Midnightsnack

I'm laying in bed and should have been asleep a long time ago. Should have been in bed a long time ago. The light is out and a humming starts. The unmistakable humming of a mosquito. 'You've got to be kidding me', I'm thinking and turn the light beside the bed back on. No joke. A mosquito. Still flying at the bed in the corner. The very corner where the spider is, too, although without a visible web. The spider goes to the mosquito, but doesn't quite get it. Turns instead to some other tiny flying creatures that came in through the window drawn in by the light. I help the spider a bit and blow the mosquito just once away from me and towards the spider. Now the spider gets it. It weaves the web around the mosquito. I turn the light out again. Only once I hear a soft humming from the mosquito. Then it's quiet.

Sleeping multi media and interactive

Dear reader,

with the tags/keywords sleep and sleeping problem, which I included here, you'll find my previous entries on what helps me when I want to go to sleep fast. Assuming I think about those methods. I want to make the entry today a multi media and interactive one.

For one thing, I'd like to introduce you to Holmes (actually a promo for the second season of "Elementary" with Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu) the clip shows a series of methods of how Sherlock wakes up Joan in all sorts of different ways, although all of them could generally just be called "mean". The clip is meant as a sort of "When you've got problems waking up, use the Holmes system". Here's the clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-aB2hU3axc

Fans of Benedict Cumberbatch certainly know the radio series "Cabin Pressure" by and with John Finnemore. He suffers repeatedly from insomnia, which lead to the piece "Insomnia Ballad" in his other radio series "Souvenir Programme". Here's the original (roughly 2 min. 19 sec.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrYGSlEmt_I

Of course there are fans, who create their own version and publish that. I find that the musical is so well done, that I want to share it with you, too. It's a bit less than 3 minutes long and you can find it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzSqubuZ7H8

And the interactive part? Well, that's your turn. What do you do, when you can't fall asleep? Or what could you suggest for others, who can't fall asleep fast or who can't fall asleep well? Anything is welcome, from music you like to listen to, to videos you have created to help others. Post it in the comments.

Until next blog,
sarah

Drug of choice

Dear reader,

a treat for you for new year's eve, although most of you probably won't read it in time and/or won't have time to prepare yourself accordingly before the party. Anyway... 

Drug of choice is something Richard Bandler came up with. The idea is that our body remembers sensations and reactions. Mind you, it's not the drugs that cause you to feel a certain way and experience the world in a certain way. It's your body's response to the drugs that does that. So for example it's not the LSD that makes you feel the way you feel, it's your body's response to the LSD.

Of course with the technique's name "drug of choice" we tend to think of drugs: LSD, or alcohol most commonly, I guess. But it can also be used to help you sleep without your sleeping pills. According to Richard Bandler, you have to take this pill or whatever once and remember it and if you do the remembering well enough, taking the thing once is enough and you can recreate the sensations again as much and as often as you like and need to. I remember Bandler talking about having several teeth removed and he needed to take some kind of meds. He supposedly took them only once and did it with "drug of choice" the next times. The good thing about "drug of choice" is that with alcohol for example, you don't get the negative side- or after-effects like hangover, headache and such. Essentially "drug of choice" means: free drugs as much as you want!

So how do you do this? Let's say you want to get drunk. You remember a past time when you were drunk or drinking anyway. Where's the first location you felt it in your body? I assume it was your mouth. What kind of feeling was it? Maybe a cooling sensation in your mouth. Where did you feel something next? And what kind of sensation? Just as suggestions: your throat? Stomach? What about your hands? Your legs? How about your head? Just go through your body, remember all the parts of your body in the order you feel the effects when you are drinking alcohol. Got them all? Go through them again. As always, do it in the order they happen for you. Do this a couple of times and you'd most likely be drunk quite soon. You may want to make sure you're sitting down somewhere the first time or times you do this. And watch out when you stand up again!

You could also create an anchor for being drunk. That way you may get there faster the next time and you don't always have to sit down going through all the parts of your body time and again.

There's a nice video of the magician Derren Brown doing this with a guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zryGzTbU49I

Derren is quite sneaky with his anchor on the poor chap sending him a short message at an unexpected time. Watch out for the guy with the turban, who's sitting in front of the guy. That's Derren. He's in his costume/disguise from another trick he did prior to this in that show. So it's not like Derren just sends him messages and leaves him alone drunk. Very responsible man, he is.

And also another video working with anchors to enhance the intensity here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsqZYezp_38

The basic idea of this is that you had the sensations before and remember them in a certain order. But others suggested that you don't need to have been drunk in order to make yourself drunk that way. We all have seen drunk people either in real life or on movies. So we have a reference, if not our own. Some say that this is enough already. I haven't tested that yet.

