Dream Editing
This might go down as one of the strangest and coolest experiments I've ever run.
About 5 months ago, I was sharing with a friend about how one of the most recurring dreams I've had for the last 10-15 years have these themes:
It's set at my high school
I wake up late or arrive to school/class late
There's an assignment that I forget to do OR there's a test I forget to study for
Massive amounts of anxiety, dread, fear, guilt
My friend posed that maybe there was some aspect from that part of my life that I hadn’t processed yet.
I said it's plausible.
So I decided to do a casual experiment:
What if I deliberately applied the tools I've picked up over the years to process through that part of my life... would that have an affect on the dreams I have?
In November 2023, I had a string of dreams that were related to the themes mentioned.
Dream 1️⃣ - November 6th
I woke up in bed in my childhood home. It was 7am on a school day.
I thought I had more time to sleep, so I closed my eyes again to catch more Zz's before going to school.
The next time I wake up, it's 6pm.
I completely missed the school day.
I felt slight dread. But. I guess since I missed school entirely, I didn't have to deal with any more of the anticipation and the shame of walking in late.
After having this dream, I thought, “Mmm... maybe the processing I did the first time wasn't complete?” So I decided to do a deeper and more thorough processing later that day.
Dream 2️⃣ - November 8th
It was in the neighborhood I grew up in.
I had an appointment to meet with a bunch of childhood friends at 7:30pm.
I had my friend drive me there.
As we were driving, we got lost in conversation and missed the turn 3-4 times.
But I wasn't anxious.
We missed a turn yet again and I remember seeing the clock read 7:28pm, I woke up soon after.
It was on the verge of being late, but woke up before it happened.
Interesting.
Dream 3️⃣ - November 9th
I was at my high school.
Apparently I had a crush on one of the teachers and I GOT TO SCHOOL EARLY to spend time with her before the school day started.
Eventually the school bell rang, students started trickling in. For some reason, I had timed it so that I would leave at 7:28am (hmmmm...) and run to my first class and still make it on time.
7:28 happened, I ran off to where my class was -- it was actually the first day of school for the school year, so I didn't know which exact room it was.
I wandered around one of the buildings trying to figure out my room situation. While wandering, I noticed another student who was lost. He asked which room I was looking for, I showed him my schedule and it turned out we had the same class.
Shortly after, we found the room and sat down.
Maybe 10-15 seconds after we sat down, the bell rang -- we made it on time.
As class got started, he introduced himself to me, "My name is Howard" (that's my dad's name, but he didn't look like my dad).
The first few minutes of class started, Howard cracked a few jokes, the whole class laughed, and I woke up.
Dream 4️⃣ - November 17
I was in a geometry class (I HATED GEOMETRY).
We were being asked to calculate the volume of something that looked like an oddly shaped box.
I remember feeling engaged.
I remember feeling like I knew what I was doing.
Neither of these statements are things I would have ever said about my schooling, historically.
I remember arriving to an answer, talking to the classmate next to me about the answer, and then discussing it in class with the teacher. Laughing and enjoying the learning. (This is far more reflective of my present day self).
Reflections
The contrast between the typical theme of my school dreams vs Dream 4 was DRASTIC.
I had never had a dream like I had in Dream 4, at least not in my written dream records.
It’s now February, nearly 3 months since those dreams.
I still log my dreams on a regular basis and I’ve not had a dream about being late to school or missing an assignment since.
Some questions I wonder about now:
Could it be that a large part of our dreamscape is affected by unprocessed things in our past?
Could it be possible to reach a place where our past is so processed, such that it forever impacts our dreamscape?
What would our dreamscape look like if the vast majority of our past has been processed?
The “Processing” Process
I imagine that someone reading this post might wonder about how I went about processing through my past that led to the shift in dreamscape, so I figured I’d break it down.
TLDR:
A combination of journaling + techniques I learned from my friend Yi who is certified in this thing called Rapid Rewire Method (she’s taking clients).
This is roughly what my processing looked like:
While journaling, I pull up into my awareness all the old feelings. I reconstruct the circumstance I was in.
So for me, it was the dread of being in high school, the dread of not feeling much of a sense of control, the lack of confidence I felt with myself, how isolated I felt, etc etc.
The more detail and vivid, the more potently I can revisit the emotion.
Once I feel like I can access the emotion again, I close my eyes, focus all my attention to it, lean into it, try to turn up the volume on that emotion to 10/10.
And then I breathe through it, let it be present in my body, allow it, no resisting.
Sometimes there’s tears. Sometimes there’s shivering. Sometimes clenching. Sometimes heavy sighing. Sometimes there’s a tightness/ache in my chest.
Whatever needs to be felt through and moved through, happens.Sometimes I hear the thoughts I was thinking at the time, I hear the fears, the anxiety, the assumptions.
Whatever comes up, I embrace it, I lean into it, I feel it fully, and breathe as the emotion moves through.
And I do this step until the intensity of that emotion no longer feels present and compassion/stillness/peace is all that’s left.
Sometimes, there’s multiple emotions underneath the first emotion, so I just repeat the same process for whatever emotions come up.
I repeat this process over and over until there’s no more emotional intensity and no more emotions that come up.
I usually stress test this by putting myself back into the original situation (step 1) and “looking” to see if the emotional intensity is still there. If I find more emotional intensity, I just run through the process again until it’s complete.
Have a friend who might like this kind of content? Consider sharing it!
What’s your relationship with your dreams like?
What experiments have you run around dreaming?
When’s the next post coming out? I no longer have a regular cadence of publishing, but when I publish, it’ll always be on Sunday afternoons at 12pm Pacific (3pm Eastern, 3am Singapore, 8pm UK).