Copy
of article in Sunday Times, KZN, 1999. Original
available on request.
Drawing
on the power of dreams
ROWAN PHILP
DOZENS
of Durbanites have been living in a dream world for the past month – and they
reckon everyone else should, too.
Drawn
from vastly different backgrounds, each member of the group claims to have
day-dreamt their way through daily problems – and even long-held phobias –
since attending a revolutionary seminar in December.
Called
“Mindlink”, the course claims that the dream state is more real than
“reality” when it comes to the way we see ourselves and the world around us.
More significantly, it claims that these things can be changed simply by
“bluffing” our dream machine – the subconscious mind – into believing
perceptions we prefer. Weird?
- - Certainly; but the results are staggering.
One
local businesswoman – Linda Thompson, 30 – went into the course with a
crippling phobia for cockroaches.
Now,
she scoops them up calmly in a glass and carries them out of her Berea flat.
Michael
Behrman, the director of a Durban computer software company, needed sleeping
pills and prescription painkillers to control daily migraines last year, but
says he hasn’t used one in the past fortnight.
“I’m
normally a sceptic, but how do you argue with evidence like this?”
said Behrman. “One of the women who did the course with me lost 13kgs inn
two weeks, without doing anything unhealthy.
It’s not magic – the subconscious is just a tool we’ve forgotten
how to use.”
Another
participant reported trouble remembering things. Now, he can not only recite the items on a lengthy order
sheet, but can remember their numbers instantly when the items are read back at
random.
Rod
Briggs, director of the Mindlink Foundation, insists that all these results are
completely grounded in science – specifically a branch called
“psychoneuroimmunology” (PNI).
British-born Martial Arts expert and academic, Briggs says the possible
effects of alpha-wave techniques are limited only by the limits of the
imagination.
Here’s
how it works: The electrical
current pattern used by the brain during the dream cycle of sleep – called the
alpha wave – can be accessed while a person is fully conscious (in beta wave).
By
visualising the colours of the spectrum from red to violet – high to low
frequency – while sitting in a relaxed frame of mind, people can dip below the
“limen” into the dream state.
However,
since the dreamer remains fully conscious, he or she can consciously alter the
alpha brain programmes – home to things like habits and phobias – which are
based there.
Seminar
participants do this by creating a subliminal “office” – complete with
calendar, workstation, clinic and big screen – from which almost every aspect
of life is claimed to be controlled.
The
screen, for instance, is used to literally “read” things which need to be
remembered, as well as for visualising positive reactions to feared things –
which are then supposed to happen automatically in real situations.
| 
