What do our dreams mean?  How can their [sometimes pretty crazy] content possibly connect with our waking lives?

There’re many theories about dreams and many different formulas for working with them to extract meaning.  Using dreams as tools of divination seems to be as old as human culture. Freud saw the interpretation of dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, and assumed that dreams dealt with the passions and unwanted thoughts that the conscious mind would not be able to handle.  Jung’s work offered legacy in this area which is also still being used today.  Many of our dreams do have content directly relating to our waking life, although they are often symbolic or coded in some other way.  One suggestion is that they come from a part of the brain that is primarily prelinguistic and therefore presents its messages in pictures rather than in words.  When we begin to decode our dreams in language, it often happens that we will lose a lot in “translation”.

Research into the nature of dreams is neverending.  One way of looking at what we know so far, in NLP terms, is that the dreaming process enables us to deal with any emotionally arousing events of the day that remain unresolved.  By playing out any ‘unfinished business’ to its conclusion via metaphoric images, dreaming deactivates the emotion and leaves the brain rested and ready to handle the next day’s emotionally arousing onslaught.  The idea that dreams are a way to process emotionally arousing experiences has some interesting implications.  When things are more charges to and for you your dreams may be more vivid – not just about what occurred, but often in anticipation of what may happen.  It’s how much something matters to you, not the external magnitude of any event, that determines this.  If the events of your waking life are highly emotionally charged, you may be restless or feel like you’re endlessly dreaming, or you may have trouble remaining asleep.

While you won’t find the meaning of your dreams by looking up symbols in dream dictionaries, it makes sense to assume that your dreams are highly individual creations which have personal significance to your waking life rather than lending themselves to being interpreted in accordance with any standardized meanings.   It is better to reflect on the impact a dream had on you, and then do your best to translate it into a coherent story and find connections between the stories of your dreams and waking life.

Just paying your dreams some attention will start to create a better link between your conscious and unconscious.   Noting reference experiences and future pacing [=imagining our future and our actions in future situations] are devices of our conscious mind to enhance what our unconscious mind does anyway.  We can think of dreaming as a way of learning from our experience and future pacing ourselves.

Another frustrated parent had recently contacted me with a fabulous querry which I just had to share with the world.  If you persist reading to the end, you may find a lot of answers to the problems of that special someone you know…  I’ll copy it below nearly verbatim and then I’ll present how I advised her.   So, here’s what she said…

I am writing about my son who is now 10.5 years old.  He was always a very bright verbal preschooler in the eyes of his preschool teachers.  He went to school and we were surprised that he did not pick up reading as quickly as we imagined.  His maths was excellent.

Fast forward a couple of years and his reading is below average and he has started to make what looks like silly errors on exams and refuses to rote learn any timetables etc.   He had difficulty with the fine motor part of handwriting from the start but seemed to get over this, but his actual writing seems years below his verbal ability.  His writing looks like that of a 7 years-old in grammatical structure (uses no punctuation and joins sentences with “and then” like when he is speaking).  His spelling is atrocious.

He has always been immensely sociable and kids just seem to adore him as he is very funny and likeable.  Anyway, he was tested with the Weschler (WISC) and his verbal came back at 132 (98th percentile), Performance 138 (99th percentile), his processing at 106 (75th percentile) and his working memory at 97 (44th percentile).  The achievement test (WIAT) reflected his below average school results – particularly in spelling which was at the 14th percentile.  The psychologist at this point said this was a very smart child with a learning disability – probably auditory in nature.  The school did not test his hearing – saying he was ‘way too articulate to have a hearing problem’.  Eventually we had his hearing tested – he has mild unilateral hearing loss (35db – 40db) at the lower hearing thresholds – he apparently only hears 55% of what is said in the left ear when noise is in his right ear.  To me, he looks a bit ADD as well – won’t concentrate on and actively avoids homework, and apparently is quite distractible in class.  Could the mild unilateral hearing loss make him appear like this?  Could this cause the apparent difficulties in writing, his worst area?

