An Open Hand 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Prologue
Pain need not be deserved to become a doorway. This poem explores how clinging deepens sorrow, how looking inward loosens its hold, and how awakening becomes meaningful through kindness.


The Hand That Opens
We ask the things we love to stay,
And hold them close against the night;
But life keeps moving through our hands,
And sorrow grows as we grip tight.
 
An open hand can still hold love,
Without demanding it remain;
We need not close our hearts to loss,
To loosen what prolongs the pain.
 
I built myself from others’ eyes,
And called their praise my solid ground;
But when their voices turned away,
I feared no self would there be found.
 
So I sat down beside that fear,
And heard the child beneath my name;
He needed care, not one more crown,
A listening heart, not one more shame.
 
I tried to force the river’s course,
To make its waters serve my will;
The harder that I fought its flow,
The less my troubled heart grew still.
 
Yet yielding need not mean defeat,
Nor letting cruelty have its way;
I choose where I must stand like stone,
And where to let the water play.
 
But what is waking worth to me,
If all I seek is my release?
If I leave others in the dark,
How deep can be my private peace?
 
I cannot bless the hurt I bore,
Or make each broken moment mend;
But I can hold another’s grief,
And let the harm with me find end.

…

DCG

First, you suffer. Then you awaken, and only then do you begin to ascend.
Strange, isn’t it? That pain is not a punishment, but a summons. A knock on the inner door that says, ‘Wake up.’ Not to the world, but to yourself.
You see, suffering shakes the foundation of who you think you are, so that you may discover who you truly are.


—A passage circulating online under Alan Watts’s name. Its attribution to an original Watts lecture has not been verified.”

Before The Verdict 

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Before the Verdict


A postulated reflection: If our histories shape what we see, what might change when we question our first judgment?
We meet one world through different eyes,
And each declares the picture clear;
But what we call another’s fault
May wear the face of our own fear.
Perhaps the past still frames the room,
And tells us what deserves our sight;
One seeks the comfort of straight lines,
One seeks a hand against the night.
We gather proof that takes our side,
And leave unwelcome facts outside;
Confirmation bias names the habit—
A tilted scale we call our guide.
Yet different views are not all true,
Nor does a wound make falsehood right;
The world resists what we believe—
Our claims must bear its testing light.
When someone speaks against our view,
The pulse may leap before we know;
Is this a threat before our eyes,
Or yesterday refusing to go?
Before the verdict leaves the tongue,
Could we allow one breath of space?
Not choke the feeling into silence,
But keep its heat from ruling the case.
What fact would make us change our minds?
What have we brushed aside as wrong?
Could reason test the claims we love,
Not merely make their voices strong?
To hear another is not to yield,
Nor must we bless the harm they do;
We can refuse a cruel demand
And ask what brought that hurt to view.
Must every difference draw our blood?
Can we meet doubt without the flame?
If anger keeps deciding for us,
How much of us will it reshape and name?

…

DCG


Transcript
Took me 42 years to understand what I’m about to explain to you in under a minute. And once you understand this, you’ll stop being so confused about why people do what they do.
There’s no one single right reality where you are right and everyone else is wrong. We assume that the way we see things is the way things are, right? Our values feel obvious, our priorities feel logical, our conclusions feel correct. So when someone disagrees with us, it feels wrong. And this is where the frustration starts.
But here’s what most people never consider. Other people are not just choosing different actions, they are seeing a completely different reality because everybody is experiencing life through their own lens, and it’s shaped by their upbringing, by their experiences, by what they’ve been rewarded for, what they’ve been hurt by—which means something subtle is happening.
Two people can look at the same situation and see two completely different things. One person walks into a messy room and feels stressed. Another person walks into the same room and doesn’t even notice it. But they do notice how people are feeling. One values order, the other values connection. Neither is wrong, but they both feel like the other is.
And Anaïs Nin said it simply: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
Our view of the world happens through patterns the brain has learned over time. And once your brain builds a certain view of the world, it starts reinforcing it, looking for evidence that confirms it and ignoring what doesn’t.
So this leads to a very different way of thinking. What if the reason people frustrate you isn’t because they’re wrong, but because they’re seeing something that you’re not?
One of the strangest truths about life is this: we are not all reacting to the same world. We’re each reacting to the version of the world our mind has learned to see.
And the moment that you realize that is the moment you stop trying to correct people who are wrong and you start understanding them.[Attachment]
Attribution search
The strongest match was a Threads post by @flipbardinas, dated April 15, 2026 in the search results. It quotes:

