Chapter 11

Hocus Pocus

or Just Plain Focus?

Is everyday life really so deep and reverberatingly meaningful? The last chapters have painted a picture of only our strongest thoughts materialising, mostly those connected with the emergence from the unconscious of the big heavies such as transcendence of limitation, change, death, rebirth, accident and reunion. Yet we know that our lives are also filled with seeming trivialities and the results of simple, conscious decision making. How powerful are our conscious thoughts in creating daily reality? Are they generally overruled by the big unknowns, our unconscious conditioning and the unconscious emergents, the 'emergencies' in our lives, which determine the major shape of things to come?

Through my experience and dream research I have observed that the bestlaid plans of mice and men are frequently thwarted by the greater conditioning of the unconscious. Where there's a will there's a way, as long as the unconscious doesn't get there first. Tongue in cheek I've used these clichés for a reason. We are creatures of habit who unthinkingly opt for the verbal cliché, the well-worn path, the tried and trusted; in short, we are easily driven by the conditioned response.

Daily reality, for most of us, is a familiar backdrop against which changes, some subtle, some momentous, act out on front stage. The familiar backdrop includes our conscious expectations (thoughts), such as the daily rising of the sun, the falling of leaves in autumn, the regular arrival of bills to be paid, ageing, predictable responses of our family and friends and the exchange of work for pay. It is also fabricated by our unconscious thoughts ingrained through conditioning. The child consistently told that life's a struggle may grow to experience life as a struggle. He may hold many conscious thoughts to the contrary, but if he is unconsciously conditioned to expect struggle, he will meet struggle, because unconscious thoughts are powerful. Alternatively a child may learn, through experience, that the only way to get loving attention is to be sick. In later life she will generally fall sick whenever she feels unloved. Her conscious thoughts about sickness and love may be quite different, but unconscious conditioning is weighty, until it is drawn into the light of consciousness and released. We are thought, and our daily life is a reflection of our strongest conscious and unconscious thoughts. Daily reinforcement sets our individual view of the reality of life in concrete. How could my life be any different?

Out on front stage are the changeables. Fleeting conscious thoughts which occasionally gain sufficient strength to materialise may drift through a few scenes, bringing small daily changes. Whenever crumbling unconscious conditioning rises towards the surface, huge momentous emergencies may play havoc on centre stage. Mid-crisis the comfortable stability of the whole stage set is threatened through synchronicity until the breakthrough insight smoothes the transition into life's next scene. Meanwhile, out in the wings, the greater, untouched unconscious ocean awaits its call. Life is indeed a stage we each design and upon which we play out our own self-scripted dramas, according to the materialisation of our thoughts. But how easy is it to change our scripts once the ink has dried? Can we edit and rewrite very unfolding moment of our lives, or are some chapters irrevocably carved in stone?

Do we progressively seal our destiny through repeated conscious and unconscious thoughts, restricting our life to one predictable outcome? Or can we change our scripts and the shape of things to come by influencing which thoughts manifest?

Dreams are often the battleground between our conscious and unconscious thoughts. At the very least, if we can interpret the dreams, we can understand the dilemmas in our lives. We may see why our conscious efforts are undermined by our unconscious conditioning and then take steps to undo that conditioning. Frequently the dream resolves the issue, the conditioning is broken and the insight emerges, heralded by synchronicity. Life shifts, reflecting the shift in consciousness.

Recently I designed an experiment to see what would happen if a conscious thought was deliberately implanted into a dream. I wondered whether it would meet its unconscious counterpart and stir things up a bit. The idea was to increase my understanding of how conscious and unconscious thoughts interact and to see if there was therapeutic value in this.

Through the Dream Research Bank I asked people to think of an insignificant object and to follow my instructions to induce it to appear in their dreams. The method involved intense focus on the object prior to sleep and was based on the principle that whatever is unresolved as you fall asleep tends to be considered in your dreams. By choosing an insignificant object I was really asking each dreamer to pick something relatively free from meaning or conflict. By the time they had thought about the experiment and focussed on the task at hand, the object was no longer insignificant: it now symbolised the dream task itself.

