Dream Interpretation with JM DeBord

This week on The Less Stressed Life, JM DeBord joins me to talk about decoding dreams, what they really mean, why they matter, and how they can guide us toward more awareness in our waking life. We dig into why violent or embarrassing dreams are not what they seem, why exes keep showing up, what it means when you smell things in dreams, and how dream journaling can be the “eighth habit” of highly effective people.

If you have ever woken up from a dream wondering “what the heck was that,” this conversation will help you understand the patterns, symbols, and stories your night brain is trying to tell you.

Find JM DeBord's new book, The Science of Paranormal here: https://jmdebord.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Dreams are stories told in symbols, not literal predictions
• Violent dreams often point to boundaries or inner conflict, not hidden violence
• Ex dreams usually highlight patterns or feelings in current relationships
• Smells in dreams can reinforce the message of the story such as flowers, sewage, or food
• Journaling dreams improves recall and helps you recognize repeating themes

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ABOUT GUEST:
JM DeBord, known online as “RadOwl,” is the author of several books on dreams, including the bestselling Dream Interpretation Dictionary. As moderator of Reddit’s r/Dreams forum, he has helped thousands make sense of their dream life with a blend of Jungian psychology and practical insight. Through his website Dreams123.com, courses, and trainings, JM makes dream interpretation accessible, showing how our night stories can guide healing, growth, and self-understanding. 

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://jmdebord.com/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/interpretdreams 
Website: https://www.dreamschool.net/ 

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY OF LESS STRESSED LIFE:
🍽️ Over restriction is dead
🥑 Whole food is soul food and fed is best
🔄 Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
🤝 You don’t have to figure it out alone
❤️ Do your best and leave the rest

SPONSOR:
Thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode! Looking for a clean, tasty way to stay hydrated this summer? Their Electrolyte Supreme is a go-to for energy, minerals, and daily hydration support. Use code LESSSTRESSED10 at JigsawHealth.com for 10% off—unlimited use!

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] JM Debord: If you are in a shitty situation, and you start smelling sewage, okay. So now the dream has created something that might visually represent the idea, but it's also reinforcing the idea of a shitty situation by actually giving you the smell.

[00:00:18] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together. Bones just breaking. I gotta get myself a little.

All right. Today on the Less Dressed Life I have JM Deboard. He is the author of numerous published books about dreams, including the bestselling dream interpretation dictionary. I saw him speak live back in April at an entrepreneur conference that I was at. And recently I had a client asking me about dreams and I thought, I know nothing about this, I know a guy who might know something.

Let's have him on the podcast, and the rest is history. So here he is. He so kindly agreed and he has a book coming out soon, so I'm sure that helps, right? Anytime you've got a book coming out, it's wonderful to go on podcast. So we're delighted to have you here to talk to us about Dreams today. Thank you.

[00:01:42] JM Debord: Christa, 

[00:01:43] Christa Biegler, RD: can we call you James? Jason? I'm sorry. Jason, not J James. Yeah, it 

[00:01:47] JM Debord: says JM on my books, but I chose that a long time ago in 2013 when my first book about Dreams came out and it just, I was trying to. Establish there was Jason Debord who had lived to that 40 some years of his life as Jason.

And I wanted the author, Jason, to be distinct from, the past, Jason. Oh, I like that. That's cool. I chose jm. Cool. So 

[00:02:10] Christa Biegler, RD: cool. It helps. It's an author. 

[00:02:12] JM Debord: It's, yeah, first initial, middle, initial plus it's gender neutral, which I wanted at the time to present, a lot of my audience actually, when I do the live events and stuff a lot of my audience, I found that people who are attracted to dreamwork tend to be in the female category.

It just probably 75% of my audiences and, from James's the marketing and stuff, that identifying your audience and being able to speak to them in a way is very important.

[00:02:37] Christa Biegler, RD: Everyone wants to feel, seen or identify with someone. And stereotypically women are a little more in tune with themselves, right?

Yeah. So I think that makes sense for dreams. That's true. And how you've gotten into this, and I'd like to know, how did this happen? I, that's always my first most curious question is like, how did you get into this realm? How did you get into dream work? What, I know you just.

[00:02:57] JM Debord: A lot,

I'm still asking myself that question.

How in the world did I end up doing this? And it's funny is that the real answer is that I had the freedom in my life to explore a lot of different things especially when it comes to personal developments. Everything from, astrology all kinds of different things from a young age, and it appealed to me.

But dreamwork came along at a time in my life when I was looking for answers, and I went to see a counselor who said, Jason, I can give you answers, but. If you're actually gonna incorporate any of this, you need to find the answers within yourself and your dreams can do that for you. And he had some training in the Jungian psychology, the psychology of Carl Jung, very well known for his insights into dreams.

And I tell you, Krista, from the moment that I opened, like we did the first dream, and I realized, oh my God, this dream is actually it. Not just a bunch of nonsense. The imagery means something, it resonates personally. It's helping me to see what's going on inside me better than I would be able to do on my own.

I was hooked, absolutely hooked. I was like, this is fascinating. Started cracking open books from people like Carl Jung and found the whole psychology of the unconscious mind, which is where our dreams are being created to be. Fascinating also. So I came into it first looking for answers, looking for help, and it snowballed from there.

I studied this stuff on my own and practiced, I've got my dream journal here. I'll show off real quick. It's the, 

[00:04:33] Christa Biegler, RD: oh, 

[00:04:34] JM Debord: there we go. One of many, the journals I've started off with, I probably have 20 of 'em in a drawer over here from over the years of writing, making a practice of writing down my dreams, and found that it is a very it's a good habit for highly effective people.

There was this book a long time ago, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and I have probably said this before, you might even have heard me say it at the event with James. 'cause when I run across crowds of people who are like entrepreneurs and they're try self-help and self-development and stuff, I like to say that dream journaling is the eighth habit of highly effective people because it's helping you to keep track of what's going on from within you and.

When you have content that comes up in a dream, it's showing you where you are at and where you're headed. It can really help to summarize an area or of your life, or an entire segment or even your whole life. It can summarize it in this very potent metaphorical imagery. And then there's a part of the mind that is more accessible while we're dreaming.

That is very good at seeing where the wind is blowing. It's very good at seeing what's arising from inside you, and it will give you this imagery that will help you to understand what's going on. So I was abs I was hooked mainly because of the way that it helped me to see into my inner world. But as I got further into it, I found that dreams are it's, I practice a lot of different forms of holistic health and, exercise and journaling of any kind.

