give up as a mother? Can you give an example of mother ease. I can't give you I

know right that just that just made me feel dirty. Um. This is that sort of exaggerated baby talk, and it's universal. It doesn't matter what language you speak, and there's there's mother ease, and we do it when we talk to babies, and we do it when we talk to our pets,

sometimes to our significant other. I generally don't use that voice um when talking to my significant either or my cat, but occasionally somebody else will be introduced to the cat and they'll like break out some mother ease on him. I'm always kind of like, oh, wait, don't talk to my cat that way. She's not she's not accustomed to this. That's interesting. You're like, don't expose my cat to to mother ease. She's going to expect this or is that what you're thinking. I don't know it just then it

might warp her somehow. You know, it's gonna irritating sound. And I'm like, oh, don't inflict that on me. You don't inflict that on the cat either. Well. The worst though, I think, is when people flirt in mother EA's and it reminds me of that Seinfeld episode in which Jerry and his girlfriends started calling each other schmoopy, you're schmoopy, your schmoopy? Well, and this I guess this also kind of ties into the whole the whole sexy baby voice, which I just don't get. Yeah, but but it seems

to be some more levels of annoying. Maybe it quite as as bad I mean, And I don't know if it's been empirically studied, like the mother ease. Oh what the sexy baby voice. Yeah, I don't hear of you study of the sexy baby boy. I don't think that there's any sort of brain development that is going on

with the baby sexy voice. But you know, at least with mother ease and with babies, we can see an actual tie there between you know, cooing to a baby and talking in mother e's and the child actually understanding that this voice is specifically for him or her and to pay attention, and that these words like dindon and now I know how to completely annoy this is awesome, um for dinner that is short for dinner, and so they sort of understand, uh, you know, phonologically from mother ease.

But that being said, Mother's as annoying as it is, is still less annoying than the baby whinings because because when those people were doing uh, the math, the subtractions, they found that they made more mistakes per math problems completed when listening to the wines and any other speech patterns or noises. And just to be clear to when they used the language samples the speech patterns, what they did is they scrambled it so that or excuse me,

didn't scramble. They had it in another language. And the reason they did that is because they didn't want people to be distracted by what was actually being said. They just wanted to hear someone talking. Huh. I wonder if anyone has ever used this to try and get something a break on their taxes or excuse some sort of clerical error in bookkeeping where they're like, I'm sorry, I work at a priest. Cool look at the study. I was. I was doing really good to get any of this right.

I was on an airplane trying to complete the report. There was a baby whining. What was I to do? It's true, but it is but this is tied to an evolutionary thing because because the idea is I mean, we've discussed before, like the big evolutionary push is reproduced, make another little person and push that person out, continue the gene, continue the species. And so therefore we have it built in that it's like whoa, one of the

larval humans requires sustenance. Stop what you're doing, tend to that, and then you can get by with whatever the other thing is, because this is the thing that is genetically most important. Yes, the larval humans are trying to get the parents attention. And that's what co author Rosemary so called Chang seems to think. She's the she ran the study. So yes, there it's something. It's the sort of pitch that could drill through any distraction to get your parents attention.

The larva require candy, the larva require toys. Whatever it is, it's more important than checking out pool. Sorry, I will really stop doing that. Um So that explains. That explains whining that the child catterwauling. What explains the annoyance that we feel when we hear only half of a conversation. Yeah, this is really interesting, and we touched on it earlier. Half of a conversation. We're even dropping on half of something, and so that our brains cannot help but follow along

and try and make sense of what we're hearing. I mean, our senses have evolved to make sense of the world around us and help us navigate this world. And uh, and therefore you've got this half of a conversation going on, even if you don't want to, even if you know it's the dumbest conversation on the planet, or it's something just completely offensive, and you know that you are growing stupider every second that you listen to it. Your your brain cannot shut it off. Um. There was an interesting

