Two guests from a recent radio show - Author/scientist Dr David Whitehouse on the Chinese "surveillance balloon" shootdown... And J.M. DeBord on the types of dreams, how they happen - and what they mean...
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| Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained. | |
| Well, at the moment, as I'm recording this, then the weather is not as good as it was a couple of weeks ago when I thought we had the first taste of spring. | |
| But by the time you hear this, probably everything will have changed and, you know, the flowers will be coming out. | |
| So I'm not going to say any more about that. | |
| Thank you very much for all of your comments, both through my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, and in every other way about everything that is going on with me. | |
| There is a possibility, and it's only that, a possibility, that I might have to miss a little bit of time, either on air or online, and that is because of something that I've known for a while has been coming up. | |
| Like a lot of people, I have problems with my teeth, and I'm missing some teeth, and have been for a while, and because of various dental problems, have lost some others. | |
| So I now need some fairly urgent work, and I've been putting it off for years, honestly, because, like a lot of us, I don't have the money for the only kind of dentistry pretty much that exists in the UK if you're missing teeth, and that's private dentistry. | |
| It can be thousands upon thousands of pounds. | |
| At this stage, I don't have a choice. | |
| Like a lot of us, maybe this is familiar territory to you too. | |
| So I'm going to have to have some restorative work done quite soon. | |
| And I'm told that there is a possibility that, you know, reactions to it and that kind of thing might take me off the air for a little while. | |
| I'm certainly hoping that's not going to be the case and that painkillers and whatever else they give you antibiotics is going to help. | |
| But I don't have a choice at this stage. | |
| So I'm going to have to do it and literally bite, or not as the case may be, bite the bullet and have it done. | |
| It's embarrassing to talk about these things, but it's one of those things that I'm having to raid my savings, such as they are, and do it. | |
| And, you know, in previous years, maybe in a long time past era, then we might have been able to get help for these things on the NHS, but mostly dentistry now is private. | |
| You try and get an NHS dentist to look at you, and, you know, you're a lucky person. | |
| Maybe in your part of the country, you can. | |
| I can't. | |
| So everything is private these days. | |
| And, you know, it doesn't matter what level you're at, that's the way it's going to be. | |
| So anyway, that's just a little update in case there are any disappearances. | |
| I'm certainly not planning on any, but I wanted to tell you. | |
| Okay, some guests from my TV show here, the excellent Dr. David Whitehouse first, talking about the things that we've been observing and in some cases shooting down, or in one case shooting down in our skies that Chinese balloon and the other things that have been observed and all of the ramifications of that and the discussion about what would happen if it turned out to be extraterrestrial material up there. | |
| That would be a kind of contact. | |
| What would we do? | |
| So I talk all of those things around with David, who of course considers those things in his book, The Alien Perspective. | |
| After that, J.M. DeBord, who is a new guest to The Unexplained from the TV show, who I thought was fantastic and will definitely have on again, on dreams and nightmares, how they come about, where they come about, and what they mean. | |
| So, those are the guests on this edition of the show. | |
| Thanks to Adam for getting the shows out to you. | |
| He is the one who posts the shows online, which is being reasonably non-technical about these things. | |
| I can't do. | |
| I can do sound recording, but I can't do the IT stuff. | |
| So, Adam does that. | |
| Thank you, Adam. | |
| And what else? | |
| If you want to get in touch with me, you can do it through the website, theunexplained.tv. | |
| The Facebook page, if there are any developments about the TV show, or not as the case may be, then you can always find that out. | |
| If the show ever disappears for any reason, go to the Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, and there will be an explanation there. | |
| It's the only way that I can keep you informed, apart from telling you on this podcast. | |
| Okay, first edition on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| First edition, first guest on this edition of The Unexplained, The Remarkable, The Amazing Dr. David Whitehouse and the shoot-down of that Chinese balloon and the other items that were observed and dealt with and the ramifications of that. | |
| This is Dr. David Whitehouse. | |
| David, thank you very much for coming on. | |
| You're very welcome, Howard. | |
| I hope you're well. | |
| Oh, yes, absolutely. | |
| No, we are disembodied voices in the night tonight, David. | |
| And very nice it is to be. | |
| There's a certain mystique about radio. | |
| I've still got in this studio that I'm sitting the glaring TV lights on me, so they haven't turned those off. | |
| But, you know, we're kind of going back to the old intimate with the microphone stuff, and it's rather nice. | |
| You have this book out at the moment, which was released last year, The Alien Perspective, that addresses something that I think is very topical right now with the shooting down of these balloons that they were speculating the ownership of. | |
| People started asking, well, maybe these things are UFOs, maybe they're alien craft, which of course it doesn't seem they are, but one day they might be. | |
| And we would need, as I was discussing with Micah Hanks in hour one of this, and as you discuss so eloquently and so eruditely in the book, we need a policy. | |
