If the brain is the organ in which our thought processes take place, the mind is surely the consciousness that gives our thoughts context and meaning. As we have seen, some sleep difficulties stem from the way in which our brain regulates various physical cycles over which we have no voluntary control, such as the biological clock. But other disturbances happen as a result of mental activity that we knowingly generate, such as worrying, and such problems can often be tackled directly by learning how to relax and banish the noise of mental chatter.
In this chapter, we explore ways to prepare our mind for refreshing sleep, gaining inspiration from techniques both ancient and modern. Some of these methods – for example, meditation – are drawn from the spiritual path to enlightenment followed in Buddhism, Hinduism and other Eastern religions; while others, such as the more recent techniques of visualization and hypnotherapy, harness the imagination and the creative powers of the mind to help us improve the quality of our sleep.
When we cannot sleep, physical or, more often, mental discomfort is usually to blame. We tell ourselves: “I can’t switch off,” “I wake up and my mind is racing,” “I can’t stop thinking about x,y,z,” “I‘m worried about not sleeping and what it will do to me,” and so the list goes on. One of the best methods for dealing with a lack of sleep caused by worry is to learn “thought management”. Expelling those obsessive, anxiety-inducing, wakefulness-promoting thoughts from our mind can be the key to good sleep. So how do we prevent ourselves from wishing we could change past situations that still make us feel angry or embarrassed? Or from lying awake, dreading future events?
A good starting point is to try to put our anxieties regarding the past into perspective. Some of us have a tendency to distort our view of life. Everything is either black or white – in any given situation we see ourselves either as a great success or as a miserable failure, when most situations in life can actually be defined in shades of grey. It is fine (and healthy) to set yourself high standards, and to try to analyze why, for example, you only achieved a Grade B in an examination when you expected to obtain a Grade A, but you also need to learn how to accept and acknowledge the validity of Grade B. One approach is to arm yourself with positive statements that disable the negative ones. For example, if you are constantly condemning yourself to failure by setting yourself perfectionist targets, before going to bed affirm to yourself: “It’s OK to be less than perfect,” or “No one is perfect,” or “No one says I have to be perfect.” If you repeat your chosen affirmation at least ten times each night, its message will slowly filter through to your unconscious. Once you start to accept the past, you will probably find that you acquire a new-found confidence in the future. But if you still find yourself constantly worrying that the worst will happen, use the same method, this time telling yourself: “Whether I worry or not, the outcome will be the same,” or “Things often turn out better than I expect.” The principle is the same: replace your pessimism with an optimistic message.
EXERCISE ELEVEN
An inability to let go of anxiety when trying to sleep or after waking up during the night just leads to sleeplessness. Set aside approximately 30 minutes each evening specifically for dealing with your worries. It may help to write them down and to make a note of any action you can take the next day to resolve them. Then try the following exercise to banish them from your mind in preparation for sleep.
1. Sit somewhere comfortable and close your eyes. Turn your attention inward and focus on your breath. Inhale slowly and deeply until you start to relax.
2. Imagine yourself surrounded by a flock of black birds, which are flying around you, vying for your attention. The birds symbolize your anxieties – the biggest representing your most pressing concerns, and so on. Focus on the largest bird and the particular worry it embodies. As it swoops down toward you, catch it in your hands. Feel how light it is and ask yourself how something so insubstantial could weigh so heavily on your mind.
3. Now release the black bird and, with it, that particular worry. Watch as the bird flies away, changing from black to white as it soars into the sky.
4. Repeat this process with as many birds as you can, taking a few moments after you let each one go to enjoy the relief that you experience.
Another useful type of “thought management” is to try to analyze as objectively as possible whether your worries are justified or whether you have a distorted view of them. During sleepless nights, it is so easy to jump to negative conclusions that lack any supporting evidence – for example, by focusing completely on any bad or unfavourable aspects of a situation and totally disregarding or denying the good aspects. Or perhaps you believe that because you feel you are a failure in one respect, you will automatically fail at anything you try. If this sounds like the type of reasoning you are guilty of when you cannot sleep, try the following technique to help you put your worries into perspective.