I've been to seminars and workshops. I was a yoga instructor for a while. I taught Pilates. I did all of this different stuff and I found that if you look at it as just a pound for pound comparison, what do you get out of it for what you put into it? I found that working with dreams was the best thing I ever did for myself.

[00:06:24] Christa Biegler, RD: Cool. Alright, so that actually leads me to so many different rabbit holes, but I'll start with this one that you brought up about the conscious versus subconscious mind. So I'll present it this way and you can talk about, the subconscious influencing dreams, however, but can we influence our dreams?

Can we consciously influence our dreams or are they out of our conscious control? 

[00:06:45] JM Debord: Oh, they are. Very much influenced, but let's be careful to note that unless you consciously induce a dream, which is called dream incubation, you're still just querying the unconscious mind and with a question, usually a question, and you're asking it for an answer and it responds in the way that it wants to.

But. The content of your dreams is not controllable by you. So you'll have people, I've been at Reddit for a long time, reddit.com, the dreams Forum. So our, we call it our slash Dreams. For years now I've been running that community and one of the things we get a lot of is someone will have a dream that involves violence, sexual assault, incest doing something bad, and then they come in and they're like, oh my God, I feel terrible about what I did in my dream.

And I'm like, you can't control your dream content. You don't choose what you're going to dream about in that conscious sense. And if you get too worked up over what you dreamed about, if you get too emotional, it can keep you from being objective about it. It can keep you from being able to get to what the dream is really trying to show you through the imagery.

But. You can, I think of dreaming as a cycle from day to night and night to day. So what happens is you have experiences during the day that, and you create these memories. Now the memories need to be sorted and cleared out. So what happens early in the night during the non-REM stages of dreaming is you basically are going through clearing the memory banks and it's thought like imagery.

There's not a whole lot of meaning to it as far as the traditional way that we mean, a dream means something. But then what happens is that those memories get sorted into sort of categories from, eh, we can let this go. It's not important to, this is critical to understand and incorporate for what's going on right now in your life.

It can range through that spectrum, those dreams on that, on the other end, the more important and get incorporated in, and then you're given this experiential. Learning experience. You get this experiential learning that we call dreaming because what's actually happening is that these memories are being reconsolidated.

So your memory structures get opened up. They become plastic in the sense of malleable. And the memories, the new memories are being incorporated into existing memory structures. It's called memory reconsolidation. And then what happens is the next day your dreaming mind is watching how you respond to what you dreamed about.

It observes you, it observes your inner world, and it then the next time you go to sleep and you dream again, it's taking not just what you experienced from the day before, that's new experiences, but it's actually seeing how well you incorporated the material. And if you didn't really get it, understand the underlying message or meaning, then what it'll do is tell the same story.

A different way. Try to find the way that it resonates strongly with you. Because the point of doing all of this really in the end, is for you to become the most conscious human being that you can be. The unconscious mind is trying to create a good partner with you, the ego or conscious part of you, by teaching you what you can do to expand, to grow, and to develop.

And so it observes you and that actually influences your dream content. So in a roundabout way to answer your question, yes, what you happens during the day influences your dreams at night, and what you dream about that night will influence. The next day because your dreams are trying to, the next day okay, did you learn your lesson?

If you didn't, then you know, we'll tell the story a different way. We'll create a new simulation that will help you to learn. And if you did learn it, then the dreaming mind says, great. Now we can move on to the next subject. 

[00:10:57] Christa Biegler, RD: So interesting. It feels like an area that's a little bit untapped because.

I don't fully understand who studies it, et cetera. And what you're describing sounds I mean oh, this cycle influences this cycle and this cycle influences this cycle, right? It's just this like dualistic thing that kind of revolves and influences each other.

And does this come from like this, what you just shared about how dreams work and they inform the day, informs the night, and the night informs the day, or however. One. One Encounters dreams. Yes. Does that come from Jungian psychology? , What are some of the thought leaders in the dream space?

You mentioned Carl Young, and I'm not saying his name per perfectly, according you were saying that. It's okay. 

[00:11:38] JM Debord: It's Carl Jung. He was, 'cause he was Swiss. It's Jung, but a lot of people say young. I did for years until I actually heard him say his own name and I was like, oh, I've been saying his name wrong.

Oops. I'm A member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and we bring together dream workers and these are the professionals who work with dreams. They're not necessarily psychologists, but a lot of them are. But it also goes into counselors, social workers, teachers, coaches, and some people are

just someone who took a really deep interest in dreams and immersed into the study and practice of dream interpretation. Now, so you have this very diverse field of people who are a part of the study of dreams. And when you talk about leaders in the field, even though Carl Jung has been.

Gone for a long time. He, what? He died in the 1960s. His thought, his way of approaching dreams is still very popular. He is very much oriented on understanding the unconscious mind, which is the creator of the dreams. Even though it's a co-creative process between the ego and the unconscious, you can still think of it as this is the part of your mind where your dreams are coming from.

So if you, the better you understand that part of your mind, the better you can understand your dream content. A lot of what happened after psychoanalysis? There was a kind of a blowback against psychoanalysis as a field, which included Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. And, there were a lot of the pioneers of dream interpretation as far as the psychological field.

There was a big blowback because. There was a lot of theory and concept without necessarily the sort of falsifiable, replicable scientifically sound sort of stuff that, science really looks for. So what happened was is that a lot of scientists actually really started studying dreams just as a phenomenon that happens during sleep, and they shucked a lot of the psychoanalysis that came along with it.

So you have people these days. Linda Schiller is one of the big people, and you would probably love to have her on your show, by the way. Linda is a retired psychotherapist who has her own approach to dream interpretation that she modeled after many decades of working with clients in a professional setting this way.

So I would say Linda is one of the thought leaders these days. Another one is Scott Sparrow. He's a retired professor and he came up with something he calls the five star method of Dream Interpretation. And him and Mark Thurston, who's also a doctor of psychology. I believe Mark is doctor level, but if he's not.

I know he teaches in a university, so you know, he's at that level of academic, so those two put together the five star method, which is really solid. In fact, they train, they have certification courses where they train people who are in mostly in the counseling and psychotherapy field. So they actually train people, who are gonna do this professionally.

And then of course at the Association for the Study of Dreams, they have a curriculum that you can follow if you want to get into that thought leader mainstream of it. But where I developed my way of approaching dreams, which I call my three simple facts about dreams, and this is the foundation of my teaching, which I call dreams.

One, two, three. And so the first thing that you understand about dreams, the very first thing, lesson number one. Day number one, you're one of my students. You're here in class or we're meeting on Zoom, or we're at a seminar or something. And I know that this audience is, needs to be started from the beginning and then we will, we'll shoot out from there.