| If we do discover something like this, and heaven forfend that we shoot it down or engage with it in some way, there needs to be some kind of internationally agreed protocol for what happens, don't you think? | |
| I certainly do. | |
| And hasn't it been an interesting 10 days or so? | |
| Because as you say, the objects in the skies were not extraterrestrial. | |
| They were spy balloons, PICO balloons. | |
| And there was a change of policy after the Chinese spy balloon, which was obviously a spy balloon from the get-go. | |
| And one hears that the CIA were tracking it from when it was launched in China several weeks ago. | |
| Obviously, there's a change of policy over that weekend to shoot things down. | |
| And it was really rather amazing to see the White House spokesman, spokeslady, Katrine Jumpier, saying, hey, guys, to the press, this is not aliens. | |
| Much as I love E.T., this is not aliens. | |
| And I heard that she had to say that Because Admiral John Christie coming along did not want to deny that it was aliens because he would have been quoted and the film would have been used on every single UFO program from now to eternity. | |
| And he didn't want that. | |
| But it all highlighted this UFO fever that was in Washington for a while and the suggestion that perhaps it is aliens. | |
| It all highlighted the policy. | |
| What do we do when it is? | |
| Now, there are only unofficial policies towards this, particularly in the United States. | |
| There is a protocol as to what to do if somebody finds something that is extraterrestrial. | |
| But it's kept unofficial because people do not want it to be found by a freedom of information search. | |
| It's slightly embarrassing. | |
| But as we've seen in the past week, perhaps it shouldn't be embarrassing anymore. | |
| And the protocol is that there are a whole bunch of scientists who would, military people who would be contacted in a fairly ad hoc manner and alerted to what has happened and be virtually asked, what do you think should happen from now on? | |
| Well, I think we definitely need a policy because one of these days, especially as I was saying in the first hour, that if America is now hypersensitively scanning the skies, if that's the right way to put it. | |
| In other words, if they've cranked up the sensitivity of their devices that detect things that are up there, then they're going to find all sorts of things that perhaps they weren't aware of. | |
| I think Americans might be quite shocked, actually, David, to be truthful with you, that they weren't already doing this to that degree. | |
| I think Americans tend to think that they're surrounded by a dome of safety. | |
| I think this will have been a wake-up call. | |
| However, when you start a sweep like that, when you get the brush up there in the sky, you never quite know what you're going to sweep up. | |
| And with the revelations about Tic-Tac UFOs a few years ago, all kinds of other stuff constantly in the news, one of these days, they might well pick up something. | |
| Whether they will tell us or not is another matter. | |
| Maybe they will have to because of the way that it happens. | |
| But they need to know what to do about this thing. | |
| How do you engage with something that you do not understand? | |
| It's interesting the encounter with these three smaller objects last weekend, which not aliens. | |
| I mean, as we've heard, one of them might have been a Pico balloon, which indicate there are more smaller objects up there, small balloons, scientific weather stations, than perhaps we realize. | |
| And the reason we haven't seen them before is because, as we've seen, the radars are not tuned to find them. | |
| So now the radars are tuned. | |
| You're quite right. | |
| We may find a lot more things up there of a similar nature. | |
| But the Tic-Tac UFOs are different because they are genuinely puzzling observations seen by fighter pilots flying off aircraft carriers in mostly, you know, just off California. | |
| They are very strange objects indeed. | |
| They've got very peculiar properties and flight movements and accelerations. | |
| And I don't think anybody really knows what they are. | |
| And there have been rumors in the past that, as well as these videos that we've seen over the past few years, that pilots have actually taken shots at these things. | |
| Although we haven't got anybody come forward and said they did done this, but there have been rumors in the community that that has actually happened. | |
| Now, is the policy changing now, that shots taken at these things would be routine, would be the policy what you would do? | |
| And if in the unlikely event these turn out to be an alien craft, it's not impossible, but I think it's very unlikely. | |
| Is the policy now to shoot first and ask questions later? | |
| And who would give that order? | |
| I mean, the Chinese balloon, that was on the order of President Biden. | |
| But maybe if there's now a policy, a military policy for taking down these things, maybe it's going to be some great, you know, like those old Kenny Everett TV shows, some great general in a tank with a ton of scrambled egg braid on his uniform. | |
| Is it going to be somebody at that level saying, let's get it down? | |
| You know, who is going to make that decision? | |
| And if they make that decision, they better be damn sure of what they're doing. | |
| It would be an admiralty decision which would be relayed to captains and commanders in the field. | |
| There would be a definite change of policy to do that. | |
| Now, you could argue that nobody knows what an alien spaceship looks like. | |
| So although these are unlikely to be aliens, who knows what an alien spaceship looks like? | |
| And they are certainly peculiar, and nobody has any explanation for them at the moment. | |
| Do they travel across interstellar distances to survey us, to surveil us, to examine us, to gather information, and allow themselves to be shot down? | |
| Seeing that these Tic-Tac videos of UFOs have got extraordinary properties. | |
| If we fire on one, if we bring one down, who knows what will be the results of that? | |
| It's probably a good job that they're not aliens, but you see the point that aliens. | |
