Dreams and Hypnosis
I had a dream which was not all a dream
Byron
I was now faced with three interlocking notions:
- That the universe is stranger than I had been educated to think.
- That Mind (and/or other non-physical forces) lies behind it all.
- And that a rational explanation of (at least some of ) it was possible.
Ideas came flooding in now, sometimes so fast that I could barely keep up. One day I realised I could even begin to see some sense in the old Greek gods of Olympus by thinking of them in the same sense as the Indian ‘gods’: ie as aspects of one Great Deity, or personifications of human psychological conditions. Thus the weird escapades of Zeus et al might make sense as parables hinting at esoteric truths. They still remained bizarre, but threads might be teased out of the silliness, in the case of Ariadne and the Minotaur, quite literally.
§ Maybe this is the standard interpretation. But it was new to me, and arrived out of the blue as a personal insight rather than from a book, which was in itself interesting.
These insights and connections all tended towards one end, I can now see, but they involved some supportive side-tracking on the way. I’m going to spread this side-tracking over the next five chapters. I’ll start with something we are all familiar with: dreams. To start with: what are dreams? What are their qualities?
- Mainly we dream in colour, but not all of us, and not always.
- We are quite certain that we are present and active in our dreams.
- There is no question of us being someone else, for example.
- We can interact with other people, creatures, and situations in Dreamworld just as we can in Wakeworld.
- We can do strange things in Dreamworld: flying, or suddenly shifting from place to place.
- We are sometimes vaguely aware that there’s something fishy about the reality we are experiencing, but can’t quite put our finger on it.
- Our experiences can have high emotional power; sometimes more powerful than in Wakeworld.
- We feel as if we have a body of some sort.
- I’ve heard of people being terrified or even murdered in dreams, but never physically hurt. But people do report feeling pain in dreams.
- We may occasionally converse with people who have died, perhaps even knowing this at the time of the conversation.
- Once in a while we bring back memories or ideas from a dream.
- If we are starved of dreams, we can expect to make up for it by dreaming extra later on.
- We know that some dreams feel meaningful, or important. Others appear to be junk.
- We appreciate that dreams often include some sort of symbology.
- We also know that dogs and other animals dream.
What is the reality that we experience in a dream? And weird though it might be, it is a reality at the time, is it not?
§ ‘Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?’ Havelock Ellis.
Many cultures paid close attention to dreams, starting with the Sumerians of 5,000 years ago. Several big names in the Jewish Torah claim to have been visited in dreams by God or a prophet. The Talmud states that ‘dreams which are not understood are like letters which are not opened’. In Egypt and Greece people went to special dream temples to ‘incubate’ dreams that would contain meaningful messages. Some of these temples remained ‘esoteric’: by invitation only, so to speak. And in Rome, the emperor Augustus decreed that anyone dreaming of Rome must describe it publicly in the market in case some meaningful prophecy of the wellbeing of Rome was hidden within it. Serious stuff.
And then there is the ritualised and induced dreaming of shamanic societies which use/d drugs to stimulate visions/dreams. These ceremonies are held to be sacred and not recreational.
§ The English language reflects an ancient folk concern with dreams in such phrases as ‘the girl of my dreams’, ‘win a dream holiday’, ‘may all your dreams come true’, etc. Clearly a ‘Dreamworld’ is here held to be a meaningful and ideal world of some sort, and not a pointless shuffling of random neuronic pops and tweets.
However, it was only the late C19 that the subject became scientifically respectable in the West, via Sigmund Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, he wrote of ‘the unconscious’, meaning a level of awareness that lies below our normal perception. It surfaces in various ways, for example in neuroses and dreams, which are hidden messages from the deep to which we should pay close attention. It struck me that Freud, as a Materialist, must have had a hard time in deciding on a source or a location for this vast subconscious world he was investigating, and for the subliminal meaning and purpose that he claimed resided there. All random, as a Materialist must ultimately believe? ‘Random meaning’? ‘Random messages’? These are paradoxical and thus meaningless concepts. And how to explain the intricate symbolism that dreams employ? How could those levels of complex organisation tie in with the random firings of neurons that a Materialist relies upon?
§ ‘Random’, because non-random firing would require a non-random force to control the firing. And that force can only be non-physical which Materialism is bound to deny.
