Strange dreams and the subconscious

Dreams are often where troubles in daily life show up.

When I worked at a printed circuit board design bureau, one of the young designers there recounted a dream where they saw them-self flowing along a circuit board copper track and dropping to another layer through a via hole. Incidental dreams can just be about cleaning out mental and emotional rubbish as a sort of garbage disposal of stuff that just needs to be released. Recurring dreams can signify something that needs some conscious attention, but is not being addressed as part of waking life. I do not know if that designer's dream was recurring or garbage disposal.

One thing about being a sort of perfectionist, or at least not wanting to release a product with bugs, is that the myriad stresses involved in the pursuit of solving the various problems that arise do not really get addressed, and so get repressed, only to come out in strange obsessive dreams. Several times, I would have a dream where I am troubleshooting a bug in the product, then gradually wake up still thinking about how to solve the problem, until I fully wake up only to realise that the bug did not exist and I was just worrying over nothing.

One way to deal with a recurring dream is to do a word association sequence, where we start with a word that represents some aspect of the dream, and quickly write down the first word that comes to mind from that. That is repeated until no more words come. The point is to not think about the words but just let them come. If not able to do it by ourselves, a friend can repeat each word back to us and write down the next word we think of.

In looking at the sequence of words, while most pairs of adjacent words will sort of flow from each other, there will be one pair that do not. There is a seeming discontinuity and that represents where the issue lies. For example, the sequence of words I got from one of the dreams is stress concern bug failure love ok forgiveness release. Here failure love are where the discontinuity occurs. The sequence before the break seems to be the stress pattern, while the latter seems to be how to deal with it.

Like many people, I have had people close to me express disappointment in me, much of which I took to heart, feeling like a failure. Even though most of what people express about others is often a result of their own frustrations with often unrealistic expectations, I still took on their emotional baggage, irrespective of how valid it was, much like a child takes on their parents' emotions, even while disagreeing with them mentally. Those feelings of failure were compounded by the many times I have let myself down.

In thinking about the words, perhaps some part of me has been trying to redeem myself in projects I have undertaken, with the product being by far the most ambitious. The latter words suggest that the proper solution for me to come to terms with those feelings of failure is not by thinking that immersing myself in grandiose projects will supposedly prove my worth to all and sundry, but by loving and forgiving myself. Seems obvious when thinking about it, and certainly a lot less effort is required, but then us humans do come up with a lot of crazy ways to solve our personal problems.

Does that mean that projects like the product are worthless? Of course not, and I see that those feelings of failure have helped me to try to do what I undertake better. The learning lesson here is to not let expectations get too far ahead of capabilities, as that is definitely a recipe for mostly being a failure. I have often challenged myself to excel, but the most rewarding projects have been ones where I have been inspired by a seemingly feint idea that drove me so strongly that I could not do anything but make it a reality, and the product is one of those.

The failures have been where I had unrealistic and self-centred expectations of myself and what I could do, resulting in me investing time and energy in outcomes that were not worthy of pursuing. Recognising that has helped me to let go of a lot of what I do not need to get caught up in. Certainly, being retired with a modest pension has meant that I do not get caught up in other peoples' useless follies, as anybody who has ever worked knows there are many.

No, the product is one where I had an initial feint inspiration, but which has driven me for 10 years. Those inspirations are not personal indulgence, but part of life's duty, as long as personal ambition does not overtake them. I have remained true to the initial inspiration, avoiding the scope creep that often overtakes projects. The time taken has been about making it work as required, while keeping mentally balanced by not having arbitrary deadlines. Writing has helped me by providing an alternative short time-frame creative outlet while also enabling me to thoroughly test out the product.

Our subconscious responds to the questions we pose ourselves while we go about our creative endeavours.

