Within the subconscious are all the banks of memory, feeling, and habit of your entire experience. The subconscious is the automatic facet; in function, between purely rational thought and reflexes such as blinking. Habits, in effect, are learned reflexes. As such, they're very handy. You want not to be forced to learn how to drive a car every time you get in it.

Feel about this, it illustrates well: you can't ride a bicycle with your conscious mind alone. There's not enough time to notice which way you're falling, decide, and react. The conscious decides where to go, and the subconscious habit does the mechanical manipulations. We have "learned how" when we have given up trying to consciously control it and let the subcon- scious do it. Note the old saying that you never forget how; that shows the easy retention of habit (subconscious automation).

However, it seems to be much more influenced by past experience than the conscious part. This is not a bad thing; it makes it easier to be automatic. The subconscious seems childlike (also not a bad thing), simplistic, and literal. It occurs to me now, and somewhat as a surprise, that when there's no input from the subconscious, the conscious facet is simplistic, too. We need both to be whole, or to have depth of personality. Together, the conscious and subconscious act in synergy: 1+1 = 3! You are wiser and smarter when you've "got it all together"! (integrity)

The above "literal" is occasionally a bad thing. I've taken people back thru surgeries, to re-experience, without pain, all that happened while under total anesthesia (means "without feeling", as in esthetics). The subconscious is always present; unaffected even by the anesthetics. The clients were able to remember sounds of instruments and machines, motions of the gurney and operating table, vague sensations of the surgery, and (doctors take note), conversations. A danger in the operating room is that the literal subconscious will hear and misunderstand a casual remark.

In one case, the doctor was reported to have said, when finishing with the instruments, "OK, let's take everything out now." He meant sponges or your leftover clamp. The inner patient, who might've taken it literally, may have wanted to scream.

Or, the orderly comes in to return the bags of plasma to the refrigerator and says "I'm gonna take all the blood out now." Taken literally, the patient could awaken later feeling mysteriously weak and anemic, or it could produce trauma, sending the patient into shock. In a situation that was otherwise touchy, it might make all the difference.... Fortunately, the young doctors (and dentists) learn better now, and the better older ones easily catch up. Still, I often wince at something said in the operating room on M*A*S*H*.

It's been an interesting experience to see the effects of the subconscious. This part of you has a strange sense of humor. It seems to be mostly what we'd call puns. For instance, when dreams are produced in the office chair, a sequence often happens that's usually interpreted as a rebirth. For instance, in one client's "trip", her path became narrower and small walls at the sides grew higher. The walls tipped inwards and finally met at the top. The path is now a tunnel. It becomes smaller, tighter. Now she's crawling, squeezing. Light is visible at the end of the tunnel (an unavoidable cliche).

After the momentous exit, clients often describe the immediate surroundings as being bushes or ferns. There are two rounded ridges going from close by the spot down into the distance. Once, taking anatomical liberties, a client saw two soft mounds beckoning in the distance there! Another saw a cow. Subtle.

This has brought up an hypothesis. I wonder if people who enjoy puns also remember their dreams better; both being aspects of good communication with the subconscious. It would be a great thesis project.

When my clients sign their "secret" name, esoteric and deep mechanisms of the personality are often revealed. This is an easy way to make a radical jump into self-knowledge. (radical means to get to the "root", as you see in "radish"! The latin is "radix".) I encourage them to start writing the name with as little thought as possible.

To show how the subconscious will bring up something appropriate, one client signed "Yarmo". It sounded like a very unusual name. She had no idea where the thought came from. My only connection, I said, was that it was the name of a store near campus. "Wow!", she said, "I've been trying to think of that name for two months!" "Trying to think", you see, is more a barrier than a pathway. The conscious mind often just gets in the way of awareness. The subconscious has so much power, and yet we (especially men) are trained to rely more on the lesser part of our mental strength!

The subconscious is a curious mixture of enlightened childishness, fortunate and unfortunate habit. Only a very few of the habits were created on purpose. We can call habit an "involuntary idea", involving perception, imagination, fantasy and hallucination.

Poe talked about what he called the Imp of the Perverse: that it's as if a gremlin inside us "makes" us do things that are against our desires and best interests. Sometimes, without realizing it, we'll make something happen that we feared happening! It may be that some crossed circuit in our brain somewhere got the thought that this action would be better than none, just so we could get past it. If this becomes much of a habit, we could cause things to happen that had very little chance of happening otherwise. This could be the operant habit of people called "accident-prone".

The subconscious can also can express great wisdom. It can assemble all the relevant information and feelings with easy access to the total stores of all your built-in memory banks, data banks, and feeling banks, to come up with remarkable answers. How this happens is mysterious to the conscious mind.

We call this: intuition. It being subconscious, we're not aware of how it's done. It's my belief that women are better at it only because they have not been taught to rely so exclusively on rational thought as have men. Women and modern men are much more free now; much more integrated with all parts of themselves, and less afraid of what they find.