| One day they might be. | |
| It has been said about alien encounters, that they could happen tomorrow. | |
| They could not happen forever. | |
| But until it happens, we will not be ready. | |
| And then when it does happen, it will then be too late. | |
| We need, as you are implying, we need a discussion about what to do when we find evidence of aliens either in a sky survey, that we pick up a signal from a distant star or a distant planet, | |
| either if we find an artifact somewhere or evidence of engineering, or if we find some evidence here on Earth in various forms, which indicate an alien presence pastor at the moment. | |
| We need to talk more about that because it is a fundamental point in history for the human species. | |
| And I don't think we have discussed it as much as we should. | |
| There are, among scientists, protocols as to what to do if they find signals or anything on another planet. | |
| But there are, if you like, governments are unimpressed by this because you can be sure that whatever the scientists agree, there are rules for verification and for announcement to the press and informing the governments of various countries, that would go straight out of the window when something is found. | |
| It's rather like Mike Tyson saying everybody's got a plan until they're hit in the face. | |
| But if we're hit in the face by all the plans would go. | |
| So we really need a more widespread discussion. | |
| And if what's happened in the past 10 days or so has done anything, it might prompt us to think about, well, this is a more serious subject than people have given it credit for. | |
| Sure, sure. | |
| And people are talking about it. | |
| Look, when you and I were boys, the conversation that we've just had, nobody was really, well, they were probably having in little news sheets disseminated by UFO groups and posted out to people second-class mail, but they weren't being had on forums like this, were they? | |
| Well, that's modern communications. | |
| The fact is that now when somebody sees something strange in the sky, it's everywhere instantly. | |
| Now, I think that most of the things we see in the Scribe are perfectly obvious explanations. | |
| And even the ones that were shown in the Senate hearings a short while ago, even some of those were obviously out-of-focus objects which were seen in peculiar ways. | |
| But the tic-tacs weren't. | |
| And those are extremely strange. | |
| And you're right. | |
| In the past week and alongside the mass communications we've got now, we are in a new era of trying to understand what's in the sky. | |
| That we can get data very quickly. | |
| We're realizing there are more objects there when we realize this may boost the subject of UFOs and diminish the subject of aliens, but something is changing. | |
| I get that feeling. | |
| You would have to be not looking in the right places and not having your ears open if you didn't get that. | |
| Exactly, David. | |
| One quick space question, if I may. | |
| According to a number of media outlets, Russia's space agency, this is according to a report from Fizz.org, but it's on many other agencies too. | |
| Russia's space agency said on Saturday, yesterday, it was planning to send a rescue ship on February 24th, a couple of days from now, to bring home three astronauts whose return vehicle was damaged by a meteoroid. | |
| The launch is expected February 24th. | |
| A spokesman for Ross Cosmos Space Agency said last Monday the space agency said it had delayed the launch of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft, saying a supply ship docked at the International Space Station ISS had leaked coolant. | |
| A rescue mission. | |
| Yes, the crew that went up in one Soyuz capsule can't come down in this. | |
| Well, they might be able to, but nobody wants to take the chance because a radiator's leaked. | |
| Radiators are very important for spaceships because when you're in a vacuum, your spaceship could either get very, very hot or very, very cold. | |
| And you need to be able to manage the heat. | |
| And the external radiators on the Soyuz are absolutely essential to be perfectly safe and to manage the craft. | |
| The problem with this is, although that they've started to refuel the replacement that's going to go up and bring the crew down, and that fueling process and preparation process on the ground is now irreversible. | |
| They have to send that craft up in the next month or so. | |
| The problem is that there are questions as to whether or not it was a meteoroid that actually hit this radiator and damaged it in the first place. | |
| There have been increasingly questions over the years, growing so in the last six months, about the quality control of Russian spacecraft. | |
| And that coupled with the fact that many components, Russian components of the International Space Station are way beyond their guarantee dates, their useful date, and are starting to show decay and failures at a greater level than in the past, does, I think, ask severe questions about the funding and the management of Russian space assets, particularly when it's integrating, interfacing with the Americans and the Europeans. | |
| Well, as they say in various places, David Whitehouse is the real deal, Dr. David Whitehouse, who I'll be eternally grateful for all of the help that he gives me on all of my shows. | |
| Now, J.M. DeBord is an expert in dreams and nightmares. | |
| Where do they come from? | |
| What do they mean? | |
| How can we interpret them? | |
| How can we deal with them? | |
| This is my first conversation with him, and I'm sure on the basis of this, there will be more. | |
| We're going to talk about dreams and nightmares. | |
| In this last week or so, quite a few people, including my own sister, have told me about the dreams that they've been having. | |
| And I too, whether it's anything to do with the phases of the moon, or the fact that it's nearly spring, atmospheric pressure, who knows? | |
| Or just the general pressure of life, I have been having a movie-style roll call of strange dreams, sometimes scary ones. | |
