Imagery rehearsal therapy

[tbone]

I just read about his method for ridding PTSD sufferers from nightmares but I don't see why it wouldn't work for regular dreams too. Here is how one site describes it but I'm sure if look around you can find much more.

http://www.guidetopsychology.com/dreams.htm

Imagery Rehearsal Therapy

The raw emotions of repetitive, intrusive nightmares can be “tamed” by a simple, easily learned technique called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT). If you have multiple recurring nightmares, select just one for the IRT process and use the process every night until the nightmare has been resolved; when that nightmare has been resolved, repeat the process for other nightmares.

1.
Write out the text of the nightmare. Tell the story, no matter how frightening, in as much detail as you can remember.


2.
Create a new ending for the nightmare story and write it out. Be careful, however, to make the new ending peaceful. Remember that the nightmare is grounded in emotions such as raw anger that have been provoked by a trauma. The point of a new ending is to “tame” the emotions, not merely vent them in violence and revenge.

A woman had been raped. She had a recurring nightmare of being pursued by a dark figure. In the nightmare, she ran and ran, and, each each time the nightmare recurred, she always woke up, sweating and gasping for breath, at the same point. So she decided, as a new ending, to stop running and confront the figure. In a subsequent dream, when the pursuing figure appeared, she turned to him and said, “Who are you and what do you want?” And here’s where her unconscious surprised her. The man replied, very politely, “You dropped this, and I have been trying to give it back to you.” He handed her a package. She asked what it was. “It’s your faith in human goodness,” he said. She woke up. And the nightmare never returned.


3.
Rehearse the new version of the story in your imagination each night just before going to sleep. Do this as close as possible to your falling asleep without any other activity between the rehearsal and sleep.


4.
Perform a relaxation exercise. Do this immediately after the rehearsal, as a way to fall asleep peacefully. You may use any technique with which you are familiar. If you need to learn a relaxation technique, try Progressive Muscle Relaxation. Or just use the Breathing Warm-up from the Autogenics Training if you need to get started as soon as possible and don’t have the time to learn something more complex.

 

[Loraine]

... can't see how this relates to receptive psi ...

 

[tbone]

I was wondering if it could be applicable to a lucid or precognitive dream strategy. Maybe as in my lottery dream attempts.

 

[Mycroft]

I was wondering if it could be applicable to a lucid or precognitive dream strategy. Maybe as in my lottery dream attempts.

The method I'll describe would be equally effective and not force you ingrain a horrible experience over and over until you felt empowered to change the ending. I have considerable experience retraining the mind to be more accepting of a situation or dissolving issues which have plagued people for decades.

For one last time watch the event unfold envisioning yourself as you were, you control the volume and speed of the the horrific event. Now create another of you watching yourself view the event from another angle, if you're too uncomfortable add another view of yourself from another angle. You watching you, watching you, watching you. You must take your time and not rush through this, events must play out in your mind, feeling the compassion, wondering what you've seen through your own eyes, considering what the other person was doing, where they insane, what brought them to this point in life?

You can do this with as many of 'you' as necessary, I have had to monitor as many as 8 of 'me' in a single trance session stepping through events as they unfolded. I've written about this technique elsewhere on this forum. Eventually your emotions become so detached from the event it is as if they happened to someone else,

Remember this! Your reality did not change! Only your perceptions!

Mycroft

 

[tbone]

I don't have nightmares, although your strategy looks good Mycroft (with a distinct shading of NLP).

I was thinking of taking a regular dream, like one where I won the lottery. Then rehearsing that dream until it came more regularly. Setting a specific way to receive numbers might make it easier than having sort through dreams finding numbers that are scattered throughout.

 

[Mycroft]

I don't have nightmares, although your strategy looks good Mycroft (with a distinct shading of NLP).

I was thinking of taking a regular dream, like one where I won the lottery. Then rehearsing that dream until it came more regularly. Setting a specific way to receive numbers might make it easier than having sort through dreams finding numbers that are scattered throughout.

I was re-listening to a Shamanic recording I found some time ago on the net. One of the lighter moments in the talk came when the guy said "The Spirits don't care about Sex or Money", he mentioned that someone in a previous audience had piped up with "Why the hell do we care about the spirits then?".

The Kabbalah perspective is very altruistic, "I will win the lottery so I can build a school and feed starving people before I remodel my home." Along with that there is varying grades of charity. The best being giving anonymously.

One time decades ago, when I was legally too young to participate, I played the horses. I baited my intuition to give me the three horses in the Trifecta, my hand circled the numbers in the correct order. On the way to purchase the ticket I found one of the horses was at 64-1. Second guessing myself I chose the horse beside it. Had I believed in my own intuition life would have been much different because had I purchased the ticket in the order I was given the numbers I would have won $62,000. Several months later when I thought I had the craving to go back and claim my $62,000 on another winning ticket, with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other hand I wound down the window and chucked $2 out the window to much chagrin of the driver..

The winning lottery ticket isn't worth the sleep you'll be giving up to attain it. Remember during sleep you are trained, your future is unfolded and decided upon, you are warned about crossing certain streets, and other life events are negotiated upon.

