I dated a physical therapist for a while in the early 1990’s. She was always talking about gate patterns of people walking the streets in St. Petersburg and what she’d need to do to help them attain the correct straight up un-caveman like walking style.

She’d talk about muscle contraction and tonality and things like that. Much of our after work conversation centered around muscles. No bell went off in my head about it then, but 16 years later I very lucidly realized…

I’m nothing but a contractor of muscles.

That’s “me”. That’s what I am. That’s all I am.

I was listening to an Alan Watts MP3 two days ago. Alan was saying that he believed the self, the “me” that each one of us feels is only a feeling of muscular tension that we identify with. He didn’t go much into it, only mentioned it that way.

The more I thought about it - it makes a lot of sense. The only time I feel “me” is when I’m doing something that is straining muscles. I may be making my jaw flap and squeezing my diaphragm to force air out through my vocal cords and moving my lips and tongue while talking. I may be standing up and balancing using muscles in my legs, hips and back. I might be running. I might be fighting with someone or ready to fight with someone. These are times the “me” feeling is strongest, when my muscles are flexed or taut.

When I meditate and every muscle is relaxed and balanced I don’t feel the me except that somewhere in my head sometimes is this idea that there is a “me” in there.

If, during meditation I take a few minutes to really look at what that feeling of “me” is - it isn’t there anymore. It’s more like a memory of the feeling of me. In the present moment while meditating - there is no me.

Hmm. Is there a me other than what I feel when my muscles are taut, or isn’t there?

When I go about daily life it feels like a me is here most times because I’m walking, driving, climbing, standing, sitting, whatever I’m doing - and my muscles are flexing or tight, giving me the feeling - the sensory feeling of being present in the body. My neck is turning, my eyes are constantly moving and blinking.

When I meditate and there is no tension in the muscles at all - sometimes I slip into the numb body feeling where I literally feel as if there is no body at all. It’s a feeling that some meditators get, for me it happens quite often as the breath slows down after sitting a few minutes. Sometimes it occurs during walking meditation, though much more often when seated on the floor in a half-lotus posture and all the muscles are relaxed.

As I meditate and look at the mind I realize something further…

I don’t control the mind.

I don’t control my thoughts. They pop up. They may linger around some issue, they may jump to another issue. I can’t control what they do. I can watch and follow what they do, but there is no “me” controlling those thoughts at all. They’re just popping up - sometimes seemingly randomly about whatever topic happens to be triggered by the neuron(s) firing at that instant.

If I don’t control my mind - what do I control? My job? My relationships with others? My physical health?

No. I only control my muscles. Everything I CAN do - is just that one task - I can contract muscles in different sequences. That’s it. That allows me to stand up. To walk. To talk. To go to work. To do anything physical. The mind - which I don’t control, does things that require memory. The mind fires off memories when faced with situations that trigger the neurons to fire.

For instance… I go to my job. I sit at my desk. Memory says, check the calendar and see what’s planned. I make the muscles move to do so. The calendar on Google lists 7 things I need to do that day. The brain remembers those things and triggers the body muscles to contract to get them done. That’s the “me”. That’s what I’m capable of really - contracting muscles and putting myself in situations where the brain can fire off neurons to help me remember what to do during work.

I approach problem solving the same way. Look at the problem. The brain fires off hundreds of things that might relate to that problem as it finds from past experience. I try one. It works a little bit… requiring more brain scanning. The brain comes up with a similar situation that happened when I was 7 years old that helps me solve the present problem. The brain contracts the muscles to do what’s necessary to keep working: typing, writing, erasing, burning a CDROm. Whatever.

I finish work and use the muscle contractions that add up to “driving” to get back home.

The stomach contracts - entirely on it’s own - and the brain fires neurons that trigger memories that tell me - when the stomach does this it means you should stick food in the mouth.