I teach him the first thing, your dreams. You subconsciously know the meaning of your dreams. And then there's a logical question which would be why? There's a simple logic to it. And that logic is that you create your dreams. So it means somewhere down inside yourself, you must know what they mean.

Otherwise, it's would be so obscure, like who? Who Then, where do your dreams come from, if not from within you? And if they come from within you, then you have to know what they mean. If they mean anything at all, then something inside you embedded that meaning into it as part of the story, which is simple.

Fact number two, dreams are stories. They are interactive co-creative stories, kinda like a choose your own adventure. What's happening is that the contents of the unconscious mind is deciding what do we wanna work on tonight? And then it crafts a story and puts you into it as a participant.

And your reactions and choices as you were dreaming determines how the story unfolds. So if, just to give a quick example, the stereotypical dream where there's some scary monster, okay? And every time you see the monster, you turn around and run, you are determining what's gonna happen next because of your reaction of running from the monster.

Then what happens, and I've heard this a thousand times. One night I got sick, this would be the person who had the dream talking. One night I got tired of running and I turned around and I said, all right, monster, tonight we scrap. I'm gonna take you on. And now they are determining a new direction for the story.

Because they didn't react the other way that they always had. They reacted a new way. And the dreaming mind goes, great, this is what I've been waiting for. Because the monster is a fear that you have been running from, it's something from your past that you feel guilty about and you won't face it. It's something that like a big dream you have for your life, but you don't think that you can actualize it and make it happen.

So now it's become this monster because it's the thing that's pursuing or chasing you, so these are the simple facts. And the third one, which I wanna get to real quick before we get to the next question, is that dreams use symbolism. It's the native language of the unconscious mind.

And symbolism is a language of symbols and gestures put together in context to create meaning. Or as I tell my students, just think a picture says a thousand words. But the picture needs to be in some kind of context. So the context is the story or the narrative, and then it presents symbols that have meaning embedded in them.

And now you've got something, you've got a dream. These are the basics of a dream. So when you understand the three simple facts about dreams, that leads you to what I call the three simple steps that you can then apply, so that you can analyze the story, break down the symbolism, and then put it all together into context, in context so that you can understand the meaning.

I would say that of all the theory, of all the approaches I've seen, the dream interpretation and from my colleagues, I really respect Scott and Linda and honestly, probably 75% of what I teach overlaps with, with what they teach too. There are certain core principles of would make sense approaching that you would want, 

[00:18:41] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. If 

[00:18:42] JM Debord: you're totally out there on in your own space, then you might be looking and going, eh, you maybe my person be so solid. Do that. There 

[00:18:49] Christa Biegler, RD: should be common denominators to how things are done. Yes. And I was actually really curious. We'll get to patterns later because you've been monitoring.

This forum for so long. So it affords you like all of these different case studies to look like. But as we talk through these facts about dreams, I think it will be cool. And you wove a little bit of a story in there about running from this monster, and then you turn around and face it. But I have some submitted questions and I think if I bring in one of those, it ties to some things you talked about earlier.

Sure, yeah. It's like sometimes people are embarrassed about a dream and it's maybe it's not actually the literal sense. Maybe you're not interpreting the dream, literally, but it's what are you taking from the dream? So yes, sure. One of the. Questions that was submitted about this was a person shared.

I have, and I just think it's similar, it's along the same lines of something you already shared. This person said, I have random, but violent dreams, very violent. What is subconsciously going on? And this person doesn't provide more information and that's okay. But maybe, I think you've already talked a little bit about this, but I think it would be good to okay, using what you just shared before, do we take this literally, are you a bad person?

What can you do with this information? 

[00:19:57] JM Debord: Alright, so yeah, you're not responsible. You don't choose what you dream about, although you can incubate dreams. But that it's very important to understand that when you have a dream that involves, for example, violence and especially when you commit the violence, the most common meaning , this person has left us very wide open because I don't have context.

[00:20:17] Christa Biegler, RD: No, 

[00:20:17] JM Debord: it's very important that you have context for really drilling down to understand what a specific dream means. But without that, because I have so much experience with this, I can speak broadly to this subject. What I found, especially when the person commits the violence and the dream is that there is something about themself that they don't like.

They want it to go away. And I've seen this with so for example, there was a guy who was really disturbed because he had a dream that he drowned a kitten. He did it on purpose. He saw the kitten, and then he's just sticks it underwater until it stops moving. And so he murders a kitten, and he is oh my God, I'm a kitten killer.

What kind of horrible human being am I? And I got, I fi started finding out some things about him. He's a young man, and he's used to be very passive and cuddly. He's just grown outta childhood. And what he's seeing in the imagery of the kitten is the part of himself that is still innocent and harmless.

And he's trying to toughen up because his friends like to skateboard and they talk tough. And, they probably got tattoos now. I don't know how early kids are getting tattoos these days, but, I can picture it and because I've known the type of, I've seen it happen before.

Where people will go through a change in their personality and something about themselves that is not socially acceptable in their group. You're a bunch of rough, tough teenage boys and you're the soft kitten. No thank you. You're not gonna fit in with those boys. So you try to toughen up, which means you need to get rid of the parts of yourself that are soft, vulnerable, and innocent.

So when he kills the kitten, what he's actually doing is making parts of himself go unconscious. Yeah. It's like submerging these personality traits back down into the unconscious mind. Another thing that I found from Violence Dreams, if it's not something where you're in like trying to repress.

Some aspect of yourself is that it just reflects that there's a high level of conflict in your life. It's often conflict that is inside you. But if you're in say that you're in a job where there's a lot of sort of combative competition with you, between you and other, rival companies or whatever, violence could be a way of expressing the way that you feel about this environment that you're in and this game that you're being put into where you have to out compete with everybody else.

And so those would be the places where I would go first if someone said, Hey, I've been having a lot of dreams that were, I was, very violent. And one of the things that I would ask is this kind of contrary to who you really are as a person? One of the first questions I ask with these kinds of dreams, because when they say, oh yeah, I'm the complete.

Opposite. I am the most peaceful, passive person you would ever, I'm nonviolent person. Why would I ever dream about being this guy running around or girl running around with a baseball bat or a knife or a gun, and I'm doing all these, violent things in my dreams. And one of the things that I've learned over the years is that, and this comes from Jungian psychology, is that everything in the psyche comes as complimentary opposites.

And so what will happen is you'll have somebody who's very consciously one sidedly passive nonviolent. And what happens is they get to a point where they're sick of taking people's crap. And this other side of them, Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde kind of situation, it breeds in the shadow of that. They create this conscious or ego conception of themself as this passive, nonviolent person, but in the shadow of that grows at the complete opposite of it.

