The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (16 page)

Breton commented, “I would be tempted to say that two people walking near each other constitute a single influencing body,
primed
.” He compares this phenomenon to “those sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors out of regions that were not there before, producing flashes of lightning.”

It
can
work like this, but let's be wary. Going around with someone else — or, certainly, in a group — can help to shut down your sensitivity to the signs and symbols around you, and may repel some of them. Why? Because we so often have the tendency to reinforce each other's long-standing attitudes and views of reality. For your friendship to be a coincidence multiplier, you both need to be in motion, and not just in the physical sense.

4. LIFE RHYMES

Mark Twain said that history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. This is certainly true of personal history. Sometimes it's the little stories that make us aware that life rhymes. Consider this rhyming episode:

Cindy had a new boyfriend. After a year of not dating, followed by a succession of bad dates, she was thrilled to have found a man who filled her and fulfilled her. The sex was terrific, and she was thinking about it when she got on an office elevator, smiling to herself over the silly phrase she had uttered as she had kissed him good-bye: “You really are a hot dog.”

Three men joined her in the elevator dressed in full-body hotdog suits for a promotion. As the elevator went up, one of the giant wieners winked at Cindy and said, “If you're hungry, I'm available.”

Here's another rhyming sequence in an ordinary day: I had an hour before my live radio show, whose theme that day was “What the Bleep Do We Know That We Don't
Know
We Know?”

I took the dog for a walk in a nearby park, thinking it would be cool if I noticed something that would give me a fresh anecdote on that theme. Just then, I noticed a flattened pack of Camel cigarettes on the path. Not exactly an exotic or uplifting sight, but it made me think of Egypt and camels.

After I returned to the house, my wife phoned to tell me her boss had just returned from a vacation in Egypt and had brought her a fabulous camel-bone bracelet. Then, when I got on the air, a caller told me she had been dreaming, night after night, about Egypt, and proceeded to describe one of her Egyptian dreams.

And another: As I was driving with family and friends to an evening concert, we heard the start of a Christmas-season message from a Catholic bishop who had been accused of soliciting young men in a local park.

“The bishop may not be an abuser, but he's a cruiser,” someone quipped. “Turn him off.”

I pushed the button for another station, and the first words we heard were “He has skeletons in his closet.”

When there is rhyme, there are sometimes very interesting reasons. To experience these things fully, Baudelaire reminds us, we need to be in a state of “poetic health.”

Black Dog on the Plane

I flew to the West Coast with my friend Wanda Burch, who had just published her book
She Who Dreams
, about her path to healing from breast cancer through Active Dreaming. I spoke to Wanda on the plane about the important role that black dogs have played in my life and in my dreams and how the black dog often figures in mythology as a gatekeeper or guide.

As we disembarked at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, Wanda said, “There was a black dog on the plane.” I turned and saw a large black standard poodle and its owner, a striking fair-haired woman, disembarking. I would have stopped to talk to them, but Wanda and I had to hurry to make our connection.

As we were standing in line at the departure gate, Wanda said, “There's the black dog again.” I started to walk over to introduce myself when I heard my name being paged. When I got to the check-in desk, the airline clerk asked me, “Would you mind sitting next to a dog on the plane?” I told her I would be delighted.

On board the plane, I swapped seats with the poodle 's owner to give the dog room to stretch out. I now found myself sitting between Wanda and the dog's owner, who turned out to be a surgeon who specialized in breast cancer patients. The surgeon told me she was originally from Wanda's part of the country — the Mohawk Valley — but had moved to Palo Alto.

When I introduced the two women, the surgeon was greatly interested in Wanda's use of dreams for self-diagnosis and healing, and she wanted to know whether her doctors had been willing to listen to her dreams. Wanda praised one of her oncologists, whom she called “Doctor Bart” in her book, for his active interest in her dreams.

“
Doctor Bart?
” the surgeon echoed, incredulous. “He called me last week. He invited me to return to the Mohawk Valley to take over his practice.”

The Shark Shows His Fin

The next story unfolded the very next day. The setting was Seattle. The black dog theme came up again. So did a shark's fin.

I was driving with friends to the Fox TV station in downtown Seattle for a live interview. We had a few minutes to spare, so we crossed the highway on foot to get a cup of coffee. There was so much traffic as we tried to recross the busy road that we began to worry we would be late for the show. Then the driver of a strange car braked in the middle of the highway and waved for me to cross. The car was amazing. It was painted in roaring waves of blue and green, and on top was a giant shark fin.

I wondered if this was setting a theme for the breakfast show. One thing I know about sharks is that they don't get cancer. I have worked with cancer patients to transfer the healing image of a shark that can gobble up cancer cells like an aquatic Pac-Man, and sometimes this has done great good.

As I waited in the studio, the story rolling across the TV screens was about a black dog that — through a bizarre chain of circumstance — had inherited millions of dollars. I noted a rhyming theme from the plane flight the day before.

My interview began, and the anchorwoman told me a personal dream, in which she was flying over Caribbean waters. Looking down, she saw the dorsal fins of sharks circling in the water below her.

I asked for her feelings, and she said she felt happy inside the dream. I suggested that, if this were my dream, I might see it as holding a promise of healing from cancer for someone I knew, because sharks don't get cancer. The anchorwoman gasped and said she had just received news that her mother was on the mend from cancer. She added that she had the dream when she was on vacation in the Caribbean, which was also when her mother was first diagnosed with cancer. There was total silence in the newsroom after this exchange.

After the show, we took the ferry across to Vashon Island to check out a possible site for future workshops. The owner was agitated because of a shark dream she had had the night before — and because that samemorning, she had discovered that some special shark teeth she kept next to her bed had gone missing.

