Have you ever wondered why we so often sabotage our best chances of success? Why, when that breakthrough opportunity finally arrives, something inside us pulls back? The answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our survival system—and Pre-REM meditation is a powerful technique for working with it rather than against it.

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This meditation practice, performed nightly before sleep, can help you achieve goals more quickly by expanding what your mind perceives as safe territory. If you commit to this practice consistently, the results can be remarkable.

Why We Sabotage Success

Consider an actor or musician who isn’t yet established—someone accustomed to earning perhaps five thousand dollars a month. When they finally receive an offer for a hundred thousand dollars monthly, they’ll naturally be over the moon. Yet something curious often happens: they unconsciously sabotage it.

Why? Because the survival system perceives success as a journey into uncharted territory—and uncharted territory means potential danger. The step forward feels too far into the unknown, too big a risk. So the unconscious mind intervenes to “protect” us, often causing us to walk away from exactly what we’ve been working toward.

This connects directly to what we understand about how anxiety operates—the survival system is designed to keep us within familiar, “safe” boundaries.

The Safe Zone Phenomenon

Your survival system maintains a safe zone for every aspect of your behavior, determined by your previous successful experiences. To keep you safe, it typically allows you to cross that boundary only 5 to 8 percent at a time.

Here’s an example: If you can successfully jump two feet, your mind may feel safe allowing a jump of two and a half feet—maybe less. Once you successfully jump two and a half feet, you’ll be permitted to attempt three feet, and so on.

This incremental approach works fine for physical skills. But it becomes frustratingly limiting when you want to make significant changes in areas like finances, relationships, or career success. The slow, cautious expansion of your comfort zone can feel like chains holding you back.

How Your Mind Distinguishes Real from Imagined

Before understanding how Pre-REM meditation works, we need to examine how the mind perceives reality.

Imagine yesterday you flew to Las Vegas for a meeting. You drove to the airport, checked in, boarded the plane, reached your destination, completed your work, perhaps gambled a bit, then traveled home. This journey created a memory file labeled “meeting in Vegas.”

Now imagine you did the same journey—but only in your mind. You’ve been to Vegas before, so you can faithfully reconstruct each step mentally. This also creates a memory file called “meeting in Vegas.”

If your mind later wants to retrieve the actual file about the Vegas meeting, which one will it consider real? And why?

The Difference Between Memory Files

The imagined file is just a small, flat video with perhaps some traces of emotions or sounds if you’re particularly imaginative.

The real file is much larger. It includes all the sounds and smells of the journey, plus all the physical and emotional sensations connected to it: cold, hot, happy, bored, worried, physical discomfort, hunger, excitement.

These sensory and emotional details are part of daily life and are considered by the mind as essential characteristics of real events. The sparse imaginary file is tagged as imagination; the rich sensory file is tagged as actual experience.

This understanding, which connects to the concept that the brain is hardware while the mind is software, is the key to Pre-REM meditation.

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The Pre-REM Meditation Practice

Now let’s use these elements to build the meditation. This practice is designed for the moments just before sleep, when the mind is naturally transitioning into a receptive state.

Step 1: Prepare Your Body

When you’re ready for sleep, take a long shower to clear the unnecessary energies accumulated during the day. Treat your body with respect and love—it has served you faithfully all day long. This preparation aligns with the practice of self-adopting your body and mind.

Step 2: The Blue Light Relaxation

Get into a comfortable position in bed and close your eyes. Visualize a flow of blue light entering through your crown chakra, just above your head.

Allow this light to slowly enter each part of your body, from the top of your head down to your toes. Recognize and thank each part of your body as it receives the blue light. Imagine yourself as a benevolent leader walking through their realm, thanking and saluting with pride and gratitude.

Visualize the blue light entering every cell, pushing out old and tired energies. See these old energies as gray, flowing out through your hands and feet.

Step 3: The Descending Stairway

When your body is fully immersed in the blue light, visualize a stairway of ten steps. Each step will bring you ten times deeper into physical relaxation—but your mind remains awake and alert.

Walk down the stairs, counting slowly, enjoying the feeling of progressively deeper relaxation. When you reach the bottom, visualize a door at the base of the staircase—a door that leads into a parallel reality.

Step 4: Enter Your Desired Reality

Open the door and visualize yourself entering the place or situation you’re working to achieve—but as if you’re already there, comfortably established in it.

🎬If you want to become a successful actor, visualize yourself on the set of a film as the lead, or driving to receive your second award.

💪If you want to achieve a fitness goal, visualize yourself already at that level—completing a marathon or walking confidently in the body you desire.

📚If you want to become a teacher or speaker, visualize yourself already teaching with ease and confidence.

💼If you want financial success, visualize yourself living comfortably within that reality—not struggling toward it, but settled into it.

Step 5: Create a Rich Sensory Experience

This is the critical element: create a short story where you visualize yourself comfortably in the life you desire, experiencing all the satisfying results of your efforts.

The story must include all the feelings, emotions, and sensations that a real-life situation would offer. Feel the textures, hear the sounds, notice the temperature, experience the emotions of satisfaction and ease.

After a few minutes of this rich visualization, allow yourself to drift into sleep.

Why This Works

When you practice this regularly—ideally every night—using different scenarios but always based on the same life goal, you imprint in your memory a fully explored, completely real parallel life. Your mind becomes comfortable with it. Your survival system perceives it as familiar territory.

This allows you to move toward that goal in your actual life without resistance from your survival system. Since your mind believes you’ve already been there, the path becomes wide open.

The technique essentially expands your comfort zone overnight rather than incrementally. Instead of being limited to 5-8% progress, you can make leaps that would otherwise trigger self-sabotage.

Integration with Mind Fitness

Pre-REM meditation works powerfully alongside other Mind Fitness practices. The Cognitive Guided Meditations available through the program complement this practice by imprinting Mind Fitness principles at the subconscious level.

For those working on emotional self-reliance, Pre-REM meditation can be used to visualize yourself already operating from that stable, internally-grounded place—making the actual development of that skill feel familiar rather than foreign.

The Captain You® 50-Day Program incorporates similar visualization techniques as part of its comprehensive approach to building emotional self-reliance and mental clarity.

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Explore Mind Fitness Resources

✔ Adult Emotional Dependency (AED)
✔ Emotional Self-Reliance
✔ Brainpower & Mental Performance
✔ The Nature of Anxiety
✔ Trauma & PTSD
✔ Guided Meditations
✔ Captain You® 50-Day Program
✔ Working With Luca

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Luca Bosurgi
Mind Fitness Coach & Cognitive Researcher
Creator of the Bosurgi Mind Fitness Method® and CognitiveOS Hypnosis®. Over 30 years helping individuals reprogram limiting patterns, expand their comfort zones, and achieve goals that once seemed out of reach.

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