Читать книгу Dream Your Self into Being - Bonnie Bahira Buckner - Страница 7

In his own way, my father was a great dreamer. Only once in my entire life did he tell me about a night dream, although I am sure I told him many of mine. But he understood many key principles to dreaming and he understood much about the power of the imagination. The seeds my father sowed provided foundation for me as a Dreamer.

My father’s experiencing of life was infinite. As a rancher, he spent his days riding horseback across unending plains in contemplative solitude, discovering surprising canyons and cottonwood-lined creeks that a glance across the flat land concealed. He drove miles across state lines to do business with other ranchers, and these long trips took many side roads that put him in contact with little-known people who possessed extraordinary skills or intriguing eccentricities—a silversmith in this small town, a leather-worker in a small house a hundred miles off the paved road—picking up from them bits of wisdom and perspectives of how a life can be lived. And he flew his own plane across the country, landing in places as different as little-used strips of asphalt surrounded by corn fields to San Francisco International. He was unbound by physical constraints.

My father seemed molded of the earth. He lived in the land, with the land and the plants and beings that populated it, and loved people and solitude equally. Most of all, he loved dreaming. His mind, thoughts, and ideas spanned the horizons. He lived both close to the planet and soared above it. Living with the seasons, the weather, and the rhythms of life, he observed miracles and lived the miraculous in nature and living.

Perhaps because of this, my father believed unequivocally in the infinite power of the mind and our imagination. As a child, if I would get sick my father would tell me to lie down in the sun. He would instruct me to feel the sunbeams on my body, warming me, and then slowly feel the beams coming into my body putting light on all the bad bacteria to banish them away. Other times he would tell me to lie down in the grass and imagine friendly ants coming up through my feet and marching all through my body, eating all the bad bacteria and viruses and then marching back out my feet once they had completed their task. He also told me that if I understood this I would never have to be sick—that my mind would always be able to heal my body if I allowed it to, and if I helped it to do so.

I was fortunate to spend a lot of time with my father, at his side as we burned miles across seemingly endless dirt roads, or trotting our horses shoulder to shoulder for long hours across pastures. During these times, he would point out what moved him, bring his thoughts to the surface for me to hear—all the while teaching me.

These experiences with my father, and his healing images, laid the foundation for the rich imagery I would learn and teach in the tradition of imagery and dreaming that I follow. My experiences with him grounded me in the physical understanding that we move with the seasons, and that we are inextricably in relationship to all the beings of the planet and even the planets and systems beyond it. It grounded me in my body, and my body to the earth, and taught me that in the expressing and unfolding of these relationships God is revealed.

The specific imagery exercises my father would instruct me in were more than simply healing a cold. These images introduced me more directly to a relationship with my body and my body’s landscape, and illustrated for me the interplay between the two.

How powerful it is to know that the mind and body are one, and that they are in dialogue with the physical world, instead of feeling vulnerable or victim to outside forces! This creates both agency as well as responsibility. If I want to feel better—from physical sickness or any emotional or circumstantial malady—I must choose to accept my role in the relationship and then respond to it in order to create the change I desire. There is no more waiting for someone else to save me—I have the ability to create change (agency) and therefore the responsibility to do so. It is about choice, not victimhood or powerlessness.

Lesson One:

The power of our mind is infinite, and our body is in direct relationship to our mind. This means that our physical world is also in direct relationship to our mind. This assumes individual responsibility.

Understanding choice banishes fear and creates a very different image for a worldview: rather than huddling inside the village walls afraid that the strange noises outside might be a werewolf, I could simply drop the walls, walk into the forest, and see whether the werewolf were there. If he was, he was tamable.

As a child, I understood my father’s imagery exercises to give me power over the physical as it relates to my body. Later, with Catherine, I would learn that this extends to responsibility over emotions and their stagnant residues: anger and fear, and their couplings—guilt, resentment, doubt, irritation, anxiety, and so forth. Imagery is the tool for choosing and taking responsibility for our part in the relationship of Self to world. It is also the means by which we can clear these stagnant residues and shift emotions into feelings of our choosing: creativity, compassion, lovingkindness, discernment, love, and etc.

Emotions and feelings express themselves through our physical bodies. Learning to map the body, and establishing a relationship with it, includes learning where and how emotions and feelings move within us. For example, for me anger is an explosive shooting out simultaneous with an ejecting up of myself out of my head and from my body; fear is a cold pulling back and crumpling in; while compassion is a grounded, warm, and golden pink expansion in all directions. Mapping emotions and feelings allows us to shift any emotions and their couplings that have become stagnant, and to choose to move into feeling.

I often explain this choosing using the two different expressions of comedy exemplified by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In Buster Keaton’s comedies, Buster is a completely sane, put-together, innocent, and “regular” guy whose environment is haywire. He might begin walking down the street on a calm and beautiful spring day, minding his own business, when all of a sudden and for no reason a boulder comes smashing down toward him, or a piano falls from a high window! As he leaps to avoid being smashed, he trips over a dog leash that is stretched tight by the lady who has stopped to peer in a window, which sends him teetering wildly to try to regain his balance and in the process sends him falling into a manhole that just opened as the workman crawled out.

Charlie Chaplin, on the other hand, enters a perfectly sane, put-together, innocent, and calm environment in which he creates havoc. Maybe he walks into a polite dinner, and winks and wiggles his eyebrows at the pretty lady whose mad husband glares, then drops a morsel on the powdered breasts of the lady of the house, and then swings his cane to make a point only to smash the ice sculpture, and so forth until everything is chaos.

Life is the Charlie Chaplin scenario. It is not the world that is doing things to us, but we who are creating our world. Once we realize we are the locus of instigation and that our actions directly create the environment in which we are interacting, we can begin to craft the environment of our choosing.

In my twenties and early thirties, I would mistake life for a Buster Keaton scenario. I would blink my eyes innocently like Keaton and wonder why there were so many yellers and screamers around me. Once, someone I was dating hit me during an argument, screaming that I was a mountain of anger and she had to express what I wasn’t expressing. This is a messed-up scenario for many reasons, but it was also a good lesson, because I had no idea I was angry. Because I was being hurt by her, and this was said as judgment, I dismissed any truth in her statement.

