Stuff To Blow Your MindThe wonders and terrors of the dreaming mind do not always flee completely with the dawn. At certain times and places in history, it seems that dreams suddenly ascend to new heights of cultural fascination. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind series, Robert and Joe explore periods when the eye of culture fixes on the dream world.
If dreaming really were a kind of truce, as people claim, a sheer repose of mind, Why then, if you should waken up abruptly, do you feel that something has been stolen from you? Why should it be so sad the early morning? It robs us of an inconceivable gift, so intimate it is only knowable in a trance which the night Watch guilds with dreams, dreams that might very well be reflections, fragments from the treasure house of darkness, from the timeless sphere that does not have a name, and that the day distorts in its mirrors. Who will you be tonight in your dream? Fall into the dark on the other side of the wall.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind? A production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick.
That was, of course a dream by Jorge Luis Borges, an author that we cite and refer to with some degree of regularity on the show, because he was fascinated with many of the things we're fascinated with on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Mirrors, dreams, strange creatures, stabbings. Sometimes that sort of thing. And in this episode we're going to be discussing the dream world a bit more. This is a topic that we also come back to with some regularity on stuff to blow your mind, and for good reason, right, because there is a universality to dreaming, and it constitutes an altered and highly subjective mental state that runs the gamut from the mundane and the frankly boring to the other worldly to the you know, from the specific to the ineffable, and from the comforting to the just absolutely terrifying. It's at once entirely shut off from the wake world and yet can greatly impact it. And we've spent a considerable portion of our conscious history as a species trying to make sense of it and to figure out to what extent these two worlds are connected, or to what extent they're disconnected, and the enigma, in many respects still remains now.
Rob When you first told me you wanted to talk about this, it was in the context of looking at a specific mythical monster, I believe one from Japan, right.
Yeah, that was kind of I guess, the White Rabbit that I followed into all of this because it's an interesting monster and it ties in with sort of practices and superstitions concerning the manipulation of dream on our side in the waking world, and I think we are going to get back to that monster, perhaps in a forthcoming episode. But as I was reading about this creature from Japanese tradition, I started reading more about how some of these ideas extended back through Chinese tradition as well, and so I thought, well, I should maybe go a little broader and looking at the larger slice of Sino Japanese thought concerning dreams, and I ended up picking up this really fascinating book titled The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World by Lynn A. Struve, published in twenty nineteen by the University of Hawaii Press. It's an incredible book, and I was particularly taken by Struve's discussion early on about the mystique of dreams in various global cultures across time, with particular times and places in which the focus of intellectual and or theologic sections of the populace are just particularly focused on the dream world and what is going on in dreams and what we should draw from dreams, and how much of our waking effort and time and thought should be dedicated to dreams.
So you mentioned in the title of the book it makes reference to the end of the Ming world. She seems to draw attention to the especially the late Ming period in China, as a time when there was a lot of writing produced about dreams and focus on the meaning of dreams, compared to maybe the same region of the world in earlier or later times.
Exactly. Yeah, And this is something I had never really thought about before, because obviously, to some degree it seems like everyone is fascinated with dreams. If nothing else, you're going to be interested in your own dreams. And then any given culture is going to have some degree of ideas about what they mean or what they don't mean. And then you know, there's going to be sort of a global trend towards you know, modernization and rational interpretation of dreams. But I'd never really thought about this idea that there are going to be times and places where if you were looking at i don't know, some sort of a mechanism that was giving you the readings. Right, this is what dream fascination is looking like. Uh oh, we have a spike. Why is it spiking? It certain or does it seem to spike at certain points, and so Struve is making a point largely for this period of time at the end of the Ming daim Honesty and its decline, as it's about to fall an end and another dynasty is about to come to power. But this argument that there are some other places as well, where all the elements are just in proper place to sort of push people inward, and particularly to push intellectuals of the day inward, those who have more time to devote to these matters, and then also you know, the ability to write about them and have their words passed on to subsequent generations. So in the books she naturally discusses the subjective nature of dreams, their wide variety, and how the quote deficit of logic and rationality unquote in dreams has inspired both suspicion and celebration, which is this duality will come back to several times in this episode. Also key to all of this, of course, is that dreams arise unbidden. Certainly we have no power over what other people may dream, but generally we lack control over what our own dreams are going to consist of, and this can prove again a source of great inspiration even divine inspiration. You know, Look what the dream world has given to me, Look what the powers beyond the dreams have given me. But in some cases and some worldviews, it may also be seen as threatening or truly terrifying, especially within worldviews where rigorous control of thought, desire, and emotion are key. You know, It's like, perhaps you're a person and in your religious devotion, you spend a lot of time denying yourself, say lustful thoughts, and then you enter into the dream world, and there are no guarantees that those lustful thoughts will not arise there and take on forms that may seem at odds with what you're trying to do with your waking self.
