PewDiePie takes care of my cat (and loses him). (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I go across town with my mother. We're traveling together in a strange land. It looks like British Columbia. There are lots of quaint local restaurants, and it's a small to medium-sized town. 

Then I'm on my own. I wind up spending the night at a suburb with a lot of condos with PewDiePie as my neighbor. I go over to his house. He lives in a large house with about four or five other guys. He's about 23 and utterly charming. And very impulsive. Everything he does seems so unpremeditated and and wild. I leave my cat in his care. I have very conflicted feelings about this decision. He seems really trustworthy while also seeming like he just does the first thing that pops into his head.

He drives off (very, very slowly) in a jeep with his friends, and immediately loses the cat. The cat jumps out of the vehicle. PewDiePie doesn't go back for the cat, but the cat voluntarily makes his way back to him. PewDiePie has got some kind of magic to him such that nothing bad happens to him no matter what he does (or doesn't do).

INTERPRETATION

I've been considering trying to make videos for YouTube again. I've tried making book reviews before, and I've also tried making math and physics videos. I recently picked up three ebooks about social media crafting for $0.49-$0.99 each. I've been learning some interesting stuff. 

The Guide to Going Viral by Brendan Kane emphasizes that it's the "effect on viewer" that's one of the most important metrics to evaluate when considering what factors made a video perform better than other videos. What emotion did you intend for the viewer to experience? This is very different from what I've learned in a college about making legacy forms of artistic expression. It doesn't conflict with what I learned, but it just wasn't a part of what I was taught. 

What I learned in theatre classes lets me know why PewDiePie was successful. He's completely in the moment. He's running completely on impulse without going up into his head in his videos. It feels completely natural to watch. It's like we're just watching someone without an agenda in the privacy of their own world. Impulsivity isn't exactly a great trait in real life though. We associate that with reckless choices and irresponsibility (losing the cat). But PewDiePie is more than just unpremeditated on camera. He has a good sense of agreeableness and what is going to be tolerated by a crowd and what isn't. I think that's the sense of magic protection in the dream.

Personally, my favorite videos are by the creators who are fun to watch because they react really impulsively without thinking. I enjoy feeling like I'm playing video games with my best friends and we're having the time of our lives. (I mentioned my penchant for let's plays to a creative writing professor and she asked if they make me feel less lonely. I do think so.) I think that the book I'm reading by Brendan Kane is more about creating videos like Mr. Beast's or Veritasium's, where the effect on the viewer is highly calculated. And that tactic is extremely successful, even though it's not my first preference as a viewer.

So I think this dream is just me trying to process some of the new information I'm getting about why some people get numbers while doing YouTube and some don't. I do think it's more than luck, but I'm not sure everyone has what it takes. (And by "everyone" having what it takes, I mean me.)

Audacious customer asks for a 90% discount... maybe. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm trying to shoot a short film. This is for love. It's not for an assignment. Somehow, I rope a family I don't really know into playing the parts. They're confused about what's happening though. I haven't really sold my project to them, and it's visible in how aimless they feel about playing their parts. There's no drive or ambition. But they do surprisingly well anyway, and I'm thankful to them. I even feel like they're my new friends now. 

Years later, one of the girls in the family finds a job at a pet store. I go into the store and prepare to ask her and her family for another favor. 

I hear the phone ring. The phone is a very old-fashioned landline. It looks like something from the 1940s. I pick up. The person on the other end wants to purchase something for like... around $40. I don't know exactly what she said she wants to buy though, so I just write down my understanding of what she said on a sticky note. I take the message to the manager, who is wrestling an octopus away from a squid in one of the aquariums. The octopus is the aggressor. It looks like it wants to kill and eat the squid. They're about the same size. I note that the octopus is a pinkish color and say, "Oh! I wonder if the person on the phone wanted to buy the octopus!" 

I look up the price of the octopus in the store's price list, and it's something around $200-$400. I cringe. It's yet another unlikable customer trying to garage sale their way through life. Such a lowball offer that would be! Then I see a small box with 6-packs of pink sparkling water and wonder if I've misjudged the situation, and the drinks are what the customer was actually asking for.

The manager gets the octopus untangled from the squid, and puts it on the counter. Then she puts it in a separate aquarium. 

I try to persuade the girl and call her family members on the phone to do another film with me. They are, once again, very neutral. But they seem to feel well enough towards me to indicate that they'd feel good about doing it again. It's a huge relief.

