REM or
Rapid Eye Movement is a trance state and is used during dream sleep. It takes up about 20% of our sleep pattern and
occurs about every 90 minutes. We need to enter the REM state in order to
assimilate information. It is a state when we are open to suggestions and when
in the REM trance state we are able to alter people’s perceptions.
During the
day we build up stress in the form of undischarged emotions, such as when the
elderly lady runs into us with her shopping trolley and doesn’t apologise, we
get stressed and want to say something, but we don’t. This pent up anxiety is
undischarged emotion, we deal with this by assimilating the event during REM
and change it into a narrative form that can be safely stored in the neocortex
but without the emotional content.
All our days
stress and anxieties are dealt with this way, in an attempt to empty our
metaphoric anxiety bucket. If we don’t manage to deal with all the stress and
anxiety during our REM sleep, we lose our intellectual control and more anxiety
builds up, we then fall into bouts of
anger, depression or anxiety.
Depressed
people worry excessively which creates an overload of dreaming, in turn all the
energy expelled trying to deal with the worry leaves a person exhausted in the
morning. The brain may even shut down before all the excess anxiety is dealt
with and this results in the person being woken up typically around 4 am, still
tired and with an anxiety bucket already partly full, their bodies haven’t had
enough slow wave sleep – a type of sleep needed for our bodies to regain energy
and make repairs to the body. Our job is to stop the excessive worrying and to
get the sleep patterns back to normal. We do this by creating REM in trance work
and feeding new information to the subconscious mind, by replicating this system
we can deal more effectively with trauma.
REM sleep is
also important to help us find solutions to problems and for memory
consolidation during dreaming or daydreaming.
Karen Taylor Hypnotherapy