Let us assume you have recently been interviewed for a new job and that you are awaiting notification of the outcome. In the meantime your sleep has been adversely affected: you keep waking up in the night and replaying the interview over and over in your mind. You feel that you performed badly and do not expect to be offered the job. Now cast your mind back to the interview and imagine that you are the interviewer. Replay the interaction exactly as you remember it, but this time envisage your performance from the perspective of a reasonable and experienced interviewer. For example, while you might feel that asking about pay reviews and bonuses made you appear mercenary, the interviewer may have felt that such questions showed that you value yourself and your skills and expect to be paid well for them.
When you do an exercise such as this, it can help to write down your findings, so that you can weigh up the “evidence” that both supports and contradicts any original assessment that you made. Make two columns and in one put your own impressions of the situation. In the other note down the impressions that the other person or people present might have gained, or how they might have felt about the situation. Once you have gathered the data, consider all the different interpretations, which may range from endorsing your viewpoint to totally contradicting it, and decide which is the most plausible. You may conclude that your instinct was right – things could have gone better – but you may also realize that an interaction or experience was not nearly as bad as you first thought. At the very least, assessing and analyzing your worries in this way can enable you to see them more dispassionately. This in turn can help you fight your tendency to distort reality and make sleep-disrupting worry a thing of the past.
Anger is a stress response which involves both the body and the mind. If we have angry thoughts, our body reacts accordingly: epinephrine (adrenaline) is released, our heart rate goes up, and our muscles become tense. We are primed, ready for action. This state of arousal is exactly the antithesis of the state required for sleep. It is therefore vitally important to deal with anger before we go to bed, as otherwise we will be too agitated to sleep.
One way to improve sleep is to ensure that we have a regular outlet for our aggression. Pent-up anger can give rise to major sleep disruption, and by causing deficits in our sleep this powerful emotion can make us irritable and aggressive, thus building up a vicious circle. How, then, should you try to release your anger? There are many different approaches. You could do something physical and take up a competitive sport, such as squash or tennis, go for workouts at the gym or learn the grace and discipline of a martial art such as T’ai Chi (see pp.88–9). Or perhaps you would benefit more from practising a gentler form of release, such as yoga, meditation or visualization techniques. Any of these disciplines will both work off your pent-up anger and generally benefit your health, as well as, of course, improving your sleep.
It is best to avoid arguments and confrontations as bedtime draws near. But if you suddenly find yourself in such a situation, what should you do? You may be able to cast off your anger by writing down your feelings on paper and then tearing them up. If all else fails, it may help to let off steam by punching a pillow in one quick burst of raw emotion.
EXERCISE TWELVE
If you find yourself in a situation where the intensity of your anger over a particular matter is keeping you awake, try this exercise to help you dissipate your angry feelings and release tension.
1. Find a small, hard object, such as a large coin or a pebble. Sit somewhere comfortable and squeeze the object as hard as you can in the palm of your hand, while at the same time counting to 10 (you will probably find that you hold your breath as you do this). Exhale and release the object, this time counting to five. Repeat the squeezing and releasing movements three times.
2. Keeping the object in your hand, empty your mind and focus on your breath – inhaling and exhaling slowly, deeply and rhythmically for approximately 5 minutes. If you find unwanted thoughts creeping into your mind, try to observe them in a detached manner – acknowledge their existence but let them come and go without reacting to them.
3. Gently reflect on your feelings. Acknowledge that you have a right to be annoyed, but try to accept that undesirable events and behaviour are part of life, and resolve to deal with your negative feelings constructively. Open your hand and stroke the coin or pebble, then put it away in a drawer or cupboard. You have let go of your anger. You are at peace with yourself.
Meditation, the process of consciously stilling the body and especially the mind to promote deep relaxation, has been practised in the East for thousands of years. As improving our sleep relies heavily upon developing our ability to relax when we are awake, it is worth spending a little while here exploring the practice of meditation.
