What Do You Say to a Naked Leprechaun

What Do You Say to a Naked Leprechaun?

Your head feels as if it were being squeezed into a jelly jar. No doubt about it: You're having another killer headache. So you close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, and the next thing you know, you see a naked leprechaun twisting a rubber band around your head.

What do you do? Talk to him, suggests Dennis Gersten, M.D., a San Diego psychiatrist and publisher of Atlantis, a bi-monthly imagery newsletter.

"The leprechaun is a symbolic image of your symptoms. So if you talk to that image--ask him why he's there, what he wants from you--you might find out this leprechaun is very concerned about your well-being," Dr. Gersten says. "That's why he's twisting that band around your head. He's trying to get your attention so that he can tell you about some underlying stresses in your life that you may not be consciously aware of."

From there, you can begin to negotiate with the image about a solution to the problem, he says. You might, for instance, promise to stop skipping meals, to get an extra hour of sleep each night and to do an imagery exercise twice a day. In exchange, the leprechaun might agree to loosen the rubber band a notch or two. After several sessions with the leprechaun, he might even agree to take the rubber band off your head and go away.

Symbolic images can take many forms, says David Bresler, Ph.D., co-director of the Academy for Guided Imagery in Mill Valley, California. A symbolic image can be a shape, color, light or lightning bolt. "Imagery is very fanciful," he says. "People can fly through the air; rocks can talk."

But images can also be fairly literal. "Literal images are more anatomically correct than symbolic images," Dr. Gersten says. "You're imagining things the way you want them to be. If you have asthma, you might picture your airways as being open. If you have cancer, you might picture white blood cells chewing on the tumor. If you have a migraine, you might picture the blood vessels in your head being very smooth and relaxed and the blood cruising through without any problems."

Both types of imagery are useful, but which is best for you? "Your unconscious mind will tell you," Dr. Gersten says. "Listen to what your intuition is saying about it. If you feel more comfortable using a literal image, such as picturing the headache going away, do that. If you feel better asking your mind to create a symbolic image, do that. It's a matter of trusting your intuition, practicing and experimenting."