Fighting Dragons: The Campfire

I have personally found that when something has frustrated me during a day that even if I tell myself I'm going to let it go, worry about it at another time if necessary, "what if" type thoughts sprout to mind. This especially happens when I am trying to fall asleep, as if the subconscious bubbling to the surface results in these incidents processing closer to the surface and more loudly than they ever had during the day. In the past such events have proven hard to quiet, and have often fed my insomnia.

Yesterday I experienced such an event that I would not be able to address until today, and this same process occurred as I was falling asleep. After a few attempts at logically arranging the thoughts, and indicating to myself that I had already gone over the scenarios being presented at length by the point, both to no avail at stemming the tide, I felt frustration turn to inspiration, in a shaping that felt in line with Fighting Dragons.

I laid on my back, closed my eyes, and pictured a campfire to my right, just at the edge of my peripheral vision. Any thought related to the incident I turned into a log and threw it on the fire. Initially the process of turning thoughts to logs was cumbersome, but it got easier, and soon enough it was an instant process that barely took conscious direction. The fire grew and grew at first as the thoughts still came rapidly, but then I noticed their frequency diminished. To my surprise, without conscious direction from me, the fire diminished as well over time, like one might expect a fire to do naturally. Within several minutes the logs were so infrequent that the fire was just embers. I knew the campfire was still there, and I knew any thought would become a log thrown right onto it without consideration, and so I rolled back to my side and was able to let my thoughts wander naturally regarding other things as I drifted to sleep.

For anyone who has difficulty quieting their mind while trying to fall asleep like I do, this feels like a game changer. Despite fallow fields, it felt inconsiderate not to share this discovery.