September 23, 2025 • 18 mins
George Noory and psychiatrist Greg Mahr explore his research into dreams an nightmares, how dreams can help us heal after traumatic events, and why western culture often misses the importance of dreams in growing strength and wisdom.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Author and psychiatrist Greg Mauer has done clinical work and
research in the nightmares and trauma. Greg is the author
of The Wisdom of dream Science, Synchronicity in the Language
of the Soul. He has published numerous professional papers and
has spoken at numerous professional conferences. He's been recording his
(00:27):
own dream since childhood and has a collection of more
than five thousand dreams. Greg, welcome to the program. Thank
you very much, looking forward to this. Tell me what
got you into the world of psychiatry.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
I was always interested in the inner life of people
and what goes on inside them, and also in my
own inner life and trying to understand what goes on
inside me. I think that's why I've been dreams. I
think I imagine psychiatry would be more about that inner world,
(01:07):
but it really wasn't. Psychiatry is kind of different now
than it was years ago. But I enjoyed psychiatry. But
I sort of began pursuing my interest in dreams later
in my career. What kind of changed my life? Was
(01:30):
a heart attack I had about fifteen years ago. Like
after that, I decided to kind of do what I
wanted to do professionally instead of what I was supposed
to do, And then I began to explore this special
interest in dreams in the inner world more.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, those life changing events really make things happen, don't they.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yes, they really do. They make you refocus your priorities
and really decide what's important and what actually matters.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
What got you to start shifting your psychiatry work into
the dream arena?
Speaker 3 (02:13):
It was I wanted to kind of be internal ambassador
within psychiatry for attention to that inner world. I think
psychiatry has become too directed towards medications and things like that,
(02:35):
and I wanted to help my colleagues first understand that
that inner world is important and in hopes that they
would respect and acknowledge that inner world of their patients.
So that was kind of my I think what I
(02:57):
decided my mission.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Was scientifically speaking, Greg, why do we dream? Anyway?
Speaker 3 (03:07):
That's a really interesting question. Dreams seem like the real
important from an evolutionary perspective, because an only more advanced
animals dream like mammals and squids and only very more
sophisticated animals. And you got to remember that dreaming is
(03:27):
a high risk thing for an animal to do because
in that dream phase of sleep, your body is completely paralyzed,
so you put yourself at risk. So it obviously is
an important thing from an evolutionary perspective. Now, what function
(03:48):
it serves is what it serves. Definitely serves a role
in processing trauma, in processing memories, especially the emotional aspects
of memories, and probably in forgetting too in letting go
of things that aren't important. So it definitely has those
(04:10):
important roles. For instance, after trauma, let's say there you
have a significant traumatic event like a car accident or
where you're you're at risk of being significantly harmed or dying.
About half of the people will have nightmares after an
(04:35):
event like that. It's like the body's way of trying
to heal. And what we see sometimes in patience is
they replay the trauma. But then sometimes the trauma kind
of instead of being like a like a sports replay
where it's exactly what happened, the mind starts to change
(04:58):
it and process it in a way or favorable way.
And that's kind of an example of what probably the
purpose of dreams are, including nightmares, and.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Of course there are various different kinds of dreams that
we all know of, precognitive, lucid dreaming, and just regular dreaming.
It's almost like it's the body's way of just trying
to correct things.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Yes, sort of balance things out. Young thought of dreams
is kind of a way of balancing the ego stance
towards towards the world, like showing you a different way
of looking at things and delivering that kind of message there.
(05:46):
And just like there's different kinds of dreams, there's seem
to be different kinds of nightmares too. There's some that
involved processing trauma. There's some that seem to like send
messages that that you that you ignore and aren't hearing,
(06:08):
So like the message has to get louder in a sense,
so it becomes like the dream kind of carries the
meta message of wake up, wake up, you know, there's
something really important I have to say with your what
your inner inner world is kind of saying. There's also
(06:28):
interesting nightmares that kind of seem to present warnings both
of potentially of things in the world itself, but sometimes
of warnings about things within you with your attitude. Like
there's a famous story of someone that kept insisting that
(06:54):
you listen to his dream at a party, and you
didn't want to, and things like that, but finally he
listened to the guy the guy's dream and his dream
was about he climbing a mountain and stepping off into
space and falling, and he was a mountain climber, and
(07:17):
Jung told him, don't climb by yourself, but he continued
to climb in like a few months later, actually did
fall off a mountain kind of in the way he
described in the dream, by stepping off into open space.
