Peek into the eerie world of the supernatural with podcaster, TV personality and author Dave Schrader. In this episode, Jim Harold and Dave discuss spine-tingling stories from the new book, “Theater of the Mind: Tales from the Darkness.”
Discover chilling ghost encounters, UFO sightings, cryptid stories, and more. Jim and Dave also explore the mysterious nature of doppelgängers, time travel, and the impact of shared paranormal experiences. Don’t miss this fascinating conversation that will leave you questioning the boundaries of reality!
Find Dave’s new book here at Amazon: https://amzn.to/4dyPsBU
Thanks Dave!
JIM’S NEW CAMPFIRE BOOK!
Get your paperback or eBook of Jim’s latest Campfire book, TRUE GHOST STORY: Jim Harold’s Campfire 6. CLICK HERE TO GET YOURS NOW!
TRANSCRIPT
Jim Harold (00:00):
Today we’re going to have an exercise in the Theater of the Mind with Dave Schrader. Up next on the Paranormal Podcast.
Announcer (00:21):
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
Jim Harold (00:25):
Hi, I’m Jim Harold and we are here with that man. You know him, of course you know him, you love him. Dave Schrader of the Paranormal 60 various TV shows such as the Holzer Files, and he’s written multiple books and he has a new one out. We’re going to talk about that and spooky stories in general. The book is Theater of the Mind: Tales from the Darkness, Ghosts, UFOs, Aliens, Monsters, and Other Strange Stories of the Supernatural. Dave Schrader, thanks for joining us on the show today.
Dave Schrader (00:57):
Jim, it’s always a pleasure catching up with you and thank you for having me on to talk about the new book.
Jim Harold (01:02):
So give people, if they’re not familiar with the book, which I just looked it up on Amazon, it’s got a top rating, people are loving it. Give us an idea of what the book is about.
Dave Schrader (01:14):
Well, doing my podcast for a number of years, I’ve taken people’s stories and we created something called Theater of the Mind where I would take the stories that people shared with me, I would read them, we’d add some dramatic music behind it and sound effects. And I just had all these stories languishing in a drawer, and I asked a bunch of the people that had written these stories, I’m thinking about putting together a collection, a book with all of these tales in it. And they were like, Dave, I’m not a writer. And I said, no problem. What I’ll do is I’ll clean them up, I’ll flesh ’em out, give ’em to you, okay? And if you’re good to go, we’ll include ’em in the book. And that’s what I got. A lot of the people like to stay anonymous because of their position in life, but they were fine with me sharing the stories and some that were on the fence because they felt their stories were weird.
(02:02):
I’m like, well, you let me share ’em on my radio show. And the kind of results I get from people is they love knowing that they’re not the only ones that have had experiences like this. So you’re actually helping others by letting your story be told, and they were totally down with it. So I included a couple of my own experiences in this book and in each subsequent book I’ll put in one or two of my own and then just a nice combination of everything from creatures to demons to ghosts to aliens, UFOs, and other strange supernatural situations. So I didn’t want to pigeonhole the book as just a ghost story book or aliens or cryptids. So I figured why not sprinkle in a good variation of different tales?
Jim Harold (02:47):
I’d be interested over the years. What has surprised you about taking people’s stories? I have my surprises that I didn’t expect in doing a similar type thing. What has surprised you about the process of being like a, I don’t know what the word is, a facilitator of people sharing their stories? What surprised you?
Dave Schrader (03:10):
I guess what’s really touched me is the fact that being able to take these stories and make them available to people and then hearing from others, I gave up the concept of judging people’s stories a long time ago, and it’s real easy as hosting our paranormal shows for almost 20 years now. You get a lot of people that share things. I don’t need to believe every story I hear. I don’t need to believe every person I speak to because that’s their experience. And it’s not for me to judge if this is real or not. It’s for me to facilitate and just allow somebody a safe place to share their stories and their experiences. And I’ve found that by doing that, I’ve had a lot of people come back to me and like I said, they’ll reach out and they’ll say, Dave, I heard that story on your show, and I’ve been almost suicidal thinking I was insane having these experiences.
(04:10):
And for the first time I feel normal. Like, okay, I’m not alone. I’m not the only one that’s had to deal with this. And that was kind of the biggest surprise to me was how it brought people together in a way I did not expect by giving a voice to the people that have had some of them just one-off experiences or a lifetime of them letting other people around the world know they’re not isolated, they’re not alone. And even though they don’t know anybody in their inner circle that’s dealing with this, they now know that the world just got a little smaller because there are people that have had strange experiences, and even if it’s not exactly like theirs, they no longer feel like they’re being singled out by the paranormal.
Jim Harold (04:54):
I feel exactly the same way. When I started the Campfire show, I thought, oh, this’ll be a fun little thing and it’ll be like sitting around a campfire. Thus the name, it didn’t take exactly a rocket scientist to come up with that name, pretty obvious. But the point being I thought, oh, this will just be a fun little, aside from the Paranormal Podcast, right, and exactly the same thing. And quickly I realized I was listening back because sometimes from our premium members, we’ll surface old stories and put them on the feeds and stuff. And this was episode 24 in 2010, and somebody said, thank you for what you do. And it’s like, well, I hadn’t been doing it that long to begin with. At that point, the Campfire was about a year old. And the other thing was is that I was surprised at how many people said beyond just the entertainment value, and certainly telling these stories can be fun.