—Transcribed from a social-media clip; original creator

Shannon Shallcross describes herself as a speaker, writer, founder, and two-time TEDx speaker. Her platform, The Gratitude Mind, explores gratitude and how perception shapes people’s experience of life

The Softened word

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The Softened Word


We used to name the weather: rain,
And feel its cold upon the street;
Now storms are “moisture events” again,
With gentle warnings, soft and sweet.
A fact once stood on sturdy feet,
It asked to be examined plain;
Now it must wear a softer sheet,
Lest someone find its edges vain.
The headlines learn the practiced sigh,
A tear is worth a thousand proofs;
One chosen child beneath the sky
Can sell a roof above all roofs.
The numbers wait outside the door,
Their coats are wet, their voices low;
But feeling enters first once more,
With lights arranged to make it glow.
“Be moved,” the anchor says at nine,
“Be angry—then remain with us”;
The screen supplies the proper sign,
The sponsor thanks the frightened fuss.
In Meet John Doe, the noble cry
Was useful while it filled the square;
The men who owned the ink would try
To turn its hope to private air.
And if the movement would not bend,
If common people kept its flame,
They would prefer its public end
To letting truth outrun their name.
No party owns this oldest art,
No faction holds the only mask;
The left can tug the tender heart,
The right can make fear do its task.
A label takes a human face,
A slogan makes a neighbor strange;
Then thought is hurried from its place,
And anger calls itself “a change.”
We polish words until they hide
The thing we ought to plainly see;
“Collateral” means someone died,
“Messaging” means: agree with me.
The clever merchant of alarm
Will call his hook a public good;
He sells protection from the harm
His tale has planted in the wood.
Yet reason need not sneer or freeze,
Nor make compassion disappear;
It asks what happened, who agrees,
What proof is solid, what is fear.
Come, reader: let the loaded phrase
Be weighed before it takes command;
Truth needs no manufactured haze—
It needs a mind that understands.

…

DCG

—Cleaned transcript
The reason so many idiotic ideas now run society—where everyone listens to their feelings and stops needing facts or reality—might be that even major publications have switched completely from reasoning to emotion.
This is day 13 of The Psychology of Masses.
Researchers analyzed language across millions of publications going back to 1850. Until around 1980, language rooted in evidence and logic kept rising. Then the curve flipped. Starting almost exactly in 1980, fact-based language began declining while emotionally loaded language climbed instead—and that shift accelerated sharply after 2007.
Rational language is what real science runs on. Emotional language is what activism runs on, because an activist is producing a version of reality that confirms what they already believe.
You see the result everywhere. Entire groups get mobilized and controlled through emotionally charged language, because emotions are how you actually control people—not statistics. Use the right trigger words, the right examples, and hit the specific feeling you are after, and people will do what you want without ever checking whether the underlying claim was true.
Which specific emotions to use, and exactly how to trigger each one, is in The Psychology of Masses.
What the clip is attributing
The historical-language claim appears to be based on a 2021 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), “The rise and fall of rationality in language,” by Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen.
The researchers analyzed Google Books Ngram data—millions of digitized books in English and Spanish—from 1850 through 2019. They found that words they categorized as relating to rationality, science, technology, quantification, and formal social systems rose in relative frequency after 1850, while words associated with intuition, belief, personal experience, sensation, and sentiment fell. Their trend reversed around the late 1970s/1980s, with a more pronounced increase in sentiment- and intuition-related language around 2007. They also reported broadly comparable patterns in fiction, a nonfiction-heavy book subset, selected other languages, and New York Times text.[nih]
Examples of the paper’s “rationality” language include words such as “determine,” “conclusion,” “data,” “result,” “test,” and “procedure.” Its contrasting category contains words such as “feel,” “believe,” “imagine,” “heal,” “dream,” and “comfort.” That distinction is central to what the speaker is paraphrasing.[nih]
Verification: accurate core, misleading conclusions

—

The clip has a legitimate scholarly source behind its narrow historical-word-frequency claim. But it turns that limited finding into a far larger political and psychological story that the study does not prove.
The defensible claim is: some selected word categories in a large digitized-book corpus changed direction around 1980, with a further shift around 2007. The unsupported leap is: therefore society has stopped caring about facts, activism is inherently emotion-driven, and emotionally charged language controls people.

