Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio. JM. De Bord is a best selling author
Speaker 1: of several books about dreams and is the creator of
Speaker 1: Dreams one two three, a process of dream interpretation, known
Speaker 1: worldwide for his ability to demystify the subject of dream interpretation.
Speaker 1: Mister de board sets his sights on the dark side
Speaker 1: or dreaming and his latest book, Nightmares, Your Guide to
Speaker 1: Interpreting your Darkest Dreams. Jason welcome, Hey George, it's a
Speaker 1: pleasure to be on the show. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Do I call you Jason or JM. Let's just go
Speaker 1: with Jason. Okay. So this the idea for this book,
Speaker 1: in part, at least reading the beginning of it comes
Speaker 1: from your own personal experience, a terrifying dream or series
Speaker 1: of dreams that you had as a kid. Let's start
Speaker 1: with a story there, all right, Well, when I was
Speaker 1: a young child, I had a dream that there I
Speaker 1: was just biking down the neighborhood in you know, along
Speaker 1: the streets of my neighborhood, and I felt this presence
Speaker 1: behind me, and I turned around and there was this
Speaker 1: man in a black car who was following me and
Speaker 1: I kind of zoom in on his face and I
Speaker 1: see that he's like he's got all these burn scars
Speaker 1: on him, and he's almost like a nightmare an Elm
Speaker 1: Street looking kind of guy. And of course the movie
Speaker 1: wasn't out at the time. This is the late nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: and I try to get away from him, and the
Speaker 1: man tracks me down in a store and the last
Speaker 1: thing I know is that he's coming to claim my soul. Now,
Speaker 1: as a kid, I didn't really know what a soul was,
Speaker 1: but I just knew that it was the most important
Speaker 1: part of me, and this man wanted it, and if
Speaker 1: he caught me, he was going to have it. I
Speaker 1: was going to be dead. He was going to have
Speaker 1: my soul and story over. So I woke up from
Speaker 1: the dream and it was, you know, like any other
Speaker 1: dream that you have when you're nine years old. You
Speaker 1: wake up, your heart's pounding, your sweating. I was probably
Speaker 1: screaming when I woke up, you know. So a nightmare
Speaker 1: at that age as an unusual. But what became unusual
Speaker 1: for me, George, was that a few years later, I
Speaker 1: was in an enrichment class and my teacher invited in
Speaker 1: a dream analyst who asked the class, has anyone had
Speaker 1: a nightmare that really stuck with them and they'd like
Speaker 1: to try to figure out what it meant? And my
Speaker 1: hand shot up because that nightmare had really stuck with me.
Speaker 1: You know, I've had other nightmares, but for some reason,
Speaker 1: that one just kind of you know, once it grabbed
Speaker 1: hold of me, it wouldn't let go, and I would
Speaker 1: think about it periodically. We went into a regression process
Speaker 1: to try to find out what was behind the nightmare,
Speaker 1: and what I imagined was that there were these two
Speaker 1: families who were in conflict with each other and there
Speaker 1: was like a blood feud between them, and the analyst
Speaker 1: asked me to try to find a resolution for their problem.
Speaker 1: And you know, at about twelve years old at this point,
Speaker 1: I thought, well, you know, fighting is wrong, you shouldn't
Speaker 1: be hurting each other. Can't we all just get along?
Speaker 1: And that didn't work out real well. The scene turned
Speaker 1: really unstable. The analyst pulled me out of it, and
Speaker 1: you know, kind of life goes on at that point,
Speaker 1: but I'm kind of a wounded animal at that point.
Speaker 1: There was something kind of leaving a blood trail through
Speaker 1: my life. As I get into my teenage years and
Speaker 1: then into my twenties, and this man who was in
Speaker 1: my dreams kept coming back, that man, the original nightmare,
Speaker 1: he kept coming back, and as I got into my twenties,
Speaker 1: he really became this regular presence in my nightmares. And
Speaker 1: I finally I had this dream one night where his
Speaker 1: minions came to kidnap me off of a street and
Speaker 1: I said, no, this is I'm ready to go find him.