So it maybe the dream was a prediction, but.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
It may it may also have been a description of
his internal state, like he it was showing him his
own recklessness, which he needed to listen to, but he didn't.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
What is a nightmare?
Speaker 4 (07:57):
Greg?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
It's far more than a late night pets that we
eat before we go to bed, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah, there's you know, we all have had nightmares. About
seven percent of people have nightmares once a week. They're
more common in kids, but they definitely happen in adults.
So there are these reflections of things we need to
listen to, or their traumas were processing, or their kind
(08:26):
of dreams of warning. And what I hear sometimes too,
and what I have had myself occasionally over the years
is kind of what I call depression nightmares, where people
wake up not so much scared as in a usual nightmare,
but they wake up feeling really unhappy and feeling the
(08:47):
sense of longing or sadness. Nightmares also cause what's called
fear of sleep. They're so anxiety to produce that people
typically wake up and don't want to go back in
that nightmare world, and so they're kind of afraid to
go to sleep. That's that's kind of famously depicted in
(09:13):
the Nightmare on ELM Street movies.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Are are nightmares healthy for us or not?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Nightmares are? They have a healthy aspect, which is the
trauma processing and warning and messages. They may also be
something that's supposed to work but isn't working, kind of
like I think of it, like the way immune reaction
(09:48):
is a healthy thing, but it's sometimes is not healthy,
like when it's an allergy or an autoimmune disease like
rheumatoid arthritis. It's that healthy, healthy reaction that's kind of
gone haywire and is doing its own things so they're healthy,
but they can be like too much of a good
(10:11):
thing and end up being sort of interfering with sleep
in their own way by causing so much anxiety. It's
like the body kind of overshoots, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
And even collecting dreams for yourself since you were a kid.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Yeah, I have this trash bag in my basem. Unfortunately
I haven't thrown it away and all my moves and
things like that, but it's a bunch of old notebooks
of dreams I started recording probably when I was eight
or nine, literally thousands of them. I'm trying to figure
(10:52):
out what to do with them because they're mostly handwritten.
But I found some cool AI software that's actually hopefully
through that I'll be able to transcribe them and put
them into text and do interesting things with all that data,
like it'll be interesting to see if some kinds of
(11:14):
things have changed, or some things were associated with stressful
events in my life. And everybody has a characteristic pattern
of dreamings. It's almost like a dream fingerprint, like I've
I've been helping do dream group for years, and everybody's
(11:37):
dreams are recognizable when if I think if they were
if they were sheared randomly between the group, that we'd
all recognize, Oh that that's so and So's dream that
sell and those dreams because they tend to have characteristic imagery,
Like I dream about water all the time, but it'd
be interesting to look at did I dream about water
as much when I was a kid or less? So
(12:00):
there's those kind of There are those kind of long
standing lifetime dream collections, but they aren't that common. So
it's an interesting kind of asset that I want to
work more with.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Do you find that most of your patients come in
with dream issues?
Speaker 3 (12:22):
I think, well, a couple things happen. One I kind
of because I work with dreams, people people find me,
and so I get more people with dream issues than
the average psychiatrists for sure. But it's also because psychiatrists
(12:44):
and psychologists tend to ignore dreams, they people don't share
them as much as they would if the psychiatrists was interested.
Like about I think it's sixty percent of patients in
therapy will share dreams at some point with with their therapists,
(13:07):
even if it's a pure cognitive behavioral therapists or is
purely interested in medications. It's it's like we as patients
know that dreams are important even if the person we're
seeing isn't as interested in them. So I probably hear
more dreams because I pay more attention and listen.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Some Some dreams allow us to solve problems in our
day to day life, don't they.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yes, there's actually a lot of interesting data about that,
even even things like math problems. They've they've done studies
where they've had college students think about math problems when
they were going to bed, and those students would do
better on tests, for instance. And there have been other
(13:56):
studies that people like going through a divorce, those who
have dreams about the divorce recover better. So they clearly
have an important role in processing emotions. And that's kind
of shown in the data, which is really interesting. It
(14:19):
just drives home that message that dreams are an important
but kind of ignored part of our lives, and our
culture is actually kind of unusual in the way that
it ignores dreams when you think of other cultures over
time and over history, they they've taken dreams more seriously
(14:44):
and realize the messages they bring, where we kind of
dismiss them as nonsense. A wonderful example of that is
a dream my father had. He never talked about dreams particularly,
but when I published my first book, he was quite
(15:09):
elderly at that point, he was maybe in his late
nineties or even a hundred. He lived to like a
one hundred and two. I was showing him my book
and he was in an assisted living but still very
much with it, and he said, oh, congratulations and so forth.
