 103.9 FM, WZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour and WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, September 13th, 2020. I'm Larry Rhodes or Doubter 5. And as usual, we have a co-host Wombat on the phone with us. Hello Wombat. Cowabunga! Surfer dude, okay. Oh, the turtles, man. Yeah, the turtles. What are you talking about? Or if you really want to do it, howdy-duty? Howdy-duty? I don't know if you've ever seen that. Oh, yeah. Okay, okay. Well, it's Chief Thunder Horse or something? Thunder Thud. I've never heard that. See, I used to watch Howdy-Duty. There we go. I did too when I lived in Chicago and I was like five. But I don't remember that. Our guests today are Dred Pirate Higgs, George, Red Leader, and J.E.W. Kennedy. Howdy. Welcome all. Howdy. Digital Freethought Radio R is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we also talk about religion, religious faiths, God's holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in Knoxville, well, you're just not. There are several atheist, free-thinking, and rationalist groups that exist here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be telling you how you can connect with them right after the mid-show breaks. Also, did you know that there's a streaming atheist call and video show? Yeah. Broadcasting here in Knoxville? Yes. It has been for over 10 years. Did you know that one about? Absolutely. Listen, I'm surprised you didn't know about Howdy-Duty when you're telling me about Bozo, the world's most famous clown. Yes. Bozo the clown, popular show in the 1940s, had a franchise television program. I remember Bozo. Super, super funny guy. And I'm just glad that you're bringing up all these old-school shows. One of the few clowns that kids aren't afraid of, I'll put it that way. But no, that's not it. But we do a video show, a call-in video show here in Knoxville, and it's been going on for quite a while. And we'll tell you more about it after the mid-show break. If you'd like us for a digital, free-thought radio hour, and use the messaging function to send us a lot of questions or comments. If you'd like to email us with questions, you can send them to AskAnAtheistatKnoxvilleAtheist.org. Wombat, what's our topic today? We're going to be talking about dreams today, which means a lot of different things probably to all of us. But we're going to find a really, really cool thread, maybe even get metaphysical with it. But before we get into that, I fill it up to our own Dread Pirate Higgs for our weekly invocation. Miracles, particularly specious, claimed done by a Miseric Jesus. We're secret ambitions of Saul, as the political agent named Paul, whose fictions do not but deceive us. Namaste. Yeah, namaste. Yeah. Dread Pirate, was that an original? That is an original. Dread Pirate, you need to start writing these down. These will be like, you make this a book. This is going to be something that's great. A compilation. Yes. Yeah. This is wonderful. It is raining really bad here. I don't know if you guys heard that thunderstorm behind me. Wow. That was going on. Flash flood running's going through Tennessee. Hope everyone stays safe. Larry, how you been? Have you been dry? Yes, we got some rain last night. I walked out to a lot of puddles on the deck this morning, but it wasn't raining. They let the dog out and do her thing without worrying about having a wet dog come back in. Yeah. Yeah. Other than that, I'm doing fine. Cool. Thanks. Cool. The seas are rather calm here in Stormwind. Yeah. British Columbia, pretty much everything's okay. Yeah. And there too. George, you're in the area. I don't know if you're in the Knoxpats area specifically, but how are things over where you're at? Well, you're getting me frightened now because... My car's running a battery charger right now. I'm charging my battery and it's sitting out in front of the house and I don't want the charger to get rain. I think you'll be okay. I think they plan for that. I think it's okay. I think it'll be all right. But I just checked the weather forecast on weather underground and it says it's not going to start raining until four o'clock, but I don't believe it. You don't believe it because I'm not a believer. Hey, we can talk about that. I'm not a believer in much of anything. We'll get a confidence scale on that. Except disbelief. I believe in disbelief. Okay. It's not raining right now here. Good. Good. Dale, how you been since last week? Well, as you recall, I used to be a low down dirty deist. And then I converted to atheism and then I decided that general atheism was just not atheist enough and I converted to atheism 2.0, which is the militant branch of atheists. Now you're a low fat. No, even that is not good enough. That's not being a good enough atheist. So now I am an atheist plus. Anti-theist? No, atheist plus. A designation that was formed by Jen McCrate. Okay. Which means what? A long, long, long time ago. What is atheist plus? Well, atheist plus means you're just as militant as anybody else, meaning that you, you know, are all for the border patrol in Portland, Oregon, kidnapping people off the street so they could be deprogrammed away from Christianity. But you also want a, you have to specialize, this type of atheists has to specialize in something to benefit mankind. Some of them do humanism, some do feminism, some do black lives matter, and that's the sort of thing, that's the way it goes. Trying to be a true atheist, unlike, you know. So like a true Scotsman atheist. Exactly, precisely. Okay, I'm going to have to look that up. J.W., how you been? It's been a while since I've seen you. Yeah, I've been all right. Just working and prepping for college. I might take a couple of classes next spring. Or I might wait till the fall, I don't know. But I've just, that's just been my life lately. What are you planning on majoring in? Yeah, majoring in, if you don't mind sharing. I'm pretty, I'm pretty set on biology. I'm not sure if I want to do fieldwork or if I want to be a teacher yet. Biology is definitely, definitely seems to be at the top of the list. So. Considering your background as training for a pastor, are you comfortable talking in front of a lot of people? Like, would teaching being a profession that you'd be excited to be involved in? Yes, and I was in theater in high school. I was in public, I was on the