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Lucid Dreaming

Intro: Dream

It is light.
It is dark.
It is light again.
It is very dark.
Dusk settles - something like dusk - a queasy, night vision green, stamped with a throbbing amber moon.
It is my backyard, but it isn’t.  Josh is there and Ben and Ryan, but he’s very young, and then not Josh, and me, and Tony, and Brian Lauers, from high school, and Jake, and then Josh.
They are golfing, and then not Josh, hitting balls, and it is light, silent, and I am watching, and it is dark, and I am not me, but I am watching me, and then Josh.
And there are pigs in the yard - first the impression of pigs, followed by pulsing pig representations - and it is yellow dusk, and the pulsing pig representations are too big, and then Josh, and there is a baby that is not mine, that I need to take care of, that looks like me, and then not Josh, and then Josh, and then not Ben, and Josh is going into the neighbor’s house to take a piss and they aren’t home but the lights are on and I am furious, and then not Josh, and the pulsing pig representations are again just the impressions of pigs and they are many, and the pigs are in danger, I can feel it, and then Josh, and it is light, and the pigs are pigs now - tangible pigs - and have green eyes, and then Ben, and then not Josh, and Marshall is in the house, and I am in the house, and Josh is in the house, and then not Josh, and Kelly wafts through, blinking her eyes wildly, and it is very bright, and then Josh - and where is the baby? - and then not Josh, and I can hear an uncle in the other room, and it is very bright, and then Josh and Ben and Marshall and Tony and my brother and me and a pig and the baby and then not Josh and this doesn’t make sense,  I realize this doesn’t make sense, and I realize I’m dreaming and then it is light and everything slows down, comes into focus.  Everything is focused and still. Lucid.
The house is mine and I am lucid.
I am dreaming.  I say this aloud and the words pulse through the air in concentric circles.  I am in my kitchen.  Everything is there.  It is my kitchen, but more - ethereal, maybe.  And Josh and Ben and Tony and Ryan and Jake and Marshall and Brian Lauers and the green eyed pig are just standing still, staring at me, waiting for me to do something.  So I put a hat on the pig, with my mind.  A beautiful deep brown bowler.           Everyone smiles.
I breath.  This is my dream and I can do literally anything I want.  The laws of physics and morality do not apply to me.  I could fly through the air like a crow.  I could make Josh do things to the pig.  I could combine Josh with the pig to make a pig-Josh and have Ben do things with pig-Josh.  I could punch pig-Josh into a billion smaller pigs with spaghetti knuckles.  I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I could do it.  I could make them all perform an elaborate three part very special episode of Charles In Charge, where the pig plays Charles and Tony plays Buddy, and Buddy is experimenting with PCP, and Charles has to help him and hide it from the kids. It could be brilliant and disgusting.  And I could play Mr. Belvedere, hell, I could be Mr. Belvedere, even though he’s not even in Charles In Charge.  I could make Mr. Belvedere a member of the Charles in charge universe with my mind. Anything.  This world, as they say, is my oyster.  I could literally make this world into an oyster.
Instead, I retreat to my studio to record - this - podcast . . .

Part I: Lucid Dreaming
In 1902, Willis Carrier recorded a remarkable dream in his dream journal. Two dream descriptions in a row might be a bit much, but bare with me.

July 16th, 1902

Dearest diary,
Last night I dreamt the most remarkable dream.  To call it a dream, in fact, does it no justice.  It was more than a dream, I believe.  Vision may be the word.  Revelation, perhaps.
It began ordinarily enough. I was trudging through the disgusting streets of Brooklyn on yet another punishingly hot day, stinking to high heaven as everybody does all of the time , cursing the three piece wool suit that people of this particular point in history are cursed to wear, no matter the weather.  My god, life is a nightmare!  Good lord, the stench!  Heavens to Betsy - the rashes!  Oh, the rashes! It’s a wonder that a person ever accomplishes even the most menial of tasks whilst drenched head to toe in sticky, hot sweat, his crotch dappled and scarlet red, itching like the dickens, his olfactory sense barraged from all corners each and every moment of each and every hellish day with the ghastly odor of three million retched, reeking New Yorkers, barely holding on to consciousness as they teeter on the precipice of of heatstroke or wage a futile battle against retching from the pungency.
I was contemplating all of this, praying for the sweet relief of the Reapers refreshingly cold, gnarled touch, when a curious storefront caught my eye.  One I hadn’t noticed before, though I have made this walk innumerable times.  It was called, “Breezy Jeff’s Emporium”.  
“What kind of name is Jeff?” I thought. 
I felt compelled to step inside, so I pushed through its unornamented door.
The most wonderful thing happened as the door opened.  I was enveloped by cool, soothing air, the likes of which I have never felt before.  It was as if God himself had exhaled upon me!  I began to weep with joy.  
When I had regained my composure, I looked about myself to ascertain the nature of the establishment, but there was little to see.  The walls stood bare, and I appeared to be alone.
That is when it struck me: This must be a dream.
Surprised to find myself so aware of this fact while still in the dream state, I nearly awoke.  The store began to fade.  Not wishing to ever leave this icy paradise, I willed it back into solidity with great effort and found that I was able to move about of my own free will.
I heard a loud humming noise from the back of the store, but was unable to see its source.  I went to investigate and found, around a corner, a strange contraption which seemed to be the source of the noise and, to my amazement, the cool air.
“My God,”  I thought. “A machine that cools the air.  This could change everything!”
I had to bring this miracle to the real world!  A dipped quill and paper materialized in my hands, and I began to make sketches and notes pertaining to its construction.
Upon awakening, I immediately transcribed my dream notes. And I’ll be McKinley’s old mother if I don’t believe this thing can actually work!