His comprehension in reading is now well above age.    Is it likely there is something else going on?  Due to his wonderful social strengths we are very reluctant (and he is devastated at the potential thought) to use any amplification options.  He does not want to appear different in any way – in his mind it would be committing “social suicide” by having to wear a hearing aid or have an FM system and be labelled.  I tend to agree that this may not be the best course for him.  I was just looking for any input at all as to what to do with this information I now have, if anything?I would appreciate any help or comment at all on any part of the above.

…and here’s how I advised her:

yes, there definitely IS something else going on here.  And the thing that’s going on is VERY positive for him – IF you know how to directionalize it!  Your son is – and notice, none of the tests he went through, NOR the wonderful psychologist, told you this, because they simply haven’t got a clue – incredibly VISUAL – and all that’s going on is that he’s just using his visual skills inappropriately in the context of words.  I hazard a guess that a very common thing that happens to many children happened to him – his brain got confused when he first encountered words at a very young age and his brain has so far not found a way out of the confusion.

Your son is incredibly visual and the facts that he’s excellent at math and reading comprehension perfectly confirm this!  Think about it: math is a visual science.  And how do you remember what a story that you read was about?  You remember the content and plot of the story, because as you read it, you created pictures or even movies in your head.  That’s visual memory.  And the label “learning disability” that the psychologist gave you for your son is a generic “cover-all” term that people who do not understand what’s going on give you, because it sounds professional and also, for them, provides an easy way out of having to deal with you and your son to any greater depths.  In the case of your son, the label actually means “using his visual skills inappropriately in the context of words”.

There’re many theories about why we dream.  It is now commonly thought that dreaming is purposeful rather than being simply the result of random brain activity while we dream.  Dreaming is thought of as the unconscious mind’s way of processing the day’s events, sorting through memories, learning from what has happened, and planning the future.

Some people function on 5 hours of sleep a night, whereas others require 10 hours.  The average length of sleeping time is about 7 and a half hours.  Although some people claim to need almost no sleep, this has not been substantiated  At least 4 to 5 hours of sleep seem to be needed by everyone, although this may be through catnapping – a number of several short periods of sleep throughout the day.   During an average sleeping period we have four or five separate dreaming cycles, each with a number of stages.  Two clearly distinguishable stages of sleep exist.  NREM [nonrapid eye movement] sleep occupies most of the sleep period.  During this time we have a relatively low pulse and blood pressure, little activation of the automatic nervous system, and few or no reports of dreaming.  The second type, REM [rapid eye movements] sleep occurs at intervals of about 90 minutes while asleep.  It is characterized by the activation of the automatic nervous system and rapid eye movements.  Every NREM phase is followed by an REM phase, each progressively longer.   It is during the REM periods of sleep that your dreams take place, whether you remember them or not.

Dreaming constitutes about 25% of a period of sleep [and as much as 50% in a newborn child] which means we’re dreaming for up to two hours each time we sleep for a long period of time.  The final REM period, immediately before we wake, lasts between 20 and 30 minutes and it is the dream at the end of this last cycle that we most often recall.  Although many people say they do not dream, there’s no difference in REM sleep of dreamers and professed nondreamers.  If the professed nondreamers are awakened during REM sleep, they’ll usually report some dreaming activity, so it would be truer to say that they don’t remember their dreams.

While dreaming, we’re protected from gross physical movement, because the brain paralyses the motor neuron system.  Eye movements continue, because they don’t interfere with sleeping.  When this protective mechanism was inhibited in animals, scientists witnessed sleeping cats leaping to their feet and attacking nonexistent objects.  When people are woken up by researchers and deprived of REM sleep, they have difficulty remembering key events in the day.  And if this continues over several days, people may have trouble learning and suffer serious physical and psychological changes.

Don’t underestimate them – if you are a parent and want to ensure that your child does well at school and in life!  Reading to your children will encourage them to get the imagination going = visualize the content of what you’re reading to them.  This will help develop the visual memory which will be useful at school for spelling, reading comprehension, learning lists, and any kind of mental arithmetic.

