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.

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.

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!

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?

Owing to the recent happenings in the English county of Cumbria where, for those of you reading this who do not live in the UK and thus aren’t abreast of the tragic drama that took place there recently to the date of this post, a guy, who obviously felt he had no escape from various financial and other [inter]personal troubles, killed 12 people amongst whom were his twin brother, family solicitor, and a few work colleagues, and injured at least 12 more in a shooting spree which he completed by pointing the gun at himself, I felt inspired to write this to explain one basic [NLP] principle that many people don’t understand and always look at me like I’m crazy when I say it to them.

The simple principle is that this guy had a positive intention behind doing all this tragedy!  Now reading this you may restate that I must be nuts!  How can shooting 12 of his closest people AND injuring at least 12 more [some of whom were complete strangers] possibly enact a positive intention, I hear you exclaim?

The answer is very simple: there’s no such thing as negative intention.   In plain fact, our brain cannot process negatives.  Here’s an age-old example which I bet you’ve read time and again on the net or someplace else: don’t think of your next door neighbor!  OK.  So what did you do?  Of course, you thought of the damn neighbor in order NOT to think of him/her!  That’s how our brain cannot process negatives.  So watch this space, because when I talk about language in my future musings, this will emerge again!

So how is this connected with the Cumbria shootings?  Well, this guy had loads of financial and [inter]personal issues which he must have felt pretty cornered about and thus saw no escape but that of ending his life and those of all those key people in his life.  So by doing what he did he was satisfying some positive intentions for himself – ones which only he knew what they were.  Revenge is one of them.  Think about it.  If you enact revenge, you’re satisfying some positive intention within yourself.  Yes, everyone else around you will see you as a nasty piece of work, but that won’t change the fact that you’re satisfying a positive intention of some sort.  In this vein, every crime, murder, rape, captivation, torture, theft, or whatever nastiness a human being may be capable of is a behavior which symbolizes some positive intention to and for that individual doing the behavior.

Many rapists’ positive intention is power and control.  Many thieves’ positive intention is abundance, getting something they want while saving themselves on the effort of working for it, many torturers and captivators’ positive intention is also power, control, and respect, and many murderers’ positive intention is escape from reality, life, pain, misery, etc.

So now that we know this, you may find it easier to view the next stupid thing your [or your neighbor's?] child may do with some reserve and perhaps even “compassion”.  Once you know that kids don’t play truant, smoke, take drugs, and abuse alcohol or sex for nothing, you will be much more effective by going straight to finding out what the positive intentions are behind those behaviors that symbolize those intentions and that everybody else just doesn’t understand.

Reporters and journalists certainly haven’t got a clue about gearing their questions and articles towards acknowledging and finding out these positive intentions.   Their job is to sell bad news [because bad news sells better than good news] and sell it fast!  Plus, of course, the pressure of moralistic stances of the older generations such as that the young generation must not be led to believe that doing acts of crime and nastiness is okay because it satisfies the perpetrators’ positive intentions presents another barrier to people’s understanding of why acts of crime happen.

Well, harsh as it may sound, sometimes the older generations would be advised to give way, because what used to be valid in their time may not necessarily not valid in today’s society.  And if we communicate the principle of positive intentions behind every human behavior to the youth clearly, we will be able to have it both ways – and quite happily so!

This is exactly the question that appears in my coaching alliances time and again and to finding the answers to which I’ve devoted many a step in time along my coaching path of life.   So here’re some of the findings mostly my dear clients, but even I at times, have found.  I hope they’ll benefit you somehow!

Well, one of my coaching conversations revealed that my client didn’t know how he breathed.  So to help him discover, which was important in the context in which we found ourselves by then, I decided to give him the following guidance:

• Place your hand on your chest and observe your breathing for a few seconds.  Does your hand move or not?
• Now place your hand on your diaphragm and observe your breathing for a few seconds.  Does your hand rise and fall along with the pattern of your breath here?
• Now repeat with your hand on your belly.  Once you find out where you actually breathe, you’ll have a useful starting point.
• Now observe: is your breathing fast or slow?
• Is your breathing deep or shallow?
• Are your inhales short and exhales long, vice versa, or equally long?
• Do you inhale with your nose and exhale with your mouth, vice versa, both with the nose, or both with the mouth?
• Can you hear yourself breathing?
• If yes, can you hear your inhales but not exhales, vice versa, or both?
• How loud is your breathing?
• Is it smooth or wheezing [as do people who have asthma]?

These questions will reveal submodalities.