I must retreat now to my laboratory to assemble a prototype.  This invention, if I am not sorrowfully mistaken, could be our cool savior from the oppressive god of heat and I must waste no time in building it!

Willis Carriers vision was not the first lucid dream recorded in history, but it very well may be the most significant, and is a fine introduction to the topic.  The invention of the air conditioner ushered in the modern age, making life bearable for the first time in human history.
How does a man discover something so consequential and practical in the non-dream world while in the dream world?  How does he gain the ability to understand that he is dreaming and act proactively within the dream?
The answers are elusive, highly controversial, and, in this podcast, wildly simplified and occasionally misrepresented.
Lucid dreaming is essentially a dream in which one becomes impassive, conscious of the dream state and able to control ones actions and surroundings within the dream.  To really understand lucid dreaming you must first understand dreaming, which no one does for sure.  You’ll get different explanations for why we dream and what, if anything, dreams mean from scientists, psychologist, religious fanatics, psychics, your mother, or the quiet guys you work with who, when they do finally talk, reveal themselves to be profoundly unpleasant.  There is very little agreement even within these groups.  One unnerving guy at the office might say that dreams are visions from god while another insists that they are representations of repressed sexual desires.  Back slowly away from both of these men.  They are the ones who make that horrible mess in the bathroom, probably.
I’m talking about you, Kurt!
A dream is essentially a hallucination - a creation of your mind.  You see things in your dreams, but not with your eyes - a real stoner mind-fuck. There’s no particular portion of the brain that these images arise from - that anyone knows of, anyway.  It’s kind of biological ocean whose depths are completely unknown to us despite its relative nearness.  
There is one theory, variations of which are currently the most pervasive, that dreams are a kind of informational sieve, a way for our brain to filter out useless information and sort the things we need, resulting in a kind of free associative hodgepodge of thoughts and images that really only seem to make sense because of our conscious tendency to string miscellaneous information into a kind of narrative.  Sort of like how if you watch a movie on mute, any music you play will seem to sync up with it.  The Dark Side of Oz phenomenon, if you will.  
It is nearly impossible to talk about dreams, apparently, without sounding like you just took a bong rip.
I have to ask, though:  If it is  truly the case that dreams are a mechanism for sorting and filtering information, why have I retained such a vast store of knowledge about the Golden Girls and Sha Na Na, but couldn’t, under any circumstance, tell you my wife’s phone number?
Either this theory is bunk or my sieve is broken.
Freud was somewhat a proponent of this explanation, though he added that dreams were a means of latent wish fulfillment and deeper revelations about oneself could be sussed out through analysis.  Those deeper revelations tended to be sex stuff.
I’d really like to get his take on which wish I was fulfilling in the dream I had where a group of monks marched into my room to tell me that Jeff Goldblum had died.
Jung largely concurred with Freud, but was much less phallocentric and posited that the existence of common dreams, which he called archetypes - flying, unpreparedness, secret rooms, Jeff Goldblum - were an expression of a unified human consciousness. 
L. Ron Hubbard, a lunatic, said that "Dreams are crazy house mirrors by which the analyzer looks down into

the engram bank.” I have no idea what that means and don’t care to find out.
There are a few things we know absolutely about dreams, specifically, which parts of the brain aren’t active during sleep. The motor cortex, for instance. It is responsible for musculoskeletal control – moving your body. When the motor cortex is stimulated during sleep – as is the case with a sleep disorder called “violent sleep”, which has been recreated in animal experiments – the dreamer will act out their dreams. Dogs will dig at the air, cats roam around, aimless and ominous, and humans have been known to attack whoever happens to be in bed with them. A prostitute named Fancy, for example.
Activity also decreases in the prefrontal regions of the brain responsible for episodic memory and integrating information. It’s the reason dreams don’t usually make a lot of sense.
I could go on – about REM sleep, neurological theories, wet dreams – but this is supposed to be about lucid dreaming, so let’s talk about that.
Here’s the thing – We don’t really know whether lucid dreaming is real. Dreams are notoriously difficult, if not impossible to monitor, so the specifics of dreams are kind of beyond us. There’s a very real chance that lucid dreams are just dreams of being lucid, not actual lucidity within a dream. The study most often cited in its favor basically consisted of a researcher telling a subject to move his eyes in a certain way in his sleep. Apparently he did, but it was just side to side.
So we are left with personal testimony, and there is certainly a lot of it.
Lucid dreamers love talking about lucid dreaming. If you begin a conversation with one, it won’t end until you’ve heard all of their tales of flying over psychedelic meadows, chatting with their dead grandpappy about the tofu situation in heaven, and bedding Khaleesi, The Mother of Dragons, and agreed that they are highly evolved mystical super-people. What they won’t tell you is that even their sweet Aunt Kathy won’t return their calls anymore. Avoid them at all costs. In fact, avoid everyone at all costs, just to be safe.
They’ll also tell you how you can become one of them. “Oh my god, you don’t meditate? You have to meditate!” They’ll tell you about looking at your hands, or flipping light switches on and off, or reading a digital clock several times a day. These are what’s known as reality checks. The idea is that if you get used to confirming that you’re not dreaming during your waking hours, the habit will persist into your dreams and you will become lucid when you realize you are dreaming.
They’ll tell you about binaural beats, beats of two different frequencies, one being fed into each ear, which create a third frequency in your brain that, theoretically, produces relaxation, concentration, and, when you’re sleeping, lucid dreams. It’s sometimes called brainwave entertainment – which may or may not also be the title of a Skirlex album, another thing I don’t care to find out – and sounds like a computer attempting Peruvian Pan Flute music.
They’ll tell you about taking B vitamins before you go to bed, as well as an exhaustive list of additional supplements that have not been approved by the FDA.
They’ll encourage you to keep a dream journal, make your own dream pillow, eat cheese before bed to have what they call, horrifyingly, “cheese dreams”, set an alarm to wake you up every 90 minutes, and wear a REM inducing mask, none of which seem conducive to any kind of sleep, let alone a deep one.
They’ll tell you that, if you do become lucid, you should “ask the dream” to let you become lucid more easily next time.
They’ll continue shouting these things at you as you slowly back away from them and they’ll chase after you when you turn and break into a dead sprint.
These people are relentless and will stop at nothing to share their inner peace.

