J.M. DeBord - Nightmares: Your Guide to Interpreting Your Darkest Dreams

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The nightmare isnt unusual for a nine-year old. It starts off with me biking around my hometown neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio. I loved riding my bike and dreamed about it frequently. It was just a normal day doing a normal thing. Then I notice a man following me in a black convertible car, maybe a Cadillac. Its 1979 and cars like that are steel and chrome beasts that belch smog and noise. The dream zooms in to his scarred face, evil grin, and feverish eyes burning with diabolical intent. He wants mewants my soul.

My soul. Thats a big idea for a nine-year-old. As a kid I didnt think much about it or even know what it was. My family attended church occasionally, and I said my prayers at bedtime. There was a God somewhere up there in the sky, but down here on Earth, on the asphalt streets of my neighborhood, it didnt help me much as I tried desperately to outrun the evil man with the crazy eyes and the icky skin of a cadaver. I heard his terrible laughter, the howl of the predator chasing its prey. Pure terror. If he catches me, I wont just die, Ill lose my soul!

I see a streetside store. People will be insidethey will protect me. Next thing I know, Im inside the store. Its empty, and theres only one place to hide. In 1979, every convenience store in my town had a pinball machine. I dash behind it, crouch, and wait, cowering against a wood-paneled wall.

In my minds eye, I see the front of the store. The black car pulls up. The bad man knows where I am. His shadow falls across the entrance. I feel his menace, and Im trapped. Its the end of all I am and have ever known in my nine years of life. Fade to black.

The horror of the nightmare jolts me awake. Where am I? A moment ago, I was trapped in the back of a store waiting to die in a way that would be worse than any movie Id watched. Not that Id watched much of anything scary, anywayour 13-inch television with its telescoping antenna picked up three channels, and Bugs Bunny was my favorite cartoon. I had no conscious memory of ever seeing a scary movie; my parents didnt allow it. The popular ones of the time were The Amityville Horror and Alien. The evil mans appearance and behavior fit the archetype of the supernatural movie bad guy, but I know that now as an adult. Back then, I lived in a bubble. The world was a safe place. Adults protected me. But no one could protect me from the terrible man who wanted my soul, and nothing could stop him except by waking from the nightmare in my bed, scared and shaking and realizing where I am.

The man was gone. I was safe. For now.

Standard nightmare, right? Sure, it was terrifying, but thats why we call a scary dream a nightmarewe have a special word for the experience. And usually, the nightmare ends and thats it. Wake up, everythings fine, life goes on.

But heres where my story detours into Black Mirror territory. A few years later, a dream analyst spoke to my seventh grade enrichment class and asked for volunteers to explore a nightmare that really stuck with them. Oh yeah, I got one for ya! During the intervening years, the memory of the undead man who wanted my soul popped up randomly like stepping on a snake, a living thing lying in wait to strike when my eyes were elsewhere. Unforgettable. The analyst used a hypnotic regression process to help me reenter the dream and trace its roots.

There, in my classroom, with my classmates standing in a circle around me, their hands touching my body to anchor me in physical reality, I step back in time to see two families in a feud. Bad blood between them. The analyst asks me to question them about the feud, and all I know is that they hate each other beyond reason. He directs me to speak with them and try to end the feud. Find a compelling reason. I think about it and say, Fighting is wrong; please stop hurting each other.

Silence. They stare at me. Then all hell breaks loose. Dark words muttered. Murder in their eyes. They close in on me. Danger, danger!

The analyst pulled me out of the hypnosis, and thereafter I was a wounded animal fleeing into my teenage years with that nightmare hunting me. The gash in my psyche left a blood trail. Easy to follow. I had plenty more nightmarestheyre common at that agebut the evil man blended into the background. I guess I had new problems to deal with.

Then, during my twenties, he appeared again in my nightmares with the same agenda: hunt me down and claim my soul. Id be dreaming something ordinary and suddenly a black funnel cloud would bear down like the evil man. Run, run! But never able to get away, just pray and hope that death passes over. Id wake up screaming, feeling cursed. I gave my soul to Jesus, took it back, gave it again, took it back.

By then I was a wreck. Most nights I went to sleep so intoxicated its a wonder I dreamed at all.

Then I sobered up and used dreamwork to help me heal. It saved my life but didnt give it back. Not fully, anyway; just enough to keep me going. Something still haunted me. Id encounter people in waking life who had the same diabolical eyes as the evil man, the same lust for fear and ability to appear at just the right time to sidetrack me. I also encountered beings of light and love. They intervened before I could fall into complete despair and never return to this reality.

Soon afterward, though, the encounters would slip from my mind, and Id question what really happened. Albert Einstein said, A coincidence is a small miracle when God chooses to remain anonymous. Believing that a supernatural experience is a coincidence or imaginary puts us back to sleep, back under the spell until the next encounter shocks us out of the stupor and we remember with a terrified cry that we fell asleep on the battlefield and the battle still rages. The battle was inside me. Author Nikos Kazantzakis knows what I mean when he says in the opening to his novel The Last Temptation of Christ:

The dual substance of Christthe yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God, has always been an inscrutable mystery to me. My principal anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh, and my soul is the arena where the two armies have clashed and met.

Id lived long enough to get really angry about being the evil mans plaything. Through dreamwork, meditation, and prayer, I gained the power to fight back, and when his minions came one night in a dream to kidnap me off a dark street and take me to him, I said no, tell me where he is and Ill go to him. I appeared inside a steel office tower with black reflective windows. Top floor. Master suite. His fortress. Dead of night, the witching hour. I see a clear glass coffin in the middle of the spacious room. Inside it lay the evil man, a vampire in his moment of vulnerability.

A trap.

Now Im standing over the open coffin and seeing him lying there, motionless. He could have walked onto the set of Star Wars and played the role of Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord. The face covered in craggy burn scars; the eyes overflowing with sickly power and malevolence; the embodiment of my pain and hate. I grab his neck and choke him, fingers sinking into his rubbery flesh, a dead fish. He just looks me in the eyes, delighted by my skyrocketing rage. I hear his slithery voice in my mind.