Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. Hey, how you doing. This is Cliff, your host of Destiny, and I do hope you're doing well today, you know. Right now, and this is being pre recorded, I am climbing pyramids in Guatemala, at Tical and Elmador. I'll be reporting back with a number of interviews of various people that I see there, as well as some interesting video. I have a camera I'm going to strap onto my backpack as I'm climbing these pyramids. A couple of them
and the Tacoll Archaeological Park have staircases. And when you see these staircases, they're in I mean it's like one hundred and plus feet in the air. And these aren't the staircases that are part of the stone pyramid. These are metal staircases that have been built that are alongside the pyramid so that you can easily get up and down without climbing the sensitive stonework that has been laid
and carved into the to the pyramid. But they're very carefully positioned next to the pyramid so as you climb excuse me, as you climb the stairs, you can see the pyramid on your right. It's too steep and the angle is too severe, and the possibilities of falling are huge, even for the most abled individual. So I'm going to strap like a video camera onto my backpack can see
me as I'm climbing this pyramid. This is one of my bucket list visits because I've been to a number of Mayan sights, but as I've mentioned before, they're all in Mexico. In Mexico, other than a handful of archaeological parks with pyramids, it doesn't let you touch the pyramids. This is a real serious problem, and it looks like the Catholic Church not only has restricted the ability to meditate or perform services with a shaman. With a Mayan shaman, it could be an Aztec shaman, or could be any
miser American shaman. They don't want any kind of connection. They're so threatened by these indigenous practices that you will be removed from the park if they suspect that you
are meditating, chanting, praising, whatever shamanistic ritually you're doing. Will be is a serious no. No, I don't think that they give you tickets which would result in a payment, but I do know that in a recent situation, someone a woman climbed El Castillo, the main pyramid at Chichinitsa in Yucatea, Mexico, and not only was she dragged and placed in jail, she was given us something like a
twenty five hundred dollars fine. She just walked underneath the fence that surrounded the pyramid and she started climbing it and people were shocked. Now that has been closed for
coming on twenty years. I had a chance to climb El Castillo twice before they closed it down, and that was the night first time nineteen ninety six, and then the second time, I think it was I want to say nineteen ninety nine or two thousand, and they just decided that they weren't going to have any more people climbing it, and they just started doing this across the board. I missed out on Ushmol, which is one of my favorite parks in Yucatam, and you can't do anything about it.
And this is why I'm so excited to be visiting Guatemala, because not only is there a number of Mayan branches there with different dialects, but the museums are world class, and also the access to these wonderful pyramids that are made to interact with. In the future programs, we'll talk about that. But you're supposed to interact with the pyramids. You're supposed to sit there next to them and meditate. But we'll get into that. So I'm actually climbing pyramids
right now and I'll report back to you. But today's program is a special one. We haven't talked about nightmares. We've talked about dreams quite a bit. But there are a number of clinics and the one we're featuring today is in the Midwest, and the guest today is doctor Greg Mayor, and he's a psychiatrist that runs this clinic. There's a number of people, a growing number of people
who are traumatized by frequent and disruptive nightmares. Now I have not personally had that many nightmares that I can remember, but according to Greg, there are people who are so disrupted by nightmares that they have to have two things happen. Number One, they don't sleep, and disruptive sleep is devastating. If you cannot sleep, your body's rhythms go nuts. You're just you're ruined. You have to close your eyes and
you have to get rest. The other situation is that people are given drugs that shifts their brain chemistry to an effect that doesn't allow them to dream. I think that's just as bad as not sleeping. But we'll hear how that's a solution today. And there are other remedies as well. Many of them are more natural, learning how to meditate, how to eat and exercise more often, and also to use intention before you go to sleep. But that's something that is really a challenge. Now we're also speaking.
We're also covering the series of new dream Wisdom Oracles, which are cards that you can used to tune into your own dream states, so you can actually change the type of dream you're having. But we are talking about nightmares, and nightmares are not fun. So today's program is Nightmares and the Dream Wisdom Oracle, and my guest is doctor Greg Mayer. You know, I've been talking about our frames now for a few weeks, and I got to tell you it's really one of the best gifts you could
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We've had a few different dream researchers on the program, but today we have someone from the allopathic academia side of things who has not only written a great deal, but also has developed some new cards and a guidebook. And I've always fascinated in dreams. I try to keep a dream journal, but I don't know I'm not taking it serious enough, and I think I should have. Given the situation in our current reality here in the United States. My guest today is doctor Greg Maher, who is a psychiatrist.
He is teaching in research acute trauma and nightmares. He has one of the only nightmare clinics in the country. We're going to learn a little more about that. And he's also the author of The Wisdom of Dreams, Science Synchronicity in the Language of the Soul, and he's coming to us today from Michigan and I'm looking forward to this interview. So Greg, welcome to Destiny. Great to have you on the program.
Thanks a lot, it's pleasure to be here.
Let's go back a little bit into your interest in dreams. I saw a Ted talk which was very well done. By the way, that must have been a little nerve wracking. But in that talk you mentioned that you have been collecting dreams from a very young age. What got you, I should say, what's the motivation for collecting dreams?