And goddamn if I don’t want to BE one of these people. I’ve tried a good number of their methods, not as an ironic experiment, but in earnest.
I would very much like to lucid dream. It sounds amazing. Passive sleep feels like a necessary waste of time, but conscious sleep eliminates that burden. You never have to stop doing. And I want to pause that recurring dream I have where I’m lost and half nude in a massive hotel with a random assortment of acquaintances and dream people while reports of an alien invasion blast from unseen speakers and finally find that Morrissey concert in the lobby that I’ve been trying to get to for all these years. I want to explore the room in the house that I grew up in that no one knew was there. I want to hear and remember music that doesn’t exist in the real world, music that evidently lives inside me that I don’t have access to. I want to be a whale for a little while and goddammit I want to have consequence free dream sex with Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend Sloan!
Not to mention that the implications or Lucid Dreaming are pretty wild. If you are able actively alter the projections of your Id and Ego, what does that mean? Something, I’m sure of it.
So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to binge eat some cheese, strap on my dream goggles, and take a brief, hopeful nap.

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UFOs Pt. II

Richard Moss
As mentioned in the previous episode, I recently purchased a large box of 1970s UFO paperbacks from a thrift store.  Each of these books was carefully imprinted by a custom stamp in blue ink with the words “From the Library of Richard Moss”.
 
Naturally I was intrigued. Who was Dick Moss? As the inheritor of his library I wanted to know the man and his work, if he’d done any, in the field of UFOlogy.  I assumed he was dead, as that’s how most collections come to live in thrift stores.  I once found about 30 snap button cowboy shirts each with the name Herman written in blue marker on the tag – a truly wonderful old man habit that doesn’t seem to be done much anymore – starting in the Medium section and going all the way to XXL. I figured Herman had either eaten himself into oblivion or wasted away from cancer or a Romanian curse like that guy in Stephen King’s book, Thinner.
 
Anyway, I Googled Richard Moss, expecting to find an obituary, but instead found four short newspaper articles from Duluth, Minnesota’s newspaper of record, Duluth News Tribune.
 
They were intriguing.
The first was dated June 6th, 1977.
Local Man Reports UFO Over Lake Superior
Richard Moss, a native Duluth resident and sophomore at the University of Minnesota Duluth, has reported an encounter with an Unidentified Flying Object while fishing on Lake Superior late Friday night.
Moss told authorities that a “large, metallic saucer-like craft” hovered 100 yards above his small boat for 3 minutes at 11:35 PM before “vanishing”.
Mr. Moss was alone at the time and there are no other witnesses.
Duluth Police are investigating the report, but declined to comment, as did Mr. Moss.
This is the third UFO sighting reported in Duluth since January.
 
The second, from August 22nd, 1995
Duluth Resident Holds UFO Symposium
Richard Moss, owner of Moss Antiques in Duluth, has organized a UFO Symposium to be held at the Holiday Inn Banquet Hall this Saturday, August 26th from 10 AM to 7 PM.
Speakers include authors and UFO researchers Brad Steiger and Stanton Friedman, among others, as well as various UFO experiencers.
Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door.
 
The third, from September 9th, 2010
Richard Moss, owner of Moss Antiques, Reported Missing
Richard Moss, longtime proprietor of Moss Antiques in Duluth, was reported missing yesterday.  According to his landlord, Oswood Bolrick, owner of Harwood Apartments, where Mr. Moss was a resident, he checked in on his tenant on September 6th, as he had not received the rent check.
“He’d never been late on rent before, so I wanted to make sure there wasn’t nothing wrong,” Mr. Bolrick said.
He reported that Mr. Moss’s mailbox was full and mail was accumulating beneath it.
”I was worried. Don’t know the guy well, but he seemed nice and has been here a long time. I knew he had the shop, so I went to check there, and it looked like he hadn’t been there a while either, so I called the police.”
Richard Moss is described as a 52 year old Caucasian male with short, gray hair, glasses, and a mustache.
Local authorities ask that any leads should be called in immediately.
They are investigating but declined to comment further.
 
And the fourth, from three weeks later.
Owner of Moss Antiques Found
Richard Moss, owner of Moss Antiques in Duluth, has been found.
Authorities have confirmed that Mr. Moss called them from his home phone and reported that he was alive and well. He said he had read of his disappearance in the paper.
No further details were available at the time of publishing.
 
Next I searched for Richard Moss on Facebook, expecting to find nothing.
There are several Richard Moss’s but only one in Duluth. His photo was a too close, unflattering, shot from below selfie of a blank faced old man with a gray mustache and dated spectacles.  The top of his head was cut off.
 