(05:45):
Some of them can be very touching, poignant, sad, but a lot of times it could be very entertaining. But aside from that, there is this situation where people really feel as though, wow, this touched me. The story touched me, or I can relate to it. Or again, I don’t feel that I’m unusual because other people have actually experienced this. Another thing that surprised me, and I want to get your take on this, is the breadth of experiences. In other words, when I first started, I thought the basic, the three basic ghosts, UFOs, and cryptids, but there’s all these little in-between stories. I call ’em head scratchers. Do you find the same way that it’s not just ghosts, cryptids, and UFOs, but there’s a whole lot more?
Dave Schrader (06:30):
Well, that’s why going through this, I had enough stories and I still have enough stories, that I could do just one book on ghosts, one on UFOs, one on aliens, one on cryptids. But then like you said, you’ve got these stories that kind of fall in between and leave you wondering, black-eyed kids, are we dealing with a ghost? Are we dealing with a demon? Are we dealing with an alien human hybrid? So let’s just incorporate all the different stories. And I think that that’s the one takeaway over the last 18 years of doing paranormal radio is what I came in with these kind of rigid beliefs of this is this, this is that. I’ve now learned that there’s no pigeonholing any type of experience because depending on your point of view, the experience with Shadow Men to me could be something demonic, to you it could be alien in nature, and to Billy Bob Ray John Joe over here, it’s something more ghostly.
(07:28):
So we’re all seeing and experiencing the same thing, but due to our belief systems, we’ve got a different perception on what the actual thing is. So I was very pleased and humbled by the fact that people liked what I did with their stories. I didn’t change any of the actual experiences or narratives. I changed a few names for them. If they didn’t want their brother named or sister or their selves, I might’ve slightly altered the town name just because they don’t want people realizing it’s Jim H from this town. I think that’s Jim Harold. I think I went to school with that guy, right? So those are some of the alterations. The main difference was a lot of these people felt really validated that I cared enough about their story to share it. And a lot of ’em, what’s touching is they’re like, Dave, I’ve always wanted to be an author, and I gave you the best of my ability in writing, you taking the time to clean it up, edit it, fix it, and make it.
(08:29):
This is like you were there with me for that moment. And that means a lot. So in a way, we both get to realize your book is out there, and I got to author something that’s now in a book, and that really kind of touched me. I felt humbled and honored by that ability to take those stories and make them accessible and do it in a way that you might’ve been afraid to share it before because of your lack of ability of writing, but now they have an easy outlet to go to and share these kind of stories. And you’ve been doing a great job with that for years with the Campfire tales.
Jim Harold (09:05):
Thank you very much. And the other thing I think about with these books is that some people won’t listen to a podcast. Maybe even some people won’t listen to a radio show. And I know what I find, and I’m sure that you find it with some of your books and you’ll find it with this book if you haven’t already, didn’t even know about your podcast, didn’t know anything about it. I picked up this book and started reading it. Now I’ve read all the books, and now I’m listening to the podcast, which is kind of interesting because you always think people are going to flow from the podcast to the book, but sometimes people flow from the book to the podcast, don’t they?
Dave Schrader (09:40):
Yeah. There’s people that don’t know and people that’ll be watching your program with Dave Schrader on it and not realize, I’ve been around for 18 years doing paranormal podcasting and TV and other things. So it’s like, wow, how did I not know this? And you think, boy, this is a very small community, this paranormal world, how do people not recognize these elements? But we’re still finding it. And I love when people are like, I heard about you on the Jim Harold podcast and now I’ve come over and I’m listening to you. You and Jim are my two favorite podcasters that I’m like, oh, that’s awesome. Or Dave, you had Jim Harold on your show. Oh my God, I never miss an episode of that. Now his show is fantastic. So I love that we can combine, and that’s been something you and I have done since our absolutely setup is showing the world we can communicate.
(10:29):
We’re not in competition. It’s not Johnny Carson versus David Letterman here. It’s two guys that share a passion and have a different way of looking at things. And we can bounce off each other, share these stories with each other and with our listeners. And I don’t have any worry that, oh, well now I’ve turned him on to Jim Harold, I’ll never hear from him again. I’m like, no, you guys got to read this guy. And I’ve been doing that since day one. I’m like, Jim Harold is one of the guys that I’ve always looked up to in this field because of the way he made the paranormal accessible and did it in a way that was always with love and respect for the fan base. So coming in and doing my show, that’s one of the main elements I wanted to bring to it, was having that empathy for the listener and for the experiencer.
