Lesson Two:
Reality is elastic. Concepts like time, space, and solidity are ideas only. Therefore, our entire existence is created, expanded, and in direct and constant relationship to our imagining of it.
Once I worked with a young man who saw himself in his future as an old man, embittered and alone. This is not the future that he wanted for himself. At the time, he was making choices he deemed safe—in work and relationships—rather than those that his Dreaming body were urging him toward. As a result he was putting distance between himself and others, and dampening his passions. By seeing the trajectory of these energies into their years-later expression, he was able to make new choices in his present that would move those energies in new directions and therefore create for himself a new future.
I had a similar experience once, in a night dream, at a time when I was putting up a lot of blocks between myself and others. In this dream, I enter a house I know to be mine and see myself as a very old woman shrouded in black, and hunched in a rocking chair in the corner of the room. The house is dark, chilly, and people are walking in and out removing the furniture. I realize I am visiting myself at my end-of-life death. I come close to myself and look her in the eyes. I realize that if I continue to block myself from others I will die alone, as I am here. There is no one familiar around this version of me—only movers. I wake up.
That dream showed me something very valuable. Because it was a possibility, not a solidity, I was able to change the course in which I was heading so that my life would unfold differently. I have since dreamed again of my death. In this dream, I am in a house I know to be mine but don’t know yet in real life. I am in a bright, warm, yellow, sunlit room sitting in a chair by the window where the light shines in on me. I am wearing all white. Outside the window is a very green lawn and it is higher up like in the mountains, with some mountain flowers like poppies you see in Oregon. I turn my face to the sun, letting it bathe me. When it is time I stand up and simply walk out of my body and out the window. I wake up.
This death dream is very different from the first one. While I am physically alone in the room, my life feels filled. I am warm and at peace; my face is uncovered—I am facing the world without masks or covering and am at peace with it. I have created a new future for myself.
When I was around ten years old, my father gave me a book called Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach and instructed me to read it.
Illusions felt both exciting and familiar to me. The main character had a small plane and was a pilot; my father had a small plane and was a pilot. The main character loved freedom and adventure; my father loved freedom and adventure. The main character was seeking depth of soul; my father was seeking depth of soul. I came to see the main character as very much like my father. In the book, the main character was given a training manual for life, so I felt this was my father now handing down that training manual to me.
To give a little backstory, in Illusions, the main character, Richard, is a biplane pilot who roams the countryside of the Midwest giving rides for money. His home is the open fields, sleeping under the stars or the wing of his plane, and every few days he moves on to a new town after he has worked through an audience. One day he is surprised to see another pilot—he’s never known anyone else to fly a plane like his and charge for rides in that area. They strike up a friendship, and this new pilot, Don, begins to teach him many things. For me, these were lessons on dreaming and manifesting.
In one chapter, Richard and Don walk down the street. Richard casually asks Don why we’re here, as in, alive on this planet. Don abruptly suggests they see a movie. Halfway through the movie Don asks Richard why they’re here. Richard, who has forgotten he had a question or what the question was, distractedly tells Don, “Because it’s a good movie.” Don presses him and Richard says it is because he is enjoying it.
After the movie, Richard is still clueless. The point, Don explains, is that life is chosen, just like a movie, where we are both the writer and director. Our life, like movies, is fun and an opportunity to learn something. In the same way that we are entertained by different movies, so too are we entertained in life. If we are entertained by dramas, then we will make sure we have drama in our life to entertain us. If we are entertained by romance, we will seek romance. If it is comedy that floats our boat, we will have a lot of laughs. And, just like the illusion of the screen, we can buy into the illusion that we are victims or heroes. We can see the same movie over and over. Or, we can step in and out of different roles, and see different films. The bottom line is that life is something we create of our own choosing.
It is one thing to be told that life is of our choosing, but it is another thing altogether to move into the active choosing of it. In the same period of my life when I was blinking naively like Buster Keaton at the yellers and screamers, I was saying over and over, “I hate drama, I hate drama.” But there sure was a lot of drama in my life!
If we let them, patterns hold us in a firm grip. Often the patterns we follow were birthed in childhood and so they have become habitual subterfuge, the ground we walk and forget to look at. Because we are always standing on that ground, it is hard to see what is under our shoes. Dreaming is a way of stepping above the ground in order to see what is underneath.
Literally, in a night dream, elements of experience that are familiar are suddenly different—a well-traveled canyon landscape is now bright red, a friend who dresses like a surfer is suddenly buttoned-up in a three-piece suit. The startle produced by the difference in the dream is a first step toward waking us up to seeing a pattern. When we learn the language of dreams so that we understand what a bright red landscape or a surfer who is suddenly buttoned-up means, the patterns become revealed. Once revealed, we are able to shift them. The imagery I describe in “Part II” of this book is a tool for naming and shifting your patterns.
In 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