There was no other information, but this had to be the guy.
I sent him this message:
Mr. Moss, I came across your collection of UFOlogy books at my local Saver’s and felt compelled to speak to you. I’m in Fargo, but willing to come to Duluth on any weekend you might be free. I won’t take much of your time and need no accommodations.  Please let me know when and where and I’ll be there.
 
And then I heard nothing for six days.
 
On the seventh day, I got the following message.
Moss Antiques, 10 AM, June 27th.
 
And so I was off to Duluth. It’s a beautiful city, equal parts blue collar, rugged nature, and college town, and I figured if this meeting was a wash I’d at least have a nice vacation.
 
I packed next to nothing, booked a room in the cheapest motel I could find – the Starlite, it was called, $40 a night, cash at the desk, next to a Hardee’s (the employee I spoke with noted this like it was a feature) – and set off.
 
I pulled up to the one story motel at 11 PM on Friday. There were a few other battered cars in the parking lot, but the Starlite was clearly not doing the business it maybe did when it was built in, let’s say, the 50s.
I checked in, got settled in my room – not much, but not bad – and fell asleep four pages into one of Dick Moss’s UFO books.
 
In the morning, I googled Moss Antiques, 4 blocks away, and set off on foot. It was in a charmingly rundown shopping district in row of brick storefronts, between a diner and a place that sold outdoor goods.
 
I was 10 minutes early and according to the sign on the door the place wasn’t open on Saturdays, so I knocked, which felt weird, but Richard Moss was at the door in a moment.  I think he’d been behind it waiting for me.
 
“Reid, I presume? Got ID?”
 
“Yes,” I said, a bit taken aback but ready for weirdness and happy to oblige.
 
Apparently satisfied that I was who I said I was, he let me in to the dimly lit, musty store, and retreated to a back room.
 
He looked old, much older than his 62 years, but unremarkable. Short, a bit hunched, bald, but for some grey fuzz around the sides and a trim grey mustache, pale skin dotted with liver spots, dressed in a tucked in button down oxford shirt, pressed khakis, and padded, beat up loafers.
 
I followed him past old lamps, dolls, toys, knickknacks in glass cases – nothing remarkable about his shop either.
 
He sat at an old oak desk, piled with papers, and I sat across from him, on a chair I had to clear off and pull from the corner.
 
He stared at me for a full minute, unblinking. I stared back, wanting him to start.  I was starting to imagine his skin subtly undulating when he finally spoke.
 
“You found my books” he said, almost a sigh.
 
“I did.  I was extremely excited to find them.  A banner day at the thrift store.  Why’d you get rid of them?”
 
“Why? I needed to move on with my life. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
 
He rose from his chair with an old man groan, stretched his whole body, like a cat, shook his head as though trying to wake from a dream, cracked his jaw, and shuffled out the open door.  He shut it behind him.
 
This was very weird, but that’s what I’d come here for.
I sat, thinking this over. This guy was acting odd, but so was I.  Why did I come here? What did I expect to learn? He doesn’t owe me anything, I just bought his old books, so I should just stay patient and accept what comes.  If this guy was really abducted by aliens – or thinks he was, anyway – it’s probably affected him in ways I can’t even imagine.  But why did he even agree to meet me, if he’s so over all of this?
 
And then I felt something . . . shift, somehow. I can’t explain exactly what it was, just a feeling in the air.  The vibe, maybe, though I’m hesitant to use that word. Where there had been nothing, now there was a palpable anxiety. Not just in me – I’m used to that, but around me.
 
I was beginning to squirm a bit, feeling hotter and hotter and there was a knock at the door and I began to turn around, startled, and that’s the last thing I remember, before waking up in my bed, fully clothed, at the Starlite Motel.
 
I felt groggy, confused, but unhurt.  I looked at the clock, it said 3 AM. I opened the window shade and it definitely looked like that was an accurate account of the time.  On a hunch, I went to my phone to check the date. June 29th.
 
I was missing a full day. I racked my brain for any memory of what had happened. There was a flash of a tentacle and maybe a . . . smiling, vaguely sexy alien woman? So I shut it down.  I wasn’t hurt. I could block out these memories. I’d blocked out – not worse, but pretty bad. I had a good life at home and didn’t need this.
 
Maybe Dick Moss was right.  It was time to put this whole UFO thing behind me.
 
I packed up my few things, and went home, never to speak of any of this again.
 
But then there was the dream, always this, every night:
 
I’m on an operating table in a dark room, with a bright light shining in my face. I can hear Richard Moss’s voice coming from somewhere I can’t place, almost in my head.  He’s apologizing, but his voice is cold, uninflected.
 
I can see vague movement in the dark behind the light.  The shapes are, to quote noted racist, HP Lovecraft, unspeakable.
 
Sometimes I get a quick glimpse of my elementary school gym teacher, Mr. Disher wearing a tophat and blowing a whistle with a mouth full of deviled eggs, but I think that’s just my regular dream life intruding on a repressed memory.
 
And then the light goes out and I’m awake, sweating and panicked.
 
Every night.
 
I couldn’t live like this. I had to confront what had happened to me.
 
So I did the only thing I could think of and took Whitley Strieber’s lead – I had recently read Communion, about his own abduction experience – and sought out a hypnotherapist to retrieve my blocked memories.
 
The man I found, through a quick google search, was named Darnold Bumber. I picked him because he was the only one that advertised hypno-regression and he had a fun name.  I called his office, and he picked up the phone.  No secretary.  I liked that.
 
I told him that I wanted to regress to just a month prior and he said he could do that, didn’t ask any questions, and I made appointment for later that same day.
 