Tara chose a white glass marble as her object. It appeared in her dream variously as a small white ball, a plastic ball instead of a glass one, four balls, a billiard ball and an egg. At one point in her dream she explained to someone,

'You see, I've been trying to find my white marble. The plastic balls, the billiard ball and now this egg show me that the universal powers are getting my message, but somehow I'm not conveying it quite clearly enough.' Finally her dream presented her with a gold neck chain threaded with a white ball before she flew up to the heavens where "the stars shone brighter than ever and were the size of ... my marble!"

Tara interpreted her dream and concluded that she had a tendency to be indecisive and unclear of her goals at times, as well as a bit of a perfectionist, searching for the ultimate perfect white glass marble rather than the near fit alternatives that she had cleverly produced in her dream.

So far, so good. The marble was an introduced conscious thought symbolising 'dream task' which had entered the battleground of Tara's dreams to stir up questions of perfectionism and indecision. A conscious thought, it seemed, had been successfully used to elucidate her unconscious response to task performance.

What I hadn't anticipated was what followed next. Tara noticed her marble appearing in her outer world as well as in her dreams. Firstly her son chose six story books at the local library.

"I hadn't noticed what they were until I began reading them to him that night. The first book was called Roger Loses His Marbles, and it told of a pig who spent all day searching for his yellow marbles. Eventually his aunt found them during the night (dream time!) in Roger's bedroom on the windowsill. On the last page there was a picture of a jar containing over fifty marbles of many colours, with only one white marble amongst them! The next two stories that I chose randomly from the six also referred to marbles, but only fleetingly: a monster with 'greedy eyes rolling like marbles' in one book, and a boy playing marbles with a monster in another book.

"A couple of days later I turned my calendar page to February and there was a picture of two marbles above the word February. The picture for that month was of a teddy bear at school surrounded by marbles. Then the next day my husband told me he had an elaborate dream about diving down into water and retrieving my marble from the bottom!"

Tara was experiencing synchronicity because, I assume, focusing her conscious thoughts on 'dream task' had challenged her unconscious thoughts on 'tasks, goals and measures of success'. These unconscious thoughts were challenged to emerge into consciousness heralded by the classic breakthrough sign of synchronicity. Tara's life became temporarily flooded with marbles because these were the outer world reflections of her inner world symbol for 'tasks, goals and measures of success'. Significantly they first surfaced as a search for something lost, then progressed through confrontation (monsters) and finally emerged associated with learning and a comforting teddy bear. Her husband's dream delivered the final symbolism of the marble's 'outing'.

Beth's experience of the dream task was a little different, since she was unable to induce her chosen object, a 'garden shovel' into her dreams, at least as far as she could recall them. However, as in Tara's case, synchronicities followed:

"On the second day I went out to greet my husband as he arrived home and stubbed my toe on a garden shovel which was on the driveway, a most unusual place for our shovel. On the fourth day I took my children down to the beach and was sitting in the shade chatting with my mother when she said, 'Goodness, would you look at the size of the shovel your son has brought to the beach!' There he was, digging a hole in the sand with a huge garden shovel. He had stowed it away in the boot of the car without asking me.

"The sixth day saw my father arrive at our house asking me if I had borrowed his shovel because he couldn't find it anywhere. Then, when I visited my sister-in-law on the eighth day, she produced two tiny plastic spades her ex-husband had given the children and said, 'Look at these. Aren't they ridiculous? They might as well be teaspoons. It would take all day to fill a bucket!'

"While the shovel saga continues, my dreams have been digging down deep into my subconscious, presenting to me things that were well and truly buried. So it seems the reverse has happened so far: that my subconscious has taken the symbol in and dug down deep with that old shovel. I find it most interesting, though, that the shovels should be manifesting in my waking life instead of in my dreams. Wow! This has potential - now what else would I like to manifest? But what then would happen to my dream life? If I choose to focus on an open door every night before going to sleep, would new doors open in my waking life?"