And so what really what the idea is that you've become too one-sided. So you're creating an equal and opposite reaction in the psyche, so that there is this part of you that is, so if you take somebody who is sadistic, they like to inflict pain, and every sadist is a masochist.

It's the psyche always works this way. So I, what I would do is I would look for this, I would ask this person if this is contrary to how you conceive of yourself and understand yourself, maybe what the psyche is trying to do is create, it's the exact opposite of who you are so that you can experience that in your dreams.

And the idea is that you will meet somewhere in the middle. You don't have to be the passive, nonviolent person. It's not saying you need to be the violent person way. Maybe violence means more like assertiveness. Maybe violence means the ability to be able to speak your truth. Maybe violence means the ability to set boundaries with people.

It's with people who've had their boundaries overrun a lot. I find that they dream a lot about being violent, and it's because they're trying to create a com. The, their compensatory force in the psyche is creating the opposite image of how they see themself. Because what it's trying to do is open up their capacity to develop and be more assertive and able to set and enforce boundaries.

So it's actually a good thing in the end. 

[00:25:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I think this is that, those examples or those possibilities, and what I like is that it's you almost laughed. I do the same. I feel like our jobs are so different and yet sometimes not so different. Very often I'm like, I would like more context around this because context is king, but if I didn't have context, here is what I can assume, because I've seen this many times.

And so that was the, part of what I picked up was you laugh about it, like so common and how relieving for the person listening to this that oh, having a violent dream, doesn't make me a horrible person. Yes, probably the opposite, if anything. So that's doesn't mean 

[00:26:19] JM Debord: there's a serial killer lurking in you or anything like that, it doesn't mean you're gonna go out and commit murder.

You should see some of the dreams, Krista, when people come with incest dreams and they really get, whacked out about that. They think there's something, I'm like, do you feel maybe a little too close with the person that is your loved one who you had the dream about? Do you feel like they are crossing over your boundaries?

Do you feel like there's, like there was one guy who had a dream about sleeping with his mother. He said it was actually just straightforward in bed with each other and he was trying, he's doing, they're doing their thing and he says he tried to get up and walk away. And my mom just kept like grabbing hold of me and trying to pull me back into the bed and.

He explained that his mom was very emotionally dependent on him, and that he had recently decided, yeah, it is time I'm moving out. He was in his early twenties, and he's it's time for me to move out and it's time for me to go on and live my own life separately from my mom. And he said that his mom was so emotionally dependent on him and was trying to push his buttons.

Oh, what am I gonna do without you baby? Oh, come here and give mama a kiss. You know what it felt like, and this is the metaphorical imagery in the dream, is that he was in bed with his mother. For anyone listening and not seeing me right now, I'm putting in bed in air quotes, because you can often find in the dream imagery a metaphor.

Metaphors are often based on figures of speech. So you look at the imagery and you go, he is in bed with his mother. What does that mean as a metaphor? And what it meant was, he felt like his mom wouldn't respect his boundaries. That until that point in his life, he was willing to play into her emotional dependency on him.

But he had finally reached a point in his life where he wanted to get away from that, which is shown in the dream when he tries to leave the bed and his mom sort of clings onto him and tries to keep him there, which is what happened when he said, Bob I'm moving out. I'm gonna get my own apartment, or whatever.

And mom's oh, what am I gonna do without you? She's trying to pull him back into bed with her. 

[00:28:25] Christa Biegler, RD: I can totally see why people would go post on an anonymous forum as well, right? And they're like, oh my gosh. Am I losing it? What is going on? And actually, I thought this was fun with the first one.

Let me give you one more and maybe it'll really tie to these other ones I remembered. Someone telling me about that was a bit kind of distraught or also trying to interpret a dream around having recurrent dreams, recurrent vivid dreams about a romantic relationship with an ex-girlfriend. For some context, there was a bit of a rift with the current, like there was a little bit of uncertainty about this, about the current girlfriend.

And of course, I have no insight onto this, but it came to me, I was like, oh, do one more, gimme one more example of I'm sure this topic is somewhat I feel like this intimacy topic is also common, comes up 

[00:29:14] JM Debord: all the time. ESP at Reddit, we, this is, we get a lot of people who they get, when they come to an anonymous forum to share their dreams there's usually something that has motivated them because it's not just the run of the mill dream.

So they'll have a dream that's very potent violence, incest, sexual assault.

[00:29:33] Christa Biegler, RD: They're like, what is wrong? Something like that. 

[00:29:34] JM Debord: Or they meet God or they have counters with the spiritual beings or aliens. They wanna know what that means. But the other one is about exes. Why do I keep dreaming about my ex?

Oh my God, I can't believe this is happening again. And this is the first thing that I try to find out is, are you in a new relationship or in a relationship currently that's somehow triggering memories of the past relationship? And perhaps, when you get in, you're in a relationship and you start realizing, oh, am I repeating a pattern from my last relationship?

Am I seeing that there's trouble ahead? If so, you could dream about your ex because you're broken up. You're no longer with your ex. There's reasons why you're no longer with your ex. And if you're repeating, if the relationship is repeating the same pattern that led to a breakup before, you will actually dream about the old relationship or the old person because it's current to what's going on in your life now.

So you're really dreaming about the new relationship, but it's disguised under imagery related to the old relationship. It could be the place where you live to work together. It could be the person themself. Most often in those types of dreams, you actually will see your ex in the dream.

The ex can symbolize that time of life. Okay, so here's an example. There was a girl who had a dream, female woman, I should say who she had a dream that she was getting back together with her ex, and she's my ex. That was a terrible time of my life and my ex was bad to me.

Why would I dream about getting back together with them? And I said, okay, let's do a little trick from dream interpretation. This is make associations. What do you associate with your ex and that time of life that you were together? I'm abbreviating this process for you, but this is basically what we did.

And she's I was really depressed. It was a bad time of my life. I was really depressed. And I said, okay, you're getting in your current dreams. You're getting back together with your ex. If your ex is a symbol for that time of life and you relate that time of life with depression, do you feel like there's depression coming on again?

And is she went, oh my God. Yeah. I have been feeling, she's I got out of the depression and I've been doing a lot better, but I've been feeling it, eating from the background. I've been feeling it coming. She's I'm starting to feel depressed again. I said, so when you the dream, when the dream says you're getting back together with your ex, what it really means is you're getting back together with your depression.

You have a relationship with that part of yourself, and the dream is saying, even though you're not feeling it real strongly right now, your dreaming mind has been observing what's going on in you. And it's noticing that this is coming up, you're starting to feel this way, and it's giving you a heads up.