INTERPRETATION

I think this dream deals with rather subtle emotions arising out of situations that I am still not comfortable with even 20 years later. Everyone in the dream was confused. These are emotions that can confuse and stun me and the people I partner with. 

These are the situations the dream simulated:

1) Being the one and only leader of a team for an independent project, like a film crew. In the dream, I was very anxious for everyone to like me. I was also pretty aimless. I have been a manager and a group project leader many times before, but I had the backing of the organization (and I had accountability to the organization). And the desperation to be liked always simmers beneath the surface. The fear of being unable to depend on anyone else to back me up or bounce ideas off of has never left me. 

2) Being the one to have to approach people for partnerships. When I was a child, I loved roping other kids into playing my "let's pretend" type of games. I don't know what happened as an adult. Now, it's scary. I think I've had several bad collaborations since growing older and trying to get more serious about artistic and business projects. That's put some anxiety into me about partnering with others as an adult. 

3) Selling things to people. I absolutely hate when people try to argue with me about pricing to get a discount. There's a type of person who will sell their likability and trustworthiness to argue for a ten percent discount on a $20 meal, and I just find it appalling. 

Those are the main uncomfortable feelings from this dream, but there are a lot of other uncomfortable feelings I haven't resolved in the dream. Talking to someone on the phone and not hearing or understanding what they have to say. Passing along an incorrect message. Getting an order incorrect. The girl in the pet store was someone I asked in real life to stay in contact after our class ended, and she declined. Even sparkling water tastes just a little bit uncomfortable. 

Gen Alpha tears down the existing structure. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm with a friend who's an elementary school teacher. He's sick of what he's been seeing in the world. So he goes into the bowels of the school--narrow passage ways, to protest. I join him. 

After winding through the black curtains and narrow halls, I emerge at a desk that's still in the bowels of the school. A former child is with me. He's a young man now. His education was stunted because of all the political upheaval surrounding undocumented immigrants. So he has to start his education now that a lot of time has been lost. I feel bad for him, and I also think that it's such a waste of potential. How much further along in life would he be if he could've just concentrated on educating himself when he was younger? I start a new round of my education now as well. We write in pencil on black paper. Someone comes to take the papers.

Then I get up to try to find my friend further in the bowels. I hadn't meant to come this far or for so long. For me, this was supposed to be temporary. I'm going to tell my friend that I'm leaving soon. I can't find him, so I follow some other people who are disenfranchised with the system. Suddenly, we're outdoors in a crowd with a ton of Gen Alphas. They're going to tear down a balcony where someone is being oppressed. 

They find the balcony and tear it down with their bare hands. A mother says angrily, "What did you kids do?! When I buy you a house, Ashley..." She says it in warning tones. The kids don't care at all. Their work is done, and they go back to school. A parent in the crowd--a woman who looks like she's from the 1980s says. "I'm a sigma!" Over and over again. "Don't mess with me. I'm a sigma." But she's very sad when she makes this declaration. 

Then, I'm back in the narrow passageway of the school. I could get caught at any time, and being here makes me feel nervous. I decide to take a left turn. It takes me into a pitch black area. Finally, it opens into the music concert stage. Orchestral music plays. I see the head of the music department. I walk, trying to blend in. Trying to hide. My friend is taking the opposite tactic. He's smiling at the head of the music department like he's just seen a celebrity. He wants to be seen and acknowledged, so he can notify her of his protest, but I don't trust that going through her will help anything.

INTERPRETATION

I don't usually like to get political, but this is kind of a political dream. I am very concerned with what I see in my corner of the world (the United States). The "Big, Beautiful Bill" just passed, and I've looked at comments from both the left and the right. I lean left, but I'm willing to listen. Frankly, I do not believe that this is a measure that's going to benefit everyone who works a job--as if that would excuse wishing ill for people who are too sick or elderly to work a job. And I don't believe there's this massive group of people who could work a job, but would rather play video games all day, so they pretend to need disability and live this comfortable, easy life. 1) You're not going to live comfortably on disability. It might not even pay the rent. 2) That's just not human nature. People aren't built to want to do nothing. If you're young and able bodied, yet sit around playing video games all day and don't have some sense of purpose in your day to day life, you probably do have depression or some kind of mental illness.  

Also, people have a bias towards thinking they work harder than average when that's not what objective measures show. 

Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but there just isn't as big of a need for workers as there used to be even when I was young. And advancements in AI will probably only exaggerate this more and more. A lot of Gen Z and new graduates can't even get a foot in the door to entry level jobs. That's one way I can see an able bodied/sound minded person giving up and playing video games all day: if it just becomes very obvious that they're not going to get anywhere no matter what they do to try to break in to the workforce. We're not doing anything to address this issue with our policies, and it's starting to disturb me.

Ultimately, I think this is a bill that makes life even more difficult for people who were barely hanging on. There is no spiritual justification for allowing this to happen. I don't think that the goodness of God shouldn't work through the government, and should only work through the Christian church. I think the loving nature of the universe can and should express itself through the everyday actions we all take, including what we do collectively as a group. 

I have chronic illness myself, and I depend on a lot of societal support to get by. Trust me, just on a practical level, you do not want a bunch of homeless schizophrenics who cannot get access to their medication or therapists running around. You should want them to sit at home writing silly short stories, cleaning the toilet, and learning new algorithms in Python. It's quite a step up from running around on the streets in a panic accusing random people of doing horrible things to me (which, I'm very sorry to say, was exactly what I was doing before I got help).

In the dream, I'm reeducating myself. I think that because of the way I was raised (and also due to the fact that education is expensive here and there was no health insurance for waitresses when I was young), I wasn't given a good head start in life. It impacts me even into middle age. I can only imagine how much worse it would be for someone whose parents have been detained by ICE and sent to prison in another country. 

I just wonder when some of these barriers to all people having a good quality of life are going to be taken down. Because I don't see a lot of technical reasons for these barriers. I mainly see a beliefs and opinions reason for these barriers. 

I listen to an astrologer on YouTube who goes by Astrolada. I can't remember which of her videos I saw this in, but I remember watching a video in which she thought that Gen Alpha is going to be the generation to fix this mess we've gotten ourselves into in which our core social systems are basically sociopathic. In the dream, the mob of Gen Alpha operates based on humanitarianism. And they don't care what the older generations have to say about it. Something about the Age of Aquarius. 

That would be nice. I am very skeptical of horoscopes while loving to listen to them at the same time though. I listen to them because they're often so optimistic that I wish they were true. It makes me hope that something good is around the corner. So even if they're not true, they motivate me to keep working on my hopes and dreams--even though I so rarely see any kind of payoff. My horoscopes are extremely optimistic this month. So we'll see.

Frustrating.

I don't even want the Declaration of Independence anymore. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I have an actress friend, and she's desperate to land a role. I've written a movie. She wants us to perform the two main roles for a casting director or an agent (someone important she's met). For the audition, I'll play the dumb hot guy/comedic relief, and she wants to play the role she might realistically get: the "everyman" and hot chick. 

Just before this, I was someone completely different. I went to a museum that let me in for free and would give me a free gift because they were having a special Trump promotion that I saw an ad for. I wore a purple Trump shirt and I had a degree while visiting this museum, and that entitled me to free admission and the gift. 

I kept thinking the place would be swarming with MAGA people and that I'd be mocked for having a theatre master's degree if I mentioned it. But no one harassed me--the topic didn't even come up. 

I started from the top of a large Colosseum or Parthenon and descended the very steep, crumbling stone stairs in pairs of 2 or even 3. And there were ants everywhere, crawling up on my bare feet. But I made it down the stairs to my reward. A woman was holding out of a copy of the Declaration of Independence or a similar piece of paper with US history on it for me. But I didn't even want the gift anymore. The experience was enough. 

So this actress puts me in her car and I complain that she didn't even give me time to get dressed up and shave my legs. I'm in a white tee shirt dress with my hairy legs sticking out. She replies that we're all given the same amount of time in a day, and we do what we want with that time. 

"Fair enough," I reply. She's not going to be distracted from getting to the audition promptly.

We rehearse as she drives, and she is surprised when I keep telling her that the character I'm playing (the boy) is a dumb, selfish guy, and nothing will change that, no matter how much hope she has that he's not. And it seems like she, personally has that wish for the script to be written so that he'll change. She's not using that yearning as her motivation for the scenes between us, which I think would be the best thing for her to do, not to rewrite the characters and plot.

INTERPRETATION

The Trump promotional special actually has more to do with my master's degree program than politics. I've ended up not needing the certification (the piece of paper) I got. I've never used it. It's been years now. But perhaps the experience was worthwhile, even though there was pain, effort, and irritation involved (biting ants, worry about politics, and the exertion of going down steep steps). 

