What you are experiencing when you meditate is perfectly normal. Strange flashes of memory, random items, snippets of songs, this mental brick-a-brack always comes floating to the surface when you first start to meditate. In actuality, this stuff is ALWAYS going on in your mind, you just usually aren't aware of it. This is the first step of meditation, becoming aware of the ridiculous amount of mental energy your chatterbox brain wastes.

Quieting this takes practice, and it can be very frustrating at first, I know it was for me when I first started. I'm a musician, and the biggest thing for me was shutting up my personal radio station in my mind. I'd start to meditate and songs would start popping into my head at random. I'd try to shut it out, and then start mentally berating myself when I had problems, which just adds another layer of thought to quiet down. In the beginning, I would actually become horribly angry with myself over it!

What finally got me over the hump was the technique of observing the thoughts. Instead of fighting them and shoving them down and getting all upset over them, I would simply look at each as it occurred. This allowed me to calm my mind, and made it much easier to then release the thought and come back to a point of stillness. There's a great line in the Conversations With God books: What you resist, persists. What you look at, disappears. No place is this more true, at least for me, than in meditation. When you resist the thoughts, you make them more real, but when you just observe them and then release them, they go without a fight.

You also mentioned the "law of attraction", and a meditative mindset is very important if you get into this. The reason so many people have difficulties using the law of attraction is because EVERY thought is creative, not just the conscious ones. So when you send out a thought-wave attempting to draw something to you, all the while having this background static in your mind, your initial thought is interfered with. Every succeeding thought of doubt or distraction just disrupts the creative process even more. It takes focus and dedication to draw things to you, and mental focus is what meditation is all about.

So my advice is this: keep on keeping on. When you meditate and the Chatterbox starts up, just look at the thoughts. Turn them over in you mental hands, let them go, and forgive yourself for having them. If traumatic stuff comes up, ask yourself "what triggered this?" Look to see how your mind is tripping up your creative process, and why. And above all, be kind to yourself. You have a whole world trying to keep you down, don't help it out!

CS