So you now can do something with that information if you want to, what got you out of the depression when you got, when left your ex? I started really focusing on myself and my own life. I'd given so much of my life, and I'm speaking from her perspective, I'd given so much of my life to my ex.

And that was so important and I made my life revolve around him and what he wanted and what his expectations were. And then when we broke up, it was hard for a while, but I started being like really focusing on myself and getting together with my girlfriends and, studying more or putting more effort into work or whatever it is.

And they're like, oh, okay, so you actually know how to get out of your depression. You just need to remember that you've done this before. So those would be the kinds of questions. And the places where I would go with a question like this, I like it,

[00:33:23] Christa Biegler, RD: It's like coaching, using. The dream, right? It's asking good questions to help someone arrive at this answer, right?

It's like back to the premise of how you do dreams, which is you ultimately know what they mean. We just have to dig back the layers. Like it's not so superficial that it's wow, you're this terrible person because you're gonna violent dream. It's okay, where are the patterns?

And I'm like a huge fan of pattern things and I wanna talk to you about, patterns. But I've got a couple, I think that'll lend itself to some tactical opportunities on what you can do now. But I've got a couple not exactly interpretation things, but like offshoot questions that people submitted as well.

And so we'll do those 'cause they're not really interpretation, but more Hey, speaking of patterns or speaking of experiences I had someone ask about smells during dreams. Someone said, I have had a couple of dreams where I smelled something in the dream. It was just weird.

So tell us any experiences you've had with that. 

[00:34:19] JM Debord: Okay. So first I want to refer to the research 'cause this is pretty fascinating. They found that people who dream more who dream about smells tend to be people who use their olfactory senses or sense for their jobs. So perfume testers, chefs, people who, they're, they use, they engage that sensory modality more because the dominant modality, sensory modality, very much is visual if, and then it's followed by auditory.

So if you look at dream content, you're gonna get 85 to 90% of dream content's gonna fall into those two categories. But then you get people who have smells and tastes in their dreams. And this research has shown that those, those people who have more of that content, a higher percentage of that content in their dreams overall, were people who worked, who needed to use those engage those senses more or use them more in their jobs.

Now I would wonder if there was something about that smell that was helping to tell the deeper story. Okay. So I find that with my own way, my dreams tend my unconscious mind, whether through dreaming or just that part of the mind that comes in from the background. One of the ways that my dreams will communicate to me is through songs.

It brings up songs that either have a certain mood to them because of the way, the chord progression and the sound, the ambience or whatever of it. Or, because there's something in the lyrics that I need to pay attention to. And the first time this happened to me I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio at the time and a city area.

There was a lot of trash garbage. It was old town Cincinnati. It was right outside the University of Cincinnati. The back then it was, you had the university surrounded by. Inner city basic, not inner city, but it just, old city neighborhoods. And I was walking along and I'm looking at the trash, the cracks in the sidewalk.

And I think that I saw something like a dandelion coming up through the crack in the sidewalk, and I'm like, oh, a little splash of color, the beautiful yellow. And I heard this song in the back of my mind, and it was Material Girl by Madonna. Now I'm no Madonna fan. Okay, let's just be clear about that.

Okay. I'd rather listen to Ozzy than Madonna. Okay. But it was like the song just randomly started playing. And basically what it was telling me is see beyond what you're seeing physically see beyond that. Because you think you live in a material world, but you know that there's also, there's a deeper world.

There's a deeper level to reality than just the trash blowing around on the ground here. There's actually beauty all around you right now, if you will open your eyes and see it. So I started noticing like the birds perched up, like the crows or whatever. They were perched on the power lines. I'm like, Hey guys, how you doing?

Like just noticing these things around me. The dandelion growing through the crack. The people. There's a beauty in everything, but I, and I was having a hard time seeing it, so my unconscious mind was reminding me through the song lyric. I would do the same thing with a sense of smell.

I would go, okay, what was that smell? How was it associated with the other content and the story? Was there some way that it's reinforcing an idea that was there in the story? And then the symbols that, and when I say story, the dream. And in the symbols that were present in it, does it reinforce?

And something that was already there. If you are in a shitty situation, and you start smelling sewage, okay. So now the dream has created something that might visually represent the idea, but it's also reinforcing the idea of a shitty situation by actually giving you the smell. If that's what it was.

I use that example smelling flowers, what is the smell and how does it fit into the context of the story? That's what I would direct this person to do. 

[00:38:26] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Okay. One more listener question, which was, as far as dreams on the spiritual side, could they be messages from God? This person said, I believe they are, but it would be cool to have a professional's take on it.

And it sounds like this comes up as well in the forums. 

[00:38:44] JM Debord: It does all the time. A lot of people think that their dreams are portals to another reality and alright, so before I can say I agree with that, what I have to do is give a context for how I agree with it. Most people think that consciousness arises from matter.

So in other words the universe was here, all these. You knew Tony and physics forces were at work. They started creating, biochemical structures that led to, first you had the planet and then you had bacterial life and life evolved on the planet, and it became, eventually we started with bacteria, and then we had lizards, and then we had mammals, and then we had humans.

And now we have this advanced form of consciousness here on this, in this material world. We're getting it reversed around. Consciousness came first. And material existence exists within consciousness. Consciousness is everything. There is a guy who invented the first semiconductor Federico Fain, who is just absolutely brilliant at laying this out because he's a physicist and he's really rich, which is one of the ways that we measure successful people these days.

Okay? Because he invented the FI don't, I don't know how much money the man has, but I know he is been very successful and people tend to listen to it more. I love it because he understands this, that consciousness actually comes first. So now apply that to dreaming. When you're dreaming, what you're doing is going into the other spectrums of consciousness.

That are possible. The waking consciousness is a frequency band and other dreaming consciousness is another frequency band. And from there you can keep going and going further and further away from what you might call waking material consciousness. And so in that sense, dreaming can be a portal to other states of consciousness.

It is by its own definition, an altered state of consciousness because you're asleep, but you're experiencing, you're having conscious experiences. And so are they messages from God or spirit? Yeah, some of them can be. One of my favorite teachers on this is Edgar Casey, who was an American psychic.

He's known as the father of holistic medicine. Edgar was also, what most people don't know, is he was a fantastic dream interpreter. One of the best ever. Okay. Because he had the ability, he said that he didn't interpret the dream, he interpreted the dreamer by using his clairvoyant vision, he could look into the person.