public speaking team in high school. I took a, I actually recited from the book of Job because I was, you know, being religious back then. And I actually, how I recited it in front of people, I got second in the state of Virginia that year. Wait a second. If it was a church program or like a... No, I, the, it was on public speaking, we have different options, different things to do. And I chose poetry and I chose to kind of smuggle in the scripture as poetry. Look at you. You were one of those dirty Christians. It was like, Hey, you're an atheist. Well, God bless you. I'll see you later. Like, oh. He was one. What are you trying to do? We have to give him credit for his move. Anyway, I, yeah, I, so I... Book of Job doesn't even run. What are you talking about? I've always been comfortable in front of a group of people. So. J.W. Why not? That's true. You are a stand up. So, yeah, counts. J.W. Did you do any debate? Um, I'm, I didn't do any debate in high school, but I definitely look forward to it when I go to college. So. Oh, very cool. Yeah. So it sounded like you had a lot of dreams, J.W. We're just dumping into that. And I think it's kind of cool because there's a lot of things that I aspire to be as well. But if I were to just say dreams, what do they mean to you as like more like an extended talk of the show? What does it mean for dream to you? Like what is, what does that mean to you? If I were just generally talking about dreams, what first stands out in your mind? Well, it's not equivocated. Are we talking about nighttime dreams? That's what we're talking about. That's the question, Larry. Well, I mean, there's that, I'd go with layer on that one. It seems to be two different cultural references to dreams. But I think since you're asking me about what I want to do with my life, that would kind of tied into dreams for the future. I'd just say I, I see dreams as more like hopeful plans that never always go exactly the way that you expected them to go. Sometimes not at all. But I think there are much more than plans. Dreams are more of like, I have a lot more emotion tied to them, a lot more yearning and hunger to them in my opinion. So you're an atheist. Is it possible for an atheist to actually have dreams about in the future? Or is it all just here now chemicals and rocks bouncing off each other? I mean, it's just a bag of chemicals, man. It kind of, it's kind of both. I mean, I still have dreams about, but I'm trying to keep us over mind about, you know, things like I said, not, not ever going to go as I plan them to go. So, yeah, I feel in the same way too. There is the other idea of dreams though, in the sense of like, hey, you're going to sleep and you see some movies or have some experiences, maybe some out of body experiences, maybe you have people talking to you, spiritual beings coming and visiting you and saying, hey, you're pregnant. Deal with it. It's going to be awesome. I know it's Mesopotamian area and Bronze Age and you can be killed for that, but it's going to work out. Trust me. If a dream told any of us that we were going to be pregnant. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But JW, what's your opinion on that? And then we'll go around. What's your opinion on dreams in the prophetic or metaphysical sense? Well, I just seem to be, my dream seemed to be a process of just visually processing things from the day or the week into some kind of abstract and random Salvador Dali type, you know, experience. Like for example, if I, if I'm somewhere in a place, let's say I'm at a store or something, I'm looking for, looking for something that I'm trying to buy and I go down on the bottom shelf and I go, oh, shit. Oh, sorry. I saw a snake or something or a big spider and turned out to not be that or maybe it was a big spider. For some reason that night I'll dream about something that, that'll find its way into my dreams or something like that. Or if I have a toothache, I'll have a dream about all my teeth falling out. Or it's just weird like that. I get those dreams all the time. I hate those dreams the worst too. Yeah. Does that necessarily mean that they're true or? No, I think there's just my, my mind processing things. That's as far as my knowledge and opinion goes on that. Hmm. I'm going to throw the question out at George. What do you think about dreams in the sense of, can I actually tell you things that'll happen in the future? Or maybe even things that should happen in the future, like, you know, prophetic, like in the future, if you don't do this, this will happen. Like is, can you think there's validity to running overnight simulations in your mind about what might happen in the future, what you can do to stop it? Well, we're talking about two different kinds of dreams here. Okay. Let's talk about the cool ones. Dreams overnight. Okay. And then I believe it was Barack Obama who wrote a book called Dreams of My Father was, or am I thinking of somebody else? No, Barack Obama. Yeah. I think, was it? Yeah. So to me, I don't remember my dreams very much. I never have. So the, the only dream I ever had that I was, was very prophetic was I dreamed of downstairs. And then I did. And I stopped. What was downstairs? I think you dreamed of falling downstairs. Falling downstairs. And, and so I, I subsequently did fall downstairs. I was wearing little shoes with leather heels and I slipped. I was going, I was going to go swimming at a community center. I, I fell down the stairs. I grabbed myself before I hit the bottom with some force. It took like three guys to peel me off the banister. Wow. I'm sorry. I was a kid having, I stopped having the dream, of course. That was, but dreams to me in this context, thinking about wishful thinking for the future, for the future of the planet of society of the United States. Or, you know, hopefully that will become more like Canada maybe. And then Canada's got its problems. So, um, Drat shaking his head. No, Canada's perfect. About all I can. Yeah. That's well. And then I remembered there was this guy called the new, of the North in, in Ontario. And I forget his name, but he was pretty bad for everybody. I'm going to recall. Drat or George, I'm going to throw this to you. You kept having a dream that you would fall down the stairs and it eventually happened. Do you think the dream caused that in any way? Or was that always