Changing the top idea in your mind is performing inception on yourself

I injured my shoulder playing football last week, with the result that lying down in bed can be quite uncomfortable. This means that I wake up quite a few times during the night, presumably as I toss and turn during light sleep phases. An interesting side effect of this is that I get to remember all dreams that I have during the night, not just the last one (usually the only one you remember cause it's the one you wake from).

Now, one surprise was how lucid some of these other dreams were. But more fascinating was that the content of the first dream was basically 'the top idea on my mind' from that day (and every day unfortunately, but that's another story). You see I hardly ever dream about the top idea on my mind, at least I didn't think I did. The dreams I remember are usually related to some minor point of the day. Otherwise it'd be great cause you could always choose what to dream about just by thinking about it a lot... well anyway my theory is that you dream about your top idea first and then forget about. By the time you get to your last nightly dream you're onto those minor issues at the end of the stack.

Also suggests that when people wake up with solutions to problems, it wasn't the subconscious, but rather something they consciously worked out in a dream they later forgot.

I don't think it'd be possible to perform Inception on yourself waking or dreaming, but perhaps one strategy would be identifying what really IS the top idea. You may think it's money matters, leaving you helpless to free your mind until resolution arrives (which could be out of your control), but maybe it's really something else like you haven't planned what to do once the matter is settled. Take your thoughts as far as they'll go, follow up every avenue of inquiry to a reasonable end, and then they'll leave you alone.

In fact, I could go farther, stating that ideas alone can't be in the tops of our minds, but rather, some idea-emotion hybrid.

"Top intuition" is the closest phrase I can think of.

> the number of words it takes to state a thought is directly proportional to how clearly you understand it

This agrees with my experience, and is a powerful thing to recognise.