That's a good question, something that I always found fascinating. But it must have been some kind of intuitive pull to look inward that I've had since childhood, because I started recording them since I was about ten or so. Not it's just kind of sporadic, but I have a files now of thousands and thousands, probably four or five thousand dreams, and I got interested in dreams in high school in a kind of an academic way. I started reading Freud and Jung and just sort of got interested
in trying to understand what dreams meant. And because I had this intuitive sense that they were telling me something important but something mysterious that I didn't quite know what it meant. And I think that was very enthralling to me. So there was that whole for the mystery of it, and I think I decided to do med school and psychiatry. I think I imagined naively that psychiatrists would be really interested in dreams and things like that, but they weren't.
So it was kind of a suppressed interest that I had kind of like a closet interest for throughout a lot of my career. But what actually happened is I had a serious heart attack about fifteen or twenty years ago, and I decided, after the heart attack, you know, I'm just going to do what I want to do. And then I sort of got more. I started exploring it more academically and more sort of openly. That's when I started writing the book, the first book.
Right, so, how many dreams have you collected? And we just talked offline before we started that you are, I guess digitizing them. You're using a talk AI system that you're going to collect them, But what how many dreams are there? And have you categorized them?
They're just by date and it's probably about it's something like thousand, probably, And there're like old notebooks from when I was a kid, like those old spiral bound notebooks, and there's some interspersed with little diaries and stuff. So it's hard to know what to do with. And I don't even read my own handwriting that well anymore twenty
years ago. So I did find some software online that is like a transcription software that is in the process of kind of learning to read my hand rough So once I, once I work out the bugs in that, then I'll be able to have a file that then I can use more sophisticated AI tools to look at
themes and maybe look at core. There's cool scales you can use to look at like life stresses at different times in your life, and you can I can see if there's correlations with nightmares or certain kinds of dream images, or have dreams changed over time. It'll be an interesting, large project that I'm working on right now.
You mentioned you're Youngian psychiatrist does young bring into the therapeutic approach the use of dreams. Does he identify dreams as an important factor in UH patient research?
He does so very much. He's different than Freud. I mean, Freud had a lot of really good ideas, but he saw dreams more as symptoms, where Jung saw dreams as messages. And that's kind of how I've always viewed dreams to this It's it feels like they have something to say, and something very very important to say. And Freud kind of understood that. He called dreams the royal road to the unconscious, but he saw it in a different way. And what I love about Jung two is Jung sides
like the associations, your personal associations. He he thought that we were connected to a deeper collective realm of images and symbols, and that those come up in dreams even though you don't even know about it. Like an example that comes to mind is I I had a think about witches when I was a kid. I had a lot of knifemares about witches and I still occasionally dream
about witches. And a couple of years ago, I had a dream and a woman was helping me protect myself against witches, and she she told me to put rosemary above my door. So I woke up and I said, well, that's that's weird. And only after I looked it up that I learned that rosemary historically has been used used to keep which is a way. So somehow I knew that without my conscious ego knowing that, which fits a kind of union model. But we connect to this deeper realm.
Right, So let's really quickly talk about your education. You're psychiatrist, which means that you're an MD who can prescribe medicines and recommend surgical procedures in the allopathic mode. What did you face as a student, I mean, if you're interested in dreams, what did you face as a young student in medical school?
Well, I sort of I like that part of psychiatry too. I think there's important things, and I did a lot of hospital work, and you know, there's medications and breaking people's confused, and that was all valid and that was my day job, which I did well, and I did a lot of teaching and things like that. But I had the interest in dreams kind of on the side, so I didn't really It took me a while to
sort of figure out how to use it. Actually, when I was very early in my career, I happened to share a floor in the hospital building with our sleep research department, so I got to know that the guy who ran that department a little bit. I was chatting with him, telling him I was really interested in dreams and stuff, and he kind of, in a very fatherly way, said, Greg, there's no future in that. He kind of meant, there's no grants, there's no money, You're not you know, forget
about that. That's not going to help you in your career. So that's interesting that that that kind of attitude. But but I sort of kept the interest and then gradually, like after the heart attack, started doing things more directly with dreams and started working on the book and things like that.
So the heart attack was a transitional period. It sounds like it sounds like you were kind of on the fence about diving in and then this health issue happened and you're like, I'm going to more fully investigate.
It's kind of like, maybe the easiest way to describe it's kind of like an alarm clock went off in my head, like, oh, I don't have forever to wait, you know, I better start doing what matters to me.
Wow. Yeah, interesting. All right, let's talk about dreams. Everybody dreams, right, So if we dream, what is a dream? And should we be paying attention to our dreams?