| Most nights that I've gone to bed, if I've slept enough and I've slept deeply enough, that's been happening to me again. | |
| And it was something that happened to me and millions of people around the world through COVID. | |
| So I thought we get on somebody really good, an expert on dreams and nightmares. | |
| And if you have a question for the person we're about to speak with, or indeed you have your own experience that you want to share, then you know the way to do it. | |
| It's 0344-4991000 on the phone here at Talk Radio. | |
| You can tweet us in the usual way, or you can text us in the usual way. | |
| I'm sure you're more than familiar with that, and we would love to have your contribution. | |
| Come on the phone if you'd like. | |
| JM DeBoard is the man we're speaking with. | |
| He's an author and teacher of dream interpretation and analysis. | |
| He's host of the Dreams That Shape Us podcast, senior community moderator of the world's most popular place to share and discuss dreams, which is ourdreams at Reddit.com. | |
| He's online to us now. | |
| JM, thank you so much for doing this at short notice because you were originally due to be on next week. | |
| So thank you for making it tonight. | |
| Hey, Howard. | |
| It's my pleasure. | |
| I'm glad to be able to talk with you and your listeners about a subject that I really love: about dreams. | |
| And, you know, look, doing some research today, I've been reading about you. | |
| I've also watched a couple of interviews that you've done. | |
| This is clearly something that occupies most of your time. | |
| It's a fascinating subject. | |
| How did you get into it? | |
| It began with learning that there was this Swiss psychiatrist named Carl Jung, who had a lot of really profound things to say about dreams. | |
| He was a kind of a protege of Sigmund Freud back during the pioneering days of dream psychology. | |
| And it really resonated with me because he talked about dreams as showing you windows into the deepest inner aspects of who you are as a person and giving you insights into the way that you really tick. | |
| And this has always been a fascinating subject for me. | |
| Any, you know, any method of being able to understand oneself better had always been interesting to me since I was just a teenager. | |
| I started with Carl Jung and I had a mentor who helped me to apply the theories to my dream life. | |
| I'm really sorry to stop you when you're in full flow there, but you sound a little bit like you're gargling water as you're doing this. | |
| I think that there is something wrong with the internet connection. | |
| Maybe you've got some other programs open on your device, but I wonder if we can reconnect with you, and I'll come back to you in a minute or so. | |
| Is that okay? | |
| Yeah, that would be fine. | |
| I'll plug in through a different interface and we'll see if we can get a better connection. | |
| Okay. | |
| Give me about 30 seconds. | |
| That's great. | |
| Thank you. | |
| J.M. Debord here, talking about how he got involved in this fascinating subject, which I think affects all of us really. | |
| You know, show me a person who doesn't, says they don't dream, and I'll show you somebody who perhaps just doesn't recall those dreams, because I think we all do. | |
| In fact, I think it's essential. | |
| I think it's almost like a laundry of the mind. | |
| You make sense of things. | |
| Now, why do we have recurring dreams and sometimes recurring nightmares? | |
| I don't know. | |
| You know, I have nightmares about people I've known in the past, and I'm not thinking about them during the day. | |
| They're not in my mind. | |
| Maybe this happens to you too. | |
| But I find myself periodically being with them in the place where they're living, you know, now and them showing me their life as it is now. | |
| And they're not occupying my day-to-day space. | |
| I don't think about them consciously. | |
| So I don't get why those people, and maybe you can relate to this, are invading my nights. | |
| But sometimes they do. | |
| And that's what we're talking about. | |
| So, JM, thank you very much for reconnecting. | |
| You said that you got yourself a mentor in all of this. | |
| Yeah, Larry Pasavento, he's a counselor here in the States. | |
| And he taught me how to connect the ideas of Carl Jung and the concepts of dream psychology and actually see it at work in my dreams. | |
| So this to me was just fascinating. | |
| And I tell you, Howard, I was off to the races after that. | |
| Like it really grabbed hold of me as a subject that I was interested in, especially once I learned that there really is this way of seeing into your dreams and then your dreams seeing into who you are. | |
| So that was about 30 years ago. | |
| And I've been immersed in the study and practice of dream interpretation ever since then. | |
| I know that you're very keen on a demarcation, you know, set of demarcation lines between the different types of dreams. | |
| I didn't know there were different types of dreams. | |
| I just thought they were dreams and the scary ones were nightmares and that was it. | |
| But there is more to it, isn't there? | |
| Yeah, there sure is. | |
| See, it depends on the stage of sleep that you're in. | |
| This is the first demarcation is the stage of sleep that you're in. | |
| Because we go through as we sleep, sleep is like dreaming is not just one thing. | |
| You can have light sleep, you can have deep sleep, you have REM sleep. | |
| REM sleep is when, you know, rapid eye movement. | |
| This has been identified as when dreams are the most vivid and they're also the most experiential and emotional. | |
| But there's also dreaming that occurs during the NREM stage or non-REM stages of sleep. | |
| And those tend to be more thought-like. | |
| If you wake up from them, you might even think that you hadn't really even been asleep because it's so much like just the, you know, kind of in the surface levels of your mind. | |
| And then there's the deepest sleep. | |
| It's called delta stage sleep. | |