a possibility? Absolutely not. Okay. Absolutely not. But falling down the stairs. Sure. Cure me the dream. Sure. Cure the dream. Nothing else to say about it. So the weird thing is I've always had a dream where I would have a math class. I would just have like a random math class. And I was like, you didn't know you had math class like in college. Like, you didn't go to math class for the last four weeks. You're way behind. I'm like, how am I behind? How am I behind? I hate that. And then I got my PhD. And now whenever I have that dream, it's just like, I got a PhD. I don't have to do school anymore. I'm done. I don't want to go to school again. I'm done. And that's like, it has been a good way to solve that. I know my mom has, for example, on multiple occasions had dreams where lions were chasing her. And she says, I know I'm dreaming whenever I see a lion chasing me. Like that's my knowledge. So what I do in my head is I just start flying away from the lion. And I'm like, wait a second. You know you're dreaming. You know you can fly. Why not ride the lion? Why not be best friends with the lion? Play video games. Do whatever you want. It's just a weird thing. George, what do you got? Well, now that you said that about your mother, I just, you know, what are you going to say about my mom? Sometimes it takes me a while to, well, not going to say about your mom. I'm just fine. I'm just fine. I have had situations where I had some kind of a fearsome dream that seemed so real that when I woke up, I was still in the dream. And I'm just wondering if that happens too. Dread, how about that? In other words, yeah, every once in a while, this has happened in my long life that the dream has been so real feeling that when I came out of it, I still was there. It took a while to acclimate to reality. Let's throw this question around then. Dread, I'm going to start with you. Have you ever had a dream, like a nighttime dream that felt so real that it felt like you're awake? And how did you deal with it? What? Kind of like lucid dreaming, you mean? Well, I feel like lucid dreaming, you're in control. I feel like that's the distinction. I mean more like- You know you're dreaming. Yeah. I feel like more like a, not necessarily sleep paralysis, but like dreaming paralysis where it's like, how do I wake up? Like I know I'm sleeping. I know this isn't real. Or like maybe I don't know. Maybe it's just like, I woke up but I'm still dreaming. I was like, oh no, it's like a Twilight Zone episode. And you're just like, how do I wake up? Yeah. I can't say I've ever experienced that in particular. But back in my 20s, I was kind of into the occult and all that kind of stuff. And Carl Jung and Mysterium Kenyung Shio and all that kind of stuff. And actually I kept a dream journal for a year. And trying to string together a narrative where one dream actually had some kind of impact on the next dream or that these were all strung together as a sort of a portrait of some kind of unfolding story in my subconscious. It was really difficult after a while to try and put that together and try to make sense of it. And it's like anything, any kind of random series of events or images. It's like periodolia where you see images in clouds. Oh, yeah. An elephant is not really in the cloud. It just looked like an elephant because we look for patterns. And so eventually I had ceased recording my dreams because I just realized that there was no sense to be made of it. So if Boudreau was on the call, he would actually take Umbridge with the fact that you just said random. Despite the fact that these seem to be things tied to your personal history, things you've encountered during the day. Have you seen any sort of pattern when you took your journal for a year? Like, hey, it a lot of salami. And next thing you know, there's a salami monster. You're like, oh, that's, that came out. That's, that's difficult. Or was it literally just now you're a ballerina, now you're Samuel L. Jackson. Now you're a planet Earth. Now you're something like it was it truly random or were there any kind of ties to what you normally experienced? I don't think so. Don't think so that there was any tie to any of your personal experiences? Oh yeah, but I don't think it was, it was in any kind of meaningful way. I mean, I, there was just no way that I could find, you know, a deeper, a deeper fact that was tying my dreams to my real life experiences. Other than just sort of, you know, the TV, TV snow after the channel signs off, you know what I mean? Yeah, you're not the only person I know who has a dream journal. What do, what, what is the intended thing that you're supposed to get out of a dream journal? Do they interpret the dreams for you? Is there like a legend or a guy that tells you if you have these sets of things showing up in your dreams? Oh yeah, of course. I mean, there's all kinds of those. I mean, you can go walk into any bookstore and find probably, you know, especially in a cult bookstore and find all kinds of books that are going to tell you what the specific images in your dreams mean, you know? But, you know, I don't know, I just after, you know, after that amount of time, trying to build a register of what these individual images meant, it just, it was nonsense. Larry, I'm going to go to you next. But I think it's really interesting that you could go into making a dream book with the idea of, man, I wish I could fall in love one day and you influence the kind of dreams you have that then you can interpret and post ad hoc support the original conclusion you were looking for in the first place. Like it seems like one big circle. And I can see the same thing from like even the Bible where it's just like, man, I really hate my neighbor. Let me read my Bible. Oh, it says hate your neighbor. Yeah. That's proof that he's going to hell. Well, I'm not an expert on dreams and any stretch of the imagination. But I feel like if during the day you feel like vulnerable, you're going to have dreams where things are coming at you and you're having to fight them off. If you feel strong during the day, you may have a hero dream or something like that. Or you're thinking about science fiction all day or just go to bed after watching a science fiction movie and may influence your dreams. But a couple of things that I'd like to bring up, maybe somebody can answer is