I think there's we're actually unusual as a culture that we don't pay attention to dreams. If you look historically and geographically at other cultures, we were kind of the out We think of ourselves as we're the normal ones, but we're really the outliers that that ignore dreams. Dreams have always been felt to be important. There's a there's a bunch of dreams, and there's like twenty one dreams
in the Bible. They say that in Jesus's time there were fifty like freelance dream interpreters in the temple areas. So it's als something that has always been people have always considered interesting and important and important in the sense
of sending messages. Now they're often viewed as like prophetic messages, and there's there's some interesting truth to that, but they also carry internal messages about who we are as people and what we need to work on, and and it's like it's like we have this friend inside that keeps wanting to help us and share wisdom with us, and we keep ignoring him. But he's there, he or she probably she, but in any case, but I think that's a good way to think about dreams. And we we
do dream a lot more than we remember. Dreams are very easy to forget, and I think our brains are probably wired that way that we forget dreams. But you know, the we usually are better at remembering them if we
pay attention, like almost like set an intention. And I sometimes do this, like, especially when i haven't remembered a dream in a while, when I'm going to bed, I'll kind of tell myself, you know, pay attention tonight, you know, and kind of tell my in herself to talk to me because I'm ready and listening.
Yeah, this nightmare clinic is really unique. I think before we started you mentioned that you you think there's probably other clinics, but I have not heard of a of a clinic that's focused specifically on nightmares. I would say that's two sided. One sided would be that the nightmares are so disruptive that people are getting poor sleep. That's that's the medical side of it. And then the other side of it would be what is the message. Why
why I clinic like this, Greg? And what what is the what is the what's the goal?
Well, it's it's actually been a wonderful thing to do. And because I've seen a number of patients who've been having nightmares for many years that are very disruptive and cause them a great deal of pain and anxiety, and they don't know what to do with it. They don't many of them have never told anyone before about the nightmares, and sometimes they're recurring nightmares. So in terms of treatment, I don't even want to call it treatment. I let's
call it like understanding and exploration. You want to make sure there's nothing medical. But most patients are referred to me by sleep doctors, so there isn't really anything medical going on. So I try to explore the dream with them. I have them tell me about the dream in detail, and we sort of try to understand it together. What the message might be. Oh interesting, And then sometimes sometimes it's something to be listened to. But sometimes it's almost
like something's gone a little haywire. And especially after trauma. About half of people after trauma, like if you're in a bad car accident or an assault or something like that half of people will have nightmare. So it's like the it seems to be the mind's way of processing that kind of trauma. So and it may be that sometimes that kind of processing kind of goes haywire, it
goes on and on. So there's a techniques you can use about reimaging the dream, like like imagining a different ending and thinking about that different ending like to almost like to induce a different dream. And that's that's very helpful too. So both the understanding and the kind of reimagining can be really helpful.
Can you give us an example of a patient that you were working with that had these traumatic dreams or these nightmares that you were that you you know, processed.
Yeah, with I'll kind of alter the story so it's not anyone in particular, and I'm not violating anyone's confidentiality, But well, I can give you a couple examples. One that analysts friend of mine, she wouldn't mind my sharing this because she shares it often, but she had a recurring dream of being chased by a wolf and she was terrified and running away from the wolf. That she was talking about her with her therapist and one day the therapist told her, when are you going to feed
that wolf? And she never had the nightmare again. It's like she realized that that was part of herself that she needed to nurture and take care of. So that's
that's one example. And I've had a sometimes people misinterpreted dream like there was someone after after a very serious trauma, that had a and they were telling me about what they called a nightmare, and it was like and it was they were telling me this family member was sitting on their bedside and talking to them very kindly, and and so I asked them, why why is that a nightmare? They said, well, because the person's dead. So they interpreted that as though they were going to die.
Ah.
But when I was able to talk to them, well, and that's it's not that that it's it's someone's visiting to to help and people. Another common thing that you can help people understand about nightmares is the the you in the nightmare is like, that's not you as that's not Greg mah, that's this actor that's playing Greg Maher and that's some aspect of Greg Mars. So people get very scared when they die in the dream or something terrible happens to them. And that that's sometimes a very
good thing. Sometimes that's part of them that should die, you know, and when that part of them dies is maybe that's something to celebrate. So that's what I mean by sometimes re exploring and reinterpreting dreams, and this is.
You know, I'm listening to you, and it sounds like as a physician, as a therapist, you're helping people realize and understand and decipher what they're experiencing in their dreams.
