Author: bridget

Have you ever wanted an answer to a difficult, personal question? Perhaps you could not make up your mind about something, or you faced a challenge you did not know how to meet. Alternatively, have you ever wanted to go to sleep and just know that you are going to have a wonderfully enlightening dream? Or a healing dream that replenishes you emotionally? If you have answered yes to any these questions, you can benefit from being able to program your dreams.

Journal your dreams and their intentions.

Keep a journal by your bedside in which you write a dream intention each night before sleeping. Your intention is literally what you want to dream about. In the morning, before you do anything else, write down any dreams you have experienced. If you do not remember your dreams, don’t give up. As you drift to sleep the following night, program your mind by repeating an intention in your thoughts and eventually, you will start to remember your dreams.

Use pictures to visualize your dream.

Before you turn out the light at bedtime, look intently at a picture which represents a topic you wish to dream about. Study the details in the picture and when you close your eyes to sleep, visualize the picture inside your mind and continue to visualize its details.

Set your brainwaves with sounds and music.

You can alter the frequency of your brainwaves by listening to anything from binaural beats (brainwave entrainment) to music. For instance, if you want to experience a relaxing, soothing dream, listen to relaxing, soothing music. It will put you in the right frame of mind to achieve your aim.

You can also listen to white noise, rain, ocean or other water sounds, or simply concentrate on the pure sound of a single note of the frequency you want to adopt. Relax Melodies has over 100 soothing sounds, which you can mix and layer, including several binaural beats. You might actually discover that what you listen to finds its way into your dreams!

Go to sleep with a pleasant scent.

It’s been said that smelling roses before sleeping has been said to promote lovely dreams, while the scent of rotten eggs, unsurprisingly, does the opposite result. Smells have an effect on us in our waking time and are equally potent when we are asleep. While you’ll want to avoid unpleasant odors before going to bed, if a certain scent makes you feel great, smell it just before going to sleep or have an aromatherapy infuser running while you are sleeping. It can’t hurt and could produce a pleasant dream!

Play video games!

People who regularly play video games develop experience in controlling virtual worlds. As a result, some discover that they are good at manipulating their dreams. Lucid dreams, those in which you are in control and aware that you are dreaming, may be enhanced by playing video games. The more you practice programming your dreams, the more likely you are to achieve success. Your brain will program itself to produce results.

Could the reason you find it hard to sleep be sitting just below the surface of your consciousness? Perhaps, the idea that repressed fears are lurking, jolting you into wakefulness when you need to sleep may seem strange. However, it is possible that anything from the fear of not being able to sleep to concerns about safety are keeping you awake.

Your complex brain

Part of you might decide that it is sensible to sleep since doing so would be beneficial on certain levels, while another part of you disagrees. At such a time, discord arises and your fear center sets off its internal alarm system. If there are problems that concern you, it is likely that they will surface when you turn out the light, despite your good intentions to rest peacefully. However, those kinds of sleep-interruptions are not exactly below your consciousness since are you are aware of them. The type of worries that are not obvious stem from repressed thoughts that send signals to your brain saying, “stay awake! You cannot sleep until this concern has made a breakthrough.”

You can see a similar pattern occurring if a loud noise wakes you in the night. The reason your internal alarm is raised is because the noise is an unknown quantity. Your brain is designed to kick you into an alert state if there is a possibility of danger. The noise is seen as a potential threat that you need to check out before you can return to snoozing. No doubt, you would find out what the noise was and this would soothe your concerns as you recognized that there was no real jeopardy, and you could fall asleep once more.

A repressed fear is somewhat like an internal noise, a potential threat to your well-being. If there is something bothering you subconsciously, it can be difficult to sleep until you acknowledge that it exists. Your system might keep pressing your alarm until you look at what is going on.

Acknowledgement

The key to stopping your brain from making you alert is to acknowledge your concerns. Often, worries that keep you awake are not so far back in your subconscious that they cannot easily be reached. If they were safely tucked away, they probably would not stop you from sleeping.

