Understanding Nightmares - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 1/22/23

pleasure to be on the show. Thank you for having me. Do I call you Jason or JM. Let's just go with Jason. Okay. So this the idea for this book, in part, at least reading the beginning of it comes from your own personal experience, a terrifying dream or series

of dreams that you had as a kid. Let's start with a story there, all right, Well, when I was a young child, I had a dream that there I was just biking down the neighborhood in you know, along the streets of my neighborhood, and I felt this presence behind me, and I turned around and there was this man in a black car who was following me and I kind of zoom in on his face and I see that he's like he's got all these burn scars on him, and he's almost like a nightmare an Elm

Street looking kind of guy. And of course the movie wasn't out at the time. This is the late nineteen seventies, and I try to get away from him, and the man tracks me down in a store and the last thing I know is that he's coming to claim my soul. Now, as a kid, I didn't really know what a soul was, but I just knew that it was the most important part of me, and this man wanted it, and if he caught me, he was going to have it. I was going to be dead. He was going to have

my soul and story over. So I woke up from the dream and it was, you know, like any other dream that you have when you're nine years old. You wake up, your heart's pounding, your sweating. I was probably screaming when I woke up, you know. So a nightmare

at that age as an unusual. But what became unusual for me, George, was that a few years later, I was in an enrichment class and my teacher invited in a dream analyst who asked the class, has anyone had a nightmare that really stuck with them and they'd like to try to figure out what it meant? And my hand shot up because that nightmare had really stuck with me.

You know, I've had other nightmares, but for some reason, that one just kind of you know, once it grabbed hold of me, it wouldn't let go, and I would think about it periodically. We went into a regression process to try to find out what was behind the nightmare, and what I imagined was that there were these two families who were in conflict with each other and there was like a blood feud between them, and the analyst asked me to try to find a resolution for their problem.

And you know, at about twelve years old at this point, I thought, well, you know, fighting is wrong, you shouldn't be hurting each other. Can't we all just get along? And that didn't work out real well. The scene turned really unstable. The analyst pulled me out of it, and you know, kind of life goes on at that point, but I'm kind of a wounded animal at that point. There was something kind of leaving a blood trail through

my life. As I get into my teenage years and then into my twenties, and this man who was in my dreams kept coming back, that man, the original nightmare, he kept coming back, and as I got into my twenties, he really became this regular presence in my nightmares. And I finally I had this dream one night where his minions came to kidnap me off of a street and I said, no, this is I'm ready to go find him.

Just tell me where he is. And I appear in this black office tower, like you know, tall and glass, and I'm at the top floor and there's nothing in the room except for a coffin made of glass. And I come up to the car and I see the man in there, and he looks like he's vulnerable, and I just all this, just rage towards this man, for all the hurt and pain he'd caused me, just bubbled over,

boiled over. And I grabbed hold of his neck and my fingers sink into his neck and I'm looking him in the eyes as I'm trying to strangle the life out of him, and he's laughing, like he's laughing at me. And I figured out later it was because he was getting me to feed on my anger, kind of like Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars mythology when he has the final battle with the Dark Lord. What are they trying to do? They're trying to get him to be cut, to feed on his anger, and by doing that, you

become the very thing that you hate. So I go into later into my twenties, into my thirties, and this thing is still haunting me, and these nightmares are still recurring. And a friend of mine, who was wise about these things and knew enough about me, said, I think there's something more going on here than just, you know, ordinary nightmares caused by things, you know, addictive behaviors, traumas, things

that normally cause nightmares. And I agreed with her because I'd worked for so long to try to figure out what was behind these nightmares, and I could never really

get to the source of it. So George, I ended up seeing a shaman, a man named Steve Rogat in North Carolina, who I was referred to by that friend, and we ended up doing a shamanic ritual and I found out that behind that man, the dreams called him the Dark Master, and that behind him the source of it was actually something that was generational in my family.

He told me that somebody had used the power of black magic against my family generations ago, and that it was carrying down through the line to me and had carried through other members of my family. And you could see a lot of tragedy in my family, and it started to make sense. It was funny, though, is that the shamans he didn't know what really anything about me at that point. He was just pulling in this information

from above. And we went into a ritual and we found the man, and to make a long story short, I had a kind of a confrontation with him in a metaphysical space, and at the conclusion of it, I felt this rush of energy go through my body, through my being, and I felt this darkness just rise up off of me and go up into the light. And at that point, the shaman clapped his hands once, really loudly, and I felt like it was finally done and over with.

And so that's what led me into writing about nightmares, because I had a personal experience with it that I felt like people who maybe have experienced something like generational nightmares would relate to and that they needed someone like me who's known as an expert about you know, dreams

to be able to validate their experience for him. You know, as as I read your story about being in school and doing a hypnotic regression there in your classroom, thinking to myself, Wow, imagine the lawsuits that would happen if that happened to some students. Yeah, that was the early nineteen eighties, and it was an enrichment class. And you know George, the teacher in that class, mister Whitmore, I'll

never forget him. Sometime before then, in the school year, he caught me in class reading from I found And here's another thing you don't find these days. I found a book on witchcraft in the school library and it contained spells in what I think was in German. It was like actual which craft spells. And I'm sitting there trying to show off to a friend of mine by

reading this stuff. And the teacher felt this sort of dark energy gathering around me, and he very seriously comes up to me and he's like, don't ever do that again. And I'm like, well, why, you know, I'm just goofing off and he's like, don't ever do that again. And he made me return the book to the library, and I think he might have brought in that analyst because he had a hunch, because it was a very unusual experience,

