dreams

Good morning!

I had another protracted 'nightmare' last night. This one was about craving itself, or the birth of craving.

My ability to recall dreams is much greater now. These protracted ones are where the dream starts around midnight and lasts several REM cycles, usually until morning, and subjectively feels like a couple of weeks. I woke up in discomfort and ate some chocolate to get back to sleep, yet the dream continued. These are different to normal dreams and probably a part of some deep processing, maybe triggered by meditation. 

The basic gist was that I was trying to keep one of my friends happy, and this was in conflict with my own desires. His mates all came round and (literally) shit in buckets in my temporary house and I was trying to just get home to my family, but the talk turned to drugs and I found myself craving them for escape from the situation.

I have never woken up because of nightmares. I seem to sit through them and see them out to their conclusion. The chocolate was just a toilet-break thing. I remember one when I was a child and some crocodiles ate all my flesh until I was a skeleton. I remember another where I fell from a building and landed with a crunch and felt all the bones in my body break and protrude from my flesh, before a few seconds of blackness and then waking in my bed.

Anyway this dream is comforting, in many ways. It shows that even on a very, *very* deep level, my brain has been re-wired to avoid craving. There was no wanting of the drugs or release; all I wanted was to avoid falling back into my old patterns. 

The real message though is that this all came about through people-pleasing.

And isn’t that the case? As someone with a lifetime of undiagnosed audhd. The adhd going ‘love me love me’ and the asd going ‘leave me alone I’m overwhelmed’. So you dance like a monkey and self-medicate because of the effort.

The world is beautiful by the way. I’m just trying not to go on about that too much any more. Now I am on to the next step, I think, which is the consolidation and continuation of practice.

I have to say that meditation is like… my favourite thing now. I play a computer game and it’s fun for 15 minutes but then I can feel my brain winding up and just want to go for a walk. To be in nature.

It’s hard to describe the peace in my life. Even this last week, which was very turbulent and challenging on the emotional front, I knew would pass. And I didn’t lean away from the emotions like I would have previously; I let them wash over me.

I wonder if the dreams are a kind of ‘washing out’ of cmem. When I was in the 88 hells I had some major deprogramming to do and at the end there was some big-time rewiring that happened; the physical flush as the synapses realigned.

But that’s not the end of it; that’s just the beginning. That was like taking me from a sick person to a healthy person.

Now I have the opportunity to move into ‘positive deprogramming’. It feels like I am consolidating my gains and lining up the next batch for removal. Or maybe they are being removed already, as I sleep, bit by bit?

I don’t really feel pressure in the same way I did. If I check investment prices then it will creep back in, so I don’t. If I doomscroll then I know that will feed into my reality so I check the headlines for a minute, once every day or two, max. And it’s effortless; there’s no craving for stimulation.

Apart from that I am just living life.

But I am *actually* living life.

Previously I was running a company and doing ironman and snowboarding and retired and doing art and travelling and in great shape and ‘living the life’ by the definition of strangers and friends, but…

All I was doing is desperately trying to fill the emptiness inside. I kept cramming things in and making the hole bigger. I was trapped. Now I am not.

I had a quick look into this kind of unguided secular awakening and I’m obviously not the first, but changes on this level are pretty rare. Getting to the A&P phase where you feel enlightened and evangelical is not uncommon, and likely where born-again christians stop, but proceeding through the hells and to a consolidation is unusual outside of buddhist traditions. 

It seems that Eckhardt Tolle went through something similar; he was incredibly addicted and woke up one day knowing he was done with his ‘self’, before realising that there was no self and retrospectively building an understanding based on buddhism and christianity. I never got along with his writings though.

I wonder… was Anthony De Mello like this? He was a Jesuit monk who taught “pure Buddhism, but constantly cited the Bible and positioned Jesus as a model”. His book Awareness was one of the first doors into buddhism for me - thanks for the recommendation, dad. But his more biblical tomes never clicked.

So here I am talking about simulations, quantum computing and dvar. Ha. I guess we all have to find our own ways in life.

Now excuse me while I go sit and hold a rock for a while.

/jb202508310838