I contract muscles to get me to some food and then throw some food in the mouth, all the while using muscles contracting to do so. I contract the mouth and tongue muscles for a while then the esophagus and stomach contract completely on their own and the food is semi-digested and squeezed into the large intestine where it’s squeezed and rolled over and over - with no conscious effort of mine.

Is my stomach part of “me”? It’s not controlled by the mind. I can’t contract it.

Am I beating my heart?
No. Is my heart part of “me”?
Am I making my diaphragm work to enable breathing?
No. I can if I want, I can force breath to come out harder or slow it down on purpose. The diaphragm is a strange muscle - yes? It’s operating on it’s own 99.something percent of the time - but we CAN control it if we choose.

We cannot control the heart - how fast or if it beats. We can’t control the stomach. We can’t control the intestines or our salivary glands.

We don’t control the focusing of the eyes. We can point the eyes at something - and they automatically focus.

What about the glands that mete out the hormones that do magic with the bodily functions. Who controls that?

Not you or me.

The only thing a human being can do - in totality, everything that we can control - is flexing some of the muscles in the body that are under our control.

What about the mind? Do we control the mind? When the body is still the mind still churns out thoughts on it’s own.

What about self-guided thought? Is this possible? Is thought something that we’re able to control without flexing muscles?

I’m not sure. I know that when I sit with eyes closed and absolutely still - I cannot self-guide my thought. My thoughts just come and go. If I choose I can pay a bit of attention and watch the thought develop into something and sort of guide it.

But you know what? My eyes are moving as soon as I start to guide the thought. Are the eye muscle contractions moving the eye enabling guided thought?

In my case - yes, I believe so. If I am contracting my eye muscles to move the eyes to the left or in short back and forth patterns then I’m able to guide my thoughts a little bit. If my eyes are absolutely still - I cannot.

Try it - sit somewhere, relax all your muscles… better yet, lay on your back and close your eyes. For 10 minutes progressively relax the muscles of your body and then try to think something - guide your thoughts without your eyes moving even the tiniest bit.

Is it possible?

I think not. Especially with your eyes open, but I think not with them closed and not moving either.

I think the eyes MUST be moving in order to guide thought. Proving, yet again that we are only capable of contracting muscles - in this case, eye muscles that enable thought to occur on it’s own.

Why, when we dream are the eyes moving left to right so fast it’s like we’re possessed by she-goblins on crystal meth?

To enable the complex creation of dreams?

If you really want to know if there is a “me” inside your body take some time not being you. Meditate on the breath… download my simple meditation e-book or find one of your own. Sit and focus on the breath until the body goes away and then look at what is “me”.

Couple that with the practice of mindfulness during your daily activities -which helps to take you away from the constant perception of “me” and you’ll soon see that there really isn’t a “me” at all. It’s just an identification of the feeling of muscle tone and contractions that makes you think there is a “me” other than the physical body that you see.

When you first start to meditate and all muscles are relaxed you might still think there is a “me” in you. Then, after applying some attention to that idea, eventually you realize, the “me” you think you feel is just the memory of the “me” you think is there when you’re flexing the muscles. When that memory stops - and it does, there is no feeling of me whatsoever to identify with.

Something mind-altering happens then because you realize you’re not separate from anything in your realm of sensory experience. You, the clothes on the body, the floor, the table, the dog, the trees, the town you find yourself in - the world.

It’s all the same “stuff”. In an instant you’re changed forever as that part of the game is revealed…

What’s the next part of the game?

In this video podcast or video blog (vlog)I I talk about what I see as the two major types of meditation. There are meditation systems which encompasses a very large, rule-filled system for meditation and there is simple meditation that is almost a pure physical effort without any of the fluff.

Video 3, Meditation: Two Types >

This is a .wmv file and plays with Windows Media Player. The file is about 41MB in size and runs for 37 minutes. This is the largest video - and they likely won’t be this large again. I wish someone could invent the magic video compression codec that gives me 30 minutes at just 1MB.