uh study into this by graduate student Cornell University. UM. He subjected people to having to listen to these half conversations, and then he had another group of people that he had listened to the same conversation, but but with the words garbled. So you were hearing not the not the words, but just the sound just kind of you know, kind of you weren't you weren't hearing a pattern or a

story or half of a story being told. You're just hearing gobbledy cook, just hearing gobbledy cook the whole um, you know, the mother on peanuts kind of a thing. Because the idea, Yeah, because the idea was, Um, are we annoyed by the sound? Is it just the sound of somebody else yabbering when we're trying to do something, or is it tied to the words? Is it tied to our brains trying to figure out the meaning of this conversation, And it's tied to the meaning. That was

what he found there. The person was far more distracted um our, Our our thought process and our problem solving bodies were far more impacted by the actual worded conversation as opposed to the gobblty cook. And I thought that was interesting because a lot of times you and I have talked about how the brain is just one of

his primary functions is predictive modeling. It's always trying to figure out what the next step is, what's going on, what, what is the pattern in front of the unfolding So it drives the brain crazy when it only has half of the information. Yeah, Lewis Black, I mean, comedians love talking about things that annoy them. It's like, like, I guess eight to nine percent of anybody's stick. But Louis Black has this bit where he's talking about overhearing part

of a conversation I believe about um. It was something to the effect of a woman saying and then if I didn't have that horse, I wouldn't have gotten into college. Yeah, I forget it involved college and a horse. And that's the only piece he heard. Yeah, that's the only piece he heard. And so he does this long bit about where he's just flying into a rage about his inability to understand what the context could possibly be for such

a ludicrous statement. And it's a great example of how I think any of us feel on some level when we're hearing this conversation, like what was that person talking about? I remember, I remember being in an airport and overhearing just just one snippet. It wasn't enough to be annoying, but I heard some guys say, yeah, I'm about to have to break through some membranes, and and that was that was it. And then so for for a while

it's like what membranes was he gonna breakthrough? Like is this metaphorical or yeah, I'm picturing him like, you know, he's like shrinking down fantastic void style and like, you know, journeying through some cellular tissue or something. I don't know, it just made or is it some slang that I'm just not hip to. I don't know. I love that, like,

is he turning into a blood nanobot um. The Science of What Bugs Us by Joe Palca and Florida Lickman is a book that actually covers a lot of this material, and co author Joe Palca actually says that you can you can actually change the circumstances um when you are being annoyed by by something like this, and he calls

it cognitive restructuring. Uh. He says that when you're faced with the situation in which you're annoyed a cell phone call, a seemingly endless line that you're standing in, or mosquito buzzing around you, you can practice cognitive restructuring. So his his example is, you can tell yourself that the mosquito is just a part of the life flow in the world,

and I shouldn't be mad. It's just trying to do what it is genetically programmed to do, and that that sort of cognitive restructuring will alleviate your your symptoms of annoyance. I'm going to try it, Okay, Well, I found that I'm One thing I try and do is just tell myself, don't be a jerk, don't be an idiot, that that tends to to help. Like if I I'll find like it'll be a situation where, um, and I think this is something a lot of people do, especially in this

day and age. Something annoys you, and you have to vent, you have to say something about it. So in our social media age, there's this huge temptation to do a tweet about it, right and and and I find it will be a situation where like, somebody has like a really annoying aftershave or deodorant on, and I'll just really want to do a tweet about how it smells like a stick of right Guard exploded in the office. But but I hold off because I'm like, that's that's just

doing nobody need good. It will be like a moment of relief, and then people would be like, wow, this is a great Twitter feed. He always does his gripe about the smells in the office. Right and so instead, are you now going to start saying to yourself right guard It exists in the world, Yes, exactly, it exists. It helps them to not stink. Exactly. Well, maybe you know right guard is better than the alternative, I guess, right, right, But it is worth noting that things like right Guard

or fake lavender. Yeah, and we'll fake lavender is such a weird thing because actual lavender smells so good, it's wonderful. Yeah, but fake lavendar is like the death of my nose follicles. Yes, like being gas and U and I mean that is is specifically tied to our genetic structure. There's a gene called trip a one that's trp A one, and in mammals, it's primarily receptor for chemical irritants. I mean, because it basically breaks down. You can't feel your DNA getting mutated,