Years later, however, when I met Catherine, one of the first things she said to me was: “You’re very angry.” Because she was not hurting me and it was not said with judgment, I could hear it. I also remembered my ex’s accusation and considered the possibility more strongly because it was now a pattern.

Catherine continued for three years to say to me, “You’re very angry,” calmly, factually, and absolutely without judgment as if reading a dictionary entry. I finally got it—and I was, indeed, really angry!

No matter how supportive and loving a family might be, none is perfect. Each of us comes into this world to face challenges, disappointments, and other pains of being on this planet and encountering these imperfect families, relationships, and other limitations of living. These challenges are part of the necessary tension for development—a perfect world would be a complacent one. How we choose to react to these challenges is unique to us, which in turn becomes the doorway through which we can begin our inner development. My way to react to the challenges in my family and life was with anger. Over time, and until I began to work on it, this anger became the armor with which I greeted everything in life.

However, once I was able to see my anger and recognize it for the role it played, I was able to move from Buster Keaton to Charlie Chaplin and begin the work of choice. My environment shifted simply by shifting my inner view and choosing new ways of meeting the world. Every seemingly minute inner shift meant a different tenor in a conversation, choice of words, and so forth, until old ways of interacting with people were no longer interesting to me, and new people began to come into my life that were attracted to my new ways of interacting. My life began to be populated with loving, kind, and gentle individuals. I moved from a life that was akin to living a perpetual heavy metal concert in a crazy house to a wonderful garden party with interesting guests and sparklers.

My father devoted my entire childhood to preparing me for his death. He did this in many ways. One way is that we talked about his death often, what it meant to him and about his feelings and beliefs about death and beyond. Because we worked with animals, and I saw or even held many animals in death, there were many moments to learn about this essential lesson and big opportunity of our life’s trajectory.

Handling, touching, and feeling death, and talking about it extensively with my father, developed in me a sense of impermanence or lightness to life. At the same time, it gave life a consistency, because all life is a great timeline that began before and will continue on beyond my specific incarnation. As a child, the impermanence bothered me greatly; I wanted to hang on to my father and to things I thought were “good.” But what my father was teaching me is that dying is living—they loop into themselves.

As I began to live as a Dreamer, I came to see the freedom my father’s approach afforded me. Life is biological in every way. Things that are good are to be enjoyed fully in that moment. Like a blossom or a new leaf, their brightness is poetic; if we try to pick it, or keep it, the color fades. Equally, things that are challenging blow through like a storm or a drought; however difficult, they never last forever.

Skipping lightly through life allows me to love deeply and clearly, to experience disappointments and exhilarations from an even perspective and to move beyond the constraints of larger expectations. This is another way of expressing detachment.

Detachment is not a removal or a cold turning away; it is a full embracement without clutching, grasping, or imprisoning. It is experiencing in totality the brilliant new leaf without picking it. There is no need to pick it when the greater consistency, the larger timeline, is enduring. The leaf can be enjoyed because every stage, every season, is interesting; and as one leaf dies, another is born. This perspective on death also planted seeds in me for being fluid and facile with change.

Change often accompanies, or catalyzes, the death of parts of ourselves. Look closely at any plant that is blooming—even as one part is blooming, there are other twigs or offshoots that have browned, died, and are falling off. This is a natural pruning, required for growth. Once we realize that parts of ourselves die many times over throughout our life and that this kind of death is required for us to move to new places in our evolution, change becomes surmountable and even welcome. This also prepares us for the physical transitions of loved ones and eventually our own death. Imagery is a way of pruning aspects of the self and rebirthing.

Another way my father prepared me for his death was to assure me that he was always with me whenever I would travel away from him. I would ask him if he meant that metaphorically or “for real.” He would tell me directly that time and space are ideas and that beyond our physical body we have a spirit body. This body can stretch and extend wherever and whenever we choose it to. He would tell me that he was choosing to continue to be with me no matter how far away I might go. I felt this to be true, and it brought all distance to within an instant for me. Later, when my father did die, it was not a debilitating event. While I grieved his passing, death was a movement into another idea of space and time, which was accessible in other ways than the physical.

I find my father accessible through both imagery and dreams, and he has visited me four times since his death. The first visit dream happened a few days after his funeral. I dream:

I am back home in the family kitchen with my mother. I hear my father’s pickup truck turn from the road onto our long driveway. I race out to the garage to meet him, and, as he always did, he turns off the engine and plays the game of coasting the truck as far as it can go toward its parking spot. We both got a lot of enjoyment out of this game. We lived out in the country and so our driveway was very long. Getting a full coast to the parking spot required, probably unsafely, racing around the ninety-degree turn at the head of the driveway as fast as one could. It was our game of chicken. This time, however, my father leaps from the truck as it is still coasting and runs toward me with the door still open behind him. When he reaches me, he scoops me into his arms and buries me in a hug.

When my father and I part from our hug I say to him, “Dad, what are you doing here? You’re dead.” It is very matter-of-fact. He replies, “I know. But I wanted to come see how you are. I wanted to check on you and your mother.” I assure him I am fine. We embrace again, and I leave the dream.

I am completely conscious in this dream, and this dream has a unique quality. Unlike other dreams where I participate unaware, dreams that are about something, or even lucid dreams where I am conscious I am dreaming and can affect outcomes in the dream, in this dream I feel I have literally stepped into a different reality. In this reality I am conscious of my other reality. I do not feel, as I would with a lucid dream, that it is a dream. It is as though one reality is simply laid on top of the other.