Let me put it to you this way, my father owns three estates and a farm, multiple apartment houses and buildings in my hometown, a new pickup truck Z71 with less than 10K miles on it and a Rolls Royce in the garage. He worries about even waking up in the morning if he is able to fall asleep, getting his meds on time and coping when the nurse who shows up three times a week. Yesterday I got to see him in action, running the business from his chair when he is able to have visitors...

Keep the money, make love, take naps, eat properly and give to those who have less.


Mycroft

 

[tbone]

I do have quite a bit to get done when I sleep so it might be awhile before I can fit it in.


I personally have no qualms about using something like this attain money. Money isn't really even real. And I'm certainly not completely driven by money. Regardless, the universe is beneficent and will provide generously.

 

[tbone]

Inception becomes reality.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2077185/Inception-reality-People-teach-new-skills-dreams.html

 

[PJ]

Actually, this directly relates to remote viewing process -- at least, to some of mine.

The re-imagining described is essentially a form of archetype work. This varies depending on the culture, and is known under a variety of other terms including Jungian, shamanic, conscious dreaming, active imagination, inner guide work (via Steinbrecher's take on Jungian AI), etc. In those cases this is undertaken intentionally. The "framework" is fabulous if it comes from a dream since it's basically a ready-made "symbolic language" of environment, relationships, dynamics, etc. If I wake up from a troubling dream and I have time I throw myself back into that world and work with it like that.

If that doesn't exist, you can invent it. It may or may not have any directly obvious relationship to the event, object, person, target, etc. you may be focused on. You can ask for your archetype of XYZ and work with what you get. If you do these enough, the entire experience becomes more and more "autonomous" -- the landscape, everything you interact with (including aspects of self, chakras and more -- all entities) -- and much deeper than the surface description would suggest.

When I last left viewing for my insane work schedule -- I hope to resume before long here, as soon as I get caught up enough on sleep that just relaxing doesn't knock me out -- I was working more "interactively with the target" than I had previously. I'd ended up an archetype-RV experiment series but retained a little of the same dynamic, just more integrated.

The down side of this is that it is very... affective on the viewer. Assuming target acquisition, human targets may involve a sort of merge for the duration if you allow it, there is a definite tendency for larger entities (which most earth-areas, other planets, etc. are) to perceive you as much as you do them which can be interesting, and most any session work can result in a degree of "impact" that tends to stretch psychology and stress the ego. The resistance that follows is a bother to deal with, to understate it.

Although it was many years of archetype work that led me to this exploration, the fundamental of it actually came from something else. Many many years ago, I had this brief memory of being someone else. It's a bit limited in scope but I'll bore you with it:

I was being carried, like on a pallet, by a couple of monks, the typical bald head robes bit, through an area like a castle that I'm guessing was a monastery. They set me down in this open space and I was sort of "sitting in on" this old man who was teaching them something. He thought for a minute, and then they tried to pick him up again -- and they couldn't. It was like my pallet was glued to the ground and they heaved to no avail. There was a middle aged man (another monk) there who was talking through this, and I didn't really hear him so much as understand that he was giving some directions. Then I -- er, he -- started talking, and explaining to all the men in the courtyard, that reality is not about objects and properties; it is about relationships. That the person who best understood this, and had the best ability for rapport with everything (to include, literally, gravity, objects, their own body, and their opponents' body(s)), was going to be the one who was successful in a battle.

That's about all I recall and it's pretty fuzzy now, there was only a little more. It made me think of some of the "wierd stories" about super-advanced martial arts that are found in legends and movies and such. When I was much younger, I'd often had the "allow rapport with an object" to "help" me do something. Move something too heavy for me. Ask something to fix itself. That kind of thing. If I did it right, it worked, but afterward later, my left-brain mentality usually tried to dismiss it as having been my imagination.

Anyway, in session, I interact to varying degrees with what I perceive in session, although a great deal of my session work is an experimental learning process with a lot of elements of self, and a lot of this is not really about the target except indirectly (keeping that clean and knowing what goes where is part of the learning process, but to a great degree, RV is second in importance to a larger internal development, for me; it exists to serve me, not the other way around).

Obviously this gets rather deeper into the topic than just imagining a different ending to a dream, but that is where it begins.

Best,
PJ

 

[sonny5085]

Pj you ever freud some of that ? (memory of being someone else?)

You being carried to another level, (of whatever it is) Love, relationships, or perhaps just acceptance of something(unknown perhaps) that your mind will not let you accept , your glued down state, your anchor , your platform perhaps was your attempt to escape.

Some bindings eh ? The battle within you ?

I dunno about those type of things , but its fun to read about these and just speculate.

 

[RedCairo]

I would only think of it in that model if I had a complete disbeliever sort of belief system about the related topics. I actually happen to believe in multiple lives and parallel realities and things like that, as well as the 'identity' nature of everything from my liver to my crown chakra to the target itself. So I don't see intentionally interacting with things as such, something that implies need for therapy LOL, just something that is a different model or way of approaching this topic.