Reverse Dreaming Hypnotic Rehearsal

We try to be calmer, healthier, or more successful, but can we really change the way we are?

Changing a habit or a way of thinking is difficult, some would say impossible. Everything you do without your awareness of doing it, is considered a subconscious belief system - from the growth of your cells, to your accent. But belief systems can change. What about Santa Clause? Or where babies come from? Throughout our lives, our minds go through thousands of changes in "beliefs", large and small. Neuroscientists describe the ability for the brain to adapt to change as neuroplasticity.

Nothing is written in stone. The processes that created a subconscious belief system also has the power to change it.

Neuroplasticity

The material which informs our brains and our belief systems comes from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and intuition (the 6 senses). What is important is remembered, what is not important, or outdated, is vented out of the mind in the process of dreaming. Dreams are hallucinations consisting of sensations: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and intuition, the same 6 senses that caused the belief system to develop in the first place. The brain uses the same process of experiencing sensations to vent an obsolete belief system as it does to program it.

For example: An individual had a childhood fear of water caused by a near drowning experience in a neighbour's pool. During that experience his mind took in these senses, associated danger, and constructed a belief system around them. He felt anxious every time he saw a swimming pool, smelled chlorine, or heard the sound of splashing. His belief system triggered the warning feeling to protect him from danger. In his teenage years, due to his group of friends, he trained himself to overcome his fears in order to go spear fishing, diving, and enjoying water sports with them. Around this time he experienced panic dreams of the incident in his early childhood. When he felt safe in water, his dreams reconstructed the childhood event so that he could let go of the danger (fear) associated with water, in the form of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and intuiting the event that programmed the warning (anxiety).

Hypnotic rehearsal, or reverse dreaming, is the technique whereby using the dream state (hypnosis) specific sensations can be experienced, with the effect of building the desired belief system. Reverse dreaming describes the process of using the dream platform for subconscious input, whereas dreaming is a platform for subconscious outlet.

"Repetition of suggestions in hypnosis reinforces the new conditions, until they become subconscious habits."

Dr. John Kappas

The NBSR Reverse Dreaming Hypnotic Rehearsal Technique:

• NBSR provides a safe, controlled environment in which the individual can rehearse positive feelings or actions without interference from the conscious mind
  
  
• Rehearsal in hypnosis allows the individual to approach resistant beliefs in layers. Each layer of rehearsal strengthens the neural pathways that form the positive belief system, and weakens the resistant belief
  
  
• Rehearsal is always emotionally positive and empowering, since repetition of the positive program builds the desired neural network
  
  
• The subconscious mind can not tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, so it accepts the reverse dream material as actual experience
  
  
• Symbolism is the language of the subconscious mind. The reverse dream material has great symbolic meaning to the individual.

Reverse dreaming hypnotic rehearsal is one of the most widely used NBSR techniques, applicable to virtually every case where transformation is desired.

"When people think "Hypnotherapy" most expect a one-treatment miracle, as if Hypnotherapy is some kind of magic. I explain it like this: How did you learn maths? Or music? Or your golf swing? Did you have just the one training session? Garry player said: The more I practice, the luckier I get..."

Andrew Wilding

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