Читать книгу Dream Your Self into Being - Bonnie Bahira Buckner - Страница 8

This is a short chapter, but an important one. It is about my grandmother. While my father laid the foundation for understanding the active, manifesting aspect of dreaming, my grandmother laid the foundation for the quiet, receptive, mysterious, and spiritual aspect.

I introduced my grandmother to you in the last chapter. She was my father’s mother, the one who instructed my father to dream the location of the knife that he had lost.

Unlike my father, my grandmother spoke to me about several night dreams. She thought that night dreams were important and that they came from God. Some of them she thought of as prophetic. In others, she met and talked with family, both alive and deceased, and she saw these dreams as offering an in-between space where these meetings could occur. Her dreams became more frequent in her last years on this planet, especially those in which she talked with deceased family, and these she took at this time to be signs that she was preparing for her own crossing over.

My grandmother was very active in her church and very spiritual outside of the church. The church was more than a physical location with scheduled events; for her, it was a living part of her relationship with God, which was seamless and ever-present. She lived in ongoing communion with God.

My grandmother ran what was called a Prayer Tree. Hers was the name at the top. When anything would happen in town that warranted prayer, my grandmother was called. The beleaguered person would spill their worries and grandmother would listen. When finally they were done, she would ask the other person to close their eyes and pray with her. She prayed intently.

As soon as my grandmother hung up from praying with the person, she would consult the next level branch of the tree, which had five names. She would phone each of these people and tell them what had happened, who needed prayer, and for what. They would each say a prayer together. Then the prayer was passed. Each of the five people my grandmother called had five more names under them to call, and so on.

The Prayer Tree calls happened swiftly, with prayers multiplying and zipping through town within the half-hour once my grandmother had set the Tree in motion. I have seen my grandmother stop to pray mid-meal, in a bathrobe, and before coffee had even been made if a call came in for the Prayer Tree. It was priority.

Along with hearing my grandmother’s night dreams, I was also told a story many times throughout my childhood. The story happened before I was born, and it is about my grandmother’s stepson, my Uncle Charles, who was in the military in active duty during World War II.

My grandmother was known for her cakes, both in the family and, famously, in the town. They were delicious, and my Uncle Charles loved them, especially her fruit cake. One morning during Uncle Charles’s station, my grandmother woke up and felt very strongly she needed to send Charles a cake. She set to work baking, working all day long with single-focused intention. She said prayers and then she shipped the cake.

We are told by Uncle Charles that the day the cake arrived he was so excited that he hid it from his bunkmates because he didn’t want to share any of it with them. When lunchtime came, Uncle Charles pretended to be sick. He told his bunkmates to go on, that he was just going to lie down for a little bit. Once they had all gone on to the mess hall for lunch, Uncle Charles pulled out his cake and lay down on his bunk to eat it. At that moment, the base was bombed. All of the men in the mess hall were killed. My Uncle Charles and only a few other men from the base survived.

I learned several things from my grandmother’s stories and examples that have informed my dreaming life. The first is that our relationship with God, our ability to step into the vertical reality, is intimate and immediate. We are able to access this at any time, and dreams are a part of that relationship. When my grandmother spoke of her dreams, she spoke of them as if they were an equal reality, just different, and in the present. In a similar way, prayer was never formalized; it was simply done as conversation.

Lesson Six:

The dreaming world and the waking world are distinct and yet the same. We can access the dreaming world at any time. This means we can access our relationship with God at any time.

When my grandmother woke up knowing she had to bake the cake for Uncle Charles, she did it as one continuous movement, dreaming to awake and bringing the dream into the waking moment. I learned from her that there is a waking world and a spiritual world and they are distinct and yet the same, one on top of the other.

Once, my grandmother told me that love can be a prayer. I understood that to mean that all of our actions are both physical and spiritual. When my grandmother baked the cake for Uncle Charles, she did it with love and intent, and then let it go. It seemed to me that her experience of the spiritual, dreaming world as one that is always present is what allowed her to do this.

With my grandmother also came a glimpse of the intuitive aspects of dreaming. She did not know why she felt she needed to bake the cake for Uncle Charles, she just knew she had to do it. She did not dismiss her knowing—she accepted it as important. She stayed in relationship with it by responding to it. She never missed the miracle.

Growing up, I respected this kind of intuition and paid attention to it. However, my first real test for this lesson came just after graduating from college.

I had left my hometown and moved to Dallas, where I was sleeping on the couch of some friends from college while looking for a job. I had been interviewing at length, focused on my goal of obtaining a job selling syndicated television shows. I had stayed in touch with the contacts I had made at NATPE and met with them regularly. Each of them told me I had to get a job selling advertising time for a local television station first, in order to gain the experience I needed to move up into selling syndicated programming.