He actually see them like an x-ray into their body, but also into their soul, into their mind, their soul, and. He said that dreams, the most common type of dream are dreams that arise from the body. They are the result of physiological processes that are happening at the time or around the time that you're dreaming.

The second most common type of dream dreams that are take place in the mind, this is the mental activity. A lot of emotional related stuff incorporation of memory. In fact, your brain rewires itself while you're dreaming and only while you're dreaming. So there's definitely a mental aspect of dreaming.

Then there's dreams about spirit. When we say spirit, we don't necessarily mean like an eternal spirit. It's spirit in the same sense of if you say that the team has spirit, what does that mean? It means there's something between them that's indefinable but really shapes the way that they interact with each other.

And that same way we have spirit within us. It's the deepest and inner most authentic part of yourself. And then the fourth, and for most people the least type of dream, but it's the most common type of dream in people who are very deeply religious is dreams where they have connection with God, whatever the creative sources.

And I would defer to Edgar on that question. Some dreams are definitely some kind of direct access or connection with whatever is creating consciousness itself. And remember that consciousness is primary. When I say creating consciousness, what I mean is creating reality as we experience it.

And probably many other infinite layers of reality of which we have very little access to while we're in this limited reality that we call the physical world. 

[00:43:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, so this whole conversation is so interesting because even if someone isn't really into personal development, they maybe are a little bit, they haven't really gone down that rabbit hole or any kind of somatic or body practices like I'm into breath work, which gets you into Theta State, which is before the sleeping or Delta state.

But people can have an interest in this no matter who they are or what they are because everyone sleeps. And so everyone probably dreams and if we think about. This. What would you say to someone who says, I know you talk about I think you said journaling is a the eighth highly effective habit. I think it's, yes.

[00:43:56] JM Debord: The eighth habit of highly effective people. Yeah. Do journaling. 

[00:43:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 'cause 

[00:43:59] JM Debord: I've met so many people who were at the top of their profession and this is what's something that they had in common. Yeah. So I should explain that. But yes, go ahead. 

[00:44:06] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Okay. So what would you say to someone who thinks that they cannot remember their dreams?

Or say that, oh, it'd be cool to journal, but I don't think I dream. I don't remember.

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[00:45:23] JM Debord: Yeah. They do. They have to dream. Except for in very rare cases of brain disease and injury, it's been shown medically in the medical literature. Everybody dreams. We know this because you have people who say, man, I never dream well, let's get you into a sleep lab and see whether or not your brainwaves are getting into the states that are associated with dreaming.

Now it runs the gamut, from, beta all the way up through gamma. As far as brainwave states. So very low hurts in the beta, very high hurts in the gamma. It's the pattern to it that you can see where a person is dreaming. What basically what happens is that the body, you go to sleep and you go deep down into delta, which is the very slowest brainwave states.

And then you come back up and your brain wakes up, but your body stays asleep. Now you're in rem stage and this is when you're dreaming. If you don't think you're dreaming, it's 99 per point, 9% likely that you are actually just not remembering it. 

And how would you 

[00:46:27] Christa Biegler, RD: suggest someone start to remember so they can start journaling?

[00:46:30] JM Debord: Yes. It comes down to time and desire. You give it the time, which means you prepare before bed. By having your dream journal ready, you consciously go to. For most people, going to bed is just a habit. But it could start with noticing your bed as you get into bed and saying to yourself, oh, I'm about to go to sleep now.

When I go to sleep, I'm gonna start having dreams. I may not remember my dreams, but I'm gonna be having them. Okay. So it makes you curious. You're queuing your mind before you go to sleep to notice as you're dreaming that you're actually dreaming. Doesn't necessarily mean that you know that you're dreaming.

You just know that, hey, wait a minute, I went to sleep. I should be seeing nothing but the back of my eyelids, but instead, here I am in Hawaii or wherever. I'm just giving a dream setting. That's distinctive as an example. No, I'm in Tucson and I'm asleep in my bed right now. Okay. This is me dreaming, of course.

But if I'm dreaming that I'm in Hawaii. Now there should be something in my mind that says, wait a minute. No, I went to bed in Doosan. What am I doing in Hawaii? So this is one of the ways you prepare before you go to bed. So you have your dream journal and you're ready to write down as soon as you wake up, anything that you remember from your dreams.

Now, I mentioned my friend Linda Schiller earlier, and she has a great technique for this. What she says is, try to remember if you had anything when as soon as you wake up, don't start thinking, don't check your notifications on your phone. Don't go off doing other things. Start having conversations, thinking about what you need to do, just.

Keep your mind focused on what it was that you were just dreaming. Get back into bed. Get into your sleep position to physically cue yourself and ask yourself, do you remember anything that seemed like some experience you had between the time you closed your eyes to go to sleep, and the time your eyes open to wake up?

What happened between those two points? Anything? Can you remember anything that seems like an experience? Because what it does is when you can say yes, it tells you that something happened because the belief that you're not dreaming becomes self-fulfilling. You believe you. If I'm not dreaming, then what's the point of spending time on this in the morning?

But if you can say I was dreaming, but I don't remember now, it answers that question. Am I dreaming? Yes you are. You used to believe that you weren't dreaming, but now you can remember something that happened that seemed like some kind of experience you had while you were asleep. That's the basic definition of a dream.

So you know now that you were dreaming and it changes the question and it can shift your entire mindset about dream journaling and remembering your dreams because you know that you were dreaming something. Now the question becomes, how do you remember it? So time and desire, you want to do it. Dream journaling takes effort.

Dream interpretation takes time. It takes effort. Very well worth it to do, but it does, and it people have to prioritize where they give their time and energy. Is it important enough to write down your dreams? That's and if it is you, so you have the desire now you put in the time. Before you go to bed, you prepare yourself and as soon as you wake up, you just focus on your dream memories.

These are the basic things that you can do, but I also find there's a third one, and I'll give this quick tip. If you're really having trouble remembering your dreams, try sleeping in a different environment than usual, or if that's not an option, change your sleeping environment, move the bed to a different wall, make something different.

What it does is it keeps part of your mind more awake and observant, and the reason why is because we have this evolutionary thing that is to protect ourselves when we're asleep, part of our brain, part of our mind will stay awake and or it'll stay more awake and observant. So it can be watching the other half of the brain as it's dreaming.

You've got one half that's being more observant because it's in a new environment and it's unsure about itself. You're sleeping in a hotel room, you're sleeping in a guest room. There's something that's different. And so it's making that part of the brain that it was evolved to be able to keep us safe when we're asleep by rising to the surface, close to wakefulness so that it can observe things.

