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Epic Halloween conversation with Forrest Borie of Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare, on Room 237, meeting Rodney, The Scooby Doo model of secularism, on the set of The Nightmare, the reenactments, watching the recreations, growing up with malevolence, a numinous trauma, developing a frame of understanding for sleep paralysis, Crucial Fictions, Dark Intrusions, dissociation/enlightenment, a lifetime of paranormal experiences, building psychic barriers, how to describe the indescribable, Jungian dream analysis at 9, archetypal psychology, symbolic language, describing entities, meeting the dead, black blobs made of fear, the Ticklers, the creation of “the grays,” conscious static energy coalescing into form, an energy membrane, born nocturnal, the edges of language, day, night, & twilight, something in the room, ectoplasm and entity-summoning, what fear begets, the original inhabitants of spacetime, tripping on cough syrup, irreversible effects of marijuana, depersonalization disorder, derealization, opening the gates of perception, storming heaven with psychedelics, self-trauma, engineering ourselves, night terrors and reality distortion, how trauma becomes our God, EDMR treatment for trauma, losing the “sacred” by healing the trauma, what lies beyond, the web of trauma, traumatic reenactments, dissolving pain barriers, messengers of the psyche a struggle to individuate, strengthening the connection to the archetypes, the need for divinity, everybody’s helpless, God is all you have, letting go of trauma, the psychic defense system, the ground of the psyche, the work of the guardian, the false construct of the ego, the Demiurge, the need for a malevolent order, internalizing abuse, a trauma-identity, diving into the nightmare, questioning our autonomy, psychic fragments posing as monsters to avoid integration, rogue elements of the psyche, a conspiracy of fragments, Forrest’s demon-companions, the problem with divinity, victimizing our own victim complex, pulling in the totality, 120 Days of Sodom, taboos and shame, Vermont as center for eugenics movement, the deep conspiracy, MKULTRA and alien abductions, directed energy weapons, the ET hypothesis, Mirage Men, engineering memes, Whitley Strieber’s story, the end game of the engineers, the prevention of wholeness, fear as repulsion, the perennial apocalypse, the need for evolution, the world as crucible, death awareness and the struggle of consciousness, raised Wiccan, Forrest’s parents, don’t talk about entities, the question of screen memories, seeking the trauma, the bottom of the personality, losing the buffer of divinity, touching insanity, an interesting life.
Forrest outtakes:
Download (Duration: 15:09—13.8 MB)
Songs: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, by Sta. Apolnia; “Graveyard Orbit,” by Crystal Stilts; “Haunted,” by Jahzzar; “Creeped Out,” by Robyn Hitchcock; “Deep diving, new age crap III,” by Party People in the Can;”Monkey Said,” by The Freak Fandango Orchestra.
I really enjoyed this.
I emailed Jasun to say so and he suggested that I leave a comment so Forrest and, I assume, other listeners could see it.
I used to suffer from sleep paralysis as a child and I was also plagued by very disturbing dreams and the two were often closely related. I didn’t know that it was sleep paralysis until much later when I was made aware of the alien abduction phenomenon and its possible link to the myths of the incubus and succubus. I could write at length but for the sake of the readers’ sanity I will summarise.
I remember waking at night repeatedly when I was about 7 and finding myself unable to move and with the sensation that something, or someone, was twisting my legs. It was quite painful. I had the impression that my tormentor was a very white muscular male who was completely bald, I couldn’t open my eyes so this was an internal impression. I also had sensations of being tickled and touched all over but it was this twisting that was the dominant sensation.
At the time I lived with my mother and two sisters so there was no likelihood of this being abuse of any kind. I had the idea that there was a large component of memory in my experience as if I was superimposing an old memory onto my current experience.
The onset of this was coincidental with my first mystical/other experience within which I saw a ball of fire in the sky. The ball was about a foot in diameter and was moving slowly. Writing this is the first time I have consciously connected the two.
As I got older I no longer felt the impression of this male figure but the paralysis continued. I felt the presence of an invisible vortex that was malevolent at times. Not being able to open my eyes it’s hard to say how I knew it was invisible but that was the impression I got. Other times I felt no presence.
Associated with the paralysis either during, before or after were very vivid “dreams”. It was hard to separate reality from dream and quite frankly language fails me when I try to describe it. The themes of these dreams were the dead, dancing skeletons, alien invasions, the revealing of thousands of spaceships in the sky that were previously hidden, derelict buildings, stairways and being trapped in a machine that was forcing me to dream (this was decades before the matrix).
Since I was about 17 the symptoms never recurred although I do still have dreams of alien invasions, post apocalyptic scenarios and malevolent intelligent machines.
I hope this is useful for others, I have rarely shared this information, even as a child. Something has always told me to keep it to myself.
🙂
Thanks for sharing all that. Your mother & sisters never had male visitors?
No, my sister experienced some SP symptoms in her 40s, a dark shape swooping at her as she was falling asleep or waking up. It looked a lot like a moth/bat like being that I dreamed about as a child.
We have amazing imaginations. The ego, this false construct; the ID of I. I’m not the ID, I just work it through. 🙂
Like any good Halloween special should, listening to this yesterday actually led to nightmares and sleep paralysis last night- although the particular entity that menaced me was one I’ve never seen before- an all-red cloven-hoofed satyr-like creature, dancing around my bed with a scowl- a nice change of pace from the usual shadow people, Grays, the giant floating crying baby’s head, or my personal favorite, the demonic black-eyed woman gnawing at my ankles.