If you want your audio to sound better, try to copy the settings (in general) from the equalizer image below for Windows Media Player. Vern sounds best at these settings or raising the left side up just a little overall.

Here is a short video about the temple I filmed the video above at. It’s called, “Wat Tum Sang Phet” and is located in Krabi, Thailand. They are developing it to include a road around the limestone karst lined with fruit trees and vegetables. They’ll likely have cave tours. It’s a really quiet Buddhist temple and the abbot there is very kind - always inviting me in for tea and fruit when he sees me.

Wat Tum Sang Phet, Krabi, Thailand >

This video is 9MB and about 8:40 in length.

Enjoy!

Best of Life!

Vern

A cave at the Buddhist temple “Wat Tum Sang Phet”

In the last post we looked at using dream interpretation as a tool for looking at the subconscious mind using a conscious effort.

In this article I’ll talk about using meditation as a tool to reduce the subconscious popcorn flying around in your head, reducing the amount that can affect your consciousness.

Meditation is an absolutely amazing tool and one that can give you the greatest results if you’re one of those people that can do a few things consistently. Meditation at it’s simplest consists of sitting in one place, closing your eyes, and focusing on the spot where your inhalations and exhalations are felt in your nose or on your upper lip.

Seems pretty simple I know, but that’s all you need to do in order to have the most profound experiences available to you as a human being on this spinning blue ball. Can you handle something like this? Sure you can. If I can do it with attention deficit disorder (ADD) you can do it, I’m sure of it.

Some people tire of meditation. Yes, believe it or not - some have a lot of expectations about where their meditative sessions will lead them - and they become disappointed with the length of time it takes things to happen. Paradoxically, if you are really wanting something to happen - it won’t. Meditation itself is like a zen koan.

One meditates to get somewhere in their mind… to advance through the stages of meditation leading to jhana or other absorption experiences.

However, if one desires overtly to get somewhere. He or she will go nowhere really. Meditation is catch-22 like that. It doesn’t seem like it should make sense, but it does. Just not sense that we can rationalize using our minds. The book, Zen in the Art of Archery teaches how in order to let the perfect arrow fly from your bow you cannot make a conscious decision to let the arrow go. It must just go. If you focus too much on trying not to focus too much - you are focusing too much and the arrow will be off course. Likewise if you focus too much on meditating to reach high levels of meditation and you’re excited about getting there and anxious - you go nowhere.

Meditation takes persistence, I will say that. Though you’re only sitting for 15-30 minutes at a time you would be amazed how difficult it is to focus on the feeling of your breath in the nose for even 1 complete inhale and exhale. Then, once you’re able to do that you’ll be amazed how difficult it is to focus for 2 breaths. And so on… Yet, this is all that’s really required in order to send yourself down the path toward the most exhilarating experiences.

The mind has a natural tendency to produce thoughts. We all know that. However, you’ve likely not really seen thought for what it is. You’ve likely not watched it consciously for any period of time. As you sit and attempt to focus your entire mind on the feeling of the breath you’ll undoubtedly be taken away from that focus toward whatever the mind wants to churn up in the way of thoughts.

Are thoughts conscious or unconscious? You might question that for yourself as you begin meditating. You’ve probably never watched a thought form in your head and followed it to see what it does. As you meditate you will. Your attention will be pulled away from focusing on the breath to something more interesting that the mind cooks up. You might follow that thought as it builds adding more thoughts around the original focus of the thought. Or, you might follow it as it branches off 16 different ways into different thoughts entirely that are all linked loosely to the first thought. The thought-chains that are created can be brought to conscious awareness if you look at them - apply attention to them. Otherwise they are in the background… in the space between conscious and subconscious. They are being fueled by the unconscious during meditation but you could choose to ‘think’ about something and the thoughts become conscious and focused around whatever subject you chose.

