May

Dreams Induced by Hypnotic Suggestion

Can the use of hypnotic suggestions influence the content of dreams. Definitively, yes , back in 60’ at the University of Chicago, Dr. Johann Stoyva made an experiment to influence the content of dreams by pre-sleep hypnotic suggestion, he hypnotized his subjects and made the suggestion ‘You will dream in every dream tonight of climbing a tree’.

The results :
Subject 1:

“We made a,… an outing trip, and I don’t know where we went; we went through the woods. We marched and marched and marched. Oh, it was very colourful, very much so …
Mmmmmmhh, I’m walking, I don’t know, with people. I’m going places in woods and then we climbed on an apple tree to pick some ripe beautiful apples.
I was dreaming about…. Egypt, my beloved Egypt! And I was taking people to a tomb in Upper Egypt. And I took them inside to some of the king’s tombs so that we could escape the strong heat.
I was a long trip along the Nile and we were thirsty and were looking for some shade – couln’t find it. Trees were very scarce there. So we visited some tombs in the meantime to escape the strong heat and I showed them all some beautiful paintings in the king’s tombs ….”

Subject 2:

“There’s this old maple in front of our house in Philadelphia. It used to scratch against the window and, ahhh, sometimes we had to cut off the branches. So, I don’t know, usually we just go out on the roof but we were all going up the tree by the base to do it. All of us. The whole family and my grandmother – and she’s been dead for about five years now. We couldn’t get up it and just scratching (sic) against the windows and making scraping noises.”

Both subjects placed the suggestions in their own personal context. I believe that more personal suggestions for the subjects would have resulted in better experience more meaningful for them. Now, if you know a self-hypnosis script you can use it to give you suggest to dream about a particular themes some people use this technique for problem solving. I tested the Hemi-sync SweetDream CD which assists you to do that (review in a later post)

You can use suggestion like ‘Tonight, I will dream about _____(whatever you want to dream), and when I wake up I will remember that dream and record it immediately’ of course, you can change the wording, use what work best for you. You will be more successful at this if prior to that, you were used to recall your dreams, they are plenty of dreams recall techniques you can find on the web. If you have never recorded your dreams you might want to start with a simple dream recall routine for a week or two before you attempt to program the content of your dreams.

Seth/Jane Roberts in the book ‘Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness’ recommend the following dream recall method :

You may if you prefer, begin by suggesting that you will wake up after each of the first five dreams ….If possible, we want to get the dreams in order here ….(note: this is for later dreams analysis)

Now, there is something else to be considered. The very self-suggestions that will enable you to recall dreams will also change their nature to some extent. This is all right, and the effect will be minimized when the newness has worn off. Again, we want the dreams in the sequence in which they occur. If do not want to wake up after each dream of the evening, then the suggestion should always include ‘I will recall the first three dreams …or first five dreams, or whatever’.
You may try two different wordings for a start, and now I am speaking of precise wording. The first : I will wake up after each of my first five dreams and record each one immediately.

The second alternative wording would be the same as the one I have just given , but the ‘wake up’ would be omitted.

You can either record your dream in a dreams diary or put them on tape-recorder . Try both methods and stick with the one that suit you best.