And above all, how can the Materialist premiss explain the realness that dreams present us with, in which we can walk about, think, talk, have sexual encounters, smell things, and fly? Freud seemed to think that sleep (and dreaming) was a retreat from Reality, not a Reality in itself.
§ Freud’s Materialist mentor said ‘No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism’. This was an increasingly popular view among scientists in the decades following Darwin’s apparently mechanistic exposition of Evolution by Natural Selection: the ruthless weeding out of inferior specimens. Ruthlessness was now OK; psycho-brutalism as above, was commonly expressed. Hitler used ‘Darwinism’ to excuse the murder of hundreds of thousands of ‘defectives’.
This attitude is with us still in areas like cosmetic testing on animals.
Perhaps the people who say dreams are all caused by angels or devils or whatever, have just as strong a case for credibility as Freud the Materialist? A stronger case, possibly, as the angel fans do at least require an intelligent non-physical force of some sort, in line with the basic requirement of simple Idealism, which Freud logically could not bring into his theories. No doubt some of Freud’s interpretations were useful, but if the Materialist premiss is wrong, is the analysis and subsequent treatment likely to be the best possible? This question spills over into modern psychiatric treatment, which tends to treat people with chemicals (although ‘talking cures’ are gaining in popularity). Clearly some chemical treatments work for some of the time for some people, even if nobody knows how they ultimately work.
§ It’s the Mind-Body problem again, this time at a molecular or atomic level. Chemicals certainly do affect Mind… but how? To say that a molecule of morphine or steroid locks into another chemical within the brain does not explain the associated mood changes and behaviours, from deep relaxation on the one hand, to aggression, mania, and suicidal leanings on the other. A simple lock-and-key ‘explanation’ doesn’t begin to explain the subjective and dynamic visions produced by LSD. Which chemical contained the glass giraffe, and which the paisley-patterned pyramid?
I was now finding deeply questionable the assumption that a Person (and his Mind and Emotions) is just a physical-mechanical entity which must thus only be physically-mechanically treated.
Modern neuroscientists also tend to share the Materialist Belief that thoughts and dreams and any meaning they contain are all manufactured by random chemical and electrical discharges in the brain and nervous system.
§ If you still think this is a rational hypothesis, please refer back to the London taxi driver experiment in Chapter 7; and note that this ‘explanation’ requires the universe to be random in all details, thus completely lacking in order, thus completely mad: which it clearly is not. For a start, you can understand the pattern of meaning in this sentence which you could not do if your thoughts were the random firing of neurons.
Is the Esoteric view of dreams any more helpful? The doctrine of Karma + Reincarnation does at least allow for an Other World in which an altered Reality or Dreamworld might exist. Freud’s non-material ‘unconscious’ could only exist in a vague and unknown manner inside the material mass of randomly firing chemical porridge that created it, along with all those other difficult abstractions like purpose and meaning and judgement. How can an abstraction like ‘meaning’ lie in a chemical, no matter how complex? A chemical has no life, while meaning is the very Stuff of Life.
An Other World sounds more rational. Neater, at the very least, and in accordance with Occam’s Razor, which always helps.
§ ‘Occam’s Razor’: attributed to the C14 English logician William of Occam/Ockham. It states that ‘entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily’ or, popularly applied, ‘when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better’.
Freud and Karmic theory would agree that ‘hidden desires’ lie behind our dreams, but whereas Freud tended to make these desires sexual, Karma suggests a broader ‘animalism’ or ‘selfish weaknesses of character’ (to a Yogi these are the same thing) as the cause. Nobody doubts that dreams can affect health. Repeated bad experiences in Dreamworld can cause anxiety and even bring on depression. Conversely, eating or drinking too much late at night can affect your dreams, so we can say that Dreamworld has a Reality comparable to Wakeworld, insofar as each world can directly affect the other.
§ Some studies suggest that bad dreams, relating to fears of pregnancy complications, or of giving birth to an unhealthy child, can contribute to spontaneous bleeding, or even miscarriages. Asthmatic attacks may be caused by dreams too. You might argue that the dreams were themselves brought on by daytime anxiety, which reinforces the circle of Wake-Dream-Wake affecting each other. Simply: Dreamworld can have a real effect on Wakeworld. Thus Dreamworld must have a Reality of its own (as Unreality can assuredly not affect Reality), and may not be simply dismissed as somewhere to run away to ‘from Reality’, as Freud suggested.
