Pretty, eh? I wouldn’t want to meet up with him on a path to Mordor, or in a dream, either.
I bet you wouldn’t like to either. And I bet you would love to be able to keep your kids, nieces and nephews, grandkids, or other children from awakening terrified in the middle of the night.
The good news is that you can. I do not make that claim lightly, and I insist that you not believe it because I say so. It deserves to be put to the test so that you can decide for yourself whether it is true or not.
Fortunately, that is easy to do. You simply have to interview one or another character in the nightmare, using the IDL dream interviewing protocol. If it doesn’t work, I want to know. Write me at Joseph.Dillard@Gmail.Com, and I will personally assist you, or if I can’t, I’ll have one of my trained students help you.
But how does Integral Deep Listening eliminate almost any nightmares for good generally in only one session? Post traumatic nightmares take longer but can still be resolved in most cases, and sleep terrors are not true nightmares.
At its simplest, the answer is when you do Integral Deep Listening interviews you expand your perspective. If you have done the interview correctly, the subject became the dream character and answered the questions in the interview from its perspective, not his or her own. What this does is frame the nightmare and its fear in a broader, non-fearful context. How is this possible?
When you take another perspective, particularly one that is already intrinsic to you, such as a character in a dream, you become a part of yourself that already knows you and your issues as well as you do. This is something no dream interpreter, therapist, or expert can do. But there’s something more, and it’s key: in addition, that character that you become adds its own perspective to yours. Therefore, the character not only includes your perspective; it transcends your perspective on the dream, your fear, and on your life. It may not do so cosmically, but it will generally do so enough that you “get” the wake-up call; you experience a perspective that makes sense, that fits the dream with its nightmarish elements and your fearful reactions into a bigger, broader pattern.
You can explore an example or two below, but you probably won’t “get” this on a cognitive level, for two reasons. First, IDL is primarily experiential, not cognitive. Secondly, it is largely transrational, which means that because it is something beyond reason, your mind will try to make sense of it by seeing it as something it knows and understands: prepersonal fantasy and delusion. You can embrace such reductionism if you want, but you may only be shutting down instead of understanding. In any case, you get to decide for yourself.
Notice that this last example is of a real life nightmare from the dream of mankind. IDL can not only help anyone get over hauntings by man’s inhumanity to man, but at the same time provide them with concrete recommendations about how they can use the lessons of murder and genocide to improve their own lives.
If you do your own experiments using IDL with your nightmares or those you know, be sure and let us know. What worked? What didn’t? Your feedback will help us improve our work so that we can help others outgrow their nightmares, whatever their origin may be.
