Dreamscape Diaries: Deserted On Dessert Island

Cycle 11 Day 25. It’s Sunday, March 29th, 6:50 in the morning.And this is another one of my Dreamscape Diaries.I remember suddenly finding myself in a big hall.I don’t remember exactly what kind of space it was, but it might have been something like an airplane hangar. It was very big.And what was just taking place was that I was suddenly part of a cooking competition.On top of that, the theme was desserts and sweets.As you might know, my diet currently is strictly ketogenic, so I don’t touch sugar, which makes things quite limited in terms of dessert choices. And even though I love cooking, I haven’t really done a lot of desserts throughout my cooking life.The main one I’ve made numerous times is tiramisu, but in no way do I have broad experience making desserts.A Dessert Challenge With the Wrong IngredientsSo I find myself running to a table where there are different ingredients to make sweets.Similarly to MasterChef, this table of ingredients is for all competitors to use. Anyone can pick from it.But when I arrive at the table, the only things left are really weird.First, there’s one kind of frozen pudding-type thing that is yellow. So I grab one of those.Then there is some tropical fruit that seems to be melting as well. It’s white-greenish. Maybe it’s not melting, but it’s very soft, and it’s white-greenish on the outside.And then there was a third ingredient that I don’t remember anymore.I have a quick taste of this white-green fruit. Then a quick taste of the yellow kind of ice cream or cream-pudding thing. And the third thing.And I don’t see anything else to pair it with.Everything is super sweet.If you know my taste buds, I prefer more bitter and sour flavors. Everything here is so sweet. I have no idea what to do with it, but I need to get going because in the dream I realize there’s very little time to make the dessert.Then I’m running with this dessert, and for some reason the yellow pudding is starting to melt.So it’s on my plate, and it’s starting to pour over the side.Through the WindowSuddenly I end up in a big room that is someone’s studio apartment.Everything is in one room.There’s a bed there. There’s a guy lying in the bed, speaking to someone on the phone, maybe, or maybe she’s present. And I see a window right next to the bed, along the side of the bed, on the other side of him.And I realize I need to get through that window.So I directly ask him if it’s okay if he helps me through it.It’s not particularly high. It’s more like an elongated window, and it’s at floor level, more or less level with the floorboards.So we open that window, and he kind of holds my hand a bit to support my weight. I’m holding on to the bed, then to the edge of the floorboards, and there’s something I can place one foot on.Then I’m on some kind of fencing, and from there I take myself down to solid ground below.And while moving through this window, I have no idea what is happening to the ingredients I’m supposed to cook with. They kind of disappear in the dream.Then I keep running when I get to the ground level, and I end up in another space where a subset of the contestants are.But most of them are the ones who already lost the previous challenge, so they don’t know anything about the dessert challenge.And I’m asking them: where should I stand to cook? Are there any other ingredients?And in the back of my mind I’m thinking that if there were other ingredients, they should already have been at the other place where I found those three strange ingredients.Something else may have happened that I can’t recall anymore.And then I woke up.Why Food Has Taken Up So Much Space in My MindMy initial analysis was that it’s interesting because this is one of the first times I can remember deliberately waking up with a dream about cooking.And cooking has been a big part of my existence over the last 19 months, because appreciation of food has become such a highly valued thing in my life.That is due to three main causes.One is that I’m being poisoned.And to some extent, whether I like it or not, that poison is damaging my body. It’s damaging cells that divide fast, and one of the tissue types in your body that divides the fastest is the one in your gut lining.It’s been estimated to renew itself every three to seven days in any given human being.So you are not the same person you were yesterday. Your gut lining is not the same as it was yesterday. Give it a week, and your whole gut lining is renewed.This is partly due to the highly acidic environment, and the fact that the gut lining needs to renew itself, and there are many complex interactions with the gut flora.But what happens when you put chemotherapy poison in there is that these fast-renewing cells will, whether you like it or not, be exposed to that poison.And if your body does the right thing, it’s going to kill off those cells. They will kill themselves, and there are mechanisms at play that will successfully renew your gut lining where that happens.So my stomach is being turned inside out, literally.And during that period, I don’t initially think much about food, because I’m being poisoned.But what I’m doing at the same time, as you know, is water fasting.So: no calories in, but there are calories out.My body goes into a starvation mode where it protects healthy cells, but obviously there is a clock ticking. With every hour, with every day that I don’t eat, my