Speaker 1: Just tell me where he is. And I appear in
Speaker 1: this black office tower, like you know, tall and glass,
Speaker 1: and I'm at the top floor and there's nothing in
Speaker 1: the room except for a coffin made of glass. And
Speaker 1: I come up to the car and I see the
Speaker 1: man in there, and he looks like he's vulnerable, and
Speaker 1: I just all this, just rage towards this man, for
Speaker 1: all the hurt and pain he'd caused me, just bubbled over,
Speaker 1: boiled over. And I grabbed hold of his neck and
Speaker 1: my fingers sink into his neck and I'm looking him
Speaker 1: in the eyes as I'm trying to strangle the life
Speaker 1: out of him, and he's laughing, like he's laughing at me.
Speaker 1: And I figured out later it was because he was
Speaker 1: getting me to feed on my anger, kind of like
Speaker 1: Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars mythology when he has
Speaker 1: the final battle with the Dark Lord. What are they
Speaker 1: trying to do? They're trying to get him to be cut,
Speaker 1: to feed on his anger, and by doing that, you
Speaker 1: become the very thing that you hate. So I go
Speaker 1: into later into my twenties, into my thirties, and this
Speaker 1: thing is still haunting me, and these nightmares are still recurring.
Speaker 1: And a friend of mine, who was wise about these
Speaker 1: things and knew enough about me, said, I think there's
Speaker 1: something more going on here than just, you know, ordinary
Speaker 1: nightmares caused by things, you know, addictive behaviors, traumas, things
Speaker 1: that normally cause nightmares. And I agreed with her because
Speaker 1: I'd worked for so long to try to figure out
Speaker 1: what was behind these nightmares, and I could never really
Speaker 1: get to the source of it. So George, I ended
Speaker 1: up seeing a shaman, a man named Steve Rogat in
Speaker 1: North Carolina, who I was referred to by that friend,
Speaker 1: and we ended up doing a shamanic ritual and I
Speaker 1: found out that behind that man, the dreams called him
Speaker 1: the Dark Master, and that behind him the source of
Speaker 1: it was actually something that was generational in my family.
Speaker 1: He told me that somebody had used the power of
Speaker 1: black magic against my family generations ago, and that it
Speaker 1: was carrying down through the line to me and had
Speaker 1: carried through other members of my family. And you could
Speaker 1: see a lot of tragedy in my family, and it
Speaker 1: started to make sense. It was funny, though, is that
Speaker 1: the shamans he didn't know what really anything about me
Speaker 1: at that point. He was just pulling in this information
Speaker 1: from above. And we went into a ritual and we
Speaker 1: found the man, and to make a long story short,
Speaker 1: I had a kind of a confrontation with him in
Speaker 1: a metaphysical space, and at the conclusion of it, I
Speaker 1: felt this rush of energy go through my body, through
Speaker 1: my being, and I felt this darkness just rise up
Speaker 1: off of me and go up into the light. And
Speaker 1: at that point, the shaman clapped his hands once, really loudly,
Speaker 1: and I felt like it was finally done and over with.
Speaker 1: And so that's what led me into writing about nightmares,
Speaker 1: because I had a personal experience with it that I
Speaker 1: felt like people who maybe have experienced something like generational
Speaker 1: nightmares would relate to and that they needed someone like
Speaker 1: me who's known as an expert about you know, dreams
Speaker 1: to be able to validate their experience for him. You know,
Speaker 1: as as I read your story about being in school
Speaker 1: and doing a hypnotic regression there in your classroom, thinking
Speaker 1: to myself, Wow, imagine the lawsuits that would happen if
Speaker 1: that happened to some students. Yeah, that was the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, and it was an enrichment class. And you
Speaker 1: know George, the teacher in that class, mister Whitmore, I'll
Speaker 1: never forget him. Sometime before then, in the school year,
Speaker 1: he caught me in class reading from I found And
Speaker 1: here's another thing you don't find these days. I found
Speaker 1: a book on witchcraft in the school library and it
Speaker 1: contained spells in what I think was in German. It
Speaker 1: was like actual which craft spells. And I'm sitting there
Speaker 1: trying to show off to a friend of mine by
Speaker 1: reading this stuff. And the teacher felt this sort of
Speaker 1: dark energy gathering around me, and he very seriously comes
Speaker 1: up to me and he's like, don't ever do that again.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, well, why, you know, I'm just goofing
Speaker 1: off and he's like, don't ever do that again. And
Speaker 1: he made me return the book to the library, and
Speaker 1: I think he might have brought in that analyst because
Speaker 1: he had a hunch, because it was a very unusual experience,
Speaker 1: even for the early nineteen eighties. And I'm thankful to
Speaker 1: this day because Georgia gave me something that led me
Speaker 1: further into my life where I eventually found the solution
Speaker 1: to this. I wouldn't have ever known that there was
Speaker 1: a solution unless I would have been down the path
Speaker 1: of dream interpretation, as I've done professionally. By doing that
Speaker 1: for myself and writing about this subject, it armed me
Speaker 1: with the information and tools that I needed to resolve
Speaker 1: this thirty year or deal. Yeah, I mean, the dark
Speaker 1: Man put you on a path that changed your life.
