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