Your Dreams Matter More Than You Think

So Candus Owens has been having dreams that Charlie Kirk's soul is visiting her from purgatory, and in these dreams he's giving her information about a betrayal.

I similarly, like I just said, had a vivid dream this weekend, and Charlie came to me and he told me that he was betrayed.

Now, to her, it's unclear if this betrayal is financial or perhaps related to his assassination, but nonetheless, a big deal. In one of these dreams, after having several that are keeping her up at night and are increasingly vivid, she sees a face come through, and it's the face of someone that knew Charlie in life that she believes betrayed Charlie. So she reaches out to this guy and says, hey, I know that you know more than you are letting on.

One face came through in this dream. It came through as clear as day. It was Andrew Kolbetz. That, as weird and as odd as it was, that I had to text him and tell him what I saw. Uh, and this is the text, just sharing with you so you guys know if this all really happened.

And obviously, when she shares this with her huge podcast audience, a considerable amount of the internet reacts understandably and says that she's losing her mind or she's grifting or she's just really not being careful about these sorts of things. But there's also an element that can't be written off. There's a huge portion of her audience that is in there sharing their dreams, their premonitions, how they knew things that they couldn't possibly know through the dreams that they had. And clearly, given her audience, which is growing, this is striking a chord with people. So I wanna talk about this because I think that the way that we treat dreams in our culture is, totally misguided. You've got a group of people that think that they're just random, that they can be dismissed entirely, and another group of people that think that they're meant to be taken literally. Both are deeply wrong, and if you don't get this, you are missing out on one of the most potent routes to self-development possible. So let's talk about how— why dreams are misunderstood and how you can use yours to make serious growth and steps in your life. We'll also touch on this Candace dream. So in order to talk about dreams, I have to speak about Carl Jung. He's my guy. I think he's the smartest man of the 20th century. Now, in 1913, Jung thought that he was psychotic, and he thought he was psychotic because he was having repeated dreams that were really haunting to him of rivers of blood cascading over Europe. He saw bodies face down in these rivers. In one of the dreams, he saw the blood rising so high that it rose to the level of the Alps, and he lived in Switzerland where the Alps are. So this was deeply concerning. He thought he was going crazy. So what happens? 1914, a year later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand is shot and World War I breaks out. And that metaphorical river of blood comes true. Now, this was an important connection to him, and he didn't think it was random, so he actually spent the rest of his career trying to understand this connection, what was going on here, and he deepened our collective understanding of the unconscious. And here was Jung's core insight, which I think is brilliant and true. So let's do this. We've got right here something you've seen before, which is the model of consciousness, which is this iceberg. Above the waterline is everything you're conscious of. This is the stuff that you're thinking right now. If I bring your attention to your butt on chair that you're on, you're conscious of that, but prior to that, you weren't. That's why the unconscious is so much larger. It's everything that is happening in and we could be aware of that we're not aware of. And so that includes the thing that is regulating your heartbeat, that includes the part of you that is regulating the pH in your stomach. But there's two very important psychological elements of the unconscious. We have here the personal unconscious which is relatively smaller, and here the collective unconscious. And this is crucial because Jung believed— and I tend to trust Carl Jung on these things if I haven't had the experience myself— that there's this collective aspect of our consciousness that we can all tap into, and especially in altered states and visions, which Jung had his entire life. And so in these dreams, we can get information about what is going on in the collective. Like, this World War I dream is an example. And Jung later in his life even believed that consciousness did not end at death. So while he didn't outright say it, there's an implication that someone who had died might communicate with someone who is alive. And if you're at all familiar with the story of how "Let It Be" came to be, which is Paul McCartney just hanging out, went to sleep, and his mother came to him because he was having a hard time and said, "Let it be," woke up and wrote what I think is The greatest song ever.

Anyway, I had a dream and my mother, who died probably about 10 years previously, was in the dream. She came to me in the dream. It's a magic moment. And she said, don't worry, it's going to be fine. Just let it be.