From a scientific point of view, the brain waves experienced during deep meditation are similar to those of light sleep – alpha waves are characteristic of both. Although we have to be well-practised in meditation to reach such a state, there are many benefits to be gained, even at the beginner’s level. Meditation is sometimes referred to as “restful alertness”, an apparently contradictory, but actually true definition, because the state of meditation marries the physical attributes of sleep with those of wakefulness. During sleep our heart rate lowers, our metabolism becomes slower, we consume less oxygen and our conscious awareness of the outside world disappears. All these things are true of meditation too – except that, although we seem to have little conscious awareness of the outside world while we practise, we are, in fact, mentally fully alert throughout. And at a very advanced level, yogis are said to be able to meditate instead of sleeping – however, I would not recommend that you try this!
You can make a start upon improving your sleep by incorporating meditation into your regular bedtime routine. The exercise on the opposite page takes you step by step through a pre-sleep meditation – in this case the focus is the flicker of a candle flame, but you could use any “sleepy” image. You need only spend ten or fifteen minutes each night meditating, but doing so will undoubtedly release the stress of the day and put you in mind for sleep.
EXERCISE THIRTEEN
One of the most common causes of sleeplessness is an inability to “switch off” our racing mind. An effective way to train ourselves to do so is to use a pre-sleep, single-point meditation. This exercise guides you on how to focus your mind on a candle flame, whose endlessly varied flickering can promote deep relaxation.
1. Light the candle and, placing it safely, sit in a comfortable position in front of it. Relax your shoulders, and gaze into the flame. Soften your focus so that you are not staring at the flame but gazing as if to see through and beyond it.
2. Bring your attention to the corona around the flame. Notice how the edge of the flame distils into a gentle haze. Squint your eyes a little – notice how doing so causes shafts of light to seem to throw themselves from the flame, like the last warm rays of the sun as it dips beneath the horizon at the end of the day. Make a connection in your mind between this image and thoughts of bedtime.
3. Now close your eyes and imagine the warm glow of the flame filling your consciousness. It is calm, safe and comforting. Breathe deeply for a few minutes, basking in your sense of inner tranquillity. (If your attention wanders, open your eyes and bring your focus back to the real flame, then close your eyes again.) Once you feel completely calm and your mind is empty, slowly open your eyes and gently blow out the candle. You feel relaxed and ready for bed.
However, before you try the exercise, bear in mind that it can be helpful to break meditation down into four separate stages, the first two of which are most relevant to helping you to sleep better. The first stage is preparation – most importantly the preparation of your environment. Choose somewhere quiet and tranquil. As this is a pre-sleep meditation, the ideal place would be your bedroom, as this will reinforce associations with peace and relaxation. It is also probably the most practical place, as it may well be the only room in the house in which you are likely to be left undisturbed. Try to ensure that the room is tidy – if you are emptying your mind of troubling thoughts, you need to make sure that your environment is free of clutter too. Although it may be tempting, try to resist the urge to meditate on your bed, which should be reserved for sleeping and sex only. Select a cushion or pillow which you can keep especially for your meditation practice and sit on this on the floor. Wear comfortable, loose clothing and choose a position that you can maintain effortlessly for an extended period of time (for example, you may decide to sit cross-legged, but there is certainly no need to try to push yourself into the Lotus position).
The second stage in meditation is application, in which we select the focus for our practice. When we first begin to meditate, it can help to focus the mind on something to stop distracting thoughts hijacking our concentration. The exercise on p.109 uses a candle flame, but you could try anything with connotations of sleep: for example, the moon, a feather (from your down quilt), even the letter “z”. Whatever you select, ensure that it does not have associations with your sleep problems – for example, focusing on a clockface showing your ideal bedtime might have the negative effect of reminding you how much later it usually is before you succeed in falling asleep. Once you have chosen the focus for your meditation, recreate it in your mind’s eye in as much detail as possible. Hold the image there until all distracting thoughts are stilled, then gradually try to empty your mind by letting the image fade away. If you find this difficult and thoughts start to intrude, bring your mental image back into focus for a while before fading it out again.
