The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (5 page)

Working with the Committee of Sleep

Athena Lou, a dream coach and friend in Hawaii, dreamed she was flying through the air with dolphins and whales. This dream inspired her to leave a secure and well-paid job at a bank and go out on her own, into the riskier field of freelance consulting. In the dream, she reveled in a fabulous sense of freedom, and she decided she needed to claim that same sense of freedom in every part of her life. Now, as a creative consultant, she encourages businesspeople to tune into their dreams, as well as other sources of intuitive knowledge. She has noticed that, more than most people realize, smart business decisions are often guided by dreams.

For instance, an executive in an international high-tech firm dreamed of Oreo cookies flying off into space. The dream inspired her to buy a lot of stock in Nabisco, the manufacturer of Oreos — and the stock price subsequently soared. Then there was a business executive on Oahu who dreamed his company's corporate headquarters was sinking like a ship. The building was tilted at an angle, just like the
Titanic
. He escaped by jumping into an elevator shaft and sliding down the incline, popping out of a window on a lower story as the whole structure came crashing down. The dream led him to go on a job hunt — and he got out just before the company got into deep trouble when the local economy succumbed to a recession.

Dreaming UpMonster.com
Jeff Taylor, the creator of the wildly popular internet job search company Monster.com, was inspired by a dream. He woke at 4:30 AM from a dream in which he built an electronic bulletin board system where people could look for jobs. In the dark, he wrote down on a pad next to his bed, “The Monster Board.” Nervous that if he went back to sleep he might not be able to decipher or decode what he had written, he went to a coffee shop and proceeded to sketch out a detailed plan.

Notice that Taylor was prepared for his guiding dream in two ways. First, he had already been thinking and feeling his way toward a major innovation. Second, he was ready to catch his dream — on the pad by the bed — and to act right away on its guidance.

Dreaming Bouncy Sidewalks
For two decades, Richard Valeriano's job as a Santa Monica street inspector included checking for damage to sidewalks caused by the spreading roots of the city's shade trees. Broken concrete is expensive to repair and a frequent source of injuries to pedestrians. Work crews in Santa Monica were being sent out with chain saws to cut down mature ficus trees.

One night after work Valeriano dreamed of a bouncy, flexible sidewalk that solved the problem. “In my dream, sidewalks were all bending and twisting, but there was no cracking. I woke up and said, ‘Wow! Elastic sidewalks! I wonder how we can make them?’”

He did not know how to enact the dream until his health club, during remodeling, installed rubber tiles as flooring. This inspired Valeriano to look for a company willing to develop a prototype for a rubber sidewalk. The tiles were made from recycled auto tires, and the city of Santa Monica tested them by having bicyclists, Rollerbladers, and women in stiletto heels, among others, do their worst.

Five years later, rubber walkways were being tried out in sixty American cities. The rubber was saving the shade trees and pedestrians' footing. Rubber walkways were installed in April 2006 around the willow oaks on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington, DC. The kids liked the bounce — though they find it's not so easy to carve your initials or draw on the pavement in chalk.

Solve It in Your Sleep

Here 's a plan for any night of the year:

Before you hit the sack, write down an intention for the night. A simple way is to fill in the blank in the following statement: “I would like guidance on. . . .”

Make sure you are ready to record whatever comes to you — and be ready to do so whenever you happen to wake up, because the
big
messages often come at unsocial hours. Many great discoveries are made between 3 ?? and 4 ??, which is also the hour (according to some surveys) when most babies are born and most people die.

If you wake up and you do not recall any dream, relax. Wiggle around in bed. Sometimes a dream comes back as you get your body into the position you were in when you were dreaming. If you still don't remember a dream, write down whatever you are thinking and feeling. You may find you have the gift of the dream — a solution or an inspiration — even if you have lost the content of the dream.

On a spring morning in 1905, Einstein woke up with a theory that revolutionized science, the Special Theory of Relativity. He had told a friend the previous day he felt he was on the verge of a huge breakthrough but was not sure what it was. In the morning, he had all of it, fresh and sparkling in his mind. There is no evidence Einstein remembered the content of his dreams from that tremendous night, but he received their gift, and it changed everything.

The lesson is clear. Whatever problem we have to deal with, from the carpool schedule to a scientific Theory of Everything,
we can solve it in our sleep
.

2. DREAMS COACH US FOR FUTURE
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Our dreams are constantly coaching us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us on the road of life. It's possible that we rehearse
everything
that will take place in the future in our dreams, though we forget most of it.

Across human evolution, dreaming has been a vital survival mechanism. It is likely that in the days when our ancestors were naked hominids without good weapons, their dream radar — their ability to scout across both space and time — often enabled them to avoid becoming breakfast for saber-toothed tigers and other hungry predators.

A recent theory posits that dreaming prepares us for challenges by putting us through frequent workouts in
threat simulation
, helping us to develop the reflexes and responses that will get us through.

This is good, but I suspect our relationship with the future in dreams is much deeper and more important than this. I believe that in dreaming, we have access to the matrix in which the events and circumstances that will manifest in our physical lives have their origins. We not only
see
future events; we can
choose
— to varying degrees, and according to our level of consciousness — which among many possible future events will manifest.

It's my impression that we are dreaming the future all the time.

If you are not yet aware you are doing this, consider the times you have had the experience of déjà vu. I have yet to meet someone who has
never
had that feeling of encountering a person or a place for the first time — in ordinary reality — and
knowing
you have seen them before. Most often déjà vu is experienced when waking events resemble something we have dreamed. We may have forgotten the dream, but when a physical event catches up with it, recognition stirs from a deep memory bank.

