WREMS – WAKING REM STATE

What is WREMS?

          Invented by Ann Fillmore in the mid-90’s, Waking REM State is a an eye movement desensitization process you do for yourself, by yourself.   For many years, Dr Fillmore and her team of volunteers taught the skill of WREMS in an AOL WOMEN’s forum area until the summer of ‘01 when the entire WOMEN’s area was shut down by commercial interests.  During these many years, a workbook evolved and special ways of giving instruction which allowed a WREMS user to take full control of the process.  The workbook and a full-length book: OPEN THE INFINITE MIND, are available on the web site: www.wakingrem.com.

           Waking REM State has been described in several articles, internationally. The article below is an extract of an article published in the UK journal POSITIVE HEALTH and can be found on their web site.  

FOR THE EMERGING PSYCHIC     

The veil between our solid world and the world of the spirit is thinning.  More and more of us are having extraordinary experiences. Usually a person with latent psychic abilities has been sensitive since childhood, perhaps had an invisible friend or talked about events in a past life.  Perhaps there was an instance later in life in an unguarded moment, something of high strangeness discounted as a one off event. But now the events happen regularly and it can be very scary.

First and foremost, reach a peace with yourself. Learn to calm yourself.  Own your own emotions.  This is vitally important as you must learn what is yours and what is ‘incoming’ and how to protect yourself from the often highly traumatic and negative influences. Protection is achieved by establishing strong personal boundaries, as well as calling upon spiritual guardians. 

Both the establishment of boundaries and finding your guardians can be achieved by learning to use WREMS – Waking REM State.  (Www.wakingrem.com and Master Your Emotions) This is a powerful technique which if consistently applied brings about a deep calm by working through all your emotional stuff, old memories and relationships and ‘de-fraging’ the vast storage files in your mind.  Plus, it’s inexpensive.         The emerging psychic should also take care of unfinished business in past lives. Hypnosis is best for such exploration. WREMS doesn’t always enable you to regress that far but it is excellent for work with what you find after the hypnosis sessions. Do NOT use hypnosis and WREMS at the same time or use one in conjunction with the other. False memories can be put in by doing the two together and you have enough to tackle without some imaginary stuff going on.

FOR UFO ABDUCTEES:

For those who’ve been involved with UFO contact or abductions, WREMS is an excellent tool to work through emotional trauma of everyday life BEFORE going into experiences dealing with the extraordinary.  As with any form of eye movement desensitization, it is not advisable to do WREMS in conjunction with hypnosis.  Having WREMS as a skill, though, is highly beneficial for recovery from discovery and recall after hypnosis sessions.  WREMS is excellent for integrating experiences into comprehensible emotional memories.

How does WREMS work?

Imagine you are calm, mindful, emotionally mature and you have a great sense of humor. Okay, so it won’t happen all at once but when you take the WREMS journey, it does happen.

WREMS – Waking REM State is a skill. Not therapy or pop-psych or new age magic – it is a practical tool that allows you direct access to your subconscious mind and the power to call up memories, desensitize emotional trauma, become CALM and move on. CALM is the sensation the Dalai Lama terms MINDFUL or being at peace. Once you learn the skill, you set off on a journey unprecedented in human exploration. Belief is not a prerequisite although there are principles you must attend to and they are tough ones.

First, you must take ownership of your own emotions. All around you are societal beliefs and restrictions on emotional change and ownership that insist you are not in control of your own emotions. For example, you may have been labeled depressed and told your brain has a ‘chemical imbalance.’  Nonsense.  Brain chemistry is always fluctuating. (See Pert’s Molecules of Emotion) When you feel sad, listless and numb, most probably it’s because you’re suppressing years of rage and possibly unresolved grief and you’ve become so frozen in physical movement that your body has become ill as well.

Instead of being taught how to identify emotions and fix emotional trauma like depression, you are told to trust a therapist – a stranger with a financial agenda who hasn’t a clue about the authentic intricacies of your life, who might put you on mind-numbing ineffective drugs which is the last thing you need. 

Secondly on the WREMS path, you have to accept responsibility for your own emotions. They are tools that signal your feelings, your intended behaviors and your health. Tools you own.

