Dreamchanging

One of the most powerful and unique techniques I found in Huna is called dreamchanging.

Dreamchanging is a type of visualization where you take an experience you don't care for very much, and change it, in your mind, into one you do like.

You can use it to change the outcome of an unpleasant night dream after waking up.

But- strikingly- you can use it in your everyday life to change the way your everyday life unfolds.

Affirmations and visualization are well-known tools to think yourself into experiencing something you would like to. For example, you can say to yourself 'I am extremely attractive' for ten minutes a day and marvel how differently you get treated after about a week or so, regardless of how attractive you originally thought yourself to be. You could think about people complimenting and charming you every day, and start experiencing more of it. So far so good- those are great ways to change your experience.

There is also the practice of going through events of your day or earlier in your life, and then changing those in your mind. You can also bring up fantastical symbolic representations of events and change those until they feel good- works just as well.

Dreamchanging does the same thing but you do it then and there. Walk down the street, someone bumps into you and scowls- you immediately imagine as vividly as you can that they let you go first in perfect manners and complimented you on something thoughtful. Repeat it a few times for good measure, and you've got yourself a dreamchange- you know it worked when you feel good!

The nice part of dreamchanging as opposed to purely imaginary visualizing is that you can use your everyday experience to guide your visualizing. The areas where you need the most change naturally get the most attention- a neat organic way to solve the conundrum of what the heck to visualize first!

It can also be loads of fun. Imagine everyone is wearing bird-shaped hats because that's the latest fashion. Imagine beautiful plants and trees are everywhere in a greyish city. Imagine everyone is naked save for Hawaiian Leis and Hippie bandannas, making heart gestures. You really can change the world.

The neatness of it is that even if you imagine very silly or very surreal things, they will still have an effect on the world. Directly, because you will feel like whatever you imagined- even if it's surreal, it will get translated into a kind of energy signature that you can feel. So if you go walking around feeling great, that has a very tangible immediate effect on your surroundings. But more important than that is that your experiences that are lined up to be experienced next start shifting because you feel better. So if you imagine a lot of people smiling at you in a high-pressure city day, you might just happen upon days where people are more relaxed, even though not much else seems to have changed. If you keep it up, your entire world starts changing and different sorts of things that are much nicer happen more and more, and before you know it- very clearly, your everyday life has changed into what you dreamed.

As with all visualizing techniques, you know by how you feel whether you're doing a good job. You're not looking to change the dream you're in except if it happens by itself due to your different feeling. The different feeling will eventually draw you into a different dream. But since that's a bit hard to track, I find it best to just dreamchange and visualize away until I feel good and not worry too much about the effect on reality I am having, confidently trusting instead that by imaginarily making myself feel good, I am changing my life events as well. So far, it has worked beautifully.

There is a bit of a trap here, a frequently encountered problem- you can start thinking of yourself as purely a dreamer, someone who satisfies him- or herself simply by living in the imagination and not doing well at all in real life. But dreamchanging is very different from that- the escapist variety of imagination usually doesn't feel that great at all because it isn't done with the understanding and confidence that the feeling point serves as the blueprint for upcoming life events. That's really the only difference, but it's pretty important- if you daydream but think it won't have any effect, it won't feel all that great. But if you daydream and say: Hey, this is real, it's just a different dream- the emotional effect will be very strong and very close to actually experiencing what you imagined as a life event. For that reason, dreamchanging is a powerful tool to change your life and is really very different from escapist daydreaming. But even if that's what you're doing right now- escapist daydreaming is great because if you forget that's what you're doing you can still get some pretty good emotional effects, and the imagination is great practice for dreamchanging, all you need to do is talk yourself into believing it can actually happen- which kind of means saying 'Yes it can! Yes it can! Yes it can, and it will!" until you get a sense that this might actually be the case. Also, it's also really good to start doing stuff along the lines of what you're dreamchanging when it occurs to you- small things or symbolic things are fine, they build.

So don't worry if you feel you desperately need something to happen fast- enjoy the dreamchange now for its emotional effects, and also look forward to being surprised in various ways by your everyday experience changing as well!!!

Dreamchanging also works really great by combining it with affirmations and visualizing- many different ways of taking you from where you are to where you want to be.