Yes, and of course that can be threatening and unsettling to people. But coming back to the first half of what you said about dreams being an inspiration and having a kind of power or authority, I think that is linked to the fact about them seeming to be unbidden, the fact that they seem to come from somewhere other than your own thoughts. I mean, you could say that, we'll wait, where do your waking thoughts really come from? Those if you examine them more closely, might come to seem as unbidden as dreams, but at least we have a sense more like our thoughts in our waking state are more under our control and our thoughts in the dream world or not. And because they feel like they're they're less under our control than thoughts in the waking state, they can take on a kind of third party authority. So it's like you can report the contents of your dreams, or even just contemplate the contents of your dreams, without the sort of self doubt and anxiety that you might have about if you were just, say, like offering your personal opinion about something. When it's a dream, it's like you're reporting something you read in another source as a kind of third party authority. And often because dreams are ascribed to gods or literal powerful figures or ancestors or other you know, beings that have senses and information and powers beyond what we have in waking life, the contents of dreams can be interpreted to have power and authority over other people. Like I can tell you my dreams, and that might have a message that you think you should pay heed to, because I'm not just saying my opinion, I'm reporting what was revealed to me in a dream.
Yeah, it's it's interesting to sort of self analyze over this, Like if if either of us were to tell our spouses to report in the morning, Hey, I had a dream in which I was wearing this green suit. It's weird. I don't own a green suit, And then you kept reporting this same dream over and over again, Like how would they interpret it? How would you interpret it? Like at some point would you just be taking it apart, trying to think of what does green mean to me? And like what is this coming from? In or they might think, well, maybe my spouse really needs a green suit. Maybe that's what the root of this is, like deep down they desire it. Like there's so many ways to sort of tease it apart and try and make sense of it when ultimately, like the signal itself is irrational.
Of course, it gets even more complicated when the dream is interpreted to include an exhortation or some kind of guide to action, because consider the contrast between a couple of other things. What if, on one hand, I just say to my family, I think I'm going to shoplift a green suit out of the clothing store, and I just present that as my idea, it seemed like a good idea to me. Versus I say, I have a dream in which I take a green suit out of the clothing store without paying for it, and I keep having this dream. Well there, it kind of seems like, look, it's not It wasn't my idea. You know, it came to me from the dream. So it's like somebody else is telling me I need to do it.
Yeah, this idea that there's something about the dream that does not seem to fully originate in ourselves. This is a theme that we'll return to again and again here, and something that various interpreters of dreams and sort of dream theorists over time have latched onto. Now, coming back to lynn A. Struve's book, she says that while in some rare cases dreams have allegedly and allegedly is important because the nature of other people's dreams is always alleged, and even our own accounts of dreams that's subject to interpretation, remembrance and reporting and so forth. In some cases you have dreams that have allegedly directly informed history. But otherwise, like, what does it matter that people are having dreams and reporting them and focusing in on them. There's sort of like two major areas that she looks out at here. One is we'll explore is like what happens when you're fascination with dreams kind of like bubbles over into making decisions about the waking world. But the other one that she touches on has to do with ultimately with like how a given society viewed consciousness, how a society views its dreams, especially in highly intellectual and authoritative cultures. You know, you can look to the surviving writings on dreams dream journals, and they can ultimately reveal much about that culture and the individuals doing the dreaming and the writing, as well as the inner workings of the mind. She writes, I submit that dream writing can indirectly contribute to a history of consciousness, not in the sense of what people were conscious of over time, such as class identity, but in the sense of what people thought consciousness was and how they experienced it. Delving into this can illuminate how they felt and understood themselves existentially, which underlay other actions and endeavors. Consciousness at its most primal is a sense of being an observant entity, and it builds and modifies selfhood by the agency of narrating what is observed, attempts to narrate that most ineffable kind of observation of what occurs to us in dreams expose this process at the most elemental level that is accessible to others and therefore on which self interacts with society. So dream talk can give us valuable information on how people probed awareness itself, under what circumstances they were moved to do so, and how they're evolving selves negotiated nurotologically with their sociocultural milieu.