§ According to a US Gallup Poll of 2005, about one person in five believes it is possible to communicate with the ‘dead’.
As dreams have a Reality powerful enough to physically affect the body, even zombifying people who are afraid to go to sleep for fear of night horrors, I would say that Dream Reality might be more ‘Real’ than we normally assume. In fact, the more I thought and read about it, this Dreamworld Reality was beginning to sound like a real, but non-material, locus in which ‘dead’ people (‘ghosts’??!) might have their being, the fringes of which we drop into and out of when we dream. In other words, Dreamworld was looking remarkably similar to the Other World required by the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation.
Most of us vaguely remember having dreamed, or might possibly become half-aware of dreaming at the time, but some people can maintain full consciousness in their dreams, and can choose where they go and what they do, remaining lucid throughout. ‘Lucid dreamers’ tell us they can construct their own Reality in dreams. For example, if you find yourself being chased by a nameless horror, you have three choices, they say. Either you can flee in terror (perhaps waking up), or, you can fight the beast, or… you can simply wish the monster to turn into a friendly moggy, and it will oblige.
§ See Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by S LaBerge and H Rheingold.
§ Fighting the beast reminded me of a Carlos Castaneda book (see bibliography) in which he had to fight a (non-physical) ‘ally’. And didn’t someone wrestle with an ‘angel’ in the Bible somewhere? Any connection here?
And what about hypnotists being able to change someone’s Reality?**
Here was an example of the Idealist claim that Mind could create directly, and not just via manufacture (‘using the hands’). Obviously, converting a terrifying beast into a cuddly kitten was not in the same league as creating a universe, but it was the same in principle: Will it so and it becomes so. Really? …. big stuff.
§ I was reminded of ‘In the beginning was the word’, from John in the New Testament.
The original Greek word is ‘logos’ which means ‘the principle of reason’ as well as ‘word’. The ‘principle of reason’ must work via intelligence and meaning. So the universe began, the NT says, with reason, meaning, and intelligence. ‘Let it be so…’ and it becomes so. In other words ‘Will it so…’
In Genesis we find ‘Let there be light..’ The idea, intelligence, creating simply by Will, as in the lucid dreamer’s monster-to-kitty transmogrification, and the power of the surgeon hypnotist to control pain: Will.**
But what of ‘Light’? ‘Let there be Light‘… not ‘Life’ or ‘Humanity’. .. More puzzles.
Lucid Dreamers also say that instead of running away from the monster, or fighting it, or avoiding it by neutralising it, you actually have a fourth option: you can face up to it on the understanding that the monster is, or carries, a symbolic representation of a weakness in your character, from which you can learn, and that once you have faced up to it, that monster never returns.
This sounded to me like a connection with the Law of Karma, which claims that your bad deeds (brought on by selfish weakness of character) will need paying for, either in this life or another one. As Karma + Reincarnation requires an Other world, and the Dreamworld looks so similar to that Other world that we nip back and forth to upon ‘death’, well, maybe our night monsters and trials are just another way of bad Karma ‘coming back to haunt us’. This karmic connection might also explain why nightmares seem to recur: to remind us of debts that need to be paid off somehow, or at least to be put back on one’s agenda. And they keep returning until you take notice.
***
Two key things about hypnosis:
- It works
- Nobody knows why.
My only personal contact with hypnosis was via the lecture by the surgeon I mentioned earlier. He told one subject that an ordinary table ashtray would be too heavy to lift when he awoke. And so it was. I knew the subject, and he wasn’t pretending. He was as baffled as the rest of us. The next subject was told that his arm would become too rigid for two other people to bend. This too happened. You can’t fake having two big blokes forcing down on your outstretched arm without it giving way. How can simply being instructed ‘make it so’? The surgeon then told the subject that when he came round again Rob (the host of the meeting) would not be visible to him. The subject (‘Jumbo’) came round and rubbed his eyes. ‘All well, Jumbo?’ ‘Yes, fine.’ ‘I want to have a word with Rob. Do you know where he is?’ Jumbo looked round the podium. ‘No.’ Rob was ten feet away from him, in full view. The surgeon indicated that Rob should pass him a briefcase that was leaning against a table leg. Jumbo was still a bit dazed. But as the briefcase left the floor and was passed across to the surgeon’s hand Jumbo’s face changed from a blank to a mixture of horror and terror. I’ve never seen anything like it. I actually feared for him. So, possibly, did the surgeon, as he snapped his fingers and put Jumbo out for the count again. He then reassured him that when he came round he would feel fine.