The next time I met my father in a dream was a couple of years after the first dream. It, too, had the same reality-on-top-of-reality quality of the first dream. I dream:

I am driving to work in my black Honda Prelude. (This is really the car that I drove, although the work that I was driving to was not my current job, but a past one.) My phone rings. (It is one of the earlier car phones, which I really had, that was hard-wired into the car.) I pick it up and say hello. A man says to me, “Bonnie?” I say, “Yes.” And he replies, “Oh good, we’ve been trying to reach you. Hold on, please, let me get your dad.” I pull my car over and park for the call. I hear a lot of movement and people in the background, and suddenly I see through the line of the call to the other side of it. Here I see my father riding his horse and roping cattle with other people on an expansive green pasture ringed with mountains. There are some other cowboys in the foreground, including the man holding the phone for my dad. I am pleased to see that my father, in this new place after death, is still doing what he loves to do and is happy.

He gets to the phone and is out of breath. “What’s up, Babydoll?” he asks. I laugh. “Dad, what are you doing calling me? You’re dead.” Again, I say this matter-of-fact. He laughs back. “I know. Sorry it took so long, I was way out in the back pasture a long way away, and I’ve been very busy. We have a lot of work to do here, you know.”

I tell my father how happy I am that he’s busy, and that it is clear he’s doing a lot of good work. I’m glad he’s there to do that good work! I ask him why he called. “I just wanted to come up and check in on you. I just want to make sure you’re doing ok.” I assure him that I am, and the dream ends.

I don’t dream again of my father for eight more years. Those dreams I detail in chapter three.

What my father called the spirit body I call the Dreaming body. Because reality is elastic, all things are infinitely malleable. This includes not just time and space, but the solidity of ideas, belief systems, and patterns. With Catherine, I learned I could close my eyes and go sit on a star to see my life in all its perspective, the leading up to and the now, and from this distance I could see it as a play. From this perspective, without the sticky attachments of judgment and habit, I was able to see clearly to untangle the knots that were causing me to trip or repeat detrimental behaviors. I could also work with ancestral patterns, going back to the genesis of distorted actions and clearing myself of their present-time expressions. I could even jet forward and see how current expressions would present themselves in my future.

Lesson Two:

Reality is elastic. Concepts like time, space, and solidity are ideas only. Therefore, our entire existence is created, expanded, and in direct and constant relationship to our imagining of it.

Once I worked with a young man who saw himself in his future as an old man, embittered and alone. This is not the future that he wanted for himself. At the time, he was making choices he deemed safe—in work and relationships—rather than those that his Dreaming body were urging him toward. As a result he was putting distance between himself and others, and dampening his passions. By seeing the trajectory of these energies into their years-later expression, he was able to make new choices in his present that would move those energies in new directions and therefore create for himself a new future.

I had a similar experience once, in a night dream, at a time when I was putting up a lot of blocks between myself and others. In this dream, I enter a house I know to be mine and see myself as a very old woman shrouded in black, and hunched in a rocking chair in the corner of the room. The house is dark, chilly, and people are walking in and out removing the furniture. I realize I am visiting myself at my end-of-life death. I come close to myself and look her in the eyes. I realize that if I continue to block myself from others I will die alone, as I am here. There is no one familiar around this version of me—only movers. I wake up.

That dream showed me something very valuable. Because it was a possibility, not a solidity, I was able to change the course in which I was heading so that my life would unfold differently. I have since dreamed again of my death. In this dream, I am in a house I know to be mine but don’t know yet in real life. I am in a bright, warm, yellow, sunlit room sitting in a chair by the window where the light shines in on me. I am wearing all white. Outside the window is a very green lawn and it is higher up like in the mountains, with some mountain flowers like poppies you see in Oregon. I turn my face to the sun, letting it bathe me. When it is time I stand up and simply walk out of my body and out the window. I wake up.

This death dream is very different from the first one. While I am physically alone in the room, my life feels filled. I am warm and at peace; my face is uncovered—I am facing the world without masks or covering and am at peace with it. I have created a new future for myself.

When I was around ten years old, my father gave me a book called Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach and instructed me to read it.

Illusions felt both exciting and familiar to me. The main character had a small plane and was a pilot; my father had a small plane and was a pilot. The main character loved freedom and adventure; my father loved freedom and adventure. The main character was seeking depth of soul; my father was seeking depth of soul. I came to see the main character as very much like my father. In the book, the main character was given a training manual for life, so I felt this was my father now handing down that training manual to me.

To give a little backstory, in Illusions, the main character, Richard, is a biplane pilot who roams the countryside of the Midwest giving rides for money. His home is the open fields, sleeping under the stars or the wing of his plane, and every few days he moves on to a new town after he has worked through an audience. One day he is surprised to see another pilot—he’s never known anyone else to fly a plane like his and charge for rides in that area. They strike up a friendship, and this new pilot, Don, begins to teach him many things. For me, these were lessons on dreaming and manifesting.

In one chapter, Richard and Don walk down the street. Richard casually asks Don why we’re here, as in, alive on this planet. Don abruptly suggests they see a movie. Halfway through the movie Don asks Richard why they’re here. Richard, who has forgotten he had a question or what the question was, distractedly tells Don, “Because it’s a good movie.” Don presses him and Richard says it is because he is enjoying it.

After the movie, Richard is still clueless. The point, Don explains, is that life is chosen, just like a movie, where we are both the writer and director. Our life, like movies, is fun and an opportunity to learn something. In the same way that we are entertained by different movies, so too are we entertained in life. If we are entertained by dramas, then we will make sure we have drama in our life to entertain us. If we are entertained by romance, we will seek romance. If it is comedy that floats our boat, we will have a lot of laughs. And, just like the illusion of the screen, we can buy into the illusion that we are victims or heroes. We can see the same movie over and over. Or, we can step in and out of different roles, and see different films. The bottom line is that life is something we create of our own choosing.

It is one thing to be told that life is of our choosing, but it is another thing altogether to move into the active choosing of it. In the same period of my life when I was blinking naively like Buster Keaton at the yellers and screamers, I was saying over and over, “I hate drama, I hate drama.” But there sure was a lot of drama in my life!

If we let them, patterns hold us in a firm grip. Often the patterns we follow were birthed in childhood and so they have become habitual subterfuge, the ground we walk and forget to look at. Because we are always standing on that ground, it is hard to see what is under our shoes. Dreaming is a way of stepping above the ground in order to see what is underneath.

