People who have difficulty getting to sleep
Alternative method for getting to sleep
Stage 3 – Hypnoidal
As both the mind and the body relax , the muscles release tensions , and the person enters a light stage of hypnosis , known as hypnoidal . When a person enters this state of mind , he is still conscious , yet he also experiences time distortion and some amnesia . We actually must enter this hypnoidal stage because it is what enables us to attain the last stage . ( No one , for instance , can honestly say , " Last night I fell asleep at 11:34 p . m . and 17 seconds .") It is the amnesia and time distortion aspects of the hypnoidal stage that make it impossible to identify the moment of transition from hypnoidal to unconscious sleep . We simply " drift " from one to the other .
Stage 4 – Unconscious Sleep
We are not consciously aware of anything going on around us .
People who have difficulty getting to sleep
This person has great difficulty transitioning from thinking to fantasy , or he simply stays in the thinking stage way too long ; usually because he is worried about something or doesn ' t know how to control his own mind .
Now that we know about the four stages , the strategy for someone having difficulty initially getting to sleep is to skip the thinking stage altogether . Therefore , when the person gets into bed to go to sleep , he needs to begin visualising or imagining the fantasy stage . Remember , the fantasy stage needs to be thoughts associated with relaxation .
One way to develop a fantasy stage is to reflect upon some real experience where you really were feeling relaxed . This could be when you were on a vacation or involved in some activity that you associate with relaxation . One of my clients visualizes riding north on Pacific Coast Highway , while another visualizes an imaginary round of golf on one of his favorite courses . Yet another visualizes being on a beach on the island of Maui . It is important that you use your own experience because you already associate that occasion with relaxation . It is most important that you stay in or maintain that fantasy thought process . That will eventually draw you into the hypnoidal stage and then into unconscious sleep .
Alternative method for getting to sleep
Yet another way of understanding how we get to sleep is to recognize that the combination of stages 2 ( fantasy ) and 3 ( hypnoidal ) result in the person actually hypnotizing himself . A person may not be consciously aware that that is actually what he is doing , but , in fact , it is .