Let's go for a ride...

There are mental exercises that are given to people for many purposes, such as relaxation, meditation, hypnosis and self-hypnosis, for which I have an incredible inability to complete successfully. As hard as I try to clear my mind when I am asked to do so, images keep appearing regardless of my efforts. If I am asked to pick and animal and then be the animal in my mind, I am just not any good at being able to simply pick one. Instead, a process of indecisiveness rules my head and by the time I have made up my mind, the mental exercise is typically all or almost all over. The same thing happens if I am asked to imagine that I am in a particular place, like the beach, or the forest. As hard as I try to transport myself to the desired mental location, I eventually find myself in the real place in which I am at, and lose the opportunity to be part of whatever relaxation exercise I am participating in. What is most frustrating about this is that in reality I have a great imagination and if I am not put on the spot to utilize it, I can easily fly away in my mind to a million different places and become anything I want at will. It is the outside request or demand for me to utilize my imagination for which I am not able to comply with unless I am given much more time than most other individuals.


Throughout the years I have purchased many different audio lessons on how to meditate, or do a variety of relaxation and meditation exercises. The result is always the same, in the middle of the exercise I simply fall asleep. Either I relax so well that I pass out, or I am not able to focus and eventually just tire and fall into the joyful pleasure of deep sleep. When I have asked others that are experts or simply good at doing this kind of thing, they all tell me that it takes practice. Well, I practice myself to sleep every single time! I even enrolled in a class once and simply found myself so frustrated after the event that I quickly lost interest in doing it again. I can only assume that these kinds of things are just not meant for me, and I will probably never be able to experience their benefits. I am not by nature a hyperactive individual, so I doubt that the real reason for my lack of meditative ability is not so much because my mind is in some kind of overdrive mode, but rather because I am missing some essential key to this puzzle. Even though this does bother me somewhat because of my obsessive desire to experience this mental state, I have pretty much given up on trying for the time being.

Years back, when my youngest son was born, I did have an amazing experience that even today still feeds my desire to be able to learn how to put my mind in a passive state of relaxation. My second son was no more than a few days old. In an effort to give my then wife some time to rest I had taken the baby downstairs to care and watch while she got some well deserved sleep on an early Saturday afternoon. This child contrary to our first born was much less fuzzy and easier to put to sleep. Wanting to bond with the baby I had put a great CD that I own with music intermixed with sounds from the tropical rain forest from Puerto Rico. I had used this CD in the past to relax and found it very soothing myself. A few songs into the CD as I was rocking the baby to sleep I closed my eyes while his light newborn baby body laid still over my chest and shoulder. Suddenly, from nowhere that I could understand, images of stars came into my mind as if we were both flying through space at what seemed to be amazing speed. My heart started to race in excitement while my mind tried to comprehend what it was that I was actually experiencing. It was so exhilarating that I feared to open my eyes wondering if that would cause it all to end. However, being the skeptic and scientifically minded person that I typically am, I opened my eyes to acknowledge that I was not dreaming. As my sight revealed that I was still sitting in the rocking chair in our family room at home, my heart continued to race as if I had been sprint running. Then I closed my eyes again, and woooooosh...there I went again, back into space with star after star moving so quickly past me that they would leave curved streaks of light in their path. Could this be real, was I actually being part of some kind of out of body experience? For the next five to ten minutes I kept gently opening my eyes over and over again every 30 seconds or so to find myself all over again in the comfort of the rocking recliner with my child sound asleep in my arms in the downstairs family room of our home. Once I would close my eyes again, there I was all over again as if I myself was a beam of light moving through space at an incredible speed. Eventually the sensation started to fade as I kept opening and closing my eyes randomly. At least 15 minutes later, when I could no longer see anything other than darkness when I would close my eyes, my heart still racing with my blood full of the excitement because of the obvious adrenaline rush, I took my child to his crib and eagerly walked into my bedroom to share the experience with my wife, but she was so sound asleep that I had to wait like a child with his knees crossed wanting to go to the bathroom.

That experience was amazing to say the least. It triggered in me an immense desire to try to understand what had happened. I bought several books on the subject matter and read them from cover to cover. For weeks I repeatedly tried to somehow trigger the same event without any luck. I played the same music and tried to relax in the same chair, and time after time I discovered how poor my ability to focus, clear my mind, and relax truly are when I try to force it. After a while I started to doubt myself, wondering if maybe it had all just been a dream. Logical thoughts created an even larger barrier wondering if maybe I had experienced some kind of stroke that had manifested itself in the amazing mental experience. Now at least 14 years later I have come full circle and believe that this was somehow much more than just a dream. The intensity of the experience and the flow of the events seem way too easy to remember for them to just have been a dream. In fact, as I think back, the only part of the experiment that I never included into my other failed trials was to have my baby son in my arms as I tried to re-experience the moment. As a scientist I believe that what was missing from my subsequent efforts was probably the most important part of the equation, my young innocent son. I truly believe that in reality I was not as much the creator of the experience, and much more as the unwilling passenger. Without any barriers in his beautiful mind, who is to tell if this is what many babies experience at that age, and I was just lucky enough to have been close enough to him to go for the ride too.

Dad