Learning as I go

They say we learn from our mistakes. Well, that's exactly what I did last night: I learned from a big mistake. I'm still tweaking that "bedtime" session I've made for myself, and last night I tweaked it too far and ended up getting the opposite result from what I wanted. Still, the strength of that bad result showed me just how powerful this session can be for me.

For years and years now, I've been playing a certain old '80's song in my head at bedtime in hopes that it would help me get to sleep, because it's just so very, very soporific. Those of you who grew up in the '80's might remember Men at Work. Well, when I was in my teens, I was a huge, huge Men at Work fan. I saw them in concert, and I had all their albums. The first album was called Business as Usual, and the very last track on it was a slow, bass heavy, six-minutes-plus piece called "Down by the Sea." Well, that's the song I've been trying, for the most part unsuccessfully, to use at night for the past I-don't-know-how-many years to get me to sleep.

So once I started experimenting with Virtual Hypnotist, I figured "Down by the Sea" would be the perfect background audio track for my "bedtime" session. I downloaded the song from Zune (and incidentally discovered, through trial and error, that the only way to get it to play during a VH session was to play it through the Zune player at a very low volume while the session itself ran with "audio" de-selected). Then I loaded the "bedtime" scripts with suggestions that this song would make me sleepy whenever I wanted it to, and that any time a stray thought entered my head, I could erase it by mentally playing that song.

Last night was the first time I tried the session out with all the various components in place.

Now, I don't know if it happens this way for anyone else, but when I start to fall asleep, my mind fills slowly with little strings of nonsense, sentences that make no sense but which I've learned to recognize as the first sign of my conscious mind giving up the reins. I know I'm relaxed when the nonsense starts up; and I just let myself drift and not pay too much attention to it, because if I pay attention, it stops. The trick is to let it just play in the background of my mind until it wells up and fills me completely.

Only last night, what was playing in the background of my mind was "Down by the Sea." And I had conditioned myself to let it erase everything else - which turned out to be everything else including the nonsense. Damn, was it effective at that! I ended up wallowing in bed, nicely relaxed - but utterly, achingly unable to take that final step into sleep.

Well, I've learned better now. I've reworded the scripts to let the nonsense through, and in fact to bring it on more quickly and fully. I've also written a much shorter induction piece, since I'm falling under more deeply now. So we'll see how things go tonight.

Oh, and on a semi-related note, I've had what I think is a very cool idea for where to go next with self hypnosis. I'm going to buy a computer microphone, put myself deep in trance, and record myself speaking the various scripts I've written for myself. Then I can use my own voice instead of "Mary in Stadium" during the sessions; and when I hear, "This is the voice of your inner drone, your tiny silver core, currently tasked with...," I'll know it really is the voice of my inner drone. I'm imagining this might make for a great deepener and a much richer hypnosis experience.

Results to follow.