The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (3 page)

As I take off on the “wrong” plane, the attractive woman sitting next tome starts talking tome as soon as she notices the book I am reading: Marc Allen's
The Millionaire Course
. I explain that the book isn't so much about making millions — though they may come with the journey — as about living life to the fullest. I open it at random and read aloud some wise counsel on how people can avoid arguments.

“He could be writing that for
me
,” says my neighbor.

We introduce ourselves. She has a movie-star name — Cybille — and she is flying home to an island off the North Carolina coast.

“That sounds like a dream location.”

“It's a bad dream. It's the wrong island.” She explains that the island is mostly a development for wealthy retirees. Not the place she thought she would be when her husband talked her into buying a home there.

We talk about Marc Allen's approach to growing a vision of an ideal life, and setting the goals and creating the affirmations that help that vision take root in the world.

“I'm a vivid dreamer,” Cybille volunteers.

“Do you keep a dream journal?”

“Oh, I always remember my dreams.”

“Really? Even after six years?”

“Six years is exactly right. That's when I got married and my dream life changed. Since then, every night I do the same thing — I go to a house on the beach in North Carolina, I spend time with my husband and family, I go to my job. But it's a different house from the one we now own, and a different husband, and a different job. It's like I check out of my present life and go into this other life.”

“You're telling me you are living a continuous life, in your dreams.”

She nods. “I've never told anyone this before. I know both of my lives are completely real. And I think both of them are taking place in the physical world. Am I crazy?”

“I don't think so. Science is telling us about the probability of parallel worlds. It seems entirely likely to me that when we make a wrenching life choice, our world splits. I guess if I were aware that there is another me, leading another life, I would want to think about what could be accomplished if I could bring both parts of myself together. Have you ever thought about bringing your two selves together?”

“Yes. I know that one day my two lives and my two selves
will
come together.”

“And what happens then?”

“Oh, it will be catastrophic.” The scary word dissolves in an impish grin. “But it will be very
interesting
.”

In this episode, the flow of coincidence brought more than a specific message. It brought a marvelous sense of connectedness and of worlds of possibility beyond the veil of ordinary perception. It carried me into what Baudelaire called the “poetic state of health,” in which it is impossible not to notice that life rhymes and that we move among patterns of correspondence. This sequence is also an example of a very practical rule for navigating by coincidence:
Every setback offers an opportunity
. Because my first plane collided with a flock of wild geese, I had the wild experience — on the second, unscheduled plane — of hearing a fascinating first-hand account of a life lived in two parallel worlds. It's hard to complain about a missed connection when it opens a deeper connection and the reward is a story as entertaining as this.

Lincoln's Dreams and the Bull Semen Enhancer

November 11, 2006
I once dreamed I was in a space like the Library of Congress, a place devoted to American history. I walked down a wide, gently sloping hall toward a room filled with books and oak file cabinets.

I paused to listen and talk to a group of wise men. As we conversed, the energy forms of dead presidents drew close to them. When the energy form of a dead president fused with that of a speaker, he embodied the knowledge of the dead president as well as his own and became truly wise.

Outside, I found more people gathered on a green as if for a group photograph. Again, energy forms of past elders were superimposed over the faces and bodies of the people in front of me. A face I found singularly ugly — black bearded, hollow cheeked, deeply pitted or pocked — floated over and around one of the men in the group. I was excited to realize that this could be Abraham Lincoln “coming through.”

I suspect that Lincoln — and certainly his Spiritualist wife — would have enjoyed this dream. Lincoln believed that all dreams have significance, and that the best people to help us understand dreams are simple people, “children of nature,” who simply do a lot of dreaming. My dream of the dead presidents led me to reflect on how, when we give our best to a certain kind of work or study, we may attract the energy and insight of great minds that are working on another level of reality. It is comforting to think that in times of great danger for a nation or for humanity as a whole, we may be able to draw on the wisdom of elders who have gone before us, whose wisdom may now be deeper than before since they are in a position to view our situation from a higher perspective, with knowledge of possible alternative futures far beyond what we can grasp on our own.

My dream of the dead presidents encouraged me to look again at the role of dreams in Lincoln's life and decision making. I learned that after the premature death of his young son Willie, during the CivilWar, Lincoln repeatedly dreamed of his son. He had a recurring dream in which he found himself in a boat without oars, drifting into the mist, a dream that he associated with possible events on the battlefield. Two weeks before he was murdered in Ford's theatre, Lincoln dreamed he was roaming the White House at night, and was surprised to find the place largely deserted — though all the lights were on — until he came to a room where a body was laid out in state. He asked a guard who was dead in the White House and was told the president had been assassinated.

At the time of the Civil War, there was still a
culture
of dreaming in North America. That's apparent in a legend about General George “Little Mac” McClellan, Lincoln's first army chief, who supposedly had a dream or vision in which George Washington appeared to him and showed him the Rebel positions on a map, enabling him to save the capital. This is almost certainly a piece of pious propaganda (though some writers on dreams have been gulled); the interesting thing about it is that you don't invent a
big
dream for political advantage unless you are in a society that takes dreams very seriously.

The story of dreaming in the Civil War goes deeper. “Dream trackers” — people who could see accurately across time and space — were respected by the military on both sides and were put to use. We could call them nineteenth-century “remote viewers,” except that this is an unnecessary anachronism, and the best of the dream trackers seem to have done much better than the Pentagontrained RV guys.

