HBM151: Blowgun Time Warp

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Image by Jeff Emtman. Digital render.

 

Season 10 of Here Be Monsters starts and host Jeff Emtman hallucinates his adolescence while working long hours. Scenes from middle school dances, dawn bus rides, the basement, and ( most crucially), a late-night raffle at a hardware store.

Do you like Here Be Monsters? Tell your friends, support HBM on Patreon, and have your boss sponsor an episode.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: Serocell and The Black Spot

 
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab

Sponsor: RadioLab

Are you curious about the world, but also want to be surprised, and even moved?

Radiolab experiments with sound and storytelling allowing science to fuse with culture, and information to sound like… well, music.  Join hosts Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser for an experiential investigation that explores themes and ideas through a patchwork of people, sounds, and stories.

Listen to Radiolab

Hello: a Radiolab episode that’s about humans and dolphins communicating.

HBM148: Early Attempts at Summoning Dream Beings

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Image by Jeff Emtman.

 

As a teenager, HBM host Jeff Emtman fell asleep most nights listening to Coast To Coast AM, a long running talk show about the world’s weirdnesses.   One of the guests stuck out though; one who spoke on his experiences with lucid dreaming.  He’d learned how to conjure supernatural entities and converse with his subconscious.  

Lucid dreams are dreams where the dreamer knows they’re asleep.  Some sleepers become lucid completely at random, but lucid dream training can drastically increase the frequency of their occurrence.

Months ago, Jeff put out a call for dream prompts on social media.  He asked if anyone had questions for an all-knowing being to be conjured in a forthcoming lucid dream.  Some of the questions are heard in this episode.  

While training for this episode, Jeff used two approaches to trigger lucid dreams.  The first was an audio recorder by the bedside.  Each morning, Jeff recorded his dreams (lucid or not).  The second method was a series of “wakefulness checks” throughout each day, stopping at random times to test reality, and to make a determination on whether he’s currently awake or asleep.  This tactic is useful as it may eventually trigger the same behaviour in a dream.  

In this episode, Jeff attempts to lucid dream to answer listener questions, but finds the progress slower than he hoped.  

Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast that is funded entirely by individual sponsors and donors.  You can become a donor at patreon.com/HBMpodcast

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna, and Serocell.

 
 
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Sponsor: Sleep With Me Podcast

Sleep With Me is a podcast that helps you fall asleep.

Host Drew Ackerman tells tangential stories, reads old catalogues, recaps old Charlie Brown specials and does other calming things all in pursuit of slowing your mind down and letting you drift off to sleep more peacefully.

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Jeff wearing his favorite Sleep With Me shirt. This shirt elicits compliments whenever its worn 🐏💖

HBM135: Dying Well

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3d image by Jeff Emtman. Cloth Texture by Simon Thommes’ Weavr.

 

We live in a culture of “death denial”. That’s what Amanda Provenzano thinks. She sees it when medical professionals use euphemisms like ‘passing away’ instead of ‘dying’. She sees it when funeral parlors use makeup to make it look like a person is not dead but sleeping. Most often she sees it when her clients’ loved ones insist their dying family member is going to pull through, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Content Note: Language

Amanda is a death doula, someone who provides practical, emotional, and spiritual support to people who are about to die. Sometimes this means that Amanda helps dying people and their families sort out their end-of-life paperwork and advanced care directives; Sometimes she helps dying people plan their own memorials. And sometimes she sits with people as they die. She says the tasks she performs are different for every person, but that her goal is always the same: to advocate for the wishes of the dying.

Amanda says that, in her experience, death is often harder for the loved ones to accept than it is for the person who is dying. “It’s almost like, in Western culture, it’s not OK to die… Like we guilt the dying person into trying to keep them here longer, with medicine and medical procedures because we, the survivors, are not capable of letting go of that person.” Because of this, Amanda recommends that people grieve by holding and touching the bodies of their loved ones after they die. She believes that talking about death openly will help people be less afraid.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 

HBM133: Prey of Worms

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Earthworm by Pearson Scott Foresman. 3D Art by Jeff Emtman.