Yeah, or the way I like to think about it, I don't like to think of it as like puzzle salting, and I don't like to think of it as like your ego needs to find the answer. I like to think about it as I want to help people develop a relationationship with their inner cells. And as you kind of have this relationship with your inner self, then you can understand each other each other better. So it's a
matter of kind of developing this relationship. And part of that is understanding that this inner friend has a different language and has a language of images and kind of says things in different complicated ways that you wouldn't wouldn't understand. Like it's a good example in that that I use in the ted talk of my dad at the end of his life when I was sharing with him the book I wrote, and he was like a hundred by that, and he was, you know, commending me and saying, geez,
that nice job, congratulations and stuff. But then he said, just because he's part of the culture, he said, oh, but aren't dreams just nonsense? And then he did what people always do when they say that, They say, for example, last night, and then he told me this dream about that my mother was still alive on the porch and he was mowing the lawn and my mother was criticizing him that the rows weren't even and he was like,
isn't that nonsense? And I'm thinking, because I know him and I knew my mother and how critical she was, I'm thinking, oh, this, this is not nonsense. This is this beautiful depiction of your life. This is your life, dude. And he didn't see it or didn't want to see it, you know, But that's what I mean by dreams talk
to us in these images. Yeah. So it's like the message to my dad was process, you know, under this is you have time left to understand that, you know, But maybe it wasn't ready to hear it, or maybe he heard it in a different way that he didn't share with him.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, doctor Greg Maher, discussing his work in nightmares. We'll be right back. My guest today is doctor Greg Mayer. He has been studying dreams but also nightmares and they're traumatic effects. I think that's an important point, you know, when you look at dreams from a generational point of view. My parents, my father was a teacher
and almost an authoritarian in some ways. He would not relate to dreams in the manner that you do. Whereas my grandfather, who was a physician who immigrated from Germany, who had a lot of stories of mythology and creatures and things like that, was very much into dreams and actually understood them in a way. So it's like it's like the dream subject skips a generation or something. It's funny that you're mentioning that, and I don't know if
that's true or not. I doubt it, but it's just a funny point that you're making that I'm kind of backing up when you talk about the inner friend or the one who's is producing these dreams. Are you referring to the soul or is it some other entity that we have when we incarnate.
I let's I'd probably call it your deeper self, you know, And if if you want to call it your soul, that's fine. But I don't think you you don't. I want to be inclusive because I don't think you have to be religious to understand that. Yeah, it's your soul or your your deeper self, or as you called it, it's yourself with a capital S.
So it is the unconscious self or the conscious I mean, because we can get into semantics here and consider the self as you know, the unconscious that is overseeing everything and is doing what I consider a dream data dump. You know, These dreams are data dumps of information that you don't get in your waking hours, but you're gonna get because this overseer, which I call the soul, is saying, hey, dude or lady, you need to pay attention here.
Yeah. So is that that self is probably mostly unconscious. I think it appears in our conscious lives. It sometimes appears in dreams as like a wise old man figure like one one of these dreams I had when I was like ten years old I happened to look at recently. It was kind of an interesting dream that I was going to my neighbor's house, but it wasn't It wasn't the actual neighbor that lived there. There was this older man, it's really very pleasant older man living there, and he
was showing me how to help these plants grow. And I think he was that kind of self figure because he was I mean, there's a couple of messages in the dream. One that I wasn't going to learn how to make these inner plants inside me grow at my own house. I was going to have to go somewhere else, and I would need the wisdom of someone like him to teach me how to have those parts of me grow.
So I think he is an example of a kind of that self figure with a capital S that appears in dreams sometimes fascinating.
Let's talk about this clinic for a minute. What are the protocols that you have developed for therapy for someone who is recommended to this to the clinics, someone who's got severe nightmares that are making their life.
Hell yeah. Part of what I don't like about psychiatry and psychology nowadays is it's so protocol driven and everybody's filling out forms and checklists and checking off the boxes. So I just kind of full of school talk to people and ask them what to dreft. I mean, I have a certain kind of soft protocol in my mind. I want to get a better basic sense of how
their sleep is. And because one thing people get with nightmares is they get afraid of sleeping, so then they sometimes develop bad sleep habits, like they wake up at night and check their phone and do things that are going to keep them awake more. So that basic sleep hygiene stuff is important. So I talk to people about bad but I talk to people about what the dream is about and how long they've had it and what
they think it means, and so it thursday. Other people have more of a protocol driven thing where they're doing questionnaires and stuff like that. I don't do that. I think that's yeah, I think that's I think that's actually bad.
But one of the things you said, Greg when we first started is that you use intentionality. You will prepare this is you personally, I don't know about your practice, but you will use the intention to set the tone for that evening for you. So that you have a dream, is that something you recommend to your patients.
Oh, I think there's a really good literature, both scientific and cultural throughout other cultures and religion, and so for you can definitely incubate dreams, like like, if you think about something when you're going to bed, you can incubate thoughts and answers to that. And they've done study where they've taken college students, for instance, in a math class, and they had and they've had some student like half the students think about math problems when they're going to
bed and the others not. And the people that thought
about the problems did better. And there's amazing stories about how people solved certain problems during their sleep and got creative insights from their dreams, like the maybe the most famous example is the book Frankenstein was all from a dream that Mary Shelley had and Beatles song Yesterday that that came to Paul McCartney in a dream, and there's the yeah, yeah, he woke up with with his court progressions in his mind, and he played him on the piano and wrote him down and he was sure he
must have heard it some where he kept asking people ete, what song is this? And nobody knew. He realized finally that this was something new, and there's still were I mean, you still had to like craft the song, but the actual inspiration and the mendelay of mendelay I developed the periodic table of elements, a mendelay of that kind of came to him in a dream. There's a number of examples, both from science and from creative literature.
But you make a very good point, Greg, You say that a lot of these great inventions and thoughts and music and whatever have the form of incubation period prior
to the actual dream itself. Is this something that you recommend to people who are having nightmares, that perhaps let's incubate or let's intent for either more clarity in our dreams or less frightful dreams, more productive dreams, so that we can get not only good sleep, which is critical to functioning well, but also a creative resolution to these horrible nightmares.
