Why Hypnosis and Dreams ?

The combination of dream work and hypnosis is truly a profound and transforming experience where the healing nature of dreams, and the potential of hypnosis as a therapeutic and personal growth tool, comes to the fore. This type of regression is recommended to anyone wishing to seek self-knowledge and actualisation. Even a sliver of a memory of a dream can be useful in this work. This is an exciting and ever so personal exploration of your subconscious mind where you get to unlock and know the secrets of your dreams.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Dreamworking

There is more to dreams that meets the eye. Once you learn how to understand and appreciate your dreams you can begin to utilize them to aid you in seeing things differently. Dreams can help you advance your self development by allowing your to face a problem and solve it. 

It is very likely that most of your dreams could at first at least be quite negative. This is because dreams tell you about inner conflicts you are experiencing. This is a good thing. Conflicts cannot be resolved if you don't acknowledge them and they are not just going to go away by themselves.
If you choose to confront a problem instead of avoiding it you will be able to move on to better things. 

Even though part of the content of your dream may be familiar, the context can be unfamiliar. Often the story can be muddled and the circumstances surreal. This is because creative imagination is the language of the subconscious and metaphor here reigns supreme. Logic on the other hand resides in the conscious mind and the two might not mix particularly well when you are asleep, at least at first.

While on one hand your dream may include the people , events , sights and sounds that make up its "characters", the meaning of the dream lies underneath the surface level. The deeper meaning cannot really be grasped by your conscious mind because it is not an intellectual concept but an 'emotional' state or feeling.

While Freud used to believe that the reason dreams can be so indecipherable is because your unconscious may be trying to protect you from disturbing underlying messages, I believe the truth is slightly different. The fact that the mind responds in very similar ways during dreams to when under hypnosis tells us that the two are similar in that we access a similar state when either deeply relaxed or asleep. This state is similar to the state children are in til the age of 6. It is also the 'creative' state artists find themselves in when 'inspired'.

What if the fact that we feel so alienated from our dreams only reflects the alienation we experience from our creative selves? If this is the case then we can help ourselves understand our dreams by allowing ourselves to enter the creative space more often and vice versa. Perhaps you could ask yourself what the feeling of the dream was and paint it. Or write a story about it. Or make a collage. Or simply close your eyes, relax, recollect the feeling and let images come to mind. Then write down the first word that comes into your mind.

When trying to understand dream symbols keep in mind that many have been given universal meanings. These meanings, while useful as a guideline cannot be taken as the absolute truth. Saying so would be the same as saying that a chair  in my painting means the same thing as the chair in Van Gogh's. While there may be archetypes that connect our collective unconscious, we assign very personal meaning to our own symbols and need to 'tune in' to them rather than looking outside for explanation.

For example: drowning is said to symbolize a fear of being engulfed by an unexpressed need, but maybe water represents an overwhelming emotion to you instead, or perhaps you are simply afraid of water due to a past traumatic experience . What is important is the feeling  attached to the image or the metaphor you are dreaming of. So ask yourself : what was the feeling I got from the scene?

The key to understanding yourself better is to try and bridge the gap between your emotional creative self and your rational analytical self. Remember, they do not need to be enemies.  Instead they could be best friends. Imagine: if they worked in harmony what more do you think  could you achieve?




No comments:

Post a Comment