The simple act of meditation does a couple things initially:

1. Focuses the mind on a small task with a tiny sensory footprint.
2. Relaxes the body completely so there is no bodily stress or concerns.
3. Trains the mind to re-focus on the area of attention repeatedly so that it becomes second nature after a while.
4. Slows down the barrage of thoughts that are being churned out.

As the number of thoughts becomes lessened the mind starts to achieve a strength that maybe you haven’t known before. It’s a kind of power that enables you to focus for progressively longer periods of time on one very small sensory input - the feeling of your breath coming in and out at some tiny spot around the nose and upper lip.

Eventually the mind-candy slows waaaay down and you’re able to experience brief moments without thought. Eventually these moments get longer. Absorption experiences start. Jhana starts. Eventually this process transforms the mind into something amazing. The mind becomes strong and unaffected by things that used to cause it discomfort… neurosis. You’ll notice that you’re relatively unaffected by things that used to bother you.

Why is that - are you a zombie now?

No! Meditation makes you much more alive than you ever were before. It gives you a new perspective on life as you realize how much time, energy, and efforts were wasted on things that really don’t matter. You’ll begin to experience life in the present moment as you never could have understood before. You may have read books on the present moment, Thich Nhat Hanh - a Vietnamese Buddhist monk has an amazing series of books you can find on mindfulness and the present moment. You might want to read those as you get started, they are a wonderful aid to help you practice getting into the present moment.

One benefit of meditation is that your subconscious that’s filled with fear, anger, and sadness churns out less dysfunctional material over time. See, when you’re sitting there quiet and watching the breath your subconscious will continually throw up a lot of information from the past that it wants you to look at. If you choose to you can look at it.

Everyone has painful memories of experiences from the past. Sitting quietly helps to bring those up. Occasionally you might cry during meditation because all the sudden sad thoughts overwhelm you and your eyes flood with tears. That’s a good thing. For major things like this it’s good to put meditation on hold and really think about the issue that brought tears to your eyes.

What is the reality of the situation? Can you change something? Often times you can change something about it… you can make a phone call, write a letter or even role-play out some interaction from the past with a friend you have now. You can change what happened in the past with the new role play situation and it can change your life from that time forward.

Nothing from the past has the power to affect you once you decide to eliminate it. It can’t. It’s finished. Done with. There is far too much present and future available to continue your life in a different way, a more functional and better way.

In fact, the only thing about the past that is still there - are the memories in your head about it. That’s IT. The action doesn’t exist anymore. It existed at one time and then it disappeared. Nobody in the world can bring it back. The memories you have about the issue are the only thing that exists - and you know - memories are only tiny electrical impulses… Change them by facing them and then doing things differently from today forward.

My father left my mother, me and my brother and sister when I was five or six years old. He did his part to come see us once a week usually and I can’t blame him for leaving as it was the right thing to do. For a long time I had memories of him and they made me feel sad. Sometime about my mid-teens I remember my girlfriend asking me if I missed my dad and if I had sad thoughts all the time about him. I told her, “Sure, I still think about him occasionally.”

But you know what? I spent the next couple days looking at the reality of the situation. He had left nearly 10 years before. He wasn’t mean to me or abusive to me in any way. He was just not there. Society was telling me that he should be there but when I thought about it myself… it didn’t really matter that he wasn’t there. I didn’t really need him close by and part of my life I realized. I got along fine from the time he left and I didn’t really know him.

Why would I want someone I didn’t know to interact with me more? The reality was, overall it really made no difference at all whether he was there or not. At that point I let go whatever dysfunction my memories and my subconscious were churning out. I moved forward. I don’t dislike my father. I just don’t know him. Should I know him? Society would answer - YES, you must know your father. You must care about him. You must do whatever you can to get close and remain close to him.

I think, what for? I’ve known lots of other people… To me it’s neither here nor there now and I’m happy in my own mind not thinking about him on a daily or weekly basis. Since my mid teens I can’t remember a time when I missed him or thought that I was missing out on a part of life for not having him as a close friend.