Yeah, very definitely. Like in that technique that's very well documented of cognitive behavioral therapy for nightmares, you imagine a different kind of ending and then think about it when you're going to bed to kind of help your mind let go of the pattern it's stuck in, if it's like having the same bad dream over and over again.
And the kind of intentions that I've definitely seen be helpful is with the intention of remembering your dream, the intention and of when it's a problem that you can't really see a solution to to kind of think about
that and ask ask for help with that. And that's part of the I know, we'll talk about these cards later, but the you know, the part part of what we wanted people to be able to get from the card was to be able to draw, you know, draw a card like pick a card and think about it, and that would give them, like a min their mind something to kind of focus on, to help draw them inward in that way.
Right you You prepared a good segue I was bringing up with the cards. Next title of the cards is Dream Wisdom Oracle forty six Cards and a Guidebook. So what is the uh how did these cards come about? Number one? And what was your goal a creating cards? In fact, I think it's a fantastic departure from your academia credit, Greg, because they are most most people that and I've talked to a lot of psychics who create wisdom cards and things like that, but it seems like
a very creative departure from what you're doing. I think it's amazing, and I really want you to define these cards for us and let us know what the inspiration was, because you just did a big painting. To my mind, you just did a great, big, beautiful rem brand or we'll call it the Mar the original mar painting in the cards.
Yeah. Well, the story of the cards is I wrote that first book about dreams, which which is good and fun and you know, there's a lot of important stuff there, but it's it was written. It was an academic publisher, so it was really expensive, and it wasn't you know, it wasn't like in regular bookstores and stuff like that. So I wanted, I wanted, I wanted to talk. I wanted, like regular people, non non professionals, non therapists, to understand
some of the wisdom that's inside them. So I thought it would be fun to kind of have some of these ideas expressed them in a way that that was understandable to folks. And I thought, you know, having an art associated with associated with it, because that's like a
different part part of the brain. So, so I had this idea of doing a guidebook with cars, and initially it was kind of the idea was a little more science y, like I actually looked up the most common kind of dream images and those were going to be all the chapters, and that kind of broke down a
little bit. But anyway, I called an artist friend of mine, Heather Taylor Zimmermann, who lives out out in Seattle's and she's like a very accomplished visionary artist, and I thought she'd give me one of her her graduate students or something. So I asked her, you do you know anybody who might want to do these cards with me? And Heather said, well, you know, I've always kind of been meaning to do something like that. Why don't we just do it together?
So she did the art, I did the words, you know, So each card core like the kind of just picking what it ran. So the cards are kind of this visionary art kind of they're beautiful, They're gorgeous, They're absolutely gorgeous, and the back of the card is really beautiful with this Luna moth. So she'd so each card man and there's a like a paperback book that goes with it.
So I wrote, well, it was kind of each thing was kind of a dialogue, Like I'd write something, she'd find or do an image, and then I'd kind of reflect on the image and the words, and she'd kind of alter the image. So she and I were in constant dialogue. And it seemed like the art and the words were in dialogue too. So that's kind of the story of the book.
So you must have finished most of the book or were you working on the book, and you would send her a chapter and she would have put together a graphic for that chapter.
Yeah, each chapter is about like an image. So she'd either she had a lot of existing stuff so we'd find stuff that sort of matched, or some of the stuff she had to create something new.
Wow, that's fantastic. Okay, So give us some examples. Well, first of all, how do we use the cards? Do we sit and think and ruminate about the problem, talk about the process.
Well, there's a couple of ways to do it. The way the way the way I imagined that people would use it was they dream about a forest, for instance, and they'd find the forest card and look at it, and that would like help them understand it would kind of stir their mind about their own dream and then they'd read my little section about forests and they'd start
making more connection in their own mind. So that's what I sort of envisioned what people like I want to want to do, which because it's the pre or some pre orders have come out, and when I would tell people about it, what they wanted to do is like draw cards and to and you can also like pull a card, and you can pull a card to do this kind of incubation, like, oh, let's say you pull a Com'm just going to randomly pull a card, so, oh, I happened to pull a card about numbers, which is
very very beautiful card, and so I'd maybe put that beside me when I'm going to bed, and maybe there's something about numbers that I need to think about and you can. We've we kind of ended because everybody wanted to make these to roll like spreads. We decided to go with that. The cards seemed to wanted to want to go in that direction.
They had their own mindset is the mind of their own, so that is really it's kind of cool though, Greg.
Yeah, no, So we we had to kind of create after the fact like ways of doing spreads and so which are actually it was too late to have in the some there's a little bit of that in the book, but there's more on the website because some of that was kind of what the card wanted that we didn't realize until after they were out.
Uh, the cards were produced when it was a June they came out.
No, they're just I got like these pre author copies. It kept getting delayed. But they're they're going to be out in mid November.
But oh, I was looking at because that's why I didn't get a set of cards.
That's why, because they're.
I thought they ran out because they were so popular. That's why I didn't get a get a debt.
