The Power of the Subconscious Mind

“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” – Thomas Edison

I came across this quote about two weeks ago on some blog (can't recall which one). After reading it, I began to enact it. Every night before I drifted off to sleep, I would send my subconscious a message or request that I wanted it to aid me in for the next day. I started off simple, with things like " Help me become more creative tomorrow" or " Tomorrow morning, let me wake up with lots of energy", which has become a problem for me in college. To my surprise it worked. I shot out of bed, blasted some Tame Impala on my speakers and was fully ready to attack the day ahead, without relying on the use of any artificial enhancements (i.e Coffee and caffeine).

I've kept this up since then, and more often than not, it has worked. But last night, I changed up my requests, and said " Tomorrow, let me raise the consciousness of some of my fellow students." Before I divulge into what happened , I must first give you some background. Around two weeks ago we were given an assignment in my freedom of expression class where we each had to create a blog post about whatever we felt was important, and then each student was to comment on three of the blogs. Here's my blog post:

http://scarandstripes.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/an-exhalation-of-exultati...

The post itself was focused mainly on how the use of psychedelics transformed the way I saw reality, and consequently, how this new sense of reality has impacted my view on college as a whole. To call the responses that I received from just three of my fellow students humbling and overwhelming would be an understatement. Even more surprisingly, everyone agreed with my post. I potentially altered the career of one girl whose friend is in my class and shared the link with her. She said " I was planning on applying to the Medill school of journalism at Northwestern–a choice I made tentatively, because creative writing has always been my passion. Your quote about “breaking news” being “broken,” and your critique of the clipped and artificial career that journalism often (albeit, not always) turns into has made me seriously reconsider my path. I am now applying to the Weinberg College of Arts and Letters. Thanks to your words, a little piece of my future has been made clear."

This is all before I ever made my request to my subconscious to help raise the consciousness of my fellow students. Fast forward to today, where I had my freedom of expression class. During the beginning of class, my teacher is going over his usual routines of going over power-points. He made a little graph displaying the various topics students wrote about, how many comments were for or against the bloggers post,etc. He jumps to the next slide, and I see the name of my blog ,Scar and Stripes, hyperlinked at the top of it, with a brief summary of what my post was about. My thought at this moment was something along the lines of " No. Fucking. Way." Out of all the students blogs, he chose mine, and I got the opportunity to read my post in front of my classmates. After doing so , several students told me that they have always had the same feelings that I expressed in my post, but never knew how to express them. To top it all off, as I was walking out of class, one of my fellow students tapped me on the shoulder, noticeably fighting back tears in his eyes behind his sunglasses, shook my hand and told me that it was "Fucking beautiful."

That's a moment that I won't forget anytime soon. The fact that I made an actual difference in the lives of my fellow students, not through any direct course of action but through the lost power of words, just flat out amazed me to the nth degree. As for now, I'm going to keep on writing and discovering, and keep on calling on my subconscious every night, and hopefully continue to have opportunities like this arise again.