Is future life progression the key to working through our problems and tapping into a brighter tomorrow?

IM ON a sandy beach. It's a warm, late spring evening and the stars are beginning to come out. One of the stars is getting closer. It's a giant golden ball and it lands on the sand beside me. I step inside.

Now I'm in the beautiful gardens of a mansion house. A fountain is trickling in the grounds while birds are flitting contentedly around me. I walk through a gap in the hedge to find myself on a beach, the stars are coming out, one of them is golden, and it's getting closer...

No, sorry, it's no use. I'm just too darned uptight and, try as he might, Graeme Harvey simply can't hypnotise me. Thank the stars I've brought a friend, who proves a more relaxed and altogether more willing candidate.

But this is no ordinary hypnotism session. We are not trying to stop smoking, start slimming or discover the root of our irrational fear of paperclips. This is future life progression, and Harvey is Scotland's first practitioner.

A qualified clinical hypnotherapist, the former police officer had already worked in past life regression before discovering its polar opposite. His own previous lives include a 16-year-old girl in a Greek village 4,000 years ago at the time of a volcanic eruption, and a decorated soldier in the First World War - whose existence he was able to verify through army records.

"Many therapists have used past life regression in therapy because you often find clients coming to you with deep-seated problems that can't be explained through their current life," he explains. "So you take them back and often you'll find the source in a previous life. Over time, many people have found that, while they're trying to regress patients, they're actually going forward."

He personally has travelled as far in the future as 2358. "It's lovely," he beams. "Funnily enough, people who have gone 200 or 300 years say similar things." So, no Big Brother vision of a dystopian future ruled by out-of-control computers and alien beings, then?

"I found I was a doctor in a clinic somewhere in Africa high up in the mountains, where the emphasis was put more on mind healing than physical healing," says Harvey.

He also pictured transport moving along magnetic rails. So far, so sci-fi. But a lot of work in FLP focuses not on going forward hundreds of years but just a decade or so, to discover a potential future that is very much within our grasp. Some practitioners do a lot of work with business people, "whereby going ahead five or ten years you can find out what trends are, what type of kit is in use, and bring that knowledge back and get a jump ahead of the opposition," says Harvey.

"On a personal level, you can see where you are and how you got there. And the beauty of it is, because nothing is written in stone, if you don't like what you see you can change it."

He recalls two sisters who came to him. "One was very happy about what she found, the other wasn't very inter-ested because she had quite a hopeless and unpleasant marriage," he says. "She was taken forward five years and was still in that unhappy situation, then taken forward ten years and was in a much better situation, had got away from her husband and was with somebody new. It also turned out the somebody new, she already knew. So six months later she'd left her husband and was set up with her new boyfriend and was incredibly happy."

As for our own session, five years on the picture is very vague. My friend sees an office situation, but it is very bright and clinical. It could be abroad, nothing is familiar.

Harvey asks questions along the lines of: Do you still live in Scotland? Where are your children? What kind of food do you eat? Are you happy? She answers in a sleepy voice that, yes, she's very happy, but nothing else is clear.

Back in the travelling golden ball, she goes forward another five years and this time everything is much more vivid. She's living in a country cottage in East Lothian and is a grandmother to two blonde children. "I have always wanted a swing seat in the garden," she says drowsily, "and now I've got one."

As she comes back to the present, she's almost crying at the thought of leaving such a happy place. Is it a fantasy future? We may have to wait ten years to find out. Or maybe she'll start property shopping sooner than she'd planned ... n

Graeme Harvey, CenScot Therapies (07748 188278, www.censcottherapies.vpweb.co.uk), 60 per session

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on January 16, 2011