Dreams, Hypnosis and Healing

1. All dreams come to us in the service of health and wholeness.
2. No dreams ever come to tell us what we already know. Their context is to move us further along in our growth and development.
3. The dream is a natural pathway for bridging the gap between the conscious and unconscious. Both have critical roles to play in the balance of the total self.
4. It is in the world of dreams that the unconscious is working out powerful dynamics inside us. What we do not deal with in our waking life comes up in our dreams. Dreams do not scare us to keep us frightened. They motivate us to deal with what we would reject. Dreams often speak in extremes to get our attention.

1.  The dream you are most likely to remember will be the last dream of the night, which normally occurs just before you wake up. Sometimes a dream will wake you up in the middle of the night. Whatever the case, be still and play the dream back in your mind, letting all its images make an impression on your mind. Grasp all images even if they seem trivial. Fragments are important in themselves and can cause more information to come to the surface later. If you have a feeling of a dream but can’t remember it, try shifting your body. Dreams seem to surface in the position in which they were dreamed as if the body has a dream memory.

 2.  Remember that most of the dreams we remember are highly charged emotionally and occur at times that are most stressful. Dream research shows that the more conflicts we are experiencing in our daytime life, the more dream sleep we need. Dreams are our attempts to resolve these conflicts and offer new perspectives. The source of a dream’s conflict may be difficult to determine, but it is important to remember that the dream generally does reflect conflict in our waking lives. If you can connect the conflict in a dream’s theme with a real-life conflict, you have a key to the dream’s meaning as well as to understanding and resolving a major issue in your life.

3.  Give yourself the positive suggestion to write down your dreams immediately in the middle of the night, even in the dark if necessary. Or try recording them into a tape recorder. To preserve their intimacy, write them in the present tense.
“I am walking down a long road when.....” Record everything—thoughts, feelings, emotions, conversation, angles, colors, people, no matter how weird they may seem. Try to stay in the chronological order of the dream to preserve its structure. Let your words flow out spontaneously but if you get stuck, give yourself time to get the precise words to describe the dream. Use a word even if it seems strange to you. Later on, it may have another meaning to add.
4.  The next morning or soon after, look again at the dream and its theme.  Ask yourself, What am I doing in the dream? (Observer, doer, creator) and What are my immediate associations with the dream?

• What seems to be the dream’s theme or overall message?
• What events of the day may have triggered the dream?
• What events that I am anticipating may be reflected in the dream?
• Why did I need this dream?
• What would I like to avoid in this dream? (What traits do I have in common with that image?) What is my response to the problem in the dream?
• How does this dream resemble another I’ve had previously?
• Choose the part(s) of the dream you want to explore and pay attention to the images that resonate to you. These images may appear in later dreams and provide a teaching for you.
• Later, rewrite the dream, incorporating your insight about it, and give it a title.

1. Dream Incubation Technique
    Teach your client to incubate a dream by inducing the feeling of relaxation and meditation. Concentrate intensively on a particular problem. Formulate what is wanted to be known into a question and repeat that question over and over again in the mind, thus programming the dreaming mind to take over when falling asleep.
     Under hypnosis, suggest that the client will have a powerful dream that will cause her/him to wake up and record the dream. Suggest that the dream will give insight into the current problem.

2.  Guided Re-Entry Technique
Under hypnosis, help your client to re-enter the dream and experience it more fully as well as possibly resolve it. Ask questions of the dreamer to evoke responses relevant to the dream and to connect it to what is going on externally.

3.  Sharing a Dream with a Partner or Group: A Step-By-Step Guide

• Sit in a circle in a relaxed or meditative state.
• While concentrating on the dreamer’s words, the group hears the dreamer read his dream, concentrating on the dream as if it were their own.
• One by one, the listeners tell their reactions and projections to the dream to give insight to the dreamer. They do not interpret the dream for the dreamer; they only tell what the dream evokes for them.
• The dreamer uses these projections and relates them to real-life events surrounding the dream, possibly considering other interpretations.
• The group or partner has an ethical responsibility to keep the dream confidential.

1.  Healing is the process of bringing resolution to oppositions in the body, soul, mind, and life. This means that the way to heal is to face conflict rather than to avoid it.
2.  Healing includes dealing with the fear or adversity in our dreams so that it is resolved.
3.  We can even use dream-work to heal the dream itself or allow it go to a natural resolution of conflicts.
4.  Healing, like hypnosis, involves removing inner blocks and evoking integration in oneself and one’s life.
5.  The need for healing is actually a spiritual issue to find wholeness (integration of all parts of the self) and new meaning to life.