In dreaming, it is important to write down our dreams and images so that we can verify how they become manifest. It is essential to verify as a reminder to ourselves of how this relationship works. Verification is an important part of the dialogue—it is like saying to your Self as partner, “I hear you.”
It is easy to say that dreaming work requires faith. Another way to consider it is that this work requires trust. Because I have been Dreaming for many years, writing my dreams and verifying them, like a scientist I have observed a world that operates according to certain laws or mechanics. Because dreaming is born of the body—it is a biological function—it adheres to its own physical laws much like other biological functions. While the Dreaming world contains the Mystery, it doesn’t operate by whimsy or caprice; it is both reliable and verifiable. So I dream in this world trusting in its modes of operation, which I have verified for myself over and over again.
It is also important to write down how our dreaming becomes manifest so that we don’t miss the miracles. Life is both quotidian and sacred. We can lift the quotidian up to the sacred by imbuing it as such. This often happens through recognition and gratitude.
I could easily have dismissed the Oprah opportunity as luck, chance, or being in the right place at the right time. Or, I could have taken it for myself and claimed it as a result of hard work. For me, it was neither; it was a true co-creating with my dreaming and conscious selves. I dreamed what I wanted to do, which had bubbled up from my inner. Then, I responded to that dream by consciously working to bring it manifest.
Consciously working to bring something manifest means simply being present and responsive when the path begins to unfold through opportunities. This unfolding is one of life’s miracles. I have seen people do all the work of imagining only to miss the opportunities to manifest because they didn’t believe in the miracle; they stayed mired in the linear reality instead of having eyes to see what was laying out before them.
It is very easy to devote rapt attention to our disappointments, concerns, fears, or the perceived gaps between our now and where we wish to be. If we do this, we become myopic to the Mystery. Instead of living a vertical reality, we settle into a linear one. With the Oprah experience, rather than seeing it as simply a series of random events in my life, I chose to lift it up to the vertical and lived it as something sacred.
The Aboriginal women could have just seen any rock on their land the same as any other. The rock we celebrated could have simply been a rock. Or not. By greeting the rock and imbuing it with their ceremonies, it became a strong connecting point for their entire lifespan as a people and a divining rod for their experience with the Divine. This is what is meant by lifting the quotidian up to the sacred and imbuing it as such.
Settling into the linear perspective flattens out our life experience. From here it becomes harder to see that all around us at every moment there are other qualities and available experiences happening in the vertical—all the miracles.
Life itself is a miracle, and each minute we are alive is an expressing of that miracle. When we think of a friend and they call us a few minutes later, or our seat on an airplane is next to the exact person we need to meet with for our business, these are also miracles. They are the expressions of our relationship with our Dreaming body, with what we recognize as God and grace. And as with the Aboriginal women’s sacred sites, we bring these miracles to us, just as they call us to them.
I have a dear friend in Texas whose family is Mexican, Catholic, numerous, and very close. She grew up in Texas, went to school there, and has lived there all her life. She is married to a Jewish man from California, whose family is small and estranged. How could these two people possibly have met?
One day, several years into his career life, the man had a thought about moving to Texas. He’d never been or lived there, but he had a feeling that there might be a girl in Texas who could love a man like him from California—this is how he says it. And so he moved there. The job he took was at the same company where my friend works. It was a match. This is an example of calling an experience to us, at the same time we are called to it. It is, to me, an example of the miraculous in life and exemplifies living in the vertical.
I see the Oprah experience as one part of my spiritual journey. It was an expression of the dialogue between me and my dreaming, or spiritual, Self. I listened carefully to all it had to teach me, and I responded to how it unfolded for me by my listening. When opportunities to manifest it arose—such as John reading my letter and calling me—I was present to it and I responded to it immediately. The experience was me actively participating in the relationship between my conscious and my dreaming.
This is one reason why I see business and creativity as spiritual paths. Both require imagining and manifesting, and becoming facile with the left-right steps forward of these two movements. Imagining is listening to the dreaming voice and being able to receive what it has to bring us; manifesting is responding to it. We have to pull back and then burst forth, just as the creation story where God pulls His Light back in order for creation to spring forth. If we move through these two steps consciously, we can engage with a deeper spiritual aspect of living.
In the process of obtaining the interview for the Oprah show position and then choosing to say no to it, I also realized that by seeing myself in the entertainment business I didn’t need to work for Oprah. Instead, I remembered I was driven to seek the qualities that initially interested me which I saw embodied in Oprah.
While “Oprah” included entertainment at large, making movies, and helping people, I specifically saw in her the qualities my father pointed out when he first suggested she become a model for me: someone who had found a creative way to help people to find their own inner, unique light and freedom. Because manifesting the job offer verified my beliefs about dreaming and manifestation, this freed me to look to my greater goals. Rather than hitching my wagon to Oprah, who had found her own Selfhood, my job was to carve my own, unique path toward a creative way of helping people.
As I was growing up, my father made it a habit to post sticky notes on my bathroom mirror so that I would wake up to a daily thought. These came from books he had read, or conversations he heard, or just thoughts he would have. Later, when I went to college, he would mail the sticky notes to me. Two of my father’s sticky notes stand out here:
Ideals are like stars. We won’t succeed in touching them with our hands, but, like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, we will follow them, and succeed in reaching our destiny.
God needs you to make things happen. Like a rock in physics, when it is in motion it is easy to direct and move, to roll along a new course with the slightest touch; when it is stationary it is nearly impossible. God can’t work with a couch potato. Don’t just sit around and ask God for things. If you want a prayer answered, go out and start doing something—God will show up once you make the first move.
My father’s life in action, and what he passed to me, is to live our passions. These are our ideals. Living our passions, however, means setting a course and then being fluid in the details of how they take form. This feels like a paradox, but in fact it is not. It is about essence, not concreteness. It is akin to letting a baby bird sit in our hands and delighting in watching it move in all its aliveness without clenching our fist around it. If we clench, we kill it.
My father’s life in action also showed me that manifesting requires effort and action, in addition to imagination. God prefers a relationship to a request box.
Dreaming is an impulse, a movement, an idea, a glimpse into the deepest recognition of our Inner and a look into the future. If we do not bring our dreams down and out into the physical, waking reality, then we’ve only done half the work. We’ve squandered the gift of the dream. However,
