Uncommon Hypnosis Master Series
The meaning of dreams
If you sit back and think about dreaming you’ll realize just how astonishing a
phenomenon it is. Without your conscious effort, every night, whether you
remember it or not, your brain creates
multi-sensory environments that you
live through. And what’s even more
amazing is that behind every dream is
a hidden pattern. This hidden pattern
is the reason the dream is there in the
first place.
Dreaming takes place during the
Rapid Eye Movement phase of sleep,
known as REM. This phase occurs
around every 90 minutes during sleep.
The REM state has also been observed in the womb. This is when instincts are ‘hard wired’ in the fetus. We
also observe the REM response in
hypnosis, and it is during a hypnotic
trance state that we reprogram instinctive or emotional responses. Hypnosis,
in fact, is synonymous with the REM
state. So hypnotic trance, pre-birth instinctive programming REM and nighttime dreaming are all connected.
It’s easy to understand why a fetus
needs to be ‘pre-programmed’ with
instincts and it’s clear why you might
want to hypnotically exchange the instinctive response of fear for an instinctive response of calm during, say,
a job interview – but why on earth do
we dream at night?
We know that dreaming must be important because we spend up to two
hours in every twenty four doing it. Nature wouldn’t have us doing it merely
for entertainment. There must be a
good reason why human beings (and
many other species) dream. We also
know that depressed people spend up
to six hours or more a night dreaming.
And we know that if we don’t dream,
we quickly go mad. So, clearly, dreaming is serving a purpose.
The ancients believed dreams could
foretell the future and that it was during the night dream that we left our
bodies and soared through the spiritual realms. Sigmund Freud believed
that dreams were a way for the subconscious mind to present to us our
secret desires. His theory of dreaming
seems dubious when we consider that
even birds dream. It is unlikely that
they are having access to their socially
unacceptable desires when they enter
the REM state!
There have been a number of other
dream theories knocking around but
the most recent, and convincing, understanding of why we dream comes
from a man I had the pleasure of working with for many years.
Dr Joseph Griffin gained his PhD for
his ground breaking dream research.
Through ten years of studying his own
dreams and the collected dreams of
hundreds of other people, he found
that dreaming serves, firstly, to keep
instincts intact. You may have seen a
cat dreaming of hunting a mouse. Now
if your cat has food dished out to it
every day by you, then clearly it is not
using the hunting instinct. But during
REM the instinct is renewed.
Secondly, Joe found that in humans
dreams are connected to what is emotionally important to us.
This much has been obvious for generations. He also concluded that we
always dream in metaphor and that
the metaphor is just borrowed – from,
say, recent TV watching or anything in
the environment, or your imagination.
The symbolism of the dream isn’t necessarily important. A better clue for
unwrapping the meaning from the
dream is to match the feeling of the
dream to feelings from the previous
day.
So those popular so-called dream dictionaries that tell that if you dream of
bananas it means you are about to win
the lottery are kind of outmoded. We
all concoct our own unique metaphors
which are – to use a metaphor –
merely the clothes used to dress the
real meaning of the dream. So the
metaphors of dreams aren’t important
in themselves and vary for all of us.
Next, and most importantly, Joe discovered that dreams were not created
by the emotions from the day before if
the expectation caused by the emotional arousal had been fulfilled.
So, for example, if you had been angry
at your partner and had then shouted
at them, had a row, made up and
agreed to love each other better in future, then the ‘emotional expectation’
had been played out. All that emotional expectation would have been
competed. No dream required.
what people would dream about by
listening to their emotional concerns.
The ones which were clearly ‘unfinished business’ were the ones that fuelled the content of that night’s
dreams.
If you want to understand how people
work, is it essential to grasp just how
vital expectations are.
Trying to recall a name that you have
forgotten produces an emotional expectation which is fulfilled once the
name eventually pops into consciousness. Whew, what a relief it feels when
you finally get that name!
The placebo expectation is fulfilled
with the completion of the cure or pain
relief.
When a hypnotist builds powerful expectation using the imagination, then
that expectation is fulfilled with the activation of a post hypnotic suggestion.
We humans have a powerful drive to
fulfill our expectations. If this wasn’t
so, we wouldn’t be compelled to act in
the world and nothing would ever get
done!
Many years ago I was sitting in a room
with three other people. I was reading
a paper and the TV was on. The program was about cancer and the narrator said words to the effect that one in
four people get cancer.