Research attribution and context: The historical language claim is based on Scheffer, van de Leemput, Weinans, and Bollen’s 2021 PNAS study, “The rise and fall of rationality in language.” Using Google Books Ngram data from 1850–2019, the authors found that selected rationality-related words rose in frequency until roughly the late 1970s/1980s, while selected intuition- and sentiment-related words declined; the trend later reversed, with a sharper shift around 2007. The study measured long-run changes in word use—not whether people became irrational, whether facts ceased to matter, or whether activists control people through emotion. Its interpretation is disputed: a published response argued that the pattern may chiefly reflect increasing informality in writing rather than a cultural movement from reason to emotion.[nih +1]

A comedy of errors 

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a comedy of errors


We wear our wisdom like a crown,
And swear the mirror got it wrong;
We build a throne from looking down,
Then call our certainty a song.
The rich announce the poor lack grace,
The poor condemn the rich as fools;
Each tribe puts virtue on its face,
Then sharpens up its favorite tools.
The scholar studies human pride,
And smiles at every lesser mind;
While Ego, seated just inside,
Leaves missing pages hard to find.
The singer breaks the neighbors’ glass,
And calls the howling “raw and true”;
The judges clap, the crowds all pass,
Because bad notes can feel brand new.
The lemon-jawed bank thief, it’s said,
Believed the cameras could not see;
He wore his cleverness instead,
And robbed himself of liberty.
We laugh, as safely we are taught,
At people blind beneath their nose;
Then praise the splendid things we thought,
And miss the button on our clothes.
The party man, the preacher too,
The tycoon, clerk, and professor;
Can find a thousand faults in you,
And call his own a small digression.
For ignorance is not a lack
Of books, or shoes, or social rank;
It is the habit of the back
To bow at truth, then rise and thank.
Still, mercy says we share the same:
A tender wish to be enough;
We hide our doubt behind a name,
And make assurance sound like stuff.
So when the facts arrive to call,
Let laughter loosen up the door;
The humblest fool may learn it all—
The wise one learns he’s fooled before.

Beware DB Norton

Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe

Sometimes the biggest fools

Are the ones who can create the show 

…

DCG

Ever met someone who is so extremely dumb that they don’t know how stupid they actually are? Ever tried to explain a new concept to someone who clearly doesn’t get it? Well, you’re not alone. Researchers have come up with a theory that explains why the less we know about something, the more confident we are in our ability to master it.
So, there’s a term for dumb and dumber? Yes, and it is more common than you might think. Join us today as we explore the avenues of dumbness. In this episode of The Infographics Show: What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
Named after Cornell University researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a condition in the field of psychology where an intellectually challenged individual fails to adequately assess the extent of their own intelligence—or lack thereof. Armed with an unhealthy bias of illusory superiority, these low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their own mental shortcomings. In other words, they are too stupid to know how stupid they are.
In a 1999 study, “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” Dunning and Kruger studied the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, a bank robber who disguised himself by covering his face with lemon juice. His rationale being that the chemical properties of lemon juice are used in invisible ink, therefore should render him invisible to the bank security cameras. An easy enough mistake—and one that cost him his freedom.
After he was easily caught by the cops, the wannabe thief was shown the video surveillance footage of himself robbing the banks. Genuinely surprised that his plan hadn’t worked, Wheeler was without the required mental capabilities to figure out the gap in his own reasoning.
Other investigations followed, and Dunning and Kruger’s 2003 paper, “Why Do People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence,” observes the following:
“Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed. Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them.”
People base their perceptions of performance in part on their preconceived notions about their skills. A good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action would be the early audition rounds of a talent show open to the fame-crazy public.
British pop star wannabe Warren Wald became a mini celebrity when he auditioned for the show Pop Idol in 2003 with a rendition of the 1980s track “Eye of the Tiger.” He sang the song so badly that the public adored him. Warren, who led a simple life, suddenly became a tabloid newspaper sensation. He gave interviews on television and radio, and the YouTube clip of him singing went viral.
Warren had no apparent idea just how badly he sang until the nature of his fame came to light. When the penny dropped, Warren realized he was being celebrated for his guts and determination rather than his promise as a vocalist. His singing career is currently on hold.
The public does have a tendency to champion underdogs, and this tends to reinforce the Dunning-Kruger effect. Studies have shown that the Dunning-Kruger effect is not limited to the mentally challenged. High-performing individuals can also overestimate their abilities. In fact, most of us do it a lot of the time.
The way to break out of the habit takes bravery and a level of humility that is uncommon in most people. We have to ask for feedback from a trusted source and be prepared for an honest response. So, if you feel you have a talent for singing, perhaps test your theory on a few honest people before appearing on national television.
What we now call the Dunning-Kruger effect is what the scientists used to call metacognition: thinking about thinking. Perhaps the less we know about a topic and the simpler it appears, the easier it is to ascribe some sort of understanding of it. We must be careful. We could well be one of the many Dunning-Kruger sufferers walking around blissfully ignorant of our ignorance.
So, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve watched somebody do? Were they aware they were doing it, or were they blissfully ignorant? Let us know in the comments.