Even major things like this can be quickly gotten over if you just analyze the reality of the situation and realize that the only thing that exists are your memories. Question them. Question your beliefs. Question what society is telling you. You’re your own person. Nobody else is looking out for you like YOU are. Change you memories or change your present life such that the old memories don’t matter that much or have less power and you change your life.

So, if you’re crying as you sit and meditate that’s a great thing because you’ve just found something from the past that you can look at and eventually rid yourself of. There’s nothing too great, nothing too powerful to screw up the rest of your life. You gave it the power to affect you up until now - and now you can get rid of it. Don’t ignore it. Now’s the perfect opportunity to destroy it.

And so meditation provides this opportunity to quell the craziness in your mind that surely exists to some degree like it does in all of us. In fact, if you had no craziness you wouldn’t dream at all.

After a year of meditation you know what?

I didn’t dream at all for the next five or so years (I didn’t count, I’m using five as a minimum though). It was amazing to realize that the subconscious had no reason to create dreams anymore. Just outrageous really. My mind was so calm and at peace with the past, present and future that it didn’t create dreams for a long time.

Gradually after 5+ years the dreams slowly started again about events that I was stressing out over. I had stopped meditating after a year and I’ve no doubt that if I would have continued the dreamless state would have also.

Today I still have dreams, but they seem to be related to not achieving goals that I have fast enough. I don’t dreams about fear, anxiety or sadness about past events. I have dreams about the future and not being where I want to be. I think this gives me the motivation on a daily level I need to sustain over time so I reach all those goals.

I’ve started meditating again recently and already I’ve noticed that my mind is quiet and balanced when I shut my eyes and focus on my breath. I have little thought - little extraneous material popping into the conscious from that nether region between sub and conscious awareness.

Meditation is an incredible tool and one that is available to you:

1. Today
2. For free.
3. As much as you want.

Mind-blowing benefits are waiting for you with practice of as little as 30 minutes a day.

I think meditation is the most important thing you can possibly do for 30 minutes. I can’t name anything that even approaches it as a close 2nd. Nothing. Nothing has the power to change your life so completely.

I’ve created a 22-Day meditation e-book course on PDF (right click, choose “save target or file as…”) if you’re interested in downloading it:

22-Day Meditation Course, Meditation without Religion >

I’ve considered revising it to add a lot of information but if I do that I’ll likely turn it into a publishable book instead. For now - grab it for free and get started!

If you have any questions about meditation as you begin feel free to write me and I’ll help however I can. I’m not a Buddhist teacher or any other kind of teacher. I follow no religion about meditation myself and I can offer nothing but the reality of how I did it and the truth of what it did for me.

It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced and I know it would be for you too!

Here are some links to videos I did about my experiences with meditation. These are in no particular order, they are just numbered as a series.

Experience 1: Body relaxed, mind starts to follow

Exp 2:  Breath slows, body starts disappearing

Exp 3:  Fatness

Exp 4:  Consciousness expands

Exp 5:  Denseness of body

Exp 6:  Bliss & Joy

Exp 7:  Highly concentrated mind

Exp 8:  One pointedness of mind

Exp 9:  Dying - no breath

Exp 10:  Interconnected cosmos, at “one with all”

Exp 11:  Just as it is…

Exp 12:  Visualizations

Here are two audio links for mp3 files (best to right click and “save target (file) as…”) of me talking about my experience with meditation and what occurred:

Meditation History, Pt. 1 >

Meditation History, Pt. 2 >

Good luck on your path to a higher consciousness through eliminating dysfunctional material in your subconscious!

Best of Life!

Vern

As I was going through my undergrad psychology program I got really interested in finding out about myself. I wanted to know everything I could about me. Why am I like this? Who am I? Why is this group of things important to me but not to other people? Why are some things of great importance to other people not important to me at all? What is my intelligence? What is the ultimate goal of life? Why are we here as human beings?