Okay, so this is interesting. So Struve is making the argument that even if you don't have people, say writing philosophical treatises on what they believe the nature of consciousness to be, you can infer a lot of things about what certain people at certain times thought believe the nature of consciousness to be by reading their reports about dreams and how they talked about dreams. Because in a sense, dreams are a dreams are relating and experience of consciousness separated from action and waking life.
Right right, Yeah, It provides this this sort of distance on inner thought process. That's and again I'd never really really thought about this either. It's easy to sort of think of accounts of other people's dreams as either you know, interesting or boring, or interesting only to them, or perhaps interesting in terms of like exactly how it is interpreted based on everything else, and all that's valid, but this added level of like, yeah, you're to some degree, these are accounts of people thinking about their own consciousness. Now. In this book, Struve ultimately dives into the particularities of Late Ming Dynasty China during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but she also highlights other times in places that seem particularly focused on the power of dream So, you know, it's all interesting, I think, coming from our current place in the consideration of dreams, sort of the tail end of what she classifies as an accelerating Western decline in the belief of prophetic and oracular dreams. And she argues that this decline has been accelerating, at least among the educated since the seventeenth century. I mean, we're still obsessed with our dreams, we still talk about our dreams, right, They still have the power to fascinate us, terrifies and all that. But we're generally more inclined, it seems to me anyway, to dismiss them as nonsense or the scrambled remnants of waking experience, thoughts and feelings. I remember David Eagleman when I initially interviewed him the interview before last, he said that he mentioned that he had always thought of it as sticking his head in the night blender, which I thought was rather apt. You know, this idea that yeah, this is what this is what you get. You know, these are just the mental leavings from the previous day, and you can pick through them. You can, you know, maybe you'll find something useful that is provides some inner reflection, but ultimately the thing itself has no meaning. It is like a waste product that is extruded from the mind.
Well. Yeah. Eagleman's particular theory about the adaptive function of dreaming was that it is a defensive action of the visual center of the brain to prevent takeover of that tissue in the brain by other senses during the dark period and the night, so that when you know it's nighttime and you have your eyes closed so you're not using the visual centers of your brain, those brain cells don't start to get recruited too much by other functions of the brain, because our brains are very plastic, and part of the evidence he produced for that was that there seems to be across the human life span and across different animals, there appears to be a negative correlation between the plasticity of brain tissue and how much dreaming you do.
Yeah, so it was an interesting hypothesis that he came to after initially seeing it as the night blender. But you don't hear someone like David Eagleman talking about dreams being the vehicle or the instrument through which God is speaking to him, or to us, or to random people. I mean, you will find it in the modern world, but for the most part, we don't really lean into that on the whole.
I mean, I guess technically, I want to say, those are two separate scientific questions. One would be what is the adaptive function of dreaming in the first place? Like why do we dream? And I think that's the main question that Eagleman was answering when we talked to him about that, that the purpose of dreaming is to prevent the nighttime takeover a visual tissue by other functions. But there's a totally separate question, which is what determines the actual contents of dreams, and you could have you in a way that's kind of unrelated to the other theory. You could just say, well that you know, the fact that we need to prevent the takeover of that brain tissue means you've got to have something going on in there. What's going on in there? What kinds of stuff you see and imagine in a dream? I mean, it could be anything. So why do we see the things we see? And that's an interesting psychological question that seems somewhat separate.
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, certainly you could have a situation where if the Eagleman's hypothesis was correct, that you could still have God speaking through the content of the dreams, because it's like the brain just needs something to keep the to keep things visually powered up, but it doesn't particularly care what is in there. And then yeah, you could have God or God's slipping a message in to the stuff in the same way that you might be able to cut up open the entrails of an animal and supposedly, you know, determine the future based on what they contain. Ah.
Yes, So it's technically there's no conflict between you being able to read the future in the in the guts of a chicken, and the fact that the guts of a chicken are used for digestion by the chicken.
