I recall seeing a news item on the television about how medical researchers had taken people with Parkinson's Disease and asked them just to think about moving. With one group, they used an MRI scanner to help the group members think in ways which lit up various motor areas of the brain. The second group were just told to think about it without brain monitoring. Apparently, the first group showed significant reduction in the symptoms, whereas little changed for the second.
I have been thinking about this a lot and experimenting with the potentials. Although I have no MRI scanner to check, it seems to me that, with all my practicing of mirroring the dancing of people in music videos, I can indeed now help myself to switch movement back on through mirroring the dance in my mind - without actually physically moving. If so, this has a major advantage in that it does not require the large energy spend of pushing through freeze, pain and stiffness when opening up movement via actual large physical movements.
There is nothing far fetched about this, because similar techniques have been proven, for example the building of muscle mass by imagining lifting weights. Indeed, although I am not physically moving much, I do get twitches and spasms of my muscles when I get into the zone of imagining the dance. As evidence that this may be an idea worth pursuing, I have included a couple of photos I just took of myself to show the definition of my arm muscles. Given that back in January I had no muscle mass at all, and indeed was in danger of muscle wastage problems, and that I don't do any weights or aerobic exercises at all [to avoid oxygen deprivation to the brain - the only types of exercise I have done is what you see in my video diaries], I find the large physical changes in my muscle definition quite remarkable.
Certainly, whether I am correct or not that the mind dancing has significantly contributed to this change, these photos do show there are obvious health and wellness benefits to the gentle movement therapies I have been developing. I believe that this kind of muscle growth is unusual in Parkinson's, which is often associated with muscle atrophy. At the very least, they show that something about our Out-Thinking Parkinson's ideas is indeed working.
One other very important point to share on this subject. Oddly, I can't "mind dance" when I'm very symptomatic or very tired. Then I am also frozen and immobile in my imagination too! Trying to push or maintain the image of myself dancing then just results in a rapid drain of mental energies. The fact that I have Parkinson's in my mind too might tell us something important about the nature of the disease.