— the infographics show 

The price of being seen 

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The Price of Being Seen


I spent too long at an open door,
Waiting for someone to call my name.
I thought their welcome proved my worth,
And learned applause can sound like shame.
I made my heart a public room,
With every window lit at night.
I hoped the passersby would stop,
And tell me I was built right.
But people carry private storms,
They see through weather of their own.
No careful speech can change the eyes
Of those determined not to know.
So much of life is wasted breath,
Explaining wounds we did not make.
We mend what others threw apart,
Then blame ourselves when we still ache.
We trade our dignity for likes,
For seats beside a borrowed flame.
We shrink to fit another’s hand,
And lose the shape that held our name.
What is popularity but smoke?
What is attention but a spark?
It warms the face for half a breath,
Then leaves the room as cold and dark.
The hamster wheel will call itself
Ambition, love, or being kind.
But if it asks you to disappear,
It is not peace you hope to find.
There is a courage without noise:
To stop, to leave, to not explain.
To set down guilt that is not yours,
And let the silence hold the pain.
I am not saying it is easy.
The old need knocks upon the door.
But every time you choose yourself,
You need their verdict a little more.

…

DCG

It took me a long time to realize this.
But the best thing I ever did for myself was get quiet. Not silent out of anger, not silent to prove a point—just quiet.
I stopped explaining myself. I stopped trying to be understood by people who already decided not to understand me.
Have you ever done that? Have you ever tried to prove your heart to someone who already made up their mind about you?
That kind of pain is exhausting. It drains you slowly—not all at once, just little by little—until one day you realize you’ve been abandoning yourself trying to be accepted by people who were never going to hold you right.
So I let it go. I stopped trying to convince people I was a good person. Because the truth is, the people who need convincing usually aren’t the people meant to stay.
I stopped fixing things I didn’t break. I stopped apologizing for things that were never mine. I stopped carrying guilt that didn’t belong in my hands.
And for the first time in a long time, I felt peace. Not loud peace, not the kind you post about, not the kind you perform for the world—the quiet kind.
The kind that sits beside you when the room is still, when the phone is down, when there’s nothing left to distract you from yourself.
The kind of peace that asks you gently, “Why were you trying so hard to be chosen by people who never chose you?”
That question changed me. Because I realized something I should have known all along. My worth was never up for debate. Not then, not now, not in someone else’s hands, not in their approval, not in their attention, not in whether they stayed or whether they walked away.
I don’t need to be seen by everyone. I don’t need to be understood by everyone. I just need to be honest with myself.
And that’s where the strength came from. Not the loud kind of strength, not the kind that argues, defends, or keeps receipts—the quiet kind. The kind that stands still and knows. The kind that says, “I know who I am, even if you don’t.”
And maybe you needed to hear that today. Maybe you’ve been over-explaining yourself, over-giving, over-reaching, over-extending your heart, just hoping someone would finally see you the way you saw them.
Maybe you’ve been shrinking just to keep the peace. Maybe you’ve been calling it love when really it was your exhaustion begging not to be left alone.
But what if the peace you’re looking for is on—
— attribution from an adaptation from a post by @elize_only

It is now that I begin to truly see 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The dream: 2247 Baily Avenue.

The childhood home — one room where I grew up, and then the other room, once my brother’s, where I stayed with my own children for a time after my divorce.


