I think my mind is getting more porous as I get older. I’m starting to realize how much I unconsciously take in whatever I am exposed to, how much I learn by a process of osmosis.  Unfortunately, not everything I pick up has a positive effect on me.  

A while back, I swore off violent movies because I noticed the imagery and situations showing up in my dreams.  One night I had a particularly graphic and violent nightmare.  Waking from the dream I recognized the scenario from a movie I’d seen just days before.  That was enough for me.

I’d like to think my mind wouldn’t have come up with that detailed and violent scene on its own.  While I always had the occasional nightmare, like everyone else, they never included graphic violence until I was exposed to such scenes in my entertainment.  Once I made a concerted effort to avoid violent movies, my occasional nightmares went back to being merely frightening and no longer included graphic scenes of violence.

It’s not all violence in movies that gets to me.  I can handle the abstract, off-screen kind.  I can even cope with basic shoot-em-up gunplay.  The violence that haunts my dreams and shakes my faith in the world is unfortunately the kind that has become so popular--the graphic, detailed, torturous violence of a psychotic killer for whom it is not enough just to kill someone.  It is this sort of glorification of violence and cruelty that I can’t tolerate.

If these images turned up in my dreams, they were clearly making it into my subconscious.  How else might they be affecting me without my knowledge or consent?  How else might they be affecting all of us--individually and as a society?

I think such depictions normalize violence.  Once at the movies, I saw a commercial where the concessions cartoons get into a brawl over who was supposed to order the tickets.  The cartoon shocked me, although no one else seemed offended.  To me, the commercial seemed to imply that it’s normal for people to physically assault one another over even the most trivial thing.  It made me wonder if we see so much casual violence in our entertainment that throwing a punch at someone who has inconvenienced us has started to seem like a reasonable, socially acceptable response.  

It isn’t just violence that seeps into our subconscious from movies.  Ideas do too.  Years ago, I saw “A Beautiful Mind,” which is a wonderful, powerful movie.  It doesn’t contain any scenes of tortuous violence, but it does contain a disturbing and compelling idea–-“what if the people and events I know and remember aren’t real?”  The idea is so haunting that it turned up in my dreams that night.  I dreamed that I was suddenly faced with the knowledge that some of the key people and events of my life weren’t real, and that I had lost my ability to determine what was real and what was imagined.  It was a disturbing dream, although I don’t regret seeing the movie.  It’s just another example of how movies sneak into our subconscious when we’re not paying attention.

Why movies?  Why not books, or other media?  I think it’s because movies are so visual, so visceral, and feel so real.  I have read the idea before that what we experience as reality is nothing more than an illusion.  The idea is not new and has turned up in a myriad places.  But I didn’t dream about it until I saw it compellingly portrayed in a movie.  Perhaps the difference is that both movies and dreams rely heavily on visual imagery.  Maybe that makes the cross-pollination easier.

Entertainment isn’t the only place I’ve encountered destructive ideas and imagery.  Advertising also has a profound and profoundly destructive effect on what we think.  

“Sixty-two thousand, four hundred repetitions make one truth,” Huxley warned us.  When you start paying close attention to the advertising you’re exposed to, you realize that the required 62,400 hits goes by pretty fast.  Before you even realize it, you’ve internalized the advertisers’ “truths”--promises like “Product X will make you happy (or smart or loved)”, or “While your husband may let you down, your favorite ice cream will always be there for you.”

Reading Jean Kilbourne’s book, Deadly Persuasion, was a watershed moment in my understanding of and sensitivity to advertising.  One of the main themes of the book is how advertising encourages us to have relationships with products instead of people.  We are encouraged to get ecstasy from shampoo, comfort from food, freedom from cars, and understanding from computer software.  Ads promise us that the right calling plan will bring us closer to our family.  They encourage us to modulate our moods with the appropriate products--this beverage when you need to wake up, this one when you need to relax, this product to cope with stress.

The cumulative effect of all these ads is that we start to believe their ludicrous claims.  Without our knowledge or consent, those beliefs become integrated into our subconscious where they affect our thoughts and actions.   If advertising messages were to be consciously present and thought about, we would scoff at them as ridiculous, because they are.  Still, the message that products can make us happy slips in unnoticed and unchallenged under the radar of our thinking minds.   When the real experience doesn’t live up to the hype, we often seek out more and better products instead of conclude that advertising lies.

Conditioning doesn’t just take place in the media. It takes place in our everyday life.  Everything we are exposed to affects our perceptions.  If we are told something often enough, we tend to believe it.

Fortunately our natural tendency to incorporate the messages we receive from the outside world into our internal worldview can work in our favor.  If we are repeatedly told how brilliant we are, we will likely begin to believe that also.  Children who are listened to and encouraged by their parents develop to be more confident than children who are continually criticized or ignored.

Even the way we talk to ourselves has a profound effect.  Dr. Martin Seligman found that optimists differed from pessimists in the way that they explained events to themselves.  In his book Learned Optimism, he shares his findings that optimists explain bad events as impersonal, temporary, and isolated while pessimists explain such events as personal, permanent, and pervasive.  Seligman suggests that people can learn to be optimistic by changing the way they think about the things that happen in their lives, and moreover that optimists tend to be happier and more successful than pessimists.  Explanatory style changes people’s perceptions over time.  If we get into the habit of telling ourselves that bad events in our lives are all our fault, will last forever, and will affect everything, then we can’t help but end up depressed and less successful than our optimistic counterparts.

Faced with a myriad of destructive messages and mounting evidence of their effect, I decided to take charge of my environment.  I’ve sworn off violent movies.  I take a critical, skeptical eye to advertising.  I’m working on removing all the pollutants, the toxic ideas, and violent, hateful images from my surroundings.  

I actively seek out movies that are gentle, true and life affirming.  I consciously opt for a more positive explanatory style.  I gravitate towards the good and find positive, healthy places to be.  I surround myself with people I admire, and spend time with those who teach me good things, things that I would consciously want to make part of my worldview.

I know I can’t remove all negative influences from my life, but I am trying to at least take more responsibility for my environment, both external and internal.  I try to only allow in what is good and helpful and true, and protect myself from what is not.  I will not allow the bad in the world to debilitate me.  I will only allow evil to spur me on toward further good.  There’s an old saying: “Watch what you eat.”   I’m learning to take it one step further and watch what I take into my heart and mind as well.