body starts craving energy. It cannot just sustain itself forever on internally produced energy. I’m not heavily overweight, so I’m nowhere near breaking any water-fasting time records.The Longest Water FastAnd speaking of water fasting, let me ask a question.Some of you may already have heard me ask this in person, but I’ll ask it here as well.How long do you think the record is for the person who has water-fasted the longest without any calories, without any intake of additional calories?Two weeks?Well, I’ve been fasting six days for 12, 13, 14 times already, and that has worked fine for me, and I’m in no way overweight. My personal record is seven and a half days. So two weeks doesn’t sound unrealistic.Okay, what about a month?When you’re water fasting, you are gradually using your body’s internal resources, its internal calories, its internal energy, its stored building blocks. So to fast for a full month, you probably need a lot of extra resources. You’re supposedly a bit overweight to be able to do that consistently.Okay, but could we go even further?Two months? Three months? Four months? Five?Well, it’s not five.It’s not six.It’s not seven, eight, nine, ten, or twelve months.It’s actually 382 days.That’s more than one calendar year! Obviously this guy was heavily overweight. His BMI was something like three times the ideal BMI. So he walked around weighing something like 240 kilos—roughly 500 pounds—and his ideal weight would have been around 80 kilos.What happened was that he water-fasted for all of those 382 days, and doctors monitored him. This was in the 1970s, around 1973, I think.They published a paper on his fasting and stated that they monitored him consistently. Every few weeks they took blood tests.And only at two points throughout those 382 days did they give any intervention.And those interventions were very minor, given what he was putting his body through.At one point, fairly early in the process, they noticed lowered potassium, one of the key minerals you need.When I water fast, I supplement with the three main minerals:* Sodium, which I get from table salt.* Potassium, which I get from a food-grade ingredient people can also use for baking or brewing.* ...and magnesium, which I get from magnesium chloride, another food-grade ingredient.Those are the three minerals you need short-term to replenish. If you don’t get them from food, you need to get them somewhere else.So I drink water with those salts mixed in during my fasts.What happened with this guy later on—around the eleventh month—was that his calcium levels started going low. So they supplemented him with calcium for about a month.But that was only at around month eleven.And after those 382 days, his weight was around 80 to 85 kilos.And he was able to sustain that weight for a follow-up period of at least five years, maybe longer.Crazy story.Re-Appreciating FoodGoing back to my own water fasting:What happens, obviously—and it must have happened to a massive extent with that man—is that you start craving food, you start thinking about food.And if he had accumulated that amount of extra body weight, it must have come from really appreciating food.So I cannot even imagine the mental journey he was on in terms of thinking about food.A lot of props to him for sticking that out.For me, I start thinking about food from the point when I feel that my body’s poisoned state is beginning to shift.So even if I still feel some nausea, even if I still feel weakened, there can already be a trigger there where I start thinking about food.That has led me, during the initial days when I start to feel that my body is processing the poison in each treatment round, to watch cooking shows.I remember one in particular: The American Barbecue Showdown. It was just heaven for my mind.A number of people are competing. They have different barbecue setups to choose from. In every episode they have two different competitions, and they have to cook different types of meat in different barbecue configurations, plus sides.And they had a meat storage room—a cold room, a freezer room. It was like heaven on earth.And yes, if you don’t like meat, or you have ethical arguments against it, I can buy those to a certain extent.But through my own priming, and the priming of my taste buds, and I think through something deeply biological as well, there is something very special about animal meat for me.When I see that, my appetite for food starts to return.That is the mental part of starting to think about food.Then there is the physical part.And the physical part starts when I begin eating again.I still remember the first time I broke my first longer fast, during the second treatment cycle.The first cycle I had done a fasting-mimicking diet instead, because I wasn’t yet ready to do a full water fast. I had read studies, especially from Dr. Valter Longo, recommending this approach, so I tried it in my own setup—eating less than 1,000 calories per day over seven days before, during, and after treatment.But that didn’t have the same physical and mental effect in me. I had a lot of issues with my gut, and for the second cycle I decided to go all in.This was back in autumn 2024, when I had just started treatment.And when I was to break the fast, the first thing I put in my mouth was a piece of broccoli.I still remember how sweet that broccoli tasted.How rich it was in flavor.How I could almost sense my body starving