one, why do we forget our dreams so quickly after we wake up? And I understand that if you finish your dreams and you wake up naturally, you don't remember much about them. But if somebody wakes you up in the middle of a dream, then you can remember an awful lot about them. And the last thing I wanted to say for it, I left the podium as it were. Well, last night I had the strangest dreams in the world and they were claymation. Oh, that's awesome. It was weird and funny and I enjoyed it. But there were some pretty bad situations in there to you. So who knows? Anyway, getting back to the why we forget it so much. Why do we forget it? Why don't you address that? Yeah, Dale, why don't you unmute yourself? Come back in. Dale, you're muted. Because you got to rake. There we go. What do you got? The reason you don't remember your dreams so well, unless you've woken up during one or at the natural sleep when you wake up, is because the brain does not produce the chemical necessary for long-term memory. Therefore, dreams do fade very quickly and you may, one that you may not remember, you may have a clue during the day. You see a shoe or something and you remember, oh, I dreamed about that. But the reason you don't remember is chemistry. It seems like deja vu, too. Yeah, where you don't remember it but you still can recall it. What do you think? Dredpire, what do you have? What I was just going to comment there is that one thing I found during the course of recording my dreams over that time is that the focus I had to remember my dreams made me or allowed me to remember my dreams much more often and much more detail. And there was always little tricks as well as just having a light in a book with a pen by your bedside so that during the course of the night, if you woke up to go have a pee or something like that, that whatever you were dreaming of at the time, you just take a quick note of some of the more salient details and then all of a sudden it opens up, they become trigger words that open up the larger dream experience. Does it work? Yeah, Del, right back to you. Yes, yes. Being aware of the fact that you were dreaming and waking up and having the memory of a recent dream, short-term memory, then if you were to go through it at that time, you place it into your long-term memory. And very often, as he said, there's an anchor. You remember one particular aspect of it and then that will open up the rest of the dream and then you went, oh, it went like this. So it's a very good idea if you want to remember, keep your journal and write it down as soon as you get up. Larry, what do you got? I just wondering how many people do lucid dreaming? I've done it in the past, particularly when I find out I'm dreaming and I can stay in the dream. The first thing I want to do is fly and it's really hard to do. Imagine yourself flying up and you do that and it's a lot of fun. I love doing that. It's just I don't notice it very much. Can I ask this question for George? What is lucid dreaming? Forget about it. Larry, what's lucid dreaming? I have no idea. I'm asking the question for George. Yeah, I don't know, but Larry just triggered a memory in me. Something I remember is when I was really young, I too dreamed a lot about flying. It was first person. I wasn't watching somebody fly. I was doing the flying. It was somewhere around the time of the stairs. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm going to look up that chemical. I think it's interesting. I've always had similar dreams and they have been always so similar that I've just never had the ability to part them from each other. It's just been like, this is the food dream or the general nightmare. I'm a simple person. So it's just like, hey, it's just bacon. It's the bacon dream. Cool. I don't have to wake up remembering what food it was just like, no, I'm just eating food. That's all. It's pretty good. I wonder if you could have so many of the same kinds of dreams that you don't bother trying to remember like phone books, numbers. You can see all the numbers, but they're just numbers. It's not a big deal. Dale, what do you think? I don't know what you're talking about there. It's possible to have so many dreams that are similar that you don't go through the trouble of trying to remember them in detail. Well, you might want to talk about recurrent dreams if you're going to talk about that area, but that's not really what I was wanting to comment on. You asked George what lucid dreaming was and I was going to help out. Lucid dreaming is a condition that usually most often occurs during a nightmare where you're saying, this is the dream and you realize that you're dreaming. You just functionally wake yourself up. That's where it mostly happens. There are some religious sex that have that practice lucid dreaming. And since we're going to do this today, I brought a machine when I was in the military. Can we see that? Yep. Okay. When I was in the military. Okay. It looks like an. Anyway, it is exactly an EKG and also can do other pressures. Depending on the what you hook up to it. The military taught me how to interpret dreams. I got kind of interested in it. Then later on I got interested in lucid dreaming and I took this EKG machine and modified it. So it would read the muscle activity in my eyes and read REM stages and then give me a visual clue by flashing LED that I was dreaming. And this is one way that you can achieve lucid dreaming. If you want to just entertain yourself in eight hours a day or whatever, you're not entertaining yourself, but you could conceivably do a lot of things. I'm particularly fond of meeting Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter. Shout out to you. And in a lucid dream, there also is a controlling of the dream where you control the atmosphere of the dream. For example, you may have had the experience where you have had the TV on and you incorporate the TV into your dream. As a matter of fact, that's probably where the life after death sensation occurs too. Or how I keep ending up in episodes of Matlock. Right. This is wondering how those things work. Okay, cool. We're actually heading towards the bottom of the half hour of the show. How about we get back to it when we come back from the break? Larry, why don't you take us out? And then I got some questions about this machine. Sure. This is digital free thought radio hour. We'll be back right after these short messages. This is the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm Dodder 5 and we're on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, September 13, 2020. The second half, as I said. Let's talk about the free thought groups that you can join right here in Knoxville. First, there's the Atheist Society of Knoxville, founded in 2002. We're in our 18th year. ASK has over a thousand members and you can find us online at KnoxvilleAtheist.org. