Getting Discomfortable with Children

Episode 24 is a bit of a bonus episode! Several listeners have been suggesting that I start doing interviews (you know, like a normal podcast), and while that has always been part of the plan, I guess I just had a lot that I wanted to say on my own first. I don’t foresee Discomfortable being all interviews all the time, but since part of my mandate is to see the world through as many different eyes, ideologies, and cultures as possible, I think doing interviews would be a great way to facilitate that process. So to sharpen my interview skills and get some practice, I did a test interview with two people who are in very different life stages than I am: my niece and nephew.

After a few false starts, I clumsily hone my interviewing skills on my 10-year-old nephew and 12-year-old niece. We dissect a trippy dream within a dream my nephew had while living in an old monastery in France last year, that ended in presumed sleep paralysis. Then my niece takes us into the recurring Alice in Wonderland dreams (nightmares?) of her horse obsessed tweenage brain, perhaps inspired by the intense books she’s been reading (what kind of 12-year-old girl reads War and Peace!?). Tag along as these surreal dreams take us on a childish adventure from medieval France, to an underwater house guarded by underwater flamethrowers, to a giant jellyfish tank in Dubai, to a Harry Potteresque safari in South Africa, and finally a war-torn alternate reality version of Hawaii!

At one point in the interview my niece refers to the “skinless horses” from Harry Potter, and after some research on my part, I’m pretty sure she was referring to the scene below about “Thestrals”, except in her dream they were Giraffes (which sounds even creepier). Apparently only people who have “seen death” can see Thestrals, which makes sense I guess after all the death my niece witnessed in her dream about wartorn Hawaii…