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.
Chapter Two:
My Grandmother: Example of Living the Vertical
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