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start. You can group here in Knoxville, the rationalists of East Tennessee. To find them, go to rationalist.org and click on their upcoming events. Earlier in the show, we said we'd talk about Knoxville's atheist call-in TV show. Well, it's called, and if you want to go to YouTube and look for it, it's Free Thinkers United Coalition of Knoxville. They have a streaming version that they send out on Monday, I think it's Monday nights now. Also, you can find their archives by going to YouTube and search for Free Thought Forum Knoxville. This should be 10 years of archives at that show. Also, if you're interested in getting involved with the TV or the radio show, come to an Ask Meetup or RET meeting or Facebook pages and let us know who you could be your next co-host or guest. On the show with us today, we have the Wombat. Cowabunga. Guest, J.W. Kennedy. George. Dread Pirate Higgs and Red Leader. And we were talking about dreams, but what are we going to go to now? The love? No, no, no, we're not talking about that. I want to talk about what we just finished off, which was the 2008 movie Taken starring Liam Neilsen, which is really, really great. It starts with that scene where he's on the phone and he's like, you just kidnapped my daughter and I don't know what you want. Or if you're looking for ransom, but I can tell you one thing. Where is the love? Guys, we're going to go over the love that you sent to us in our listener feedback section. This is comments directly from our YouTube channel based on our last week's episode, which was, there's an atheist in my foxhole. And what can we do to shout to Christians to help them know, like, hey, even when you have hard times, it's still okay to not believe in a God or result to prayer. You can actually get yourself out of bad situations. Dada's Trading Room, who's a fan of the streaming by Dread Pirate Hicks, says, hey, you know, it happened again with the audio being on a Dread Pirate site. But you know what? I could hear all the rest of you guys. I have no problem watching you the next day when the feeds uploaded to YouTube. Also, I have nothing against you guys talking about the same topic. Use a different word from that. But we were all basically in agreement from the start of the show. It would be cool to see, maybe we can play some devil's advocate in the future and see if we can have more similar conversations. But again, Dada's Trading Room has no problem with us all being in agreement with each other and being friends. That's cool. Thank you, Dada's. Next comment, Nathan Matthews says, fear is an incredible motivator used as religious coercion. But when we demonstrate that it is possible to navigate hardship without religion, we dispel the aphorism that there is no atheists in foxholes. As Doubter 5 noted, if someone gives credit to religion for our resilience, that is a great opportunity to explain mindfulness in lieu of a religious crutch. Doubter 5 with the shout out. Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. That was really great. Thank you. Jennifer Isaac says, some can be talked with whatever theist and some are not like many of my family. Though even if I was still Christian with facts, some rather tinfoil hat nonsense instead. Either way, most never chat about other than having to mention a deity or rarely anything else. Alisa is an atheist married to my Christian husband. There is some room for conversation. Although not much beyond that he knows that I'm an atheist and does not care. So I'm guessing from that is like, hey, you know, she's in a relationship where she's married to a Christian. The Christian knows that she doesn't resort to praying to get herself out of situations. And maybe that's like the best way for Christians to realize, oh, there's another option. Just watching the people that we love and the friends that we hang out with. Work those sums out of that situations. I think that's really true. Thank you, Jennifer. John Cowart says, guys, we got a lot of comments. That's great. All right. John Cowart says, I think SC is a great way to get believers into the foxhole, earnestly attempting to understand someone's view on the religious beliefs leads to a positive interaction where hopefully any negative assumptions they had about atheists can be questioned. And I think that's really useful too. I love talks when I'm talking about God with a Christian and then they ask me questions knowing that I don't have that same belief. Like I don't hide the fact that I'm an atheist when I'm doing my talks. And when there's that turnaround and they're asking me questions and I'm answering them genuinely, it's like, oh man, I never thought about it that way. Oh, that's cool. That seems pretty good so far. I don't like the label, but I really like everything that you're telling me. I'm like, dude, you don't even need the label. Just consider that like, there's other options than the one that you, the dogma that you've been raised in. It's like, yeah, I really don't have a good reason to believe that. It's like, wonderful. Thank you, John Cowart. Elfootman says, what if you discuss each other's views on metaphysics? I think that'd be a good opportunity for a future show. Metaphysical, maybe we should get in that. Yeah. I'm not sure we have any different metaphysics. Well, you know, Dale changes his on the week, so like we can probably tune in on to that. He's ready. So thank you. What is metaphysics? What are metaphysics? Hey, we'll say that for the next episode. But thank you guys so much for all of your comments. If you want to have your comments reviewed over the show, feel free to list them down here on my YouTube channel. Let's chat. If you're watching this year or on Dread Pirates upload or doubter files and multiple links that he'll provide at the end