What you will find will be safe. Just as you don't expect your hand to suddenly begin to slap you, you won't expect your subconscious to hurt you. Your subconscious is you; its mystery is wonderous, not malevolent (having a "bad wish"). What images arise in dreams are designed to be safe, and seem to be cleverly arranged to be at the border of conscious understanding. Images whose meaning escapes you are often obvious to someone else. With attention and trust, you can "translate" your own.

When image "X" is difficult to understand, the "Martian" technique is useful: "I'm from Mars, what's an `X'? What does it do?" What it is or does may be applicable in somewayto yourself.

A dream doesn't mean what a book says it means. A dream doesn't mean what a friend or even a therapist says it means, nor even what you think it means. It means what you feel it means. A "dreambook" may say that a dream of flying means a desire for sex. Well, maybe.

An age-regression I once did revealed the basis for an interest in flight that went back to the age of 18 months, perhaps less. In hypnosis, she remembered her father tossing her up in the air, and feeling close and loved. He had died soon after, and her mom remarried. She'd had no conscious memory of her "real" father; the dreams and interest in flying may have been a connection with that unmourned loss.

"A dream not understood is a letter unopened". (From the Talmud) For one thing, a dream is a therapeutic message from the subconscious. That facet of yourself has the same survival instincts as the others; the same desire for smooth functioning.

Dreams can be practice for possible/probable future events. They can also be reruns of good or bad experiences from your past; second chances. See how who you are now would do it; and then if it happens again, there's been a preparation ready to be called into action.

Dreams can be so vivid or meaningful that they have all the power of an actual event. That effect makes hypnosis a powerful tool, and makes dreams a "royal road" to self-understanding. I've noticed that many clients have significant dreams the night before the session, as if they'd saved them up til we could talk about them soon after.

It's been said lately that dreams have no meaning. (Cow-cookies, I explained.) There are no effects without causes. True, some, perhaps most, meanings are unimportant, and some are too obscure to interpret, or too easy to misunderstand. But there's a reason for it all. Feel, not think, for the meanings.

But dreams fly away thru the first quick blink of a waking eye. The returning conscious mind thinks "Oh, what a strange dream; couldn't mean anything". Then "Oh, yah. Kinda interesting. I'm sure to remember that. No need to write it down, I'm awake now." A minute later you know you'd been asleep then, but now you're awake. A minute later you think the same thing again, and by then the dream is beyond recall. It's still there in the subconscious, but out of reach. This is called "state-dependent learning". Your sleeping-self remembers, but the awake self doesn't.

As you prepare for sleep, it's helpful to program into your mind the desire to remember. Having a notepad beside the bed is helpful; and a tape recorder whose buttons you can push in the dark is the easiest of all. "Easy" is the most important thing to someone who's really still asleep. Remember, you deserve to know and understand that most important person in the world: yourself.

Every ninety minutes, a cycle comes around to dreamtime. The eyes begin REM (rapid eye movement) and, if awakened, a subject will usually report a dream. What is so interesting to me is that the cycle continues, if more subtly, in the daytime waking state. Perhaps this is the time you feel distracted, bored, or even have daydreams. It's probably better to go with the flow at such times, and not fight it.

You could even put the distraction to use; give the subconscious that time to communicate. It might have the answer; in fact, that may sometimes be why the distracted feeling came up in the first place. All that intuition, all those banks of data are available in there; use 'em! Instead of consciously trying to fight the feeling, see if any communication is in the pipeline, or just close your eyes for the break-time that your body's natural cycle says is important.

By the way, if you sometimes "can't" sleep, memorize these exact words, and their meaning. (Each word has a reason for being there.) "Casually try kinda hard to hold your eyes half-open, without blinking much." (and... half-open is never where you think it is.)

If dreams are letters from the subconscious, there are also what I call "singing telegrams"; another way for messages to get through. It's as if this is the "daytime mode" of dream operation. If a piece of music comes to mind without an apparent stimulus (elevator muzak, distant radio), it may be a message coming through. (and it may be a passing radio that you hadn't noticed.)

Listen to the words. Go back and forth in the lyrics til you find a line that feels stronger, means more. It may be able to tell you more about what your deep feelings are than you thought you knew.

Once, at the end of a session, the client looked over my shoulder to the window and said "there's been a change in the weather." The unusual phrasing and tone of voice caught my ear. I said "And...". He looked at me curiously and said "There's been a change in the scene... and from now on there'll be a change in me!" There indeed was. It turned out that that was the last session she needed (for that phase of her life).

I had no clients one weekday. I was happily buzzing around the house when a tune came to mind from "Fiddler On The Roof". "if I were a rich man." No, that wasn't it, wishful as I might've been. It was: "didn't have to work hard." Some telegrams, you see, can be wise and profound, some funny or punny, and some nicely informative.