The third and fourth stages of meditation, reached by advanced practitioners, are realization and transformation. In the former, the meditator witnesses the universal truth – that we exist in spirit form within our physical bodies, which are themselves merely the vehicles of our existence and not the essence. Transformation is the act by which the yogi reaches nirvana – the final spiritual goal in which physical form is overcome by the enlightened spirit. When you meditate with the aim of promoting sleep, bear in mind that we are essentially spiritual beings who can rise above the baggage we carry in the material world, but do not become distracted by this philosophy – accept it as a truth.
Widely used in Eastern meditation, mandalas and yantras are visual representations of the universe that can be memorized and brought into the mind as a focus for the mind’s eye. Mandalas range from a simple circle with a dot in the centre to highly complex, geometric images, sometimes partly figurative, that are full of religious or spiritual symbolism. Yantras on the other hand do not contain any human or animal likenesses – instead they symbolize the universe purely in geometric shapes. As an aid for getting a good night’s sleep, the value of mandalas and yantras is to provide us with a focus for the mind in meditation. By distracting the mind from worries and alerting thoughts, these intriguing images can help us to relax into a state of tranquillity, and ultimately, sleep.
The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) noticed that some of his patients, who had no knowledge necessarily of Eastern mysticism, began to draw and paint mandala-like pictures. Jung became intrigued by the idea that mandalas and yantras are universal symbols from the “collective unconscious”, representing the primal order of the psyche. It is certainly true that these patterns appear in all cultures. For example, they are present in such diverse forms as Native North American sand paintings, the rose windows of Christian churches, and in nature itself as snow crystals and many-petalled flowers. The exercise (opposite) shows you how to create your own mandalas or yantras and use them as a focus for pre-sleep meditation.
EXERCISE FOURTEEN
If you design your own mandala or yantra as a visual meditation to help you to sleep, whether consciously or unconsciously you are likely to create a pattern that is symbolically meaningful to you, and therefore easier to work with. When you have devised your mandala or yantra, sign and date it and put it somewhere where you can see it regularly, to help to fix it in your mind.
1. Take a large piece of paper and draw or paint a big circle in the middle. Add some other geometric shapes to form a pattern within the circle. Choose your colours carefully. Use predominantly relaxing shades, such as blues and greens, that are easy on the eye.
2. Fill the circle with whatever you feel belongs there, but remember that the purpose of the mandala is to help you improve your sleep and that your design should reflect this theme. For example, you could perhaps incorporate a closed eye, some stars or musical notes (to remind you of your favourite relaxing music) in your design.
3. To use your mandala as a meditation aid, place your design at eye level, at a comfortable distance from the place where you sit to meditate. Sit down on your cushion or pillow and close your eyes. Concentrate on your breathing for 2 minutes to still your body and mind. When you feel ready, open your eyes and focus on your mandala.
Fundamental to all ancient meditative traditions is the act of visualization. When we practise a visualization, we watch in our mind’s eye the scene, object, person or action in as much real-life detail as possible – the more vivid and lifelike the image, the more effective the visualization. The act of visualization is useful in the quest for sleep improvement for two reasons. First (and most specifically), it has the advantage of focusing our mind fully on matters other than any anxiety we might have about sleep; and second, as a form of meditation, it regulates our breathing, slowing our heart rate and encouraging relaxation.
One of the most effective uses for visualization in sleep improvement is as a sleep trigger. If we can create for ourselves the perfect sleeping place in our mind’s eye, we can return to this place each time we wish to fall asleep. And the same technique can be used if we wake during the night and find it hard to return to sleep. First, think of the most relaxing place you can imagine. This might be somewhere that you have actually visited, such as a tranquil forest glade where you once spent a lazy summer afternoon; or somewhere that you imagine as the most restful place on earth, such as a secluded tropical beach. Close your eyes and breathe deeply for a few minutes. Try to empty your mind of distracting thoughts. Conjure up an image of the restful place. Visualize it in as much detail as you possibly can. Let us assume it is the forest glade. What trees surround you? Is the glade partly shaded or bathed in enveloping sunlight? What tones of green can you see in the leaves, the grass and the other foliage? Can you smell the damp soil? Do you hear birds singing? In your imagination think of this place in all its glorious detail. Visualize yourself lying peacefully in your restful place. Feel the comforting support of Mother Earth under your back. Now focus on one sound – if it is birdsong, imagine the tune lulling you into sleep just as your mother used to sing you lullabies. Feel the warmth of the sun on your skin – you are bathed in the rays of its goodness. Breathe deeply and with each breath imagine drifting further and further into sleep. Now you are gone …
One of the keys to establishing a successful pre-sleep visualization lies in honing your general powers of observation. Start simply. When you eat, regard your meal as a feast for your eyes as well as your palate. Absorb all the colours of the food on your plate and concentrate on the various tastes as you chew (effective visualization is enormously enhanced if we can employ all our senses to conjure up an image). On your walk to work pay attention to the buildings you see – what is each used for? Are there any interesting “landmarks” such as an antique mailbox, a newspaper stand or a flower stall? Can you identify the trees along the sidewalk or the flowers growing on the verges? Do you know the names of all the streets on your route? You may be surprised at how much detail usually passes you by as you hurry along every morning, lost in your own inner world. By developing your powers of observation in this way you will be able to make your pre-sleep visualization more vivid and plausible.