Speaker 1: Thank you dark Man. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and oddly,
Speaker 1: I found that the power to be able to respond
Speaker 1: to such a situation is something that you can carry
Speaker 1: over into other aspects of your life. And I learned
Speaker 1: something from the experience of this, which is that we
Speaker 1: have this very odd way of creating the heroes in
Speaker 1: our world, is we put them through life and death
Speaker 1: or deals, or at least by pushing them to their
Speaker 1: limits and beyond. You know, if you look at what
Speaker 1: Special Forces soldiers go through when they're in training, maybe
Speaker 1: one out of twenty of them, let's say, are able
Speaker 1: to pass the test. And this is also the kind
Speaker 1: of ordeal that saints and Shamans and others go through.
Speaker 1: We seem to have this thing built into deep into
Speaker 1: our own minds that will create challenges for us, and
Speaker 1: some of us go out and seek them. We might
Speaker 1: climb a mountain, or go through special Forces training, or
Speaker 1: you know, some kind of get a master's degree and
Speaker 1: enter into some kind of rarefied field of knowledge, something
Speaker 1: that will really challenge us. But then there are others
Speaker 1: who they seem to create their challenges more through having
Speaker 1: to face ordeals of a different kind. And I found
Speaker 1: that sometimes that's what's really behind people's nightmares. They want
Speaker 1: the challenge to be able to overcome it. And the
Speaker 1: thing about it, George, is that it's kind of an
Speaker 1: all or nothing deal. I mean, it's kind of do
Speaker 1: or die in a way. Because that experience that I
Speaker 1: had could have not ended up so well for me.
Speaker 1: I know other people who didn't make it through those
Speaker 1: kinds of ordeals and they end up crushed by them.
Speaker 1: So the way that I found that this works, ultimately
Speaker 1: you are setting yourself up to be able to face
Speaker 1: a challenge so that you can answer the call to
Speaker 1: greatness or at least have the opportunity to. And are
Speaker 1: all nightmares metaphorical in a sense that they're not literal
Speaker 1: to the events that you recall from your dreams? Are
Speaker 1: nightmares that they're all allegorical, metaphorical, and you've got to
Speaker 1: figure out what your brain is trying to tell you.
Speaker 1: I find that there are layers to it. And yes,
Speaker 1: most nightmares dreams are metaphorical. They're little stories that are
Speaker 1: told to help you to learn, and they use metaphors
Speaker 1: because they get around the egos, defenses and barriers. Metaphors
Speaker 1: leap right over top of those barriers and defenses, and
Speaker 1: so that's one reason why dreams speak to us mostly
Speaker 1: in metaphors. However, there is an objective side to some dreams.
Speaker 1: Louise van Franz, who as a student of Karl Jung,
Speaker 1: said that around twenty percent of dreams are objective, meaning
Speaker 1: that they're speaking more literally than they are figuratively, and
Speaker 1: that you are going to have everyone almost nightly is
Speaker 1: going to have dreams that are objective. When people though
Speaker 1: have these experiences like I had. I think that it's
Speaker 1: better to approach it where the odds are in the
Speaker 1: favor of it being something metaphorical, because it can easily,
Speaker 1: for one, you can mislead yourself into thinking that a
Speaker 1: nightmare is something more than what it really is. Most
Speaker 1: of them are stories that are told using the language
Speaker 1: of symbolisms, which is just what an ordinary dream does.