Jim Harold (11:14):
Right now, I don’t have a lot of empathy for my dogs, but hey, that’s life at a home studio. I thought about pausing, but hey, this is life. That’s what it is. That’s what it is. And I hope they shut up soon. But anyway, I was going to say something really profound here, but they kind of blew it. No, but no, I agree. I think there is room for everybody. There really is room for everybody. And I’ve always tried to welcome other podcasters and dogs and everybody to the party, and no, seriously, I welcome longtime podcasters and people who even predated me. I mean, all of us can look to people like Noory and Art Bell and people like that, and the late great Ian Punnett, who we unfortunately lost. I don’t know what’s going on down there. But the point is, there were people that predated us too. It wasn’t like we just got the idea of talking about the paranormal. No, there was that guy Art Bell, and before him there was Long John Nebel at WOR in the late sixties. So all of this has been going on a long time. We’re just hopefully carrying on the tradition and also bringing in new people too. I think it’s great.
Dave Schrader (12:32):
And what’s nice too, Jim, is I love the fact that people will say, you know what? And this was always my fear, there’s only so many topics we can cover. Okay, so Jim’s going to talk about Amityville and Dave Schrader just did a show on Amityville, so I don’t need to listen to Jim’s because Dave just did it, or I don’t need to listen to Dave because Jim just did it. But then I get people that listen to both and they’re like, man, what a great bookend, because Jim came at it from a different perspective and asked a different set of questions that were right on point. And then Dave, you came in and it was like you picked up for Jim and asked a different set of questions. And obviously there’s crossover, but the fact that we can examine the same stories but with a different level of interest and fascination makes the story come to life and breathe in a different way. Because what you might find really fascinating about this experience, I’m not as impressed with, but I do like this part of the story. And we come together in kind of a nice way to compliment each other’s shows and work by giving life to different aspects of each one of these experiences.
Jim Harold (13:44):
Now, I don’t want to have you give us chapter and verse of all the different stories. I mean, that’s why people should go and buy this book. I’m going to bring it back up on the screen here. Theater of the Mind: Tales From the Darkness. But what I will say is, do you have one story that you really like that you could share us a little bit of it with us so we can get a flavor forward? I
Dave Schrader (14:07):
Love these stories. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of stories. This was some of my very favorites when I go do live talks, these have been some of the ones that I’ve shared and people are like, man, do you have that in a book? I’d love to share that with my neighbor or my mom or my uncle who loves the paranormal. So I really kind of pulled together some of my favorites, but I didn’t take all of my favorites. I want to sprinkle them in each book. But probably one of the more profound stories for me was my own experience in the hospital. And I’ll share that one because that’s my tale to tell. But in the book, I’ve got everything from time slip phenomena to doppelgangers, the changeling in Ireland, ghosts, UFOs, alien phenomena, even some near death experiences and kind of sleep visitations. So I wanted it to be, wow, there’s just one goes into another and gives you the idea to see the commonalities between the different type of experiences.
(15:07):
But with mine, I actually thought I was having a heart attack and I had this severe chest pain. I was not feeling well. I brought myself into the hospital and they found out I had pancreatitis, and we were going through protocol and dealing with that, and then the gallbladder was messed up, and they’re like, we’re going to remove your gallbladder. And this was a few days before my son’s wedding, and I’m just like, I got to be out for my son’s wedding. They’re like, no, no, no problem Mr. Schrader. So they brought me in, took care of me, and I am going to be a hundred percent open as I’ve always been about this, Jim, I was on a morphine drip. So it’s easy to say maybe this experience is colored by the medication that I was on, but the memory is as clear as this conversation you and I are having right now, which is from people I’ve spoken to and other people that have been on morphine that have never had this experience.
(15:59):
That’s where I kind of lean into. I think this was a lot more paranormal. I had this weird ability, Jim, that when I was in the hospital and I had my eyes open, I could see you standing next to my bed talking to me. I could see the entire room, and when I would close my eyes, I could still see the room exactly as it appeared, but I could no longer see any of the living people. I saw spirits and I saw them. They were cloistered kind of as I’m laying there looking forward, they were cloistered off in the right hand corner of my room, and it was like a group of 10 to 12 of them. They were very washed out, gray looking figures. And they stood there kind of watching me, and there was this one woman, wild hair, and it was straight out of a horror movie, Jim.
(16:43):
She would kind of float across the room to me and hover in front of me. Her hair slowly moving, the wind was blowing it, and she was mouthing, and it looked like she was screaming at me. I was never afraid. I was very unsettled by it more because as I kept telling her, I can’t hear you, I don’t know what you’re saying. And it was terrifying looking because the crazy hair, the gray ash in face and the mouth going like that, she’s screaming at me, but I feel like she was just trying to be heard. And at one point, my former partner and co-host Tim had come to visit me in the hospital and he was standing off to my left, and I was kind of fading in and out, and I closed my eyes and I turned to the right and I start talking to somebody and he goes, Hey, D, I’m over here.
(17:37):
And I said, I turned to him with my eyes still closed. I go, oh, I know you’re here. I said, but it’s a good thing you’re on this side of the room. The other side is packed. And he goes, what are you talking about? And I started talking to the ghosts over in that segment of the room, and I could still hear Tim talking to my girlfriend and he’s like, what’s going on? She goes, I don’t know. He is been talking to something in his room, which a, I think made everybody really nervous because we hear all of these near death experiences and as we get closer to death.