The ancient Egyptians and Greeks are said to have put patients into a trance to promote healing, while African and American tribal cultures have long used drumming and dancing for hypnotic effect. Since its discovery by the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer in the late eighteenth century, hypnosis has been used by generations of doctors and psychotherapists in the West to encourage patients to cure themselves by implanting in their minds a suggestion that they are able to do so.
When James Braid embarked on the first scientific investigation of hypnosis in the nineteenth century, he pronounced it to be a form of “nervous sleep”, similar to natural sleep but induced by the patient’s concentration on the hypnotist. However, more recent research shows that the brain waves of hypnotized subjects closely resemble those of people who are awake.
Contemporary hypnotherapy involves putting the patient into a deeply relaxed state in which their critical faculties are suspended. The hypnotherapist can then implant positive suggestions into the subconscious mind that will affect the perception or behaviour of the person both during and after the trance.
Hypnotherapy has proved that it can successfully treat some of the common causes of insomnia, such as pain and anxiety. While there is little research to indicate whether hypnotism can improve sleep directly, it may be worth trying the direct approach, in which the hypnotist may suggest, for example, that your bedtime drink is a powerful sleeping potion, which will make you fall asleep as soon as you go to bed.
EXERCISE FIFTEEN
If you cannot visit a hypnotherapist, try the following exercise in self-hypnosis to improve your sleep. (Note: anyone with mental problems should seek medical advice before trying self-hypnosis.)
1. Lie on the floor in a comfortable position, your arms by your sides. Focus on your breathing, feeling yourself sink into the floor as you completely relax.
2. Fix your gaze on a point on the ceiling and take five, progressively longer breaths. As you exhale each time, tell yourself: “I am ready to go to sleep.”
3. Imagine yourself going down 10 stairs into a beautiful bedroom. As you descend, count down from 10 to 1, and try to feel increasingly relaxed. Watch yourself lie down on the sumptuous bed and sink into the soft covers. Tell yourself, “I am falling deeply asleep,” as in your mind’s eye you drift off. Focus on your sleeping figure and breathe deeply.
4. Tell yourself: “On the count of three, I will wake up feeling totally relaxed and ready for sleep.” Count to three. Slowly get up and go straight to bed.
During early sleep research experiments, subjects were asked to sleep in anechoic (echoless) rooms. Although we might think that silence is the optimum aural environment for sleep, the researchers actually found that it had an adverse effect on the sleep of their subjects. Looked at closely, the conclusions of that early research seem perfectly logical. We are enveloped by sound at all stages of our existence. In the womb, hearing is one of the earliest senses to develop, and as we grow we are soothed by the sounds of the amniotic fluid and our mother’s voice. As adults, even when we take a few moments to relish what we call “silence”, what we really mean is that we have temporarily escaped being disrupted by noise. But undoubtedly some noise is still present – the echo of a child’s voice, the hum of passing traffic, the natural sound of birdsong.