Two kinds of shame: one as a child, and one as an adult.
The shame of the adult takes an even tighter hold on the constraints of your manhood when it is shared with your own children. That differs from the shame you carry as a child yourself, growing up in the house of pain.

How you deal with the shame you feel depends a great deal on the audience around you.

Note

The trauma: CEN or childhood emotional neglect: CPTSD 

The father: authoritarian narcissistic

The mother: codependent, and lived in fear, but also looked away and did not protect

The ex-wife: also authoritarian with a need for control

In one room, you are the child

And in another room, you have your children who see 

Two rooms in the same bewilderment

The common denominator: me

The activities of a child versus 

The activities of a man

The comparison is poignant

But the shame still stands

I now understand my trauma

Unhealed wounds must be processed through connection

In silence, they fester unseen

So with this testimony, I raise my objection 

One shame is learned

One is self created

The burdens of inequity

When you point the finger at yourself – it’s related

The lessons of accountability

And the politics of shame

It’s extremely hard to point the finger

When the finger is pointed at your name

Oh how we justify

The economy of quid pro quo

Just what do we testify?

Sometimes, I don’t rightly know

Like sitting in your own church

Like sitting in your own pew

Just what will we receive?

Just what will we do? 

In childhood I learned to overthink

In adulthood, I did the same

I now try to integrate emotion 

The man, the boy, and the claim 

Over 50 years with living in silence

The reflection from the polished mirror, I am now me 

Funny how when I start to go blind

It is now that I begin to truly see 

CLG

…

DCG

Cognitive dissonance inside a lucid dream

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Cognitive Dissonance Inside a Lucid Dream
A thought experiment from DCG
~
Close your eyes.
You are asleep. You are dreaming.
And you know it.
The walls are soft. The rules are gone. No one is watching. Nothing you do here will follow you into the morning.
Or will it?
~
In my waking life, I hold certain beliefs. I have written some of them down and numbered them. I call them life hacks.
They are simple. They are mine. I live by them, or I try to.
But what happens to a belief when you carry it into a place where it no longer seems to matter?
That is the thought experiment.
~
Life hack #1 says:
It’s easier to avoid temptation
Than it is to resist it.
Life hack #5 says:
The more you tell the truth
The easier it becomes.
Awake, these two live together in peace. One tells me to step away from temptation. The other tells me that what I repeat, I become.
Now take them into the dream.
In a lucid dream, temptation does not wait at a distance. It stands in front of me. I cannot walk away from the room, because I am the room. Avoiding it is no longer possible in the usual way.
So life hack #1 goes quiet.
And life hack #5 begins to whisper something darker. If telling the truth gets easier each time, then what about everything else I repeat? If I give in once in a dream, knowing it is a dream, does it get easier the second time? The third?
One belief says step away.
The other says you become what you rehearse.
In the dream, I cannot step away.
So what am I rehearsing?
~
Here is the question underneath all of it.
If I know it is only a dream, is there any penalty?
No one is harmed. Nothing is broken. I wake up and the world is exactly as I left it.
And yet, I chose. I was awake inside the sleep. I knew my beliefs, and I set them down, just to feel what it would be like.
Is that a sin?
Or is it only a picture of one?
~
The other life hacks do not stay silent either.
Life hack #2 asks what I would find if I looked into my own heart. What was the true intent behind the choice? In a lucid dream, intent is all there is.
Life hack #6 warns that avoiding, done as a habit, can leave you always lost. Is calling it “just a dream” its own kind of avoiding?
Life hack #7 says what we run from pursues us, and what we face transforms us. Was the dream a place where I faced something? Or a place where I ran toward it?
Life hack #8 says the strength of your faith and the error of your convictions will entangle. Is that not exactly what happens here? The belief and the betrayal, tied together in the same moment.
And life hack #10 reminds me that the water never changed. Only the room. If I am the water, does it matter what room I am poured into? Or does the water remember every room it has been in?
~
I do not have the answer.
I am not sure there is one.
But I keep coming back to a few simple questions.
If I would not do it awake, why do I want to do it asleep?
If it means nothing, why do I feel it?
If I do it once to know the feeling, will I do it again to keep the feeling?
And if a pattern forms in the place where no one sees, is it still only a dream?
Or is it a practice?
~
Maybe the dream is harmless.
Maybe it is a rehearsal.
Maybe it is a mirror, showing me what I would do if the consequences disappeared.
Maybe that is the most honest place I will ever stand.
~
Close your eyes again.
You are dreaming. You know it.
The temptation is right there.
What do you do?
And who are you when you wake up?
…
DCG