But then, like a lot of people, he kind of
(15:29):
paused and said, oh, but aren't dreams just nonsense? And
then he did what a lot of people do. It's
almost like they're following the same script. He said, For example,
last night, I had this dream, and he told me
this really beautiful, transparent dream, which he thought was nonsense.
(15:49):
In his dream, he was mowing the lawn and my mother,
who had long passed, she was on the porch and
she was kind of criticized seeing him for the way
he was mowing, that the rows weren't straight. So he
tells me this little dream and says, isn't that nonsense.
I'm thinking to myself, dude, that's that's that's a beautiful
(16:12):
picture of your life. Because my mother was that kind
of person. She was very critical. I think that's part
of why I loved dreams so much. They're like little artworks,
you know, like like this dream and this single image
captures my dad's life. And even there's like a deeper
message too, because the idea of mowing, you know, and
(16:34):
here when you're one hundred and two, that that has
a message of end of life and harvest and things
like that. So such a beautiful condensed image that I
think that's why I love dreams so much.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Greg, do the dreams originate in the brain or somewhere
outside of the brain.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
They for sure originate in the brain, and they originate
in deeper, deeper brain levels. There's these waves that come
from deeper in the brain. You can see them on
EG tracings, and those deeper waves trigger the brain to
(17:18):
go out of its normal deeper sleep phases into this
special space phase of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep
when you have the dreams, and there's interesting changes in
the body too. The body becomes paralyzed, as we mentioned earlier,
(17:45):
but otherwise the EEG. The brain waves become essentially the
same as adult as awake brain waves. So it's kind
of interesting you go into this special phase of sleep,
and it seems to be a special phase that we
(18:06):
have like an independent need for. Like you can let
people sleep but wake them up only when they go
into this rem sleep, and they don't do well if
you just deprive them of rems sleep, even though they
get plenty of plenty of sleep otherwise.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Author and psychiatrist Greg Mauer has done clinical work and
research in the nightmares and trauma. Greg is the author
of The Wisdom of dream Science, Synchronicity in the Language
of the Soul. He has published numerous professional papers and
has spoken at numerous professional conferences. He's been recording his
(00:27):
own dream since childhood and has a collection of more
than five thousand dreams. Greg, welcome to the program. Thank
you very much, looking forward to this. Tell me what
got you into the world of psychiatry.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
I was always interested in the inner life of people
and what goes on inside them, and also in my
own inner life and trying to understand what goes on
inside me. I think that's why I've been dreams. I
think I imagine psychiatry would be more about that inner world,
(01:07):
but it really wasn't. Psychiatry is kind of different now
than it was years ago. But I enjoyed psychiatry. But
I sort of began pursuing my interest in dreams later
in my career. What kind of changed my life? Was
(01:30):
a heart attack I had about fifteen years ago. Like
after that, I decided to kind of do what I
wanted to do professionally instead of what I was supposed
to do, And then I began to explore this special
interest in dreams in the inner world more.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, those life changing events really make things happen, don't they.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yes, they really do. They make you refocus your priorities
and really decide what's important and what actually matters.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
What got you to start shifting your psychiatry work into
the dream arena?
Speaker 3 (02:13):
It was I wanted to kind of be internal ambassador
within psychiatry for attention to that inner world. I think
psychiatry has become too directed towards medications and things like that,
(02:35):
and I wanted to help my colleagues first understand that
that inner world is important and in hopes that they
would respect and acknowledge that inner world of their patients.
So that was kind of my I think what I
(02:57):
decided my mission.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Was scientifically speaking, Greg, why do we dream? Anyway?
