Strip Poker as a Vehicle for Change
Well, not real strip poker. First of all, it was in a dream, and second, it was only my client stripping, ordered to do so by a sniper. In Quanta Change, the worse the dream, the bigger and better the change. So, you can imagine how much anticipation I had for this client’s potential good change. And, I’m happy to say that my anticipation turned out to be fulfilled.
When I tell people that the real work of Quanta Change takes place in their dreams, they have a hard time believing me at first. But, it’s true. Dreams are the time when the sense of self recharges. The sense of self stores how we feel about being ourselves, and the only time it is open to permanently releasing negative feeling is during the recharging time of sleep. So, with the catalyst of the Quanta Change Sensory Message playing and a client’s daytime shifting work to tell their brain specifically what they want to change, this big change does actually take place while they dream. As layers of the negative feeling, called Learned Distress, are peeled off permanently, one’s natural well-being expands to take its rightful place as the automatic, generating force in their life.
While this change takes place automatically (so there’s no lucid dreaming involved), and the change has already fully taken place by the time someone is telling me about their dream, it can still be really fun and fascinating to look at dreams. Often, as with the dream I’ll describe below, we can connect the dots between the Learned Distress my client desires to unlearn, the way they’re shifting to tell their brain to unlearn it, the dream itself, and what happens in waking life following it.
The Dream: My client is hiding from a sniper behind a big car. Someone else was initially hiding, but wasn’t truly protected. My client looks at the car and realizes that he knows that the engine of this car is constructed in such a way that it will protect someone from being shot. He becomes that other person, so that he can keep them safe behind the engine. But, he realizes that he needs to expose himself to the sniper, so he stands up and reveals himself. Then, he has to follow the sniper’s instructions, which were to strip one piece of clothing at a time, like strip poker. He thinks to himself, “Are you serious? I really have to do this?!” He ends up only having a big shirt on at the end. He realizes that someone is filming him. He gets a look at the images and thinks, “Wow, I’ve gotten overweight again, like I was many years ago.”
Shift Theme: (Shifting is the daytime work of Quanta Change, which tells the brain specifically what to unlearn during sleep.)
His shifting work is in two areas. One is about it being good for him to openly and honestly share himself with the world. The other is about it being good for him to be completely healthy.
Context: (You bring people, places, animals, things, situations, or time frames into dreams based on the feeling that they trigger within you. In a Quanta Change dream, it is these triggered feelings that are unlearned.)
- He is able to use his knowledge of this big car to hide and even to help someone else hide. In real life, he has always been a wallflower and reluctant to step out of the shadows at all, unless he can be the expert in something.
- He has had several dreams since beginning to work on this Shift Theme that have involved hiding from snipers and then exposing himself. This one had the most exposure required, because he was commanded to take off his clothes.
- Seeing himself as being overweight again in the dream takes him back to the last time he was overweight. At that time, he had gotten a new, sedentary job, and was also diagnosed with diabetes. This time frame was before he started working to lose the weight and try to become healthier again.
Points of Change: (In a Quanta Change dream, each time there is something wrong and the dreamer does something about it, they permanently remove a layer of Learned Distress from their sense of self.)
The first point of change is when he decides he needs to step out from behind the hiding place that his knowledge of the big car gave him. The layer of change at this point is his brain is unlearning the need to hide behind being the “expert.” The next point is where the sniper asks him to start taking off clothes, as one would in strip poker. He questions it in his mind, but does it. This is another layer of Learned Distress peeling away about it not being safe to “expose himself” openly and honestly. As a general rule, nudity in a dream is about exposing who one really is to the world. The last point of change is when he sees the images of himself as he really is. His brain is taking him back to a time when he wasn’t healthy at all. For this client, health and interacting people are tightly intertwined, so his brain is starting to work on the reality of being unhealthy.
Result: Over the next couple of weeks, he had multiple instances of people noticing him just for who he is and thanking him for his presence. A group he is part of is planning a trip several hours away. He told them that he doesn’t have the money to go, and two of the other group members actually fought over who was going to pay his hotel bill. They said he was too important to the group not to have him there. He had social situations where he would normally hang back, but where he felt that he had the right and the confidence to put himself forward to greet and engage with people he had never met before.
As Quanta Change participants often tell me, he said he didn’t plan any of this out. It just happened effortlessly. He said that he really feels like he matters, and that he has a new sense of confidence he has never felt before. He said for the first time in his life, he feels really natural just socializing and interacting with other people.
Do you have scary dreams? This is when your brain is recharging the most intense of your Learned Distress. Quanta Change taps into that dream time, and often into those same dream themes, to allow your brain to unlearn that Learned Distress for you. Take a look at the people, places, animals, time frames, and situations in those dreams. Then, think of the negative feelings about yourself that are triggered by those elements. This will give you a window into what you could begin unlearning to reveal your natural well-being.