5. THE WORLD IS A FOREST OF SYMBOLS

The phrase comes from Baudelaire:

Nature 's a temple where living columns

Sometimes deliver messages in riddles;

Man makes his way through forests of symbols

That watch him with intimate knowledge.

Everything that enters our field of perception means
something
, large or small. Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds.

We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and
available
to all the forms of meaning that are watching and waiting for us. We travel best when we can manage that sense of rhythm and rhyme that Baudelaire called “a poetic state of health.” The celebrated ancient Greek authority on dreams, Artemidorus of Daldis, said that the great requirement for a successful dream interpreter is “a gift for resemblances.” This is the key for reading the symbols that are watching us along the trails of ordinary life, and the gift grows with practice.

The signs that come up are sometimes unmistakably in our face. Kathy was fuming over the angry breakup of a relationship when she noticed that the woman driver ahead of her who was running a red light had the following bumper sticker: “I use exlovers for speed bumps.” Kathy had to laugh. That so exactly reflected her mood, while also inviting her to take a look at herself and lighten up.

But the very nature of a symbol is to carry us beyond what we know to what we do not yet know (or remember), and for this reason the meaning and valence of symbols is often obscure to the little, every day mind. So how do we learn to read those “messages in riddles” (
confuses paroles
)? Through practice. There are two forms of practice, in this connection, that I recommend highly. The first is to look at the incidents of daily life as if they were dream symbols. The second is to develop a personal set of markers you can use as road signs after you have tested them.

Look at the Incidents of Daily Life as Dream Symbols

We need to take dreams more literally and the incidents of waking life more symbolically.

If we dream of a house or a car, a dream analyst will often encourage us to think about what is going on with the house or the car as an analog for something that is unfolding — or stuck — in our psyches or our bodies. If there 's a problem with the furnace, you might then want to ask how your heart is troubled.

I've found this approach helpful in working with dreams — though the dream house may also refer to our literal house, or be a home in another reality altogether. However, I find it even more interesting to consider the condition of our literal house or car in a symbolic way.

For instance, a man who was driving himself very hard at the office had three flat tires in a single week. The third time, he heard the pun. A problem with a “tire” might have to do with getting over-“tired.” When he realized that, he also noticed he had been getting increasingly short of breath. He decided to pace himself and ease off in “tiring” situations.

As we were approaching the closing in the sale of a house where I had lived and written for a decade, I looked for a tie to wear to the lawyer's office. However, I couldn't find any ties in my wardrobe in the new house. I then realized that — although we had moved everything out of the old place and checked and rechecked that it was empty and broom-clean — I must have left my tie rack on the door in the master bedroom.

We made a detour on the drive to the lawyer's office so I could get my old ties out of the old place. It was not too hard to see the dreamlike symbolism here. Selling a house (or getting a divorce, or quitting your job) does not automatically break the old ties. You want to make sure you are not leaving yourself psychically and emotionally “tied” to an old situation, even as you move physically beyond it.

Practice Your Secret Handshakes with the World

As we travel through our forest of symbols, we 'll start to notice recurring signs that point to something that lies on the road ahead, out of ordinary sight. These signs may be telling us it's going to be a great day, that we 're on the right track, or that something fabulous is about to manifest. Or they may warn of danger, when the best thing we can do is get back in bed and put our heads under the covers.

These signs, of course, are secret handshakes from the world. We want to practice squeezing back, with just the right movements and pressure. This means getting to recognize your own personal markers and testing them.

There is a forest people in northern Zaire for whom travel is very perilous. There are predators in the jungle — the humans worse than the animals — as well as landslides, floods, and broken rope bridges. These people are always on the lookout for markers to tell them whether it's wise or safe to travel on a given day. They pay attention, among other things, to involuntary signs from their own bodies. You stub your toe, and that is good or bad depending on whether the toe is on your left foot or your right foot. You sneeze, and again that is a good sign or a bad sign depending on whether most of the air is coming out of your lucky nostril or your unlucky nostril. Which is which? In the teachings of this forest people, nobody can tell you that. You find out by trial and error. You stub your left big toe, say, and you see how the trip works out. If you get to the next village safely, and your business is profitably concluded, and nobody robs you on the way home, you may conclude that your left toe is your lucky toe. But you'll need to test this again to make sure. You have to be willing to stub your toe a few times — and then check the outcome during the rest of the day or the whole of the trip — to get this right.

Superstition? Maybe. But if this is superstition, it's of a personal and practical kind.

I'm not sure which is my lucky toe, but I know about lucky birds and animals — meaning those that are lucky for me.

I have no problem with black birds in general, but if I see a solitary crow or raven flying away to my left, I take that as a sign to watch out for something going wrong that day.

Back in the mid-1980s, tired of big cities and the commercial fast track I'd been on, I was considering a move to a rural location in the upper Hudson Valley of New York. Through an interesting riff of coincidence, my wife and I were shown a large piece of land with a falling-down farmhouse that
might
be coming on the market in the near future. I sat with a great white oak behind the house, thinking about this possible opportunity. Fixing the house might open a “money pit,” and there were a bunch of other calculations, and yet this place seemed deeply right. I had always loved oak trees, and sitting with this great white oak, I felt deeply at home. Yet I wanted another sign, an unmistakable handshake from the world.

A red-tailed hawk came circling overhead, speaking tome urgently in a language I knew I would be able to understand — if only I spoke hawk. She swooped lower, sunlight glinting on her silver-white belly plumage. And she dropped a wing feather between my legs.