of this show. Thank you guys so much for your feedback and the love. All right. So we're going to go back to dreams. I had a question. Dale had presented to us an EKG, which he used to help him have more control over lucid dreaming. And I want to know the mechanics of observing your REM sleep to enabling yourself to have lucid dreams. What's the connection there? How does that machine help you lucid dream more effectively? Well, I had to modify it a little bit. But but you can see right now you've got a trashy little EKG line going. I've got myself hooked up. But it's not hooked. It's not configured for the lucid dreaming right now. But the way it works is the way the mechanics of it is that you have an electrode. Now this was the first generation. Like I'm I understand that it monitors your sleep. But you're saying it triggers lucid dreaming. Like how does it right? No, no, no, no, no. It doesn't trigger lucid dreaming. What it does is it gives you the message while you're in your dream. For example, you have the electrodes set up. You're doing your rapid eye movement. The machine realizes that there's muscular movement. And then you have it set. So when there is so much muscular movement within a certain certain period of time, then that sends a signal to some lights that you have over your bed or wherever, tiny little LED lights. And you can see light through your eyelids. So the light gives you flashes. And I modified one machine so that it would actually talk to you and say you are dreaming or give you the flashes. You're supposed to train yourself so that when you hear this message, start thinking, well, I could be in a dream right now. And it takes a little bit of practice. But I have yet to meet Sophia Vagara. But I'm looking forward to that. Anyway, you can have dreams about anything. Now that's one type of lucid dreaming. Another type is where you create a framework like a beach or a cowboy cattle drive or something. And then you have that be the framework for your dream. So it gives you a signal while you're sleeping that hopefully you pick up and maybe when it takes you out of a deep sleep and then you're in a realm where you can control the sleep dream a little bit or at least be so sleepy. You're already in. I'll just daydream while I'm half asleep anyway. I have to go work. Yeah, because some dreams I've noticed that it's really strange because there's like a level of control that I have and some dreams that I don't have in another. When I'm lucid dreaming, when I realize that I'm dreaming and I try to control something, sometimes I can change the environment and sometimes I can't. And sometimes I can fill in the blank and sometimes I can't. It's very, it's not always the same. Yeah, Larry, you said you fly whenever you have the opportunity to lose a dream. Why don't you teleport? Why don't you like space travel? Like why? Because flying is fun. It's like why would you walk from one end to a roller coaster to the other? You'd rather ride it. But you can teleport and save yourself time. That's a good point. Other things. I like the movement. Oh, okay. Okay. Is there a limit to how high you fly or is it just like do you fly as fast as you walk? Like what are we talking about here? Jesus. Is it Superman flying? What are you doing? I think it's Superman. But I generally don't get more than a couple hundred feet off the ground and I can just fly around and see the trees and the buildings and things like that. Sure, sure. Usually open areas. One thing that's funny is one thing I like to do is I like to fly on cardboard. Like if you ever tried to hold a big piece of cardboard up and the wind gets it. Sure. If you hold it just right you can lift you off the ground in dreams. Which is kind of true. Yeah, it would have to be a little bit more for me. That's kind of fun when you're not even doing it. So you guys have some pretty exciting loose dreams. Mine is never that entertaining. It's always about texture for me. Like if I'm thinking, if I'm dreaming about something like a simple basic thing. A case. For my dreams that are lucid it's like I can zoom in and see all the details on the surface of something and almost touch it and I can feel it and I can be like oh I really understand what this is. It's like broidery leathered and has this really nice smooth texture to it. And then I wake up but I've never been chased or flew in and stuff like that. That or five. What do you got? One thing I've always heard and I find myself kind of true that if you're in a dream and you want to know if you're dreaming look at your hands because your hands won't resolve in your dream. What does that mean? You can't see your hands? You won't see the fingers. They won't be individual. You look at your hands and they'll be like that or something. Like low polygonal things. Yeah, but you're saying you can actually touch things and feel things and it's tactile. Do you see your hands when you're dreaming? Yeah, on multiple things. I know everyone dreams a little differently. My trick for if I need to know if I'm dreaming is can I read something? I was going to say that. Okay, okay. And I think I got that literally from Batman in the animated series because it was a scene where it's like he opens up his library and he can't read any of the text and he's like oh I know I'm dreaming. The Riddler's got me in some sort of contraption or something like that. But I've since tried to do that and it's like there are words there but I can't make sense of any of them. And I can't tell you what letter is what letter. I'm like this is fake. Okay. All right. What am I doing in the library? Time to start looking at carpet. Because that's all I do when I lose a dream. I'm like look at this carpet. If I even make out words, yeah, sometimes the words will just, like I can read what the word is, but the words will always, it's never makes a coherent sentence ever when I'm reading. I wonder if that it means that reading is at a higher brain function that we can't do in our subconscious like the trick for it. Dale, do you have an opinion? Tell us in observations. Yeah. Reading is, a lot of people mention that reading in numbers is a problem. But not, there are, there are plenty of exceptions where somebody has read signs and names and actually seen numbers and had numbers said. So it's a generally yes and it may be related to