| We used to think that no dreaming went on during delta stage, but we've woken up in studies, we've woken up people from their delta stage sleep and they'll say, yeah, I can remember dreaming, but it's very, very deep and distant. | |
| It's like you're deep underwater because you really are. | |
| Your brain is in delta stage pattern, which is very slow and meandering. | |
| This is when people say that they have experiences like having visitations from loved ones, or they find themselves in places that seem very far away from the material reality. | |
| You might call those the sort of the paranormal experiences of dreaming tend to happen during those stages. | |
| Edgar Casey, the famous psychic, and Bob Monroe, who was famous for Journeys Out of Body and his other books on astral projection, both said that the spirit of the person leaves the body during the delta stage of sleep. | |
| Maybe not so much leaves, but it goes back. | |
| You kind of tune in to another place where they say that everyone originates from as conscious beings. | |
| You might call that place heaven. | |
| So it's, yes, there are different types of dreams. | |
| I used to think that there wasn't. | |
| I used to think, like most people, that dreaming was just pretty much what we understand from the REM stage. | |
| You have these vivid dreams and they can pretty much follow a pattern. | |
| You know, you can use the concepts and theories of dream psychology to penetrate into them. | |
| But what I found is that's actually a minority of the dreams that we have every night. | |
| Most of them, Howard, or at least a majority of them are coming during these other stages of sleep. | |
| So I think it's important to know what's going on, what type of dream that you're having, because as a dream interpreter, if you try applying the conventional theories and techniques of dream interpretation and analysis to these other types of dreams, you're not going to get very far. | |
| But what I find is that people will try to make it fit into that box. | |
| They have a preconceived notion of what a dream is, and then they'll try to make all dreams fit into that box. | |
| And I think it does an injustice to the people who you're trying to help. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, that's something that's brand new to me because I've spoken to people about dreams before, and I can't recall them saying, well, that's interesting, Howard, you've recalled this personal experience, and it's kind of you to share this. | |
| What stage of sleep were you at? | |
| Were you in a deep sleep that night? | |
| Were you in a light sleep that night? | |
| Were you just before waking up? | |
| Those things determine the nature of the experience from what you said. | |
| And the approach to understanding. | |
| And the way that you unpick it. | |
| Right, right. | |
| What's the difference then? | |
| You see, look, again, I'm being simplistic here because it's all I know. | |
| I was five, and I remember watching a TV program you might be aware of. | |
| It's a British program called Doctor Who, which has a very long 60-year or so illustrious history here in the UK. | |
| And I remember seeing quite an early one of those when I was a little tiny boy in black and white. | |
| And then because I was a little boy of five, going to bed early and having what was probably the worst nightmare of my life because of that show. | |
| But I don't understand why and how I had a nightmare and why it frightened me so much when I don't recall being that scared when I watched it on TV. | |
| But in the nightmare, I was in abject terror. | |
| So what makes a dream about something you've experienced cross over to being a scary dream, aka I think, unless you tell me differently, a nightmare? | |
| Well, great question. | |
| Because a lot of people think that just because they'll have content in their dreams that reflects things that they've watched and listened to, that all it is is regurgitating those memories. | |
| It's like Scrooge says about the undigested bit of gruel that is the ghost of Christmas past. | |
| He says, you're just this phantasm of the night. | |
| You mean nothing. | |
| You know, you're just this bit of me that is unresolved and undigested. | |
| And that's what people will think when they have an experience like yours where, you know, Doctor Who, you know, this, the show, something about it gets incorporated into a dream that really shocks the pants off of you. | |
| What the dream is doing is it's the dreaming mind. | |
| This is the concept that I teach, is the dreaming mind is like a storyteller that is observing 24 hours a day what's going on with you. | |
| It is observing all of the movies you watch, the books that you read. | |
| It knows how to use that, use those stories and incorporate it into your dreams. | |
| So it found something in that show that you watched that it could use as a parallel with something that was going on in your life. | |
| And because it was a fear that it probably, because it was a nightmare, it was probably related to something that you didn't understand. | |
| That was exactly what I was about to say. | |
| So does that, and I'm sorry for jumping in here, it was like that sort of light going on Eureka moment when you said that. | |
| At five, of course, I wouldn't have understood the complexities and the finer points of what I was watching on TV. | |
| So I guess what I'm asking is, are you more likely to have a scary dream or a nightmare if you've experienced something that you cannot quite rationalize? | |
| Oh, very much. | |
| Yes. | |
| You know, a lot of the things that scare us the most are things that are incomprehensible to us. | |
| I mean, I know on your show that you've, you know, you've talked to people who've had experiences like, let's say, I don't know specifically if it was about alien abduction, but that's one of the things that people can experience that they have no frame of reference for understanding what's happening to them. | |
| So in a similar sort of way, when you encounter things in your life that you're not ready for that are incomprehensible to you, then they get incorporated into your dreams. | |