Am I hearing any funny sounds? Am I smelling any funny smells, smelling smoke, for example. So we have this evolutionary warning system, radar. Call it like a radar. You can use it so that it can be more observant while the other half of the brain is asleep and dreaming, even though the whole brain is dreaming.

But this is, in theory, what's happening is one side of the brain is more observant and awake and it can observe the other side of the brain that's actually deeply asleep and dreaming. And then it can actually record those memories. Yeah, 

[00:51:40] Christa Biegler, RD: that's, dream memories 

[00:51:41] JM Debord: are very elusive. They are slippery and they can easily disappear.

That's why you have to focus on it really intently. Yeah. But I tell you, nine out of 10, I'll just say nine out of 10, I've dealt with a lot of people who had trouble remembering their dreams. And I'll say that 90% of them, once they applied this advice, found that they started remembering dream content.

And once the ball got rolling, this happened to me. Suddenly I am filling my journal with it took a few weeks or a few months, I forget how long it was, but I used to be one of those people that didn't remember anything. And once the ball got rolling it was a flood. Yeah. So it will happen and get ready to spend a lot of time in the morning journaling, all that stuff.

[00:52:20] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Bringing it to consciousness. What you've mentioned is just a little bit interesting about like arousing part of the brain because we. I appreciate you bringing in some of the science and like my experience from a mostly physiological perspective is when you take different supplements, different things happen with sleep.

Like I know what triggers massive dreaming for me with sleep, and it's actually a little bit of an route, like it's usually B six, which is a little bit more like B is usually more related to. It does lots of things, cellular energy generally. Yeah. They're generally more related to energy producing.

And I can get, I'm one of those people who can get away, I call it, with taking things before bed without it disrupting it. That might be contraindicated in some other people, that some people could not handle it. There's lots of reasons for that, but I've always noticed it makes my dreams extremely vivid enough.

Yes. Where I've seen that. And and I know different people have different things. I know I get into deeper sleep when I'm on different things that are sleep more sleep supportive things. But your comment about like almost a rousing part of the brain kind of makes sense for the B vitamins doing that to me specifically.

So just interesting. 

[00:53:25] JM Debord: Yeah. B six, by the way, is the only thing in the medical literature that's shown to improve dream recall because it improves overall me dream memory. So That's great. You didn't know that? That's funny. I had no idea. You found that through your own experience. Yeah, I just was like, oh, 

[00:53:38] Christa Biegler, RD: it seems to be the B six is the common denominator here, so I appreciate that.

'cause I did not know that. 

[00:53:43] JM Debord: And so it's, I love that, that it came up spontaneously 'cause it is true. And it's, there's other supplements that people take for enhancing the vividness of dreams. I can't recommend any of them. I didn't find that any of them worked for me. But the B vitamins I found is, are very important.

And B six in particular because what it does is it helps to improve memory. Yeah. And that's basically what you're trying to remember these very elusive memories that can very easily disappear on you. So the, anything that you can do to improve your overall memory will help you with your dreams.

If you take, if B six is energizing for you, take it in the morning because it's not that it has to be, it's the. Of preponder, I forget the word. It's basically how much of it is in your system. 

[00:54:28] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And when you've been 

[00:54:29] JM Debord: taking B six long enough, it's not like it all just goes away overnight. Like it, you, once you've built up enough in your system, then you get the effect. Even if it's, you took it in the morning and now you're sleeping at night, you're still gonna get the benefit of the enhanced memory. 

[00:54:45] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And it's not a problem. It's just oh, me taking my vitamin thing, things that happen to have B six in them.

Yes. That are just creating that. And I recall sometimes I, we've actually avoided it because the vi dreams are almost too vivid. But, I could prioritize actually, harnessing those, I think you call it dream harvesting. It's like you gotta collect them. 'cause you gotta look for the patterns, and look for the actual messages between the dreams, not at their surface level. Yes. Which is honestly one of the take home themes for me from our conversation is that let me mention real quick 

[00:55:14] JM Debord: if it's okay to go to dreams one two three.com. Yeah. I re it's an early draft of a book that I'm re-releasing, but I basically at that time, no publishers were touching dream books and so I was like.

This is sad. I've got all this material I wrote, so I was like, screw it. I'm gonna put it on the internet. So I got dreams one two three.com. I had that domain bought and it was sitting there with nothing. So I'm like, I slapped together a website, basically put all of this material together.

There's an entire. Book worth of material that's accessible. If you go just to the front page on dreams one two three.com, you can go by subjects and you can go through it. And what I'm doing is I'm giving people who maybe have not had exposure to Dream Interpretation a place where they can go and get a taste of the way that I do it.

Yeah. Which is based 75% in the way that people like Linda and Scott and others that I didn't mention. But the sort of the consensus on the way that we do this, Carl Jung and then 25% is probably. Pretty unique to the way that I approach dreams. Yeah. Because of how much work I've done in these online dream forums.

I've got at Reddit now about dreams. I have about 25,000 comments in my history. It's over, 15 years of time and I've accumulated about 25,000 comments. So if you look at it and break it down to, there's probably been something along the lines of, seven, eight, 10,000 interactions that I've had with different people or.

Sometimes the same people, but about different dreams. Yeah. It's like talking with them and understanding it. So what I've learned is when you have people who don't really have an immersion in this subject in the same way that I did on the academic and the study side of it how do you explain these concepts to them without losing them?

So I broke it down to make it really, that's why we start with three simple facts. I broke it down to make it as simple as I could. So go to dreams one two three.com to get a taste of it. And then I have a crash course in dream interpretation called Rat Owls. That's my online name. My nickname at Reddit, R-A-D-O-W-L.

So Rat Owls crash Worse and Dream interpretation. A lot of the people who were at the business by design. Came up to me and said that they had ordered the book after I did a sort of a preview of my, and then they got in touch with me afterwards too, to say that they were absorbing this material and it was helping them.

It's fun and whatever it is that they were doing because you mentioned that it learning how to ask questions is a big thing that you do as a coach. And this is one of the things that as a dream interpreter, or we call 'em dream workers these days as somebody who is a professional who works with dreams, you're not trying to interpret the dream for the person.

You're trying to help them to figure it out for themselves because of simple fact number one, subconsciously you understand what your dreams. 

[00:57:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Now 

[00:57:58] JM Debord: subconsciously is the operative word, but

[00:58:00] Christa Biegler, RD: I think we can apply that concept if we apply that concept to life more actively. People are all commonly looking for someone to just give them the answer, but if we actually help people pull the answers outta themselves, we end up with a lot more alignment and happiness and fulfillment in our lives.

Yes. So yes, I like, I appreciate that a lot. What are you excited about right now? What's coming out for you? What book are we on next week? 

