Many of us have had those common dreams, haven’t we? Where we have been trying to run away from something and out legs would not work, yet our mind was kind of floating along with it… Or many boys have that recurring dream of somehow feeling naked at school in front of other people… And many of us may have had those psychedellic types of dream, where the brain really made some unusual connections…

That can sometimes be as much as we know or regard about our dreams.

In this film then, we are given the opportunity to look deeper (literally) into the everyday phenomenon of dreaming and the premise that we have deeper levels of mind that can be reached within our dreams.

Today, in real-life, away from the glitz and glamour of the giant screen, huge advances in neuroscience research by a wide range of pioneers across a wide variety of universities have led to a many new insights regarding the liaisons among dreaming, cognition, and the brain.

This research requires laboratory environments and the use of incredibly high-tec equipment and use of technology, as you’d expect… So it was wonderful to see this film allowing the viewer to appreciate that truly remarkable observations about dreams can be made in regular life by regular folk, by simply reflecting upon the kinds of things that occur regularly in our own dreams, the places where we spend approximately 30% of our lives.

So as an example, the film demonstrates in dramatic fashion that our dream environments, which are composed of buildings, natural scenes, or fantastical landscapes etc, are all created by our brain, somehow.  Some of these creations are as awe-inspiring as a George Lucas sci-fi film or as dramatic as a Shakespeare tragedy.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the film, Cobb, says that in our dreams, we do not consider such landscapes and other creations to actually be generated by ourselves, though of course both the dream setting and the image of ourselves within the setting are fabricated by the very same brain. Other aspects of the dream world, such as decisions, preferences, and choices can also be construed as ‘self-generated.’  Aspects of these self-generated processes resemble those of waking life: Deciding which pathway to walk along when navigating a journey is a similar process and choice in a dream or in waking life.

The film also allows one to appreciate that many aspects of dreams can be irrational.

For example, I once dreamt that I was playing football with my friends for a first division club, only to moments later be sat in an exam hall at school listening to the vigilator giving orders in a foreign language that made me panic because i did not understand. Plus there were TV screens on the walls. I just got my head down and focused on writing the exam.

*Breathes cathartic sigh of relief and carries on*

Such random series of events do not happen in reality, mainly because sensory inputs from ‘the real world’ constrain the creations of the mind.  The mind is not a passive entity, but a creative one, much like a film producer.  According to one piece of dream research I have read, we fail to detect the random series of events and other absurdities that occur in our dreams because the higher-level, rational centers of the brain (such as prefrontal cortex) are less activated when dreaming than when being awake. So we do not rationalise about what is going on. We just carry on with it and all its quirks…

At the same time, many aspects of the dream do stick to reality. For example, in my afore mentioned ream, we all wore football boots and the same colour kit… The wall mounted TVs were all correct in detail and the walls of the exam hall were the same colour as my school sports hall.

In the film Inception, it shows that, upon experiencing physical harm in a dream, we experience pain, even though there is no real physical cause of the pain. Such an observation can be readily made in our dreams.

And of course, we never consciously rationalise about how we ended up being in that place in the first place… In some weird and wonderful dreamscape that we are sat in, we never stop and think… “Hang on a minute, how did I get here?” Which is mentioned in several scenes in the film…

Overall I loved the film, mainly for the sheer bloody-mindedness of it all…

And as for all these hypnotherapists jumping on the bandwagon just because it often refers to the sunconscious mind… Pah!

Heck, at least I jumped on the bandwagon and talked about dreaming and am not espousing notions that I can do the same things as the film using hypnosis… Instead of highly complex chemical sedation and wired-up technology as is used in the film…Hahahaha… You have got to look out for some of that stuff…

Have a great weekend.

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.

I often espouse the benefits of self-hypnosis, progressive relaxation, meditation, as well as running and other forms of exercise as wonderful ways of reducing stress and being able to deal with it more effectively.

These are all well and good and things I certainly employ in my day-to-day life. What is omitted here though is what is actually the most important source of stress reduction: relationships.

This week, I had pointed out to me another piece of research that indicates just how vitally important human contact is for our psychological as well as physical health. This study over at the Public Library of Science website, reviews the results of many, many earlier studies including data from over 300,00 people, and found that those with strong relationships have a 50% lower risk of mortality than those who are isolated and without social support. Yes indeed, a 50% lower risk of mortality!!

As it says in the study itself, that’s as large a benefit as people get from not smoking!!

So what are the reasons for this striking statistic do you think? One notion from other authors is that we develop our ability to cope with stress from our early teachers, such as our parents first and foremost. While our folks nurture and interact with us, giving us physical affection when we are very young, our stress systems get hardwired to think and believe that Mum and Dad help to relieve stress. We all see this happening when parents pick there kids up from playgroup or return home after work in how the childs face lights up.

This notion is extended so far and is so important, that even a 100-year-young person is going to have their blood pressure lowered if they have their 125-year-old mother around with them interacting and supporting them!

As with everything that I ever write about and as with every theory that exists  there are exceptions to the rules. Abused children, for example.

