DAY 47 – YOU ARE GETTING VERY SLEEPY . . . (JUST A SUGGESTION)

April 25, 2013

47 of 65

You Are Getting Very Sleepy . . . (Just a Suggestion)

I was quite young when I was born, and spent the first months of life as a baby. It seems that nothing much happened in those earliest days – at least nothing memorable – because I remember nothing.

My parents told me that I caused them a lot of anxiety, going to the hospital with pneumonia when I was seven months old. You would think I would remember something like that, but I don’t. During later childhood, I seemed to be get bronchitis each year. My Mother told me it was probably because the development of my lungs was adversely affected by the pneumonia. I accepted that suggestion and continued to come down with bronchitis, just as was expected of me.

Since that time, I have run more than 30,000 miles; so I believe the lungs are fine.

Our family moved from my Moline, Illinois birthplace to Irving, Texas when I was less than a year old. At least that is what I was told – again, I have no memory of it. My first real memories are of Texas.

I recall a quiet street with what I thought of as a forest at one end. I remember playing in a sand box with other children in the neighborhood. I remember that our dog Tripper was lost and we had to drive around in the car to look for him.

I had a small toy football that I would hold until my Dad would say “Throw it here, Doak.” Then I would throw it. Doak Walker was a standout football player at nearby Southern Methodist University. Apparently I was suggesting that I wanted to be a sports hero like him.

When I was two or three years old, some friends of my parents were visiting, along with their son, who must have been five or six. He was one of the big kids who was actually going to school. That gave him quite a lot of credibility. Combine that with my childish suggestibility, and when we were in the back yard and he said, “Let’s have a rock fight,” of course I said, “OK.”

Then he said, “You run and I’ll throw rocks at you.” Again I said, “OK.” As I ran around the yard, he picked up and threw small stones, all of which missed me. Finally, he picked up a much larger rock, threw it as I was running away from him, and struck me solidly in the back of the head. I fell to the ground screaming, with blood flowing from my head. The adults came running out to see what had happened, and I was taken to the hospital for stitches.

I believe the other child was disciplined, and I believe that I became less prone to accept other people’s suggestions after that. A number of folks who know me say that it probably explains a lot that I was hit in the head as a small child.

Jumping forward several years: During the summer after I completed 6th Grade, I was at the Arvada Public Library and somehow came across a book called The Search for Bridey Murphy. The librarian told me it had been a best seller by a local author and that it had been made into a movie; but it was not difficult reading. I checked it out and found it fascinating.

The author, a Pueblo Colorado businessman and amateur hypnotist had placed a young woman from Pueblo in a trance and “regressed” her. That is, he asked her to recall events from earlier and earlier times in her childhood. Finally, he asked her to remember a time before she was born, which led to a detailed narrative about a life she supposedly led as a woman named Bridey Murphy in Ireland in the early 19th Century. Much of the book was simply transcriptions of the hypnosis sessions, followed by an account of a contemporary trip to Ireland to verify the matters she had revealed.

Today, many people practice “past life regression.” Whether anyone actually remembers former lifetimes during those sessions is unclear. However, in 1956 when the book was published the concept was quite novel and aroused great interest. There were certainly skeptics from the time of the book’s publication, but I didn’t know about them. I just knew that I wanted to learn hypnosis.

I went back to the library and began checking out every one of the few books on hypnosis in the collection. Some of them I understood, others I did not. After a few months of study, though, I had picked up enough information to consider myself a hypnotist. I began practicing on other kids in the neighborhood and at school.

I did the usual stage hypnosis tricks – telling the subject his eyes were tightly shut and could not be opened; having an arm held out to the side, telling the subject it was strong and solid and could not be forced down when I pushed on it; things like that. They all worked just as they were supposed to.

