Ever have daydreams? You know the ones...you win the lottery and you are driving around in that flashy new car. Or you just saw the love of your life walk by (you have no idea who this person is so they can naturally be perfect:))...and now you are on some island in the shade sharing your world with them.
Daydreams are great things. We have all had them since we were young. maybe you saw yourself as Evil Kenevil or Daniel Boone (sorry ladies I dont know what you dreamed about) but you knew it was just a daydream, a fleeting thought that came and went.
So why, suddenly do we have these stupid "daydreams" of terror?
I never thought I was really going to be Davy Crockett, why do I believe that these negative daydreams are somehow going to come true?
I still have the nice daydreams. I imagine myself on a tropical beach in a hammock in the shade sipping some exotic fruit punch and listening to some beautiful music. But I dont imagine that is really going to happen to me. It is just a passing fancy.
So how can we learn to treat the obsessive negative thoughts as passing fancies? How can we understand that they are no more real than the hammock on the beach? It seems to me the key to defeating this disease is to realize that it is a disease, not reality and that the thoughts are just passing through, not premonitions of things to come...any more than the wonderful daydreams are.
Once we can dismiss any connection to reality these thoughts have, we can let them drift through and pay them little mind other than simply noticing them and letting them pass...just like a stranger on the street.
I believe this is a somewhat Zen like approach. Most of the meditation discs I use instruct me to "notice, simply notice" as though the thoughts were a petal on a flower in a field of flowers. I look at it for a moment and then pass on to the next thing.
I am practicing.
Mike
