The Day I Decided to Stop Ignoring the Weeds in My Head
I’m not a spiritual guy, never have been. I’m a practical person. If something isn’t working, I grab a wrench or a screwdriver and fix it. But for about three months last winter, I was waking up feeling like I’d just done a full shift of manual labor, except the work only happened inside my eyelids. It was the same damn dream, over and over again.
I was always in a garden. Not a nice, maintained one. This was a jungle. A forgotten, humid, absolutely choked-out mess of green. Giant weeds, thorny bushes, things I couldn’t even identify were pushing against walls and smothering everything else. I would try to pull one out, and three more would spring up in its place. I’d wake up angry, usually covered in sweat. My wife, bless her heart, finally told me I was muttering about needing a machete in my sleep. That was the point I said, “Enough is enough.”
Setting Up the Low-Tech Surveillance System
See, I figured if my brain was going to run the same messed-up movie every night, I needed to treat it like a recurring bug in a system I was trying to debug. I wasn’t going to buy some crystal ball or download an app full of vague nonsense. This needed boots-on-the-ground, real-world data collection.
I grabbed a cheap spiral notebook—the kind kids use for homework—and a BIC pen. The rule was simple: The moment I woke up, before I even checked my phone, I wrote down every single detail.
I structured my log like this, forcing myself to use actionable verbs:
- Time & Immediate Feeling: What time was it? Did I feel panicked, frustrated, or just tired?
- Dream Snapshot: Where exactly was I? (Always the garden, but sometimes the gate was locked, sometimes the tools were rusted.)
- The Dominant Plant: What was suffocating the place the worst? (This detail was surprisingly consistent—sometimes it was aggressive ivy, sometimes giant nettles.)
- The Real-World Preceding Day Check: What was the absolute biggest stressor or avoided task from the 24 hours before the dream?
This forced logging was grueling. There were nights I woke up at 3:45 AM, and my hand was shaking from sleep inertia as I scribbled down that the ivy was specifically wrapping around a rotting wooden bench. But I kept at it for a solid two weeks, just collecting raw data, refusing to interpret anything yet.
Connecting the Dream-Weeds to My Real-Life Garbage
Once I had about 15 entries, I spread the notebook pages out on my kitchen table and just stared. I wasn’t looking for symbols like “water means emotion,” that’s crap. I was looking for a pattern between the immediate feeling of being overwhelmed in the dream and the corresponding action I avoided during the day.
The pattern slapped me in the face.
The Overgrown Garden was not about my actual yard. My actual yard is fine. The garden represented the “project” I kept delaying. You see, a few months prior, I had been handed this huge opportunity to take over management of a small rental property—a great potential income booster. But it required about 40 hours of legal cleanup, renovation planning, and contractor wrangling. Every time I thought about it, I felt that crushing weight, so I just watched sports instead.
The dream was my mind screaming about this neglected asset. The ivy that was constantly trying to choke everything? That was the mounting paperwork and legal liability I was avoiding. The rusted tools? That was my own lack of motivation and my inability to just pick up the phone and call a real estate lawyer.
The Action Plan: Grabbing the Shovel
Once I identified the actual mess—that neglected rental property project—I shifted my focus from logging the dream to logging my actions against that real-world problem. I didn’t try to change the dream directly; I just started clearing the weeds in real life.
I committed to the following:
- Monday: Call the property lawyer and schedule the first meeting. (Action: I broke the gate lock.)
- Wednesday: Spend two hours organizing the receipts and old documents for taxes. (Action: I started pulling the smaller weeds.)
- Friday: Get three quotes from contractors, no excuses. (Action: I grabbed the functional shovel.)
I wasn’t magically fixed, but within four days of actively taking steps on the rental project, the dream started to soften. It didn’t disappear, but the intense feeling of suffocation was gone. I still saw the overgrown garden, but suddenly, there was a path leading through it that I hadn’t noticed before. I was walking, not just trying to pull weeds from a standstill.
The lesson I learned? Your mind isn’t sending you complicated riddles; it’s just showing you the metaphorical state of the things you are actively ignoring. If you keep dreaming about a huge, messy chore, stop looking up “dream symbolism” and go clean up the actual mess you’re making in your life. That’s the only real interpretation you need.