When I thought I was good enough, I wanted to try the past life regression techniques I had learned from reading about Bridey Murphy. The subject was my brother Lonny. When I instructed him to go back to a time before he was born, he began to talk about being a soldier in a Roman legion, though he was some nationality other than Roman. The details were not clear, but it seemed like it was supposed to be toward the end of the Roman Empire in Greece or Persia. I asked him what year it was and he responded, “3147,” or some such date. It did not make sense to me. I asked, “When you say,’3147,’ do you mean AD of BC?” He looked puzzled and said, “It is the Year of the World 3147.” I thought things were getting too confusing, so I brought him back to normal consciousness.

A short time later, I hypnotized a kid who lived up the street named Dale McCombs. I had him put his head on one chair and the heels of both feet on another. Then I told his body to become stiff and rigid and very strong as I stood on his abdomen. As I was standing there admiring my work, my Mother came into the room. She was not amused. She thought I was doing something dangerous that could cause injury to someone, so she instructed me never to hypnotize anyone again. She gave the instruction very firmly, with no possibility of negotiation, so I took that suggestion seriously.

When I was in college, I eventually learned about calendar systems based on anno mundi, or “the year of the world.” In such systems, the numbering of years begins with the supposed date of the creation of the world rather than with the birth of Christ. I have not undertaken the research to determine when and where such a calendar may have been used in parts of the Roman Empire.

I have hypnotized a few people – but only a few – since then, at their request, to help them study or mentally prepare for some important event. It is not difficult, and most minds are responding to subconscious suggestions all the time, anyway. I have also used self-hypnosis when I thought that might be beneficial. Try it if you would like. You can just click here and tell yourself that you are getting very sleepy.

 

11 thoughts on “DAY 47 – YOU ARE GETTING VERY SLEEPY . . . (JUST A SUGGESTION)

  1. I’m glad to hear your story. I thought I was weird, but now I see I am pretty normal.

    About that girl who was “appraising” you – are you familiar with the Freudian concept of “projection” as a defense mechanism?

    • Yup. Around here we call that the mirror principle – what you see in others can be a projection of yourself, and sometimes you’re actually looking at your reflection rather than the truth of the other person.

      Maybe that was it! I might have split off my reality because I felt guilty about desires considered inappropriate in those days and projected it onto her, and got a Jungian counter projection in the bargain!

      But I invoke Occam’s Razor here.

      I put forward these assumptions and favor them as the simplest proof of the hypothesis that projection was not in play:

      1)She looked curious because she was curious, and 2)she looked to be appraising me because she was trying to figure out how I knew all that stuff, and found it interesting that I did. And 3)sexual tension was present because sexual tension was present. And 4)
      I didn’t follow through because I didn’t follow through.

      There. That seems right good proof to me. ; )

      (Hope you’re smiling, sometimes my sense of humor is off the beaten path and not noticeable unless you can actually see my eyes…)

  2. Brothers seem to be a good target. It’s weird how parallel your experience was to mine. I did it all, too, and about the same time; Bridey Murphy, Edgar Cayce, hypnosis – 7th grade in my case. Self hypnosis, too. I didn’t stand on my brother, but I had him stiff as a board between the chairs. I regressed him, too, and got an 18th century woodsman, a character out of James Fenimore Cooper. My brother always swore he was never out. My other brother knows better, because he saw him flapping his arms and squawking like a chicken and putting some real heat into it because somebody had just stolen his eggs…

    For a year or so my family lived in an old Victorian mansion in Colorado Springs that belonged to a doctor before we bought it, and the private library was intact. I picked it all up at home, along with an education in human sexuality from a clinical medical database that was awesome. Four years later, in a sex ed series of classes at my church, at the final class, it paid off. The parents were invited, given a review of the material we’d covered, and then, just to prove our parents knew more about sex than the kids did, we all took a test. The scores, believe it or not, were announced. I scored 82 out of 84. The best parent score was 44. I got a lot of really interesting, suspicious looks from the parents. All the students basically had the same look – they were in total awe. But there was one girl who wasn’t awed so much as she was curious. It looked to me like she was appraising me. I should have followed through on that, but I was a young idiot, shy, and full of idealistic notions….

    Libraries are fun.

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