Another beautiful example of how you can use submodalities is when you are self-diagnosing a health problem – and perhaps assessing whether it’s serious enough to see a doctor, or preparing for how you’ll explain it to the doctor, or considering what to do next.  Let’s take pain as an example.

• Where exactly is this pain located?  Be as precise as possible when pinpointing it.
• How intense [strong] is it [perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10]?
• Is it static or does it even seem to be moving?
• If it feels like as if it were moving, where does the movement start, go, and finish?
• Does the movement have a direction?
• How does the pain get from the place of origin to the destination [if it seems to move]?
• Is the pain continuous [dull ache] or intermittent [throbbing]?
• Does the pain feel weighty [heavy] or weightless [light]?
• Does the pain have pressure to it?
• Does the pain feel warm or cold?  How warm or how cold?
• Does the pain have a sound?
• Does the pain have a color?  Or can you even see all the stars behind your eyelids?

These are the submodalities of pain.  Excellent for those whose heads [frequently?] give them migraines, whose backs or heads ache with tension, etc.   Once you know the submodalities, you can work with them.

Another example: do you always mislay your keys and then waste half and hour looking for them?  Well, where are the submodalities in that?

• First of all, did you take a mental picture of the keys on the surface where you last lay them?
• If you did, was that picture in color or black and white?
• How near or far from your face could you see that mental picture?
• Did you see it clearly or was it fuzzy?
• Did you see it right in front of your face, slightly up and to the right, slightly up and to the left, down on the floor, or in one of the bottom corners of your visual field?
• Was your mental picture bright or dark?
• Was the picture still or moving?

And some readers of this article will love this example! Do you ever talk to yourself – either aloud [perhaps when no one is around] or inside your head / body without you actually pronouncing any words?  Well, I’ve never yet met a person who wouldn’t.  But the fact is that this internal dialogue can well be nastily harsh, critical, or cluttered – and the most insidious thing is that we may not realize it, because it’s so much part of us that we’d never think of examining it, let alone treat our internal dialogue as the starting point to solving our problems!  So here go some submodalities that can help a person pacify their nastily harsh, too critical, or even cluttered internal dialogue:

• Where exactly is your internal dialogue – the voice inside your head / body located?
• How loud [on a scale of 1 to 10] is it?
• Whose voice is it?  Yours?  Your mother’s?  Partner’s, schoolteacher’s, or someone else’s?
• Is this voice high-pitched [shrieking or howling] or low-pitched [deep, resounding, reverberating]?
• How fast does it talk?
• Do you hear it in stereo or just through one side in your head / body [mono]?
• What accent does it have?
• Does it emphasize certain words?
• Does it sound smooth, rich, guttural, nasal, or grating?

As I said before, once you know the submodalities of anything, you are in the position of working with them = tweaking them.  How?  By playing experiments on yourself.  Turn the volume down a little.  listen now.  Is it more comfortable or less comfortable than it was originally?  Turn the brightness up a little.  Does this feel better or worse than the original?  Make the throbbing of the pain throb in longer intervals or at a slower pace.  Does this ease the intensity of the pain a little?  I hope you get the idea.  And the best benefit of working with submodalities is that you can do it anywhere and without the outer world knowing!

I’m currently working with a guy who has agreed with me on each of the occasions when I reminded him that the central theme of our coaching process was how submodalities could be used in one’s everyday life.  So, since I intend to make the contents of this blog available to members of the general public who are not involved in the field of personal development before those who are, I feel – after somewhat long a break from writing – inspired yet again to offer some answers this question up for the wider world’s benefit.

But wait a minute!  What was that long italicized word again?   Read on.  All will be revealed – in a language that you’ll understand!

Every experience is uniquely coded by your brain in terms of both its structure and its content using our 5 senses.  These 5 senses are technically known as modalities.  Within every sensory system there will be finer discriminations.  Each picture, sound, feeling, smell, and taste will have its own content and structure.  The structure consists of its own qualities.  These finer qualities are known in NLP as submodalities. Some submodalities have qualities which are analogue [such as brightness or loudness].  And some have qualities which are digital (=either / or), such as still / moving.

For an experience to be differentiated, it must have some qualities that make it distinct.   If a number of similar experiences have no easily discernible differences, we run them together and are unable to distinguish them later in time.  We make meaning of an experience not only from its content, but also from how we represent the content to ourselves in terms of its structure = its submodalities.   We always have some kind of a response to the experience – we feel something about it.   So it follows that if we change the structure, the meaning and feeling will change accordingly.