Speaker 3 (03:07):
That's a really interesting question. Dreams seem like the real
important from an evolutionary perspective, because an only more advanced
animals dream like mammals and squids and only very more
sophisticated animals. And you got to remember that dreaming is
(03:27):
a high risk thing for an animal to do because
in that dream phase of sleep, your body is completely paralyzed,
so you put yourself at risk. So it obviously is
an important thing from an evolutionary perspective. Now, what function
(03:48):
it serves is what it serves. Definitely serves a role
in processing trauma, in processing memories, especially the emotional aspects
of memories, and probably in forgetting too in letting go
of things that aren't important. So it definitely has those
(04:10):
important roles. For instance, after trauma, let's say there you
have a significant traumatic event like a car accident or
where you're you're at risk of being significantly harmed or dying.
About half of the people will have nightmares after an
(04:35):
event like that. It's like the body's way of trying
to heal. And what we see sometimes in patience is
they replay the trauma. But then sometimes the trauma kind
of instead of being like a like a sports replay
where it's exactly what happened, the mind starts to change
(04:58):
it and process it in a way or favorable way.
And that's kind of an example of what probably the
purpose of dreams are, including nightmares, and.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Of course there are various different kinds of dreams that
we all know of, precognitive, lucid dreaming, and just regular dreaming.
It's almost like it's the body's way of just trying
to correct things.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Yes, sort of balance things out. Young thought of dreams
is kind of a way of balancing the ego stance
towards towards the world, like showing you a different way
of looking at things and delivering that kind of message there.
(05:46):
And just like there's different kinds of dreams, there's seem
to be different kinds of nightmares too. There's some that
involved processing trauma. There's some that seem to like send
messages that that you that you ignore and aren't hearing,
(06:08):
So like the message has to get louder in a sense,
so it becomes like the dream kind of carries the
meta message of wake up, wake up, you know, there's
something really important I have to say with your what
your inner inner world is kind of saying. There's also
(06:28):
interesting nightmares that kind of seem to present warnings both
of potentially of things in the world itself, but sometimes
of warnings about things within you with your attitude. Like
there's a famous story of someone that kept insisting that
(06:54):
you listen to his dream at a party, and you
didn't want to, and things like that, but finally he
listened to the guy the guy's dream and his dream
was about he climbing a mountain and stepping off into
space and falling, and he was a mountain climber, and
(07:17):
Jung told him, don't climb by yourself, but he continued
to climb in like a few months later, actually did
fall off a mountain kind of in the way he
described in the dream, by stepping off into open space.
So it maybe the dream was a prediction, but.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
It may it may also have been a description of
his internal state, like he it was showing him his
own recklessness, which he needed to listen to, but he didn't.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
What is a nightmare?
Speaker 4 (07:57):
Greg?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
It's far more than a late night pets that we
eat before we go to bed, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah, there's you know, we all have had nightmares. About
seven percent of people have nightmares once a week. They're
more common in kids, but they definitely happen in adults.
So there are these reflections of things we need to
listen to, or their traumas were processing, or their kind
(08:26):
of dreams of warning. And what I hear sometimes too,
and what I have had myself occasionally over the years
is kind of what I call depression nightmares, where people
wake up not so much scared as in a usual nightmare,
but they wake up feeling really unhappy and feeling the
(08:47):
sense of longing or sadness. Nightmares also cause what's called
fear of sleep. They're so anxiety to produce that people
typically wake up and don't want to go back in
that nightmare world, and so they're kind of afraid to
go to sleep. That's that's kind of famously depicted in
(09:13):
the Nightmare on ELM Street movies.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Are are nightmares healthy for us or not?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Nightmares are? They have a healthy aspect, which is the
trauma processing and warning and messages. They may also be
something that's supposed to work but isn't working, kind of
like I think of it, like the way immune reaction
(09:48):
is a healthy thing, but it's sometimes is not healthy,
like when it's an allergy or an autoimmune disease like
rheumatoid arthritis. It's that healthy, healthy reaction that's kind of
gone haywire and is doing its own things so they're healthy,
but they can be like too much of a good
(10:11):
thing and end up being sort of interfering with sleep
in their own way by causing so much anxiety. It's
like the body kind of overshoots, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
And even collecting dreams for yourself since you were a kid.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Yeah, I have this trash bag in my basem. Unfortunately
I haven't thrown it away and all my moves and
things like that, but it's a bunch of old notebooks
of dreams I started recording probably when I was eight
or nine, literally thousands of them. I'm trying to figure
(10:52):
out what to do with them because they're mostly handwritten.