His office was located in a dated strip mall, between a vape shop called, mystifyingly, Sports Vape, and a pizza place I’d never heard of – Popolino’s.
 
The only indication that this was the right place was some lettering on the glass door which read, Bumb ypnotherapy – some of the letters had worn off years ago and hadn’t been replaced.
 
A bell jingled as I opened the door, but wasn’t necessary as Dr. Bumber was lying on a couch only four feet, staring up at the ceiling and puffing on a vape pen.  The small room was slightly hazy and smelled of something like Mike and Ike candy.
 
He popped off the couch immediately, nimble for his significant girth, releasing a cloud of sticky sweet vapor from the small, theoretical mouth under his great, bushy white mustache. I was encountering a lot of white mustaches lately.
 
He was somewhere in his sixties and looked so much like Richard Moss in a clownish fat suit that I was momentarily anxious.
 
“I apologize for my claustrophobic accomodations,” he said.  “This used to be the waiting room, but I’ve sublet what used to be my office to Sport Vape for their overstock and moved everything in here.  They’ve got wonderful products, and I’m free to help myself. Do you vape?”
 
I told him I did not. He seemed a bit mystified, but moved on.
 
“Shall we get started?” he said, sitting on a folding chair next to the couch.
 
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t you need to ask me some questions?
 
“Just the date and location of the memory you’d like to recover.  But first we must make something clear.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“This is all a figment of your imagination.”
 
“What?”
 
“This, all of this, me this office, your journey here, your entire life, your bodily self. Imagination. You’re just a consciousness projecting reality. You projected me saying all of that.”
 
“I. I’m sorry, what?”
 
“It doesn’t really change anything. It’s not as though you can stop feeling like this is all real and important or there’s anything else for you to experience, but it might be reassuring to know that you are the one true consciousness and everything else emanates from you.”
 
“How could you possibly know that?”
 
“I don’t. There’s no me to know it.  You know it and you’re revealing it to yourself now.”
 
“Huh. Is this some psychological trick to ease my trauma?”
 
“If you project it that way, I suppose. Listen, I’m just a facet of you. Same as your parents and grandparents and teachers and wife and kids and every person and thing you’ve ever seen or touched. Like I said, it doesn’t really change anything.  It’s all real and important to you and that’s not going to change unless you kill yourself, in which case all of this existence will simply vanish momentarily until your consciousness conjures up a new reality, probably instantaneously. Are there other existences, other projecting consciousnesses that you don’t know about?  You have no way of knowing that, and as such, neither do I.”
 
“This is a lot of heavy information.”
 
“Yeah.  Do you still want to do this regression?  You’ll only be further manifesting a memory, just like you manifested the absence of a memory.”
 
“No, I suppose there’s no point.”
 
“Well then, I guess we’re done here.  Are you sure you don’t want to vape?”
 
“Well, I suppose I might as well, given what you’ve just told me.”
 
“True.  I’m currently puffing on the mike and ike flavor, but, of course, you can manifest whatever you’d like.”
 
“Ummm . . . I’ll take the smell of my teenage bedroom.”
 
“Sorry, we don’t have that.”
 
“But . . . “
 
“I’m kidding! Just a second.”
 
He disappeared into what used to be his office – what I had projected what used to be his office to be, I guess – and came back a moment later with a state of the art vape pen and a vial labeled “Teenage Bedroom”.
 
He showed me how to fill the pen and then handed it to me.  I took a puff, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t taste like incense, sweat, cheap cologne, and me, with a slight undertone of marijuana.
 
“Huh,” I said.  “I guess that proves it.”
 
“I guess it does.”
 
“Well, manifest you around, I suppose,” I said, and we both laughed and laughed and laughed.
 