Jim Harold (18:02):
Yeah, death bed visitations, they thought you were having death bed visitations,
Dave Schrader (18:08):
And I think I was just in that zone of so relaxed on the medication. I’m obviously sensitive to a degree because I have seen, heard, felt, been influenced by spirit realm. So I just in that zone, removing the ego in it, I was able to finally experience it. I just wish I could have heard what the spirits needed, but to have that moment was really earth shattering to me because it showed the perception of the third eye. When my eyes were closed, I could still see the interior of my room and the detail and the spirits that were there, but with them open the room looked identical and I could see the physical beings. So it was a very weird, trippy place to kind of be in between realms and teetering like that. And it really impacted my heart because leaving the hospital a few days later, I was left with this kind of almost survivor’s guilt of I don’t know what to do for those beings or those spirits that are still there in the hospital. And I’ve done prayers and such. And every time I go to a hospital to visit or get myself worked on, I always do a clearing prayer for the hospital hoping that it’ll help God or universe or whatever find these spirits and help them and usher them home.
Jim Harold (19:34):
Now, when you saw these spirits, these weren’t people you knew. These are just strangers, like ghostly strangers, basically
Dave Schrader (19:42):
Ghostly strangers in gowns, hospital gowns. So it was kind of like I had a room full of either people that maybe passed in the room that I was in or had just collected here together in this kind of PAC mentality, which I cover in the book. I talk about this theory, I call it the Bay Theory. My friend Misty Bay and I were at a bar one night kind of talking about the supernatural, trying to figure out why ghosts would haunt hospitals and prisons and old asylums, you’d think that’s the last place on earth I would want to hang out and linger.
(20:19):
And she peeled the bud label off her bottle with expertise. And she said, so this bottle, this is the best of us. This is the perfect part of who we are, this paper. And she crinkles it up. She goes, this is the pettiness, the rage, the jealousy, the anger, and just the garbage part of us that doesn’t move on to the next elevation. And if you think of it that way, it’s like the animal base part of who we are. So it hangs in areas that it knows. It hangs with other beings of that same kind of vibrational tonality or darkness, and that’s where it stays until it eventually just dissipates. And I thought, boy, that’s something really powerful to consider. And having read a lot of different theories on religions, there are many religions that believe that when we move on, only the best of us goes. And what’s left behind interesting is that spiritual gunk that we find in all of these darker hauntings.
Jim Harold (21:17):
That’s an interesting, interesting idea, great story there. And I highly encourage, I’m going to throw it up here again, people get Theater of the Mind: Tales from the Darkness. Of course, if you’re on audio, you can’t hear it, but you can easily look up Theater of the Mind: Tales from the Darkness. Now, you mentioned one category of stories, and I think you mentioned there’s something about it in the book, we don’t have to talk about that particular story, but one, we were talking about surprises in doing these shows where we collect people’s stories and there’s a particular type of story that’s prevalent, surprise me, and that’s doppelgangers. I mean, I knew of the concept of doppelgangers before I started doing this, but the fact that the doppelganger isn’t just a weird thing where you happen to see your double, but there seems to be a lot of paranormal activity wrapped into it, maybe a lot of tricksters, those types of things. What have you learned about doppelgangers? Because that’s one of my favorite subjects because I really don’t understand it.
Dave Schrader (22:18):
Well, that was something that really intrigued me. I remember reading a book called Satan’s Harvest, and it was one of the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren about this guy Frenchie that became possessed. And they started noticing weird things like he would be inside the house doing something and they’d look out the window and see him walking from the shed to the garage, and they were like, what the hell? And so doppelgangers have often been considered these kind of evil entities that are parading around pretending to be us. And there are stories. And I found this interesting because with the doppelganger, we always kind of had this one explanation, but now I realize there’s branch offs, there’s different variations of what that is. First of all, I think we’re haunting ourselves a lot. How many times have we been home and we hear our wife or our children call out our name and we go, oh, I’m down in the basement.
(23:09):
I’ll be right up. And you come upstairs and nobody’s home, and two minutes later you see your wife pull into the driveway and you’re like, I just heard your voice. You just called out to me. No honey, I just pulled in. You just watched me. So you are living in that space. I think time is happening simultaneous, and we’re bumping into those time slip phenomena. So if you see your wife and then she’s gone, she rounds the corner and disappears on her way into the laundry room or the basement or whatever in some mundane task, does that mean it’s something evil that’s trying to lure us in? That’s what horror movies us to believe because it’s a creepy element of it. But I think part of it is we’re bumping into these personal haunt things. I think part of it is that there may be dark things that are trying to take on that form.
