Asking Those Bad Dreams Away... Positive thinking NLP Technique - NLP Article

Recently my 5-year-old daughter reported having had a few bad dreams. This further led to some less-than-desirable behavior around bedtime before she went to bed, and then, some resistance to drifting down into a comfortable sleep at a good time.

So I created a ritual and offered her some tricks to making sure most if not all of her dreams would be good ones. She jumped at the opportunity and wanted to know the tricks. So I told her, it was easy -- it was just a few questions that she could ask and not answer. I used a technique I learned from one of my own trainers, Rex Steven Sikes -- simply put -- just asking better questions.

Some of you may have learned about how we direct our attention with our questions from Tony Robbins, but this article takes it further with "complex syntax". Combine 'asking better questions' with 'complex syntax,' (designed to confuse the conscious mind and engage the UNconscious mind) and we get great results.

So now my daughter & I have a ritual every evening whereby I come in at bedtime and we ask some good questions.

Of course, the deal requires her to "practice keeping her eyes closed for as long as she can" while we run through some questions. I say the questions and she repeats them out loud, though softly. And then between some of the questions I recommend she take a long... slow... deep breaths... (which, increasingly, lead to yawns!)

Here are a few of the questions I use, with lots of variation:

I wonder how easily I'm going to fall asleep tonight?
Will I have several amazing dreams, or only 3-4 good dreams?
I'm not sure just how wonderful my dreams are going to be tonight, but won't it be fun to discover comfort inside of sleep?
How much will my body grow and heal naturally while I rest tonight?
Where in my body do I feel the most relaxed?
How much will I enjoy my deep and comfortable sleep?
Will it take me 4 minutes to drift into dreamland, or 6 or 7?

After we run through a few of these, if I pause for a minute or two and just recommend she keep breathing deeply, she's usually asleep without further questioning.

We've been doing this for a couple of weeks now. I recently asked her if she was still getting bad dreams, and she answered, "no, I get only good dreams now. So we have to keep doing the good questions!"

I must say, I haven't yet solved EVERY challenge I face as a parent, but with NLP I certainly feel more empowered than I would have been 10 years ago to handle what comes up, evaluate situations as impartially as possible, and, design creative solutions for them.

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