You may also want to take it further than just getting rid of your sleeping pills. They only gave me one once or twice on a night before surgery. But I don't usually take them and wouldn't do it again ever given my experiences and knowledge about hypnosis now. Certainly they gave me some stuff to calm me down before surgeries. You may want to recreate those sensations, too, if you aren't used to sleeping pills. I'm sure you'll go to sleep very soon that way. Even if you don't take sleeping pills. I know I could drift off quite easily that way if I wanted to. However for sleeping problems I usually do something less "dramatic", but equally effective, as I wrote in other posts before.

You could substitute sleeping pills, if you take them on a regular basis and don't want that anymore. Ideally you shouldn't need sleeping pills on a regular basis anyway. Certainly you can get hypnotically drunk with this method, too. How about replacing pills that help you with sexual dysfunctions of some kind with this method? How about if you have a weight problem and make up your own drug with “drug of choice” to help you with that? Or a confidence booster for shy people? Or... post your ideas to use this method in the comments. (Also see my Long live placebo post for that, if you haven't already read it.)

You could also combine effects or effects of different substances and make your own new free drug! It's  free, no negative side-effects, no after-effects. And you can have it as often and as long as you want. I have this naïve idea that people teach this method to addicts and the drug-related crimes and deaths go down and drug taking goes down. But maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part. I haven't worked with addicts, I don't really know about addictions. Would be cool if it worked though.

Please be careful, if you want to use this method to replace actual medication you really need. Like a diabetic who needs regular insulin shots for example. At least consult your doctor about this before. There are some pharmaceuticals you should actually take and not replace them like that. Not without consulting a doctor first anyway.

Until next blog,
sarah

Sweet dreams (Father, don't you see that I am burning?)

Dear reader,

let me tell you a bedtime story. One of Freud's clients came to him and told him of a father, who had the following dream (from “The Interpretation of Dreams“ by Sigmund Freud):

“A father had been watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look from his room into the next, where the child's body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for a few hours the father dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "Father, don't you see that I am burning?" The father woke up and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that the old man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle.”

How could a dream like that happen? One option may be that the father sensed the smoke or the light and integrated it into his dream. That's how we're supposedly dream anyway, we dream of things we experienced during the day and/or actual sensations we experience now creep into the dream. A logical explanation. But it doesn't explain why time and again there are people burning to death in their bed after having fallen asleep with a light cigarette or something. Also they say about hypnosis and trance that if we really have to be awake, because there's danger ahead, we'd be out of hypnosis or trance instantly and ready to act. Without having experienced that personally, I do believe that about hypnosis and trance to be true. But it doesn't explain the burn victims.

Next theory. We enjoy dreaming. Likewise many people enjoy being in a trance. That means that in order to wake up, we need either a strong outside stimulus or the dream has to be so uncomfortable, that being awake seems more pleasant and that's why we wake up. The father dreamed of his son, to be close to him. But the fire was a stimulus that needed to action. So he dreamed of his son waking him up. Sounds logical, doesn't it? Maybe. But much like the paragraph above, shouldn't we wake up with a fire all the time? Either waking up from the fire itself or from dreams forcing us to wake up?

Taking into account the possibility of a life after death or that the soul lives on after death or something like that, the son could also have contacted his father for real in or through that dream. Although personally I rule out that theory. Because I know that Harry Houdini wanted to contact his mother very much. After he was dead, he would have done everything possible, to contact his living wife. Even if he tried, there's no account of him actually succeeding in it to this day.

What then can we make of this dream? Your theories?

Until next blog,

sarah

My wonder garden (or Sleeping fast part 2)

Dear reader,

I already wrote about what may help to go to sleep faster once (Sleeping fast... if you want it and remember...). Today I want to share with you a method, which has helped me some years ago. I don't use it much these days, because I can go to sleep fast and easy and the methods I described in my earlier post help me sufficiently enough. Nevertheless the one I like to tell you about today is also very effective. When I started using it, I didn't know it is actually a hypnosis method. Only later on when I read about hypnosis, did I recognise this method again. What I am going to describe now, is purely my own imagination. Of course you're totally free to change elements of it as you please and envision them.

I'd have my eyes closed and would imagine a staircase out of bricks in a building of bricks. Something like a hallway in a castle. The staircase were clearly visible, although the hallway wasn't lit as such. I never counted the steps and didn't walk them very consciously. Sometimes I would sit on the top step for a while and wait a moment, before standing up and starting to go down. Sometimes, after a few steps down, I'd just “be” at the bottom. At the end of the stairs there'd be a closed round wooden door with a door knob.

Behind the door is a garden with a path with a bend. The garden is blooming with lots of colourful flowers. The reader might enjoy bending down and take a sniff at some of the flowers. Are there butterflies in your garden, too? Let's go further down the path. First a bit more straight on. Then there's the bend. A bit further straight ahead. The path leads to a sitting area with a couple of chairs and a bench.