| And these are the things that tend to frighten us. | |
| And the things that frighten us become our nightmares. | |
| Once you understand those things better, whatever it is, once you understand it better, it's no longer nightmare fuel. | |
| This is why children are known to have the frequent nightmares until about the age of 12 or 13 on average, because by the time they get to that age, they understand the world better. | |
| They understand themselves better. | |
| And the things that used to be incomprehensible and frightening to them, they have a better grasp of so that they're no longer being turned into nightmares. | |
| Isn't that interesting, James? | |
| So if you're a parent listening to this now, talking to my listener, and your child has had a nightmare, do you recommend, even though your average parent develops a lot of savvy, like my parents did, but they're not qualified psychiatrists or psychologists or dream analysts. | |
| They're just good parents. | |
| But is it recommended that you ask your child, what was it about? | |
| And then you try to explain it? | |
| Well, I would ask them what it was about and think of it as a story. | |
| It is something that they've experienced. | |
| And this is the first thing that you need to approach. | |
| When you approach talking with someone about a nightmare, whether it's a child or an adult, you need to realize that they've had an experience. | |
| It's an experience because it was something that was completely believable as it was happening. | |
| They think that the nightmare is actually happening. | |
| Only when they wake up do they go, oh, it was a nightmare. | |
| It wasn't real. | |
| But I'll put air quotes around real because while you're experiencing it, it's very real. | |
| So the worst thing that you can do is say, oh, it was just a dream. | |
| Forget about it. | |
| This is unfortunately what some counselors, psychiatrists, and parents, whoever, what they do because they can't, they don't know how to approach talking with someone about that kind of experience. | |
| So you get them for them, one, the ability to be able to share it with someone does wonders. | |
| At least you can externalize it now. | |
| If you have had a nightmare and you can't talk with someone about it or a disturbing dream or any dream, really, but especially disturbing dreams, then you feel like it's still stuffed down inside of you. | |
| By being able to talk about it with someone who shows genuine interest, it does a lot to relieve the pressure that's behind it. | |
| Now, as far as analyzing a dream, I think that it's better to talk with Someone in a way where they can figure it out for themselves. | |
| What did the dream or the nightmare, what did the experience mean to them? | |
| This, the old way of interpreting dreams, was you would have the analyst who probably has an advanced degree. | |
| They're probably a psychologist or a psychiatrist. | |
| And then you would sit down in the chair or on the couch and you would tell them about the dream. | |
| And then they would tell you what it means. | |
| And Howard, this is an antiquated way of doing business in the dream work field. | |
| In modern dream interpretation techniques, we ask the right sorts of questions to begin with to get the person to reveal their own insights or to under to get to their own insights. | |
| You as an analyst might have ideas based on your experience and your knowledge to be able, you might have an idea of what the dream means, but you don't want to impose it on them. | |
| I'm a member of the Association for the Study of Dreams, and this is the first rule in our ethics, is that we never impose a dream interpretation. | |
| So it's a kind of prime directive for dreams. | |
| So are you saying, just as we wrap this section and go to some commercials and then come back, JM, are you saying that there is always a lesson or a message or some kind of symbol, sign for you in every dream? | |
| Is that right? | |
| Well, the dreams that are the meaningful ones, the REM stage dreams, I will say the conventional sorts of dreams that we've learned about and that are usually illustrated in dream theory and psychology, I will say yes. | |
| But I'll go back to what Carl Jung said about it. | |
| He said that dreams are invariably trying to teach the ego something it does not know or understand. | |
| And whether that is a message or a lesson or a perspective, I think that his words are better for framing our understanding of it. | |
| Dreams are trying to teach you what you don't know. | |
| Boy. | |
| And you probably need to know. | |
| That's a great point to park it for now. | |
| JM Debord is here. | |
| Now, listen, this is an introduction to JM, so you don't have to do this. | |
| We can do this, and hopefully he'll come back and we'll do it on the next conversation here. | |
| But I mean, if you've got a dream experience or a nightmare experience, I'm pretty sure, and I'm going out in the limit, that JM won't mind hearing it from you. | |
| If, especially at times like this, you want to know what's happening, the latest news about the show, what's going to happen to it, anything else, my podcast, schedule, all the rest of it, go to my official Facebook page. | |
| That's the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, and all that information is there for you to share and be a part of. | |
| I am here only on talk radio, and on talk TV, there's something else. | |
| I've no idea what. | |
| Let's get back to JM Debord. | |
| We're talking about dreams and nightmares. | |
| JM, where do I take this now? | |
| I've got one from Shane in Sydney here, a tweet from him. | |
| Shane is a longtime listener, and he's listening in a completely different time zone from where I am or you are, JM. | |
| He says, I dreamt of my great-grandparents who've been long gone. | |
| They're telling me not to close the door. | |
| That's very strange. | |
| Have you just a ballpark thought about that? | |
| I mean, we don't know what stage of sleep Shane had that in. | |
| We don't know if he was in a deep sleep or a light sleep or whether it was just before waking. | |
