Short Rest: C3 Ep. 57: Cold Hard Truths

Every time I realize I'm dreaming I can float through it until I try to make big changes Like as soon as I try to fly or something I just wake up. I am only able to change little things, like what the color of a house is.

“I’m supermanning into a flashlight Caldwell” is a phrase that will never leave my brain

Late comment, but when I was young I had really bad recurring nightmares and I think as a defense mechanism I learned to lucid dream. My experience was not total control, but my objective self in my dreams could squeeze my eyes shut and "change the channel" until I found a dream that wasn't scary and then would watch my dream self as though it was a TV show!

I like how Emily says "nightmere"

Im incredibly surprised there was no mention of Peregrin Took, which is Pippin from LOTR's full name

When I was really young, I had heard about nightmares from other kids and was scared, so I for reals prayed that God would keep them from me... And the closest thing I've had to a nightmare didn't happen until I was in my early 20s. Any time a dream started to get scary, someone would turn and basically look directly at the "camera" and say, "This is a dream, you can wake up," and I would wake up every time. I now have stress dreams instead of nightmares. Usually about students misbehaving, but often it'll be a repetitive circumstance where I'm being chased or going through a series of doors/up and down stairs trying to get away from something. After a while, my brain becomes aware that the repetition is the problem, so I'm able to semi-lucidly navigate to a new path, which breaks the pattern and relieves the stress. Brains are weird and cool.

I am exactly like Jake, except I taught myself to lucid dream. Constant nightmares as a kid, still only ever have nightmares or stress dreams if I dream, but I can tell that I'm dreaming pretty quickly and start to change things or just wake myself up to reset if it's too stressful to fix the dream haha

As someone who used to frequently lucid dream, flying and fucking is exactly what I did too... The only downside to smoking weed is that my dreams are mostly suppressed unfortunately, so I only get to experience the lucid dream when I'm taking a tolerance break now

Is Jake… the chosen one? 💤💭

If nobody else has mentioned it, peregrine comes from peregrination which comes from Latin peregrinatus. To wander in a foreign land.

Bahumia!!

Thank you Caldwell for clarifying that a Peregrine Hawk is indeed a Peregrine Falcon. For those 7 seconds it was really bothering me

I, too, choose to fly or have sex in most lucid dreams 🤣

If you make a habit of looking at your hands and counting your fingers, they never look right in dreams, so you can look at your hands and realize you're dreaming.

Tha k you for the correction, Caldwell. Ollie high, big Ws

Can we get a review of the Star Wars Christmas special for a mixed bag? I think the grinch could have saved it.

Dude the flying and fucking thing had me almost bust up laughing at work while my boss was right behind me in a meeting on his computer. Best I could do was suppress it to a quiet wheeze

I used to lucid dream ALL the time as a child - in my teens I had really bad depression and anxiety and just the worst nightmares that I basically creates an entire "dream best friend" to help me out but then I had a dream where she basically told me I was too old for her now and I had to learn to do things on my own - basically never lucid dreamed since...... 🤷🏼‍♀️

I feel so seen that I have literal goosebumps! I also always have lucid dreams because I had a lot of nightmares and sleep paralysis when I was a kid, except when I told my dad, he said, "Be a man, fight the scary stuff!" ... which is basically the same as a loving coaching from Jake's mom... Also, I also only fly and fuck...

My recurring bad dreams are basically “I need to finish getting ready to go to this thing” and it’s takes me all day and night and I’m so anxious because we’re running LATE

Sometimes I’ll tell someone I’m dreaming, and they’ll get scared and tell me I’m not supposed to mention it. Then I’ll get scared and end the dream so I don’t have to deal with the consequences.

A actually JUST wrote a Psychology paper on the variance of lucid dreaming!

Goddammit why they had to talk about lucid dreaming so accurately

4 year old Caldwell looks so satisfied with what he found out by fucking around. My son does the same... will he end up with Caldwells crazy energy?

I definitely have Caldwell-style lucid dreams. It would honestly be a pretty useful power IRL to just be able to poof out of that reality when you get too stressed.

I know it was a joke at the end of the episode when Emily said it was nice to matter in the campaign because you don’t matter in real life and I just want you to know that this podcast and the four of you mean a lot. D&D has so incredibly enriched my life and y’all are a part of that.

"Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness" by evan Thompson is a really good book on the states of consciousness & how people access them. also i've been listening for four years & just caught up to the latest episode 😎

Anyone else learn lucid dreaming from blues clues?? I've been controlling my dreams all my life?

Will our patron sub transfer to iTunes? For some reason patron lags like crazy

Murph stepped into a Sweet Blue Hole, it was foretold.

Wet memory 🤣

Christ air!

I'm so sorry, but that outfit that Caldwell is wearing has some crazy implications lmfao. I think there was a movie about it it was something like the Boy in the Striped something, something... 🤣🤣

I accidentally taught myself how to lucid dream out of nightmares by treating them like channels on a tv and changing them by blinking my eyes in my dreams

My mom also taught me to Lucid dream because of terrible nightmares! My tricks are looking at my hands to control the dream, and closing my eyes to open them in the real world and wake up. As a kid I would wake up from a terrible nightmare, then breathe and strategize. Then fall back asleep and immediately go back to the same dream and control it to make the ending not scary (ages 5-7 it happened almost nightly). One example was a recurring dream about an evil witch. Usually I'd summon my late great grandfather's spirit to help me defeat her. The thing about faces in dreams is that you can't create a face, you only see faces you've already seen in real life.

For a second I thought that was a picture of Murph's Fred Flinstone costume.

As a classicist, you said peregrine and I immediately knew you'd looked up Latin and I LOVED IT

The meds I’m on give me weird dreams I’ve been on them for like 5 years and my dreams have consistent lore. Like, the school I teach at isn’t the school I’m at in real life, but it has consistent architecture and I know the whole layout of it. The house I live in isn’t my real house, but it’s the same house in every dream. If I have an odd job for a dream, it takes place on this one street and I’ll be like oh that’s what that building is, it’s the dress store I’m now working at. And then in my next dream I know that’s the dress store, even if I’m not working there in that dream. I don’t know if it’s lucid dreaming but it’s weird af.

murph please do give us a sketch of the eladrin-dragon-giant chess board because i thought i understood it and now that you've explained your alternate idea i feel like I'm lost

The picture for this episode combined with "Cold Hard Truths" makes this look like a true crime podcast about this murdered child

Anybody else so glad Caldwell corrected Murph on that peregrine falcon piece? Like I was frothing at the mouth, but then good ol Caldwell came up to bat🫡

Murph, you said it was embarrassing that you use a Latin translator, but I absolutely do the same thing! It's a great source of inspiration, even if I don't use the direct translation.

Superman into a flashlight would be a fantastic song name for some psychedelic jam band

I just held that Falcon! Im working on becoming an apprentice falconer! I just got to fly some this past weekend. So dont shame the names!

“What is a Mage Hand if not a fleshlight?”…. My. God.🤣

Thank you Caldwell for the falcon clarification lol

My school anxiety dream is that I'm back in college and I learn that I completely forgot about one of my classes and never went to it for the entire semester

I was listening to the dream part before I went to bed and it freaked me out a little lol. All the stress dreams, and then I had one. Hahaha

somewhere between murph & jake on the lucid scale here. super anxious & hyper focused person, so a lot of stress dreams (when i can remember them, because cannabis & my snri definitely affects dreaming in general), but i used to have a little more control to not come right out of the dream when i realize i'm there & continue on. the best way to practice is to lets say when you wake up but have a few minutes before you have to actually get up, or youre taking a nap, resting, whatever: keep perfectly still. do not scratch that itch on your leg or reposition to get more comfortable. that's your brain testing itself and the rest of your body if youre awake. you can think about whatever you want to help you fight the urge. eventually your brain is like "we're asleep!" and you'll start to see things and dream but be fully awake. i achieved this only once years ago and was in an apartment i've never seen before in full detail. i started turning my view and thinking "holy shit im doing it" and as i had that thought gravity flipped, everything floated upwards and i woke up.