I wish to just that out yet. So they're they're now printed. They're sitting in a warehouse somewhere, but they're going to be actually out and they can be pre ordered now, but they won't be shipped till I think.
Yeah I saw them on Amazon. You can't. You can't pre order them. So this is interesting. Talk a little bit about the evolution and I think they haven't really come out yet, but you've had test groups. I guess look at them. Your initial idea was somebody has a repeating kind of a dream. They pull a card that is uh, part of the theme of the dream, perhaps.
Yeah, maybe the central image of the dream.
Yeah, central image. So and then you have them write something down and then that's the incubator for the for them to actually intend and move towards a more positive dream.
You could use it that way when I was thinking of initially there would be more like a guide to exploration, like I let's say I dreamt about a forest gel that's interesting, or another card is lost, as that's a real common dream.
Lost, I don't know where I am.
Yeah, yeah, so what does that mean? You know? And so you look at the card and the images might stir something unconsciously. You read stuff in the book and I would give like historical examples of being lost and some significant dreams about being lost. So that might stir your own connections. Because one thing that has happens when we're dreaming is it's it's like a psychedelic trip. We just don't think of it that way, but there's the same kind of brain activation and these new connections that
you would get on a psychedelic trip. So the dream stirs up that state of mind allows for these new connections. So you it's sometimes you have to kind of kick it around in your mind to get where these connections are going.
So you are you suggesting that dreams kind of create a neuroplasicity and expand the mind a little bit.
Well, they cut your egos shut off, like this ego that's where you and I are talking. That's kind of shut off when we're dreaming, and that opens us up to all this other stuff that's in our head and in our unconscious that we don't even know about because we kind of turn all that off just to get along every day in the world.
We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly with my guest today, doctor Greg Maher, discussing his work with trauma and nightmares. We'll be right back. My guess today is doctor Greg Mahr. He is a sleep specialist focusing on nightmares. He has just released a new series of cards. Their oracle is called dream Wisdom Oracle that is designed for you to understand your dreams but also
help you with your dream time. Wow, I've never heard that before. So that so that's the the ego I guess too, right.
Yeah, And if you want to use neurophysiological language, it's it's the oh shoot, the default mode network, which is kind of the system in your nervous connections that we sort of maintained our every day, ordinary life in the world. And when that gets shut down. I have a cool slide that I show and talks. You see all these different parts of the brain light up and get connected that normally aren't. So that's why some of the imagery
is kind of weird and stuff like that. So that's why I like the idea of sort of nurturing that kind of connection or exploring that kind of connection. So the idea with the visual image of the cards and the words, the words are kind of evocative, so it's to get you to walk around that spay that new space in your head.
I like your psychedelic drug analogy because it's like the cards are are the drug they're influencing the dream state, is I think.
Or I think the dream is like a drug induced state, and the card is something that you might be holding to keep your attention in that date and focus your mind.
I mean, I don't think Sarah Toonam has been thought of as a psychedelic. But you know, it's funny. I'm trying to think of the paneal gland. The paneal gland produces a drug like effect when it's stimulated, and I'm wondering if the panial is part of this whole dream factor.
Well, it's It certainly sets our sleep wake schedule, and we kind of mess up our pineal gland because we're we're like in modern culture, we're always like pretending it's summer and pretending it's daytime, and we have we want to be as productive as possible, so we have all these electric lights so we can pretend it's daylight all the time. Yeah, and we're sort of pretending like that our night world of dreams and stuff doesn't matter. But
it does. And they like, if you take people and put them like away from lights in a cave and stuff like that, they'll sleep longer, and they'll interestingly have these buy it's called a bi phasic night pattern where they'll sleep for a few hours and then they'll wake up like at two in the morning for an hour or two and then go back to bed. And that's an interesting state because people are like you're, they're more creative. They think that's maybe when the cave paintings were done
and things like that. I have a poet friend who like wakes himself up intentionally with an alarm clock at two in the morning because he feels like he writes better then. And then make makes sense because I think you're more connect that default mode network is more shut down, and you're more connected to that inner world. So I think that's what dreams are are part of that inner
world trying to talk to us. And I like the kind of the idea behind the cards and the book is to to help help us connect connect with that world and make us feel more comfortable.
Yeah, and you've made some important points here that our society, Western culture is what I'm referring to. We're over stimulated. We're overstimulat because we're we're looking at our phones all the time, and we're watching TV too late, and we drink alcohol and we are stimulating our body so that our subtle thoughts and energy is depleted. You know. It's weird.
Yeah, And we don't pay attention that we're you know, to those that we're trying to be productive all the time and make money and then yeah, it's kind of sad. Really we're kind of trading away the most important things for stuff that doesn't really matter. And that's kind of what I realized after my heart attack, that some of the stuff that I thought was so important wasn't really
so important. Like I remember in the nurses when I went to the cardiologist and they did my EKG and stuff, like even I could see, even not mischiagist, I could tell that there wasn't a good looking EKG. And she was saying, Oh, you're you're gonna We're gonna have to take you for a caf And I was like, oh, I have to finish these I'm just going to run back to my office because I'll tell you take a while. I got to finish these notes and stuff.