(23:56):
And then I think there is time slip phenomena where you’re having, and I’ve got two examples of this in the book. The first one, the phone call story is a form of time slip phenomena. And then the doppelganger story, which I thought really kind of turned the whole thing on its ear for me, was a great telling of this experience of this guy witnessing himself in a totally different way. And it again, fed into that time slip phenomena when he meets himself. And that version goes, oh, I remember this. And he’s like, what? So it’s that weird time slip moment repeating itself. So that to me has been cool. So the whole concept of doppelgangers, this being that appears to be you but is not you, I don’t think there’s any one answer to what is causing that as well. I think that there are a wide variance from everything, from things that are trying to pretend to be you, to your own time slip phenomena to just residual hauntings and artifact of who you are because it’s impressed in this location, and you’re going to bump into that from time to time.
Jim Harold (25:06):
Yeah, it reminds me, people of a certain age of my age will remember this are old eight track tapes, and you would listen to the eight track tape, and sometimes when there was silence between songs, you would hear the faint echoes of another song that was in a different track on the tape. It was in parallel, but the head of the tape was slightly misaligned maybe, and it was just playing just the most quiet little bit of Mrs. Robinson or whatever it was you were listening to, or steely Dan or whatever it was. But the point being that the tape wasn’t possessed, it was kind of like stacked, as you said, the music was stacked, so it was a misalignment of sorts. So maybe it’s like, I hate to use an overused phrase, but like a glitch, a glitch in the Matrix, one of my favorite time slip stories, and even if you want to share it again, and if it’s in the book, don’t do it. But there was one you told about a lady who, I think she was an older lady, and she saw these guys coming into her house and then it kind of flipped on its head. And I use that one a lot because it’s one of my favorite stories in that regard. Can you share that with folks again, that was so illustrative of this whole concept?
Dave Schrader (26:21):
Yeah, and I didn’t include it because it is such a short little story. There was not enough meat on the bone to flesh it out, and I didn’t want to create a fake narrative just to make it longer. But basically this guy said, explain this to me, Dave. My grandparents bought a cornfield all these years ago, and they built a house there. It wasn’t ancient Native American burial grounds, it wasn’t civil war. Nobody ever died there. And one day, 35 years, 40 years after they built the house, grandma’s sitting in the chair in her living room watching Jeopardy in the middle of the afternoon, and these three shadowy figures walked into the room and stood before her and then turned and ran out. Now, grandma’s house is haunted because grandma hasn’t lost her mind. She’s not teetering on dementia or Alzheimer’s, but she just saw this and everybody believes grandma, but nobody died there.
(27:10):
How could this haunting exist? And we were all baffled by that, Dave. And then a few years later, my grandmother passed away and I went to go visit my grandfather with a couple of my friends, and we walked into the house and walked into the living room, and they’re sitting in my grandmother’s chair, was my grandmother. And the three of us stopped and looked at each other and looked at her and then ran out of the room. And I stopped and I said, wait a minute. This is exactly what my grandmother experienced from the other era. So who was haunting who in that moment? And that was just a mindblower for me. And I was like, wow. I’ll tell you what, there’s a great book. It’s a novel called Nevermore, and it’s written by William Hjortsberg. It’s like H-J-U-R-T or something, very long Norwegian name.
(27:55):
But it’s a great book about Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And it’s a novel using real history and real people in history. And it’s interesting because there are these murders taking place in the kind of way of Edgar Allen Poe murders, and they’re trying to figure out what’s going on. And suddenly Arthur Conan Doyle starts experiencing the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe, and he’s telling Poe about these murders. And to Poe, he’s seeing the ghost of this man. He doesn’t know, but this ghost is giving him ideas for his books. So it’s what’s feeding what, right? It’s this great grandfather paradox taking place of these murders taking place in the guise of Poe books, Arthur Conan Doyle talking to Poe somehow in the past, giving Poe the idea for these stories. And it’s just a great little novel that tells a very weird murder mystery that encompasses time slip and ghosts and the supernatural. And then having Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe is the main kind of protagonist throughout the story. It’s really worth the read if you enjoy that kind of sci-fi genre.
Jim Harold (29:11):
We’ll be back after this short break on the Paranormal Podcast.
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Jim Harold (31:59):
That’s right. Go to paraboxmonthly.com and take advantage of that great deal. Thanks, Jim, for taking some time out, your very busy schedule. Now, I know you’re going to get back to designing more great shirts, no purchase necessary to be entered into their monthly drawing. You can find all the details at paraboxmonthly.com. Thanks, Parabox.
And now we return to the Paranormal Podcast. I’ll give you another one. Loyd Auerbach, who I know you know, a great parapsychologists. He told a story where he was doing a segment for the old TV show Sightings, and they were investigating this place that a murder had taken place, and people reported that they saw ghosts of the murder victim, and they would see a replay of the murderer murdering this person who had been killed. Well, the murder victim obviously was dead, but the murderer was very much alive and like 40 miles down the road in prison. So again, our ghosts, what we assume they are, I mean usually it used to be, like you said, the old in search of days, ghosts were dead people. UFOs are little green men flying craft cryptids are animals in the woods that we haven’t discovered. And having both of us have a similar experience having done these shows all these years, the answers aren’t so obvious anymore, are they?