None the less, with the findings of this study reaffirming that the link is so important, and that supportive friends and family have so many health benefits, I think it is well worth taking stock of the level of supportive interaction you get. As those of you in this field will know, as we develop and grow, we create generalisations from our younger life and as such, other social contact also gets connected with stress relief and well being.

This study of many other studies really does demonstrate overtly that these effects and subsequent benefits last an entire lifetime… Family and friends truly are wonderfully therapeutic and beneficial and healthy. So go and empathise and connect and rejoice for more reasons than usual at Christmas when you are cooped up with all those guys!

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.

For many hypnotists and hypnotherapists I have encountered over the years, hypnosis is all about suggestion. Much research has been conducted to show that many people are suggestible and responsive to suggestion without any formalised hypnosis – there are a bunch of references to such work over at the wikipedia page on suggestion. In particular note the work of Spanos and Kirsch.

Suggestion is considered as a central concept of the field of hypnosis and it has been defined by some as:  ‘A communication, conveyed verbally by the hypnotist, that directs the subject’s imagination in such a way as to elicit intended alterations in sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts and behaviour.’

Really, today I wanted to write about some of the classic ways that suggestions used in hypnosis and hypnotherapy can be made as effective as possible and I am coming on to that… However, you can’t really discuss hypnotic suggestion without clarifying and classifying them first.

Any good, well-qualified hypnotherapist or student of this subject knows that suggestions get categorised according to the modality in which the suggestion is expressed, though as you’d expect, some suggestions involve more than one modality.. Let me explain that in a bit more depth.

Behavioural suggestions, for example include ideosensory suggestions which relate to changes in somatosensory experience brought about by responding to ideas that have been communicated by the hypnotherapist. These types of suggestion appears to the subject to have an automatic quality. Ok, so that can sound a bit too clinically academic for my blog, so here is an example….

The therapist repeats suggestions to the subject that their body is feeling heavy, warm and relaxed (as many hypnotherapists do tend to suggest) and the subject begins to experience these sensations. Basically, responding to direct suggestion.

To illustrate this is a slightly negative sense, many hypnotherapists and hypnotists use this example for generating analgesia (i.e. To start off a glove anaesthesia technique) and may suggest that the subject imagines that one of their hands has been immersed in a bucket of ice-cold water. When the hypnotist then continues to suggest that the hand is becoming more numb and colder as they imagine it more vividly, they respond accordingly.

Placed under much scrutiny and featuring in much of the work of Pavlov (the guy more famous for making dogs dribble) ideomotor suggestions (IMR’s) convey the meaning that a movement occurs in response to the idea of that movement; this is whereby the subject does not actually purposely move their arm (for example) but contraction, relaxation or inhibition of both voluntary and involuntary muscles occur in response to the suggestion. So they imagine something happening to them and without choosing to do it, it starts to happen. The Chevreuls pendulum exercise is a great example of this.

Antagonistic or ‘verbal challenges’ fall into this category of suggestions.  These include suggestions where the subject is told to try and “resist” the response.  This fits in nicely with one of Coués laws of reversed effect – the harder one tries to do something, the harder it becomes to achieve, was his rationale.

There are also more cognitive kinds of suggestions that include and are known by many as ‘hallucination’ and ‘delusions’ as they affect cognitive functions and convey the idea that the suggested experiences have a very real quality and the subject is able to interact with the images accordingly.  They may also include suggestions which can be considered to be forms of “role enactment” behaviour as in age regression or age progression.

Milton Erickson used a variety of suggestions in his hypnotherapy work to great effect.  These included indirect suggestions, embedded commands, truisms about sensations, open ended suggestions and double binds among others. Rather than give a direct suggestion, which appeals to the Conscious Mind according to Erickson theorists, which invites evaluation, Erickson used indirect suggestion, which resonates with the Unconscious Mind and is less likely to trigger evaluation.

It has been found that individuals who expect to be responsive to suggestion usually are.  On the other hand, people who have anxieties about ‘losing control’ and who find it difficult to ‘go with the flow’ tend to be less responsive to hypnotic suggestions.

Though there are exceptions to most rules in hypnotherapy and life, some typical rules of suggestion (and thus ways of making them more effective) are:

- Keep them simple. Ericksonian, indirect hypnotists would also say be specific on the ‘what’ and vague on the ‘how’, trusting the unconscious mind to work it out.

- Expectation re-enforces suggestion. Make suggestions with the expectation that they will be followed. it has been proven time and time again (especially by Kirsch) that we truly expect something to happen, it enhances the likelihood of it happening massively.

- Ensure the suggestions are ‘ecological’ and suit the subject’s values and beliefs. Anything too radical, or too far removed from the reality of the individuals map of the world, is unlikely to be effective.

- Make positive suggestions – suggest what you want and not what you do not want. If you mention things you do not want, the thinking goes that you are suggesting that thing anyway, the classic “don’t think of a pink elephant” syndrome.

- Use appropriate emotive language. Using language that elicits helpful emotions supports any suggestion. Ideally, a hypnotherapist or hypnotist will have spotted the kind of language used by the individual and can use that same kind of language back to them.