Third.  After several months of doing WREMS you realize you are no longer emotionally out of control. This can be a shock. To you and everyone around you.

Fourth. WREMS gives you a doorway to the infinite universe and infinite means limitless. Another concept we earthlings have problems with.

Let’s get going. Let’s move on.

Even before birth all mammals and some birds dream. Whenever we dream, whether with or without REM, whether asleep or awake, we are in touch with the subconscious.  (see Solm’s work on dreaming). I use the term subconscious as the function of mind below the BETA brain wave frequency where we do everyday experience in our society. One simple way to picture mind is to think of an iceberg. The tiny visible tip above water is your conscious chattering busy social mind.  The subconscious lies below but they make up one iceberg with no real boundary. 

We should also take into account that English is a rather crude language to describe the subtleties of ¼ moving on and beyond.

There are few ways as effective as Rapid Eye Movement to communicate with the subconscious.  The simple action of moving your eyes back and forth in a rhythmic motion, whether asleep or awake, opens a direct link to your subconscious, specifically the area where your memories are stored. Since your memories are filed by the emotions you experience at the time, you also have a direct link to your emotions. Everything you experience throughout your life – perhaps even beyond here is stored in subconscious.

Musicians keep their WREMS ability, as do artists and other creative folk. Overall though, we Westerners lose most of our ability to do Waking REM State around eight years old because society discourages intense daydreaming and creative imagination and in fact, stigmatizes a child who persists in being ‘out there’.  Why?

In Western history, mysticism was considered evil and spiritual access was relegated to priests. Later, under the guise of medical professionalism and hard science, emotions and the subconscious became the domain of psychiatry. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press that the European adult had an acceptable way to consciously induce WREMS again. Yes, READING – when you only look at a book, you see funny symbols.  When you move your eyes quickly back and forth and read a book you have an emotional response and imagery.

WREMS is daydreaming with intensity. WREMS is being creative, playing music, writing a book. The total extent of WREMS is as infinite as the mind itself. For myself and the thousands who’ve taken the WREMS journey the goal is to make emotional health and self-sufficiency available to the world.

DOING WREMS

For those of you who want to take the first baby-beginner step onto the invisible bridge over the great chasm, here you go. The BASIC INSTRUCTIONS will get you in and the TOOLS will get you through. 

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that getting in is merely the first step. As with any journey to unknown lands, you will want a map, a guide and advice from those who’ve already traveled the path. Don’t hesitate to ask. (www.wakingrem.com)

BASIC INSTRUCTIONS

To Get in

          Read all the instructions and all information on identification of emotions; it’s important. Your conscious/ rational mind lies to you. You were not taught how to DO emotions. For example: little girls are shamed if they become angry and little boys are taught to cover fear with rage. Thus a grown woman who becomes very angry blames herself and becomes terribly ashamed and then depressed. Men despise themselves if they exhibit fear. So strong is this that you can often tell how threatened and afraid a man is by how in rage he acts.  That’s why the COLOR = EMOTION CHARTS were invented, to give your subconscious a way to bypass the conscious mind and to tell you EXACTLY what you are honestly feeling. Trust the color.

Look over your COLOR=EMOTION CHARTS thoroughly to be aware of what color and what shade of that color links to that emotion. You don’t have to memorize the charts. Your subconscious mind picks up the messaging technique almost instantly.

Pick one emotion or focus. Feel it strongly – example: if you want to work on anger, be angry – growl, snarl. Do not expect your first WREMS session to stay on your chosen focus. Learning to maintain a focus often takes many sessions.

Go to a quiet, private place. No music, no TV. Have tissues and a blanket with you. Tissues are for tears. The blanket is in case you bring up something scary because FEAR makes you feel chilled.

Hold your fingers or a pencil in front of your eyes.  Move fingers/ pencil back and forth in steady swings and make your eyes track back and forth. Do about 24 eye swings then pause. Wait about 30 seconds sensing what is happening to you. The swings and the pause are one set. Some WREMSers close their eyes during the pause. During swings eyes must be open.