And don’t be afraid to boldly ask your children what they visualized!   Asking them about their experience = getting to know their ways of thinking.  How many parents bother to ask their child what the character from the story looked like to the child or what she was wearing when the child imagined her? Very few!  And these very parents who never think to ask are later most surprised when they find out that their child has trouble spelling, reading, remembering what the reading was about, writing, or even math.  Well, if you don’t ask, you won’t know.  And if you don’t know, you don’t know your child.  No wonder then that discovering these differences comes as a big shock!

So keep asking – about everything!  Where and when did what happen, how, why, and who with whom made it happen?  Who and what else was there, colors, places, indoors or outdoors, things the characters had on or with them, etc.

And if you have a nanny who generally does the bedtime story reading, show her this article, ensure she understands its point, and train her to interact with your children too!

One of the peculiarities of the English language is the phrase “do you know what I mean?” And another is the phrase “I didn’t mean it that way!” Well, NLP has repeatedly proven that yes, you did mean it exactly that way – every time you said it!   How come?  I’ll show you…

Every sentence someone utters comes from at least one of the following three ways of the speaker’s being:

• deletion
• generalization
• distortion

Deletion is about deleting.  We perceive the world directly and then choose to pay attention to what we deem important.  We cannot pay attention to everything – we need to be selective, otherwise we’d suffer from constant sensory overwhelm.  We ignore, or simply do not notice a lot of potential information in our environment and this is exactly what deletion is.

When you’re telling someone about your vacation [holiday], you’re imagining the place exactly as it was when you were there, complete with all the sounds, people, action, smells, and tastes you experienced there.  But if you were to describe all that information to someone, you’d never finish talking!  So you delete a lot and only describe what you deem most important.

Generalization is about generalizing.  Over time we begin to notice that some things stay the same, other things recur, and there’s certain consistency in our experience.  By noticing these regularities we simplify our understanding of them and draw conclusions = devise laws and rules to predict – with varying degrees of success -  what is likely to happen in future.  This is generalization.

Do you have to figure out what a door handle or knob is [for] every time you see one?

Distortion is about distorting.  We each live in a world of our own and this world is our reality which has meaning for us.  Within our reality we make connections and interpret things at an abstract level.  Others live in realities of their own which are very different from ours.  If we wish to engage with others, we need to discover something about their reality.   We’re likely to interpret – and infer meaning from – others’ states, behaviors, and utterances according to our own reality.   Often we base our interpretations on minimal or no evidence, or make connections between disparate phenomena, sometimes without any sensory experience to check them out.  And this is distortion.

How many times did you say or hear others say “I know exactly how you feel…”?  If only you did know!  In fact, you’ve no idea – until you ask!

So now we know that there’re ways to question what others – and we – say.  And now you understand, perhaps, why the phrase “I didn’t mean it that way” makes absolutely no sense!  Bear this in mind the next time you’re in conflict or misunderstanding with someone.  It’ll help and liberate you no end!

The answer is simple: because they find the content of lecture notes [and other study materials such as textbooks etc.] very hard to take in.  This is demotivating because students see no progress in learning and feel the struggle and the rest is…

…well, a disaster! So how can we help?

Have you ever thought about the simple fact that if you read some story, you enjoy reading it, because you make up your internal pictures or even movies of the plot as you read?  Well, exactly the point!  While in stories there’re lots of concrete nouns [=words that describe people, places, objects] and lots of action verbs [words that describe what one does = action], study materials aimed at the higher education student have very few concrete and loads of abstract nouns [such as descriptions of states, intellectual concepts, and jargon pertaining to the subject of study] and very few action-oriented, but lots of nonspecific, auxiliary, or passive verbs.  The key difference is that the concrete nouns and action verbs in stories are easy for us to visualize, while the abstract nouns and compound auxiliary and nonspecific verbs in study materials have no pictures.