| But would there be something in that for him? | |
| I would ask him if he has a sense of close the door to what and think of it as a metaphor. | |
| In the conventional type of dream experience, everything that is communicated to you is some type of, has a metaphorical meaning. | |
| A metaphor makes a comparison between things. | |
| They are apparently unlike each other, but you can see the meaningful connection once you understand the metaphor. | |
| So when we use a figure of speech that includes something like, close the door to the past. | |
| So if somebody says, don't close the door, and it means to the past, then you understand the metaphor. | |
| So what she didn't share was what exactly was the door being closed to it. | |
| That may not have been explained by the dream. | |
| And how are this is where dreams leave it up to you to figure some things out because they don't necessarily want to give you every piece of information. | |
| And the reason is because it would be too easy. | |
| It would be handing the answers to you. | |
| So in a situation like that, I get that, where Shane is having a dream about his grandparents telling him to not close the door, to leave the door open, right? | |
| Okay, to not close the door, which is, you know, similar but different, if you know what I'm saying. | |
| I missed out a vital word there, but nevertheless, to not close the door, there's some kind of what are you not closing the door on? | |
| What are you not allowing into your life? | |
| So, I mean, it's just the same thing as we've been discussing in reverse. | |
| I'm sure there are people who have the reverse dream. | |
| So there is a message there, but you've got to be a bit of a Hercule Pyro and try to work that out for yourself. | |
| And I guess if you're having difficulty, if you're disturbed by your dreams on a regular basis, that's where you have to see an expert. | |
| Well, yes, it can. | |
| What I teach people, though, that they can do DIY dream interpretation. | |
| They can go to dreams123.com right now and learn my three-step process. | |
| I wanted to, one of the reasons why I started teaching dream interpretation is because once I had, I had help figuring it out. | |
| But once I figured it out for myself, I was like, wow, this isn't as hard as it seems to be. | |
| You know, I mean, it can be a little obscure sometimes, Howard. | |
| I mean, it's not easy, but once you have basic facts, information, and a process to follow, then you can get into the interpretation of your own dreams. | |
| And that makes you the authority on your dreams. | |
| And are they when people find out that you go ahead, Howard? | |
| I was just going to, because it flows from what you've just been saying. | |
| Are there exercises? | |
| You said that you've got this process, process, as you would say, you know, to allow people to do this. | |
| But are there exercises that you can do to allow yourself to more readily remember the dreams that you've had? | |
| I mean, I've got a tweet here from somebody who says it's been years since he remembered any dream that he had. | |
| But assuming that you do remember your dreams, are there ways that you can employ to make you remember them better? | |
| Or in the case of Mark here, who's tweeted me, he says he hasn't remembered a dream for years. | |
| Is there a way that he can deploy a method that would allow him to remember the dreams that he's probably having, but just not recording? | |
| Yes, there is. | |
| First, you are dreaming. | |
| You have to establish that for yourself first. | |
| A lot of people say instead of that they're not remembering their dreams, what they'll say, Howard, is that they're not having dreams. | |
| That's not true. | |
| Everyone dreams, it's just that they're not remembering them. | |
| So the first thing is you need to give it the time and attention. | |
| And that means when you wake up in the morning, first thing, think only about what you remember from your dreams. | |
| Stay still in your bed, in your sleep position. | |
| So basically laying down, unless you sleep, you know, like in a reclined position. | |
| But what that does is it's a bodily cue. | |
| A lot of people get up and they start their day and those dream memories, they start vanishing very quickly. | |
| Dream memories are stored in a special type of memory. | |
| It's a short-term memory that is easily overwritten by new memories. | |
| So when you get up and start thinking about something other than trying to recall your dreams, you are forming new memories and they are overriding the dreams that were in your short-term memory. | |
| Another thing that I would do is right around in the middle of the night after about four, four and a half hours, is either wake yourself up or some people wake up naturally. | |
| Just lay there in bed and think about what you were just dreaming. | |
| The practice of this really helps. | |
| So you have to assure yourself that you have been dreaming. | |
| I've got a question from Jenny in Farringdon in London. | |
| And I'm going to try and distill this. | |
| But I'm wondering whether, like when I was a little child, I didn't understand Doctor Who. | |
| And there is an awful lot of scary and worrying news around at the moment. | |
| And I wonder if this has had any impact on Jenny. | |
| Jenny keeps having a recurring dream where London is being bombed by fighter jets. | |
| And she's also having, I don't know whether that's part of the same scenario, she's being stuck on top of a jagged cliff hundreds of feet up in terrible fear. | |
| But there seem to be two parts to this, whether it's one dream or whether it's two. | |
| You know, let's just look at the London being bombed by fighter jets. | |
| Now there's a lot of worrying news about what's going on in Ukraine and whether that might become a broader conflict. | |
| I wonder if that is about this whole thing of things that scare you and you can't rationalize then appearing somehow served up in your dreams. | |
| And that you have no control over because you hear about these things happening in other parts of the world and how they could start affecting you where you are. | |