But if you had got mad with your boss
at work but couldn’t shout at them because you thought they might fire you,
then you’d have a build up of emotional expectation, with no fulfillment.
It’s like stretching a rubber band to
ping it at someone, but never letting
go.
I was only half listening, but some
emotional expectation must have been
activated within my mind. One of the
people in the room said, perhaps inevitably, ‘I wonder which one of us that
will be!’ That was like a hypnotic suggestion setting an unconscious expectation.
Your brain would need to be freed up
from that emotional expectation, and
this happens by dreaming it out at
night, metaphorically. This completes
the emotional circuit and switches off
the arousal, leaving your brain clear
for tomorrow’s emotional arousals.
Later in the evening I watched a program about an explorer traveling
through a desert and that night I had a
nightmare, which is something very
rare for me. I found myself wandering
alone through a huge open space – a
bit like a desert. This symbolism was
clearly just borrowed from the TV
show about the explorer. Next in the
dream I started to become aware of
So dreaming is like an emotional flush
system. Joe found he could predict
feeling very thirsty and thought that I
would die of thirst if I didn’t find water
soon.
Suddenly I came across a little old
woman standing behind a counter.
Because of dream logic I didn’t find
this weird at all! She had four cups of
water in front of her on the desk. I
asked her for a drink and she told me I
could choose one cup only but she
had to warn me that one of the cups
was poisoned. I chose one and drank
but found that I felt unwell -she informed me regretfully that I was dying
because I had chosen the poisoned
cup.
At this point, thank goodness, I woke
up. I had no idea what the dream
could have been about until I recalled
the cancer TV show and realized that
the pattern fitted – one in four people
get cancer – at least according to their
statistic.
My nightmare had effectively completed the circuit, therefore switching
off the anxiety by using a close metaphorical fit – being poisoned rather
than getting cancer. Now my mind,
thanks to dreaming, was clear of that
particular expectation and I’d only
need to dream more about cancer if I
continued to focus on it or worry about
it during following days.
Dreams are meant to be forgotten
about, but we all do dream. If you recall your dreams you should be able to
fathom their meaning by linking them
back to emotional expectations from
the day before. We can have positive
unfulfilled expectations too. If you are
excited about an upcoming event that
is yet to happen, your brain may attempt to complete that expectation by
giving you an exciting enjoyable
dream. So if you tend to problem
solve, think positively and not worry
then you’ll have fewer dreams and
when you do dream they’ll be more
pleasant.
If you are very unassertive or spend a
lot of time worrying about stuff you
can’t change then you will have to
dream more to switch off all that unful-
filled emotional arousal and expectation. Remember, if you spend time ruminating negatively about the past this
is still creating an emotional expectation as far as your brain is concerned.
Over dreaming causes daytime exhaustion because too much time spent
in the REM state exhausts the orientation response. This response is a basic brain function that switches your
attention from one thing to another. If
you have over-dreamed through the
night then in the morning you have no
capacity to orientate to anything new
on the outside.
Over dreaming gives you a flat battery,
which is why depressed people wake
up feeling so very tired. Depressed
people dream more because they
worry more, but they don’t switch off
the worries by active problem solving.
In fact, depressed people increase
their negative expectations through
catastrophising. This is something we
go into in depth on our Depression
Learning Path – if you are interested
just search for it in Google. We also
give strategies for breaking the cycle
in our Depression Recovery Program
on the same site.
To have energy and focus during the
day you need to have the right proportion of dream-free sleep. When we use
hypnotherapy we are often tapping
into the dreaming brain and completing emotional circuits, which frees up
the brain, which is why even highly
stressed people can feel so much better after a short hypnosis session.
For example, if I help cure some one’s
post traumatic stress response after a
car crash then we find they stop
dreaming about it or having flash
backs. This is because we have safely
and calmly completed the circuit using
hypnosis. We have done what nature
had failed to do in its attempts to
dream out the trauma.
So now you have learned what
dreams are for and how they work and
also why over dreaming happens and
how it can cause the symptoms of de-
pression by leaking energy and leading to exhaustion.
Dreams are endlessly fascinating and
once you start to see the pattern you
can begin to get a unique insight to the
workings of your own and other peo-
Mark Tyrrell
ple’s subconscious mind. Using Joe
Griffin’s understanding of what dreams
are for and what they mean supplies
us with a fantastic tool to discover
what really worries us.