Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Hypnosis

I was lying in bed the other night, in the throes of jet lag and insomnia, trying to convince myself to go to sleep. Somehow yelling "GO TO SLEEP" at myself tends to make me more panicky, and so sleep really was not happening anytime in the next fifty years.

So I tried that trick of relaxing your body starting with your toes. But I lost focus before I even got up to my ankle.

Then I tried deep breathing for a little bit: "slow inhale.....slow exhale...." but the focus on my breath made me think about my heart, and for some reason I have been worried about having a heart attack - everyone worries about that in the middle of the night, right? - and so started having a panic attack instead of descending into sleep-fulness.

Side note: How likely is it that at some point, someone, somewhere is going to use this blog as proof that I should be institutionalized?

The only rational option then became to find something to hypnotize to me to sleep. Obviously.

That's right: I did a Google search and for $24.99 got two hypnosis sessions, led by a man with a quite yummy Scottish accent, about calmly making decisions.

The thing is, it actually worked. I fell asleep.

So, early this morning - still in the web of jet lag - I decided to try it again.

The thing is, I must be the worst hypnosis patient. Ever.

Five minutes into the recording, he told me to start counting backwards from 300, by 3s. I did NOT remember this happening the first time I listened.

How did I miss the fact, the first time around, that I was supposed to be occupying my conscious mind with backwards counting, so that my unconscious mind was left free to explore the possibilities of my life?

I HAVE NO IDEA.

So I started to worry that, by not participating well in my hypnosis sessions, I would get wires crossed in my brain and end up more messed up than before. Things started to become stressful at this point.

And then on top of this, there was the problem of counting backwards by 3s, from 300.

This proved more of a problem than anything, to be honest.

"300....297....ummm....294......291.......OK....288...WHY AM I NOT BETTER WITH NUMBERS? Ok....*quick finger count*.....285......Right? Yes.....Ok....283....WRONG......282....."

And then I got hungry, so went to make myself an early breakfast instead of trying to get back to sleep, and ignored the rest of the recording.

Conclusion: That was $24.99 well spent.

2 comments:

  1. Hahaha. This just made me laugh. It just did.

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  2. can you send me the hypnosis thing? i need it now... :(

    ReplyDelete