so so our bodies need another alarm system. Um. And they've they've done these experiments where they found that if they removed this from a fruit fly, it will lap up cinnamon water like it was just normal water. Um. They've removed it from mice and the mice will just eat a whole bunch of a sabi and not care. It's used to help us pick up on harmful chemicals, but it's also it can also be uh be set

up by by extremes of colder heat. It's uh basically this kicks in any time our bodies meet the outside world, so any number of like chemical or physical irritants that's what's happening. And it's really interesting why you would be annoyed by those smells because on a cellular level, it's saying like this is danger or could potential changer, and we don't know. Yeah, yeah, potentially, And certainly there has been you know, I'm not sure about current products, but

they're hit. In the past, there has have been some concerns about various air fresheners. I mean, I'm sure they're so are for a lot of the products out there, about some of the chemicals that are involved in That's why people end up going for these these more natural products in any cases, because it's this whole question mark of what am I actually pumping into the air. So our bodies, Yeah, their bodies actually get in on the conversation too, and they're like, whoa, I think this might

be harmful. Let's get away from this particular odor or funk. The funk coming in. It's the cloud of fake lavenger, yes, yes, rushing toward us. And actually that brings up another point when we're talking about actual funk in terms of like hygiene or also another huge thing, uh on airplanes coughing

and sneezing. Another stand up comedian as He's and Sorry, has a bit where he's he's talking about somebody like flying into a rage at him about him having the sniffles, and he and the person's just like, you can have the sniffles for you know, however many hours and he was like, whoa, that was, you know, really an appropriate amount of anger over someone having the sniffles. But it can be annoying on one level. It is like this unpredictable sound, like when's it gonna stop, when's it gonna

happen again? You know? And then if you add into that someone not covering their mouth when they cough, like that's the worst. And I think I think the reasons here pretty obvious, and that is that this is somebody's else's hygiene issue going on. They've got some sort of a bunk that we don't want to catch. So it's it's natural that we would want to avoid it at

all costs. Okay, So that's why you see people on the airplane sometimes like constantly spring their hands and cleaning, or just George's bringing on like a tub of it and just you can't do that anymore, but you still bring on a tub of hand sanitizer and just and just glob it on specifically, what right you'd want a barrier of glob hand sanitizer? So glad they don't do that,

let you do that anymore. Yeah. Well, even on taking the train to work, you know, somebody will cough and instantly all I can think about are those images where they show how far a cough travels, you know, where they show this like giant red cloud that stems out and I'm like, oh, like even when somebody's covering their mouth, I'm just kind of cringe. And then if they don't, I'm just like, oh, disease vector, throw that person from the tree. That's it. I mean that's because you're you

are witnessing all of that. So yeah, we're trying to detect disease um and even decay right because certain smells and we're like whoa, uh, it's all very interesting how we are doing this on an unconscious level. Oh here's another one for our I think our last little bit on this one. I was once on the train and it was it was pretty crowded and uh, and somebody gets on and they're having a loud, annoying and appropriate conversation where it's like really mad, they're really irritated on

this phone call. And then they add and this train is really crowded, and you know, that's one of my pet peeves. And I'm thinking, that's that can't really be your pet peeve. Don't act like you're the like one of the few people on earth who doesn't dig a crowded train. Like unless you were a, um, you know, like a groper on a like a Japanese subway, or you're a pickpocket, you're you're probably not going to be really wild about the idea of a really uber crowded train.

But it's also a regular condition of at least in our city at peak times, you know, so you you come to expect this, but we still we never get quite used to it. You know, like there's nothing there's nothing sweeter than an empty train pulling up at the track to take you to work. I will say that at the peak of summer, when you're in the train and it's just like it's a hundred ten outside and drew inside the train. Um, it does kind of start to smell like the reptile house at the it does.

