another chapter of the book Illusions, the two pilots are eating lunch at a diner. Richard is bemoaning the loneliness of his life. Don reminds him that we make life as we choose it, that even Richard’s life (an adventure movie of the freedom of the open skies starring the lone hero) is what he has chosen. And remember, we can always choose another script for our movies.
Don explains that we manifest with the power of our imagination. He encourages our downtrodden hero to think of something to manifest, an object, something simple to start with. Richard blurts out that he’ll manifest a blue feather. A blue feather!? Don shrugs, then instructs him to close his eyes, and to see it—clearly, and in detail—and then let it go.
That evening as they are preparing a camp-side dinner together, Richard receives his feather as a picture on a carton of milk packaged by Blue Feather Farms. He’s thrilled. Don tells him next time to see himself in the picture he imagines if he wants to manifest the real thing.
When I finished reading Illusions, my father asked me what I thought. I told him it was my favorite book of all time. He asked me what I liked about it. I told him that I thought I already knew what the book was about before I had even read it. Somehow it felt more like it was reminding me of something than it was telling me something new. I liked the idea that life is what we choose it to be, and I was excited by everything that I was going to experience ahead. All of life, and all that I wanted and would ever want, seemed as reachable to me as simply closing my eyes, seeing it, and then walking out the front door to meet it. When he asked me what entertains me, I said adventure. If there were a movie genre called “discovery,” I would have said that.
Then my dad told me I could do anything I wanted in this world, be anything I wanted to be, I just had to dream it. Dreaming, from my dad’s point of view, happens when we are awake like the manifestation exercise Don instructs Richard in for his blue feather. For him, it is the language of our boundless, infinite imagination that is arrow-connected to our deepest passions. It is the precursor to choice, direction, and action. Ultimately, it is doing.
I understood my father’s dreaming as being what we do, that it becomes what we choose for making a living in life, which should be an expression of our greatest desires and passions. What I heard from my father is that our work—what we do in our outer world—should be equivalent with the interests that move us in our inner world.
My driving inner quest was to understand dreams. It had been my inner quest as far back as my second earliest memory at age three. That very specific memory was itself birthed from a dream. And from that memory forward I can remember all of my life—it is as though this memory was my first birthing, or the moment when I entered actual consciousness.
In this memory, I had woken up from a nightmare and had come to sit on our front steps in the morning sun to clear my head and think about it. I knew I had had nightmares for as long as I could remember. They were violent, terrifying, and always woke me up with a pounding heart, so much so that I had become terrified of sleeping at all and every night tried as hard as I could to delay the event. Because I had nightmares every night, I had no reason to think that the rest of life would be any different, and I knew that people lived a very long time. This was an intense realization for me and I thought I wanted to die, instead of facing years and years of nightly terror.
I sat on those steps and thought about how to kill myself. As I did, I began to disturb a line of ants running across the concrete near my feet. I suddenly thought, I don’t know what death is! What if death is one long sleep from which we never wake up? This would be one long, continuous, forever nightmare! I couldn’t imagine anything worse. So I abandoned the thought of killing myself for the moment.
Now I began to just wonder about the nature of sleep. Was it possible for the human body to never sleep? It didn’t seem so. I thought I could go a day or two without sleeping, but eventually sleep would win. And what if it didn’t? I had never known anyone to not sleep. What if not sleeping leads to death? It was the only alternative I could think of, and so I was back where I started.
The only thing left, I thought, was to wonder if I could learn to understand my nightmares. What were they? Could I interact with my dreams? Can dreams be changed? Could I come to a life without nightmares, where I wouldn’t fear sleeping?
In that moment, at age three, I made a vow to understand my dreams. I would find a way to live without terror. I would learn to master my nightmares. I made this vow with myself and that which I knew to be bigger than me, which today I call God.
From that point forward, I had an intimate relationship with my dreams. I dreamed often and watched them carefully, and I thought about them during the day to try to discern their meaning. I also carried the nightmare of that pivotal morning with me as a talisman, knowing that once I found the person who could explain it to me, or I learned to understand its meaning, I would have fulfilled my mission.
So dreaming was my greatest passion and interest. I was fascinated with dreams. At age ten, however, I had no idea that a person could actually do dreaming for a living. I figured it was simply a question I would answer for myself “on the side.”
I did, though, have a clear purpose for my doing. I remember having this purpose as far back as age five, and it’s become an intention I have held and repeated as prayer over and over throughout my life. That intention is that God use me—whatever unique parts that make me, Me—as a vehicle for good in this world. That’s what I wanted to do.
I had a very clear image for my purpose prayer, which was my body as a literal vehicle that God as Essence pushed into, way into my fingertips, to guide what I touched and did. I understood that all of my talents were unique to me and so could be used to fulfill a unique purpose for God’s work, just as a tractor does something different than a pickup and both are necessary to keep a farm going.
I told my father about my purpose-goal and he explained that talents and passions are the same. Being a vehicle meant delving deeply into—or doing—what interests me, because those are the unique parts of me that make me, Me. Asking to be a vehicle for God’s work is an objective, which sets our focus. Building the vehicle, however, is the doing. It is for us to manifest what that vehicle looks like and does. I wasn’t supposed to wait around for God to hop in and build everything out; instead, I was to build it out myself by exploring my passions and getting my own vehicle on the road. God would point out directions once I was driving along.
So, still not seeing how dreaming was something that could be work, I answered my father by telling him about my other interests and passions: being the first woman president of the United States, a writer, a psychologist, and a scientist. I wanted to make movies and work in entertainment. And in all of this, I wanted to help people. This became my dream list, and he told me I could do all of them.
A few years later, my dad woke me up in the very early morning. Whispering, he told me to follow him to the living room. There, the TV set was on. I grew up in a sparsely populated part of Texas, and our house was out in the country, far enough from town we couldn’t get cable. Because my father was a cattleman and a rancher, it was important to him to receive the most up-to-date commodities market information, so he had bought a gigantic satellite dish that looks like the kind TV stations use today. It brought us channels from all over the country. This morning, in the still dark outside, it was tuned to a news show.
My father sat me down in front of the show and pointed his finger at a woman talking on it. He told me that her name was Oprah Winfrey, and that if I wanted to be in entertainment that was the woman I should use as my role model. He said she was going to be a superstar because she was real, had talent, and genuinely liked people. I watched her closely.
The next morning I got up and watched Oprah again. Every morning I would get up and watch