There is a highly instructive example reported in the Richmond, Virginia,
Daily Dispatch
on November 24, 1863. It involves a Confederate soldier who had the gift of tracking deserters to their hideouts. In this particular incident, the dreamer located a deserter who had been well hidden in a smokehouse and secretly fed by his wife for five weeks. Here is the original report, titled “Hid Away in the Smokehouse”:

One day last week one of Captain Shannon's men fell asleep, and while in this mood “dreamed” where a deserter could be found. He told his Captain of his dream and he immediately sent a squad of men to the place where the young soldier dreamed he was, and found him. Well, reader, where do you think he was? He was in a hole or cellar, all hid away, and things such as barrels, boxes, &c., piled up over him, in his smoke house. There was a small space left open through which his wife fed him. When taken by the cavalry, he begged them to let him see his children, that he had not seen them in five weeks. This is what we call running the thing in the ground. This is not the only deserter that this same soldier has dreamt of and found. We would here say to the deserters (in the way of parentheses) who are in caves and close places, that you just might as well come along and report, because if this man gets a dream at you he 'll find you sure.

In the midst of my research on Lincoln and Civil War dreams, I need to catch a plane to lead another seminar. I choose as my inflight reading a novel by Connie Willis,
Lincoln's Dreams
. In the novel, a contemporary dreamer finds herself — again and again — inside the mind and situation of a Civil War leader, often in harrowing battlefield situations. Her dreams give her accurate information she cannot know from any obvious source. The novel is thrilling and original, with much historical data on Lincoln's life and command decisions. I have just come to a part describing Lincoln's acromegaly — the condition that caused his feet and ears to grow too big — when a man who looks like a prosperous rancher takes the airplane seat next to me.

He opens a book, and when I glance over I see a picture of Lincoln on the page he has reached. I ask my neighbor what book he is reading. The title is
Lincoln on Leadership
. We are both impressed by the coincidence, especially when we discover that neither of us has ever traveled with a book on Lincoln before, and my neighbor has purchased his book only that morning. The coincidence is even more striking because, like me, he has just come to a page in
his
book describing Lincoln's acromegaly.

We talk about what gives great leaders an edge. My neighbor pulls out a little notebook to share a marvelous quote: “We come into our zone where our passion, skill, and experience come together.”

I ask my neighbor what business he is in. He tells me that he is a cattle farmer — as I had guessed — but is also “heavy on science.” He explains that he has helped to develop a new product that enhances the potency of bull sperm, and he “gender biases” it so that two-thirds of the calves produced will be heifers. He gives me a technical account of the process, then hands me his business card, on which his job description reads: VICE PRESIDENT, SEMEN PRODUCTION AND TECHNOLOGY.

Later on that trip, I show the card to some Chicago women in my seminar. One of them quips, “There are a lot of guys who would love to show that off in East Chicago bars.”

This episode was a fine example of one of the rules of coincidence:
there are things that like to happen together
. It encouraged me to pursue my research into Lincoln's dreams, and the larger role of dreams in history, and gave the side benefit of a good belly laugh along the way.

FIVE MINUTES A DAY
TO DISCOVER THE BIG STORY

As we hear stories from many others about the power of the Three Only Things, we 'll discover that dreams, coincidence, and imagination are secret engines in the history of
everything
. This is vital to our understanding of the past and to our ability to navigate present challenges and create a better future.

In part 1 we'll learn about the nine powers of dreaming and how to tap these powers to lead richer, fuller, healthier lives, starting each day with greater energy and insight. Our dreams are constantly coaching us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We see things in our dreams that later take place in physical reality; this is called precognition. We also see things that may or may not happen, depending on whether we do something with the information. We preview a car accident we may be able to avoid if we use the dream as a travel advisory. We get a glimpse of our ideal job, or the perfect home, or even the partner of our soul — but that wonderful dream may not manifest in the world unless we get the details straight and take appropriate action.

Our dreams start preparing us for what life will give us months, years, even decades into the future. For instance, when he was just fourteen, Winston Churchill told a school friend at Harrow that he had dreamed that one day he would be required to lead the country and “save the capital and the empire.”

We 'll find that dreamers — so far from being impractical or floaty — are often highly successful in their chosen fields of endeavor because they are able to see far beyond the present horizon and draw energy from their vision. Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, says of himself, “My most marked characteristic is the ability to dream more than most think practical.”

In part 2, we'll confirm that coincidence is never “only” anything, and we'll learn how to track coincidences and the symbols of everyday life as homing beacons. A stream of coincidence alerts us to the fact that we are not alone, that we have invisible sources of support, and that we may be on the right course even when the whole world seems to be going the other way — or alternatively, that we may need to adjust our goals and behaviors to a deeper agenda. We'll learn that by working with the nine rules of coincidence, we can use
anything
that enters our field of perception as a personal oracle and charge our everyday lives with creative juice.

In part 3, we 'll learn the
practice
of imagination: the fabulous art of “making things up” — and finding they are altogether real. The greatest crisis in our lives is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck and bind ourselves to the wheel of repetition because we refuse to reimagine our situation. We live with a set of negative or confining images and pronounce them “reality.”

To live the fullest, juiciest lives, we need to invest our energy and attention in a form of active imagination that dares to revision everything. We 'll accomplish this by learning and applying the seven open secrets of imagination, including the great truth that Rabindranath Tagore expressed, with poetic insight, when he wrote: “The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.”

We'll build a home in the imagination and use it as a place of healing, relaxation, and creative inspiration — and we'll learn how to manifest the best things we grow there in our everyday lives.

In just five minutes a day, we can tap the power of the Three Only Things in fun and practical ways. Each section of the book offers fabulous games we can play in the thick of everyday life. These simple exercises allow us to tap into extraordinary sources and resources that can give us a winning edge, as they have done for many highly creative and successful people.