Text: Question: What are dreams? What is hypnosis? Are these phenomena of any significance in understanding the nature of Mind or the illusions of the sense-perceptions? Answer: Dreams are the result of not being asleep. Sleep means more or less lowering of the vibration potential passing through your brain - not the Mind. The purpose of that lowering of potential is to let your senses - not Mind - relax and rest for an interval so they fully stop all action of thinking and imagining. In utter relaxation, one cannot dream, for all of the memory records which are stored in the brain have no motivating force behind them to set them in motion. When you are fully awake and have that full motivating force flowing through your senses, you can pick any record you choose from those stored memories, but when you are not quite asleep a little current flows through your stored records and awakens parts of many of them without your power to control them. This strange mixture is what you call dreams, and the clarity of them, or their vagueness, is dependent upon the power which motivates them and the fact that they are uncontrolled. Hypnotism is the power generated by one person to compel another to act in accordance with his own desire. In an inconspicuous manner, you see hypnosis in practice everywhere - a mother who thinks for, and rules, her son, or any strong character in any walk of life who controls weaklings by his greater knowledge and will. Practice in the art of multiplying will power will strengthen one in this respect just as practice in exercising certain muscles will make them more powerful than others - or practice in certain arts and skills will give one proficiency over a lesser practiced person. Many doctors have developed strong hypnotic powers without intending to do so - in fact some have developed these with sufficient intensity to operate upon a patient without giving an anesthetic. These phenomena have significance in understanding effects of the senses but not of the Mind - for they are not mental. The whole of these teachings explains the difference between sensing and knowing. By carefully reviewing the lessons from the beginning, you will see the golden thread of that thought throughout the entire series. Walter Russell, Home Study Course, unit 9, page 708.

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