Maybe you don't take that to mean much, but there's clearly power in these dreams, right? There's a reason that Martin Luther King said, I had a dream. There's a reason that when you ask someone what their dream is, they know that there's potency. There's this power there. And you don't want to write that off. The problem here is that probably 99% of our dreams are going to be the personal— let's see if I can draw this— bing bing— they're going to be the personal unconscious surging to conscious mind. There's a number of problems here though, because what we often think is happening is we'll have this very personal dream, but we confuse it for a collective dream. We think we're tapping into objectively true information when we're tapping into subjectively true information. That means things that are true about us. Now, why does this happen? This happens because dreams and the unconscious communicate in symbols. They are symbolic in nature. And if you start to take your dreams literally, this doesn't make sense very quickly. For instance, even in Candace's dream, this is occurring at Benjamin Netanyahu's wife's funeral.

We were there in this dream setting for Bibi Netanyahu's wife's funeral.

Now, she is an older woman and she's going to die sometime, and it might be soon, and that might make Candace declare victory here. But clearly that's not happened. She's not sitting with Charlie Kirk at the funeral. There's a symbolic nature as to why that's where they are. Why are they in Israel? Why at this funeral? That means something to Candace, but it's being taken as just an aberrant detail where the rest is a very literal confession of a betrayal. That's a miss. The problem that occurs here if we don't take things symbolically is that we enter into what Jung termed ego inflation, and this is genuinely dangerous. Ego inflation— you've all seen this if you've been in a crowded city square and somebody thinks that they're Jesus Christ and they're carrying the cross and they're like, think they're the Messiah. They're often mumbling or bumbling. That is a case of many of ego inflation or psychosis. Now, ego inflation is far more common than psychosis. It occurs any time that our ego, which is an aspect of our conscious mind, identifies and is overwhelmed with an aspect of the unconscious mind. To say that more simply, we forget that the unconscious is going to communicate with us in symbols. We take it very literally. So that guy who thinks that he's the Messiah might have had an experience of his unconscious mind coming up and be like, "You are the one." I choose you, or something like that. He goes, oh my God, I am objectively the one. It's me and not these other people. So this is why it's very important to know telltale signs of ego inflation so that you don't drift into an area where you're going to hurt yourself or other people. And there's 3 things that are very clear, and a 4th bonus that I'll give you, but it spells out SOS. First is it confers status to you. That's your S, right? You're special. You're above and beyond other people. You have a truth that other people need to get that comes through you. Now, on its own, this isn't a bad thing, but it's when it's combined with these others. The second is that it's taken to be objective rather than subjective. 99% of the time— and I, I do hold space for Jung's collective unconscious and for you to get something about the world from these dreams— but 99% of the time, your dreams are talking about aspects of your psyche that you have split off. If you're having repeated dreams, it means that there is a message generally that you need to get about your life from these dreams, not that they're objectively true. The repetition means that the dream is urgent and important for you to pay attention. You need to unpack that symbolism fast or there will be consequences. It doesn't mean that this is true for other people and you need to take this to everyone else as some sort of objective truth. That's an issue though. And the last thing, which we talked about before, is the symbolic collapses into the literal. So we all know that when our teeth fall out in our dreams, that doesn't mean we're going to wake up anytime soon and our teeth are going to fall out. But when we see someone that we know, right— I've had this happen a lot where my girlfriend will have dreams that recurring that we're at some sort of a party, I'm talking to someone, she comes up to me and I ignore her. But this has literally never happened in our, in our relationship in 8 years. I have never just flat out ignored her repeatedly while she's trying to speak to me, especially if I'm in public. As she ran the analysis that I'm going help you guys, and I'm going to break it down for you. She started to realize that I represent something in her psyche, and this isn't necessarily about our relationship, though there's learnings there too. It's about what the masculine aspect that I represent is relating to her ego. And in this case, it was that I represent safety to her in her dreams. She's trying to get safety, but she's unable to feel it. So let's take all this together