July 2010 - Your Dreaming Mind

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Have you ever awoken from a dream and not known whether the events you were just part of were real or imagined? Has it taken you a few moments to compose your thoughts before you convinced yourself that it was "just a dream"?

The reason you experience an emotional or physical reaction to your dreams is that your unconscious mind does not know the difference between a real or imagined situation. It assumes all dreams are real. By the way, this is also why hypnosis is so effective for positive change, because when we make positive suggestions to your unconscious mind, it accepts them as real and true, unlike your conscious critical mind that simply argues with positive suggestion.

Dreams can be convincing. They can be exhilarating, strange or even terrifying. Some dreams seem to be prophetic. They can also like an episode from The Twilight Zone!

Although there are many people who swear they never have them, we all dream. It is just that some people can recall every detail of every dream while others remember nothing and are thus convinced they do not dream. For most of us, however, we remember some dreams but forget most.

Even the dreams we remember upon waking are soon nebulous and forgotten as the daily grind of life takes over our thoughts, emotions and actions.

For a select few dreams are not just broken images that are remembered upon waking – they are vivid fantasies that are lived during sleep and experienced consciously and as strongly as the real world!

These people are known as lucid dreamers and there is a ton of empirical evidence to suggest anyone can learn how to lucid dream if they are willing to perform some simple exercises.

There are a variety of theories that try to explain why we dream. Some researchers say that dreams are a way of dealing with the events of the day to help us organize our memories of the day’s events and what they mean to us.

It’s almost like it is our subconscious mind's way of clearing away the clutter from our mental computer, classifying what is left and storing it in memory for later retrieval.

This might explain why we sometime awaken still feeling tired. All the mental activity during the night has exhausted us.

Apparently, we're all quite active during sleep time. Scientists say that we sleep each night in four or five, 90 minute cycles. During the dream state, or REM cycle, our minds are fully active with neurons firing galore. Research has soon that this REM state, or dream cycle, occurs approximately every 90 minutes.

When we consider that if a person lives to age 80 and sleeps 8 hours every night they will have spent 233,600 hours sleeping by the end of their life – that’s over 26 YEARS!

Even though we need quality sleep to be healthy and function at our peak, it almost seems like an awful waste of valuable time. Think what we could do with that extra time!

For this reason many people learn the art of lucid dreaming and decide to spend some of those 26 years living out their fantasies, solving problems and …. well…. just enjoying themselves!

Once you've mastered the art of lucid dreaming you can control EVERYTHING in the dream state. Think about the possibilities!

If you’re interested in learning Lucid Dreaming, there are many good books on the subject. Stephen Laberge Ph.D. has written several credible books on Lucid Dreaming.

When clients come in, I often ask them about any repetitive dreams. Your dreams frequently reflect real concerns, or issues you are working on at the unconscious level. This is your unconscious minds way of healing old issues. What’s fascinating is that repetitive dreams and or nightmares often completely stop after using hypnosis to release old negative emotions, fears and limiting beliefs. So, if you want to know what you’re working on, look at the content of your dreams.

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