Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Fun with self-hypnosis

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I know, I know. I’m never around, I never post anything any more. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m tired all the time—if I could, I would nap every day.

My friend Michele speculates that I might be in mourning. Maybe. Maybe I’m just depressed. Maybe I’m just severely lazy and don’t want to do anything. I don’t know.

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Back in grade school—it was after we moved to San Francisco, because I remember the school and even the room I was in—a teacher led us through something I would now call “guided visualization.” (Surprisingly, I don’t remember who the teacher was who led us in the visualization.) Why did we do this? I don’t know. I just remember the picture that went through my head of walking down some path, in nature… And whoever was leading the visualization said something like, “…and now you see someone who is very important to you…” And I did! Just like that!

I thought that was the coolest thing.

Flash forward a couple of years. Actually, more than a couple of years; I think Darin and I were already together. I had trouble falling asleep for years and went to a hypnotherapist to see if that would help. She speculated that perhaps I had trouble falling asleep because I had grown up learning to be afraid of someone coming in to my room. I guess the whole “repressed memory” movement was still on. My reaction to her speculation was then and is still now, “Oy.” While doing the hypnotherapy session I definitely went under—so far under I didn’t remember any of the hypnosis part of the session when I left.

I didn’t pursue the hypnotherapy angle because I’d been so annoyed the one hypnotherapist I’d been to see, but I did read about using visualizations for self-hypnosis to put yourself to sleep. I eventually developed this extremely detailed area: I start on a beach, facing the ocean. When I can finally feel myself sitting on the beach towel, on the hot sand, I stand up, turn around, and walk toward the cliffs behind me. I go up the spiral staircase cut into the cliff, lined with onyx and with a silver handrail with tons of carvings in it, until I get to the top. At the top is a giant field, and I basically have three directions I can go: to the east, a forest; to the north, the next cliff, off in the distance, which has a gigantic Ludvigian castle on top of it; or to the west, where the field stretches off until I come to another forest.

I usually don’t make it to the top of the stairs. It was a pretty effective method of getting me to sleep.

Last year I began to be a little stressed out about the move (fancy that) and I went to see a hypnotherapist in Sherman Oaks. I wanted him to make me a tape ostensibly to help with weight loss, but I think he saw through that and made me one about relaxing and feeling less stress. At least, I think he did; I listened to that tape a lot and always blanked out on it. Even when I decided I was going to listen to it just to hear every word, I would zone out until his voice told me to wake up. Evidently I’m the kind of hypnotic client who immediately goes into a comatose state. Either that, or I’m taking every opportunity I can to catch up on my sleep. (There’s some word or phrase that means “goes into hypnotic coma,” but I can’t remember what it is. Ba-da-bum-bum.)

I don’t know if the hypnosis actually worked. That move really stressed me out. But maybe it would have been worse.

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I’ve gotten interested again recently in self-hypnosis. Every book I’ve read has told me to make my own tapes, but since I don’t currently own a tape player, I would have to make my own MP3/.wav files, and I haven’t put together the setup for that. So instead I’ve bought some premade scripts. None of them have worked particularly well. A few haven’t even put me under.

But one I got from Audible called “Contacting Your Inner Guide” by Shakti Gawain did work. Well, actually, at first it didn’t: I listened to it and nothing happened. I didn’t get any of the pictures I was supposed to get. There are two sessions: one relaxes you so that you can ask yourself a question and boom: the answer appears in your mind. (This did not happen for me.) The second one has you going to your nature sanctuary, where your “inner guide” appears to help you.

I remembered that visualization exercise from school so long ago, and I really wanted an experience like that. So I listened to the second session on the recording a couple of times, and I couldn’t get it to work. I’d come up with some natural place (that wasn’t my beach with cliffs, because if I used that all I do is fall asleep for the night) and then try to see the person/animal/color/whatever, but nothing ever happened.

Until I decided that I didn’t feel relaxed in the natural setting. What I wanted was a nice cozy manmade retreat. I have a painting that shows the corner of a beachfront property with a long covered patio. It’s the kind of place I dream of having. (Without the hassles of, like, property ownership or anything.) I said, I should imagine myself there. So I did. I walked through my wonderful beachfront house, which strangely had all-white furniture in it (a choice that is simply Right Out when you have kids), and then I settled on to that long covered porch to wait.

And sure enough, when the time in the guided visualization came for someone to show up, a long stretch car something like this only in yellow with the top down comes through the gate toward my house, and out pops a young Joan Collins in a white Givenchy suit with a white wide-brimmed hat (much less frilly than the outfit in that picture) hops out and bounds over to me. She tells me I need to have more fun! more style! I need to remember to enjoy myself more and not be so deadly serious about everything! (I don’t know if she threw a “darling” or two in there, but she should have if she didn’t.)

I don’t know if this was a lifechanging experience. I do know it cracks me up every time I think about it. So maybe Joan did her part in bringing me a little fun.

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The hypnotherapist in Sherman Oaks told me about one client he had, a TV writer, with whom he worked on a script in which the writer would watch a TV and the show he wanted to write would come on. All the writer would have to do when he woke up was write down the show he’d just watched.

Maybe I can work my way up to that. But in the mean time, I’m going to have girlfriends over so we can discuss nailpolish colors.

On Victor Davis Hanson

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I keep reading people quoting the latest column by Victor Davis Hanson, saying that they are stunned by how much of the neocon koolaid he’s drunk. I’m not amazed at all. Here’s all I needed to know about VDH, from his book Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom:

Greek literature to an American student of the present age can be unpleasant. No wonder we now prefer to instead to craft mechanisms to convince us that the hurtful past is not really what it was. Consider, for example, what the Greeks would say of this advertisement from the Fall 1995 Oxford University Press “Special Sale Catalogue,” promoting a new edition of the The New Testament and Psalms:

…a new version of the Bible that speaks more directly than ever before to today’s social concerns, especially the move towards universal inclusivity. The noted scholars who produced this work address issues such as race, gender, and ethnicity, more explicitly than ever before. In this version, biblical language concerning people with physical afflictions has been revised to avoid personifying individuals by their disabilities; language referring to men and women has been corrected to reflect this inclusiveness precisely; dark and light imagery has been revised to avoid equating “dark” as a term for persons of color with “dark” as a metaphor for evil; references to Judaism have been corrected to avoid imprecise allusions in relation to Christ’s crucifixion; God’s language has been improved to reflect a more universal concept of God and Jesus Christ.

Words of two millennia are to be “corrected,” “revised,” and “improved.” Apparently the sensitive academic is equipped to do what God could not. This reinvention of the past comes with the now customary Orwelling twist: weakening vocabulary, bowdlerizing the text, and seeking distortion are to be reinvented as speaking “more directly,” addressing issues “more explicitly,” and avoid “imprecise allusions.” Any reader of the New Testament knows that for good or evil there are really few “imprecise allusions” in relation to Christ’s crucifixion. Readers grasp who did it and why.

I can’t help but think: code words. I’m not sure of this, of course: after reading about half of this book, I wasn’t sure what the primary agenda of Who Killed Homer? was, let alone any secondary, covert one. But little fillips like these showed up often enough to make me go Hmmmm. And I wasn’t at all surprised to read op-eds from him that put him ever so slightly on the right.