As he ended his presentation he told all his subjects that the ‘influence’ was now lifted and no post-hypnotic suggestions would apply any more. He added an anecdote of one occasion when he had a guest for dinner who wanted beer (and not wine) with his meal. They had been exploring hypnotism before the meal, so the surgeon put his guest into a trance again, and assured him that when he came round ‘Water would be beer’. Not only did the guest praise the quality of the ‘beer’, but he became quite tiddly on it, even down to his pupils dilating.
§ A direct physiological effect which is not under conscious control… The surgeon said he’d seen it many times.
The following morning the surgeon went on holiday for a week. When he returned he received an irate phone call from his guest asking what the hell he’d been playing at when they last met, because for all the previous week he’d been bathing in beer, making tea with beer… It seems that it is vital to be precise in your suggestions.
The surgeon had rejected me as a subject but towards the end of the presentation I suddenly felt as if a blind had been drawn in my head and became quite woozy. My girlfriend became concerned for and helped me through the throng to ask if the influence had been lifted from me as well.
‘Yes,’ he said, and my head began to clear.
Five strange things were demonstrated that evening:
- That one man’s mind can control another’s
- That his control can have an effect on normal physiological systems like muscle control
- That it can also affect subconscious systems like pupil dilation
- That it can somehow fool a sensible person into literally not seeing what was in front of him
- And that it could, or so it definitely seemed, affect even someone not directly involved with the process.
***
Thirty years on I returned to the puzzle of hypnotism, and came across a twenty year old psychology text book. I looked up ‘Hypnotism’ in the index. It wasn’t there. In a 750 page book there was no mention at all of hypnotism. There were equations with Greek letters in them, and lots of graphs, and articles on ‘Limitations of Factor Analysis’, and many pages on Oedipus and incest and the like but there was no mention of one of the most profound and baffling psychological conditions of all. Meanwhile, I read of many examples of how hypnotism was being used, for example, in Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, ranked among the top 50 hospitals in the USA for heart surgery, cancer and respiratory disorders…
to reduce general pain
to stop smoking
to reduce anxiety
to improve depression
to overcome a fear or phobia
to relieve pain during certain surgeries
Important hospitals use hypnotism regularly so why was it ignored in the textbook? I looked in the indices of my other science books and was surprised to see no mention. One or two did note that Freud used it, but that was all. There was no mention in my Penguin Dictionary of Biology. The clue came from Richard Gregory’s The Oxford Companion to the Mind in which he states that interest in hypnotism has largely passed into the arena of the experimental psychologists. These are the people who like measuring things above all, and who produce graphs with Greek letters in them. They tend to concentrate on things they can measure, and tend to disregard things they can’t. As you can’t weigh an idea, or measure a mother’s love in milliseconds, these things get left out of the picture. Hypnosis had become reduced to the countable and measurable and, more recently, patches of brain lighting up in MRI scans. No doubt all these things have some value, but the problem is that Very Big Stuff (like using hypnotism to help people) gets left out, simply because it can’t be reduced to plots on graphs, and if something is ignored for long enough it begins to become invisible, undervalued, and eventually dismissed as irrelevant or non-existent. Add to this the fact that Materialism is the philosophy of the day for most physiologically-inclined researchers, and that Materialism can’t accept the existence of something as bizarre as mind control at a distance, and the subject gradually drifts into non-existence.
I found an article which claimed to give the modern scientific view of hypnosis. It was by an eminent psychologist, but in the course of 10,000 words, he made no mention of the practical application of hypnosis for all the healing effects above. Nor did he mention the even more extraordinary examples of hypnosis and self-hypnosis leading to immunity from pain. In fact, his main thrust seemed to be that hypnosis didn’t really exist: it was just ‘suggestion’. He also suggested that ‘hypnotic trance’ did not exist; it was really just very deep relaxation.