Literally, in a night dream, elements of experience that are familiar are suddenly different—a well-traveled canyon landscape is now bright red, a friend who dresses like a surfer is suddenly buttoned-up in a three-piece suit. The startle produced by the difference in the dream is a first step toward waking us up to seeing a pattern. When we learn the language of dreams so that we understand what a bright red landscape or a surfer who is suddenly buttoned-up means, the patterns become revealed. Once revealed, we are able to shift them. The imagery I describe in “Part II” of this book is a tool for naming and shifting your patterns.

In another chapter of the book Illusions, the two pilots are eating lunch at a diner. Richard is bemoaning the loneliness of his life. Don reminds him that we make life as we choose it, that even Richard’s life (an adventure movie of the freedom of the open skies starring the lone hero) is what he has chosen. And remember, we can always choose another script for our movies.

Don explains that we manifest with the power of our imagination. He encourages our downtrodden hero to think of something to manifest, an object, something simple to start with. Richard blurts out that he’ll manifest a blue feather. A blue feather!? Don shrugs, then instructs him to close his eyes, and to see it—clearly, and in detail—and then let it go.

That evening as they are preparing a camp-side dinner together, Richard receives his feather as a picture on a carton of milk packaged by Blue Feather Farms. He’s thrilled. Don tells him next time to see himself in the picture he imagines if he wants to manifest the real thing.

When I finished reading Illusions, my father asked me what I thought. I told him it was my favorite book of all time. He asked me what I liked about it. I told him that I thought I already knew what the book was about before I had even read it. Somehow it felt more like it was reminding me of something than it was telling me something new. I liked the idea that life is what we choose it to be, and I was excited by everything that I was going to experience ahead. All of life, and all that I wanted and would ever want, seemed as reachable to me as simply closing my eyes, seeing it, and then walking out the front door to meet it. When he asked me what entertains me, I said adventure. If there were a movie genre called “discovery,” I would have said that.

Then my dad told me I could do anything I wanted in this world, be anything I wanted to be, I just had to dream it. Dreaming, from my dad’s point of view, happens when we are awake like the manifestation exercise Don instructs Richard in for his blue feather. For him, it is the language of our boundless, infinite imagination that is arrow-connected to our deepest passions. It is the precursor to choice, direction, and action. Ultimately, it is doing.

I understood my father’s dreaming as being what we do, that it becomes what we choose for making a living in life, which should be an expression of our greatest desires and passions. What I heard from my father is that our work—what we do in our outer world—should be equivalent with the interests that move us in our inner world.

My driving inner quest was to understand dreams. It had been my inner quest as far back as my second earliest memory at age three. That very specific memory was itself birthed from a dream. And from that memory forward I can remember all of my life—it is as though this memory was my first birthing, or the moment when I entered actual consciousness.

In this memory, I had woken up from a nightmare and had come to sit on our front steps in the morning sun to clear my head and think about it. I knew I had had nightmares for as long as I could remember. They were violent, terrifying, and always woke me up with a pounding heart, so much so that I had become terrified of sleeping at all and every night tried as hard as I could to delay the event. Because I had nightmares every night, I had no reason to think that the rest of life would be any different, and I knew that people lived a very long time. This was an intense realization for me and I thought I wanted to die, instead of facing years and years of nightly terror.

I sat on those steps and thought about how to kill myself. As I did, I began to disturb a line of ants running across the concrete near my feet. I suddenly thought, I don’t know what death is! What if death is one long sleep from which we never wake up? This would be one long, continuous, forever nightmare! I couldn’t imagine anything worse. So I abandoned the thought of killing myself for the moment.

Now I began to just wonder about the nature of sleep. Was it possible for the human body to never sleep? It didn’t seem so. I thought I could go a day or two without sleeping, but eventually sleep would win. And what if it didn’t? I had never known anyone to not sleep. What if not sleeping leads to death? It was the only alternative I could think of, and so I was back where I started.

The only thing left, I thought, was to wonder if I could learn to understand my nightmares. What were they? Could I interact with my dreams? Can dreams be changed? Could I come to a life without nightmares, where I wouldn’t fear sleeping?

In that moment, at age three, I made a vow to understand my dreams. I would find a way to live without terror. I would learn to master my nightmares. I made this vow with myself and that which I knew to be bigger than me, which today I call God.

From that point forward, I had an intimate relationship with my dreams. I dreamed often and watched them carefully, and I thought about them during the day to try to discern their meaning. I also carried the nightmare of that pivotal morning with me as a talisman, knowing that once I found the person who could explain it to me, or I learned to understand its meaning, I would have fulfilled my mission.

So dreaming was my greatest passion and interest. I was fascinated with dreams. At age ten, however, I had no idea that a person could actually do dreaming for a living. I figured it was simply a question I would answer for myself “on the side.”

I did, though, have a clear purpose for my doing. I remember having this purpose as far back as age five, and it’s become an intention I have held and repeated as prayer over and over throughout my life. That intention is that God use me—whatever unique parts that make me, Me—as a vehicle for good in this world. That’s what I wanted to do.

I had a very clear image for my purpose prayer, which was my body as a literal vehicle that God as Essence pushed into, way into my fingertips, to guide what I touched and did. I understood that all of my talents were unique to me and so could be used to fulfill a unique purpose for God’s work, just as a tractor does something different than a pickup and both are necessary to keep a farm going.

I told my father about my purpose-goal and he explained that talents and passions are the same. Being a vehicle meant delving deeply into—or doing—what interests me, because those are the unique parts of me that make me, Me. Asking to be a vehicle for God’s work is an objective, which sets our focus. Building the vehicle, however, is the doing. It is for us to manifest what that vehicle looks like and does. I wasn’t supposed to wait around for God to hop in and build everything out; instead, I was to build it out myself by exploring my passions and getting my own vehicle on the road. God would point out directions once I was driving along.

So, still not seeing how dreaming was something that could be work, I answered my father by telling him about my other interests and passions: being the first woman president of the United States, a writer, a psychologist, and a scientist. I wanted to make movies and work in entertainment. And in all of this, I wanted to help people. This became my dream list, and he told me I could do all of them.