The end

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The Mandela Effect

The Mandella Effect
 
Imagine: You’re wandering through a thrift store, through the holiday decorations – Christmas is a month out and it’s a mess of Santas Claus and Jesus bullshit. Turn the corner and there are the cups. Just a lot of cups. Then kitchen implements, home décor, knick knacks, craft supplies, collectibles.  You pass the shoes and the clothes – no mothball trousers for you today – and the electronics to the media section. 
You flip through the CD rack.  You’ve no use for a CD – What a garbage technology! – but you’re wistful by nature and CDs used to mean a lot to you.  Maybe you’ll activate some dormant memories.  There’s the usual assortment – Christmas compilations, boy bands, post grunge, rap rock, classical, Blues Traveler, Amy Grant, some vaguely emo looking something you’ve never heard of. 
And then you find it: Pearl Jam’s fifth studio album, Yield, released in 1998.  This album meant a lot to you as a teenager, and the mere sight of the cover sends you back to the shag carpeted, incense musked basement bedroom of your youth.  You’ve spent a lot of time in thrift stores over the years and never come across this album.  It wasn’t particularly popular upon its release as Pearl Jam had ceased to be the cultural behemoth it once was and evolved into a band for Pearl Jam fans, not the world at large. 
You flip open the gatefold – Pearl Jam had shunned the typical crystal pack for three records now – to find the fold in booklet.  You smell it.  It smells just as you remember.  Like good paper. Thick paper. You flip through, a vague smile on your face. Love swells in your bosom. 
Then you see something that confuses you.  A picture of Matt Cameron, drummer for Soundgarden and FUTURE drummer of Pearl Jam.  But not until the next album, Binaural, which isn’t very good. Jack Irons played drums on Yield!
You’re sure of it.
You flip to the back of the booklet, to the credits.  Eddie Vedder, vocals/guitar/ukulele, Jeff Ament, bass, Stone Gossard, guitar, Mike McCready, guitar.  All checks out.
And then the drummer: MATT CAMERON!
“My god!,” you think.  “What is happening!  This can’t be! Surely this can’t be! My memory is infallible! My Pearl Jam knowledge is infallible! Matt Cameron was NOT the drummer on Yield!  He wasn’t! Impossible! The world is crumbling at my feet! Everything I thought I knew has been called into question!  Have I gone mad! Has mania gripped my brain meat! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!”
You scream and run from the store, pushing over an old lady and an entire Menonite family in the process, open the door with such force that it swings from its hinges, slaps against the plate glass store front, shattering it.  You run and run and run and run till all civilization is behind you, run until your legs cramp up and you fall to the leafy floor of a dark and mysterious woods, panting and weeping.
You are never heard from again.
You’ve just experienced the scourge infecting millions upon millions of people all over the world.
It’s called The Mandella Effect, and there’s nothing stopping it from afflicting you or someone you love.
Some background:
The Mandela Effect was discovered by an adult reading a children’s book.  Their name has been lost to time, but the book was one in The Berenstain Bears series by Stan and Jan Berenstain.  They are about a gender normative family of bears that live in a tree and may or may not be farmers of some sort. They are vaguely Christian but not in a “We’ve read and understand the bible” kind of way.  They’re very relatable to many Americans.
Anyway, the aforementioned adult reading a children’s book had a similar experience to the one previously detailed.
They were astounded to find that the name of the books was not Berenstien, spelled b-e-r-e-n-s-t-i-e-n, but Berenstain, spelled b-e-r-e-n-s-t-a-i-n.
This shook them to their very core. 
But instead of disappearing into the woods, they took to the internet. And, as it happened, their core was not the only core shaken.
Seemingly everyone agreed that this was simply not correct and the topic caught on and spread like a head cold in a DMV. Investigations were made. Videos were proffered. Further examples of the phenomenon were discovered.
One example in particular gave the phenomenon its name.  Many people were absolutely certain that anti-apartheid revolutionary, philanthropist and all around hero Nelson Mandela had died during his unjust prison term sometime in the early 1980s and were furious to find out that he’d continued to be one of the greatest people on earth for years after his release from hellish confinement.
So, The Mandela Effect was born.
Some other popular examples:
There used to be a Jiffy brand peanut butter.  Now there’s just Jif.
Curious George used to have a tail.
There once was a t in the brand name Skechers.
The monopoly man had a monocle.
Various other minor misspellings and character details and song lyrics.  You get the picture.
 
So what is The Mandela Effect?  I think we can say absolutely that it’s definitely not just a bunch of goofuses slightly misremembering trivialities from their long passed childhoods. With that out of the way, we’re left with several options.
Option 1: The Mad Swiss Scientists at the CERN laboratories ran their bony fingers through their wild, white hair, adjusted their comically thick spectacles, rubbed their dry palms together, cackled maniacally and smashed two atoms together in the Large Hadron Collider in 2014, which done broke time and space as we know it.
Option 2: Parallel Dimensions exist side by side, each deviating only slightly from the one next to it, and we slip between them like Keanu Reeves’s English accent in that Dracula movie.  Those hubristic Swedes may have exacerbated the slippage.
Option 3: We live in a simulation, are nothing more than the hyper complex, anxiety riddled Sims of a highly advanced civilization.  The idea here is that technology – Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, specifically – are advancing by proverbial leaps and bounds all the time.  Surely, at some point in the future, we’ll be able to create autonomous or semi-autonomous virtual people and control their world.  In this theory, we are actually those automatons, or maybe automatons of the automatons onward to infinity.
In this line of thinking, the life and death of Nelson Mandela are nothing but a glitch in the system or the whim of a future teenager loaded up on goof balls.
Option 4 is similar to option 3 except that it pre-supposes that the Matrix films were on to something other than tacky sunglasses, black dusters, and emboldening school shooters.
Option five is my favorite, and goes back to the idea of parallel dimensions. This one’s actually fairly comforting. The idea is that when we die of anything but old age, we jump dimensions into the one closest to us. In the dimension we’re leaving, we’re dead, but in the new dimension – which is ALMOST identical to the one we just left – our life goes on with nothing more than the memory of a potential near death experience, if that.
An example:
Say you’re dicing up some ham to make a delicious ham salad for a potluck this weekend.  You know damn well that no one likes ham salad, but you do, so you’re going to bring it, enjoy it yourself, and then have plenty to take home for later.
 
