Weekend Special Edition |

I decided to let everyone veg out with a little info from our resident transpersonal dreaming expert, Eric Hul as he discusses his experiences with various modalities.

Eric Hul is an advanced lucid dreamer, Reiki practitioner, martial artist, and a researcher of transpersonal consciousness, hypnotherapy, and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). This article provides a brief taste of how NLP and Reiki modalities can affect or interact with dreaming. It is steeped in personal experience and is not meant to train the reader on how to conduct their own NLP/Reiki practices.

This is information only, and the author & publisher do not claim to be psychotherapists or clinical healers. What the reader does with this information is completely their responsibility.

NLP, Reiki and Dreaming

by Eric Hul

During my first Reiki attunement, I had a strange experience that I could not explain. While seated in a comfortable, straight-backed chair, my eyes were closed as two other individuals and I participated in an opening meditation. Although I cannot remember what the meditation was about, a vivid scene played out in my mind that was uncharacteristic of me at the time.

I was suddenly standing on a beach, just after sunset, approximately 30 yards from the dark, gently lapping water. Behind me was a deep jungle-like forest, ominous, yet oddly calming. As I looked out over the water, I could feel the warm breeze on my face. Unfortunately, I couldn’t discern whether I was wearing clothing or not, but I surmised that I may have been barefoot, since I could feel the sand touching my feet. Approaching me to my left was a rather short, slender woman wearing a loose eggshell-coloured flowing dress, wrapped like a toga. She had long brown hair, brown eyes, tanned skin and was smiling in a gentle sort of way. Almost immediately, I recognized her as someone important to me and gave her the name “Allana.”

When she reached my side, she sat down on the sand and gestured for me to do likewise. I felt loved and accepted by her, yet remained strangely impartial to her physical appearance. As she followed my eyes, she directed my gaze upwards into the sky above the water. There, as if a tear had formed in the fabric of space-time, opened a window into what I understood to be a “future” time. Through it, I could see an unimaginably beautiful crystal city made of clear quartz-like material with a slight blue / purple hue. The city seemed vacant, yet I couldn’t help but feel that it was populated by a group of people that were connected to me in some way. Just as suddenly as the vision had appeared however, it disappeared the instant the Reiki Master took her hands away from my head. I spent the next hour crying my eyes out.

It wasn’t until 2 years later that I met Allana again in a dream. In fact, it is quite possible that she was the one who extended her hand to me to help me out of my body during my first OBE. Was she a figment of my imagination? A spirit guide? A “past-life” associate? A “future” incarnation? The answer to all of these questions is most likely, yes and no. The context and perspective of the answer must be taken into consideration. If you are familiar with “chunking” in NLP, the considerations of our response will vary depending on how far we chunk up. The larger the context (frame) within which we place our experience, the more complicated our situation becomes, lending less credibility to labels. Consider this response – could she possibly be all the above?

Similarly, in a broad context, NLP can be considered a method of modelling mindfulness. Basically, it is about turning concepts back into processes by thinking about how we think. The idea here is that with enough curiosity and a willingness to experiment with our experiences and the experiences of others, we can discover (or rediscover) a great deal more about who we are and how we interact with those around us. So how does this relate to dreaming? Well, dream imagery is often steeped in symbolism that is tailored to the dreamer. By understanding our own unconscious processes through modelling our behaviours, values, beliefs and rationalizations (NLP), we can more easily discern the language by which our dreams speak to us (that is to say, we speak to OURSELVES [self-talk]). In addition, by broadening our scope of awareness through NLP, dream recall becomes easier, as we are less likely to prevent ourselves from accessing those aspects of that we would rather conceal or ignore. The creation of a value hierarchy can be a useful tool here and serve as a spring board for creating healing scenarios in lucid dreams.

From my experience, I have found that every dream reality (including the one in which you find yourself in right now) is connected to everything else in existence. That is, everything is connected to everything, or everything is everything, or, simply, everything IS. Like threads in a giant spider web, we cannot hope to affect one without disturbing the others. Therefore, whatsoever we experience in dreams can literally CHANGE our waking reality. For example, it is possible that by creating a dream in which you stand up to an oppressive or suffocating entity, you can physically transform the DNA of cancerous cells back into their natural, healthy state. In one of my own dreams, I was able to regrow damaged cartilage tissue in my left knee using Reiki in an out-of-body state. Weird? You bet. But it worked.

After years of research into the idea that the mind is far more powerful than we are led to believe, one of my preliminary conclusions is that our notions of what is possible are direct functions of our expectancy. This means that, if all realities are indeed subjective, we are free to make things impossible for ourselves, if we choose. Otherwise, it’s a wide open ball game.

Reiki and NLP are both documented methods of creating change in our lives and are supported by decades of tangible research. So what about my experiences with Allana? I can only speculate that, through my own conscious intervention, I gave myself permission to have an experience conducive to opening myself up to new possibilities, thereby clearing away some of my internal blockages (mental, emotional and spiritual) that were preventing me from accessing my other natural, latent abilities. As with any method that involves personal growth, a change in one area will inevitably lead to changes in other areas. And so, it is possible that by working with myself and others using Reiki and NLP, I could have begun to indirectly pave the way for more vivid dream experiences. With that said, any intervention that directs the conscious mind further inwards (towards the heart) instead of outwards, can be extraordinarily useful. The only essential part is that we continue to remain OPEN to the guidance that exists all around us – to become aware of it and to respond accordingly.

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