Here again was Humpty Dumpty land where the true meaning of awkward words and effects could be massaged out of sight. The writer was clearly a Materialist (although this was not stated) and thus he was obliged to dismiss anything that did not fit the dogmatic certainties of Materialism. This included the concept of the unconscious mind, which he refers to as a ‘magical entity’. Thus the third key thing about hypnosis:
3) To a Materialist, hypnosis is a gross embarrassment which must be ignored, scorned or ‘rationalised’ out of existence wherever possible.
A couple of White Crows to show the poverty of the Materialist stance:
- In the 1930’s Dr Jack Gibson, a graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, performed over 4,000 hypnosurgeries including amputations and eye operations.
- Numerous studies have shown that hypnotically-prepared patients need less anaesthesia and shorter operation times, have less anxiety, less nausea and recover faster.
- Hypnosis before breast cancer surgery reduces the need for anaesthesia, the level of post-op pain, and the time and cost of the procedure, according to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
- David Spiegel, MD, of the Stanford University School of Medicine, says ‘It has taken us a century and a half to rediscover the fact that the mind has something to do with pain and can be a powerful tool in controlling it’.
- Hypnotherapy has been successfully used as a treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, eating disorders, compulsive gambling, sleep disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And Dr JE Williams (et al) have reported that it can be used to increase a lady’s bust size by an inch and a half (~4cm).
A couple of ‘personal’ examples reported by the BBC:
- In Peterborough in July 2008 a 67 year old lady called Bernadine Coady insisted on using self-hypnosis to control the pain while undergoing keyhole surgery inside her knee. An anaesthetist was on standby but was not needed.
- Alex Lenkei, age 61, from Worthing, West Sussex, chose hypnosis over anaesthetic before undergoing an 83-minute operation at Worthing hospital in April 2008 to remove a walnut-size piece of bone from the base of his thumb using a hammer and chisel and a surgical saw. Consultant orthopaedic surgeon David Llewellyn Clark agreed to the unusual sedation on Mr Lenkei, as the patient had been a registered hypnotist since the age of 16. Mr Lenkei says he was fully aware of everything going on during the procedure and felt no pain. The hypnosis process took less than a minute.
Hypnotists (and the occasional brave scientists who have tested the effect) know that they can cause real physiological effects on people’s bodies, including raising blisters on the skin, as reported in The American Journal of Psychiatry. Dr Mike Gow became the first person in the world to replace a woman’s front teeth with implants using only hypnosis to control the pain. He received the Best Young Dentist award at the Dentistry Awards 2008.
There is no doubt at all that hypnosis is a real effect, and of a different order to just ‘suggesting’ things to people who are ‘relaxed’. It is indisputable that Mind can control Body in ways well beyond everyday experience.
The absolute necessity is for one Mind (or possibly two) plus an idea (‘hypnosis’) plus the desire to act, plus the will to see it through. Is that enough? Or is there more to add?**
‘Sports hypnosis’ can improve a tennis player’s serve or a golfer’s drive by applying imagination and will to ‘mental tennis’ and so forth. ‘Biofeedback’ enables deep relaxation by wilfully correlating the mind’s activity with the brain wave frequency associated with relaxation.
§ ‘Will’ had turned up a lot by this point: a hypnotist requires it to deny pain, as does a lucid dreamer, in turning a monster into a kitten.**
What dreams and hypnosis have in common is that the Mind/Body link seems somehow to weaken, allowing some separation of Mind from Body, thereby allowing strange facets of Reality to peep forth, which, if they weren’t so common and clearly natural, we might call ‘super’natural.
Vibes and Intuition
Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality
Alexis Carrel
The only real valuable thing is intuition
Albert Einstein
Mind can clearly operate in a separate Reality from the physical body in dreams, and can also directly affect the physical body via hypnosis. We know that to be true, despite Materialist Science trying to ignore the fact. But what else might Mind be doing that we haven’t been paying close enough attention to?
If you have found anything of interest in ‘Bad Dogma!’ so far, please tell all your thoughtful friends. Thanks.