Dave Schrader (33:31):
No, that they’re multilayered and tiered. I call that experience a fractal. I think we leave fractal pieces of our soul in many places. That’s how there are ghost stories of, you know what, Dave? Here’s something really weird. My aunt owns my grandmother’s childhood home, and my grandmother died 400 miles away in Nebraska. We see her as an old woman ghost there. But my aunt keeps seeing a ghost of this little girl that looks exactly like my grandmother, but she wasn’t a little girl when she died. And I’m like, well, maybe that house as a child was so impactful for her, whether it was she was abused brutally there. So there’s that piece of her that’s kind of broken and fractured, or maybe it was because it was just such a place of joy and love that she seeded that property with that portion of her.
(34:22):
And then the house that she died in was the house that she raised her family in and lived with the love of her life. And there’s couldn’t be elements of those moments that we leave behind of ourselves. So I think that there are portions and there are holistic practitioners who do something called soul retrieval, which is helping to pull you back together from all the places that you’ve left, pieces of you and all the pieces of you that you’ve left with people, you’ve had intimate encounters with, friends or lovers, and you’ve left those pieces of you with them. And sometimes you need to reclaim them. So if you ever feel like, boy, I just feel like parts of me are missing, there may be more to that than just this kind of melancholy, oh, my life is changing. You literally, you’ve bonded with this person.
(35:07):
You’ve shared good, bad, indifferent moments with them that may have left pieces of who you are embedded in their world, and that’s how you draw from them. And that may be, and explain how you wake up today and you’re just in this blase mood. You’re like, boy, I feel, I just feel horrible today. I feel so depressed, but I don’t know what’s causing it. And 10 minutes later, my buddy Jim Harold calls me and he goes, Dave, do you mind if we talk, man, I’m having a really rough day. And I’m like, oh, I don’t think these are my feelings. I think it’s my connection with Jim Harold and the fact that he called me to share what’s going on in him matches so much with these feelings that I’m having. So I think that when you make those connections to the living and to those spaces that we live in, there’s always going to be that part of who we were that stays there.
Jim Harold (35:55):
I love having these mind blowing conversations with Dave Schrader, and it kind of spirals a little bit out to other subjects, but that’s fine. That’s part of the fun of it. It’s kind of like you described being at the bar, having a beer with your friend and cooking up some actually very interesting theories that tie into actually research that’s been done and other scholarly works have been done. And here is one that I heard maybe a year ago on the shows that I was talking to an author by the name of Anthony Peake, and he had a book called Catching the Ferry Man. And his idea, I think most of us have had something like this happen or know somebody who has where you’ll be in a situation, it could be driving, it could be just doing anything, and you have a warning of danger.
(36:43):
Get out of here, don’t hit the gas pedal, wait a minute. I had one where I was walking past when I was like 18 years old past a huge logging truck and something told me to get away from it. Within a minute, all the logs fell off on the side where I was walking, I would’ve been crushed. And I think most of us have either, again, had that experience or something similar or know somebody at least. And Peake’s idea was, is that a lot of times people think that’s our guardian angel. Maybe that’s a loved one looking out for us, those kinds of things. And I’m not discounting that, but he had a different theory because he had a very similar experience on a motorway as they call it in England. And something caused him, I think, the slow down or something. And most certainly, if he had been going at this current rate of speed before he slowed down, he would’ve died.
(37:34):
He believes that there is in essence, two of us you could kind of compare it to. If you’re standing and playing an old school arcade game, let’s say Donkey Kong, and there’s the Donkey Kong character on the screen that’s like you and I going through our lives, but then there’s the person who is controlling the joystick and controlling Donkey Kong. That’s what he calls the eidolon. That is the higher self. And it goes back to, I think it’s Greek mythology or something, I’m not sure what. But anyway, the point is, is that when that voice is telling you, walk this way, not that way, introduce yourself to this person, not that person that is your eon giving you directions. Because his theory was that we reincarnate through life and then we’re reborn. But at least for a number of lifetimes, we’re reborn as ourself. So that eidolon has built up experience over the years and you’re basically replaying the same game. Now, it can go in different branches depending on what you do, but it’s kind of like, well, don’t push the gas now because last lifetime it didn’t work out so good. And then you basically play on, it’s kind of like a video game. And I’m not saying I necessarily agree with that theory, but boy, it does make you think. It does make you, and that’s one of the things I love by what we get to do. We get to talk about stuff like this.
Dave Schrader (39:07):
Well, reincarnation is fascinating in itself, but I’ve been one to believe when you think about this, Jim, when I say reincarnation, everybody was Abraham Lincoln or Napoleon or Marilyn Monroe, and it’s easy for us to roll our eyes. Of course you were Cleopatra. What if they were, what if they really were and so was I, and so was Jim Harold. Maybe we’re not all insane. What if life is a series of avatars and with every death when we choose to come back, we can choose that soul contract. We can choose what life we want to lead. And maybe I just want to know what it was like to be Marilyn Monroe so I could actually know did she die or was she murdered? And I get to live that life as Marilyn, which leaves me with the memories I shouldn’t have. Right? And then Jim Harold does the same thing.