So although we might think that we should soundproof our bedrooms, what we really need to do is to free ourselves from disruptive and disturbing noise. Of course there are practical solutions, such as mending a broken door latch that clatters, but other annoying noises – for example, a neighbour’s dog barking or a party in the same apartment block – can be difficult to stop as they are beyond our immediate control. In these cases (and if we have difficulty sleeping anyway), providing our own sleep-promoting sounds can be invaluable, whether to muffle the noise that disturbs us, or to provide another focus for the mind, or simply to trigger the mood of sleep.
We all have our own ideas about which sounds we find most relaxing, but one of the most accessible and universally enjoyable is music. If you like listening to music, why not keep a special selection for pre-bedtime listening, and try to incorporate half an hour’s listening into your normal pre-sleep routine? Better still, record your own sequence of tracks, compiling a series of tunes or pieces that are increasingly relaxing – gentle melodies can caress our senses and ease away physical tension. Find somewhere comfortable, perhaps the couch in the living room, and just sit back and listen. (Although it may be tempting to lie on your bed, some believe that this is not a good idea – in Feng Shui, for example, the radiation emitted from electrical equipment is believed to cause an imbalance of energy in your bedroom and so impair your sleep.)
Everyone is used to having music in the background, but if you are using music to help you prepare for sleep, try actively to engage with it. Immerse yourself in the music, bringing it to the foreground. Experiment with different combinations of pieces until you discover your own perfect pre-sleep selection.
Few of us realize that babies in the womb are already sensitive to sound. Recent experiments have shown that if an unborn child regularly hears the same song during pregnancy, he or she will come to associate it with the security of the womb. Then, when the infant is exposed to the same song after he or she is born, the familiar sounds will be comforting and help to encourage sleep.
While novelty wakes the brain up – and also generates stress hormones – routines tend to settle it down. Sleep is partly a learned behaviour, and so the conditions we come to associate with going to sleep ultimately help us to drift off. Routines provide a basis for developing such associations.
It is up to each of us individually to decide how soon before sleep we embark upon a bedtime routine. For most of us this is an automatic, almost robotic period, in which we go through the ritual of washing, cleaning our teeth, changing for bed, getting into bed and then perhaps reading a few chapters of a book. Prayer might also be part of the routine. Then, when we finally turn off the light, we expect that our brain will recognize this as the time for mental shut-down and relax into sleep.
However, for most of us getting off to sleep is rarely that simple. Many of us have a problem switching off our minds and sometimes we need to re-learn the primary association that we learned as a baby – that bed is a place for sleeping, not thinking. One way to reinforce this attitude is to set aside a short period of time before attempting to fall asleep, to make a conscious effort to deal with unfinished business. First, this means not reading in bed. Although we may find it a relaxing pastime because it forces our mind to think about something other than the anxieties of the day, reading engages our attention, and disengages our mind from the purpose of sleep. The bed is not a place for concentration – it is for sleep and (apart from sex) only sleep. A bedtime ritual, therefore, should consist of activities that consciously clear your mind.
First, note down any issues that are concerning you on a piece of paper, then fold up the paper and set it aside for the next day and banish the issues from your mind – anything that you wrote down is better dealt with after a refreshing night’s sleep. Get yourself ready for bed, and try to empty your mind of meandering thoughts using a meditation or visualization (any of the ones in this book will do). If any thoughts creep in, let them simply pass through your head, without allowing them to settle. Only once you feel ready for sleep should you get into bed.
Of course, it is not only adults who need bedtime routines. Children, too, often find it hard to settle down at night and can find it comforting to have a nightly ritual. Establish a predictable routine – for example, a bath or shower, followed by dressing for bed and then half an hour doing any restful activity that will help them to settle. Do not be tempted to bend the rules – at the end of the half-hour, it is time for bed!
This may seem an unusual idea, but we have within our grasp the opportunity to improve sleep using sleep. As we already know, REM sleep is also known as dreaming sleep, but the difference between REM sleep and dreaming itself is similar to the distinction between the physical properties of the brain and the consciousness we experience with our mind. In other words, our brain activity can be measured and viewed objectively, whereas our dreams are unique, highly subjective and unquantifiable mental events. These events are believed by many to present opportunities for greater understanding of our unconscious, and through that understanding we can achieve increased self-knowledge and overall wellbeing. In addition, we already know that dreaming sleep comes second in the hierarchy of important stages of sleep, so by encouraging our dreams and learning from them we not only improve our self-understanding, but also maximize this fundamental aspect of our sleeping pattern.