and pull it back to you. I believe Jung believed that you have a very powerful conduit to deep intelligence occurring every single night, and you can even learn to have these sorts of, uh, imaginal visions, which Jung called active imagination, in your waking life. And I want to help you to unlock this. So the first thing you have to do is you have to take this seriously, not literally. And what I mean by that is when you have a dream, step one is going to be to record it in some way as soon after as you can. I know it's tough in the morning, you don't wanna do this. Pen and paper used to be rough, but now we all have a phone, we all have the voice memo thing, ChatGPT, whatever. Record your dream as best you can as soon as you have it. You can go back to sleep. Step 2 is to write out all of the key players, the key locations, and the key items, the objects in the dream. So in Candace's dream, she might write Charlie Kirk, she might write Benjamin Netanyahu's wife's funeral, or Israel, or something like that. She might, if there was a salient object or a phrase that came up, she would write all of that down. And by the way, I want to give some credit to Dreamwise, which is the book that helped me with this dream interpretation. And then this is really, really important. This is the brilliant insight from Dreamwise. The third step is that you step into each of those things in a first-person view. If you've played a first-person shooter, you know what this means. You are looking out of the eyes of that thing. So if Candace were to step into Charlie Kirk's first-person view of the dream, she would be looking out at herself. She would be looking from his perspective as they sat on the table. You can do this with yourself. If there's a monster chasing you in your dream and you're usually looking over your shoulder, look from the perspective of the monster. And what you will find here is something incredible, is that it feels very different than it did when you were on the outside. Now, once you're on the inside of this— this is your third step— you can go to the fourth step, which is to ask, who am I? What do I represent? What am I trying to share with the, with the broader psychic system here, with the psychological system? Now, if you do this, you are going to find some incredible things. You're going to get in touch with aspects of your unconscious that you might not have known. You're going to get information, very personal information, about relationships that are and aren't working, things where you're betraying yourself. Especially if you're having repetitive dreams, this is really, really valuable. And I'll close with this: when I was a kid, I had repetitive dreams of a Scooby-Doo monster chasing me and the Scooby-Doo gang. And I didn't really tell anyone about it, it just scared me. I learned to wake up from these dreams because they were so terrifying, but they would persist. And they even occurred through high school, and in college a couple of times they happened. I didn't think anything of it, never addressed it. Several years later— well, these were still happening sporadically— I began work on trauma work. I went to therapy, I started doing psychedelics, and I recovered memories that I knew had happened but that I'd sort of split off, dissociate, and cut the feeling off of, of abuse that I'd suffered as a kid. And as I began to address this in a direct and conscious way, I didn't realize it immediately, but these dreams stopped. And not only did these dreams stop, but a lot of the bad dreams that I was having where it was like fighting underwater or I couldn't get the thing that I was trying to get, those went away too. Not entirely, there were still other aspects of my life, but I didn't realize that the repetitive thematic nature of these dreams was my unconscious trying to tell me, hey, look, pay attention to this, this is important. And as I did that, I began to heal in ways that I didn't think possible. And externally that looked like repairing relationships with my family, having really hard conversations patience about what had happened. It wasn't them, but there was a lack of direct protection that might have prevented something like that. So I share this with you to say that this is why this stuff is so powerful. I feel so much better having addressed that in myself, and if I'd known that my dreams were this canary in the coal mine telling me, "Hey, pay attention to this," this could have been addressed years earlier. So I hope that Candace takes the opportunity to analyze her dreams through a subjective, non-literal lens that she can resist the temptation of ego inflation. But even if she doesn't, I hope that you are able to do that with your dreams. Probably you're someone who is just writing them off. Maybe now you can be someone who gets value from them. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. Let me know what you think of the new set. Let me know what you think of the iPad. It's technologically challenging for me to get going, but if it's useful to you guys, I'll keep it going. Either way, appreciate you, and I'll see you in the next video.