 

Bodies are odd.  Anyone who can see their own nose will tell you the same.  So will anyone whose diet changed their body odor. And so will anyone who’s ever felt their phone vibrate in their pocket only to later realize it was a phantom ring. 

Our bodies make stuff up constantly and do plenty of questionable things without asking our permission first.  It can feel disorienting, especially due to the fact that being our sole points of reference, they’re hard to see outside of.  So, people invent analogies for the body, ways to understand what it is, and how to use it. 

On this episode, Jeff interviews the operators of several bodies on the models they’ve developed to help them navigate the strangeness of the world we live in. 

Thank you Allison Behringer of the Bodies Podcast for sharing Juliana’s comic about bodies of water. And thank you Jackie Scott for helping record the freight elevator heard on this episode.

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion. 
—Marcus Auralius, Meditations, c. 180 AD. Translation by Maxwell Staniforth.

Heard on this episode:

Dr. Kelly Bowen is a naturopath in Seattle, Washington. 

Juliana Castro is the senior designer at Access Now and the founder of Cita Press. 

David Schellenberg is the singer and guitarist of Tunic, a noise punk band from Winnipeg, Manitoba. 

Divya Anantharaman is the owner of Gotham Taxidermy in New York City. Divya’s been on the show before disassembling birds and explaining taxidermy.  See HBM093: The Brain Scoop. 

Tammy Denton Clark is a medical social worker in southern Utah.  She’s also the mother of HBM co-host Bethany Denton.

 
 

LDS president Boyd K. Packer explains how the body is like a glove.

 

975 Likes, 24 Comments - Gotham Taxidermy (@gotham_taxidermy) on Instagram: "Day to night 🤪 Swipe through to see my #transformationtuesday. It's amazing what a shower and some..."

514 Likes, 18 Comments - Juliana Castro V. (@juliacastrov) on Instagram: "Swipe ➡️ for españolito cursi ✈️ ❤️ 🌊 ☁️"

HBM131: A Cure for Carsickness

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David Denton, Bethany’s father, pictured in his Air Force uniform with the reflection of two of his children visible. Photo illustration by Jeff Emtman.

 

Bethany Denton has a long history of carsickness. Ever since she was a little girl, long car rides made her nauseous and gave her stomachaches. Once, when she was four years old, her carsickness was so bad that she made her dad take a detour to look for a cure at the grocery store.

At the time, they were driving through Central Idaho, visiting all her dad’s favorite places from childhood.  They drove to Kooskia and Kamiah, two small neighboring towns where Bethany’s dad lived for some time with his cousins. He used to love playing outside with his cousins, and hear stories about the land around them. One of his favorite places to go was The Heart of the Monster, a landmark that is sacred to the Nez Perce people. They also made the trip to the Denton family plot at the Pine Grove Cemetery in Kooskia, so that Bethany and her brother could visit their Grandpa Bill’s grave. Bethany’s grandpa was Bill Denton, a sportscaster for KREM-TV in Spokane. She never met him, he died years before she was born.

Audio from the Heart of the Monster site courtesy of Nez Perce National Historical Park, used with permission.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 

HBM121: True North

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HBM host Jeff Emtman on the roof of his university’s library in 2008. Northern Lights image by Johny Goerend via Upsplash.

 

Angels helped Here Be Monsters’ host Jeff Emtman once.  They picked him up and took care of him after a bad bike crash.  It was just one of many times that Jeff felt watched over by God.

Jeff used to think he might be a pastor someday.  And so, as a teenager, he made an active effort to orient his thoughts and deeds towards what God wanted. 

In this episode, Jeff tells four short stories about faith (and the lack thereof) through the metaphor of declination, or the distance in angle between the unmovable true north, and the ever shifting magnetic north.  

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music:  The Black Spot
Photos: Jeff Emtman

 

View from the middle of Holden Village, where Jeff spent his Junior year of high school. Trees discussed on the episode are pictured far left. Click for a 180° panorama

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