“a human potential destroyer- in a lot of ways.” i found this to be so much more than an astute observation. very heart felt and back and forth as i listened to you both. what i mean is i felt it way over here, you had this already in the can, had gone about your daily lives, but there it is. here i was, listening. responding, cheering you on, with bated breath and not all halloweeny or anything, but riveted. thinking of that old show i only ever heard once- only the shadow knows- or something. every time i heard the clink of ice cubes, tinkling, a sip, a sigh, a fone buzzing in forrest’s head, a chuckle, what i’m saying is i was there. and you never knew. exactly like what you were talking about really.
i loved what forrest had to say about the cultural context being essential to us, us being deprived of it despite what some would have us believe to the contrary.
dreams were big in my family as a kid, we talked about where we went every morning while we had our porridge. well, while my dad made the porridge and tried to not burn the michif toast all at the same time. very weird growing up thinking that everyone went places every night when they were lucky to have a dream. weirder still finding out that they didn’t.
i’d go all bill morrison, but i won’t cause i can’t, lack his amazing honing in sight and out wit.
really enjoyed this, in a bunch of places, saw segues at every turn.
wish i lived out your way. i’d love to catch your workshop and say hi jasun, so have fun will wish you what you need.
Thanks nana! which was the human potential destroyer – LSD?
well, when forrest was referring to anti-pyschotic meds being the go to treatment of choice for a spontaneous psychic break, as opposed to say, within an ‘other’ culture this break wouldn’t be seen or heard as an aberration but recognized as a gift in disguise. please don’t think i’m being flip, it never feels like a gift, sure as hell doesn’t look like a gift either, and it is never a choice one would ever make, to go to hell and back. hell for everyone who bears witness to this use of anti-psychotics on their loved one.
i find myself wondering how the profession, down to the resident can look in their mirrors, at the end of a day on their wards.
i agree with what forrest alluded to with the comparison between a break and the effects wrought on by choosing to pry open the doors of perception, and those similar effects of a break. seems to me the treatment is different, both attitudinally as well as in long term approach.
sorry, i went off the deep end there.
i’m back, seriously now, there is no language for this or so i thought, the more i listen, the more i’m not so sure about this.
can’t believe you nana’d me. i love it thanks!
When Forrest described the black, amorphous(?) shapes that inspired petrifying fear I nodded in agreement. In the Fall of 1976 my parent’s bought a house from an old couple and we spent our very first Christmas in that house and I had just returned from a semester of college and was of the age of eighteen. During that holiday, I found that I could not sleep in my room. The minute I turned off the light, although the garden outside my bedroom window would be phosphorescent with the light of a gibbous or full moon, the space within my bedroom would be inky blank and hovering above me would be an amorphous black shape that caused my heartbeats to involuntarily accelerate. Curiously, having read one of the eeriest stories of my reading career–I was a reader from an early age–a story by Algernon Blackwood, erstwhile member of the Golden Dawn, called “The Willows,” I recalled that the protagonist of that story protected himself from the baleful numinous presence of the willows that abounded on a portion of the Danube River he was navigating, by pointedly thinking of ordinary, banausic everyday memories of a life (and pointedly NOT thinking about the abounding willows and the numinous darkness that surrounded them.) Whenever I recalled having tea with friends or warm memories of being with my dad and his cronies as a child, the terror would subside and my heart would resume its usual rhythm. (Eventually, this haunting became apparent to other members of my family and a priest was invited to bless the rooms with holy water!–which was done.)
Later, around the time that Mount Saint Helens blew up in Washington state, I’d have sleep paralysis cum out-of-body experiences. During the day, although it was a summer in Portland, Oregon, I would report to my security job at the college I was attending with chattering teeth. My fellow students would ask in amazement if I was cold.
A memory–Istvan Nadas is performing the complete keyboard works of J.S. Bach at my college that summer. Across from me is a hypnotically alluring young man who seems to look at me and yet is not looking at me. Later that night, I’d “awake” to find my consciousness intact but my body paralyzed, but I’m aware of, quite consciously, that I’m being photographed–the flashes go off startling me–by the young man who was at the recital. Eventually, somehow, my body would once more be under my conscious control. That happened repeatedly so that I questioned my grasp of reality.
It’s ironic. I cannot fathom why such a beautiful young man would find me so attractive that he would risk criminal trespass to photograph me while I slept in my dorm room. So I favor a Freudian rather than Jungian interpretation: I was so smitten by the young man’s beauty and our shared adoration of the music of Bach–my soul mate!– that I effected a state of sleep paralysis to reify an imagined interest, on my part, of his interest in me, so that the sleep paralysis was actually a variation of Freud’s thesis of dream as wish-fulfillment.
Likewise, my out-of-body experiences in which I’d turn rotisserie-wise to face my body lying on the bed–at which point I’d be so startled as to snap back into my body–are perhaps vivid dream recreations of my experiences with the volcanic ashing of Portland, Oregon that inspired so much fear and distrust in civil institutions’ ability to be truthful and to cope with the extraordinary.
Can I email you, Jasun? It’s not something I really want in the public eye, not because I would be embaressed but because I just don’t want to share it with the whole world.