There's a certain funk. But all of us being said, we still have not answered the question about why nails on a blackboard are so crowd thing. Yeah, go back, we'll get we'll get the crowds, but let's let's go to the nailboard thing. Well, before you get the nail board the I'm gonna we need to take a break. Oh yeah, we do. I know it's annoying, but we'll gree high back after this. This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel.

At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot com and explore the answers to life's questions. And we're back. So, yeah, we have crowds to discuss, and we also have nails in a chalkboard. I mean, that's the big one. So let's go ahead and discuss nails on a chalkboard. It is the iconic annoying sound. And I think everyone responds the same to this.

And this again, this is a universal thing. The jury is still out on exactly wine nails on chalkboards send shivers down our spine and make us clench our teeth. But in nineteen eighties, six study by doctors Lynn Helper and Randolph Blake and James Hildebrand, subjected volunteers like the fantasy artists who did all the token illustrations. Yes, that's what I mean. The name caught my eye. Um volunteers.

I'm gonna put volunteers and quotation marks, I think, uh to sixteen different sounds and found that the sound made from dragging a three pronged garden fork dragged across a piece of slate was the worst, which is kind of like mona of course, nodah. It was like that the high frequencies were actually the culprit. But they found that when they removed the high frequencies from the sound recording that that had no difference. Oh so it was the it was a combination of the high and the low.

It was actually the middle frequencies that were driving everybody nuts. But still no solid reason for the response though. The study hazard a hazard a guess in which they positive that the frequency is really similar to the warning cries of certain monkeys and apes. Okay, so on a very like ancient level, we're back to this primordial form in the forest, and typically in in forest settings or or

even on the savannahs. You'll have multiple animals that are present, but but but one prey animal, say giraffe or or or one monkey species will put out the call. They're like, oh, there's a predator in the area, and everything will spine right. Yeah, we see this in a various nature documentaries, and one of the co authors, Random Blake, said, you know, he he feels like this is actually a good theory in that primate warning cries are some of the recordings that

he has of them. He says, if I didn't tell you what you are listening to, you could easily think you were listening to fingernails on a chalkboard. But the studies other co author, James Hildebrand or hill in Brand, I should say, he disagrees. He says that the nails on chalkboard zone is just a very particular sound and a very particular reaction, and it's not the kind of reaction that you would have if you are encountered a

dangerous animal. Well, yeah, I have to say, like when I when I've heard that sound in the past, I don't feel like I'm having that Oh my goodness, there's a saber tooth tiger in the area. Response Yeah, it's more of like, oh stop that. Yeah, and he says that the response has to do more with like friction and memory and it's not sound per se, but it's the image that's conjured up during that scraping, which I thought was really interesting because there is, uh, there is

something very uh tactile even happening. Even though it's a sound that you're hearing, it's something that you can almost feel as if you were doing it yourself. Well, it also I don't know, you just can't help but think of claw us. You know, it's like claws and like Freddy Krueger or something, or or some sort of like sharp implement. It's just and it's also the person like

it's in it's in many case. I mean you certainly you have situations where a teacher will do it accidentally, but so so often it was it's done by some jerk who's going, we're trying to get a rise out of somebody, So you end up associating, not associating the sound with the type of person who does annoying things just to watch people react. M it's a very bartsome some move. Yeah, that definitely definitely a bart move. Crowds. Crowds, Yes, so yeah, this this one lady on the train's pet

peeve of large crowds. Why is this annoying? Like why don't we just want to get in there and just go elbow to elbow and just dig off the body heat like penguins. Well again, I think it's that predictive modeling, right, because if you have a crowd swelling around you, you you no longer have these visual markers. You're kind of getting lost in the crowd. You don't you're getting disoriented, and that could have you know, have these feelings of

panic or specifically annoyance because hey where am I? You're you're in my way, and all of a sudden, um, this becomes sort of like a threat to you, right, Yeah.

