Dreams and Hypnosis

Have you ever woken from a dream at a crucial moment and then spent the rest of the day wondering what would have happened next? Me too. That is until I discovered dream hypnosis.

Dream hypnosis allows you to re-enter a specific dream or recall a specific memory deep within your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind being your inner memory bank that always communicates to you when you sleep, through your dreams.

It is here within the subconscious that all your memories, secrets, fears, happy and sad times are held, but it is only when you sleep that your mind becomes free of restrictions, such as our ego based thoughts or feelings that your subconscious begins to process, replay and evaluate your daily activities, learned knowledge and past memories etc.

This occurs naturally, in order for you to find a solution, be guided or advised or forewarned about a future problem or event at an unconscious level.

You consciously have no control over this process, because it occurs when you enter a light to medium sleep state and your conscious mind (logical thinking side) automatically becomes dormant allowing your subconscious to take over.


Dream hypnosis is a similar process to sleeping, because both occur during (REM) Rapid Eye Movement sleep state. The only real difference is when you sleep you lose conscious awareness, but when you enter dream hypnosis your focus and attention increases.

Hence, sleep makes you lose your attention and hypnosis increases your attention.

Hypnosis makes it easier for a dreamer to access their dream, due to both dreams and hypnosis being controlled by the subconscious mind. The same mind being where all your memories and dreams are kept.

Dreams are therefore the language of our subconscious and have three common factors; images, emotions and bodily sensations whereas, your conscious mind speaks via words and thinks more linearly, making it harder to deal with your emotions and images.

The main secret to understanding and interpreting your dreams is by learning to translate your subconscious (images, emotions and sensations) into conscious understanding, by associating your dream with a particular situation in your waking life, or by breaking it down layer by layer, separating the symbols, emotions or feelings and decoding it step by step.

You can do this by writing down your dream in detail by describing your feelings during the dream and after waking, making notes about how you feel, what was happening, the characters in the dream, where they noticeable colours or smells; every detail no matter how minor means something.

This becomes clearer when you begin to associate your dream with any ideas, thoughts, memories or insights you may think it may relate too, in a past, present or future life experience or situation.

It is important to list all the main characters and their reactions, because sometimes characters may represent a real person or symbolize a part of your own personality or someone else’s, often characters are distorted and can contain more than one person behaviour or characteristic.

Re-entering Dream Procedure

There are two ways to re-enter dream hypnosis. Via an hypnotist / therapist or via Self-hypnosis. Either way results in the same benefits being achieved. However, if you are relatively new to dream interpretation then it is advised to contact a hypnotist / therapist.

The role of the hypnotherapist during dream-hypnosis is only to guide the dreamer during hypnotic state, allowing the dreamer to understand and interpret their own dream; a hypnotist will not interpret the dream for you. (The entire dream is started, developed and completed by the dreamer)

During a session with a hypnotherapist, the dreamer will choose whether they wish to dream in silence or speak their dream out load. Either way does not matter, because during the de-briefing the dream will be discussed in depth, especially if the hidden message is still not clear and the dreamer requires closer.

Following this, the session begins with a relaxation followed by a technique called dream incubation, this is when the dreamer focus’s intensively upon their specific dream they have chosen to uncover.

What happens at this point is very much down to the dreamer, because the more the dreamer focus’s upon their specific dream the more they will remember and the clearer the dream will become, until, eventually the dreamer will be able to run the dream over and over within their mind, similar to action replay.

This prepares the mind, by programming the subconscious mind with the specific dream choice, hence, the dream takes over and induced sleep state (hypnosis) occurs naturally.

In this sleep state, dreamers have reported that they feel comfortable to deeply relaxed, sleeping but not quite sleeping, aware of their external surroundings, but feel comfortable with what they are experiencing internally.

Alongside this, the hypnotherapist continues to guide the dreamer, by asking related questions. For instance: Tell me about your dream? What is the hidden message? What does the dream teach you? The hypnotherapist will also prompt you to notice every detail, colour, smell and feeling. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? What time of day is it?

No matter how trivial or unimportant it may seem at the time, all images, symbols, thoughts or feelings must be remembered and recorded. As everything means something, after all it is your subconscious thoughts and life experiences that create your dreams.

And it is only when a dreamer begins to understand their dream and themselves that reframing within the mind can take place. Hence, by the dreamer understanding their dream, it becomes easier to understand themselves, resulting in healing, understanding and complete wholeness taking place.

The value of this process is invaluable to a dreamer on waking, especially if the dreamer suffers from low self-esteem or confidence issues, having problems with recurring dreams or nightmares or relationship problems.

Remembering and recalling dreams

Dreams play a major role in our waking lives, more than you might think. Dreams not only guide and warn us but they also give us solutions to problems in our waking lives.

Remembering dreams on waking is generally common place amongst those people who suffer with stressful lives or are going through a worrying time; this is due to the dreamer being highly emotionally charged during this period in their life and their conscious and subconscious mind working desperately to find a solution to their waking problem.

Remembering your dreams is not a complicated procedure. All it really needs is a positive attitude and a willingness to succeed. Everybody dreams regardless of whether you remember them on waking are not.

The first step to learning to remember your dream is your intent to do so, followed by writing them down in a dream journal or recording them onto a tape recorder. (This is the best way to start to enhance your memory recall).

The second step is to make sure you are getting enough sleep, because the more sleep during the night, the more opportunity you will have to awaken from your dream, remember, recall and record them.

Waking in the morning and trying to recall a dream, is not enough, as sometimes you will dream many times through the night and will not be able to remember all of them in detail on waking.

That is why it is important to repeatedly say to yourself, before sleeping ‘I will remember my dreams’ because this programmes your subconscious mind to awaken you after each dream, in order for you to record your dreams separately.

If you struggle to remember or recall anything, and are insistent you will not dream, then you will probably find that you will not recall or remember your dreams, as you are already instructing your subconscious mind that you will not be able to do it and it will follow your thought train.

To succeed in remembering and recalling your dreams, all depends on your willingness to succeed and your intent.

Intent before going to sleep is the best method to recalling and remembering your dreams, as this prepares your conscious and subconscious mind and over time allows you more control over your dreams.

Your mind is very powerful which is why you need to be determined to remember and recall your dreams. Even though you may be under the belief that you lose control during sleeping, this is not actually the case, you have choices during sleeping, very similar to those in waking but it is not until you can remember your dreams that you will be able to take control of your dreams.

Dreaming is a natural everyday process just like breathing, but it is not until you fully understand the images and symbols you may see hear or feel during sleep state, that you will be able to truly understand the hidden message behind the dream.

Therefore dream hypnosis is an ideal solution to anyone wishing to understand their dreams or themselves in more depth, overcome nightmares or find out why you are having recurring dreams, plus many more benefits that can only be revealed, by entering your own subconscious and discovering your own hidden secrets deep within your own internal memory bank.

For further information on this fascinating subject check out:
Become the dream: The transforming power of hypnotic dreamwork (1997)Randal ChurchillISBN: 978-0965621809
Sleep Hypnosis Dreams (2003) L Rokhlin ISBN: 978-1410206916