Sometimes when we sleep, we dream. It happens in a stage of sleep architecture called the REM stage.

My thinking is that when you wake up, you wake up into a collective dream of your family, village, town, country, and the world, what we call the “reality,” and we are still dreaming.

Your self-narrative in your awake state determines your dream within this collective dream. Most of your fears and worries come from this self-narrative.

Controlling the self-narrative is not natural; they are often negative, coming from our primitive part of the brain trying to protect us. Always in the lookout for what can go wrong, it is designed for survival, mating, not for maximizing happiness.

Three powerful aspects control the self and collective realities: identity, beliefs, and thoughts.

Peeking under the hood of these three, I am sharing what I have discovered so far.

Identity:

Identity is like a global variable in the operating system or you can imagine it as your screen size and resolution.

When you take on any identity, it limits you by default. Identity is a limiting factor. Your identity (limits) defines the boundaries your current level of intelligence can operate with and accept as part of you.

You can see it at play in both macro and micro levels. When someone says I am Indian, French or American, or when someone says, I am not rich/famous/credible enough to do X.

You can also be given an identity by someone – titles, labels, ranks, certificates – and most likely, you will take it and play it out very seriously, often without question.

Once you identify, your brain sets it as a boundary of operations. The key is to recognize you have a choice.

Beliefs:

The next significant variable is your beliefs.

They also define a limiting framework for the intelligence to operate on a smaller day to day scale, which has a compounding effect.

Most beliefs turn into unconscious rules by which we operate. I had struggled with beliefs for a long time, and they seemed very hard to change.

There is a simple way to change your beliefs that are not supporting you.

Just replace the word “believe” with “decided.” Suddenly, “I believe I need to have achieved X to write this article” becomes “I decided that .. “.

When beliefs become decisions, you get a handle to hold on and can change them.

Thoughts:

Oh, negative thoughts.

There is too much literature out there on this topic. The fact is that the brain cannot process two thoughts simultaneously, so whenever you are feeling negative, focusing on gratitude makes the negative thinking go away.

There is nothing spiritual about it – you are replacing the wandering chemicals like dopamine and stress hormones with the “here and now” chemicals like serotonin by changing your focus.

There is something even more powerful. That is realizing your thoughts are not different from your actions, and you have agency over them and are responsible for thoughts as much as you are for your actions.

How would you feel if your arm was acting on its own and knocking things off the table? It could happen if you never use your hand and lose muscles and voluntary control over it.

That is what is happening in the untrained mind. You must practice and build those muscles.

The first step is to understand thoughts and actions are the same, even if you have not unlocked that level yet.

Ideas in equals ideas out. There is no other way. In my quest to demystify personal and collective narratives, these are some of the people whose work influenced me. Steven Kotler , David Bayer, Alexander Korb, Daniel Z. Lieberman If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you follow them and read their materials to create your conclusions.