Yes, all right. Coming back to these different periods and times, there's been an uptick in interest in the contents of dreams and this idea that there's something meaningful there to really latch onto. One of the periods that Struve touches on is the Romantic period in Europe, particularly late eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries. Shruve writes that the quote felt limitations of an Enlightenment rationalism and mechanism, especially as a concern the human body and the inner workings of the mind, led to a kind of increased interest in the non rational and the mysteries of the self, consciousness and the unconscious mind. She writes, quote with growing interest in dreaming as a medium through which to link these compulsions. Dreams came to feature prominently in natural philosophy, medical thought, the budding field of anthropology, art in art theory, personal notes, and especially creative writing and literary criticism. This occurred as intellectuals responded with elan and or anxiety, hope, or dismay to the ethical French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, rising nationalisms, and socio and environ mental changes attendant on the early Industrial Revolution.
If I understand Struve's argument correctly, this seems to fit with the pattern of the late Ming period in that I think she understands an increased focus on dreaming among the people producing writing as a common feature of periods where there is a lot of where there is a lot of strife and rapid change.
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I think that's that's one of the main reasons that the Romantic period here is such a nice parallel example. Now, in bringing up Romanticism, you know, the mind instantly goes to particular authors of that period, say Samuel Taylor Cooleridge, who lived seventeen seventy two through eighteen thirty four, whose work often explored dreams as well as those visions brought about through the use of opium. So I wanted to look at like another text that dealt with this topic, and I ran across a very interesting book from nineteen ninety eight titled Coolidge on Dreaming by Jennifer Ford, and it explores this naturally. In the specifics of the poet's work, but also in the large, the larger context of eighteenth and nineteenth century dream fascination in the West. You see examples of this in the work of other notable Romantic authors as well, like Lord Byron and Thomas de Quincy, who, of course, of course also famously imputed opium. Ford writes that there was no consensus concerning the nature of dreaming at the time, during the Romantic Romantic period, with opinions are really centering on the big three interpretations. So one potentially divine visions you know, could be could be God sneaking in a voice or a message there, or some you know, supernatural entity with our interests at heart. I guess you could also look at that as too, a font of creativity and inspiration, a natural place for the poets in the writer's mind to go in the artist's mind or three dreams as residue or byproduct, which is, you know what. We've been discussed this idea that maybe dreams are nothing but just sort of the reassembled contents of things we thought about or observed, etc. During the course of our day.
Now.
Coolridge was much inspired by the writings of antiquity on the matter, considering the idea of prophetic dreaming especially, but he also consumed contemporary writings that included both serious attempts to understand dreaming from the vantage point of current medicine and physiology, as well as magical and mystical strains of thought. Now this is kind of an aside here, but one of the things that Ford points out is that one of the authors that he would have, of course read from antiquity would be Homer, and who in the Odyssey describes the two gates from which dreams may arise Quote four. Two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn, and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of saun ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfillment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass when any mortal sees them.
Well in a way, that belief is not very helpful. So it's like some dreams could contain prophetic content and other dreams are there to deceive and misguide you, but you can't you can't know which or which.
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of the ideas presented by the gomork and the never Ending Story, you know, the idea of this link bit and creative creativity and deception between dream and creations of imagination and lies. But and I guess this get touches on, like one of the real problems of valuing the content of dreams is that, like, sometimes dreams are just stupid. I mean, there are gonna be maybe some there's some versions of it where you're like, okay, there's always something there might be cryptic, but there's something there that might be your viewpoint regarding dreams. But at times you're gonna have an uphill battle because you're going to have that dumb dream where you're what like in the the the words of Mitch Hedberg, you know, had a joke about a dream in which he had to build a go kart with his old boy, something like that. You know, you're gonna have dreams that you're really gonna have to have to try hard to find some sort of prophetic interpretation or meaningful interpretation of what's there. So easier to say, well, you know, sometimes they come through this gate and they mean something. Sometimes they come through the other gate and it's just complete crap.
Now.
Ford has a section here where she briefly goes through mentioning you know what other writers of antiquity had to say about it, Like Hippocrates and much later Gallan, both agreed that dreams mattered and they were connected to health. They also wrote that Galen in particular wrote that they could contain divine messages of healing contained in dream symbols and so forth. But for both of these individuals, however, food and digestion were deeply linked with dreaming.
Hmmm, yeah, you might be an undigested bit of beef for cheese.
