Have Better Nightmares - by James Moore

 

 

While I was enjoying a late night drink with a friend recently, my friend suddenly went into panic mode and leapt up. In a frenzied state, he started a familiar dance of patting all the pockets on his jacket and jeans. Twice. Whilst jigging about he simultaneously scanned the room, the floor and under the chairs then produced his car key and rushed outside.

 

He reappeared a few minutes later, the colour restored to his face, smiling and holding up his beloved i-phone. Knocking back his drink he told me that losing it was his “worst nightmare”.

 

“Look”, I said, “I know how much you love that thing and maybe one day you’ll marry it and have lots of baby devices but is that really the best you can do?” He gave me a “what?” look. “Surely you can come up with a better nightmare than losing your phone?” “But my entire life is on it.” “Even so, it’s hardly the stuff of Grimm’s fairy tales is it?” So I told him what my worst nightmare was.

 

Spending a summer vacation in a remarkably cold summerhouse on the north Danish coast, I awoke in the middle of the night to find someone - or more precisely something - leaning over me. It was of zombie-like appearance, dressed in 19th century naval garb complete with stripy shirt and long-tailed coat. Its legs ended below the knee in long wooden stilts and its long arms were stretched out towards me. The tips of its fingers ended in crows' beaks, which were snapping at me in what sounded like Russian. As I sat up it suddenly grabbed my ankles, the beaks nibbling into my flesh, and it began to pull me out of the bed. And then I really woke up. “You see,” I said to my friend, “now that’s a nightmare. What you’re talking about is something else”. “Okay,” he conceded, “it wouldn’t be my worst nightmare but it would be a monumental pain in the rear.” I raised an eyebrow. “Alright, it would just be a bunch of stuff that I’d have to sort out.”

 

Of course if he hadn’t found his phone that night then it would have been his worst nightmare.  But only because he had already chosen that outcome. He would have found plenty of evidence to support his view and no doubt get increasingly stressed.

 

So what’s going on? Take a look around you and spend the next sixty seconds looking for anything that is brown, however large or small. Next, close your eyes and try to remember as many of them as possible. Okay, so how many did you get? We all subconsciously filter information – we have to in order to avoid being overloaded by all the stuff that surrounds us.  The part of our brain that does this sorting is called the Reticular Activating System and it decides what is or isn’t useful to us based on our perceptions.  In short, we notice the things that our attention is focused on. That’s why, when you decide to buy a new car, all of a sudden you start to see the very same model and colour everywhere you go.

 

Now, without looking up, try and remember how many black things there are in your surroundings. Not so easy this time is it? The messages that you give yourself have a huge influence on your attitude and behaviour. By giving yourself better messages you can consciously focus your attention on things that will support your success. This way you can influence your Reticular Activating System to find even more of it. In short, better messages will get you better results.

 

We spent the rest of the night discussing what might actually make good nightmares – stuff too gruesome to repeat here. After all, if you’re going to have them they might as well be ambitious. Incidentally, a few days after my own worst nightmare, I made a discovery in the local bibliotek. In the late 1800s a Russian circus used to sail into the village we were staying at and perform on the site of our summerhouse.

 

Sweet dreams...