If your mind is buzzing and you do not know why, a repressed fear is probably waiting to emerge. Furthermore, if you did not have the same experience the previous night, it is likely to stem from an event that happened in the day. Perhaps an old fear was triggered, or a new fear was created by an event that you failed to think about at the time. For example, an unexamined phone bill, inadvertently shoved in a drawer, might have triggered a subconscious fear surrounding financial concerns that need to be addressed. Acknowledging the concern by writing it on a to do list could help you sleep.

Sometimes, the repressed thought that is making you alert could stem from a fear of not sleeping. Such a scenario is likely to occur if you have recently had transient insomnia that stemmed from a known cause. The initial problem will have gone, but left you feeling afraid that if you continue to have insomnia, you will not be able to function well during the day. You can be so wrapped up in worrying about not being able to sleep that the idea becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Recognizing that the initial problem has passed and that this is the cause of your fears can be soothing, thus aiding sleep.

Subconscious insomnia is your brain’s way of alerting you to a potential threat to your happiness. Much of the time, the ‘threat’ is not really a cause for alarm, and simply recognizing what it is can set your mind at ease. At other times, understanding what ails your mind can be helpful since doing so forces you to address issues that you have been avoiding. When you acknowledge them and begin to make plans to find solutions, your fears subside and you can sleep.

Most people experience sleep paralysis at some point in their life. It is that strange feeling of being conscious mentally, but not being able to move your body. When this occurs, the result can be that you feel afraid. Indeed, it is possible to undergo physical sensations that are unpleasant at such a time, which might mistakenly be attributed to an unseen force. At other times, people report that they have not yet slipped out of dream mode when they undergo paralysis, and parts of their dream is still visible to them. If they do not realize that they are asleep, they may assume that their dream is part of reality. However, sleep paralysis is not thought to be harmful or an indication of an underlying mental disease.

Long ago, before sleep paralysis was understood, people automatically assumed that something unnatural and sinister was underfoot when they were unable to shift their body, but could sense things around them. The typical sensation that they were being strangled or that someone was sitting on their chest lead them to imagine that witchcraft was at work, or that an incubus was in their bedroom.

Although the condition is better understood now, countless people still report that strange goings on occur at the same time as their paralysis. Some even put their experience down to alien abductions. However, the odd experiences that occur during paralysis can be explainable.

As you fall asleep, a signal is sent to a region of your brain to start the dreaming process, while another is sent to a different part of your system informing it to stop your muscles from moving. If this did not happen, you would move about during sleep, which could be dangerous.

Some experiences involving sleep paralysis tend to occur when people are lying on their backs. Interestingly, so do many out of body experiences. When you lie on your back to sleep, there is a chance that your breathing might not be as full or comfortable as it is when you lie in a different position since your airway can collapse a little, making obtaining air difficult. This is not usually anything to worry about since your system will pass along the information to relevant parts of your system so that you partially awaken and roll onto your side. However, occasionally, the communication arrangement might not work 100%, leaving you moderately alert mentally, although still in dreamland to an extent, while your body remains frozen.

Unfortunately, as your muscles have not been woken, breathing might still be laborious. As a result, your system panics and you wake up fully, albeit mentally rather than physically. Your brain attempts to work out what is happening to you as you need air, but cannot remedy the situation. Next, your fear center kicks into action. Now you are experiencing a heavy sensation on your chest, a constricted throat and you are terrified. Dreamland is just around the corner, and might still be providing some input. At the same time, your brain will gather all the information it can glean about your situation and come up with a possible scenario to justify matters. Hence, you could think that there is someone harming you, which would explain the physical sensations that you feel.

While some people encounter such experiences only once, other report that they happen to them frequently, which makes them afraid to go to sleep since they want to avoid the situation occurring.

So, what can you do if you have sleep paralysis often and want it to stop? You might try not sleeping on your back, and making sure that there is plenty of fresh air in your bedroom. There again, if your sleep paralysis does not stem from your system attempting to wake you in order to help you breathe better, there might be another external reason at large that you can remedy. For example, perhaps sudden loud noises half-rouse you and lead to your condition. Making your bedroom as soundproof as possible might be a useful solution. However, it is also true that your paralysis may occur for no apparent reason, in which case, telling yourself to remember that nothing dreadful is really occurring when it happens might be useful. People can sometimes recall such messages to themselves when in a mentally, but not physically alert state.