Did you have your heart attack on campus on the in the hospital?
No, but I the doctor was in the hospital where I worked at But but I was, And she she looked at me like, no, you're not going to go back to your office. And then I realized, oh, yeah, you're right that this is more important. You know that kind of paying attention to our inner selves is very important.
I want to use these cards in a couple of seconds here and and hear what you come up with. Let's pull uh one or two cards, and let's have you read the theme and what you would say would be the recommendation of the car to call it that.
Yeah, So I'm just randomly drawing a card and the card is water.
Water Okay, beautiful?
Yeah, And water is water is actually a really common image. It's kind of an interesting choice because that's one of the most common images in my own personal dreams. So maybe that's why I drew that car, because I have water dreams like all the time. Like I've been in this dream exploration group for years and everybody always lasts, and I'll always dream. I'm always walking by a river
or swimming or kayaking or looking at an aquarium. That's so water usually has to do with the unconscious because you're kind of immersed in it, and it depends like if you're in a little water thing like a pool, for instance, that's often like you're personal unconscious, where if you're swimming in the ocean, then you're in this big
collective body of water. So I don't remember what I wrote in the book, but I can look, well, you can, but I'm sure I said something like that, and I probably explored that image because there's you know, the the way the water appears can be very different in different dreams and different and important ways. Like if you're on the water but you're in a cruise ship, then that's a very collective way, whereas if you're in a kayaking
then that's it's a different kind of way. You're not immersed in the water, you're skimming along the top of it. And I have a lot of dreams where I'm swimming where I'm actually immersed in the water, and maybe that's because I love trying to connect with the unconscious so much that But somebody.
Who's having the dream of being in the ocean, either swimming or on a boat, and they're having a repeat version of that, what does that signify.
That sometimes dreams keep repeating because we're not listening to them, so they have to keep knocking, as it were. So maybe there's something in their unconscious that they haven't connected with that they need to listen to in a different way.
Okay, and what is the book? What can you read like the first paragraph of the water because I'm thinking that the book denotes some form of decode. Is that my right interpretation or no, just my.
Only objection was decode sound real.
So I'm sorry. Whatever language you want to use.
I would say, it's a exploration exploration water. So I'm looking at that page two of three to two.
Oh, sub you don't have to read the whole thing, just like the paragraph or two, so that we get a sense of what you're trying to achieve by these well, I mean dream interpretation. There you go interpreting the dream.
Oh well, it's I it's I looked up the page for swimming, so it's similar. So the beginning is a description in words of what's in the card. So the card of I'm sorry, I'm trying to hurry and then I'm messing up. So let me look at the other one, which is two eighteen.
Take your time.
This is the actual swimming card. Okay, water. So so I described the card a little bit, saying a figure floats peacefully on his back and on the back of a turtle. The turtle is a spirit guide carrying the dream figure through the water. The water is born of spirit. The sky is ablaze with a circular mondoli like mandola like figure of the south. How far can we get if we let the turtle bear us?
So it's interesting. So you're you're, you're, you're interpreting the card's design as part of the dream and the people and as the person's reading, what they're getting is information that they reinterpret.
Yeah, I'm kind of that little paragraphs. First paragraph is always about the card, and the idea of that is to help people pay attention to the details in the card, because the card is very thoughtfully drawn and painted. And then I go on to say, a dream about water is an invitation to a relationship with the unconscious. Do we relate to water willingly? Or does it burst into our lives? Do we dive in, wade in or tiptoe in? Is the water clear or dirty? Flowing waters like rivers
represent the unconscious flow of life. Swimming pools represent a more personal aspect of the unconscious. Big bodies like oceans are deeper levels of the unconscious. Water cleans, as Beige baptizes, our relationship to water and our dreams represents our relationship to the unconscious. So the first pair, So then I kind of go on at different length and different stories about dreams about water. So the idea is to kind
of nurture that sort of exploration. Yeah, hide you into and through that inner world.
No, I like it because you're you're defining with your years of practice. You're going, this is what I see in water, and here's the various aspects of it. Yeah, this is how people used to interpret it, and so forth and so on.
Between my own dreams and the dream group and all the stuff I've read and all the people. Yes, I've heard like thousands and thousands of dreams and I love them. I just love listening to them because they're so beautiful. They're like little works of art, like my father's dream. But it's such a beautiful little work of art and in a single image captures this whole life. I mean, how could you do that? I couldn't. I couldn't do
that if I tried to. But that's that's the point when you try to mess it up, but when it just you.
Know, what's interesting, Greg is the fact that you're in practice. Now, can you use these in your practice? Or is it not copasetic because it's not a drug or a therapy of some gain?
Oh the cards you mean? Yeah, Oh, I probably that would make me feel a little self serving to use.
Well, no, if it's helpful, you know, and it's.
True, you know, I that's an interesting idea. I haven't thought about it.
Oh my god, I thought you were. You're going to use these in your as a therapy for your OW.
I never thought of it that way. But as the more the more people look at the cards, the more ideas I get, like said, they kind of have a mind of their own.
