[GO SEE] "Inception"! Excellent Film Pregnant With Ideas

As someone interested in hypnosis and the human mind, you need to see this movie. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the many parallels to our work.

To discuss the film in the way I'm about to will reveal things about it that are much more fun to discover yourself, so if you haven't seen it yet, stop here and go see it. Then come back and tell us what you think!



The film has some great ideas and ways of illustrating them. And it's fascinating even for those not necessarily interested in hypnosis. But the applications to hypnosis are many and rich. Here's just  a few of the larger things I've been chewing on since I saw it yesterday (and new ideas will keep popping up, no doubt):

1) Inception. The film adopts several premises in order to allow the plot to work, one of which is that it is indeed possible to "plant" an idea in someone else's mind. So take the idea of inception in relation to what we do as hypnotists: is it possible (within therapeutic or even "conversational" contexts) to make someone have a volitional idea they wouldn't normally have on their own? Or aren't we merely indirectly giving permission to think and/or do something they already want to? The film stops just short of really dealing with this question, as far as I can tell.

2) Projection. The film illustrates something that I think is immeasurably important in our work.

A) When one works with another's mind, one MUST make concentrated efforts to keep the work client centered, for several reasons, not the least of which is to keep one's own unconscious material from corrupting the work. The film illustrates an excellent allegorical situation that clearly shows how this is a possible issue.

B) During certain scenes in the film (which is most of them), the story is told in the "architecture" of one's "dream". In these scenes the "extras" so to speak are all merely "projections" of the dreamer's unconscious. When it detects the intruder the projections will attack. I found it to be a brilliant illustration of how the unconscious mind is self-preserving, and has an acute ability to sniff out material foreign to its own deep source. Effective suggestion work does indeed depend on our ability to camouflage the "new" thought with the clothing of what the subject is already thinking.

It's certainly not a perfect model for the mind, but an elegant and compelling one none-the-less.

3) Are We Dreaming? Clearly, the message of the film is much larger in scope than to fall conveniently under the umbrella of hypnosis or even the mind. It's a fundamentally philosophical question. But, There is some extent to which it can apply to our work and the models we adopt. Is there another level of our mind - above the conscious?

Hypothetically, If there is such a thing as a higher mind, of which our "normal" waking mind is but a dream, how would that apply to our manner of work? What could we do to improve the effectiveness of what we do? How could that perspective aid us in helping our clients?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Jason





www.lifechangehypno.com