Life Hacks, #1 to #11

  1. Life hack #1: “It’s easier to avoid temptation / Then it is to resist it.” (unknown)
  2. Life hack #2: “If you can look into the heart / What would you find? / The true motivation / What you have behind the mind? / If we do not mark our path / With our true intent / What then guides us? / In our true consent?” (DCG)[thundergodblog]
  3. Life hack number three: “To heal a heart and soul / You must reveal the heart and soul / Always consider forgiveness / Only we control what we console.” (DCG)
  4. Life hack #4: “To forgive is not for the ‘sole sake’ of relieving another of their guilt, but rather for the ‘sake of the soul’ that had been perpetrated upon!” (DC Gunnersen)[thundergodblog]
  5. Life hack #5: “The more you tell the truth / The easier it becomes.” (DCG)
  6. Life hack #6: “Ignoring, or avoiding is a pernicious kind of sloth / If it becomes a habit / You might always be lost.” (DCG)
  7. Life hack #7: “What we run from pursues us / And what we face transforms us.” (unknown)[thundergodblog]
  8. Life hack #8: “The strength of your faith / And the error of your convictions will entangle.” (unknown)[thundergodblog]
  9. Life hack #9: “Be the reason / Someone has a better day.” (unknown)[thundergodblog]
  10. Life hack #10, “The Water Never Changed”: A bottle of water costs $1 at the corner store and $6 on a plane, but the water is the same. “Nothing about the water was ever the problem. / Only the room it was standing in.” Your worth doesn’t change with the setting.
  11. Life hack #11: “Every day, you have two choices: to focus on what’s wrong, or to embrace what’s right. Choose gratitude. Choose joy. Choose to see the beauty in the little things…” (anonymous)[thundergodblog]
    The post for #1 on the site is dated August 11, 2026, even though #2 is from October 2025. It may have been reposted.

My Hacks and the Dream Experiment
My question: if you know you’re dreaming and still choose to sin, does that corrupt you? My own hacks mostly say yes, but only a little. What matters is the choice you make while aware, not the fact that it happened in a dream.
• Awareness makes it a choice (#2, #8). In a normal dream, things just happen to you. In a lucid dream you’re aware, so choosing the act is an “intent” in the sense of #2. #8 fits too: your faith and the conviction you’re breaking get tangled together. That tangle is the cognitive dissonance i’m describing.
• Repetition builds habit (#1, #5, #6). #5 says truth gets easier the more you tell it. The reverse would also be true: an act gets easier the more you rehearse it. #6 says a repeated habit can leave you “always lost.” #1 says avoiding temptation is easier than resisting it. Practicing the act in a dream wears down the avoiding, so waking life would take more resisting.
• Running from it vs. facing it (#7). This hack leaves room for a different answer. If you use the dream to face a temptation and understand it, it could change you for the better. If you use it to indulge the temptation, it’s the thing you run from, and #7 says that pursues you.
• The counterweight (#3, #4, #10). #10 says the water never changed, only the room. A dream is just a different room, so your core self is still there. #3 and #4 say it can be fixed: be honest about it and forgive yourself. In their terms, that’s “reveal the heart” and “the sake of the soul.”
• #11 suggests a way to aim your lucidity: use your awareness to practice what’s right instead of what’s wrong.
A possible conclusion: a dream doesn’t corrupt you, but deliberately choosing something in a dream and doing it again and again can wear down a belief, the same way a waking habit does. My  hacks point to three stages:

  1. The dissonance: #8
  2. The wearing down through habit: #1, #5, #6
  3. The way back: #3, #4, #7, #10
    This connects to real research. People practice skills in lucid dreams, and imagined rehearsal can shape how you act. Dream ethics, including Augustine’s worries about what he did in dreams,

Is not our own thinking?

