is it just me or....

Throughout my practitioner course I put down long days of concentration and sleeping in an unfamiliar hotel down to my strange dreams. That was until a few days into the course Paul McKenna asked who has been experiencing a good nights sleep along with very nice and memorable dreams, I certainly had. Following last Thursdays evening with RB again, amazingly deep sleep and a quite remarkable dream that still makes me smile now.

I have always enjoyed dreaming (both day and night) and would love to know what the correlation is between NLP orientated sessions and enhanced dream experiences. By enhanced I mean easy to remember and very nice stories unfolding in my head as I sleep. Paul McKenna went on to say that this was the result of spending the days with himsefl Richard Bandler and Michael Neill but what specifically was going on there?

I talked this throught with a person on another course since Thursday who commented that the Neuro Pathways (am I correct in underdstanding these are not physical connections but more like schemata, just terminology to allow the process to appear to be physical?) do a majority of their re'alignment and changing whilst we are sleeping and hence the active brain- thus dreams. But why pleasant dreams and yes yes, nudge nudge-wink wink, VERY pleasant dreams!

Hi, Matt --

Yes, I've also noticed that my dreams become quite bizarre and enlightening, actually, when listening to Bandler.

I think he gives post hypnotic suggestions that we will work things out during our sleep, which is great!

Our neural pathways do organize themselves while we sleep -- that's why babies sleep so much...everything is new! Also, the first time I went to Paris and had to speak French all the time, I noticed my need for sleep increased -- it wasn't jet lag -- my brain needed to get all the new information stored.

IHere's a quote I just found from the Harvard Medical School Guide to Achieving Optimum Memory :

"The scientists found that the neural pathways that were active during the learning period were reactivated during sleep."

Now, back to RB -- I think something distinctly metaphysical is going on as well...he is able to spark growth, whether he is there or not. My boss at work is like that...powerful charisma. It's related to the idea of transmission, in the spiritual sense...

And it's something I am working to develop in myself -- to teach, or coach, my students and clients while they are in the dream state.

Playing with boundless states of consciousness is endless fun!

- V

Bandler does give lots and lots of post-hypnotic suggestions about integrating learnings during sleep and dreams, and certainly lots of people on my prac training reported amazing dreams.

I have a whole new category of dreams related to developing NLP skills, like a second voice questioning and meta-modeling the first internal dream voice, and all sorts of "change-machine" workings that part of me wakes up just enough to go, "Oh yeah, that's happening."

Haven't noticed any increase in the "VERY pleasant dreams" category, but maybe I can put the change machines to work on that, too.

Hi All,

A couple of things here...

First of all, it seems that we do all of our learning and memorizing as we sleep. If you teach someone to do something some morning and then keep them awake for 36 hours afterwards, they most likely won't have learned what they were taught and will have to learn it again!

And since at least some of our dreaming tends to reflect this process. Sleep research has shown that when people learn a new and challenging skill, they'll tend to dream performing that skill at some point that night (although they might not remember the dream upon waking), for example.

So, since one of the things you learn at a good NLP training is just how much more pleasure you can handle now, it's no mystery if we consolidate that new skill set and dream our way to being even happier night by night!

The unusual sleep patterns and the wonderful dreams (remembered or not) are one of my favourite bits about attending or even teaching these sorts of things!

And thanks to everyone for sharing their experiences! Anyone else got dreamtime stories to tell?

Be Well,

Michael Perez

Wow, Michael - I hadn't thought of it in that way before, but every time I started a new kind of job (before I picked a career and even new jobs were somewhat familiar to my skillset) I went home and dreamt about doing the job over and over all night. So I was just cementing in the new skills. Cool.

I spent the year before my first NLP training reading voraciously on the subject. I'm sure I learnt lots, but don't recall anything much in the way of dreams until the first time I fell asleep listening to a Paul McKenna trance induction and dreamt about being creative in new ways (over and over all night). Then more of the same since starting to use NLP (as opposed to reading about it), lots of dreams as in the post above, from the first day of my Prac course right up to the present.

During the day for the last couple of months I've been editing website content, one of the tasks for which is putting what I've done into editable fields on a website, moving content from place to place, with each field having a different function, then testing the results. Last night I dreamt I was doing the same thing with the contents of my mind: moving blocks of "text" into different fields and testing the results.

I love my mind...

When I attended my Prac I had the most restful sleep in years. I was also physically sick twice and I attributed that to "getting rid" of internal poisons such as misconceptions, outdated ways of learning and coping, and excess emotional baggage.

I had one dream during Prac (blushing here even now) that I have every month or so. What I read into that was that there was positive change going on and new ways of handling everyday events in a new way. I'm please whenever I have that dream because I know that change is still going on.