what part of the brain the memory is, what those are being drawn out of. Mmm. All right. I wanted to bring up another interesting point. I think, Dale, you brought this up as well. You said chemicals are triggering in our brains or not triggering. Our brain behaves biochemically differently when we are asleep compared to when we're awake. And I am also aware that there are people who probably even wrote influential books like the Bible, you might have heard of it, who have probably have been influenced by saying this nicely, burning bushes, especially when it comes to writing things that are in revelations and stuff like that, because there's some real psychedelic imagery that's going on in those chapters. Seven headed dragons. Seven headed dragons, oh man. At least one wearing a crown. It's just bizarre things that you feel like could only come up with a guy who is basically looking at the world, pulling out things, and then going on a trip of some sort, and then combining those things in an interesting way. Yeah. So I wonder like, can you, is there validity to altering your biochemistry while you're awake and having dreamlike states while you're awake and pulling more accurate information from there, now that you have your higher faculty brain functions, along with your chemically induced brain functions. If I have a prophetic, if I go into like a smoking tent and come out and be like, Larry, I have found the, I've found out that there's real life beyond this planet. I just had it. I'm awake. I'm not asleep. This isn't just some dream. This isn't a dream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this isn't some dream. This is a real thing that I had while I was awake. Is there any validity to it now that I'm not dreaming anymore, nor asleep anymore? It's not that you weren't dreaming and you can be awake and be on piety or other psilocybin or psychedelic drugs and your mind is altered. Your perceptions are altered. Your brain can provide you feedback without you wanting it to or without external stimuli. How many times have you heard that people have hallucinations or auditory hallucinations or hearing their mother's voice after the mother's been dead for years and years? If the brain is not stimulated, it will provide its own stimulation. That's one of the main things you've got to take away from psychology. J.W. It's like the pareidolia that I was talking about where you're seeing your brain is just it's a pattern machine that infers meanings and things that don't necessarily have meaning. So I want, man, I really wonder what would happen if we get to the point in technology where we can just straight up record our dreams, maybe even put them on a USB drive, and we realize that it's not even like a movie. It's just a series of patterns but our brain is like, oh, I'm going to turn this into a thing. Our brains are just making a pattern out of stuff. Oh, I'm blowing, J.W. You're so weird. What if our brain is just looking at these random things like a flying adventure? Larry, what do you got? Well, it's not only that, but the things that you remember seeing are memories now. They're no longer visions. And your memories are malleable. They can change over time. You can manufacture them. People make memories out of suggestions that they hear. And the longer the time between the time you had the experience and the time that you're relating it, your memory can degrade or change. I just want to throw this to you after I make this one point. There might be a possibility that there is no such thing as dreams. And it's not so much a question of why do we keep forgetting our dreams. It's more like why do we even imagine that we have them in the first place when it could just be a thing that we try to reconstruct based on social inferencing after we wake up, we make these manufactured ideas of like, oh, you had a dream? Well, I had it too. You had the Holy Spirit? Right now. That's a deep question. You talk a lot about this before we came today and I'm like... One of the things that really gets me is how many of you have heard about the type of anesthesiologists, the anesthesiology that you have that you don't go under. You don't repress pain. They give you something that makes you forget the pain that you had when you were in surgery. Oh, that's nutty. I mean, they talk about mind blown when I first heard that. That's crazy. But I understand that's mainstream pain suppression at this point. I saw your hand raise. What's up? Well, I was thinking about one aspect of dreams that I encounter often is time dilation. You know, that time doesn't flow in a steady sort of way. It can be compressed. It can be expanded. It can wobble to and fro sort of thing. And I always find it fascinating waking up after a particularly memorable dream. Essentially having lived a couple of years or maybe half a lifetime. It actually reminds me of an episode like the next generation where Picard encounters that artifact where he lives an entire lifetime within a few moments and then awakes with the memory of an entire lifetime in addition to the one that he's actually in. And it's about this compression of time or this dilation of time. I find that very interesting. You're saying that time is kind of like a wibbly wobbly timey-wimey type of thing? Dr. Who says? Yeah. What do you have for us, Scott? You're talking about waking anesthesia. Propethol is the most common drug. That's where you are awake during the procedure. More often than not, colonoscopy might be something that someone might remember. And you don't remember it as a matter of fact. You have no sense of time passing whatsoever. And what was the other thing? It was something that someone just just now mentioned. Ninja Turtles. Hey, speaking of maybe I'm going to try to refresh your memory. I like the idea. I like the far out idea. It's not necessarily something I'm convinced of, but the idea of all dreams are just manufactured memories that we are coming up with after we wake up. That's our brain trying to rationalize where we've been since we've been unconscious for hours. And the idea could be like, hey, you know, I can imagine yesterday with me wearing a blue shirt even though I wasn't wearing a blue shirt. I can very easily do that. It's very easy to construct memories. And it's very easy to have high confidence in my memories that I had. But