Well, would new doors open in her waking life? The answer, Beth, according to my experience, is that they probably would, but not in the way that you mean.

Years ago we lived in a beautiful townhouse with a little back garden that led down to a harbour. I used to enjoy having water at the back door. When we needed to move, I sat the family down and asked everyone to think about what they wanted in our next house and we compiled a grand list of all our wishful thinking. I added 'water at the back door'. Well, you can probably anticipate the end of the story. The first house we looked at the very next day had everything on our list except it was inland, away from the sea. It was built in a U-shape, enclosing an unfinished courtyard. I looked through the glass of the back door, and there it was: the whole courtyard was flooded to a few inches of water. I had got my 'water at the back door', but not the kind of water I had really meant!

We did move into the house because it checked with our other requirements but it turned out to be a difficult year. I look back on that time as an emotional watershed, symbolised by the 'water at the back door' (water symbolises emotions in dreams). Ultimately it was cleansing, as water always is, since we were able to use the challenges that year presented in a positive way and move forward to a more fulfilling lifestyle. What I had done, I now realise, was focus my conscious thought of 'water at the back door' which challenged my unconscious thoughts on water (symbol of emotions) and back door (symbol of private self or what you put behind you). Synchronicity heralded the stirring up of old emotional conditioning which bubbled up for recognition and resolution.

The old adage 'be careful what you ask for because you might well get it' is true. Each of these three examples involved a focussed conscious thought challenging an unconscious reaction. The unconscious delivered literally, yet the manifestations, the marble, the shovel and the water were symbolically meaningful in the contexts in which they arose.

The obvious link here is to the manifestations encountered during the hypnosis project described earlier in the book.

Let's revisit the fourth hypnosis session (Chapter 4) where I took three conscious thoughts (a bunch of orange and maroon flowers, a cheque for $174 and the concept of the Chinese Wall) into hypnosis to present them to my unconscious self. John, the hypnotist, was my prompt, writing down the three thoughts, hypnotising me and then discussing these with my unconscious once I was in trance. The point of the experiment at the time was to test to see whether I was creating, through hypnosis, the shape of things to come rather than simply seeing the future.

As discussed earlier, the three ideas all manifested in forms varying slightly from the original intention. The flowers came in the shape of a gift of a flowery orange and maroon blouse following the exact description I had originally but unintentionally given John when I said 'orange and maroon, like my blouse'. The cheque came in the shape of Glen's new mobile phone number, with the numbers rearranged and including the original '80 cents' which I had dropped from the experiment at the last minute. The Chinese Wall, as a concept, manifested more fleetingly to begin with, but finally resonated in a series of Chinese references including the 'out the blue' offer from a publisher to translate one of my books into Chinese.

Tara's marble, Beth's garden shovel and my 'water at the back door' were all examples of focussed conscious thoughts which challenged our unconscious thoughts, at a symbolic level, to emerge and declare themselves through synchronicity. The keywords are focus and symbolic. Under hypnosis I was always aware of 'two Janes': the one experiencing the hypnotism and the one objectively taking notes. It was as if I stood at the borderline between my conscious and unconscious worlds, one foot firmly planted either side of the line. In the manifestation experiment John kept me focussed on my previously chosen conscious thoughts while also in direct communication with my unconscious through hypnosis. I focussed and the thoughts manifested symbolically. I can look at the final manifestations and understand my old unconscious programming more clearly through the way it handled the symbolic challenges, just as I might look at a synchronicity in my life and learn from it accordingly.

In short, I created, through conscious focus, what I needed to know about myself. I manipulated aspects of my 'future' by challenging my unconscious to unfold in response to the stimulus of a focussed thought. The question now becomes: how much is our future determined unconsciously, how much can it be changed through focussed conscious thought and how much directional control do we have over that focus?