Guard Your Mind

I enjoyed making the last dream-related video so much that I made another one. This one was much more difficult.

The previous video, “In the Light” luckily contained all the lyrics in my original dream journal entry. That is very rare, though not unique. This dream had no lyrics at all. I had to make them based on my journal notes and my memory of the dream itself. Making lyrics out of that took some time. Then I had to make them as concise as possible. Making AI videos is not cheap if you care about getting a good result. And even then, you’re lucky to get a reasonable facsimile.

Enforcing concision caused me to leave out some elements of the dream. I don’t think this affects the overall message, but might mean that some people would have to watch more than once to fully understand. I wrote two versions of the song. The first ran six and a half minutes — I had already started animating it before realizing it was far too long. I made a new set of lyrics that ran about three and a half minutes. That’s the one I used.

To generate an AI video, you need a good tool (I used Kling.ai) as well another AI (claude.ai) to help me write the prompts. Some shots were easy, like the falling elevator. It produced three usable shots and no duds. It frequently failed when camera motion had to be specific. It also made numerous errors trying to keep track of who was wearing what and where they were standing from one shot to the next. I had no idea there were so many ways to configure the facing position of two people in a closed elevator until this project.

It is unusual for me to find dreams frightening. I don’t know why, but that is the case. It does happen, but only very rarely. I may have had 10-20 nightmares out of almost 14,000 recorded dreams. When I was filmed for the TV project in Houston last month, the director seemed to expect that I would react to dreams about future events the same way I would react if they had happened while awake. It doesn’t happen like that.

This dream is an example. Many people would likely find it frightening. However, it was necessary for the spiritual message it contained. I was not frightened in the dream. Other people likely would be. For that reason, I toned it down a lot. That, and I doubt any AI would be willing to render some of the things I was shown. Think of Dante’s Gates of Hell, or something similar when you wonder what I mean.

And that’s essentially what this dream was; a serious spiritual warning that took the form of bringing me to a place that many would identify as Hell, then explaining what I had to do to avoid becoming a resident. It sounded easy, but in practice is not.

I was shown that mental imbalance can spread from one soul to another by the simple act of reacting and making yourself involved. I was shown many things that made me want to act: to intervene to save someone, to defend myself, or any one of a number of other things. I was shown that any level of engagement, even if only expressed as a thought, creates a spiritual entanglement that harms one’s soul, indelibly marking it with that thought (or deed), making it a part of the history of that person.

Forgiveness may come, but it was clear that would be a part of the history also, and that history was ugly even if the post forgiveness and repentant portion is clean. This was represented in the dream as spiritual deformations that appeared and multiplied as fast as thought. For every flash of anger, another permanent disfigurement.

Then I was shown the source, or a source, of this: Satan himself. As in the two or three other dreams where he appeared, he was totally unlike any representation I’ve ever seen. He always comes across as a friendly, clean cut, caring man of indeterminate age, but looking about thirty-five to forty.

In the dream, Satan unsuccessfully tried to tempt the woman who gave me the warning. The specific form of his offer remains the most sinister example of trickery I’ve ever heard of or read about. What made it unlike any other account of temptation I have encountered is that everything he said was true, and nothing was technically omitted. The deception lay entirely in what his words left no room for — which was everything that mattered most.

Then, she looked at me and told me that she’d brought me to this locale, and encountered Satan himself, for the express purpose of showing me the danger faced when we fail to retain our mental composure in all things. It wasn’t that it was wrong to intervene in a dangerous situation to help another, but it was dangerous to do so without a calm mind.

The best analogy I can offer is cigarette smoking. When a person first inhales, the effect is immediate and obvious — they choke. But once the habit is established, the damage becomes invisible. They no longer notice it happening. Only after years of accumulation does the cost become apparent, by which point it is already serious and possibly irreversible.

What I was shown suggested that unguarded thoughts and reactions work the same way. The damage is real and immediate, but invisible. It accumulates silently. The deformities I saw on the figures around me weren’t punishment — they were the accumulated record of habitual unguarded reaction, built up one small invisible increment at a time. Like a lifelong smoker’s lungs, made visible.

With that as my huge disclaimer about one of the dreams I consider among the most interesting I’ve ever recorded, please be aware that my wife thinks that even this sanitized version remains scary. So, if that would affect your mental poise, you’re probably better off not pushing the “play” button on the link below.

For everyone else, here it is: