These ratifications, paired with the double binds, allow Julie to enter trance quickly, deepened by a descent through nature along a river and then a luminous waterfall, so as to let her Young Me express itself freely. I invite the young woman to tell me the first thing she does when she wakes up in the morning. She tells me she turns on her phone to see if her Facebook friends have liked her latest post. I tell her that’s great, and encourage her to tell me what she does before that, to find the non-emotional moment she has always experienced. She then answers, as if it were obvious: “Well, I open my eyes!”.

Perfect. She places imaginary points in space symbolically corresponding to this action yesterday, last week, and long ago when she was a little girl. She then throws these points, which she had previously connected behind her head, to form a straight line which, after transforming, becomes a bobsled track. The same process, this time moving forward, produces a luminous rainbow band. After perfectly connecting these two lines at the center of her chest, Julie begins slowly flying over the bobsled track on a cloud.

She notices there are holes, spots where grass is growing, scraps of metal, and a helmet lying here and there... She systematically finds the right response to each problematic situation, until she gets a track that is spotless and perfectly smooth.

When she inspects the rainbow path, Julie must first cut her way through a very dense tangle of brambles with a machete. She then asks for the help of experienced gardeners who carefully uproot the thorny bushes so they never grow back. Julie rewards the workers by letting them take some of the rainbow’s inexhaustible light. As she continues on her way, she notices trains passing overhead and underneath the rainbow with a deafening noise, darkening it. She then declares that there has been a switching error and that the trains have no place here. I ask her what solution she might consider to fix this problem, suggesting she shrink the train with a magic wand, bring in railway workers to build a new track, or move the trains with a special crane.

She interrupts me and says with a broad smile: “I’m going to tow them with my flying boat.” She seems to carry out the operation with disconcerting ease and finds a clean, bright, colourful path that suits her perfectly.

She can then return from trance on the count of three with visible satisfaction. In the Harmonic Alignment technique, it is sometimes harder for the guided person to erase a small stain on a path than to move a herd of elephants. In an altered state of consciousness, the symbols and metaphors of the mind are nothing rational.