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