| And these are much bigger than what you as an individual have any control over. | |
| So I would say that the first thing to do is if there is something that you're listening to or watching that's using a lot of scare tactics, then I would stay away from it. | |
| Here in the States, we've got certain news programs, they'll remain unnamed, that really like to crank up the fear factor. | |
| You know, they make everything very ominous. | |
| And if you need to consume the news, then do it from a source that maybe isn't so sensationalized. | |
| But also it's to be careful of what you're taking in. | |
| The second thing I would do is anything that you can do to calm yourself and look inside, like to address wherever that fear is coming from. | |
| These things that stir you up from the news, they have to be able to latch onto something that's already within you. | |
| So it is finding something that is a fear that is already within you. | |
| It's playing into your existing fear, right? | |
| Listen, I'm a news guy, right? | |
| That's my background. | |
| Saturday, I gave myself a day off the news because I just realized that all of this stuff about the quality or lack of quality of our government, the fact that prices are going up, the war in Ukraine, the fear that it might spread, all of the stuff, stuff, stuff that we get, there's nothing that I can do about it. | |
| And I am a news guy and a junkie of news. | |
| I turned it off on Saturday. | |
| And I tell you what, I slept well that night, Saturday into Sunday. | |
| Just quickly on Jenny's trip. | |
| I don't know if you can do this bit quickly. | |
| Jenny also says that she's stuck on top of a jagged cliff, terrified hundreds of feet up. | |
| What might that mean? | |
| Do you see the metaphor in that? | |
| I mean, we use these sorts of figures of speech, like, you know, like you for picture the scene. | |
| She's there. | |
| She's alone in a dangerous sort of situation. | |
| That might be a reflection of her general state of being, how she feels, what's going on in her mind. | |
| She feels like she's alone and surrounded by danger and she can't get away from it. | |
| A lot of times what dreams show you through their landscapes like that and the settings is the general psychological atmosphere of what's going on in your own mind and the conditions of your feelings. | |
| I would recommend, Jenny, that if you could take a walk out in the country, listen to the birds, smell some, you know, the flowers this time of year in Tucson, Arizona, where I am, things the spring is already here. | |
| You know, but if wherever you are in the world right now, get some time out in nature, listen to the birds, and like what you did, Howard, turn off the TV or the radio for a while. | |
| Get away from it. | |
| I think it's massively important. | |
| You know, we could talk all night about this, Jay. | |
| I'm really glad that you could do this tonight. | |
| But, you know, when I go for a walk in my local park, which is a huge royal park here, as they call it, it's like a huge area of countryside. | |
| It's got deer and swans and all kinds of nature. | |
| And when I look at them like I looked at them yesterday, I thought to myself, you are blissfully unaware of all of the stuff, the garbage, I guess I can use the word crap at this time of night on the radio. | |
| You know, all of the crap. | |
| You don't know anything about this and your cycles of life have continued the same because you're not bombarded by all the human garbage that we are bombarded by. | |
| It's a great place to be just only for a day. | |
| One quick question from John in Leicester. | |
| Thanks for this, John. | |
| Flying dreams. | |
| You know, almost like being naked at the bus stop, these are dreams that people have all the time. | |
| Can you ask your guest, that's J.M. Debord, about flying dreams where you're flying like a superhero, like, you know, Superman himself? | |
| Some say, says John in Leicester, that it's because during dreams of that nature, you leave your body. | |
| You're actually performing that within the dream. | |
| What do you think? | |
| Well, I do know, I have had that experience, and I do know people who have sort of mastered some of the deeper abilities of consciousness, abilities of the mind, and they have frequent dreams about flying under their own power. | |
| And they say that they are actually having, call it an astral projection experience. | |
| Some people call it dream walking. | |
| And that is one way of interpreting it. | |
| And I think that that experience is, it can happen. | |
| The other thing is I think it expresses the feelings like feeling uplifted. | |
| Your spirit is soaring. | |
| These are figures of speech that we use. | |
| And dreams visualize these ideas. | |
| If you say that I feel like I'm on top of the clouds, that is just like a really uplifted feeling. | |
| You feel great. | |
| Well, how would a dream visualize that idea? | |
| It would show you flying up in the clouds. | |
| So there's a feeling that comes with it. | |
| And that's what I would really like to do. | |
| It's almost aspirational. | |
| There are loads of things that I would love to ask you. | |
| And sadly, we've only got about a minute and a half or less. | |
| One of them was about precognitive dreams. | |
| I guess if you can just answer this question and then the next time we talk, and I hope we do talk again soon. | |
| Precognitive dreams, do they happen? | |
| Do people have predictive dreams? | |
| Yes, they do all the time. | |
| Everyone does. | |
| It's a common ability of the mind. | |
| Precognition has been studied very widely. | |
| Among all the dream phenomenon, it probably has the most scientific basis. | |
| Julia Mossbridge is a neuroscientist who studied it very deeply. | |
| And I can say I've had many of these types of dreams. | |
| They can be about things that you're going to eat for breakfast in the morning or a life-changing event that is. | |
| Isn't that interesting? | |
| JM Debord, thank you so much. | |
| What is your website address so people can go and check you out? |