I began devouring books on western philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Hare Krishna movement, transcendental meditation, Vipassana meditation, Hatha Yoga, Chakras, hypnotism and many other subjects. I also began meditating at this time which I’ve talked about a little bit in my posts here but that’s covered more in-depth in my bio.

I knew some of the “why” questions about life were unanswerable but I wanted to find the answers I could about me. That was the most important thing I thought - figure myself out. In a short time it became apparent that I had to do whatever was possible to eliminate the negatives I was carrying around as baggage. If I got rid of my baggage I could begin to fully optimize my consciousness. Apparently there was negative material in the conscious and the unconscious (subconscious) and it was apparent that the subconscious was the place to start, it being the more primary level.

In the psych program I was learning a lot about the mind and Freud’s interpretation of how the subconscious (unconscious) affects our lives.

Freud said, “Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.”

We had some classes about dream interpretation and I realized I really needed to start looking closely at my dreams to find some of the answers I was looking for. In particular, the dysfunctions show up rather overtly in dreams. I knew from my studies that dreams were really important as indicators of what’s going on underneath the conscious mind and that they could help me become a better person. Less stressed. Less dysfunctional.

Dreams happen while parts of our brain are active during sleep. Dreams are both psychological and physiologically based.

Physiologically, states of sleep are measured using an electroencephalograph (EEG) attached to the scalp by small electricity sensing electrodes. Using the EEG tiny amounts of brain activity called “waves” are recorded. There are two distinct types of brain wave activity during sleep: Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and Rapid eye movement (REM).

NREM sleep consists of four stages the sleeper enters progressively, passing deeper states as larger and slower brain waves prevail. Stage 1 marks the transition between being awake and Stage 1 sleep. In this stage brain wave activity goes from beta waves indicating wakefulness, to alpha waves. Stage 2 is light sleep. The body prepares for deep sleep by moving through theta waves to delta waves. Stages 3 and 4 are deep sleep stages characterized by prominent delta waves with Stage 4 being the most intense.

In REM sleep, brain activity is heightened, similar to the awakened stage 1 state with some differences. The eyes remain closed, but move back and forth from left to right, sometimes rapidly. The muscles of the body are usually paralyzed during REM sleep. This is a good thing because during a bad dream the dreamer is prevented from harming himself or others. Heart rate and respiration increase. Dreams are most easily recalled while woken up in this state of REM sleep.

I noticed I remembered my dreams the most clearly on nights when I woke up around 5am for a restroom trip. When I awoke again later after falling asleep again I had a lot of trouble recalling the details of my dreams. It seemed that 5am was about the best time for me to recall them.

I bought a mini-digital voice recorder so I could record my dreams as soon as I woke up, enabling a much better recall and in-depth analysis later that same day.

Your subconscious mind is incessantly throwing dysfunctional thoughts around like a hurricane full of popcorn. Occasionally some of that popcorn blows up out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind where you might think about it or ignore it all within a fraction of a second. If your subconscious is filled with fear about different issues, then the “fear popcorn” flies up into your conscious mind often and is able to influence your thoughts and decisions there. This fear popcorn can then influence your present actions, plans, future actions and your entire life really. It’s nothing to ignore, you need to take strong action to resolve whatever dysfunctional popcorn your brain is continually cooking up.

I’m a strong believer in removing all the major types of popcorn flying around in your subconscious so you can have a conscious life that is almost entirely uninterrupted by negative subconscious influences.

Subconscious material is usually based around fear, anger and sadness. In graduate study my practicum professor, Dr. Barry Naster (Hamid) shared with me his theory about treating people with mental disability. He used the acronym, “FLASH” to designate the 5 basic feelings every person has. Fear. Love. Anger. Sadness. Happiness. Notice there are 3 negative and 2 positive emotions?