With the actress scenario, it seems to me as though the actress and me are both versions of a kind of wisdom that the other needed. The actress can set material goals and accomplish them (shaving the legs and driving us to the audition), but the comedian had wisdom and insight into human nature that the actress needed. She'll only get so far with just taking action without that insight. So it seems like a call to balance those parts of the brain out. 

Keeping the dinosaurs out with squirt guns full of thousand island dressing. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

It's my first day to start working at a local cafe. It's huge, like a warehouse with a lot of different rooms created with room separators. 

I spend a lot of effort listening to a young barista talk about getting her art in a magazine. She had put it on display in the cafe, which helped her get it in the magazine. 

Then I listen to another young barista's personal beliefs and problems. 

They train me--or I should say, they tell me what to do, but they don't show me. I do my best, but the cafe is like a maze and I get confused. 

I stay late and follow a guy around who makes rat poison to seal the dinosaurs out of the room using thousand island in these very serious-looking black super soakers. 

My parents come to pick me up. 

The next day, I open the cafe alone. Luckily, my old boss from a bar I used to work at pulls in with his sports car and tells me he pays useful people very well, because he makes a lot of money off of them. I feel incentivized. Let's both make some money!

And then he does a much better job of training me how to open. He does every step himself with me right beside him to show me how to do it right.

Then I wake up, pee, and give my cat his 3 a.m. snackies and brushies. 

I go back to sleep, and then I'm manning a booth at a science fair. The scientist hasn't come and set it up yet, but I'm admiring him from afar. 

I really like what's on display in this booth. They're called "biological blankets," and they're quilts that do some kind of cool sciencey thing. I don't know what. I need to look into that after they get the booth set up and I have a minute to read the presentations. But I'm excited to come here to do this. 

Then the scientist arrives! I'm surprised to see that I recognize him. He's Dr. Bruce Greyson, who wrote a book about near death experiences called After. I absolutely loved that book. He's even more impressive than I had thought!

"Can I have fifty bucks?" he asks me. 

Instant disappointment. 

"Uh, yeah!" I give him $50, almost all the money the fair paid me to be here, which wasn't that much, but it had meant a lot to me. I would have stretched it out. 

He goes to work putting up his quilts, and does a good job. But he hits on my assistant running the booth with me. I think he's married. And he says little things here and there that are starting to make me think that he's kind of a douchebag. 

I hate that someone I had admired so much is throwing up so many red flags now that I'm actually getting to know him. 

INTERPRETATION

Hmmm! I'm sure remembering a lot of my dreams lately, although I did have a lengthy dream about hanging out with the Beatles that I forgot. Pity. 

Anyway, I think both of these dreams have something in common: meditations on the way people are hired. 

In the first dream, I'm confident and happy to be at this workplace when they take the time to train me properly. When they just expect me to show up and know everything with a mostly hands-off approach, I'm nervous and am not useful for much other than listening to my coworkers and hanging out with the exterminator. 

In the second dream, this guy clearly isn't hired for his personality. He's hired for how he looks on paper. 

Over time, I have come to be very wary of people who have credentials and look good on paper and don't have a personality type that gets along well with others. 

In my opinion, workplaces these days have it all ass backwards. They should be interviewing and hiring people with good personalities, and then invest heavily in training them. They shouldn't be looking for a certain set of credentials at all. 

Writing on the sky. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm on a street on what appears to be a busy space station. I'm watching a young woman. She picks up a street cat that looks like it could use help crossing. I watch her put the cat down. 

Then, something else crops up which makes her want to adopt the cat: it's all alone. I see her cement the decision to adopt in her mind. She seems to feel a need to explain her decision to the people nearby at a desk. 

Then I find myself writing. I'm writing with hundreds of other people in a stadium. I write on the literal open blue sky, on the ceiling of the space station we're on as I lay on my back. The lady beside me notices what I've done and gives me a reassuring nod. My cursive looks like smoke or burnt leaves in the sky.

Then I'm writing on paper. I'm writing about Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager. Seven goes up to the mail clerk and asks for a change of clothing. She bumps into the Doctor, who asks her what she's doing. She replies that she's looking for a change of clothing so she can assimilate it. He says she won't find it there. 

A stack of mail gets knocked over, and sure enough, it's a brown package with a spare uniform inside. The cloth peeks out from the tattered edges. 

I try to write a witty reply from the Doctor, but I'm stuck writing by hand with ragged scrap of rubber or something that degrades with use as I press it against the paper. It hardly makes a mark on the paper, and my handwriting is ridiculously messy. The only way I'm able to get anything on paper is by writing really large and sloppy. I should give up on writing, but I don't. I need to see what happens to Seven and the Doctor. 