(39:57):
And he was Marilyn Monroe, so maybe multiple people lived a life as Marilyn at some point to understand this. And again, it’s just that kind of interesting philosophy. But I also believe in something that I call time travel therapy. And I’ve been working on this with people and have had a really cool experience. A lot of times when I’ll do these live events and at the end I go, can we just do a fun little moment together? And it could get emotional? And people are like, let’s do it. I say, okay, I want you to do me a favor and close your eyes. And now I want you to imagine just let yourself deep breathe a couple of times and let your mind go to black as much as you can. And then I want you to imagine a time in your life, and it may have been 30 years ago, it may have been two hours ago when you felt the most broken and alone, the most unloved or hurt you’ve ever felt in your life.
(40:48):
And I want you to just see yourself in that moment and just be witness to that. And then I pause and let everybody kind of have that moment and I go, no, I want you to, as you are in your mind, I want you to walk up to that version of you right now. And if you’re laying down, I want you to lay down. If you’re kneeling, I want you to kneel down next to that person. If you’re standing there, I just want you to go up and wrap your arms around that version of you. And I want you to just start repeating, it’s okay, we’re going to get through this. We’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. I promise you. I love you. I’m here for you. I’m telling you we are going to get through this. And I have that.
(41:26):
And there’s a big faction in the audience that gets very emotional. And afterwards I go, now I want you to stop for a second now that we’re done that I want you to think back to that moment. Remember when you felt the most broken and alone? Do you remember that voice at the back of your head saying, we’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. Maybe it was this moment right now that was just coming through to that. And here’s the thing. You can go back and visit that moment as much as you like. I believe we can time travel kind of in the quantum leap sense of, but only within ourselves. I can’t affect Jim Harold. I can’t go kill Adolf Hitler, but I can start to change things in my world. And there are times like you where things tell you, the spidey sense goes off, get away from that truck, and all of a sudden the logs break free and you would’ve been crushed had you been standing there.
(42:16):
Is it that we’ve lived our own life multiple times and we’re picking up on that like Bill Murray and Groundhog’s Day and we’re learning with every evolution? Or is it the fact that we are reaching back to those moments, to those moments saying, you Jim Harold, this is where you become crippled and spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair, get away from the truck, get away. And maybe after so many times of visiting yourself, that voice hits you and that voice, the reason it’s so familiar and doesn’t feel negative or obtrusive is it’s because it is you. And this time you step away and those logs come crushing and you don’t get injured. So it’s hard to say, but I think focus on healing within yourself and give yourself that permission. A lot of us are afraid to talk to therapists. I don’t want people to know what I’ve been through.
(43:05):
I don’t want people, I feel vulnerable. Well then be your best therapist. Sit in those moments, reach out to yourself and start to give you that strength because what do we know about right now? What I can tell you about right now is it’s happening, which means when I was a teenager and I thought my life was over, I can go back to that moment and remind myself, we’re going to get through it. How do I know? Because here I am today and I got through it. So that’s the best therapy for me is reminding myself and doing that. It sounds very woowoo, but to me it’s a time slip phenomena. Why can’t we affect ourselves that way?
Jim Harold (43:39):
You’re talking about retro causality basically, which is a studied thing. And when I first heard of that, that is mind blowing, but I’ll give you an example. And it’s not emotional per se. It’s not like this great sensitive moment, but I remembered you worked in radio, but I worked on the ad schlepping side. I sold advertising and those kinds of things because got out of school with my freshly minted broadcasting degree, and back then before the internet, they said the first thing you need to do is get any job at a station. So I followed that and I totally fell into sales for like 15 years. But the point was is that at the time I hated it.
(44:21):
I’m like, this sucks. And I also noticed another thing. I was intensely interested in every other function at the radio station. I wanted to know how the traffic department ran. I wanted to know how the promotions department ran. I wanted to know how the production department ran. Of course, I wanted to know how the sales department ran. I wanted to know each and everything, and I didn’t know why. And I would ask people about their jobs. Well, how does this work and how does that work? And I go in and spend probably way too much time with the production guy watching him do his job. And probably my bosses are saying, why aren’t you out on the street selling more ads?
(45:01):
But the thing that I say about the job I do today, I’m not the best person on air. I’m not the best tech person. I’m not the best editor. I don’t have the greatest voice. I don’t ask the best questions. I am not the best at business paperwork. But unlike most people, I can do competently every one of those functions, somewhat competently. My mediocrity is my superpower and the fact that I can do all those different things, and that’s pretty rare. Somebody sell their own ads, be able to do all the things that I do in a day. And that’s not to blow my own horn because as I said, there’s way better personalities than me. Right there on the screen is one of them. But few people can do as much as I can do and do it relatively okay. But I think somehow I knew this was my ultimate career path, that I would have my own little media company and do my shows and stuff, and that’s what I was going to end up. And something back then was telling me, pay attention to this. Pay attention to that. Pay attention to this. Because basically what I do is very close to running a radio station without an antenna. It’s basically my job.
