Getting over seeing the Subconscious as an Adversary

[snoop]

So this is something I’ve experienced myself and have seen people post about a lot, but have since gotten over. Now, I’m going to later propose that the subconscious isn’t some singular entity that happens to be like another you who communicates in strange ways and controls your innermost desires or whatever, but let’s ignore that for now. We’ve all (or most of us) had that time where it felt as though our subconscious was working directly against our intentions, right? Whether it be in becoming lucid in the first place, or when it comes to trying to control our dreams. I used to feel that that was going on, but somewhere along the way I realized that I had falsely attributed my own lack of ability to some fabricated adversary who happened to… also be me. This belief fueled an expectation of failure and for results other than what I intended, and in turn made that come true. The truth of the matter was that I was so new to what I was doing that I didn’t realize how complex feeling out how to control one’s dream could actually be (and to what extent expectation, whether conscious of it or not, played in how effectively you could control your dream). There was no other me secretly sabotaging what I was doing, it was simply me to begin with. My need to find an explanation for what happened colored my understanding of the situation and every subsequent situation as a result. Upon realizing this, chains of failures resulting from things that shouldn’t really result in failure have stopped. For instance, closing my eyes in a dream used to be enough to end a dream. I wound up getting very flustered by it. What most likely happened was that I woke up once (maybe even by chance) after closing my eyes in a dream. From then on I associated closing my dream eyes with the dream ending, and every time I did it I knew instantly that I messed up and the dream in fact ended like I expected it to. I had trapped myself into believing with great conviction that closing my dream eyes meant the end of the dream, and made it all the worse by obsessing over it. Once you become aware of what’s going on, its much easier to let the association go and to find success where you previously found failure. For instance, when something I try doing doesn’t work, I don’t get discouraged, I just have to find another way to try things. Sometimes things don’t work exactly the way you imagine. Before I almost felt some kind of… fear that whatever was going to happen wasn’t going to be what I wanted, that I’d lose lucidity, or that what I was doing simply wouldn’t work. This was all because I thought some part of me was trying to stop me from doing what I wanted. This feeling I had came up every time I tried to do something, and was actively causing some of the negative things I expected to happen, to in fact happen.

[snoop]

I wanted to make this part a separate post to break up my massive wall of text. It's pertinent to the topic, but not necessarily something needed in the original post. Sorry if this breaks any rules. On the subject of the subconscious itself… I definitely don’t believe there is some other you within you. What happens to be “you” is a very nebulous concept to begin with. Is the angry you the same as the happy you, or sad you? What about the you who is intently focused on something or who is daydreaming? What about the you who fell asleep yesterday and the you who woke up this morning? All these “yous” are equally as you as they aren’t. If the you that was you when you were a child is not you now, neither is the you that you were a second ago. They’re all you, but different, and very difficult to actually define. Some have more differences in comparison to one another than others, but that shouldn’t matter when we’re talking about individuals. A clone of you that’s instantaneously created of you stops being “you” the second they come into existence, but they’re as close to you as any one person can get, right? There’s no point in saying the you a second a go is closer to being you than the child you, because they’re still not you. Unless of course you entertain conventional wisdom and decide that all yous who were you are you (so long as you are not physically and temporally present at the same time, meaning you’d be separate from a clone or some other version of you existing at the same time you do). This latter view is the only one useful for functioning, so we should go forth assuming all thoughts are entirely our own, even if expectation defies our desires. You might ask then, why can some people get responses when asking their subconscious “directly” in a dream, or when speaking to dream characters? Does it really not make sense that you’d get a response? If you can expect a door to lead you to a new dream scene, or that you can shoot flames from your finger tips, would not a dream character or the thing you call the subconscious when you ask it something respond? If you expect it to, why not? In that sense, you really can speak to some kind of “subconscious”, but believing it is another you who is somehow separate is kind of putting the cart before the horse. There’s no way to verify that, and given how changing my beliefs regarding this has affected my own lucid dreams, it seems to confirm my hypothesis.