- Engage and use the power of imagination. Use the imagination to ‘practice’ new behaviours. As referred to in my describing of the kinds of suggestions, when you engage the imagination, it has a real-life effect on the physiology and life of the individual.

- Phrase suggestions to be in the present tense. Suggestions should be happening now – as in ‘tomorrow never comes’ – the change and desired outcome is required now and in this moment.

- Repetition is hypnotic, repetition is hypnotic, repetition is hypnotic… Many schools of thought believe that repeating a suggestion, either word for word, or in slightly different formats enhances the likelihood of it being effective.

-  Want it to work and expect it to work. The congruence of the delivery of the suggestion is incredibly important. If you do not deliver it like you believe in it, then neither will the individual receiving the suggestion. Say it like you mean it… Mean what you say!

-  Give a reward. That is, tell them what happens as a result of accepting this suggestion… How does it make life better? When they have a rationale and reward as a result of the suggestion, then they are likely to accept it more readily.

So there you have it… I could go on and on even further about suggestion, but this is an overview and some basic thoughts on the subject… I’ll be back tomorrow… Unless the day is equally as hot as it was yesterday and I literally shrivel away in my office…

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.

Last year, the birds ate 99% of the cherries in my garden at home. So this year, our cherry tree has been moved to a remote corner of the garden, the fruit are thus harder to get to and I have positioned a bunch of tall-standing shrubs that birds cannot stand, right next to it… Add into the mix the fact that we have a cat who is outdoors a great deal with this warm weather, and the birds have nabbed a lot less this year… Here is the tree a few weeks ago, with the cherries just turning red:

So this weekend, having picked several of the cherries during the past week at different stages as they ripened enough, I decided to bake a cherry pie with the fruit of all this labour… Our cherries are cooking cherries and so are not good to eat straight from the tree.

So you pick them, stone them and give them a good wash:

Then they get soaked in some good quality brown caster sugar, a drop of kirsch (we are so devilishly naughty) for around an hour or so. Then the juice gets syphoned off and mixed with cornflour and cinamon, then added back to the fruit. The fruit and its sauce gets poured into our pastry lined dish, and I spent some time weaving strips of pastry to get that lattice effect that looks like something Nigella Lawson would do rather than a football-loving, blokeish hypnotherapist… I have to confess, I did google instructions on how to best do this and watched a couple of US housewives giving instructions on this via YouTube… The joy of the modern world…

Next up, it all got put in the oven, filled the house with a smell that made us want to drool, and out it came after 40 minutes:

We then place a slice in the bowl, scoop some ice cream into the mix, and you have a mid-afternoon summer tea for any occasion, even just hanging out at home and pottering in the garden in Summer with your wife.  Marvellous.

“So Adam, what on earth has you turning into a househusband got to do with therapy and hypnosis?” “Yeah, this blog is about hypnosis, hypnotherapy and all that stuff, not some modern version of the BBC’s 1970s sitcom the Good Life!”

Well, it’s funny you should say that… This was an incredibly simple, joy-filled experience for me.

Whilst doing my pottering on Saturday morning following my run along the beach, I listened to the podcast of the Radio 4 show “All In The Mind” which is a brilliant show all about mental health, psychology, neurology, therapy and so on… They had interviewed a marvellous group of people, led by a local therapist and psychologist who felt that many of their clients and patients did not like the clinical setting of a therapists room, and struggled with formalised therapy for all manner of reasons.

So they had set up a weekly event that invovled them going for a walk in the country and chatting about stuff at the same time. That was it. It was virtually unanimous that it was hugely beneficial to all who joined in. They got to chat at their own pace with friendly people, they got to connect with the great outdoors and enjoy nature and received much therapeutic gain.

There is other such research that can be investigated to show the benefits of being outdoors, having some moderate exercise… And enjoying nature, enjoying fresh air, sunshine, rain and the elements.

Planting fruit and vegetables, picking it and sharing the experience with a loved one is something that makes me incredibly happy and feel well. I recommend it greatly. Ok, am now going to finally take off my apron for my actual client sessions today….  ;-)

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.

The Sun writes about this story here and the Star writes about this story here.

This is the news that Peter Andre has gone public by enquiring about whether hypnosis can help him erase someone from his mind, the Sun states the following:

The Aussie, 37, made the odd request as he filmed new game show Odd One In with new One Show host Jason Manford.

When confronted with a panel of ‘hypnotists’ – of which only one is a practising professional – Pete asks: “Is it possible through hypnosis to forget someone from your recent past?”

By all accounts this request made the crowd cheer as they made the connection and realised he was referring to his ex-wife, pantomime baddy, Katie Price.

Sooo… I wonder what the hypnotist replied?

That’s it. Short and sweet entry today… Got a busy day and then a weekend of running along the sea front, baking cherry pie with the fruit from my garden and spending time with friends and family… I’ll be back Monday.

© Adam Eason Personal Development — visit Adam-Eason.com for great articles, interviews and more on hypnosis and personal development.