So now that you know the background, how can you use submodalities in your everyday life?  Here’re three examples I’ve picked up from working with people over the years:

• having trouble getting up and kicking the body into life in the morning?   And is it annoying you to the point where you’d dearly like to change it for the better, but you don’t know how?

OK.  So what’s the first thing you are aware of when you wake up?  Is it warm or cold?  Light or dark?  Loud or quiet?  Sharp or fuzzy?  Near you or far from you?  Heavy or light?  Black and white or in color?  These are just a few questions that will help you get to whatever it is you’re first aware of.  And then you can work with it.  Play with it question by question by changing each of the elements for the opposite to see if that would make a difference for the better.  And why stop there?  After all, the opposite may be equally uncomfortable!  So now you can go on scales of 1 to 10 and adjust your submodality to the form that will work for you best!

• often suffer from headaches or any other aches for that matter?

Here you can explore submodalities of your pain beautifully!  Where in your body is the pain?  How intense on a scale of 1 to 10 is it?  Is it continuous or intermittent?  Is it static or does it move?  If it moves, does the movement have a direction?  How does the movement get from the place of origin to the place of destination?  Does the pain have a color?  A sound?  A taste?  A smell?  If a color, how bright is it [on a scale of 1 to 10]?  If a voice, is it loud of quiet?  If a taste or smell, is it heavy or light?  And now, how do you need to adjust any – or all? – of these submodalities in order to get the pain to bother you less or even diminish completely?

• do you have the problem of ringing or buzzing in your ears?

How loud is it?  Where is it located?  In your ear?  Behind it?  Higher up in the head?  Where exactly?  How loud is it?  Now imagine a sound system with round knobs.  Pick one for volume.  Now grab it and listen to the ringing / buzzing in your ears [or where?].  As you listen, imagine turning this volume knob down a fraction.  Did the loudness of the buzzing lessen?  Turn the knob down another fraction.  How is that now?  Better?  Keep turning – a fraction at a time and observe what happens…  Get the idea?

It feels incredibly liberating when you suddenly realize that you can do something other than pumping your body with caffein, nicotine, alcohol, or drugs in response to any such reactions of your body.  Of course, every signal your body gives you is a message that I’d sincerely advise you acknowledge instead of suppress, but things like ringing in one’s ears often becomes nothing but a pure co – habit.  Well, now you can do something about it – free of charge and at will!

Good luck!  And, as always, I’m here to be informed if you wish to do so!

That’s exactly the impression most formal education, corporate, and even family environments – at least in the Western part of the world – exude.  So here I am, inspired [again] to bring this concept face to face with NLP and looking into how NLP can help here.

Has it ever crossed your mind how different things would be if formal education professionals paid attention to the states of their learners?  Have you ever been asked at school how you were feeling before your class started?  Have you ever been asked whether there was anything you needed to do or feel before your class started?  Have you ever been asked what the best state for your learning was or would be?  And even if you had been asked this question, would you know the answer to it?

Maybe you would. Great for you!  But you definitely are in the minority.  Most people in this world have no clue, because they’ve never been compelled to explore these areas.  Yet, states, about which I wrote already once on this blog, can also be used as a tool for producing excellence.

So how can we use them? One example are presentations.  Have you ever faced the hell of giving a presentation?  What state were you in at that time?!!!  And when you finished, did you feel nervous as hell?  Inadequate?  Incompetent?  Like someone [and who says that couldn't be your boss?] is gonna come up to you and say it was boring?  Well, did you plan what states you’d like to take your audience through?

This is it! You might not be aware of this, but folks like standup comedians, orators, and inspirational speakers [including politicians:)] use states to induce responsiveness of their audiences.   And while listening to them you will be going through sequences of states that is by design.

So the next time you find yourself facing the challenge of putting together a presentation or a wedding speech, first consider what state you want to be in.  Then consider:

• “I want to have them start here [here = in state x].  And then gradually we’ll move to here. [state y].  And we’ll finish at this point [state z], because this is the note I want them to leave the room on.

So in planning the speech, resort to this:

• What state do you want people to be in when you begin?
• What will be the sequence of states you will take them through?
• What state do you want them to finish in?
• And how will that be useful to them thereafter?

Equally, if you’re an educational professional, be it in a one-to-one tuition, in a kindergarten, at a university, or teaching anyone else,  nothing’s stopping you from making this approach pat of your life.  And you’ll see how much success it’ll bring you and those around you!