No matter how stubborn and stiff your eyes are, make your eyes move. This is what gets you into a Waking REM State. Your eyes may hurt or feel gritty or give you any number of complaints. Keep going.  Remember when you sleep REM your eyes flick back and forth at incredibly rapid speed. If you have physical symptoms, e.g.: headache, these have meaning to your focus; they are NOT caused by the WREMS.

After several sets you may feel dizzy or have a surge of emotions with or without images or feel nauseous or any of a number of reactions depending on the emotion-memory file you have accessed. You are now in and have direct contact with the subconscious, specifically the area where your memories are filed and since your memories are filed by the emotions you were experiencing at the time, you also now have direct access to your emotions. Be READY! Remember you are in control.      

Journal – taking notes is vital because things go very quickly and you may have to go back in a subsequent session to deal with what comes up. 

Feel emotions as deeply as you can. Let them surge full power. Be glad you are feeling.  Many people have to go through session after session to get rid of NUMB in order to recover their emotions.  Here is where we instruct you about anti-depressant medications. You can begin doing WREMS work while still on a/d meds, but to DO complete work, especially to master and finish a focus and to desensitize, you must come off the anti-depression medications (SSRIs, et al). Consult your medical doctor first. Tell him what you are about to do. Explain that WREMS work takes the place of a/d meds and WREMS brings about permanent, positive change. Amazingly, we’ve found medical personnel to be more open to WREMS than therapists who are often, to be polite, not.

To stop a WREMS session, simply stop moving your eyes.  If you have not completely finished clearing the file you will dream it out during your next night’s sleep or finish it in a subsequent WREMS.   

No matter how tame a session you experienced, there was material uncovered or desensitized. Much of this material was not put into words. It may take hours, sometimes days for material to surface to a verbal level or perhaps not at all. You may only receive images, colors or body sensations. There is no absolutely right or wrong way to do WREMS. You will find your own style.

The Three TOOLS of WREMS

RECALL

DESENSITIZATION

COLOR=EMOTION CHARTS for EMOTION IDENTIFICATION

(For the COLOR CHARTS go to www.wakingrem.com)

All are absolutely necessary to master your own mind and your own emotions.

RECALL

          If you want to access a particular person or event, use RECALL.  To help with the focus, look at photographs or memorabilia during your pauses; e.g.: photos of your Mom at a young age or your high school graduation. Your subconscious mind will send you sensations, emotions, colors, images. As long as there is material to bring up, the RECALL will continue. Avoid judging or doubting, fighting, interpreting or questioning the material being RECALLED.  You don’t want to have to DESENSITIZE yet. You simply want to know what happened or how it really was. This might be difficult because of the surprise factor. Often, what you were told happened, say in family myths, was not what really happened.  You will be receiving from your subconscious mind the truth because your subconscious mind never lies.

Another use of RECALL is to ask a question of your subconscious mind. This is a little trickier.  You must be able to focus on the question you are asking.  Keep it simple. Remember, the subconscious mind is not very verbal. For example, if you ask how old you were when you fell off that big black horse, your subconscious mind will most likely send you the image of your falling off the horse and the feel of hitting the ground. The first couple times you assign an age to the images and sensations, you think you are guessing.  Not so.  You’ll soon learn to trust your ability to verbalize what the subconscious mind sends you.

Take this to heart. Your subconscious mind will do as you ask it to do, but in its own way and its own time. Arguing with it could only make it more stubborn. Respect your subconscious mind.

DESENSITIZATION

This is what permanently changes your reactions to and interpretations of emotional situations. It changes the way you behave and it bestows CALM and mindfulness.

The best way to explain how to DESENSITIZE is to give an example. Let’s say you are having problems at work with the ‘boss from hell’.  Go to your private place. Get comfortable as desensitizing is almost always painful.

Get in. Focus on the BOSS. Lets say the emotion of ANGER/ FRUSTRATION comes up with the image of BOSS.  Keep going. Bring up everything about BOSS and AUTHORITY.

