I had a really fascinating thing happen last night while dreaming. I felt myself waking from deeper levels of sleep, and I kept repeating a phrase to myself, as if in order to remember it later. The phrase was ‘fractal mapping’, but applied in a certain context.
This is what the Fractal Foundation has to say about Fractals:
“A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos.”
Some examples of fractals are sea shells, snowflakes, lightning, ferns, broccoli, peacocks, pineapples, crystals, mountain ranges, trees and leaves, shorelines, rivers, sea urchins, and sea stars.
What about Fractal Mapping? What is it? How does it apply to our world?
“It is the underlying fractal structure of geographic features, either natural or human-made, that make reality mappable, large-scale maps generalizable, and cities imageable. The fractal nature is also what underlies the beauty of maps.” – Bin Jiang, Cornell University Library
Distilled into plain language then, fractals are repeating patterns—simple and complex at the same time. They are something relatively simple, repeated over and over and over again, to create a larger pattern. When you closely observe the pattern, you can discover its building block at the heart of the chaos.
When seen in physical states in nature, fractals are indeed beautiful. I’ve always loved to see how elements of our world can be built in these ways that are perfectly orderly and pleasing to the eye at the same time. And the end result takes an endless variety of shapes and form.
But what about how fractals can apply to non-physical reality?
In my dream, I knew fractal mapping could be applied to how we approach stressful times in our lives. We have all experienced moments of profound stress, when we feel overwhelmed by everything we’re expected to cope with at once. The key to enduring these moments, according to this dream, was to apply fractal mapping to understand the basic building blocks of our unique manifestation of stress—the single leaf of the fern, or the single segment of the sea shell. Take the smallest part of your cause of stress. Distill it down to its most basic components.
It is possible. Patterns appear in our lives as well as in nature. We repeat the same behaviors ourselves. We get stuck in the same cause and effect loops until we learn from our mistakes and correct them. For example, if we are enabling someone else’s poor behavior, cleaning up their messes so that they don’t have to, we will get suck doing so over and over again until the exhaustion overcomes us. Our frustration with the situation builds and builds until our discomfort—the effect of our choice to enable—reaches a breaking point.
Now, it’s your job to figure out what specific choice you are making that’s building your fractal pattern of stress. When you take it all apart, what’s repeating?
Take that thing. That small thing. Find a way to change THAT. Discover a way to make a different behavioral choice to help yourself escape your fractal pattern of stress.
You can ease your monstrous stress load by using fractal mapping to understand the nature of YOUR reality.
As I came out of my dream, lifting up to more shallow levels of sleep, I kept repeating the phrase fractal mapping to myself, over and over—another fractal—in order to remember it. I honestly knew nothing about fractals until this morning, when I did research upon awakening. This can be a tool to help yourself. To HEAL yourself. You can conquer your self-made mountains. You can break them down to their smallest parts. Understand the pebble and the whole mountain will crumble.
Have a blessed day, friends.
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