Daydreams and the Mental Diet

People who have been in manifestation circles for any amount of time will be aware of the concept of a 'mental diet' aka raising your vibration, or in plain English: not letting the mind doubt your visualizations. It could, in a way, even be referred to as plain old positive thinking. This practice is greatly enhanced with a regular meditation, though a concentration focused one as I have taught elsewhere.

The point is that concentration can be improved with practice and the goal is 'near concentration'. This isn't 'perfect' concentration like a state of samadhi. It means to get to a point that, although there are sometimes quite lengthy periods of not being concentrated on experience, the concentration stays 'near' enough that it's possible to recall pretty much every twist and turn the mind took since the last point of concentration. This is a major milestone because it means that there is no part of the mind that is unwatched and a true 'mental diet' becomes possible.

The difference between mental diet and mindfulness

An important distinction is to recall that we are developing a mental diet, not a mindfulness practice. The difference is that mindfulness is passive (watching mind with concentration) and mental diet is active (choosing the mind's contents with concentration). In some ways these two things are similar, in that both require near concentration. I might be repeating myself slightly, but mindfulness is passive, and based on observing the contents of the mind, which is beneficial in developing insight (and so awakening) into self and reality, but with the mental diet there is a goal of affecting reality a certain way, in a good way, and so choosing our thoughts and feelings.

Mental diet and shadow work

This is all well and good in theory, until you try it. Yes, there can be the problem of losing concentration for long periods, which is one thing to work on, but the other are the gnarly aspects of the psyche that come up. I'm talking about repeating negative daydreams. These can be short-lived relatively, and 'created' from the recent past, like being angry at someone from an event a couple of days ago and replaying it in your mind. These types of recent daydreams have less 'staying power' and are fairly easy to reset with replacement thoughts.

But there is another type of daydream based on much earlier incidents in life, playing out the relationship with your parents or events at school or whatever. Sometimes they are obvious, other times they are veiled. I mean, if it's some unhealed aspect of childhood then the characters in the daydream may be direct and obvious. Other times the same energy can create a daydream with the same underlying theme but more recent characters or even Hollywood characters in abstract situations or a myriad of variations.

These daydreams reveal unhealed 'knots' of the energy of consciousness, that keep playing and create a need to feel a certain way. With a period of observation over time, it can be seen how that recurring feeling has manifested unwanted situations in life. It's a key skill of the manifesting practice: to be able to link mental events to the corresponding situations in the world as they are 'pushed out'.

How to start a mental diet

It's generally necessary to keep a log (a written record) for a a period, and record repeating themes with the goal of healing. If this whole idea feels a little strange, consider one thing. It's not uncommon for people to be interested in recording and understanding night dreams, even though that's a less effective practice as we have less agency in the dream world.

One way to aid the moment-to-moment concentration (mindfulness) required to keep the log of daydreams is to either have a watch that beeps hourly or set a mindfulness app to do this so that you are interrupted on a regular basis for a moment and can note what (if anything) the mind was doing at that point. Sometimes there's nothing significant happening, but soon you'll be able to build up a body of these repeating daydreams, not always identical in detail but you can note the common themes between many of them.

Also, it helps to notice where (in the body) the accompanying emotion is sensed, with a view to being able to change it. Another helpful observation is to notice any triggers, and avoid them. There one example I can give you from my mind, which is a program I used to watch on youtube about The World's Strictest Parents, and internally this would always trigger me. Hours after watching it I'd see my mind awash with negative daydreams.

An example of a mental diet

Well perhaps if I tell you about some personal daydreams from my own practice, to illustrate the technique. My childhood was pretty unhappy, including school. I noticed one daydream that would play occasionally. It was basically a memory. I was on a school trip towards the end of my school life where we were all taken to a supermarket to see what working life was like for the staff and how it would be to have a job there. The manager showed us around, the staff room, industrial fridges, all that kind of thing.

After the tour we were all assembled outside and it was time to go home and the teacher instructed us to write a thank you letter in our own time. I remember being really resentful of this (I never did so). For me, school was basically an eleven year prison sentence given but not in relation to any crime. Now, we had all dragged around a potential workplace with the idea of handing us over to be tax paying slaves. It was my opinion then as a fifteen year old, and I feel the same at fifty! In the daydream, rather than just go home and write a thank you letter, I lose it and rant on at the manager, shouting about how I've just been imprisoned for eleven years and that I'm never going to work there, even for a gold bar.

From my past practice, I uncovered another daydream like this, based on past reality, that would keep on playing. It also concerned my schooling (35 years after I left) and a computer class I attended. I'm old enough that when computers were first introduced into the school, they were not graphical based or anything but were the old DOS type you had to type code on. There wasn't even a mouse. This was at a time where another class I attended was touch typing using old manual typewriters (perhaps I shouldn't admit how old I am here!). Anyway, the teacher in charge (I can even remember her name, Mrs. Morgan) didn't know the first thing about computers. She said at the start of the lesson on the first day, that she would be learning along with us as she doesn't know anything about the subject.

For a whole year, we sat alone in front of computers while she read a book about computers to herself, in silence. She was supposed to have studied this book already in her own time. She was paid by the state to take the class but didn't actually take it.

This bothered me at the time and it bothers me now looking back. It bothers me that I was so powerless back then. If I had have tried to complain to someone, at best, I would have been screamed at by a school master. There's also a fair chance that I would have been either humiliated before a class or possibly straight up assaulted. But in this daydream, the way it plays now, is that I am in the class, programming the computer fluently, and the teacher is begging me to take the class and I am aloofly ignoring her! Man, it feels GREAT!