Sometimes placed under lock and key

Hidden from ourselves

And from others to see

— DCG 

Three classes shy 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Three Classes Shy


Why do I walk the mesa late at night,
beneath the bell tower’s arch of sun-bleached stone?
Why does the old campus glow so bright
for one who walked away from it alone?
I left my home at seventeen, so young,
and paid my way with every dollar earned.
Who heard the quiet hope upon my tongue
each night I studied while the lamp still burned?
Why is there always one more class to find,
a room I cannot reach, a door that’s locked?
Why does the schedule blur inside my mind
while minutes slip away upon the clock?
Psychology, philosophy, two roads
I traveled far but never saw them end.
Three classes short. Who measures all the loads
a working heart must carry, lift, and tend?
I married, and I worked for forty-one
long years, and gave the best of what I had.
So why, when all those working days are done,
does one unfinished piece still make me sad?
Is this the reason that the dream returns?
Does painful truth play hide-and-seek at night,
and wait behind the library till it learns
I’m strong enough to face it in the light?
And if I face it, what else might I find?
That no diploma measures who I’ve grown?
That every lesson life has left behind
has taught me more than any class I’ve known?
The past is history, so let it be.
The future is a mystery, still unknown.
But now, this very moment, sets me free,
a gift we call the present, all our own.
So if a dream keeps calling you by name,
what hallway, what closed door, waits there for you?
Perhaps it doesn’t come to bring you shame,
but just to walk you home, whole, and new.

…

DCG

“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.”

— unknown 

This was the dream. I woke up on the San Diego State University campus, wearing a very plush San Diego State letterman jacket, which I have owned in the past. I was surrounded by people, many of whom were from where I worked. The people I had my career with showed up throughout the dream, even though many of them did not attend San Diego State.
We were sectioned off, almost as if we had been told to serve the campus community for some unknown reason. We were grouped together in square formations, almost like attendance lineups, or even in classrooms. I walked around and saw people from my job. I didn’t know why they were there too, because many of them did not go to the same school I did.

This dream, in some form, keeps coming back: me on the campus of San Diego State University.

Transcription
“Here is the twist. I was three classes shy of getting my degrees at San Diego State University. One in psychology and one in philosophy.”
Annotation: the two degrees would have been a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy.
A Revelation
I left home at 17 and paid my own way through San Diego State University. I studied toward a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy while working full-time.
I always meant to finish. But marriage and work took priority, and I spent 41 years with my employer. I ended up three classes short of both degrees, and not finishing those classes is my biggest regret.
My education has always mattered deeply to me. That may be why the same dreams keep coming back. I think they may be my mind returning to the one important thing I never finished the way I wanted to. This isn’t a failure. It shows how much I still value what I worked so hard for.

I convalesce 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

In the sanitarium of my mind

I convalesce

Just what then will I epitomize?

Or, do I digress?

The mind is a curious domain

You can turn your attention inside

Discover the connections you’ve made

Then learn where the pit of your fears reside

Consider the invisible opérations

Disassociation or self defense

The subconscious training rituals

The impulse to build a fence

Observations from the playground

Internalized with limited objectivity

Often laid dormant or forgotten

In the shadows of obscurity

Is it really too much to ask?

How we descend upon humanity? 

How we treat each other and ourselves? 

The question in perpetuity 

Some say only knowing the reasons

Will not be enough

You must also be able to feel

Or your experience is just a bluff

The body holds its own accounting
A ledger written in the chest,
A tightness where the words fall silent,
A weight that will not let me rest


What wounds the most is often absent,
Not the blow, but what was never there,
The comfort missing from the doorway,
The empty space of unmet care


A child will trade away the feeling
To keep the bond that keeps him fed,
Authenticity for attachment,
A quiet bargain in his head.


So I learned to think instead of feeling,
To analyze and not to weep,
Assembled reason like a fortress,
And buried sorrow in the keep.


But thought without the heart is exile,
And feeling without thought, a flood;
The mind must learn to hear the body,
The pulse, the breath, the rush of blood.


So I return to meet the younger,
The one who stood beside the wall,
And name the ache he could not utter,
And answer, finally, his call.


To face the shadow is not surrender,
But gathering what was cast aside;
The anger I was taught to swallow
Becomes the strength I need not hide.


Responsibility becomes the medicine,
To carry what I did not choose,
To bear the load and find the meaning
Within the things I feared to lose.


Compassion, then, is not indulgence,
But curiosity made kind,
A question asked without a verdict,
A gentle light within the mind.


The fence I built becomes a garden,
With gates I open and I close;
Not every soul will find the entrance,
But those who do, the heart well knows.