And there have been the there have been various computer models have been together about how crowds behave, and I thought it was interesting that they pointed out the larger crowd becomes, the more they people in the crowd be can behaving like molecules and a fluid bouncing off one one of another at random, and eventually you reach the point where it becomes so jam packed that there's there's no control, like no, no individuals in control of the crowd.

It's like the airplane situation of who's in control. I'm not in control what's going on, except on a much more real scale. I mean, that's why you have various large gatherings where things could out of hand and people end up getting trampled or pushed up against the fence. Uh, you know, the soccer riot, even on stuff like the the the hajj and and Mecca. I mean, it's the whole reason that when when you have large groups of people gathering, police like to to have a heads up

on it, on it occurring. Um. One of the reasons, like it or not, that social media departments of various police departments are increasingly focusing on flash mobs because if there's gonna be a lot of people gathering in a place, even if it's something sort of simple like oh, you know a thousand people wearing party hats, well that's great, but it's still gonna be a thousand people suddenly appearing in a tight space, and that brings up various wild

cards of human behavior and just sort of groupthink, or in this case, it's not even group think, it's just bodies behaving like molecules in a space. It's interesting too. I think in some of those studies protect to people who study um like egrass flows for public transportation, they noticed that when it starts to get somewhat crowded, that people actually do move in patterns like V formations, and

it's weird that they naturally do this. It's sort of like the emergence that we've talked about before, how people just like there's sort of like one brain that takes over and and that actually those sort of formations aren't really helpful because they block, you know, the ways that

you can sort of navigate the crowd. But then there is a tipping point where the crowd becomes there's so many people in the crowd that, like you said, them, it's like they behave erratically and it's like molecules bouncing off one another. But it's really fascinating, right, And then you, like you said, you get into big enough crowd and you're gonna lose your bearings. You're not gonna where you are,

and that's gonna that excites and frighten us. Frightens us on a on a very primitive level, because um, I mean, just rewind back to ancient times and imagine yourself in some sort of a setting where there's the potential for that saber tooth tiger to be around the corner, and you don't know where you are, You don't know where you are in relation to your home base to cover, to where you just came from, and to where you're going your very life maybe at steak right, and if

you don't have that blueprint, that predictive modeling, then everything is a threat, right because you're taking all that stimuli in. Yeah, and I do applaud Atlanta's Marta public transportation force the significantly cutting down on the number of saber tooth tiger attacks that occur every year. Well, I think it's all there, the posters that they've put up. It's just it's a there's a lot more awareness. Yeah, Yeah, don't don't feed them. It just encourages more saber tooth tigers to run around

on the tracks. And definitely don't approach them and try to pet them. Yeah, even if they're wearing a top hat exactly, so pet peeves. There you go. We covered some of them, not all of them, but some of the big ones anyway, and the ones that have been studied, though I imagine everybody has some variation uh on these that they find it extra annoying. Well yeah, and some of it depends on the environment in which you grew up in, right, That's that's definitely going to call your perception.

Yeah yeah. This podcast, though, it also serves as a nice sort of part two to the previous podcast we did about like why is the sound of gum chewing annoying? Yeah? Yeah, And we actually received a few different listener males about that. One we heard from listener An who writes in about miss aphonia. She says, Wow, I may have this, but I think it's also connected to my a d h D. I have a worker who pops her gum and makes

your stuff nasally sounds, and it drives me nuts. I can't concentrate on conversations if there's quiet music or talking going on in the background. My absolutely worst trigger is the sound of something dragging on a cheap carpeting. An example of the kind you find in offices are dorms, especially socks on furniture or furniture dragging on it. Socks alone bother me and I hate wearing them to the sounds they make when being put on or taken off.