[00:58:23] JM Debord: Yes. Okay. So I have a book launch. This is through a. New York publisher. Okay. I've been working for years. I used to dream about this all the time of like landing in New York or Paris or San Francisco and 'cause these are literature meccas, right?

And I would be like trying to find an apartment and basically trying to find a place in the publishing industry. I always thought of getting to New York, like if a New York publisher will pick me up, then boy, I've arrived, right? 

[00:58:48] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh 

[00:58:49] JM Debord: It's not about dreams. There is a chapter about dreams because they had me write a book.

It's called The Science of the Paranormal. And it was fascinating. I couldn't believe when my agent called me up. I have a literary agent and we've been together for a long time and she gets these queries from publishers who'd be like, oh, do any of your authors want to take on this project? Because the publisher had the idea for the book.

Yeah. And they need the author to write it. And they're like, we wanna do a book on the science of the paranormal. And my agent comes to me and she's Jason, this sounds like you. And I'm like, are you kidding? This is totally me. 'cause I've been into this subject for years and just as a natural fascination.

And I wrote a book that follows the research and seeks to answer the question, is there anything here that's really been proven? Because it is the science, right? And I have a BA in political science. I took, the philosophy of science I, scientific methods, how to understand research terminology and statistical significance and all that stuff.

So I had to bone up on that stuff again 'cause it's been years right? But I immersed into what ended up being 150 years of study about the science of the paranormal. And it's was absolutely fascinating and I found that there really is good science. I found that the sub public generally does not know that the science is out there.

When you go into public discussions about paranormal subjects related to science, say spoon bending right there, it's a, oh, it's just a magician's trick. And didn't the great Randy or whoever, the James Randy didn't, James Randy debunk that. And as soon as I hear debunk, it's, I know that they're not real scientists, but anyway.

And I'll be like, actually, yeah they, some of them were shown to be charlatan, some of them were stage performers. Some of them had prop spoons. But let me give you this list of Nobel Prize winners. Who did it themselves or were standing with the person as they did it, and now let's talk.

Because there is real research into this that was done in real research labs under tightly controlled conditions, and there were people who claimed to have the ability to bend spoons with their minds. And they did it while the cameras were rolling. They did it while the researchers were there. And it wasn't a prop spoon, it wasn't a trick.

It wasn't bending the spoon and trying to pretend oh, snap. Oh, I didn't apply any force at all. No they've done this under controlled conditions. And I actually talked with someone who did it. She was a radio host Wendy Garrett, and I talked with Wendy about it and was like, you actually did this yourself?

And she's yeah. And she's this, the metal went soft. She's but the funny thing was is that until like I was trying to do it on my own and I'm trying to focus on the metal and I'm like, okay, spoon bend. And nothing was happening. And then the people who were part of this workshop gathered around her and they started contributing their energy and she's I got caught up in the moment of it.

And then all of a sudden I felt like a change in the metal and it went soft. And all I had to do was just was like putty. She's like, all I had to do was apply the lightest force. And the thing just bent. I was like, so this actually really happened to you? And she's yeah. And I'm like, okay, then let me go look into the science.

And I found that there really was science that was debunked. Or shall we say? It was falsified, but I also found that there was science that was replicated and not falsified and that there were very credible people who said that they witnessed it for themselves. So those are one of the, there's probably 25 different subjects like that a lot of it comes out of pop culture.

So pop culture references, things that you've seen in movies and on tv, like it's is that really possible? Can people communicate telepathically? Can? Are there such things as spirits and poltergeists? Are people really reincarnated? Is there any science that says that? People have reincarnated, oh, I'm sorry.

How about the 2,700 cases in the files at the University of Virginia division of the perceptual studies top flight scientists who gathered this data and actually accounted for, so anyway, it was like, yeah, there is a lot of science to this and it's fascinating and for whatever reason, most people don't know about it.

So what I'm trying to do is present it to them and then come to basically that science needs to get its act together because mainstream science is rejecting this stuff. But there are, there's a committed group of people they call Parapsychologists and paranormal researchers who are real scientists doing real science, who have come up with very highly sta statistical significant results.

So I tried to write it as a pop culture book because that was what the publisher wanted from me. But I also wanted to bring in that I know a lot of these people personally. I'm connected to them through some of the people that I know who have done the research and said, look, there is good science here.

And I was trying to get that out to the public to say if you dig deeper than just the sort of common perception of this, you'll find that there's actually what you might call proven research. It's been proven through statistics, it's been proven through evidence, it's been proven through experiment.

Tables have levitated in laboratories. Ectoplasm has manifested from mediums. People have communicated information telepathically and it was under very well controlled circumstances. There were no tricks involved in it. It sounds 

[01:04:37] Christa Biegler, RD: like you've had a lot of fun with that one that comes up next week.

I 

[01:04:40] JM Debord: did. Can you tell, I know I light up as soon as I start talking about this stuff. I got it. I asked, I'm really looking forward to this. I asked you what 

[01:04:45] Christa Biegler, RD: you were excited about. Okay. That's, I, so people can find you at Dreams 1, 2 3 or Rad Owls Crash Course in Dream Interpretation. Is there anywhere JM people, yeah, JM deboard.com 

[01:04:55] JM Debord: links to all that?

Yeah, so J-M-D-E-D-O-R d.com and I can get you to all that, but yeah. At Reddit, I've, I'm at the Dreams Forum. I'm at the Carl Jung Forum past Lives and Reincarnation and Edgar Casey, I run all those forums. And then I also have my books and Dream school.net. I will be training people to be certified in Dream.

Workers as dream workers. I ran a cohort last year and we've been trying to figure out how to do this again. Now I have a partner, she was my first student. She got through six months of deep immersive training and one of the things she told me is, God, dude, you gotta make this easier on your students.

'cause most people do not have the time to immerse like I did, totally in this subject. And I was like, okay, let's figure out a new curriculum and then we'll bring in a new cohort and we'll teach people how to be dream interpreters. 

[01:05:45] Christa Biegler, RD: Cool. Thank you. Thank all time way. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on and doing a little dream interpretation and showing us these patterns and this pattern recognition and how people can get started about this topic.

I just think it's an interesting, it is a very interesting topic, right? That kind of applies to all of us. It's just that we don't always, we haven't really thought. Sometimes we haven't thought about it, unless we're moved to think about it. So I'm glad to just bring this topic.

I'm glad that you came into my life, to try to open my eyes around some opportunities around dream interpretation. So thank you so much for coming on today. 

[01:06:15] JM Debord: My pleasure. Thank you, Christa.