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Last night I listened to motivational affirmations in my sleep to combat procrastination, but I bet you'll never guess what happened next!
It was time for bed so I put a single earbud in and pressed play on the video before drifting off to affirmations somewhere between REM cycles and half-awake grogginess, where the line between dreams and reality meshed together.
I had a dream, ironically, that I was wearing an earbud listening to a voice looping through whispers of affirmations. There was nothing unusual here, the source of the voices must've been the slick white earbud lodged deep within my ear canal, so when I tired of listening to the voice I removed the earbud, but to my dismay the affirmations still survived, looping over and over in my head with no end, no beginning, and no source, this is where the nightmare begins, relentless and unchanging with no apparent end - "To infinity and beyond!"
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New Fear unlocked!
More fear set in as I pawed at my ear some more, thinking this can't be right, convinced the sounds would never end. Suddenly I felt something as a blanket of calm rapidly materialized over my minds eye, "Eureka" might I have just discovered the issue in a hidden gem, a tiny piece of white smooth earbud was indeed still lodged in there deep inside. One after another, I pried out phantom plastic dream fragments—each time thinking “this must be it… this must be it, the sound will stop!” Finally, I yanked out the last imaginary dream shard, and the whispering affirmations abruptly cut off. In that moment of silence, I realized I was dreaming all along. The panic melted away into bliss, & relief—both because the noise stopped, and because I’d remembered it was just a dream.
The next morning, I woke up oddly productive. No procrastination in sight, no hesitation—just action. Maybe the affirmations did work… just not before sending me through a surreal nightmare first. Lesson learned: the subconscious mind fights dirty when you try to reprogram its laid-back ways—like a zen master who’d rather throw a punch than fold its hands in peace. My procrastination was strong and clingy to the inner core of my being, but by facing it I found peace and won.
Sharing this experience isn't to scare anyone from trying these affirmations while they sleep, it's quite the contrary, it's to show how powerful something as simple as putting an ear bud in your ear before you go to sleep can be. Even though I did have this nightmare I'm not worried about listening to affirmations while I sleep again. Normally you can't hear it at all while you are inside your dreams, lucid or not, and this was a first time freak occurrence for me. I'm a very experienced dreamer and in all my years of lucid dreaming and affirmation listening nothing like this has ever happened, and since it did happen once, the chances of having the same dream again are so pretty small, so I plan to pop my ear bud back in tonight and finish listening to more of these motivational affirmations since I am seeing a difference.
On a side note:
Also... a funny thing happened last night, right after I got the affirmations to stop looping in my head, I heard my cat scream really loud from outside my house, so loud it broke through the dream and woke me up. Maybe my cat knew he had to save me too, but I think mainly he wanted to come in out of the rain. At that point I woke up, it was 1:00 AM, I took the earbud out in real life, and fed my cat. I guess that's why I remembered the dream so well, thanks to my cat waking me up before the next dream overwrote it. It also gave me time to do a little more reflecting on that crazy dream turned to nightmare, at that point all I knew was it's time to put the earbud away for the night because I had enough motivational affirmations for the night.