To give you an example, here’s a story:

I’m walking down a quiet country lane.  Nobody around, just me in my jeans and walking boots, squeezing a half-full bottle of water in my hand.  It’s a nice pleasant day, birds are twittering, trees are gently whispering the rustle of their leaves.  Suddenly I hear a noise in the distance.  It sounds like a motorbike or a car.  And then I notice it’s getting closer and closer.  Before I realize it, it whizzes past me…

By the way, what was it that whizzed past you as you were imagining this while reading the excerpt above?  And what color was it?

And here is an extract from a study material:

The dissociation process is not always effective and often other things must be done to deal effectively with these kinds of problems.  in this particular case, however, the process was extraordinarily effective and there were very few repetitions of the common patterns of emotional breakdown.

Well, I believe I’ve proven the point more than enough!  And, surprise, surprise, the same applies to legal, corporate, and business documentation – as I already wrote about in one of my much earlier entries.

So how can we help the poor university student to decline the invitation to the next party and give the void time to studying?

Students:

• visualise as much of the content you read as possible!  For abstract nouns, you can use symbols, things, places, people, and even colors.  Go with whatever comes to mind first.  That’ll be somehow significant to your brain – otherwise it wouldn’t have come up!
• Verbs are kind of easier – somehow the brain finds even the passive verb more digestible.  But passive verb can easily be transformed into active verb.  So, what’s stopping you?
• And once you have clusters of concepts, put them into a story.  Make up a movie like a film director – whatever the setting and characters, as long as your brain has some visual representation of what you’re reading that makes sense to you and is an easy anchor for retrieval.

This is such a huge topic that I intend to devote at least two [if not more] entries on this blog to it.  After all, language [along with other things] is in the heart of NLP and in its very name too!  If NLP means Neuro-Linguistic Programming, we’re talking about the linguistic part of our programming.  So language definitely deserves a huge chapter!

Another credible reason why language is so important is that be it verbal or nonverbal, it is the basis of communication of living creatures amongst each other.  Animals have their language.  And if language wasn’t important, would people bother to develop hundreds of its forms?

But for the purposes of clarity, let’s stay with English.   How is NLP connected with language?  And what tricks can an NLP-lay member of the general public take home from this blog and apply to his/her life?

Let’s start with an important principle [that applies to any language: whenever people say or write things, they have to leave out a lot of information.  Otherwise it'd take forever to describe anything.  So the actual language we get to read or hear is the tip of a huge iceberg.  And it is taken for granted that we will be able to fill in the parts that are submerged in order to make sense of the communication - given the context we're in and what we know about the other person.

We can also choose to find out what exactly is in the submerged part of the iceberg by asking questions that we hope will give us more information.  In many people's everyday lives it is rare to actively seek further information from the speaker.  People are more likely to do so when confused, when they think they disagree, or when they really know they need more information in order to achieve their purposes.  When we start to examine what people say - including ourselves, we find that we take a huge amount for granted, leave a vast amount of information out, make sweeping generalizations [that have few or no qualifications], and make meaning of absolutely any utterance we read / hear.

Communication is not just about the specific sentences that a person is uttering.  Each person has a history and exists in a particular context, both of which give meaning to what s/he says.  S/he has learnt to describe the world in which s/he is living in certain ways, often symbolically and metaphorically, and takes a lot of that world for granted.  The more you find out about how people really think, the more you realize how very different they are from you.  People live in radically different worlds – with vastly different presuppositions.  What is amazing is that we manage to communicate at all!

We may notice these differences when people are being specific.  But when the language they use is vague, what usually happens is that we invent a meaning based on our own experience – and this may have nothing in common with what the other person is actually talking about!  Nevertheless, you often hear people say: “I know exactly what you mean”.  If only!

Therefore part of clarifying communication is eliciting more information about the context of the communication.  This is where NLP comes in.  What is vague?  What has been left out?  What is possible?  What are the rules here?  What is true for this speaker / writer?

You could start doing this with yourself: take one of your habits of speech, for example, and start exploring it by asking:

• What makes me say this?
• What led up to me saying this?
• Why am I saying this?
• What am I hoping to achieve by saying this?