And all the years of your study and practice, and you're you're documenting your dreams as a kid. You got five thousand dreams. You're you're the forefront of the of the industry.
My friend, Well, using cards was never part of my medical school.
Well, that's my question is that you may not be allowed to introduce the cards in your practice because of some AMA protocol or some kind I don't know.
The nice thing about being as old as I am is I can kind of do what I want. No one's going to do anything to me.
I think they're a great solution.
No, I like that idea. And actually, what one of the people I shared the deck with is a is a Torot card readers, and he was very excited about them. He said, Oh, I'm going to use these tomorrow, you know, and as supplementing is to row cards or something.
So I think I think there's motivation on two sides. First of all is nightmares, which is what you're all about in your research, And the other is instigating, influencing and cultivating dreams. And this is the problem that I have. I have so much on my mind that I forget to set an intention to when I'm in bed to have dreams, but I miss the interpretation. And I have dream journals from years ago, but I haven't been doing it for you know, many years, because I'm just so
caught up. And those cards it's not like a great way to kickstart.
The intention is really important. Like we've this has happened several times with the dream group that I do. People will come because they're interested in dreams. They'll come kind of apologizing, saying, yeah, is it okay if I just come and listen, I don't really remember dreams, and we'll say, sure, you know, that's cool. And then but then like two weeks later, the fact of them having gone to group. Two weeks later, they'll come back and say, oh, I
had two dreams last week. Yeah, but that's the kind of like setting that intention or paying attention, yeah, or beginning that relationship is another.
Language, fantastic. The cards are called Dream Wisdom Oracle forty six cards in guidebook. My guest today has been doctor Greg mar. I want to have you pick another card as we conclude, Greg and give us a further sense of this collection. Forty six cards. So forty six cards is a lot. That's a lot of different topics.
Yeah, the four or five of the cards are like tips, They're like word cards with like twelve tips to remember your dreams. And oh so it's like five of them are those kind of cards.
So it's more like forty one cards and.
Are yeah, okay, okay, well that's interesting. The card I picked is death, so maybe that was referring to the end of the interview. And yeah, and death, like we talked about, is kind of one of those scary nightmare images that often doesn't mean death, that means death of a part of yourself. So let me see what I said in the death in the card. Death is in the card. Death is contained in a box, but a spacious one where he has room to move and even
dance with him in the box. Are Kala lilies in Greek mythology that Kayla lily was created from drops of milk from the breast of hair US's Zeus's wife Us had Zeus had fathered Hercules with a mortal woman. Hercules would be mortal because he was born of a woman unless fed by milk from the breath of a guy. And then I the box is surrounded by pink, mob and green colors of life energy. Surrounding Death's coffin are
images of the lushness of life. And just to go on, I won't go on with all that, but just the beginning of the actual material about death. To dream of death is to dream of rebirth. Every night, our waking self dies as we sleep and a deeper self comes to life. A death dream is a call to the night world, where the everyday self is dead but the inner self is alive. And well, so what that is a very fitting way to close the interview.
Yeah, very excellent. Good. I mean, that's a good one because a lot of people think, oh my god, I pulled the death card. I'm in it.
Yeah, you're dead. Nightmares sometimes our interpretation of a dream that has an important positive message.
Yeah, fantastic. Uh, Greg thank you for joining me. That was insightful. And uh, I'm gonna have to ask inner traditions to get a deck of cards because I've been you know.
Uh.
I know Gail Towards your publicist, and she's a good one. Uh, but I never got the cards even early. I typically get an early set as a test set, you know, and so.
Just because they haven't been out yet. But if you don't get them for her, just email me. I'll just mail it to you.
Yeah, fantastic. I think you got something. I think you're I think you're onto something here and I appreciate the inner site and the I should say insight and what what develops from these cars because it's so unique for a psychiatrist to present these. So you're I think your child is coming out on this one and really doing a number. He's he's got his crayons in hand, he's doing a number.
That's that's a nice image. I like that.
All right, Hey, congratulations and thanks for joining me.
Thank you.
Dreams are really critical to a lot of creativity. In fact, I know artists that cultivate their dreams. They'll have a intention before they go to sleep, have their journal by their by their bed and kind of work with the unconscious to cultivate and develop dreams, to answer questions, to
solve problems. And this is something that needs to be really worked on even more because I for a lot of people, dreaming isn't possible because they're just so exhausted, or they don't have trouble they have trouble sleeping, which is a problem. So the Dream Wisdom Oracle cards are now available. If you go to Amazon and look up doctor Greg maher m AhR, you'll see the cards and check them out. It might be something you want to try. So thank you Greg, it was nice to have him
on the program. Yeah, I got a perfect gift for you. It's a self gift for twenty twenty six. It is joining our Grand Egyptian Tour April twenty eight through May tenth. This is a special event because we have access private access to a number of sites, including temples, the pyramids, a notable pyramid being the Kufu Pyramid, as well as a number of ancient sites that will visit privately without
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I want to thank my guests today doctor doctor Greg mar coming to us from Wisconsin as always, a team of Gail Tour, Mark Foster, and Faya Pavar. You guys rock all right, take care of you well, and we will talk to you next time.