A few years later, my dad woke me up in the very early morning. Whispering, he told me to follow him to the living room. There, the TV set was on. I grew up in a sparsely populated part of Texas, and our house was out in the country, far enough from town we couldn’t get cable. Because my father was a cattleman and a rancher, it was important to him to receive the most up-to-date commodities market information, so he had bought a gigantic satellite dish that looks like the kind TV stations use today. It brought us channels from all over the country. This morning, in the still dark outside, it was tuned to a news show.

My father sat me down in front of the show and pointed his finger at a woman talking on it. He told me that her name was Oprah Winfrey, and that if I wanted to be in entertainment that was the woman I should use as my role model. He said she was going to be a superstar because she was real, had talent, and genuinely liked people. I watched her closely.

The next morning I got up and watched Oprah again. Every morning I would get up and watch Oprah on the Chicago morning news show, and when my dad was in town he would watch her with me. Soon Oprah got her own TV show, and so I watched her in the afternoon. I added “working for Oprah” to my dream list.

Years later, when I was a senior in college, my father asked me at winter break what I wanted to do when I graduated that coming spring. I was getting a degree in Communications: Radio-TV-Film, and I told him I still wanted to work for Oprah. Oprah was in the entertainment business, and she was about helping people—two of the things on my dream list. But I told him I didn’t know how to go about it.

My father instructed me to get a legal pad. I loved when he said this, because it always meant an idea was being hatched and that an adventure would ensue. To this day, I get a thrill of excitement when I pull out a fresh legal pad: it represents all possibility to me and the genesis of something being formed.

I sat down with my father and the legal pad of possibilities and wrote two letters, both introducing myself and stating my dream. One letter was going to be sent to all of the alumni from my school who were living in Chicago, where the Oprah show was produced (I would later get the list from my college). The letter told them a little about me, and a lot about my dream to work for Oprah.

The second letter was to Oprah herself. It was a lot like the first letter, only the first letter asked if that person knew someone who worked for Oprah that I could get in touch with to ask for a job, while the letter to Oprah just asked for a job directly.

I sent over fifty letters, plus one (the one to Oprah). I heard back from one of the fifty. It was from an alumnus who was a high-level financier at a bank that specialized in loans to entertainment properties. His wife knew someone at the Oprah show, and he knew someone at the company that distributed the show. First, though, he wanted to talk with me.

From my tiny town in Texas and out-in-the-country home, Chicago seemed a million miles away from the phone I held pressed to my ear. And John, the alumnus, was like a superstar with his huge job and connections. The phone felt like a live wire in my hands as I felt a charge being connected to this bigger world of possibilities, and I couldn’t believe John’s kindness to spend a few moments with me.

The first thing John did was ask me a battery of questions about the entertainment industry. He especially wanted to know what I knew about syndication. I worked at the local ABC affiliate station while in college, but knew nothing about syndication. John told me about the NATPE convention—National Association of Television Production Executives—which was being held in New Orleans that month. It was a convention all about syndication. He offered to send me his tickets because he wasn’t able to attend; I just had to get myself there. I assured John that wouldn’t be a problem.

John’s instructions for me once I got to NATPE were to go and talk to everyone in the King World booth, and to meet one executive there specifically. He knew this executive and I was to use his name when introducing myself. King World is the company that sold the Oprah show to TV stations around the country. That, John said, was called syndication. Then I was to call him when it was over.

When I told this to my father, he had a different set of instructions for me. As part of my preparations for going to NATPE, he had me make business cards with my name, address, and phone number on them. He told me to talk to everyone at the King World booth just like John said, but to do it quick. Then I was to go all around the rest of the convention and introduce myself to everyone that I could, handing out all 500 of my cards to people I spoke to personally. I was to tell each of them, during some part of that conversation, my dream.

I took both my father and John at their word. I walked all over that convention floor and shook a lot of hands. I also told my dream to a lot of people. I especially made sure to talk to all of the production companies headquartered in Chicago, in case the efforts to meet with Oprah fell through, so that I could triangulate my strategy in getting to her company. I didn’t hand out all 500 cards, but the stack was a lot smaller when I came home.

Sending me to NATPE had been a bit of a test with John. It was instructional, and at the same time it was a way of gauging my interest and dedication to my goal. Fortunately, I passed. Soon after NATPE, John called and asked if I could fly to Chicago by the end of the week to interview at The Oprah Winfrey Show. I did, and was offered a job on the spot.

John’s sending me to NATPE was a response to my efforts. This is important to note because dreaming is a relationship between our inner voice and our outer efforts. That sentence should be bold and underlined. What we see in our imagination, or what our dreams tell us, is but a wisp until we respond to it and bring it manifest in the physical.

Dreaming is both nighttime and daytime, both imagination and effort. If we live solely in our imagination, we won’t get very far in life, neither if we live solely in effort—both are required. Together, dreaming and manifestation work as a dance that moves us forward and draws the form and direction of our life.

Sending me to NATPE was also a gift from John. Rather than remaining something abstract, I now had an image of the entertainment industry, and specifically of me in the entertainment industry. Walking the convention floor I had, literally, stepped into the business for that brief window, and I could see myself working in it. I would walk into different exhibitor booths and could imagine myself shaking hands with buyers, talking about television programs, sitting at tables and scratching out deals. By forming into an image, the entertainment business became a tangible reality.

Image is our blueprint. As much as images are the language of our present experiencing, they are also the destination we direct ourselves toward. It is from image that our conscious processing makes decisions.

Lesson Three:

We can do anything by seeing it. We can create any reality we choose. We are the creators and captains of our life.

Images are the bases of all our actions. Just like driving a car somewhere, if we can’t see where it is that we are going, we have nowhere to go. The images that we see inside are our destinations. As Richard was instructed in the book Illusions, putting ourselves into our images makes them manifest in real life and in very real ways. Walking the floor of the NATPE convention directly put me into a now-tangible image, which then became a now-tangible destination.