(46:22):
And somehow I knew to pay attention. And how did I know that? Unless there was that voice saying, Hey Jim, you don’t know why, but you better pay attention to this. So I’ve often thought that, and that plays into me for retro causality,
Dave Schrader (46:35):
Right? And you’re bouncing back and affecting the conscious version of who you are. I love the fact that science can pinpoint how my heart works, what my brain does, what my lungs are functioning. But they can’t find where consciousness exists. They don’t know what consciousness even is. Is it an exterior force? Is it an interior force? Is it an objective force? We don’t know. And I love that because that tells me that we have no limitations to what we can do and who we are. It is only us that allows other people’s limitations and boundaries on us to keep us from going to places we could be. Do I believe that aliens built the pyramids? No. Why can’t it have been humans who just didn’t know they couldn’t do what they were doing? It was humans that were not given limitations. They were told, do this.
(47:31):
Okay. And they did it. And they took the information that they had at the time and the knowledge that they had, and they worked together and they created something and they created it in such a way that it was so different and so powerful that other cultures around the world got that conscious upload. And they built similar temples. And does it mean aliens shifted rocks? Does it mean some exterior force did this or God built it? No. It just very well could be that we as humans had these abilities and maybe we did fly and maybe we did raise people from the dead and heal with our touch, but we’ve forgotten those parts of who we were. We’ve given up on that part of us because we’ve been told that doesn’t exist or you can’t do that. Only God can do that or a holy person can do that. And we’ve lifted that. But I’ve looked at the Bible and I think it’s interesting that Jesus says that, Hey, with belief in God, but overall with belief, you can do all the things that I do. So that’s power. And I think we don’t give ourselves enough credit for just what we are capable of doing in humanity and as people and when we come together, how powerful we can really be.
Jim Harold (48:45):
No, it’s true. It’s very true, I think. And that’s why you see people who make great innovations in areas that they’re not necessarily considered expert in or they’re classically trained, but yet they figure it out because it’s not been trained out of them. They don’t understand what they’re not able to do, so they just go on and do it. And the other thing you talked about, tapping into that consciousness, that’s why many times through the history of science, you see pre-internet, when we all couldn’t communicate instantaneously, you would have two people on opposite sides of the earth working on the same problem and creating essentially the same invention at the same time. It’s the same reason I believe you have a pop artist or someone or a rock artist who said, my greatest hit, my greatest, my masterpiece Yesterday came to Paul McCartney in a dream.
(49:41):
It comes out of nowhere. They say my biggest hit, I wrote it on the back of a sandwich bag in five minutes. I don’t know where it came from. It came from the consciousness, the universal consciousness that we all tap into. And I really do believe that’s a thing to me. The brain, I think the materialists think of as, I don’t know, when you first got a computer, when I first got a computer, there was no real internet or anything. I just had a computer that sat there. And what was on that computer was basically whatever programs you had in that was it. You didn’t have this greater super information. Super highway you could link into. But I think our brains are like computers once you hook them into the internet. Yeah, there’s this stuff that’s in here, but even of more importance is all the stuff out there that we are sending and we’re receiving and we’re tapping into. So I think we’re kind of like tapping into this cosmic internet and all of us are sending and receiving. And that’s why sometimes the signals get crossed and it’s all so fascinating. These are the kind of conversations we always have with Dave Schrader and I find them fascinating. Dave, I guess at this point we should tell people where they can continue the conversation, listen to everything, watch everything you do, and also of course, check out this very successful new book from Your Theater of the Mind.
Dave Schrader (51:07):
Yeah, the book is out and available. You can get signed copies on my website at paranormalsixty.com. Or if you are anywhere in the world, you can order it off of amazon.com. It’s not signed, but you can get copies there. It’s now available in ebook form and in soft cover. And I’m working on the audiobook version I hope to have out at the end of April. So I’m hoping to have it out just in time for Hallowteen, which will be April 30th, which is that month. And that date just in between now and Halloween. And since we all want to find reasons to keep Halloween alive, I think Hallowtween should be a real thing.
Jim Harold (51:44):
I like it. I like it a lot. And I also like catching up with Dave Schrader. Dave, thank you for joining us today. Continued success with everything you do.
Dave Schrader (51:54):
Thank you very much, Jim. It’s always a pleasure and keep carving the path, man, because people love you. I hear from people all over the world when I’ve appeared on your show or you’ve appeared on mine, and there’s nothing but adoration for what you do. So I want you to know that what you do matters and it counts, and you make the world a little bit smaller and a little easier to access for people because of your abilities and your openness and your great hosting. So thank you so much for what you do. Jim,
Jim Harold (52:20):
Thanks so much for joining us today on The Paranormal Podcast. I certainly appreciate it and certainly check out Dave’s show and his book, Theater of the Mind and Paranormal 60. He’s great at everything he does, and he’s always been a true friend to me and the shows. And thank you for tuning in. We appreciate it very much. And please tell a friend about the Paranormal Podcast, and that is so important. I think we have some of the best people on our show, some of the best guests, hopefully some good interviews. I think I do okay, and I hope you enjoy it. And if you’ve listened this long, I think you do. So please make sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app and hit that share button and share the show with a friend today, and we’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody. Stay safe and stay spooky. Bye-Bye.
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