Exactly, yeah, exactly the example I thought of as well from a Christmas Carol. Now, Plato, Aristotle, and for the most part, and with some notable exceptions, argue that the dreams were not prophetic. Apparently Cicero kind of was wishy washy on this. Aristotle, however, was pretty firm on the matter. Ford writes, quote he explained sleep as the rising to the head of vapors from digestive processes. Dreams could be explained by their relation to the material world and to waking thoughts, and not as a result of prophetic messages from gods. Totally in the potato camp.
Here, there's more of gravy than grave about you.
That's Aristotle, yeah, now, but still, this idea of prophetic dreaming cast a long shadow across Western history. And of course, you know, outside of what's going on in the like intellectual realms of eating given culture, obviously you every kind of deeply rooted folk traditions and so forth as well, which you know, none of the things authors particularly get into that as much. But with the Christian tradition, Ford points out, there was always a lot of back and forth on the matter because the Bible itself seemed to be of two mind signs on prophetic dreaming, sometimes championing the prophetic power of dreams and other times denouncing it, in fact casting out the dream observers with the soothsayers and the wizards in the Book of Deuteronomy.
Well, I feel like this is a repeating pattern, and I think this will come up again in some stuff we'll talk about later, either in this episode or in the next one in the series. But there's always sort of a tension in the practice, in the reception of the practice of receiving revelations, whether that's through divination or whether that's visions and dreams and so forth, because many religions will have that type of content in a sanctioned way, like maybe some of its orthodoxy or its history, its stories, its current priesthood will practice things that involve some methods of knowledge of that form, and that will be the sanctioned version. But then there is sort of an unsanctioned version that is not promoting orthodoxy or is subverting the power of the priesthood or whatever, and well, you don't want to allow that stuff. So it's kind of like, you know, well, there were some visions and dreams that were legitimate, and that's part of what we believe now. But if somebody is telling you new information from visions and dreams, then you've got to be careful about that.
Yeah, that's not canon. But anyway, during the time of the Romantics, a lot of this increased interest and confusion about dreaming had to do Ford stresses, with quote the perceived unsatisfactory factory, mechanical and associationistic explanations of dreams offered by John Locke, David Hartley, George Berkeley, and others. Interest in the forces and features of psychic life began to increase, and a concept of the unconscious mind began to emerge. So it seems like a lot of these unsatisfactory ideas involved digestions. So I guess, you know, ultimately it's not very romantic for someone to say, look that dream you had. I know it was really inspiring, but it was essentially like you passing gas in the night. You shouldn't give it a lot of attention unless it is, you know, interfering with your ability to sleep. But it also comes back to what you said earlier about like a time of change, a time of like changing ideas and emerging ideas, and sometimes this kind of feeling of like, well, no, that that can't be right. That's not how I feel about it. That's not what these voices from the past have necessarily agreed with now. Coolerdg himself wrote that he thought much of these discussions were too dismissive of the personal, psychological, mysterious nature of dreams, as well as their overall value to the dreamer. But he also read the writings of Scottish metaphysical rationalist Andrew Baxter and was particularly taken by his arguments that dreams did not originate in one's own soul, but were brought on by external beings, so dream spirits were to blame, because otherwise, how could we dream something that we had never witnessed or thought or felt in the waking world. How could we meet someone in dreams that we had never met in reality.
This seems like an odd thing for Coleridge to be enticed by, because, like, he was a writer, so you'd think he'd be more familiar with the concept of creative imagination. And how like, yes, a character can start talking back to you in your mind and you you haven't met them, You made them up. This is part of the creative process.
I yeah, it's a good point. I kind of interpreted those being like again to her point, like recoiling a little bit from this. You know what the rational world is saying about dreams, You know that it's it is potato. And then on the other hand, you know, wanting this idea that's more in keeping with the muses, that dreams are overpowered, that they that they are coming to us and giving us something, giving us a creative gift that we might run with. And apparently this is the kind of thing that Baxter was talking about. You know, the idea that the dreamer is visited during sleep and that quote dreaming may degenerate into possession.
Oh okay, So you could imagine it being attractive for Coleridge and other romantic writers to think like this in the same way it might have been attractive for writers who literally believed in the muses as entities, because it gives that same kind of third party authority to what you're writing that I was talking about with dreams earlier, like you know, if oh, I didn't just make this up, this was given to me by a divine being.