Of these, fear, love and sadness tend to really influence our dreams. Our dreams arise from material in the subconscious that hasn’t been dealt with adequately in the conscious mind. The subconscious will cook up popcorn around this material for 72 years until you die if you never deal with it.

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives,” said William Demen. This view comes from the idea that dreams are formed as a way for us to deal with unresolved issues in our minds. Things that we’d dare not do socially in front of people can be acted out in the safe environment of dreams. Those with a lot of these socially unacceptable desires will have more dreams of this nature.

I think most of my dreams are of the fear, sadness and anger variety. But I can see that some of them had unresolved desire components that couldn’t be acted out socially too. Dreams appear to offer a safe place to let your mind question everything and do everything that it needs to do to resolve the desires and questions it has. If the dream is especially emotional it will push that content to the conscious mind in the form of memory when you wake up or it might even wake you up as you’re dreaming about it.

For many years I had dreams about walking through the woods and seeing bears unexpectedly. In this case, it was actually BEARS that I was afraid of due to some horror stories I was told while camping by my uncles and my mom’s friend. Alligators were a big thing too, though that was based on something else. Then there were the tornado dreams. Of course I had the common falling off a cliff dream occasionally too.

I began interpreting each dream so I could rid myself of the subconscious popcorn and live a more free, balanced life that was uninfluenced by fears, sadness and anger from the past. Here’s how.

If you are currently able to remember your dreams when first waking up then you’re ready to go. Or maybe you are like me and the early morning restroom trip is an almost nightly occurrence and you remember your dreams then. Great. If you don’t remember your dreams when you wake up, no matter because you’re probably having them, you just need to change when you wake up. Try setting your alarm to wake earlier, don’t worry you’ll probably be able to return to sleep after dictating your dreams - if not, no harm done because you’re awake at an early hour when everyone is sleeping! It can be a very productive time of day! What you’re doing is important enough that you must make yourself wake up. Think like that. Act like that. Make it happen.

If you normally wake at 7am, set your alarm for 6am. Do you remember your dreams when you wake up? If not, try 5am. If not, try 4am. If not - and so on. People dream most heavily during the last stages of sleep so you shouldn’t have to wake up much before 4am! I notice If I wake at 5:30am I’m able to remember the most clearly. Usually I’m sleeping by 10:30 - 11pm at night.

Before you sleep set your alarm and put the recorder close to your bed and within a short reach. If you’re using your phone to record, as I did for a while, make sure you find the voice recording program in your list of applications and set it up before you sleep. In the early hours you don’t want to be fumbling around clicking 16 buttons to get started recording. You should be able to roll over, grab the recorder and click once or twice to start recording.

You may notice during recording that you’re making NO sense at all. That’s OK. Sometimes that happens and it will be even more bizarre later when you listen to it awake, believe me. It’s hilarious actually.

After you wake up and you have some time to begin analyzing your dream(s) get a pad of paper and pen and make sure you’ll be free of distractions. Start playing the first bit from your recorder. When one sentence has passed STOP the recorder and write it down. Leave a few spaces and play and stop again after one sentence, writing it down exactly as you said it into the recorder.

Once you’ve copied down the entire dream you shouldn’t go on to the next one which might be influenced by what you just heard and wrote down from the first dream.

Start reading over your first sentence. Look at the words you used. Bear? Dog? Honolulu? I always look at the nouns first and as I say them I might realize the word means something more than what it does at face value. Dreams are made of symbols. The word is a symbol for something else. Dreams are built on these symbols. The mind puts together a story based on symbols and what words really mean - to create the dream. It’s what the word means to you that’s important, not the face value of the word. However, some words might mean exactly what they are - you know? Sometimes certain symbols in your dream mean the same as they do for other people. Sometimes your symbols are unique. Don’t let someone tell you what your symbols mean. Dream interpretation should be phenomenologically based (specific to each person).