The way i was sure Murph had set up the Eladrin dragon chess game that way to be a lore dump of how the Giant wars went 😂

I learned lucid dreaming in spite of my mother!!! She told me that Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video would give me a nightmare. That night much to my chagrin I started having a nightmare about it and told myself “you’ve seen this before” I gained full control. Been able to do it at will ever since. Wild how mothers unlock that stuff 😂😂

This is so validating because I have such similar dreams to the stress ones discussed! I’m constantly back in high school or college and can’t find my schedule or classrooms. Thanks y’all, I guess I gotta try lucid dreaming. Another lucid dreaming technique that I’ve heard of is to draw an X on one of your hands in real life and get in the habit of checking regularly to see if it’s there, and naming to yourself “this is real” when you notice it. Then, you might be more likely to check for it in your dream and if it’s not there, BOOM you know you’re dreaming. Emily, it might be worth a shot!

I’m so glad Caldwell stepped in because I definitely was having trouble finishing the story about the use of “peregrine”

Next live show someone is going to yell ‘you’re dreaming’ and you’re gonna wonder

I have a recurring nightmare where I am parking my car in a lot that is very full and I keep accidentally bumping into other cars and parking incorrectly and each time I do I have to start at the entrance of the lot and try to park again. So mundane and silly but it is infinitely stressful in the dream.

i love when caldwell makes anime references 💙 hxh was exactly what i pictured during the chess scene

love that the file name for the thumbnail is "wetcaldwell2"

You can collect that capital W, Murph. Peregrine falcons prefer to nest in ledges and gaps on sheer cliffs. That's part of the reason they do better in cities than most birds of prey! Skyscrapers aren't too different from their ideal nesting places. And to top it off, there's always plenty of fat city pigeons to pick off! -Tori the Bird Nerd

Thanks Jake for reminding me of "Heaven is a Halfpipe"!

Last I checked Peregrine is a hobbit.

Thanks Murph for the peek behind the screen regarding Calder's challenge. Knowing you took a break to do that makes me more confident as a GM to do similar.

Caldwell with the Shogi reference I love it

Caldwell my brother in christ they were playing Shogi in HxH

I feel so seen because I thought I was alone with this but no it must be a first child thing to do in the American south because I also have a series of professionally taken photos taken while outside wearing “fancy child” clothes

Little Caldwell cosplaying as one of the Bananas in Pyjamas is too damn cute

Little Lord Caldwell reveal

I have lucid dreams but my dreams do track time, it's part of my internal clock that wakes me up at 630 am everyday

idk if it's just narcolepsy but I almost exclusively lucid dream and I can read words and change things in the dreamworld but it feels sort of like swimming against a current, so if I get distracted I start to lose control of the dream. Apparently poets are also more likely to be able read words in dreams even though 90% of people can't read or write in dreams.

Ahh, yes. The HunterxHunter game. Clocked that reference. 👍 (I still get nightmares about the Ant arc 🥲)

Peregrin is etymologically tied to pilgrim i believe

Just here to praise Caldwell's Hunter x Hunter reference. It's wonderful to have a man with such refined tastes on Naddpod. Even if he called it the stone game with the bug guy.

Extremely worth noting that the peregrine falcon was pivotal in the animorphs books. Yes really (spoilers)

Just ordered some paw paw dice and me and my friends finally going to start playing all of our first campaigns!

Emily be careful you can get blood clots playing punchies

Jake, im a nightmare girlie too! My mom taught my older sister to lucid dream so she could wake up out of nightmares, and then my sister taught me to do the same and then it led to being able to lucid dream. As an adult, i also get sleep paralysis, which feels like lucid dreamings evil twin

Did anyone else think of Animorphs when they started talking about peregrine falcons?

Peregrine falcons are also known in North America as DUCK HAWKS! It's all there... written in the ancient tomes...

I cannot believe I thought that photo of Caldwell was Kazoo Kid

Wow! I had thought for sure Murph was drawing from the word 'peregrinations' in calling the duck team peregrines. Cool that he's looking through Latin words!

It’s such a treat to hear your post-aha moments. Thank you for letting us behind the scenes of your most masterful collaborative storytelling. Truly incredible ep

Caldwell was always gangly damn

JAKE IS THE LISAN AL GAIB

I know the stone game.

I feel like caldwell made that Gungi reference from HxH specifically for me, i just finished the chimera ant arc on my 4th rewatch.

I see you Caldwell referencing Meruem playing Gungi and discovering the joys of humanity.

Bahumia!

Murphy Opening with "I fucked up" a rose before even the dawn breaks!

Can’t wait to figure out where the convo that led to this photo goes.

Have not even finished the campaign ep, let alone the short rest, but I know in my bones that’s Caldwell in that pic