You can be in physiological sleep, lying on your back, and you can dream of walking through the house or talking to a friend in the yard. You can listen to the birds, smell the flowers, feel the breeze and enjoy the conversation with your friend. Everything is perfectly real because your unconscious mind allows this elaboration in a dream. The truth is that you are in bed between the sheets. During the dream you may sit down in the garden chair. At one particular moment you might have turned over and rested your back against the mattress. That was the time when in your dream you leaned against the back of the garden chair. The great secret here is that the unconscious mind can deal with the reality of the bed mattress and blend with it the reality of eye memories or [tag-tec]mental[/tag-tec] images of any kind.

Here’s a fun demonstration. Imagine me holding up a notepad and telling you to keep looking at it. Actually, all you receive from this particular object is a visual image. You keep looking at it, but you will notice that I put it on the table and you can conceive seeing it right there. However, you still have the visual image and visual memory in your mind. You could project the visual image in the air exactly where the actual object was before. This is exactly what you do in your dream. You project memories of objects and ideas so that you can talk to a friend in the garden.

In the state of [tag-tec]hypnosis[/tag-tec], you give your attention to selected ideas. For example, if I were to ask anyone of you what you wore on your third birthday, you would look at me and say: “That was a long time ago. How could I possibly remember it? It really is not important, and why should I remember it?” You would reject the task of recalling because of circumstances and your acknowledge of the difficulty. In the [tag-tec]hypnotic[/tag-tec] state the subject is susceptible to ideas and accepts them. Under hypnosis you would accept the idea that what you wore on your third birthday is simply part of the birthday. You did have a third birthday, which is an historic fact. Furthermore, you did wear clothes, and furthermore, on that third birthday there was a momentous combination of one-time experiences. In the trance state you could start thinking in terms of those realities. [tag-ice]Hypnosis[/tag-ice], therefore, is essentially a state of receptiveness to ideas and the appraisal of their inherent values and significance.