So, I do a quick free-association for each noun and see what else comes up as a possible meaning. For ‘bear’ maybe “Professor Sanocki” comes to mind. For ‘dog’ maybe “taking care of” comes to mind. For ‘Honolulu’ - maybe it means “home” to me. And so on. Write down what each noun means to you - really means to you in your mind.

Once you go through the sentence for nouns, check the other words and phrases. See if they might mean something other than what they appear to be. Maybe they won’t. Finish one sentence before going to the next. When the dream interpretation is finished then read over it and try to get the overall feeling about the dream. Was it fear about something? Anger? Sadness?

Then, define more clearly what fear, sadness, anger or combination of these the dream was really about. What is the issue that needs dealt with about these feelings? Can you name it? That’s the goal, name exactly the situation, the memory, the ongoing problem that is going to keep making subconscious popcorn until you address it.

Different problems in the subconscious require more or less thought about them before they disappear. If the major feeling in your dream was fear that you’d forget your combination lock at school - then it wouldn’t take much more than writing it down on the side of your rubber soled shoe in order to stop that dream. For me in high school this was one of my fears. I refused to write down the combination and I had many locks. One for my bike, one for my soccer locker, and one for my regular school locker. I had the dream all through high school and even into college about forgetting the combination to my locks. I could have taken care of it back then and it would have vanished if I’d just given it some thought and created a solution.

Freud’s idea was that the meaning of all dreams was about unfulfilled sexual desire and impulses. He might interpret my dream about failing to remember my locker combination as really meaning I was impotent. You might guess that I don’t put much credence in that line of thinking. Freud had some incredible ideas and much of it is still in use today. However, his head seemed to be planted firmly in his crotch as he attributed the meaning of everything to be of a sexual nature.

Your dream might be as simple to resolve as my combination lock dream. Even as simple as it was, it caused me bad dreams and stress for a long time. The feeling of dread as I went up to my soccer locker and tried many number combinations that didn’t work, and the soccer bus was leaving without me because I couldn’t get my uniform was a really sick feeling. Something so simple created so much negative energy over years of time.

So even the small issues are worth fixing quickly. If you have some major issue that you need to resolve you might need to spend a lot of time thinking about it consciously and working out the reality of it. Reality kills the power that fear, anger and sadness have. You might have had a bad experience years ago and you dream about it. Getting over it so it doesn’t have the power to affect your life anymore might take a couple days. It might take a week or month of counseling. It might take refocusing your mind on other areas. It might take talking to the person you had the bad experience with - or role playing talking to the person and getting it out out of your system. It might take hypnosis, aversive therapy, or behavior modification.

Whatever it takes - get it the hell out of your system and stop letting it affect your life. If you don’t, the most ridiculous and the most devastating experiences will have the power to be relived over and over as the subconscious pops the corn day after day and night after night.

Dream interpretation can help you resolve nearly every issue in your life because dreams are like a peek into your own private world of dysfunction - and all of us have one.

Once you can interpret the real meaning to the symbols in the dream and get at the feelings, eventually being able to define the exact problem that’s causing the bad dreams you’re on your way to a much more fulfilling, stress free, happy life!

USE your bad dreams to fix you. It’s not brain surgery and you probably don’t need to see a psychologist. Put the time in to do some dream work and get to know all your dysfunctions and go about systematically resolving them through dream interpretation one by one.

Though I don’t believe in the Scientologists’ game plan for living their lives or that the e-meters they use have any credence at all, I do believe that they’re on the right track with attempting to become free of subconscious and conscious garbage that stays in the mind until we do something about it.

Ideally we need to identify all our conscious and subconscious dysfunctional thoughts, memories, habits, superstitions,  and then work on getting rid of every one of them.

So, you can go about things this way as one method to become self actualized or move to a higher consciousness that is less affected by the subconscious… or there’s another way. I don’t know if I’d call it easier for everyone, but for me it was much easier.

That will be the next article…

Quieting Recurring Subconscious Popcorn Through Meditation

Best of Life!

Vern