You’re chop, chop, chopping away, salivating at the thought of wrapping your lips around all of that salty ham drowning in thick, creamy Hellman’s Mayonnaise, when the doorbell rings.  You set down your knife and go to the door.  When you open it up, there is a stranger.
He is a tweenage boyscout selling popcorn to raise money to go camping, or for knot education or whatever.  You buy some popcorn. Always feels good to help a youngster and don’t nothing beat a big old bowl of air popped popcorn.
You go back to your ham salad, feeling pretty good about yourself, when suddenly, out of nowhere you are struck by a deep, sticky malaise.
It comes from nowhere and means nothing, but it’s all around you.  You’re suddenly sad and hopeless and the ham salad seems like a bad idea and your air popper broke last week. You’d forgotten about that.
Why can’t anything ever work out for you?
You set the knife down again and go to sit in your living room and do the breathing exercises your therapist taught you to do in times like these.  You sit with your back straight, eyes closed, and breathe, slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, for three minutes.
This helps, if only a little, and you’re proud of yourself for identifying your negative feelings for what they are – generalized anxiety – and doing something constructive about them.
Then a blue Chevrolet Colorado smashes through your front window and crushes you against the oak bookshelf you splurged and bought for yourself for Christmas last year, killing you instantly.
Now, in your current dimension, life will go on without you in it.  Your friends and family will be sad, will miss you deeply.  There will be a funeral.  They will learn to go on.  Your absence will become normal to them, but every once in a while they’ll see a ham salad and remember how great you were or a blue Chevrolet Colorado and be furious at the injustice of the world.
Meanwhile, in the dimension nearest ours, both of your legs are broken and you’re screaming in pain, confused by this unexpected turn of events, worried that you are maybe paralyzed or your testicles got crushed.  Your neighbors will rush out of their houses to find out what just happened.  They’ll step through the wreckage of your living room to find an old man behind the wheel of the blue Chevrolet Colorado. He’s just had a stroke and lost control of his vehicle and they’ll see you against the bookshelf, grimacing and struggling to get free. The paramedics will be called, and you’ll spend a week in the hospital and a few months after that on bedrest and then on crutches.
Four years later you’ll find out that Jack Iron’s wasn’t the drummer on Pearl Jam’s fifth album, Yield, and go screaming into the woods, just another victim of The Mandela Effect.
Or something like that.
What happens when you die of old age is anyone’s guess.  It’s not a very well thought out theory.
I’ve had two brushes with the Mandala effect, outside of the Pearl Jam album thing which I made up. 
Anyway. For years I had a very distinct memory of catching Gary Gaetti’s homerun ball in Game 6 of the 1987 Major League Baseball World Series.  Even had a ball that I told people was THAT ball.
I was sure of this story.
Turns out, however, that Gary Gaetti did not hit a home run in Game 6 of the 1987 World Series.  Also turns out I was not at that game or any other World Series game that year or any other, for that matter. I was four.
Spooky.
The second is a vague memory I have of getting my head stuck between the cast iron railings of our apartment balcony when I was three.  The fire department had to come and get me out.
I told this story to a co-worker once, and he looked skeptical, then mentioned that this may have happened on an episode of Designing Women.
It occurred to me that he might be right.  I had watched a fair amount of Designing Women in my youth.
I don’t know what was more surprising: That my memory was apparently incorrect – or had it been altered! – or that the two of us were both fluent enough in Designing Women trivia to have a conversation about it fifteen years after the show went off the air.
Let’s suppose for a second that the Mandela effect isn’t a paradox and/or conspiracy.
Let’s suppose, improbably, that people are misremembering things in a very reasonable and demonstrable way.
Why has the idea of the Mandela Effect gained so much traction in people’s imagination?
First, I think, is just nostalgia.  It’s fun to think about things from the past that you rarely have occasion to consider. It’s why I spend a weird amount of time looking at pictures of discontinued foods on the Internet.  It takes you back to a different time when a particular brand of fruit snacks seemed central to your existence.
Side note: This may be another example of the Mandela Effect.  As a stoned teenager, my favorite food was Chiquita Banana Fruit Snacks.  They were gelatinous and dense and there were banana ones, and strawberry banana, and orange banana.  I used to put them in the freezer and then eat whole boxes at a time.
My friend Tony remembers my obsession with them, but no one else seems to.  I can’t even find a picture of them on the Internet, let alone information.
So, let me just say now, if anyone listening has any information about Chiquita Banana Fruit Snacks, please contact me.  Anyone who can obtain and send some to me will be awarded with TWENTY AMERICAN DOLLARS!
The second reason people are so fascinated by the Mandela Effect is that something about the time we’re living in seems . . . broken.
Nearly everyone you meet has good intentions, but as a society we seem to be descending into something sad and terrible and nobody knows how to stop it.
It’s scary.
An explanation, at the very least, would be nice.
If the world isn’t as we perceive it and there’s been some kind of glitch, well, that’s something anyway.
And if we can name it, or name its symptoms, maybe we can do something about it.
Probably, though, we’ll just spend the next year or so sporadically arguing online about how Cheez Its used to be spelled before forgetting all about it and focusing on the next minor, meaningless controversy and clinging to our immediate, observable reality as the world plummets into chaos or doesn’t.
Either way, I’m going to go listen to Yield. 
That, anyway, is just as I remember it.
 

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Reptilians Pt. 2: Para-Palaver

Welcome to Para Palaver – the only podcast that isn’t afraid to tell you the truth because I don’t have anything left to lose. I’m your host, Darvin Schlender, and I guarantee that this is the most revealing unadulterated paranormal podcast out there. Unlike some other podcast and radio hosts, I’m not afraid of the government or the Illuminati or the Greys or even the Reptilians because nothing that they could do to me could ever make my life worse than it is now. I would welcome the sweet touch of death, if I’m being perfectly honest, but I’m too cowardly to do it myself. I’m fat, balding, smelly, a little drunk, I lost my job, and my wife took the kids and moved in with Salvatore, my shift manager at Arby’s, oh, I don’t know, 187 days ago.
We’ve got a great show for you today brought to you by the good people at GetchaGold.com, amongst others. GetchaGold.com – the world is ending, why not get some gold? Go to GetchaGold.com and enter the offer code “Sadsack” to get a free 8 by 10 professionally taken photo of all the gold you’ll be buying with your first order. That’s GetchaGold.com – the gold getters!
Tree psychic and my Brother-In-Law, Bramlett Kendripple will be calling into the show later. But first – the news.