Yeah, I mean it reminds me a bit of some of our past discussions about the bicameral mind hypothesis, you know, as sort of like, okay, there's the idea that a god might speak to you, but here's this other idea that kind of gets you to a similar place, but through a different, different strain of more rational thinking. Though I guess at the end of the day, you're still talking about some sort of entity outside of your own being in the case of Baxter's writing. So I don't know, but I guess I tend to sort of interpret it here as being like, you know, it's the irrational in the rational insight. Any given person's mind, and certainly you're able to hold on to and be attracted to conflicting ideas, but still from that idea, it's a short walk to pre existing concepts of dreams brought on by demons and the like. Believe Baxter wrote about the incubus and the succubists a bit at least the general concepts the link is made between nightmare and madness, and Ford makes special mention of this quote. The notion of dreams as possessing the dreamer provides a rich source of anxiety and thoughtful deliberation for Coleridge and many others who ventured into the often hostile territory of the dream. Dreams were involuntary events and could not be controlled. Often the dream itself was perceived as the controlling force. I know, in my case, oftentimes I will sort of think, you know, vaguely about like there being something that is programming my dreams, Like there's a little person in my head that makes a lot of programming choices, like it's a TV channel and often makes just illogical programming choices, like like I'll look at it and be like, well, think of all the things that I did yesterday that I read about, or experienced or watched on television, and this is the dream you gave me. This was the programming that was selected for my night's entertainment.
We're rerunning transfers five, five times in a row.
I would love transfer five dreams, but no, it's generally a lot more boring. It's like, I don't think you know the target audience here. But anyway, one sees this idea of dreams possessing the dreamer and the works of Coleridge to Quincy, Wordsworth and others. But Coleridge again also kept abreast of modern medical writings, as we as the writings of people like the physician Erasmus Darwin, who stressed, quote the terror of involuntary thoughts, sleep and dream as a sub human state in which we cannot fully exert our will. So, you know, I guess this seems to be just a common theme that everyone who's thinking about dreams have to come up against, is that there's we can't fully control it. And what does that lack of control mean?
Well, again, when I really think about it, the question it raises is what does it mean when we do feel like we're in control of our thoughts? What causes that sensation because again, like I feel like the closer you look at the moment to moment functioning of your waking mind, the more mysterious the origins of your thoughts becomes, and it can start to feel like a dream. We're like, wait a minute, why did I just think about that? Did I really have control of thinking about that? What made me say transfers five? Where did that come from? Yeah?
Though, I know what you mean. Though, I guess at times there are waking thoughts and you know, if we have a really active, you know, default mode network, we can kind of self analyze and we'd be like, oh, well, this is why my when here, and then you know, we can sort of try and trace it. But dreams often are more difficult to interpret along those lines, like they're less easy to interrogate.
Well, I guess sort of what I'm getting at is that it seems like maybe the difference is that in dreams we have less of the illusion of control over the direction of our own thoughts that we feel we have during waking states.
Yes, absolutely so. You can see a number of these ideas reflected in a poem by the romantic author Lord Byron. This is a piece that Ford also references in the book, but I thought it might be nice to read just a portion of it here. Again, this is from Lord Byron's The Dream. Joe, do you do the honors? Since I read the boretes at the beginning?
Oh sure, let's see. So this is an excerpt from The Dream. They pass like spirits of the past. They speak like sybyls of the future. They have power, the tyranny of pleasure and of pain. They make us what we were, not what they will, and shake us with the vision that's gone by, the dread of vanished shadows? Are they? So? Is not the past all shadow? What are they? Creations of the mind?
All right, Well, on that note, we're going to go ahead and close out this episode, but we'll be back in part two and we'll continue to discuss this idea of the mystique of dreaming these different places where in time where there's there seems to have been a surge and interest in the power of dreams and the like, the practicality even of dreams. So we'll look at a few other different cultures, including the Ming dynasty example that Struve is directly mentioning, and eventually we'll get to that monster. I don't know that may be even further along. But at the end, there's a monster at the end of this book, is what I'm saying.
Will it steal my dreams? It might?
It meant very well, might, or it might just help you build ikea furniture for all night long?
Will it steal a green suit for me?
Ooh, one would hope, One would hope that monster has connections all right. Well. In the meantime, if you want to write in about your dreams, hey, We're always happy to hear them. Our listener mail episodes published on Mondays, Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, from My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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