Dreaming has intrigued the human race since time immemorial, but Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the famous Viennese psychiatrist, was the first scientist who expressly declared that he considered dreams to be the “royal road to the unconscious” – a means of accessing the non-conscious parts of the mind. (Freud’s contemporary, the Swiss Carl Jung, on the other hand, formulated the idea that some dreams are an expression of the reservoir of racial memories and experiences that are possessed by every one of us. He termed this storehouse of knowledge the “collective unconscious”.)
During the 1990s, Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University, Boston, using data derived primarily from dreams recalled by trauma victims, argued that the main function of dreaming is to calm the mind, which is bombarded, and consequently overloaded, with stimuli during waking hours. He suggests that during dreaming, deep cross-connections (which are not made during wakefulness) are formed in the brain, thereby dissipating energy and allowing the brain to “let off steam”. By increasing the number of cross-associations that are created in the brain, this process may have the added advantage of aiding the consolidation of memory. The release of energy in the brain may also trigger the mind to represent our dominant waking emotions and concerns metaphorically in our dreams. For example, the fear and terror experienced by the trauma victims was expressed by dreams of events such as “running from a huge tidal wave”.
One of the customs of the Ojibwe, a Native North American people, is to place hoops known as “dreamcatchers” next to their babies’ cradle boards to protect them from bad dreams. The dreamcatchers derive from an ancient myth about Asibikasshi (Spider Woman), a sun deity, who spun webs around the sleeping places of babies to filter out bad dreams. When the tribes scattered, Asibikasshi was unable to reach all the children so the women began weaving their own dreamcatchers. They used willow hoops, whose circular shape represents the sun, criss-crossed with “string” made from plant fibres. The web is attached to the hoop at eight points, representing Asibikasshi’s legs, and there is a small central hole to allow the good dreams through.
The work of Freud, Jung and Hartmann forms the basis of techniques employed by many psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in stress management (part of which includes sleep improvement) today. If we explore the messages from our unconscious conveyed in our dreams, we can achieve greater self-understanding, which can give us the strength to tackle any problems in our waking life that are adversely affecting our sleep. The exercise opposite presents a way to encourage vivid recollection of your dreams.
But what of using dream cues? Through this technique many people are able to promote dreams on specific problems in their waking lives to try to find solutions from their unconscious. To cue your dreams to focus on improving your sleep, meditate for a few moments on an image that, for you, embodies deep relaxation or refreshing sleep. For example, perhaps you imagine yourself relaxing peacefully in your garden, in the shade of an apple tree, on a warm summer’s afternoon. Hold this scene in your mind for a few moments, visualizing it in as much detail as possible. Can you feel the gentle breeze caressing your body? What is the sweet scent you smell? Note how sleepy and content you feel. Hold this image of perfect tranquillity in your mind and tell yourself that this is how you wish to feel every night as you drift off. With any luck this exercise will guide you safely into dreaming sleep, where your unconscious mind can perhaps suggest other ways to improve your rest.
EXERCISE SIXTEEN
Most of us remember only brief fragments of our dreams, but it is possible to learn how to recall them in more detail. Try this exercise every night for a week – it will help you to discover any important, recurrent themes.
1. Before retiring, place a pencil and paper within easy reach of your bed. Reflect on any topics that were often in your thoughts during the day.
2. As you settle down to sleep, relax and clear your mind of mental clutter, allowing thoughts to drift across your mind without paying them any attention and letting sleep come naturally.
3. If you awaken during the night, write down any dreams you have had in as much detail as possible. You can make a sketch instead, if this makes it easier to express the content of your dream.
4. When you wake up in the morning, write down any dreams that you can remember, noting key emotions as well as people, places, events and so on.
5. Analyze your dream report to see if any particular themes emerge.
6. Compare the content of your dreams with the topics that were often in your thoughts the day before, noting any obvious links, coincidences, symbols and so on. You may be surprised by the associations you find.