Well, folks, the Reptilians are at it again. One of their scaly minions, my wife Sheila’s new boyfriend Salvatore Cullata, cut my hours at Arby’s down to 20 a week. Looks like I’ll be living off of stolen curly fries and Horsey sauce for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you something about that Lizard bastard – and this is just so typical of Reptilians – everybody treats them like they’re so great just because they don’t have an ever-growing, irregularly shaped bald spot and a sweating problem, but that’s the dead give away. People have bald spots. People sweat. People gain enormous amounts of weight in very short periods. Real flesh and blood people like you and me. We’d all have flat stomachs and long curly black hair and pencil moustaches and be 23 years old if we could just shape-shift into whatever form we pleased. And it’s just so obvious that he’s a Reptilian, it makes me sick, but Sheila just won’t listen. How else would you explain the fact that he’s only been in this country for 8 months and is already a god damned shift manager? Strings have been pulled and I’m talking about from all the way up the chain of command, folks.
Thinking of him bringing back a bag of Jr. Bacon Cheddar Melts to my blissfully naïve, smiling children just makes my skin crawl.
Oh, god, I just wants my family back! Sheeeeeeilaaaaa!

Sorry. In further news, Reptilians egged my car again and the Illuminati stooges at the bank keep charging me overage fees.

I’m being told that our guest is on the line, so let’s go to a commercial and we’ll be back with my brother in law, Bramlett Kendripple.

And we’re back. We’ve got our guest on the line. He’s a tree psychic as well as the brother of my lying, cheating wife. Bramlett Kendripple, welcome to Para Palaver.

BK: Now, Darvin, we agreed not to talk about Sheila. I’m happy to be on your little show, but if you continue to say things like that about my sister I’m just going to hang up this phone faster than you can say Great Basin Bristlecone Pine. Is that going to be a problem, Darvin?

DS: No. No it’s not. My apologies. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do.

BK: Darvin, I’d be happy to. First and foremost, I am, as you said, a tree psychic. Now – tree psychic, what does that mean exactly?
Well, it means that for as long as I can remember I’ve been blessed by the good Mother Earth with the ability to communicate with what I like to call “the wise old dinosaurs of the plant kingdom.” And by that I mean trees. Why do I call them dinosaurs? Well, ‘cause they’re so big, silly, and they’ve been around for so long. Longer than real dinosaurs, even. Did you know that the first tree ever sprung up from _? Well, it did.
I can speak with all kinds of trees: Black Ash, Shagbark Hickory, Pignut Hickory, Bitternut Hickory, White Ash, Hornbeam, Cucumber, Beech, Slippery Elm, American Larch, Sycamore, Christmas, Wonderboom, Big Banyan, ah, Strangler Fig, Florencecourt Yew, all kinds of Oak, Mulberry, Limber Pine, Sitka Spruce, Eucalyptus – the list goes on and on. The only kind of trees that won’t talk to me are Cherry Trees. I know they can, but their just stubborn. It’s like they got chip on their shoulder or something, probably because everybody’s always pickin’ their cherries. I’ll get to them someday, you just watch.
Now, what do I talk to trees about? All kind of things, really. From real important things like murders and kidnappings and the continued omnipresence of our Reptilian Overlords to sad stories about lightning bolts and lumberjacks and bugs and my love life to fun stuff like jokes and recipes and what not.
Now –

DS: Do they have anything to say about Sheila and that greasy roast beef Nazi she’s got raising my children?

BK: Darvin! What did I tell you not two minutes ago? Have you been drinking, Darvin? I saw you at the K-Mart yesterday and you looked worse than a Sugar Pine with Commandra Blister Rust! I’m worried about you!

DS: I’m fine. Yes, I am drunk. Let’s get this over with. What do the trees have to say about Reptilians?

BK: I’m going to answer that question because it’s so important, but I don’t like this one bit, Darvin.
What do the trees have to say about Reptilians? Well, I was chatting with a lovely Golden Maple in a patch of trees at the Dagoberto Llamas Memorial Baseball Field Complex – you know, the one just East of the Hobby Hut? So, I was chatting away with Petula Willfinger, that‘s the tree’s name, Petula Willfinger, about how sick it is that Americans hold that monster Paul Bunyan and his disgusting blue ox in such high regard on account of he was basically a genocidal maniac bent on the destruction of all trees West of the Mississippi and Petula says to me, she says, “Did you know that Paul Bunyan was one of them Lizard People that rules the planet earth from behind a veil of secrecy and subsists primarily on human flesh and blood?” And I, of course, I was shocked, though I’d always had my suspicions that that was the case and I told her so, and she said, “It’s true. Why do you think he was so tall? He’s a space lizard, that’s why, and from what I hear, I’m not going to name names, mind you, but a little bird – a blue bird – told me that he’s still alive and living in the moon and was a kind of a secret weapon for the Reptilians and would come back one day to finish the job of enslaving us for good and making us build their pyramids or whatever.” Well, I was about to tell her how that made perfect sense to me and ask her what if anything we could do to stop him, when, wouldn’t you know it, out of the blue I was hit by a foul baseball and the next thing I knew I was in an ambulance trying to tell the paramedics about what I had just heard and they were telling me to be quiet. (Deep breathe)
Anyway –
DS: That’s – that’s enough. God, my head is pounding. We need to wrap this up. Thank you for being on the show, Bramlett, and tell your sister that she ruined my life and I want my kids back and I hope her boyfriend dies in a grease fire.
BK: Darvin!
DS: Thanks for listening to Para Palaver. Join us next week – or don’t, what do I care – when I’ll be talking to Gertrude Aftergut, a 72 time alien abductee and my whore wife’s hairdresser.