Do Subliminal Messages Work While Sleeping?

Subliminal messages are usually messages or sometimes affirmations. They are normally either visual or auditory and are presented at levels that are below your normal perception. In other words, you don’t consciously hear the messages that are being played subliminally.

But just because you can’t consciously hear the subliminal message doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. What happens is that the message is picked up by your subconscious mind, in much the same way as you can hear your name being mentioned across a crowded room, even though there’s way too much noise in the room for you to consciously hear your name being spoken.

So, to put it another way, subliminal messages are perceived by your subconsious, which is one of the deeper parts of your mind.

What are subliminal messages?

• They are soft, almost hidden, messages that are audible to your deeper, subconscious, mind or unconscious mind but inaudible to your conscious mind. Much like a really quiet whisper or the gentle rustling of leaves across the other side of the street.
• They are messages designed to be conveyed below the normal limits of your perception. For instance, you’re consciously reading this page but there are almost certainly other things happening on your computer or phone or tablet. If you’re on a computer, you’ve probably got more than one tab open and there will be things happening elsewhere. I doubt you’re focused on the clock but somewhere your subconscious mind will notice when it clicks on to the next minute.
• They can be hidden in Images as the illustration from 1892 by Charles Allan Gilbert shows – depending on how close you view it, the image is either a human skull or a woman admiring herself in a mirror. So remember that subliminal messages can be anywhere, not just in audios. There’s even a whole conspiracy theory debate about hidden subliminal messages in otherwise innocent Disney movies.

Do subliminal messages work you’re sleeping?

A test carried out on psychological studies show that a subliminal message has the potential to influence you regardless of your waking state because of its ability to go through the conscious mind and they do indeed work while you’re sleeping.

They can be even more effective than listening to the same recording whilst you’re awake.

For instance, if you’re listening to a subliminal session about success, and affirmation is along the lines of “I am successful”, there’s a good chance that your conscious mind will be saying “I cannot be successful, and I have issues” or otherwise sabotaging the message. Even if you tell it that the whole idea of listening to the track is to help you become successful or whatever else it is you’re aiming to improve in your life.

The main aim of playing subliminal messages while you sleep is to avoid the criticism (intentional or otherwise) that comes from consciously hearing the message, even at the very low level that a subliminal message is played at.

It is argued that the subliminal messages will work more effectively whilst you’re in the land of nod because they allow the message conveyed by the affirmation to go to deeper parts of the mind which in turn will help your conscious mind to accept the affirmation, even though it’s really been by-passed in the process.

People who have gone through subliminal message sessions have reported improvement in all sorts of areas in their lives. That’s been reported whether they’ve just played the MP3 ordinarily or have played it, sometimes on loop, whilst they’re asleep at night.

Personally, I like to just play the track once as I drift off to sleep because I find the constant background noise too distracting. But maybe one day I’ll create my own custom subliminal track with just the whispered audio and that might work for me. Definitely worth a thought but at the moment I’m personally keeping to the twilight zone time where I’m not fully awake but not in deep sleep.

That said, research findings have shown that subliminal message sessions can be strangely powerful. Theoretically they shouldn’t work but, much like placebos, that doesn’t mean that they don’t work. If you do any research at all on placebos and their effects, you’ll know that they work a lot of the time. Weirdly, larger pills and coloured pills work better than small white pills. And if the placebo is in the form of an injection it works even more often.

What that almost certainly means is that the more persuasive a sales page is about the power of the subliminal message it’s promoting, the more likely that message is to work.

Very odd.

But then our minds aren’t exactly the most logical things in the universe – we’re not Dr Spock and it shows.

Regular sessions of listening to subliminal messages can be highly effective especially when the affirmations are repeated multiple times. That’s normally the case with subliminal recordings – they loop through a handful of messages several times during the course of the recording.

That works well for several reasons but the main one is repetition.

And playing the messages while you sleep allows the almost imperceptible messages to be readily absorbed by your subconscious mind. Which is win-win really – you get the benefits without having to take time out of your already busy day to listen to the recording.

The small effects that are noted in most research studies are magnified through repeated sessions and this is how the effectiveness of using subliminal messages while you sleep is increased.