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 Oprah on the Chicago morning news show, and when my dad was in town he would watch her with me. Soon Oprah got her own TV show, and so I watched her in the afternoon. I added “working for Oprah” to my dream list.
Years later, when I was a senior in college, my father asked me at winter break what I wanted to do when I graduated that coming spring. I was getting a degree in Communications: Radio-TV-Film, and I told him I still wanted to work for Oprah. Oprah was in the entertainment business, and she was about helping people—two of the things on my dream list. But I told him I didn’t know how to go about it.
My father instructed me to get a legal pad. I loved when he said this, because it always meant an idea was being hatched and that an adventure would ensue. To this day, I get a thrill of excitement when I pull out a fresh legal pad: it represents all possibility to me and the genesis of something being formed.
I sat down with my father and the legal pad of possibilities and wrote two letters, both introducing myself and stating my dream. One letter was going to be sent to all of the alumni from my school who were living in Chicago, where the Oprah show was produced (I would later get the list from my college). The letter told them a little about me, and a lot about my dream to work for Oprah.
The second letter was to Oprah herself. It was a lot like the first letter, only the first letter asked if that person knew someone who worked for Oprah that I could get in touch with to ask for a job, while the letter to Oprah just asked for a job directly.
I sent over fifty letters, plus one (the one to Oprah). I heard back from one of the fifty. It was from an alumnus who was a high-level financier at a bank that specialized in loans to entertainment properties. His wife knew someone at the Oprah show, and he knew someone at the company that distributed the show. First, though, he wanted to talk with me.
From my tiny town in Texas and out-in-the-country home, Chicago seemed a million miles away from the phone I held pressed to my ear. And John, the alumnus, was like a superstar with his huge job and connections. The phone felt like a live wire in my hands as I felt a charge being connected to this bigger world of possibilities, and I couldn’t believe John’s kindness to spend a few moments with me.
The first thing John did was ask me a battery of questions about the entertainment industry. He especially wanted to know what I knew about syndication. I worked at the local ABC affiliate station while in college, but knew nothing about syndication. John told me about the NATPE convention—National Association of Television Production Executives—which was being held in New Orleans that month. It was a convention all about syndication. He offered