Seven nights of automatic writing and I’m starting to see a pattern (is it just me?)
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I’ve been doing automatic writing for the past week, mostly after my evening sit, and I’m not sure what to make of it.
I’m a software engineer, so my first instinct was to check if I was just pattern-matching. I reread the pages the next morning and asked myself: is this me, or is this something else? The first two days were mostly nonsense—half-formed sentences, names I don’t recognize, and a lot of “the door” and “the water” stuff. I almost quit.
By day four, the writing started getting sharper. It wasn’t pretty. It felt raw, like the kind of language that shows up when you’ve been carrying a lot and finally stop editing yourself. For me, that landed hard because I’ve been in PTSD recovery for a while and have done some legal psychedelic-assisted work. I’m not saying the pages are “proof” of anything. I’m just saying the material has been eerily specific about things I haven’t thought about in months.
The thing that got me is the recurring image of a locked room with a key under the floor. It’s not a symbol I’d normally reach for. In tarot terms, it feels less like a dramatic Tower moment and more like the Eight of Swords—trapped, overthinking, convinced the way out is harder than it actually is. I keep coming back to Jung and the idea that the psyche has its own language, archetypal, symbolic, not always rational. I don’t know if I fully buy that in a clinical sense, but it matches what I’m seeing on the page.
What I’m curious about is whether anyone else has done a multi-day automatic writing streak and noticed the material “settle” after a few days? Like, does it get less chaotic, more focused? I’m worried I’m just feeding confirmation bias by looking for meaning where there’s none. But I also don’t want to flatten it into “it was just my subconscious” if there’s more going on.
I’d love to hear how people keep records, whether they date everything, use prompts, or just let the hand go. Also, if you’re into tarot, how do you translate these kinds of images into cards without forcing it? I don’t want to turn every scribble into a reading, but I also don’t want to ignore the pattern if it’s there.
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