Speaker 1: But then if you don't find the answers, if you
Speaker 1: don't find the meaning and understand the dream through that route,
Speaker 1: then you need to start looking at the possibility, at
Speaker 1: least that it might not be metaphorical, that there might
Speaker 1: be something that's objective and literal about it. And do
Speaker 1: you have a working definition of what becomes a nightmare?
Speaker 1: What qualifies just something that's scary, or how do you
Speaker 1: break it down? Usually it's the emotional aspect of it
Speaker 1: a nightmare. I mean, dreams and nightmares are being produced
Speaker 1: by the same process going on in the mind. The
Speaker 1: imaginative senator centers of the mind turn on and create
Speaker 1: these experiences for us that we know as dreams. But
Speaker 1: when you get into what you would classify as a nightmare,
Speaker 1: is that it's going to be for one very emotional
Speaker 1: it's going to affect you deeply. And two is it's
Speaker 1: probably going to wake you up. You know, like you
Speaker 1: could have an anxiety dream, you could have a bad dream,
Speaker 1: and at the conclusion of it, it won't necessarily wake
Speaker 1: you up unless you wake up naturally to use the
Speaker 1: bathroom or something. But the nightmare is probably going to
Speaker 1: shock you awake. And that is one of the ways
Speaker 1: that you can classify the difference between a bad dream
Speaker 1: and a nightmare that's level of emotional affect and doesn't
Speaker 1: wake you up or not. The nightmare is being produced
Speaker 1: by the same processes that here's going that's going on
Speaker 1: that are producing your dreams. So being able to tell
Speaker 1: the difference is usually a felt sense of what it
Speaker 1: is that you experienced and how strongly you reacted to
Speaker 1: it and make you make a further distinction between nightmares
Speaker 1: and night terror. Good question, yes, and you know this.
Speaker 1: Finding out the difference for me actually started on my
Speaker 1: last appearance on Coast to Coast. We had a caller
Speaker 1: who described nightmares and I tried to approach it as
Speaker 1: helping him with nightmares, and I came to understand that
Speaker 1: there is a different prince between them and the main
Speaker 1: thing is that a nightmare is an energetic process because
Speaker 1: of trauma. The energy of trauma has been absorbed into
Speaker 1: your nervous system, and then you go to sleep and
Speaker 1: you relax enough that that energy can be triggered and released.
Speaker 1: So the way that I learned about this in a
Speaker 1: more in depth sort of way was through a friend
Speaker 1: of mine who was having chronic nightmares we thought were nightmares,
Speaker 1: and what he described to me was just the most
Speaker 1: horrible sorts of carnage that you could imagine, just terrible experiences.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't find a source of it. George, I've
Speaker 1: been and I've been working with dreams for thirty years now,
Speaker 1: and I've been through all the schools of thought I
Speaker 1: teach dream interpretation, so you know, I should be able
Speaker 1: to find especially with a friend who I'm working with
Speaker 1: closely and have multiple conversations over a span of time
Speaker 1: about what he was experiencing, and I kept thinking, there
Speaker 1: has to be these are nightmares, there has to be
Speaker 1: a source behind it. But when he explained to me
Speaker 1: what had happened to him as when he was a teenager,
Speaker 1: where he had the experience of having a gun pointed
Speaker 1: at him and being told that he was going to die,
Speaker 1: that he was going to be murdered by this person
Speaker 1: holding the gun. The person holding the gun was his stepfather.
Speaker 1: He had to live in the same home with this person,
Speaker 1: which meant that he experienced that terror. That there was
Speaker 1: the initial terror of thinking he was going to die,
Speaker 1: but then there was also the daily grind of living
Speaker 1: with someone who was that callous and dark hearted, and
Speaker 1: the fear that he lived under imprinted this energy into
Speaker 1: his nervous system. So there he was thirty years later,
Speaker 1: and you know, he hasn't he's been out of that
Speaker 1: environment for all that time, but the trauma of what
Speaker 1: he experienced was still trapped within his own body, within
Speaker 1: his nervous system, and when he would go to bed
Speaker 1: at night, it would release, and then it became a
Speaker 1: night terror. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every
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