My thought at the time was that I would move anywhere to work in order to gain this needed experience, so I set up interviews in Dallas as well as other cities. I began to notice in my interviewing process that with some of the stations I met with I felt bright and open in my body; with other places, my body felt dark. I began to note these feelings as important indicators of my intuition.

After a couple of months of pavement pounding that had only generated a part-time assistant position, I submitted my résumé to a television station in Tucson, Arizona. I landed a phone interview, and then a second, and more correspondence that eventually progressed into an in-person interview. With great excitement, I flew to Arizona to meet with the station.

As excited and bright as I felt in all the previous steps leading up to the interview, the moment I arrived I went dark. I couldn’t understand why. Every person I met at the station I enjoyed, and the position was a great opportunity for me.

At the end of my interview, they asked me to join their team. With all the steps we had taken together, and especially with me flying out for the final interview, it seemed I would have answered yes right away. But inside, my body still felt dark. To everyone’s surprise, including my own, I asked to have a couple of days to think it over.

The entire flight home I kept hearing my inner voice: “Don’t take it.” I asked many people their advice on what I should do. Everyone I asked, including my father and all of the syndication contacts I had made who were mentoring me, advised me to take the job. But still I heard the inner voice and now I had begun to feel sick to my stomach thinking about taking it.

I had told the station I would take three days to think, and at the end of my three days I turned down the position. I followed my inner knowing despite the “on-paper” advantages. This was a very uncomfortable thing to do, especially given how much time and resources both the station and I had poured into the interview process, and especially since I couldn’t give a reason for my decision. I had no answer as to why I was saying no—I just knew I had to do so.

A couple of weeks after I turned down the job, my father died shockingly and unexpectedly in a plane crash. It was at the same time I would have been just starting the job at the station, had I said yes. I would have been in a strange city, with no friends or family around to support me, and I would have had the stress of a new position. Instead, I was still in Dallas, a familiar city where I was surrounded by friends and close to home. Was this the reason why I felt I shouldn’t take the job? I have no idea. But I do know I’m very glad that I followed my inner knowing.

There’s a part two to this story. Just a day or two before my father died, I had interviewed with a company that made my body feel bright. I liked each person I met there, and by the end of my interview I knew I wanted the job.

While I was at my father’s funeral, the woman whom I would be directly working for at that company called my apartment with the intention of hiring me. My roommate answered. Fortunately, I had told my roommate about the job interview, and she suddenly remembered this as she was writing down the message.

My roommate immediately told the woman what had happened with my father and about how much I had talked about wanting to work at her company. She knew there was a need to fill the position quickly, and I had not told her when I would be returning because I hadn’t known myself, nor did she want to call me and disturb me at that time. So she asked the woman to take a chance and wait for me to return from the funeral before filling the position. The woman did not agree or disagree, but said she would consider it.

The woman did wait, and when I returned we met for lunch. After lunch she offered me the job. This job opened many doors for me and my boss became a very important mentor, and later friend, in my life. We remain close friends today. She told me months after I had been working for her that she had felt in her intuition she should hire me, though she had many doubts about hiring someone for a demanding job just after such an unexpected event. Yet, she felt she was somehow put in my life at that time to sort of watch over me. Knowing what I did about my experience with Tucson, I also felt that this meeting was meant to be, and meant to be in its timing.

A year and a half after taking this job I had a similar test with my intuition. One of my syndication sales mentors had introduced me to a man named Lonnie who ran the research department of a major entertainment studio in Los Angeles. I was told that getting a job in his department could lead to a job within the studio selling syndication—my goal. When we talked he was very kind, but he was concerned about my lack of experience and had no current openings. Something sparked for me in the call, though, and so I went full force into asking him for any opportunity to let me show him my abilities.

Lonnie graciously gave me numerous projects. I say “graciously” because I know I was a bit of a pain in hounding him for them. He acted with integrity, however, and each of the projects was a test to see how much I really knew about the industry. I worked on them at night or on weekends. But still no job offer.

After a year of talking to Lonnie and preparing projects for him, I moved of my own accord to Los Angeles. Lonnie still did not have a position for me and so I began interviewing at other studios in earnest. Lonnie and I became friends, and he also became a true mentor. He continued to give me projects to hone my skills and to teach me about the industry. Through Lonnie, I became much more professional and versed in the business. Then I had an interview with a small, startup syndication company.

The start-up company was run by a very skilled man who did things in the business that many people didn’t think were possible—such as starting this company. He was a bit of a rainmaker and a master salesman. When I met with the company, my body felt bright. They liked me, but didn’t have a job selling syndication, so they offered me a job working on one of their productions with the promise that if something became available in syndication I would be in position for it.