But I found some cool AI software that's actually hopefully
through that I'll be able to transcribe them and put
them into text and do interesting things with all that data,
like it'll be interesting to see if some kinds of
(11:14):
things have changed, or some things were associated with stressful
events in my life. And everybody has a characteristic pattern
of dreamings. It's almost like a dream fingerprint, like I've
I've been helping do dream group for years, and everybody's
(11:37):
dreams are recognizable when if I think if they were
if they were sheared randomly between the group, that we'd
all recognize, Oh that that's so and So's dream that
sell and those dreams because they tend to have characteristic imagery,
Like I dream about water all the time, but it'd
be interesting to look at did I dream about water
as much when I was a kid or less? So
(12:00):
there's those kind of There are those kind of long
standing lifetime dream collections, but they aren't that common. So
it's an interesting kind of asset that I want to
work more with.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Do you find that most of your patients come in
with dream issues?
Speaker 3 (12:22):
I think, well, a couple things happen. One I kind
of because I work with dreams, people people find me,
and so I get more people with dream issues than
the average psychiatrists for sure. But it's also because psychiatrists
(12:44):
and psychologists tend to ignore dreams, they people don't share
them as much as they would if the psychiatrists was interested.
Like about I think it's sixty percent of patients in
therapy will share dreams at some point with with their therapists,
(13:07):
even if it's a pure cognitive behavioral therapists or is
purely interested in medications. It's it's like we as patients
know that dreams are important even if the person we're
seeing isn't as interested in them. So I probably hear
more dreams because I pay more attention and listen.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Some Some dreams allow us to solve problems in our
day to day life, don't they.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yes, there's actually a lot of interesting data about that,
even even things like math problems. They've they've done studies
where they've had college students think about math problems when
they were going to bed, and those students would do
better on tests, for instance. And there have been other
(13:56):
studies that people like going through a divorce, those who
have dreams about the divorce recover better. So they clearly
have an important role in processing emotions. And that's kind
of shown in the data, which is really interesting. It
(14:19):
just drives home that message that dreams are an important
but kind of ignored part of our lives, and our
culture is actually kind of unusual in the way that
it ignores dreams when you think of other cultures over
time and over history, they they've taken dreams more seriously
(14:44):
and realize the messages they bring, where we kind of
dismiss them as nonsense. A wonderful example of that is
a dream my father had. He never talked about dreams particularly,
but when I published my first book, he was quite
(15:09):
elderly at that point, he was maybe in his late
nineties or even a hundred. He lived to like a
one hundred and two. I was showing him my book
and he was in an assisted living but still very
much with it, and he said, oh, congratulations and so forth.
But then, like a lot of people, he kind of
(15:29):
paused and said, oh, but aren't dreams just nonsense? And
then he did what a lot of people do. It's
almost like they're following the same script. He said, For example,
last night, I had this dream, and he told me
this really beautiful, transparent dream, which he thought was nonsense.
(15:49):
In his dream, he was mowing the lawn and my mother,
who had long passed, she was on the porch and
she was kind of criticized seeing him for the way
he was mowing, that the rows weren't straight. So he
tells me this little dream and says, isn't that nonsense.
I'm thinking to myself, dude, that's that's that's a beautiful
(16:12):
picture of your life. Because my mother was that kind
of person. She was very critical. I think that's part
of why I loved dreams so much. They're like little artworks,
you know, like like this dream and this single image
captures my dad's life. And even there's like a deeper
message too, because the idea of mowing, you know, and
(16:34):
here when you're one hundred and two, that that has
a message of end of life and harvest and things
like that. So such a beautiful condensed image that I
think that's why I love dreams so much.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Greg, do the dreams originate in the brain or somewhere
outside of the brain.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
They for sure originate in the brain, and they originate
in deeper, deeper brain levels. There's these waves that come
from deeper in the brain. You can see them on
EG tracings, and those deeper waves trigger the brain to
(17:18):
go out of its normal deeper sleep phases into this
special space phase of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep
when you have the dreams, and there's interesting changes in
the body too. The body becomes paralyzed, as we mentioned earlier,
(17:45):
but otherwise the EEG. The brain waves become essentially the
same as adult as awake brain waves. So it's kind
of interesting you go into this special phase of sleep,
and it seems to be a special phase that we
(18:06):
have like an independent need for. Like you can let
people sleep but wake them up only when they go
into this rem sleep, and they don't do well if
you just deprive them of rems sleep, even though they
get plenty of plenty of sleep otherwise.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
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