So in the sanitarium of my mind,
I convalesce, but not alone;
The thinking and the feeling marry,
And I, at last, am coming home.

…

DCG

If every lock opened with every key, keys would become useless. People work the same way. You aren’t meant to connect with everyone. The people worth keeping are the ones your personality was meant to unlock. Because your job isn’t to open every door, it’s to find the ones you were made for.

— unknown 

Rented lives 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Rented Lives


We never heard the danger come,
it wore the clothes of ease;
it did not break the door or knock,
it simply took the keys.
The young men learned to call it free,
the hours they slipped away;
but strength is not a thing you rent
and borrow back someday.
When life at last asks them to stand
and lift what they must bear,
they reach for will and find it spent,
already rented there.
The daughters learned to be a picture
before they learned to be;
it’s hard to hear your own soul speak
while watching what they see.
The husband builds and pays and mends,
he keeps the roof and wall;
but useful is not the same as known,
and no one finds him there at all.
The wife holds every heart but hers,
she shelters all from storm;
but somewhere in the holding up
she lost her own true form.
The driven build a bigger life
around the same old wound;
they call the square footage healing,
but the hurt just has more room.
The elders watch the world rush on
with wisdom no one sought;
the grave is not the thing they fear,
but mattering for naught.
And we, the rest, are entertained
right out of what we know,
informed right out of quiet peace,
and lulled from where to go.
This is the only life we have,
not rented, not on loan;
the danger is we’ll spend it all
and never make it home.

…

DCG

Transcript
A lot of people are hurting right now. That’s you. I think this is a must-listen.
So I said to ChatGPT: “I want you to act as a risk analyst. However, your job isn’t to predict the stock market or insurance claims. It’s much more important than that. You are a risk analyst for the human condition. You study what actually puts groups of people in danger before they realize they’re in danger. For each answer, I want you to present the single greatest hidden risk facing that group. I’m looking for the things underneath their habits, culture, technology, family roles, addictions, ambitions, and fears. Stay away from the obvious ones. Keep your responses short and sweet and make it land. Here we go.”
Q: What is putting young men most at risk right now?
A: They are being trained to confuse escape with freedom, so by the time life asks for strength, their willpower has already been rented out to pleasure.
Q: What is putting young women most at risk right now?
A: They’re being taught to become an image before they become a person, and it is hard to hear your own soul when you’re constantly watching yourself from the outside.
(Damn, I worry about that with my girl so much. Think about it all the time.)
Q: What is putting husbands most at risk right now?
A: They’re quietly becoming useful instead of intimate, then wondering why the house they provide for no longer feels like a place where anyone can find them.
(What a line.)
Q: What is putting wives most at risk right now?
A: They’re being asked to make everyone else feel held while slowly losing access to the version of themselves that also needs holding.
Q: What is the main risk for our most ambitious humans?
A: They’re mistaking expansion for escape, building bigger lives around the same wound, and calling the square footage healing.
(Wow. That’s America.)
Q: What is the biggest risk to our grandparents?
A: They’re watching the world move on without asking for their wisdom, and the deepest danger is not death, but the belief that their life has become commentary instead of contribution.
Q: Let’s distill this down to the everyday person, people like myself and those listening. What’s our biggest risk?
A: You are being entertained out of your instincts, informed out of your peace, and distracted out of the one life that is actually yours to live.
(All right, y’all, if you like these shorts, I am…) [clip ends]

— saggy says 


My Answers, Same Prompt
Young men: They’re being offered achievement without risk: games, porn and online rankings all feel like winning, so they never build the tolerance for real failure that turns a boy into someone others can lean on.
Young women: They’re learning to judge their lives by other people’s reactions, so they can be admired and still be unknown, sometimes even to themselves.
Husbands: They’re letting loneliness look like competence. Because they handle everything, they end up with no one they need and no one who knows they’re struggling.
Wives: They’re becoming the family’s memory and schedule, keeping track of everyone’s needs, until their own wants feel like just another item on the list.
The most ambitious: Each goal they reach becomes the minimum, so they’re never done. They gain time and money but lose the ability to feel that anything is enough.
Grandparents: They’re being made comfortable instead of needed. Being kept safe while no one asks anything of them slowly tells them their story is finished.
Everyday people: We react so constantly that we’ve stopped choosing. Hours pass on things we never decided to do, and a borrowed life can feel exactly like our own.

— perplexity