and reaching for those nutrients—almost like tentacles from my body stretching out to grab the calories from the broccoli.And how the enzymes in my mouth, while chewing, were coating those pieces of broccoli and connecting them to my taste buds.Since then I’ve had many good, blissful experiences of appreciating food and re-appreciating food, both right upon breaking the fast and afterwards.So I now have a very real appreciation for food in my life.I had some of that before, too. I already enjoyed cooking, and my girlfriend Jonna really likes cooking as well. So we have a strong bond over cooking. It’s one of our love languages.We also sometimes go to restaurants to get inspiration and to enjoy cooking at an even more refined level than what we do at home.But desserts—I haven’t really dabbled in them much at all.I’m more of a savory-palate kind of guy.So it was interesting that I was dreaming about making desserts.I do not know why, but I think I know why the theme of food was so present in my mind.Partly because of this deep appreciation for food that I’ve developed over the last nearly two years.But also because my former neighbor, who I’m still in touch with, had just yesterday posted that he had won third place in a cooking competition for cooking students.So I had been chatting with him, congratulating him, asking how the competition went and what his dishes were.And Jonna’s birthday is coming up, so we’ve also been discussing whether to book a restaurant near our house.And then of course my mind is also shifting toward the fact that sooner or later I’m going to get the chance to re-appreciate food again, because I’ll soon be going down into the hole of the next treatment.Now, unfortunately—or maybe fortunately, in a double-edged way—it has been delayed.In terms of continued treatment, that is unfortunate because I need to keep the pressure up.But I do get a few extra days without being poisoned, which in the short term can be nice.Unless I start to feel that the tumor burden is rising again.So mentally I think I’ve already started shifting into that next phase. The weeks where things had started to feel a bit more normalized—they are over now. I’m going back into the trenches.And I think all of that amounted to me entering this dream state and fabricating these things.Problem-Solving in Dreams and Psychedelic StatesBut the trajectory of the dream as a whole is interesting too.At least from my own memory of how my dreams tend to work, it is very often the case that I am supposed to solve some weird, irrational, complex problem or puzzle or riddle.And it is often about moving around in physical space and trying to find a way to solve it.I’ve had similar experiences when taking psychedelic drugs, where I enter an altered state and my brain tries to solve the cognitive challenge being posed to it by a perceptual field that has become warped and skewed.How does the mind solve that?Well, it can’t.Because the whole point is that the field has become warped. There are aberrations. Things are distorted.So the only way to really deal with it is to accept it.To realize: okay, these things are shifted. You are no longer in the mind state you used to think of as the normal one. Now you’re in a new one, so you might as well accept it.So in this dream, maybe it was the same thing: just accepting the challenge, whether it made sense or not.But there was also the additional element that I had to move through space in the dream.I had to go through this weird setting with a window behind the bed of a man I didn’t know, and from there I ended up in another place. There was heat around, so my dish was melting in my hands, or the ingredients were melting in my hands, and I was supposed to make a dessert—which is difficult when desserts are usually something cool.So there is something about dreaming, and also about psychedelic states, where my brain is creating these challenges.Novelty-Seeking and the Architecture of My MindAnd come to think of it, that is also how my brain works in a sober and healthy state.I’m quite far out on one end of the spectrum in terms of novelty seeking and discovering my environment.I can see it in the track record of my life.I can stick with things over time, but I always need to layer new things on top of them, which means I am constantly seeking new stimuli, new knowledge, new spaces, new people, new influences.That can be a strength, but it can also be a burden.It’s a difficult balance to strike, especially in today’s society where you have such immense access to information.And I’m definitely not alone in thinking about this.In my current life position, it has been helpful—but it’s also something I need to guard against.It has been helpful in the sense that I am very thankful, for example, that I live in the age of large language models.Because in no alternative universe without something like that would I be able to have such an intense dialogue with another entity about choices of protocol, evaluating symptoms in my body, stacking different recovery strategies together, and—to a lesser extent—evaluating scientific sources.As you all know, in my experience with ChatGPT, it does hallucinate quite a lot, so I need to be the source of truth when it comes to scientific evidence, and I need to do my own research outside of the model.But in terms of taking the level of evidence I accept and then recombining things, or sometimes offering its