Even thinking about it makes me feel icked out, so that that there's some inside there into a very particular annoyance. In this case, socks. I wouldn't have guessed socks. I wouldn't and I may have been kind of snickering a little, because I mean, for snee, socks are absolutely good. I think I like putting none pair of socks. That's because they're soft. They're soft. It's good time. But again, masophonia

is it's those subtle sounds that drive people crazy. I recently read where someone was driven nuts by the sound of balloons being blown up and then ties that, yeah, somebody was ranting about yes specifically like you you go to an event and there's somebody making balloon animals, and yeah, it's like magicians clowns. I kind of go medieval on because it drives me nuts. Yeah, well there you go. So, yeah, I can definitely understand how socks could be annoying to somebody.

Has you know, this subtle sound in the background that eventually leads to madness. We also heard from We Have by the Name of By the Name of ian Ian Wright. Soon it says I'm a big fan of the podcast started listening during the summer, and now I've listened to almost all of them. I just finished the Missophonia podcast, which totally blew my mind nonintended. I wondered why the sound of eating eating bothers me the way it does, except when I do it. It's not fun having this.

I really like food and the people I'm with, but it's incredibly hard to concentrate and keep cool when all you hear is chewing, not to mention, you feel awful because something people need to do and generally enjoy, and

it creates a layers of unwanted emotions. So I found that interesting here from somebody who who seems to experience something at least closer to miss aphonia than than than a lot of us, actually screed well in and I thought it was interesting about that is when we were looking into it, people who ignored their feelings tended to

to actually experience them even more. And so I can't imagine how difficult that must because you're trying to manage the situation, right and you're with your loved ones, your friends, your family, trying to just eat a dinner and and to to feel that sort of anxiety just must be unbearable. So I know that there are some things that you can do some um coming into behavior therapy for that. So so although there's no cure, there are some some

avenues you can take. Yeah, definitely and uh not related to the mesophonia. We also heard from a listener by the name of Annie, who also happens to edit this show for us. Yeah, Annie writes in and says, um at the end of your Nightmare podcast. Yeah, I know this is a little late. You called for accounts from people who have died in their dreams. For eight years now. I've had dreams with a continuing storyline that takes place in a futuristic, war torn world of genetic modification. Did

dreams don't come at frequent intervals, Um. Sometimes I have to wait weeks to find out what happened after I woke up from the last one. Each new one picks up where the previous one left off. The characters have undergone the passage of time. There are flashbacks to other dreams, and I can never predict what's going to happen. I've woken up stunned at the outcome of these dreams before and will consciously trut I every night to return to

the story, usually to no avail. The funny thing about it to me is that the character and I say character because it was me, but much more awesome in every way. Uh, that was based off me, and the dream died after only about a year, so I'm not even in them anymore. I see it from the point

of view of one of the other characters. The p o V switched over to the new character after the death of my own, which can sometimes be strange and unsettling to feel uh something so strongly while dreaming and then wake up and have your own very different take on the whole thing. Anyway, just thought you might find it interesting. Love the podcast je put the awesomeness, Well,

that's a pretty awesome dream on several levels. Yeah. Actually, I was so excited to hear about that because I've had something similar like that, but not to the degree that she has. And I really think that we should just all encourage her to write those dreams stands. I really feel like there are like three novels here or word time napping. I'm going to talk to Roxanne about getting that. Yeah, Annie, Annie needs to go into the slate chamber. And create some dreams. Yeah, because I've mentioned

before how I returned to this setting. It's like some sort of unreal public transport underground train kind of situation. But there's not like an overarching story or character. It's just kind of a place that I seem to wind up and it seems very much a product of my daily commuting. But this, this is a whole another thing. And I mean to be killed off in your own dream after a year, we're written out of your dream.

That's but I love that it continued. It was like, Okay, that character came to an end, We're still going forward with this storyline here. Maybe it's not a dream, or maybe this is the dream? Are you going in parallel? Universal could be so so Annie, when you listen to this, just consider the fact that maybe this is the dream and the real world is the one where um, you're dead. I guess um. Okay, no, no, no, no, that is no. If you're listening to us, Annie, write down the dreams

if you want to read the story. So, if you have something you want to share with us, be at a pet peeve um, a sound that annoys you, or some strange other world that you go to in your dreams um that involve the future of humanity. Let us know.

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