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NLP and Dreams

There's no question dreamwork changes lives. Dreams provide adventure, inspiration, a chance to be anyone or anything we want. Psychologists analyze dreams to fuel their work. But is there more? What if we could choose a specific change we want to make in our behavior, apply some simple mental techniques, and completely transform ourselves? That's the promise of a system called NLP. What's more, NLP can work synergistically with dreams to help us take control of both our sleep and waking lives.

NLP, (short for neuro-linguistic programming), is a system of skills and techniques that allows people to quickly change their subjective experience. Its purpose is to help people do whatever they do better. Salespeople, teachers, athletes, and therapists all over the world use NLP to improve their skills. Why not dreamers?

The field of NLP is too large a topic to cover here. It's crammed full of linguistic models, hypnotic induction techniques, exercises to enhance observation, and bits and pieces of just about every other field of study that's ever existed. Rather than explain what NLP is all about, I'm going to suggest a few ways in which we can easily apply it to dreaming.

One of the most famous NLP patterns is the sleep strategy, or insomnia cure. How come some people lie awake all night, unable to sleep, while others start snoring the moment they lie down in bed? An NLP'er exploring that question would look at insomniacs and "fast" sleepers, and ask them questions about what's going on with the pictures, feelings, words, and sounds in their minds. It turns out that many insomniacs make huge, flamboyant mental images and unconsciously chatter at themselves in high pitched voices. A person who falls asleep quickly, however, tends to talk to themselves in a slow, sleepy voice and dim the lights on their mental pictures.

You see, we can control our minds the way a movie director controls a scene: by changing the lighting, focus, angle, and soundtrack of whatever we imagine. Mix that in with a little knowledge of dreaming and hypnosis, and we can come up with a strategy to increase our chances of wake-induced lucid dreams:

First, relax your body and use the "fast asleep" strategy to bring sleep closer. As you lie in bed, slow your internal dialogue down, and make the voice sound sleepy. Tell yourself you're sleepy and are about to drift off. As you keep that tone of voice, begin to talk about the dream you'd like to have, or whatever hypnogogic images come to mind. Use sensory based words. Talk to yourself about how the dream sounds, feels, looks, smells, and tastes. If you find the images are far away, imagine them drifting closer and getting larger. Eventually, make them door-sized and imagine yourself drifting through.

The real power of this technique is that you can use it to induce sleep almost any time. Of course, NLP is all about subjectivity - so if this particular technique doesn't work for you, try something else.

Another area of NLP is called modeling. Modeling is a way of learning in which we attempt to duplicate another person's results by duplicating their mental and physical behaviors. We all did this as children when we learned to speak, but once we learn language, we tend to learn mostly through often-less-efficient verbal instruction. NLP offers several refined patterns for modeling people. One simple technique, called "Circles of Excellence", works quite well in dreams.

To do this exercise, first think of something you want to accomplish or improve. Ask yourself, who is already getting this outcome? It could be someone you've met, a celebrity, or a character in a movie. You could even make the person up. This is the person you want to model.

Now, imagine two circles on the floor. Step into one, and in the other, imagine a life-sized version of the person you want to model. See them doing what you want to be able to do. Go inside yourself and arrange with your unconscious mind to leave yourself behind temporarily. When you are able to do this, step forward, out of your body, and into the image of the other person. Experience what it would be like to be them. Notice what it's like to do things their way. When you are ready, return to your body and incorporate this experience into yourself.

That's how to do it while awake, but we can enhance "Circles of Excellence" with lucid dreaming. For one thing, in the dream state, you're using every ounce of your brain power to create a fully realistic version of the other person. Not only that, you have the added ability to move around in the other person's body, and actually dream yourself into the situations they encounter. Even if you don't have a specific outcome in mind, it can be fun to "dress up" in someone else's body for a while.

One of my favorite applications of NLP has to do with the way people structure time. For example, how do you tell the difference between a daydream about the future, and a memory of long ago? To explore that, make a mental image of something that happened two years ago. Make another image of something from a year ago, then six months, then last week. Now make an image of something you expect to happen next week, next year, and two years from now. If you're like many people, you'll find that you can draw a single line to connect all these images in space. (And if not, rearrange the pictures and try it on for a while - it's your brain after all.)

These "timelines" have a lot of uses in NLP. They're a convenient way of looking at your life as a whole - past, present, and future. If you imagine yourself floating above your timeline, you can quickly see times in your life that stood out - memories that you can enjoy, learn from, and improve. You can also use timelines to find recurring patterns in your life, or see the effects of your current behavior into the future.

In dreamwork, timelines can double as a navigation tool. If you imagine your timeline as your brain's built-in time machine, you can use it to travel far into the future, or into the past. What happens when you go further back than the moment of your birth? Some people have reported visions of past lives, while others report that their timelines connect with those of their parents. And if you're particularly adventurous, you might ask what happens at the other end of your timeline, far in the future?

As you can see, NLP gives us quite a few ways of exploring dreams. This article has barely scratched the surface though - there's more to NLP than strategies, modeling, and timelines. If you're interested, you can learn about NLP online. There is a good selection of NLP-related links at http://www.newhoo.com/Science/Psychology/NLP