The trip to NATPE was also a gift in another way. Not only did going there prepare me for the job interview with Oprah’s company, it put me in a situation where I could be creative, or not, to make a little, or make something much more.

I could have spent the whole time talking to just the folks in the King World booth. That was, after all, what I had come there to do. Instead, at my father’s suggestion, I walked the convention floor over and over, speaking to people from MCA, Columbia, Paramount, Universal … all the studios and all the boutiques. I saw how television shows are packaged, watched how buyers and sellers talked to each other, what they ate, and how they dressed. My worldview expanded, and I made countless contacts. This was all very good, because I didn’t take the job at Oprah.

The job offered to me at The Oprah Winfrey Show was to work in production, and production was starting the following week. I had, by this time, only a few more months left to graduate college. I was faced with a choice: graduate from college, or take the job at Oprah that I had dreamed about since junior high. I chose to graduate.

I made my choice with freedom and lightness of heart, because I had verified that dreams of our passions can become manifest. The lesson that my dad had been teaching me, that I had read in Illusions, I had now tested and experienced for myself. Rather than feeling like the closing of a door saying no to the job offer, the offer was a promise to me of endless possibilities. I said no with the newfound assurance that I had a lifetime of opportunities to manifest for myself.

In dreaming, it is important to write down our dreams and images so that we can verify how they become manifest. It is essential to verify as a reminder to ourselves of how this relationship works. Verification is an important part of the dialogue—it is like saying to your Self as partner, “I hear you.”

It is easy to say that dreaming work requires faith. Another way to consider it is that this work requires trust. Because I have been Dreaming for many years, writing my dreams and verifying them, like a scientist I have observed a world that operates according to certain laws or mechanics. Because dreaming is born of the body—it is a biological function—it adheres to its own physical laws much like other biological functions. While the Dreaming world contains the Mystery, it doesn’t operate by whimsy or caprice; it is both reliable and verifiable. So I dream in this world trusting in its modes of operation, which I have verified for myself over and over again.

It is also important to write down how our dreaming becomes manifest so that we don’t miss the miracles. Life is both quotidian and sacred. We can lift the quotidian up to the sacred by imbuing it as such. This often happens through recognition and gratitude.

I could easily have dismissed the Oprah opportunity as luck, chance, or being in the right place at the right time. Or, I could have taken it for myself and claimed it as a result of hard work. For me, it was neither; it was a true co-creating with my dreaming and conscious selves. I dreamed what I wanted to do, which had bubbled up from my inner. Then, I responded to that dream by consciously working to bring it manifest.

Consciously working to bring something manifest means simply being present and responsive when the path begins to unfold through opportunities. This unfolding is one of life’s miracles. I have seen people do all the work of imagining only to miss the opportunities to manifest because they didn’t believe in the miracle; they stayed mired in the linear reality instead of having eyes to see what was laying out before them.

It is very easy to devote rapt attention to our disappointments, concerns, fears, or the perceived gaps between our now and where we wish to be. If we do this, we become myopic to the Mystery. Instead of living a vertical reality, we settle into a linear one. With the Oprah experience, rather than seeing it as simply a series of random events in my life, I chose to lift it up to the vertical and lived it as something sacred.

The Aboriginal women could have just seen any rock on their land the same as any other. The rock we celebrated could have simply been a rock. Or not. By greeting the rock and imbuing it with their ceremonies, it became a strong connecting point for their entire lifespan as a people and a divining rod for their experience with the Divine. This is what is meant by lifting the quotidian up to the sacred and imbuing it as such.

Settling into the linear perspective flattens out our life experience. From here it becomes harder to see that all around us at every moment there are other qualities and available experiences happening in the vertical—all the miracles.

Life itself is a miracle, and each minute we are alive is an expressing of that miracle. When we think of a friend and they call us a few minutes later, or our seat on an airplane is next to the exact person we need to meet with for our business, these are also miracles. They are the expressions of our relationship with our Dreaming body, with what we recognize as God and grace. And as with the Aboriginal women’s sacred sites, we bring these miracles to us, just as they call us to them.

I have a dear friend in Texas whose family is Mexican, Catholic, numerous, and very close. She grew up in Texas, went to school there, and has lived there all her life. She is married to a Jewish man from California, whose family is small and estranged. How could these two people possibly have met?

One day, several years into his career life, the man had a thought about moving to Texas. He’d never been or lived there, but he had a feeling that there might be a girl in Texas who could love a man like him from California—this is how he says it. And so he moved there. The job he took was at the same company where my friend works. It was a match. This is an example of calling an experience to us, at the same time we are called to it. It is, to me, an example of the miraculous in life and exemplifies living in the vertical.

I see the Oprah experience as one part of my spiritual journey. It was an expression of the dialogue between me and my dreaming, or spiritual, Self. I listened carefully to all it had to teach me, and I responded to how it unfolded for me by my listening. When opportunities to manifest it arose—such as John reading my letter and calling me—I was present to it and I responded to it immediately. The experience was me actively participating in the relationship between my conscious and my dreaming.

This is one reason why I see business and creativity as spiritual paths. Both require imagining and manifesting, and becoming facile with the left-right steps forward of these two movements. Imagining is listening to the dreaming voice and being able to receive what it has to bring us; manifesting is responding to it. We have to pull back and then burst forth, just as the creation story where God pulls His Light back in order for creation to spring forth. If we move through these two steps consciously, we can engage with a deeper spiritual aspect of living.

In the process of obtaining the interview for the Oprah show position and then choosing to say no to it, I also realized that by seeing myself in the entertainment business I didn’t need to work for Oprah. Instead, I remembered I was driven to seek the qualities that initially interested me which I saw embodied in Oprah.

While “Oprah” included entertainment at large, making movies, and helping people, I specifically saw in her the qualities my father pointed out when he first suggested she become a model for me: someone who had found a creative way to help people to find their own inner, unique light and freedom. Because manifesting the job offer verified my beliefs about dreaming and manifestation, this freed me to look to my greater goals. Rather than hitching my wagon to Oprah, who had found her own Selfhood, my job was to carve my own, unique path toward a creative way of helping people.