It's always a pleasure and surprise for me to see who's sitting there at the table waiting for me. Sometimes the two chairs that I have there are taken and also the bench has one or two persons sitting there. Sometimes there's just one person there. In any case never a person I really know, but always people I'd assume to be enjoying their presence or people I'd like to have conversations with or that might inspire me. Magicians like the “psychological illusionist” (as he calls himself) Derren Brown, who himself uses a lot of hypnosis and could “hypnotise” me to sleep. Although so far nobody spoke a word in my garden. Or Teller of the magic duo Penn & Teller. During performances he never speaks. If he does speak, it's always with his back to the audience or with his mouth covered. But on YouTube you'll find videos in which he does talk. So I do know his voice. In the garden he wouldn't speak though. Most of the time I'd find him there with a coin in his hand and he'd roll a coin across his knuckles. His decades of practise and experience make tricks like that look much easier than they are for me. With him it's a flowing movement and he could do it en passant. Charming. Bewitching.

After sitting there for a bit and watching Teller with the coin or just enjoying the presence of people there, I'd fall asleep. If the bench is free, I might lay down there and go to sleep in the garden and for real.

Like I already wrote above, you are free to create your own garden and take from mine what you like. Still I'd like to give you a couple of things to consider to get the best effect from this: 

• If you want an exact number of steps to the door, I'd recommend 20.
• Also I'd suggest to take a sniff in your garden and sense smells at least once, even if you don't specifically bend down to a flower. Far too often there's talk and suggestions only about visual aspects in exercises and methods like this. It's a fact however that we find it easier to get into a situation, the more senses are activated. Smell and taste usually are ignored. By smelling a flower, you'd have at least have smell in a bit once.
• Of course a sitting area is no must have, neither is having one or more persons sitting there. Create your own surprises for yourself, like I keep surprising myself about who'd be sitting there.
• For sort of “security reasons” I'd recommend to you, if you have persons, to make it people you don't know and are rather very unlikely to ever meet. Known persons may hurt or disappoint you some day. Those persons are not very likely to be in your garden anymore. Generally it's still better to not have people you know in places like that garden from the start. That way the garden is forever a safe place full of joy. 

My hypnosis friends (you know who you are) might have other suggestions to consider. Maybe I'll add more in my text depending on your comments or if I think of additional important aspects. For now that's it for me. I wish you much fun and joy in your garden and sweet dreams. If you like, you can share your experiences here.

Until next blog,

sarah

Sleeping fast... if you want it and remember...

Dear reader,

how about this: a night owl writes about how to fall asleep fast. Well, that's me right now, right here! I like the night, because it's quiet, calm and peaceful. The hectic of the day is gone. I get creative a lot of times at night.

Actually much like with my current way of dealing with pain, my fast sleep method is borrowed. It's an idea I heard from Richard Bandler. He says, the problem insomniacs have is that they give themselves bad suggestions. They talk to themselves in their head in a fast and hectic voice ("Talk to themselves in their head? I don't do that!" That's exactly the talking in your head I'm writing about.) and go on about "can't get to sleep" on and on. Of course you're never going to get to sleep that way! It comes close to the old "don't think of a pink elephant". Okay, you may also keep yourself awake thinking about the past or the future or both. Whatever it is, it's no good, because you're keeping yourself awake when you should sleep!

So Bandler's idea is to slow down your inner voice. I don't think I've talked about this to someone face to face yet. It was always online somehow. Lately what I think worked best as an explaination is to remind people of when one person starts yawning, you start yawning, too. So if you talk fast, you can't get to sleep. Slow down your inner voice, make it sleepy and you'll fall asleep with it.

If people say they have trouble falling asleep, I always ask them what's going on in their head. So I don't right away go into "slow down your dialogue". I had one person, who told me that she saw images in her head. Like a movie where she'd "replay" the day or see what would be happening the next day and stuff like that. I told her to slow down the movie. Make it slow motion, like they did with the Matrix movies in the fight scenes. Slow it all down. I don't know if Bandler ever suggested that. I only remember him talking about the dialogue. But it made sense to me to tell her to slow down the movie, if she had pictures in her head.

I sometimes lay in bed late at night and can't get to sleep, mind you. This technique is something that requires discipline. When I can't get to sleep, I don't look at the clock. I know it'll only make it worse. It'll start me going: "Oh my, it's x now. I really have to go to sleep now!" It's useless dialogue, so I don't even go there and don't check on the time. Instead I go: "There you are again. You know what to do." And even with the second sentence, I'll start slowing down. I may even go back to other thoughts I've been thinking, but it'll be slow and maybe a yawn or two as well...

Like with many other NLP techniques, it's all about hitting that point of "Stop it. I want something else." Sometimes it even takes me some time to get to that point. But when I do, I get to sleep quite fast from there on.

Until next blog,
sarah