Here's Why

AVOID EATING GRAPEFRUIT AND DRINKING GRAPEFRUIT JUICE
WHILE BEING TREATED WITH THIS MEDICINE

There was a big splash for a day in the news recently about this label, so it seems a good time to set the record straight.

Last weekend I visited Maryong in Western Sydney to visit the backyard Sydney Robowars stadium! These are "featherweight" radio-controlled robots of under twelve kilograms that fight each other in a metal garage converted into a stadium, complete with bullet-proof plastic viewing wall and video cameras. The robots can be viewed at http://robowars.org/robots.html There were teams from Queensland, and Victoria as well as the locals. They were a very friendly, open and interesting bunch of enthusiasts, with many family teams. I'll post some photos up when the film comes back. They meet every six weeks, and have a lot of fun.

I recently discovered that Woolworths sell my childhood favourite cake: Hedgehog Slice. In North American, its like crushed cookies swirled into a coconut chocolate fudge brownie with chocolate icing. Sadly, some baking companies also label this as "chocolate fudge", which is a completely different confection. I faithfully followed a "chocolate fudge" recipe when I was very small, perhaps six, and was bitterly disappointed that when I finished, I didn't end up with Hedgehog slice. Scarred me for life. My mother still teases me by buying me actual chocolate fudge occasionally... I found a cooking free receipe at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A765948 Most of the receipies on the web wrongly instruct you to mix in some kind of nuts, which ruins the whole endeavour. Shredded coconut should be the closest any kind of nut gets to my hedgehog slice. The things that LOOK like nuts are actually biscut pieces. This has prompted a tongue twister, which bodes well for the healing of the ciguatera poison induced damage to my speech centres: "How many eggs would a hedgehog hog if a hedgehog could hog eggs?"

My brain's speech processing centres were attacked by the ciguatera poisoned fish I ate on December 1st 2002, and it took me six months to be able to get together the concentration to write a radio script explaining my condition, and to read it on air at 2SER FM. You can listen to it here , if it doesn't start playing, then right-click your mouse and choose "save target as" to save the file to play in the media player of your choice.

I went to an Australian Skeptics dinner tonight where Lynne Kelly performed a magic act and speech where she challenged the audience to consider the emotional as well as the intellectual reasons for people's supernatural beliefs.

Lynne went on to explain about her experience of Night Terrors, a kind of vivid hallucination that some people experience just before falling asleep or just after waking. Its a very real experience, and not anything at all like a dream. She explained that she had experienced large spiders jumping onto the bed, and she has taken that frightening experience and embraced it by studying spiders and using spider decorations and jewelery.

She explained that people who experience Night Terrors are labelled in psychology as a "fantasy prone personality" - FPP and make up about 5% of the population. She asked everyone who had ever experienced the Night Terror halluncinations to stand up, and I was one of them.

Apparently Lynne expected a number of us to stand up, but I'm the first person she has met who has also seen the big spider and knows exactly how real the experience feels.

I looked "fantasy prone personality" up in google, and found some interesting stuff. Some of it applies to me, some I merely wish applied to me.

The Hypnosis FAQ at PsychWeb has the following:

"Called the 'fantasy prone personality,' (FPP) these correlates do not seem to form a unitary personality type, but represent a diverse group of naturally imaginative and visionary individuals.

Josephine Hilgard and other researchers have also found similar results, that some people have particularly rich inner fantasy lives and cultivate a lifetime of vivid imagery experience corresponding to an openness to unusual experience, extraordinary memory in many cases, capacity for intense concentration, sharp sensory acuity, and unusually strong somatic responses to mental imagery (such as response to placebos). "

Thats me. I discovered at an early age that I could hypnotise myself and others fairly easily.

I use mental imagery to provoke somatic responses all the time to deal with all the symptoms my illness have thrown up at me. I have a limited ability to affect pain and itching and other unpleasant symptoms, using mental imagery as a kind of "graphic user interface" of the autonomic user system. I've been able to help other people's pains to improve by sharing my imagery and a form of strong hypnotic suggestion when pain-relieving drugs weren't to hand.

I also use mental imagery to help me remember things by imagining a glow around something hot, or dangerous, or dirty. I don't hallucinate and see things as real as a Night Terror, but I can see enough of my "tag", to always be reminded.

On "Big Brother" recently, one of the men in the house chopped some chilli peppers, and then later touched his genitals without remembering to wash his hands first. He was punished with a strong burning sensation from the remains of the chilli juice on his hands. I was surprized that he would forget. I would have visualized a "tag" of a red glow to remind me, and even if I suffered his absent-minded moment and forgot, when I next went to use my hands, the pretend "red glow" would have reminded me.

This kind of delibertae mental imagery gives the gift of easy rehearsal. This gives me an uncanny "beginner's luck" because I have already rehearsed and internalised a new skill before I try it.

I caught the end of a documentary once that suggested that shaman's and story-teller's from the earliest times of human pre-history were "fantasy-prone personalities" who were able to hypnotise themselves to induce a trance in themselves. With the skill of entrancing oneself comes the ability to entrance others. The documentary showed a shaman in Africa who the anthropologist speculated was performing closest to the shamans of our ancestors. They pointed out that ancient cave painting from around the world accord with the dot and grid pattern of "tiny sparks in everything" that the shamans describe. This pattern also matches the physical structure, they suggested of the visual cortex itself. The shamans were experiencing their visual cortexes more directly than most humans. The documentary ended within 5 minutes, and I was ill that weekend and didn't have a TV guide, so I do not know what the documentary was called or who the anthropologist was or what his theories were titled.

I need to spend more time on google and the libraries to find out more about this.

Fran Stalling at http://www.healingstory.org/articles/web_of_silence/fran_stallings.htm
says:
"Both hypnosis and storytelling require a setting which fosters good concentration. People must be comfortable enough to relax, and there should be a minimum of distractions. However, even when the audience sits on creaky bleachers in the hot sun and jackhammers pound across the street, as happened at one ill-starred outdoor festival, certain powerful stories can still conjure a wall of silence within which the magic happens."

Neuro-linguistic programming" is a story telling and visualisation rich method of hypnosis, that for some reason attracts the ire of professional skeptics. I'll have to look deeper to find out what they don't like. I've been harranged by such a professional skeptic in the past about NLP. To me, the idea that you could apply light suggestions in a light trance by capturing and leading the imagination fully met with my experience of the world. However my friend was adamamant that it was total rubbish and in the same class as fortune telling. His argument was that it didn't work. Perhaps he was in the 5% class of people that are resistant to the trance state and are not able to learn to be hypnotised easily.

Enough for now, many points about this gift worth more study. Night Terrors deserve a whole seperate study of their own.

My way of coping with their occasional intrusion, is to immediately switch on a bedside light, as this breaks the trance, and restores you to normal waking consciousness. The hallucinations usually vanish. Pointing your finger at them and making a shooting gesture, can also dispell the illusory demons, in my experience.