Then I watch an interview with the Doctor about why he was so sure she was wrong about being able to get another uniform.

INTERPRETATION

As for the first part of the dream with the girl justifying adopting the street cat, I can explain that by the fact that I am on a weight loss journey. So I watch this YouTube channel of a female bodybuilder who critiques Gorl World. 

I really dislike Gorl World. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically a community that harshly judges fat influencers like Amberlynn Reid and Foodie Beauty for failing to lose weight. They try to throw other rationalizations in there, but that's what it boils down to. 

So I block most of those channels except for this female bodybuilder's, because when I listen to her, she throws in tons of useful knowledge about health and fitness. Plus, her disgust at the neglect of these fat influencers' health is really motivational for getting fit and eating right yourself. 

I learned through one video or another about Gorl World that Foodie Beauty had this big drama because she tried to adopt a kitten straight off the streets, which is illegal in the country she was in. In the dream, there's a need to justify taking the cat off of the space station street.

And then in the writing half of the dream... man, in real life, it's getting hard for me to keep writing. For many years now, I've wanted to put writing down because I just don't see any material benefits from it. It's fun, but it's never made me a substantial amount of money. There are so many other things that seem like a better use of my time. But I just keep writing. It feels good to lie back and write on the sky... to get that approving nod from the people around me. And I need to know what happens next with my characters. But sometimes it's hard to justify how I just keep writing instead of doing more "productive" things. 

How could I have done that? (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm in the house I grew up in, but I don't live with my biological family. I live with my stepfather. He's decided to get rid of two tables from my childhood home. I consider this carefully. 

I have emotions attached to those tables, but when I think about whether or not we need them, they really are just clutter. I could write on those tables, and maybe the writing could be amazing! But we have plenty of other surfaces I could write on. 

I let that stuff go and stand outside on the front porch waiting for strangers to come pick them up.

As I watch a man drive up to the neighborhood circle and find a place to park, I reflect on something else I had gotten rid of many years ago: all the venomous snakes I used to keep. I remembered all the adrenaline involved in that hobby. All the near misses from times a snake had struck at me. The anxiety I felt every time I had to feed them or clean their cages. And I thought... how could I have so ignored my inner emotions that I would pick up a hobby like that? Sure, I really like animals, but the way that hobby made me feel was so, so bad. How could I have done that? I remembered the relief I felt when my local pet shop and the local zoo accepted the animals. And I considered how I hadn't stopped feeling better ever since I dropped them off. 

INTERPRETATION

I'm having to get rid of my deceased mom's stuff to make more space in the house, and I've been wrestling with it. I don't think I had peace about the daily picking through her old things and giving them away to charity until I spoke with a counselor who said, "It's just stuff." And it's that simple and that true. 

I've come to think of my "spiritual experience on drugs" on the operating table as a possible near death experience. It had so many similarities with the NDEs that I've seen on YouTube and read about. And I've come to feel that it's very likely that we experience an afterlife. 

I have a good feeling about where my mom is at. I think she's happy. And I wonder if she's watching. Whether there is or isn't an afterlife, surely she is beyond the concerns that consume us in this Earthly world. Although she was really attached to her stuff in her lifetime, if she is watching from an afterlife, I don't think she would be a malicious presence that resents what I'm doing with her leftover stuff. If my NDE was any indicator, we feel immense love and peace and non-judgment in death. But my anxiety conjures up irrational fears about her being angry with me sometimes. I think this dream is asking me to work through those feelings.

But there's a second half to this dream. I've never kept venomous snakes. But it's a theme in some of my dreams lately. 

I had another dream in which I was a kid and my father had an entire farm of venomous snakes. It kept me in daily terror living on that farm, because snakes are very good at escaping. And I desperately wished my dad would find us a new way of life, but I knew that these venomous snakes were our source of income and no venomous snakes meant no food or shelter. In that dream, the snakes represented the daily yelling and psychological abuse I endured while a child. I had to live with this thing that made me feel horrible every day because there was no other way for me to survive. 

I think the venomous snakes are a similar symbol in this dream with the tables. I had horrible anxiety and pain almost every day for many years in my 20s. Most of that was just the result of untreated mental illness, but that co-mingled with a lot of bad choices--especially choices that I made about who to associate with and how I interacted with them. It's in such stark contrast with the relative peacefulness that's been in my life ever since I got proper medication and social support.