without physical evidence, it's just my word against my own brain. And I'm willing to take my own word against my own brain a lot of times without realizing how biased that could actually be. I may not actually have just one big dream over the entire night. I might have thousands of very small vignettes or lengthy dreams that have been going through time dilation. And maybe I just remember the last 30 seconds of something and I wake up and I'm like, oh, I must have been dreaming about those things for the entire night. It's like, no man, you had an entire adventure. This is like, you just remember the last act of this whole epic saga that you had. You have now convinced me that there is now so much more exploration to be done in the topic of dreams that I didn't even know. Man, it's like men in black when you get your memory erased. You're just like, oh, yeah, it was a post-men, my terrible. You were such an amazing human being. Oh, well. George, did you want to weigh in on any of this? Did you have any comments? My only comment is having had surgery a couple of months ago. The anesthesiologist sent me a couple of texts and he said, would you please give me feedback? Please post your feedback on this website. Man, how can I do that, man? I was asleep. Hey, that's a good, there's a good joke in there somewhere. That's really, really good. My anesthesiologist had a survey of asking me how I did. If I put down anything, you did a bad job. I don't know, there's something there. It's from a really good point. All right, so as we wrap up today's show, I just want to say, hey, dreams are really cool. This was a cool topic and I'd love to get metaphysical with you guys in the future. But until then JW, where can we find your stuff? JW, I got two YouTube channels content coming soon. One is JW Kennedy for my music and comedy. The other one for my seridepistomology is going to be Speak Your Beautiful Mind. And I have two Twitter accounts that are tied to that. Those both, both of those. So follow me on Twitter at JWK hates the news and at your beautiful mind. Like I said, content coming soon. Nice. And don't feel, feel free to upload these talks that we have every week. Yeah, like if you're part of it, you're producing content. You can release that as well. You have my explicit permission. I might start doing that. Yeah. Dred Pirate, where can we find your stuff at? Also, every Sunday morning at 8am Pacific Standard Time or Pacific Daylight Time depending on what it is. We live stream this show. So by all means come on board and have a look and then you can make comments as we're streaming and then I try to share them as much as I can with the co-host here. Who would I need to subscribe to in order to get the channel? It is, it is mind pirate M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. R-A-T-E. Nice. Very cool. Dale, do you have any recommendations of stuff we should check out in the next week? You mentioned a lot of, I guess what I'm imagining Classy Danes from a while back ago. Is there anything that you would recommend that we check out in the next week? No. Cool. All right, George is there anything that you would recommend that we check out over the next week? Yes, yes there is. Old Doctor Who episodes with Nice. Very few. If you want to see how much the production people could accomplish on a very, very low budget. There are some wonderful stories and my favorites are the Brain of Morbius. Okay. The Pyramids of Mars and the Usurians especially that. Cool. Very cool. And there's enough out of me. Yeah, hey and I like Old School Doctor Who so I think that's a good pull. Also Old School Red Dwarf if you guys are even aware of that. Old Red Dwarf. A lot of stuff. I love that. Yeah. Time dilation. There's probably like four episodes on Just That Alone six episodes on Dreams. There's some really good humorous takes on the things that we've been talking about today. I highly recommend that. Yeah. As for me, Black Lives Matter and keep thinking about that over the next week. If you're watching my stuff and my channel thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it and I'm going to be uploading finally my Kentucky Free Thought convention talks. I wanted to go out and do talks this week but it started raining over the weekend. I'm just like, oh, that's a shame. So there's a guy named Quinn Questions. He's been doing his talks where he's social distancing with a face mask on. I'm like, hey, that's a good idea. I'll try that out when the weather gets a little bit better. But in the meanwhile I'll have a backlog of talks that I'll be putting on my channel eventually. Dread Pirate. I'm sorry. Number five, the one and only why don't you take us out? Oh, wait, I have a quick question. I want to know what atheism is all about and I heard that you were probably an expert on the topic. Is there any book? What atheism is and what it's all about? I happen to have a book on that very topic. Oh, I hope it doesn't have a complicated title. I really hate complicated title. Atheism what's it all about? It's very long on Amazon. You should be able to find it there. And you can also find a lot of my stuff at www.theatheist.com. We also have our radio show archives there. Atheist songs and many articles on the subject. Particularly, I would like to draw your attention to my article on miracles and false memories as we talked about today. Go to my pages and look for that. Miracles and false memories. Dale's book, although he's not mentioned it, can be found at howjesusdidit.com and it's about how Jesus did his miracles. Not using any magic, of course. And if you have trouble leaving your religious beliefs behind, I'd like to recommend going to recoveringfromreligion.org. They do great work there and may offer you help that you need. And if you'd like to listen to prior shows, they're not only available on digitalfreethought.com, but they're also available on iTunes, Stitcher, LuminaryPodcast.com, My Heart, etc., etc. And if you have any questions for the show and have me to love you'd like to send in, send it to AskAnAtheist at KnoxvilleAtheist.org We'll answer them on future shows. Remember, everybody is going to somebody else's hill. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. And be sure to like and subscribe. We'll see you next week. Say goodbye, everybody. Goodbye, everybody. Take care.