Dreaming online: How Screen Time Shapes Identity and Connection

Yesterday, in my Skool screen time challenge, an unexpected awareness rose.

It wasn’t about distraction, or hours wasted scrolling, or even the endless tabs.

It was softer, more intimate: I noticed that I don’t always reach for the screen to escape—sometimes I reach for it to check on one of my teachers.

And then the deeper awareness landed—if there were no screens, I would have no contact with them. No livestreams. No voice notes. No words carried across the invisible wires.

What would that mean in my life?

Who would I be if those teachers were no longer reachable?

For over a decade, I have been dreaming online. My initiation, my community, my belonging have been braided through glowing rectangles.

The screen has been a doorway, a drum, a temple.

And yet, the question haunts me: If the doorway vanished, what would remain? Would my identity shift?Would the dream I have built unravel, or would I finally see what is mine alone?

And then another question, sharper still:

When there is no reciprocity from the other side—no sign, no mirror, no echo—what does that mean?

Are you dreaming together, or are you dreaming alone?

Would they also wonder who they are without you?

Would the teaching shift if you disappeared from the circle?

Or is this, too, part of the medicine—learning where you project belonging,

where you are truly met, and where you are not?

Ancient traditions remind us that true transmission happens heart to heart, body to body, under sky and fire.

Yet in this age, the medicine often arrives through pixels...bytes of light.

Is that less sacred—or is it simply the evolution of how wisdom travels?

Maybe both are true. Maybe Spirit finds any way She can to reach us.

But Spirit also whispers: You are not defined by who answers back.

I sit with this paradox today. I honor the gift of having been able to study, listen, and be shaped by teachers I might never have touched in another lifetime.

And I also wonder who I am without the portal.

What part of me is screen-born, and what part is eternal?

Reflection for you: What parts of your identity have been shaped by digital contact—teachers, friends, communities you’ve only ever met online? And if those portals went dark tomorrow, or if no one reached back through the wire…what would remain that is still yours, untouched?

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