The next image comes up WHAM! maybe of that professor you hated in college.  Feel the ANGER/ FRUSTRATION.  Work through the next image and the next. Finally you hit the CORE memory file, let’s say it’s your father. Finish it. You’re now up to about ninety minutes. This will probably not clean out your entire file on father, but it will certainly desensitize your file on ANGER/ FRUSTRATION with authority.  Usually, instead of one emotion, you will go through a predictable cycle of emotions: e.g. ANGER _ SHAME _ SADNESS _ ANGER, in each session.

You know you completely finished a file when you become CALM and the color message changes, e.g. (dark red) ANGER has become (bright red) DETERMINATION. 

When you see your boss again you don’t react as you did before.  Usually, he no longer reacts to you the same way either. We don’t know why this occurs but often other people recognize you’ve changed before you do.

A shift in your perception comes about three days after your WREMS session and the next comes at three months and a big shift exactly a year later. These plateaus are sometimes subtle and often you become conscious of them only when challenged with what before would wreck your day and you don’t react.

A warning:  Desensitizing gives you the power of seeing what has happened over all these years.  It does not change the situation. Review the Principles of WREMS.  You can change only yourself. If this bothers you, do a WREMS around it until you are at peace with what is. The moment you have completed a WREMS your destiny will have changed. This you must accept.

It’s best to wait about three days between sessions. There’s no law against your doing a session sooner. It’ll just take longer to reach the next plateau.  What you need to do, you must get done

          Clear all the negative, dark material before doing positive affirmations. If you try to force yourself into a positive frame of mind before you’ve cleared the negative your subconscious mind will rebel.  It will fight you and we WREMSers have learned from far-reaching experience that you do NOT want to argue with your subconscious mind which has a long, perhaps eternal memory! Let’s say you have stage fright and hate to speak in front of crowds; you do a WREMS on getting up on that stage and wowing the audience – your entire WREMS session could be one big headache, literally, because you are refusing to face issues in your childhood about, perhaps, being teased by mean bullies in the fifth grade school play. Clear the negative first then the positive will come automatically.

There are other experiences that come with the CALM.  I must tell you to be aware of their existence and to be ready for their arrival.

Out there and beyond

When you have reached a place of CALM over and over again, when you have proven to your subconscious mind that you are, perhaps comfortable is not a good descriptive word, but at least not terrified of moving beyond the BETA mental state, something or somewhere or sometime begins to happen. Basic WREMS itself takes you beyond normal boundaries and when your subconscious mind is ready you will find yourself moving into the extraordinary. 

Doing WREMS changes your perception of reality.  Usually the first clue you have is the way time takes on a different context. Time slows and begins to flow more like a river rather than coming at you in swift moments of frenzy.

The second strangeness might be a talent you’ve always had and overlooked as coincidences. Except now you unquestionably do it. You suddenly know what people are feeling and that they are lying about their feelings. You subsequently are able to image their thoughts and plans. Your ability to do this may be evidenced first when you see them differently. This weird shift happens more directly if you’ve done a WREMS with focus on an individual and it can be a person you’ve known for years and the person suddenly transmogrifies in front of your eyes. You find either how deeply you care for the individual or how you’ve been playing a game by rules you no longer want to follow.  The spooky stuff happens when you react to the person in reality not according to the signals sent out.  Most people don’t like being shown they are lying emotionally. 

Then comes knowing who’s calling on the telephone or going to send you email or whom you’re about to meet at the store. 

Take these events as early warning that the barriers put in place by years of cultural restrictions are falling away and your subconscious mind is starting to trust you with more of the infinite universe.  You need to learn new ways of creating boundaries without shutting down. You are about to face stuff you only read about in science fiction stories and if you are the least bit a sensitive ¼ well, again, I say – the barriers are falling away and you have already stepped onto the strong, invisible bridge leading to ¼ out there. Learn your basic skills well and bring them with you. The adventure is about to begin, again. 

*****************************************************************************

References:

Fillmore, Ann, (web site) www.wakingrem.com

 *********  Master Your Emotions, 9/03  , Positive Health Online, UK

www.positivehealth.com

Pert, Candace B., Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel, 1997, Scribner

Solms, Mark, Dreaming and REM Sleep are Controlled by Different Brain Mechanisms, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (6): 2000  

Most recent posts by

All posts by