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.)