Part of you may be thinking that this is a waste of time and your money

Like a Humming bird my dragon changes colour with the flash of light.

Dragon Story.

M'reen Hunt (c) 

And suddenly, your world is filled with the ominous sight as the dragon fills the space by the mountainside and you become part of your bolder, in fact you try to be the bolder as he sweeps down the valley his wings making deep turbulent whooshing sounds and you notice the branches of the trees singeing and swaying like seaweed in the strong ocean currents. The petrifying thrill of danger crashes with the cold, hard feel of your video as your fingers press record, and without seeing, your eyes skim to check the red recording light, but really all they see is the rainbow flash as the silver shafts of the dying sun strike the dragon’s outstretched wings that blaze from blood red crimson to shimmering emerald that instantly merges with deepest cold cobalt blue. He’s searching, searching, looking and mewing in that plaintive, bone chilling cry, searching with those far seeing eyes looking for movement, any movement, feeling the air and a crazy part of you is reading the headlines, ‘George captures the dragon on video’. No. Concentrate, don’t breath, and you feel the heat as the grass is withering before his gigantic shadow, and his head is snaking this way, looking, smelling, sensing, and he passes over your bolder so close that you can taste his sulphurous breath, the smell of death and suddenly he alights and folds those dark wings with their cruel barbs, his head is down, down close to the ground and he is eating, eating some poor defenceless creature, but not you, not you. And he starts to rise, slowly carrying his prize, and you are amazed at how the video just seems to follow him of its own accord as you stare in fatal fascination, your sweat cold, and your heart racing as you adjust the zoom to the carrion he’s carrying. Still shaking that its not you as you zoom in to that limp, helpless shape, noticing the drooping wings, the clawed feet and as the dragon changes direction the sun shimmers crimson and golden on the baby dragon going home.

Now that story is a load of rubbish, I just made it up one day, it doesn’t even believe in full stops,

 it just flows as ‘and’ follows ‘and’. You know that dragon’s aren’t real, so, just because I asked, 

you can go with the flow of the story without criticising too much. If I’d asked you to face that spider, your boss, that appointment, your panic then ‘going with the flow’ would be far more difficult - if not impossible. But was the story such a waste of time? You found out how far you can go with the flow and if you could feel the heat. Covertly you found that you are able to protect yourself from danger, that you can function under stress and that there are recognisable rewards. You may now be wondering how all that is possible, as you only heard a silly children’s story. The more primitive subconscious mind works easily with pictures as language is so ambiguous and belongs to the modern and conscious mind; so your inner mind heard the metaphor or the moral that was applicable to you. But you may ask, ‘how do you know that that story was applicable to everyone in the room’? And I might respond that there are basic emotions and that we all carry an element of fear that 

we’d like to overcome.

Did you hear another sub plot? You may feel that you are being attacked, maybe from unknown sources and so adopt a defensive posture. When in actual fact you are creating that attack in your mind, it is your perception of events because it becomes obvious that the assumed attacker has other interests. You may not be consciously aware of this interpersonal problem, but your subconscious mind recognises this and over prints the new story of the metaphor. In real life, magically ‘the attacker’, the person in question has a change of attitude and you get along with them in a better way. This has happened so many times with others and as you will read, it was my change of attitude – not theirs – that made an iffy relationship great! So the induction (the going into trance bit of our session), or various parts of the therapy section may deliberately use words or parts of words, silences or gaps, little stories (metaphors), or rambling scenarios to speak directly to your subconscious mind that accepts only that which is appropriate at this time.

I feel that the dragon of ancient mythology or the fear from childhood contrasts with the cold plastic video of the present or the reasoning of the adult; this is a rather inelegant attempt at a ‘confusional’, the words spoken should cause you to concentrate on the details of the information until you eventually give up and simply go-with-the –flow. Part of you (the analytical bit) may be thinking that this is a waste of time and your money and while you are arguing the point in your conscious mind you are allowing your appropriate message into your subconscious mind. 

Right now, try not thinking of an elephant, how long is it before you can get that elephant out of your mind? Make it a circus elephant, no, a rampaging wild one. Your subconscious mind is wonderful.

I don’t use this dragon story in therapy, but if I was sat in your chair, I couldn’t ‘see’ a dragon, 

and there is no way in which I could feel the boulder, smell, taste or hear. I just have to go with 

the sense of the story and that is fine, just go with the flow and it will be OK.

Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blog www.ourinnerminds.blogspot.com 

which takes advantage of the experience and expertise of others.