As I was growing up, my father made it a habit to post sticky notes on my bathroom mirror so that I would wake up to a daily thought. These came from books he had read, or conversations he heard, or just thoughts he would have. Later, when I went to college, he would mail the sticky notes to me. Two of my father’s sticky notes stand out here:

Ideals are like stars. We won’t succeed in touching them with our hands, but, like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, we will follow them, and succeed in reaching our destiny.

God needs you to make things happen. Like a rock in physics, when it is in motion it is easy to direct and move, to roll along a new course with the slightest touch; when it is stationary it is nearly impossible. God can’t work with a couch potato. Don’t just sit around and ask God for things. If you want a prayer answered, go out and start doing something—God will show up once you make the first move.

My father’s life in action, and what he passed to me, is to live our passions. These are our ideals. Living our passions, however, means setting a course and then being fluid in the details of how they take form. This feels like a paradox, but in fact it is not. It is about essence, not concreteness. It is akin to letting a baby bird sit in our hands and delighting in watching it move in all its aliveness without clenching our fist around it. If we clench, we kill it.

My father’s life in action also showed me that manifesting requires effort and action, in addition to imagination. God prefers a relationship to a request box.

Dreaming is an impulse, a movement, an idea, a glimpse into the deepest recognition of our Inner and a look into the future. If we do not bring our dreams down and out into the physical, waking reality, then we’ve only done half the work. We’ve squandered the gift of the dream. However, if we respond to our dreams, suddenly life springs open with possibilities.

Lesson Four:

Dreams by themselves are only one part—it is like one person dancing. Dreams require us to pull them into a grounded, manifest, and physical reality through our conscious attention and effort. Dreams and consciousness are two partners in a complete dance.

The work of manifestation may be to engage in the dream, such as making the commitment to paint each day if our inner is leading us to paint, or to write letters as I did to ask for a lead to an interview. The work of manifestation is also the work of developing the inner to remove the blocks that impede our progress.

I have worked with people who have seen their dreams clearly, and even taken a step or more to manifest them. But, they came to me because of a pattern of shutting down just as the manifesting of the response began to unfold. For example, a call would come from a letter sent to a place of possible employment, or an invitation to speak at an event would arrive in the email, but these responses went unanswered for days or even weeks. My clients had hit a block. Eventually many of these offers expired altogether—jobs were filled by other applicants, other speakers were chosen, and so forth—and the opportunities to manifest were lost because of an inability in that moment to actively respond to what their dreaming had put into motion.

Whatever blocks or issues you have in your business and creativity are exactly the same issues you have in all aspects of your life. This is another reason why exploring blocks around our business and creative lives is a path of inner development.

The blocks that impede our progress take many forms; for example, fear, insecurity, feelings of being undeserving, what you perceive to be your mother’s belief that you can’t make money as an artist, your father’s belief that you’ll never be good enough at anything, or the belief that it is your sibling who is the creative one. You might carry a belief system that says only your father can be the star, or that you don’t deserve happiness, and so forth.

We have to do the work to clear ourselves of our blocks in order to bring dreams and manifestations into being. This is another way that manifestation, or miracles, are things we co-create. Co-creation means doing our part to clear the path to be able to both respond and receive. We have to clear ourselves of the belief systems of others we have chosen to pick up, or the tangled associations we have fashioned when faced with life’s challenges, in order to become who we truly are.

Manifesting our deepest passions requires developing our inner being. We have to clear and sweep ourselves of emotions, residues and the beliefs of others much like the Aboriginal women had us clear the space for the sacred ceremony. To do this means recognizing clearly who we are—the outer garments in which we may have cloaked ourselves, in addition to our deepest, truest Selves. In order to sweep out that which does not serve us, or is not part of our true selves, we have to see it. The process of developing one’s inner Self involves a brave and honest look at all the patterns that we have drawn in our life. This can be done through working with images and dreaming.

Once we have cleared the space of inner blocks, stagnant emotions, and old belief systems, the True Self can powerfully step forward. This is called Selfhood and it is being a fully realized person. That’s maybe the biggest reason why I believe that choosing to find and follow our deepest passions is a path toward personal and spiritual development.We each have a unique place and contribution to make on this planet and it is only by coming to the Self that we do so. The imagery exercises in “Part II” will help you begin to do this work of clearing and discovering.

In the Jewish Torah (Genesis 12:1 & 2), Abraham is told by God to leave his native land and his father’s house to go to the land that God would show him, and there, he would be made a great nation. Curiously, the directive God gives him is “Lech Lecha,” which means “go to yourself.”

As I dream this Abraham story as a dream, it is when we go deeply within ourselves that we reach our true “land,” land being the body and that which is the bound Self (bound as in having geographic bounds; or, as in the body, physical boundaries that separate us as individual beings from other beings). From our true land—that which is our truest Self, our deepest embodiment of Self—we become abundant and fertile in our creations. Creations are our “nation,” meaning our progeny or that which we create from our deepest passions, and it is they that become fecund or great; creations are anything we beget from our unique Selfhood, such as a book, a painting, or a family.

In order to go deeply into our truest Self, we have to leave the culture and history of all that is telling us what is supposed to be, or how we are supposed to be; in other words, our “native land”—our upbringing.

We also have to leave the house of our father, which is to say, leave the story of our father (parents), the belief systems, the expectations, and all that our parents have placed on us of their wishes and expectations, their doubts, and all the patterns of behavior we have taken on from them that impede our individual expression. It is only by freeing ourselves from expectations and all that would influence, sway, or demand of us, all that we have taken on from others as our own, that we reach the Self of our own land.

By being completely “naked” of all the imprints of our upbringing, we find that which is uniquely, undeniably, completely original in our Selfhood. Like our fingerprints, Selfhood, is completely individual.

The Abraham dream is also one about the action of manifesting. How can we understand that God is telling Abraham to walk toward the land God will show him, after he’s started walking? It’s a contradiction. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be shown where to go first, so that the step is at least pointed in the right direction? Where in the heck is Abraham supposed to go?