If you adopt the practice of recording your dreams and comparing the dream data with subsequent events, it won't take long for you to notice some matchups. The incidents you preview in your dreams may be trivial or terrifying, blah or wonderful. They may be events in your own life, or events in the future history of the world.

In our dreams, we have several kinds of engagement with the future.

Precognitive Dreams

Through
precognition
, we see events and circumstances ahead of time, as they will be played out. A precognitive dream may be literal or symbolic or both. For example, a dream of a tsunami might turn out to be both a preview of a literal disaster and advance notice of an emotional storm that will hit with the force of a tsunami. We may not understand what we have seen in a precognitive dream until a physical event catches up with that dream. It may also be difficult for us to understand what we have seen because we are looking at things from a certain angle, perhaps the perspective of a different person. But with practice, we can learn to recognize markers that a dream relates to future events, and we can then move to clarify and use the dream information.

Such practice becomes very interesting when our dreams show us possible future events that can be changed for the better. We may call such dreams
early advisories
; they may be
early warnings
or early signals of coming
opportunities
.

Early-Warning Dreams

Some dreams are
early warnings
of a possible future problem — a crisis at work, the bust-up of a relationship, a health problem, a car accident. We may not want to focus on any of these unpleasant possibilities. But if we are willing to study what an early-warning dream is telling us, we will often find that it is giving us vital information that can help us avoid the problem if we take appropriate action.

Here's a simple, everyday example: Cara dreamed that a good friend pulled up beside her on the right side of her car and pointed at the front right tire, signaling that there was something wrong. On waking, Cara inspected the passenger side of her car — something she was otherwise unlikely to do — and found that the fairly new right front tire was flat. The dream advisory enabled her to take care of the problem immediately and get on her way safely without a major hassle.

Sometimes we dream the future for the benefit of another person, or even of a great cause. What will then happen depends on whether we can find an effective way to get the dream information to the person who can best act upon it. What follows is an example of a dream that changed history when it was passed on to the right person.

The Dream That Saved the First Roman Emperor
Rome may never have had emperors but for a dream that saved the life of Octavian, Julius Caesar's great-nephew. In 42 BCE — in a scene made famous by Shakespeare 's play
Julius Caesar
— Octavian and Mark Antony commanded legions that were gathered at Philippi, in Macedonia, to avenge Caesar's murder. Arrayed against the army of Octavian and Mark Antony in strong defensive positions were the forces of Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Caesar who called themselves liberators of Rome. Before the first battle of Philippi, Octavian was ill and exhausted in his tent. He was roused by a friend who told him he had dreamed that Octavian would be killed in a surprise attack unless he left his tent at once. Octavian heeded the dream warning, fled from his tent — and so escaped being stabbed to death soon after when Brutus's soldiers burst in and plunged their swords into his camp bed, shredding it to ribbons, under the impression that the boy general was still in it. Octavian and Mark Antony were victorious in the second battle of Phlippi, and Octavian became Augustus, the first Roman emperor.

Early-Opportunity Dreams

Early-opportunity
dreams may also require action if we are going to manifest a future we'll enjoy. You dream you are in your ideal home, or doing the work that nourishes your soul and your bank account, or you are with your soul mate, who is someone you have not yet met in the regular world. These dreams may be inspiring and encouraging, and you don't want to let them float away like helium balloons. You'll want to figure out what practical action you can take to move decisively in the direction of these happy dreams.

Any future we can see (in dreams or through wakeful intuition) is a
possible
future, and we can influence the odds on the manifestation of a specific future event. While it may seem impossible for an individual to change certain future events perceived in dreams — like a natural disaster or death at an advanced age — it may still be possible to work with the dream information in a useful way: for example, to alert friends not to go on vacation in the place where the dreamed hurricane will hit, or to help someone whose death is near, and their family, to meet that situation with grace and closure.

Dream Seers

Inmost human cultures across history, dreamers who provide reliable information about events at a distance in time have been highly valued. When their visions have involved the possible destinies of nations and armies, they have been called seers and prophets.

In Spain, in the time of Philip II, a young noblewoman named Lucrecia de León became renowned as a
vidente
(seer) and a prophet. Her gifts were first revealed when, at age twelve, she accurately described a royal funeral procession in Badajoz; weeks later, news reached her family home in Madrid that Anne of Austria, Philip's queen, had died in Badajoz as the royal couple were traveling to Portugal. Later Lucrecia dreamed the destruction of the Spanish Armada and the death of its admiral a year before those events.

In her dreams, she functioned as a psychic spy, secretly traveling to the home of Sir Francis Drake in England to eavesdrop on the plans of Spain's enemies. She often roamed the palace of Philip II at night, picking up details of court intrigues. Her information was considered so valuable and so time sensitive by the head of the powerful Mendoza clan that he arranged to have a cleric record Lucrecia's dream reports every morning while an armed courier waited to rush them on horseback to his master.

While some of Lucrecia's veridical dreams are cases of precognition (the wreck of the Spanish Armada), others are more likely examples of traveling clairvoyance, in which her consciousness was projected across space to view synchronous events happening at a distance. What is remarkable is that she was able to move through time, in her dreams, in very much the same way that she could travel across space.

I believe this is true not only for a seer like Lucrecia de León, but for all of us. When we go dreaming, we travel in time — to the past as well as the future — in much the same way that we are accustomed, in physical life, to traveling in space.

Time Is a Kind of Space