I’ve been reading quite a lot lately about hypnosis. I’m particularly interested in its potential for therapy, but I also believe I’d have made quite a good stage hypnotist. Perhaps there is still time for that.
I don’t believe I have ever been truly hypnotised — certainly not by a kind of creepy guy who tried to do it to me at an alternative health and wellbeing fair in Brisbane a couple of decades ago, and not by some of the tapes and videos I’ve recently purchased.
While the people who, supposedly, know about this sort of stuff say that anybody can be hypnotised (even those who stubbornly resist it, although they take longer), I think my problem has been that I’m too engaged with the process — wanting to understand what’s going on, rather than giving in to it.
Having said that, I have been in a kind of hypnotic state that occurs during dreams. While not entirely ruling out the possibility that I am a freak, I assume others also know about that point in your slumber where you are aware that while what you are experiencing may seem quite real, it is a dream. It usually happens to me not long before I wake up to attend to a call of nature.
Unless it’s a nightmare, I usually find it quite disappointing when I realise that nothing around me is actually happening. It’s especially poignant when the dream involves people who have died (like my father, who regularly appears in my dreams), or situations that evoke actual or contrived happier times.
I read once that our dreams all have meanings, and that we should record them in the hope that they cast light on current or future events. Prince Charles apparently does this — or, at least, has someone do it for him — but that may not be the best recommendation.
For that reason alone, I am now noting that I’ve just woken up from a nap in which I was at a dinner party with some of my real friends and family along with the comedian/ author/ polymath Stephen Fry who, for reasons now not clear, threw up over me. At the point in which I realised it was just a dream, and thus began to wake up, Stephen was furiously trying to clean me up with a towel while I was imploring another friend to grab a camera and register the moment for my Twitter feed.
I was sad to wake up because I really do wish Stephen Fry was among my circle of friends. And I’d certainly love to be able to post that picture.