The same day I received this offer from the start-up company Lonnie asked to take me to dinner. At the dinner, Lonnie beamed that a position had just become available in his office and that he could, finally, after all this time, hire me! He was thrilled. One would think I should have been. But, inside my body, I felt dark.

With great fear I told him I had to think about it. He was aghast, and rightfully so. After over a year of basically badgering this man for a job, almost any job, I now had one offered to me and I was asking to think about it. I explained to him the situation, and that I thought the other position might lead more quickly into my getting a job selling syndication. He blew up and told me at least forty reasons why I was wrong—start-ups go under, they had nothing to sell, his was a legitimate position but what the other company offered me would be a step back on some little production, etc. I heard him, but I still told him I needed three days to think about it.

During those three days, Lonnie called me several times a day to give me reasons as to why I should take his job over the start-up. I am very grateful for his generosity in doing this. He was acting as a true friend who was genuinely worried I would make a decision that would derail my career. Lonnie’s reasons were sound: his offer was at a giant, established studio with name value, it would afford great experience to set me up for my goal, the studio would generate networking and other door-opening opportunities, his position paid twice the salary I was offered at the other job plus benefits, and so on.

I greatly appreciated Lonnie’s attempts to sway me to his job. I thought each of them through. But my inner voice kept telling me to take the start-up. After my three days thinking, I did just that. Despite my fears that I would lose a great friend and mentor, I followed my inner voice and turned down Lonnie’s job offer.

My job at the start-up was the lowest level production position available. I did grunt work all day. However, true to their word, when a position opened up for a syndication sales job I was allowed to pitch myself for the role. I got it. The start-up had led me to my goal in less than a year.

The new position came with a salary that surpassed what Lonnie’s studio position had offered. More important, it evolved into a five-year successful working experience that opened far more doors than would have opened had I taken Lonnie’s studio job. I also made some of my closest friends at the start-up, including a future business partner. And, five years later when I was ready to move into a new venture, so, too, were the heads of the company. They left the start-up to form a production studio and brought me over to run it for them.

A few years into my working for the start-up, Lonnie and I were having dinner together. He suddenly said, “You were right.” I asked about what. He said I was right about taking the job at the start-up and turning his down. He said there would have been no way I would have ever moved into selling syndication that quickly and gotten promoted as fast as I had if I had taken the job at his studio. To him, I had gambled and won; to me, I had once again verified my inner voice.

Lonnie is a dear friend to this day. He is also the friend who financed the building restoration company I mentioned in the last chapter. He and I also co-founded a company that put me in the maelstrom of politics at a national level. But both of these ventures came much later. It was clear that the initial spark with Lonnie meant we had things to do together, just not that original job at the studio.

Intuition is a part of dreaming. I learned about it by experiencing it, and then I developed my facility with it doing the dream work with Catherine.

Bodily signs are an integral part of intuition and dreaming. As Catherine would often say: In-Tuition: learning within. Dreaming is the language of the body. Our spiritual body is housed in our physical body, thus our experiencing is through that specific lens of what we take in through our senses, and how our body responds to this information (in-formation). Thus, knowing how the body moves in response to images and feelings is very important.

In my untrained days, I could only say that I felt “light” or “dark” about job possibilities. As I trained, I learned that I have specific movements and feelings all through my body in response to experience. For example, when I hear a truth I feel a silver, sparkling electric “wiggle” up and down the middle of my chest like unzipping a zipper, and when I make a shift an expansion occurs in the middle of my chest. These feelings are signposts and they often precede physical manifestation, which is one reason they are integral to intuition. I will talk about how to map the body in this way in “Part II.”

Responding to intuition, as I’ve described in this chapter, often means going against conventional thinking. Dreaming requires us to make brave choices, like I did in saying no to the offers from the TV station and Lonnie. Selfhood is a brave endeavor. Making choices from our innermost Self, however, ultimately brings much greater rewards.

In the previous chapter, I described a dream of my father’s in which he sees himself clearly finding the knife he thought he had lost. By asking his dream he stepped into a deeper, more knowing part of the Self. My grandmother extended that by showing me that dreams also allow us to connect with others. They can connect us in the way that my grandmother knew to bake the cake for Uncle Charles, as well as in the way that she would meet with family in dreams. Dreaming, I came to understand, is both individual and communal. It is access to the dream field where connections and movements outside of time can occur. Intuition is a part of dreaming, and dreaming begets intuition.

Lesson Seven:

Dreaming is both individual and communal. It connects us to the deepest, knowing part of the Self, and also connects us to others. We stay in relationship by responding to our dreams.