Over a long period of observation, I found that so many of my daydreams have the theme of righteousness or valid indignation. Some of the daydreams I noticed are completely unrelated to my schooldays but based around my current life - but all of the imagined scenarios allow me to feel indignation. In these scenes I am always a victim, blameless, and now I am either being acknowledged or getting revenge somehow. So I needed to feel vindicated, innocent, recognized. So the essence of it is that as a child I was felt totally powerless and experienced the unfairness of situations. I needed to feel empowered, that I could change something that was wrong, and I didn't. And now, a whole lifetime (it seems) later, these scenes keep recreating to let me feel what I needed to feel. I clearly still have a need to feel it as these scenes, memories, are unhealed. It's as though an energy is trapped somehow or the past is still existing in some way I have access to. See my other writing for more along these lines - and the solutions.

Nowadays, all this time later, I notice that my normal waking life, also creates situations where I can feel like this (what I needed to feel then). Though these times are usually not happy situations, like the daydreams creating the present aren't happy. There are many examples, but I'll give one. I choose to live in a developing country, which I love, and where I am a different race to the people around me (like my childhood). Recently, there has been a wave of nationalism and over the past couple of years I've noticed occasional outright racism where I didn't see it before.

One common thing nowadays is that some local people refuse to sit near a foreigner under any circumstances. When I get on a train or go to the cinema, the person I am assigned to sit with will occasionally immediately get up, refuse to sit with me and demand to be reseated. The thing is, it's a minority of locals who do this, I don't see others foreigners complain so much and so I seem to attract it.

Of course, it isn't my fault. I am completely innocent. Let's refer to the elephant in the room and call it what it is: racism. And of course, I can feel what I've always needed to feel, innocent. Indignant. ...Sad.

So what can be done to improve the mental diet? The point is to not need to keep feeling this way. This is the thing about unhealed thoughts and memories and daydreams. They can morph into other things and so go unnoticed. There are so many daydreams based on this original need from my childhood to feel a certain way, it could have gone under the radar. By keeping a log and looking for the emotional theme I was able to see not only how the original events morph into other unrelated images based on scenarios closer to me in time, but also to events I was unconsciously manifesting in my current, waking life. These things go unhealed over a whole lifetime. It's bewildering in a way. I'm an old man now and my daydreams are often based around my schooldays, which is absolutely ridiculous if you think about it.

Mental diet and healing

One huge, huge part of the problem is our identity. These events in our past explain to us (and the people around us) who we are in the present. Some of it is good and some of it is bad but all of it is bullpoo because we really are much more than we could ever imagine. Now perhaps I could go off on a tangent in life that strengthens this identity. Perhaps these daydreams, on an unconscious level, could make me create a rebel identity, an intentional dropout and misfit, which I did for most of my youth.

When I was an older man, then I developed a strong Asian identity. Looking back it was the unconscious influence of these unwatched daydreams. I actually went to live in India for six years (I'm half Indian by race) and held quite negative views about white people (not happy to admit that but I want to be frank about my past so I can help people). That strengthened my racial identity and although I didn't talk about it, if I had have done I think people would have encouraged me.

I would have said look, I had this past in the UK and was a victim of racism daily, constantly stopped and searched by the police for no reason (well, for the reason of race), was attacked once etc. and now I'm living in India and learning Hindi and going back to my roots and people would say that's great and to develop my Asian identity and it will be good for me and I am a victim blah blah blah...

But it's not good. The daydreams form an identity, a feeling of who I am, and I don't want to be any single thing. I don't want to be Indian, brown, disabled, eccentric, male, British. I want my mind to be clear, with disciplined, chosen thoughts and feelings so that I can manifest the life I want, feel how I want, act how I want and be in a powerful position to help the people around me. When I see someone suffering because they were a victim, of racism or violence or anything, I want to feel compassion as a human being. I don't want to see that as a race issue as it strengthens this feeling of self, WHICH IS THE PROBLEM, that I am orientated in this world by a series of repeating thoughts, daydreams, memories of who and what I am - when I am actually, essentially, an open, infinite consciousness that is choosing to limit itself (myself).

How to deal with the daydreams

One way, when you get in the habit of noticing them real time, is to stop them, and change the dynamics. So, for example, in the old computer class daydream, I imagine, instead of being aloof, feeling compassion for the teacher and helping her. She probably felt really bad not understanding the subject.

Revision ala Neville Goddard

Another way is to review the day before sleeping. When you develop near concentration and can remember most daydreams, you can use the Neville Goddard technique of revision. Simply replay everything that happened in your day the way you wished it had have happened. So if you received a letter with bad news in, revisualize it as a letter with good news in it, and feel a different feeling.

So each memory of the day taken into sleep is a re-imagined as a good one. But you can revise not only the days events in the world, but also the days events in the mind. If daydreams were based on negative memories, make up new memories as I just described, and believe those memories are the real ones (by choosing to feel a new emotion to go with them (a different sensation in a different place in the body)). It sounds insane, and it is, but it works.

Ultimately, you just stop. Again, this is where the concentration meditation PRACTICE can help. When you learn to keep focus on one thing for a period of time, it is an exercise of letting go of certain specified thoughts and choosing other deliberate thoughts. Some daydreams, even if painful, are hard to stop thinking. It's almost like watching TV and it's not easy to leave the lure of teh screen to the toilet until the advert starts. You don't want to walk away.

Towards and ultimate and final healing

In the mind, to concentrate in meditation, you are learning to immediately drop any thought and then to prevent it returning at all as an act of will. So the ultimate answer to stopping these thoughts, is ... stopping these thoughts. Because 'healing' can go on forever. I got into New Age subjects when I was still at school and have been consciously 'healing' all of my life. Ultimately, the healing itself is an identity and the solution is to STOP, and then stay stopped, and that is the end of it.