Rushing In My Dreams - Balancing Act?

In my last post I talked about procrastination.

During the week or two before writing that I became aware of several dreams in which I was rushing. There was no particular place that I was rushing to. No particular task to accomplish. Not running from anything. Just rushing. Just the feeling of pressure that comes from rushing.

It may have been related to the fact that I was procrastinating with those reports and that led to a feeling of "having to get something done." Maybe that's it; in my daytime consciousness I was doing a fairly good job of pushing the task out of my mind - and then in my sleep / dream time world, it shows up as the concrete abstraction (how's that for juxtaposing two words) of just plain rushing - without any specific content.

But another thought also occurred to me. That was that with any change there is an inevitable backlash which tries to re-establish the original state of affairs.

In my situation, I started this process when the words "I will rush no more" became my mantra by applying them in an ongoing, daily, and gradually expanding manner. The "ongoing" was important because to not do that it would just become another incomplete experiment in living and I've had enough of them already. The "daily" was important because that has a more cumulative power and helps to maintain momentum. An analogy would be with exercise. It's better to do some exercise every day than to save it up for extended periods of exercise every few weeks or so. As we all know that is the surest way to increase injuries and then that will set the person back even further.

And the "gradually expanding" was important because that both makes it real and that also makes it much more interesting and "alive."

I also wanted it to be gradual to forestall the inevitable backlash. The bigger the initial change, the more abrupt it is, and the more radical it is the bigger will be the pushback. It is as if the force of habit of the original lifestyle suffused with rushing and mindlessness and consumerism has a life of its own, and if you push hard, it will push back hard. Isn't that one of the basic laws of physics - every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It's not just physics. That's also life.

Another way of looking at this is that a person or a system tends to keep doing what it's doing unless it is acted on by an unbalanced force. (If all the forces are balanced, i.e., equally counteract each other, than the object / system will either remain stationary or will continue at it's same rate of speed and in the same direction it's headed.)

The strategy I adopted was to apply an unbalanced force combined with the principle that "the slow way is the fast way." You could call it a stealth approach the goal of which was to allow for change of very well ingrained habit clusters (lifestyle, society-style) by keeping the change beneath the radar so the pushback would be (almost) avoided.

To go back to the dreams now, I wondered if the mindless rushing in my dreams was a signal that "the old way" was "creeping" back in?

And then an interesting thing developed. When I made this connection, the dream sequence ceased ( - at least so far.) My further thought was that now the new system (I will rush no more) is well established and the pushback from the dreams (unfocused rushing) is a "threat" to the new and more prized system and therefore I / it wants to neutralize the potential resurgence of the old system.

Neat.