own evaluation of different methods, it has been crucial to me.And so has simple access to all the science being published around the world in biology, medicine, and health.That has been immensely helpful.But then there is also so much information out there now that you can overconsume almost any kind of information.So novelty seeking is definitely a double-edged sword in modern society.But you are who you are.What can I change?I think in my position, novelty seeking is also very life-giving. It gives me life energy.So I need to acknowledge that if I do not pursue my natural instincts, there will always be some cost inside my body in terms of friction—in terms of my organism not being aligned with my own nature.And that misalignment causes imbalances.I already have enough imbalances as it is.So I need to find ways to strengthen my bodily systems and have them more attuned to one another, because they all speak to each other.If there is an imbalance in one part of my body, it can absolutely give rise to imbalances elsewhere.So it is a bit like a forest fire.I need to stay constantly vigilant so that there is no single point in my internal architecture where a subsystem starts burning enough to create momentum, a snowball effect, something that becomes harder and harder to deal with.Obviously, the biggest such issue right now is my tumor burden.But there are others.One of them already happened, and it had me fighting for 8+ months to try to curb the adverse effects of treatment: the imbalance in my nervous system, circadian rhythm, and daily hormonal signaling, which caused all of those really annoying symptoms that chopped up my sleep and threw off my energy cycle throughout the day.At times it left me unable to live an active life at all—basically trying to time short walks just to get back toward some level of activity, while having to stop strength training for many months.That was, in big part, due to damage to my autonomic nervous system.That needs to be kept in check, repaired, strengthened, healed.And then also the peripheral nervous system—neurotoxicity, inflammation, damage in the hands, feet, fingers, and toes.You do not want that to go past a certain threshold, because it will absolutely affect quality of life.I know, for example, a Spanish friend whose father was treated with neurotoxic chemo and is now suffering from peripheral neuropathy in his feet to the extent that he basically does not want to leave his home anymore.Then there are other bodily systems.Just now, on Friday, this blood marker suggesting possible liver impact showed up for the first time.So any internal organ—any subsystem in my body—needs to be kept in check.The quality of my immune system, so that it does not erode over time under aggressive treatment.My brain health, my mental health—which I could and should explore even more, even though I have been actively doing that since day one of this cancer journey.I have instinctively appreciated mental health, psychological health, emotional health, dealing with stress, quality of sleep.There are so many subsystems that we cannot go through all of them.But the point is that all of these sum up into my overall health.What is interesting is how much my novelty-seeking behavior is actually helping me troubleshoot things.It is helping me understand how all of these different subsystems interrelate and combine. Sometimes they work together. Sometimes they work against one another because I might be pushing the gas pedal on strengthening or repairing one system too early, while another system still needs a dormant state for a few more days before it can tolerate that same intensity.So this is an ongoing battle.A battle inside my body.A battle to find the balance between novelty seeking and problem-solving on the one hand, and just leaning into what is and accepting it on the other.Because we have the sympathetic nervous system, connected to activation, struggle, fight-or-flight, bearing external pressures.And then we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is about accepting and resting and letting the body do its own work without external input—without having to novelty seek, without needing to solve some new problem, but just landing in who you are, sitting down, breathing, closing your eyes, falling asleep.And given the crisis inside my body, I need both.I need some aggressive strategy here. The problem is far gone, and there need to be strategies implemented that are not just about passively accepting the situation—at least in my conviction—in order for life to sustain itself.And unfortunately that includes elements that also harm the body itself, the healthy parts, not only those parts you want to ameliorate or eliminate.So it is a dance between acceptance and struggle.Acceptance and struggle.And that will keep going for the rest of my life.I think it will for you as well.It may not always surface with the same intensity that it has for me, but life is a struggle.Life does contain pain and painful episodes.But without that pain, without that suffering, what would there be?There would be no life.That would be death.So I would rather take an ounce, two ounces, a handful of suffering than have no suffering at all.Because having no suffering would mean having no life, no life force.And to conclude there: be mindful of your life force, fam.Talk to you soon.Namaste. 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