even for the early nineteen eighties. And I'm thankful to this day because Georgia gave me something that led me further into my life where I eventually found the solution to this. I wouldn't have ever known that there was a solution unless I would have been down the path of dream interpretation, as I've done professionally. By doing that for myself and writing about this subject, it armed me with the information and tools that I needed to resolve

this thirty year or deal. Yeah, I mean, the dark Man put you on a path that changed your life. Thank you dark Man. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and oddly, I found that the power to be able to respond to such a situation is something that you can carry

over into other aspects of your life. And I learned something from the experience of this, which is that we have this very odd way of creating the heroes in our world, is we put them through life and death or deals, or at least by pushing them to their limits and beyond. You know, if you look at what Special Forces soldiers go through when they're in training, maybe one out of twenty of them, let's say, are able

to pass the test. And this is also the kind of ordeal that saints and Shamans and others go through. We seem to have this thing built into deep into our own minds that will create challenges for us, and some of us go out and seek them. We might climb a mountain, or go through special Forces training, or you know, some kind of get a master's degree and enter into some kind of rarefied field of knowledge, something

that will really challenge us. But then there are others who they seem to create their challenges more through having to face ordeals of a different kind. And I found that sometimes that's what's really behind people's nightmares. They want the challenge to be able to overcome it. And the thing about it, George, is that it's kind of an all or nothing deal. I mean, it's kind of do or die in a way. Because that experience that I had could have not ended up so well for me.

I know other people who didn't make it through those kinds of ordeals and they end up crushed by them. So the way that I found that this works, ultimately you are setting yourself up to be able to face a challenge so that you can answer the call to greatness or at least have the opportunity to. And are all nightmares metaphorical in a sense that they're not literal

to the events that you recall from your dreams? Are nightmares that they're all allegorical, metaphorical, and you've got to figure out what your brain is trying to tell you. I find that there are layers to it. And yes, most nightmares dreams are metaphorical. They're little stories that are told to help you to learn, and they use metaphors

because they get around the egos, defenses and barriers. Metaphors leap right over top of those barriers and defenses, and so that's one reason why dreams speak to us mostly in metaphors. However, there is an objective side to some dreams. Louise van Franz, who as a student of Karl Jung, said that around twenty percent of dreams are objective, meaning that they're speaking more literally than they are figuratively, and that you are going to have everyone almost nightly is

going to have dreams that are objective. When people though have these experiences like I had. I think that it's better to approach it where the odds are in the favor of it being something metaphorical, because it can easily, for one, you can mislead yourself into thinking that a nightmare is something more than what it really is. Most of them are stories that are told using the language of symbolisms, which is just what an ordinary dream does.

But then if you don't find the answers, if you don't find the meaning and understand the dream through that route, then you need to start looking at the possibility, at least that it might not be metaphorical, that there might be something that's objective and literal about it. And do you have a working definition of what becomes a nightmare? What qualifies just something that's scary, or how do you break it down? Usually it's the emotional aspect of it

a nightmare. I mean, dreams and nightmares are being produced by the same process going on in the mind. The imaginative senator centers of the mind turn on and create these experiences for us that we know as dreams. But when you get into what you would classify as a nightmare, is that it's going to be for one very emotional it's going to affect you deeply. And two is it's

probably going to wake you up. You know, like you could have an anxiety dream, you could have a bad dream, and at the conclusion of it, it won't necessarily wake you up unless you wake up naturally to use the bathroom or something. But the nightmare is probably going to shock you awake. And that is one of the ways that you can classify the difference between a bad dream and a nightmare that's level of emotional affect and doesn't

wake you up or not. The nightmare is being produced by the same processes that here's going that's going on that are producing your dreams. So being able to tell the difference is usually a felt sense of what it is that you experienced and how strongly you reacted to it and make you make a further distinction between nightmares and night terror. Good question, yes, and you know this. Finding out the difference for me actually started on my

last appearance on Coast to Coast. We had a caller who described nightmares and I tried to approach it as helping him with nightmares, and I came to understand that there is a different prince between them and the main thing is that a nightmare is an energetic process because of trauma. The energy of trauma has been absorbed into your nervous system, and then you go to sleep and you relax enough that that energy can be triggered and released.

So the way that I learned about this in a more in depth sort of way was through a friend of mine who was having chronic nightmares we thought were nightmares, and what he described to me was just the most horrible sorts of carnage that you could imagine, just terrible experiences.

And I couldn't find a source of it. George, I've been and I've been working with dreams for thirty years now, and I've been through all the schools of thought I teach dream interpretation, so you know, I should be able to find especially with a friend who I'm working with closely and have multiple conversations over a span of time about what he was experiencing, and I kept thinking, there has to be these are nightmares, there has to be

a source behind it. But when he explained to me what had happened to him as when he was a teenager, where he had the experience of having a gun pointed at him and being told that he was going to die, that he was going to be murdered by this person holding the gun. The person holding the gun was his stepfather. He had to live in the same home with this person,

which meant that he experienced that terror. That there was the initial terror of thinking he was going to die, but then there was also the daily grind of living with someone who was that callous and dark hearted, and the fear that he lived under imprinted this energy into

his nervous system. So there he was thirty years later, and you know, he hasn't he's been out of that environment for all that time, but the trauma of what he experienced was still trapped within his own body, within his nervous system, and when he would go to bed at night, it would release, and then it became a night terror. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more