The other night, I had a dream that stuck with me—a vivid one that felt more like a message than just random images stitched together by sleep. In the dream, I was performing brain surgery.
There I was, holding tweezers, carefully extracting these tiny, white pills from someone’s brain. One by one I removed them, placing each into a jar. It wasn’t gory or unsettling—it felt precise, almost methodical. Then the dream shifted, as dreams do, and the scene turned into an analogy. The brain I was working on became a webpage. You know how some webpages have triggers? A website trigger happens when you click on a hyperlinked word or button, and it automatically zooms you down the page to a specific section that hyperlink is anchored to.
The dream told me: This is how emotional triggers work.
Something happens—someone says the wrong thing or a situation feels all too familiar—and suddenly, you’re mentally transported to a specific, well-worn place in your mind. A place shaped by past experiences, unresolved emotions, or old wounds.
In the dream, pulling out the white pills was like removing the code for those triggers. I wasn’t just doing surgery; I was debugging the mind, dismantling the connection that automatically launched someone into a spiral of reactive thoughts and emotions.
We’ve all experienced those moments when a trigger takes over. It feels like a flash flood of emotion, rising before you even have a chance to understand what’s happening. You’re no longer acting from your grounded, present self. Instead, you’re operating on autopilot, driven by a reaction so automatic it feels like a reflex. Triggers hijack our ability to pause and respond intentionally. They’re the mental equivalent of clicking a webpage link and being zoomed to another place.
The trigger’s job isn’t subtle; it’s there to keep you “safe” by rerouting you to a well-worn path where you can operate by instinct, no matter how misaligned that path is with who you are today.
In the dream, pulling out those little pills—the code for the triggers—wasn’t the end of the process. It was just the beginning. With the triggers gone, there was no automatic “click-and-scroll” reaction anymore. The webpage didn’t jump straight to the painful section of the story.
But what was left behind on the webpage was still outdated copy.
And that’s where the second part of the dream came in. It wasn’t enough to remove the trigger. The next step was to rewrite the story. To change the copy of the webpage itself.
The stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world—and ourselves within it. When a trigger is removed, it leaves space to question the narrative it was tied to. Was the story even true? Is it still true now? What other perspectives could I bring to it?
In the dream, this editing felt fluid, like the words on the webpage weren’t fixed in place. They were open to change, flowing like water. This wasn’t about erasing the past or pretending the pain never happened. It was about holding the pen again. About realizing that the story of who we are isn’t static—it’s a living, breathing thing that we have the power to revise.
Triggers aren’t just obstacles to be removed; they’re also clues.
They point to the places in our lives where we need to spend time with our story. Where we might need to zoom out, see the bigger picture, and write something new.
This process takes patience.
It’s not about forcing yourself to “get over it.” It’s about curiosity. Asking: Why does this always hit me so hard? What part of me is still holding onto this narrative? What part of this have I avoided fully feeling? And what would it feel like if I could let it go?
In the end, we are all like that webpage in my dream—full of triggers, stories, and opportunities for revision. The challenge, and the gift, is to recognize when it’s time to pause. To pick up the tweezers and carefully debug the patterns that are no longer serving you.
To look with love and compassion at what’s missing, what’s true, and what is not true.
To ask what words belong on the page now.
And to remind ourselves that the story is ours to write. Always.
