Self-Hypnosis

Er...I couldn't really figure out where this belonged, so I thought I'd post it here.

Anyway, for around eleven months now, I've been self-hypnotizing for relaxation, self-amusement, and to sharpen my mental imagery. I went through my standard routine: gradual body relaxation, imagining myself walking down a staircase, then having a drink of "liquid relaxation." Then I imagined a nurse was hooking me up to some sort of relaxation machine, and had her tell me that when she turned it on, it would be a much more intense relaxation than was possible in the waking world. When she turned it on, I got a very weird sensation. Suddenly my body was half-numb and possibly paralyzed. It felt almost like my body and the chair were the same stuff, like they were carved from the same block or something. I had this weird, happy, soaring sensation. There was a bright halo around the periphery of my vision (I had my eyes closed). The soaring sensation intensified until I felt on the edge of...something.

My point is, this same sort of thing has happened to me during meditation, and when I was attempting a WILD. Has this happened to anybody else? And does anybody know what this sensation is? And, what I want to know more than anything else, what comes after it, what's beyond the edgee? (Like my WILD attempt and the meditation, I seemed to get "turned back at the border")

Interesting! Something like this happened to me just yesterday, while meditating.

I'm going through kind of a rough patch right now, and decided to do an equanimity meditation to help it along.

Eventually, I figured I should try some visualization work, where I picture the bad/painful energy being released, and going through some kind of purification symbol, to be turned into something pure and re-usable for constructive means. I picked a phoenix, just because it's a meaningful symbol to me.

I started visualizing a phoenix, and for a split second, I heard a voice in my head saying, "Here, let me place that for you." Then, two hands came into my peripheral vision (closed eyes), grabbed the phoenix, and adjusted its position slightly.

Then, the visualization went away, and I just felt a weird tingling all over my body. My eyes were also rolling way up, and as I relaxed them, the tingling also went away eventually, and things went back to how they were.

Sometimes, when I meditate while tired, I start to drift to sleep a little bit (and catch myself tilting over), but that didn't happen this time. I was wide awake during the whole thing.

I wonder if it's just the standard thing you go through when your brainwave frequencies change into the Alpha or Theta levels.

I think it might have been something like the beginnings of a WILD, where you relax your body and keep it still until you trick it into thinking you're asleep. It would have been really hilarious to get sleep paralysis while sitting upright lol. But it was late enough in the evening that such a quick transition into SP and REM is unlikely. That's something I'd expect in the early hours of the morning.

It's funny you should mention eyes, because mine do all kinds of odd things when I'm in this state...it feels like they're roaming all over the place, and my eyelids twitch like crazy.

Yeah, I'm thinking it must be some sort of alpha/theta wave thing too, considering it always happens when I'm meditating or self-hypnotizing or trying to go to sleep.