With many of our life's challenges, we may know there is a solution, but we repeatedly bang our heads against the wall trying to nut it out. For things that we know we do not know about, we will go to our favourite search engine, often having a misplaced trust in how useful it will be to us. However, with the things we know we should know, we will become frustrated racking our brains trying to force ourselves to remember. As we get older, that frustration tends to get worse because our memories do not seem to be what they used to.

Our subconscious is like our personal search engine as it tries to answer the many questions that we expect our conscious minds to answer. The point at which that answer comes has been called the eureka effect, being named after the word Archimedes supposedly uttered while running naked down the street after having a sudden epiphany during a bath. The point is that the answer comes when not actually thinking about the problem, but when doing something that does not actually involve much thinking at all. That is, the answer comes when relaxed and the thinking pressure is off.

Mostly, the process is something we do not control, but just happens, often at times when we cannot write down our epiphany, like when having a shower. However, it is something we can have some control over, but we have to understand its dynamics to take advantage of it. The sequence is to think of what we want to know, then stop thinking about it. The answer will come at some later time when we are more relaxed, but how long after asking the question is unknown and something we have to place a lot of trust in.

The good news is that if we practice using our subconscious in this way, the answers come more rapidly. I had relied upon my subconscious a lot before starting this project, so I was quite used to getting results, but only when I was not stressed out with getting an answer. After retiring, and so not having expectations from other people of getting solutions in their timeframes, I really started to have more times when I was not so stressed to get answers. Sitting on the toilet is the perfect opportunity to get answers, which is why someone called their toilet their illumination chamber.

My home office is only a few metres from the toilet, so I would often get some epiphany while there, though not necessarily about what I had just been thinking about. However, it got so responsive that my subconscious would come back with an answer about my current issue before I even reached the toilet door. Mostly the information was about some minor aspect, but sometimes it would set me on another way of thinking.

With the page where articles are edited, I had an issue where I needed to keep some information about the current element being edited, and so was thinking about where to store that information. I was considering what elements to store information about when I had to take one of the many toilet breaks that occur when making sure I drank enough water during the day to keep my brain in working thinking order. When I got to the toilet, the words all of them suddenly came to me. Now that was far more radical than I was thinking about, but I decided to run with it.

I then coded the recursive PHP process to add the information to each element in the runtime XML in memory, and strip it out after XSLT rendering but before saving. I tested out how much time that would add to the page processing, which came to about 20 milliseconds, which was not trivial, but not unreasonable. While I had been thinking about very local information only for the particular element being edited, having that information for all elements opened up many opportunities that I discovered over the next few weeks in solving the myriad other editing processing tasks.

While I later pared down some of the bulkier information for those elements that were not direct ancestors or descendants of the current element, all of the shorter information was kept and used in the XSLT processing and some PHP called from that. Overall, the epiphany resulted in a streamlining of the processing and opened opportunities that avoided what would have been a lot of situation-specific ad-hoc programming to extract and store the specific information needed at each of those times. It enabled an elegant and universal solution to context information storage for editing.

Even AI LLMs would have difficulty coming up with such a suggestion because they do not have the broad knowledge of the broad project situation, nor the systemic and emotional drivers involved. These would have to be encoded into the prompt, assuming that I was even thinking about them. My subconscious knew all these and could therefore come up with a suggestion based upon criteria that I was not even contemplating would be relevant.

Using the subconscious takes a lot of stress off the thinking process, but it requires the sort of environment that allows creative processes to thrive. Being in a pressured deadline-driven environment would likely not foster a willingness to trust in it. The old-style R&D labs where there was a lot of fundamental interest-driven research would have allowed many such epiphanies, but modern R&D is far too focused on getting quickly monetisable results that solve short-term problems in ad-hoc ways for CEOs that want to justify their huge salaries and bonuses.

If willing to experiment with the subconscious, there is much to be gained. It is a workhorse that can be told when we want to be woken, along with being tasked to find out what we may not even know at the time, even if that is to point us in the right direction to find out. There is more to being conscious than mere brain function, and exploring our subconscious opens us up to that.