As I continue to dream this dream, I feel that God is asserting that we are in relationship. Meaning, when we take the step to move toward our greatest inner true Self, the direction unfolds and becomes increasingly clear. Once we take the action—the step of moving forward—then God will show us the details.

Going is the movement that starts the journey—it is the inner impulse and intent that causes us to raise our foot toward stepping. Before the foot steps down, in the time and space between intent and physical step, where the foot lands will be directed. Taking the first step is our commitment to the relationship, and the work of it. It is the action of bringing the Dream into the tangible, into the grounded, manifest physical world. It is our agreement to engage in the journey, our response to the “I’m here.”

It is also by taking that step into the unknown that we are most empowered. Like any good teacher knows, the student grows the most when they are enabled to find the questions and the answers for themselves, rather than being told how to think. And, because in this reading God will show us, taking that first step is entering into a covenant of the promise of how the Dreaming world works. We both dare and trust, we hear the quiet Inner Voice and we step forward where we are met, in response, and are shown space and fertility greater than anything we alone could have imagined.

There is no other human being like us on this planet, never before nor ever will be. Selfhood is both birthright and obligation. Each of us is given the possibility of coming to Selfhood. This is inherent in our beingness. We are obligated to engage in the process because by coming to the Self we bring to the world that which we uniquely are fashioned to bring. Do we need to carry forward what made our parents, our parents? Or, to compromise our own possibilities by living out the life someone else dreams on our behalf? Our uniqueness is necessary for the world, and expressing our uniqueness creates abundance. This is how I dream the dream of the Abraham story.

In my early thirties, I was a founding partner in a real estate development company. Our company bought historic apartment buildings which we then restored, rented out, managed, and then eventually sold.

Initially this venture began as a partnership in search of home. I bought, with a dear friend, a four-unit apartment building that we restored together in order for us to live there. We became deeply involved with the families who lived in the other units in the building and in the neighborhood. Together with them we formed grassroots efforts to improve the neighborhood; we worked with the local kids, teaching them building skills; and we organized co-projects with juvenile offender teens to plant trees and clean trash.

I loved this time of restoring the building simultaneously with restoring the community. It was work that was directly helping people to excel as individuals and also as a group of neighbors, and our efforts involved me in projects working directly with city government. Overall, it was a deeply satisfying experience and ful filled two of the passions of the dream list I gave at age ten to my father: politics and helping people.

The renovation efforts and the apartments in our building that we rented out and managed were beautiful and profitable. During the process, a longtime friend and business mentor dropped by one day to say hello. He saw how much we had done to change the building and the neighborhood, and he saw it as a success.

My partner and I had embarked upon our project as a way of having a home that was partly financed by the rental income of the tenants. We had become involved with the community simply because we were passionately engaged in its betterment. But after seeing the results of our efforts, and their greater potential, my mentor invited us to partner with him and make a business of buying and renovating buildings, which he would finance.

We agreed and the business grew very quickly. As it grew, there also grew a distance between me and the projects and people we interacted with. The time needed for the business took our time away from being able to do the projects that meant so much to me. And, rather than tenants who had become friends, with each added building the new people occupying them simply became tenants.

At this time, I began to have a series of dreams in which I would be in a meeting with Donald Trump, which had caused me to be late to my meeting with Oprah, with whom I was supposed to write a book. I would realize with grief that I was again late (I knew I had been late many times before), and I would rush out from my meeting with Donald Trump and race toward the meeting with Oprah, desperately upset that I had put off the appointment and that I wasn’t respecting her, and wondering why I had done so when I liked Oprah so much more than Donald! Writing with Oprah was what I wanted to do more than anything, why was I always so late?!?!

As the dreamer of this dream, I made an emotion-less business out of real estate, and I have stayed too long there. My biggest goal, what I wanted to do more than anything, was to find a creative way to help people. And my Dreaming was telling me how to do it—write a book!

Dreaming is a light that gives us an initial movement forward and a glimpse ahead at the path. I had no idea what I was supposed to write about, or what kind of book it was meant to be. Like Abraham, I simply had to hear, respond, and step forward. Stepping forward, another light flickers in the up-ahead illuminating the next steps on the path, just as Abraham was told by stepping forward he would be brought to the land he would be shown.

The last lesson in this chapter is from the only night dream my father ever told me. It is a dream from when he was a small boy.

My father’s father had a temper and was violent. As a child, if he told you to do something, you did it. If he told you not to do something, you avoided it. No questions, and you didn’t want to explore the alternatives.

One day my father asked to borrow his father’s pocket knife. He was told he could, but that he had to bring it back at the end of the day or he would be in trouble. Night came, and with it, dinner. At the dinner table, my father was asked for the knife. He didn’t have it! He had forgotten even where he put it! He begged his father to have the night to find it, and he was given until dawn to do so.

After dinner, my father ran to the barn and searched relentlessly. The knife was nowhere to be found. In the late hours, my grandmother came out to the barn and told him it was time to go to bed, that he had searched enough. As she put my father to bed, she told him to ask his dreams to show him where it is. My father closed his eyes and prayed that his dreams would do so.

After falling asleep, my father dreams this:

He sees himself get up out of bed and walk out into the pasture. He goes along the fence line, counting fence posts. When he gets to a certain number he reaches up and feels the top of the post. Here he finds the knife, out of eyesight.

My father jolted awake from his dream and, in his pajamas, ran out to the pasture, counted fence posts, and when he got to the certain one reached his hand up. Just as in his dream, the knife was laying on top.

Lesson Five:

Dreaming is a part of the True Self. It is what extends us beyond our physical self; dreams hold the past, present, and the future. We can ask them a question and they will answer it.

From my father’s dream, I learned that our Dreaming Self is bigger, reaches further, and knows more than our waking self. I learned that we can ask questions of our dreams, and that our dreams will answer them. This told me that we have a special relationship to our dreams, and that this relationship is important. I understood that dreams are a part of us that is watching, and talking to us, in a different way from the part of us that is always doing something, but that both parts can talk to each other. And I learned that the watching part of us is very intelligent and can always be trusted.

If we close our eyes and look inside, we will see.