I size up the three gate agents at the desk. One has dressed with slightly more sartorial flair than the others and has a rather exotic name: Valerio. I pick him as the man to consult.
“Valerio,” I tell him, “I suspect that you are a magician. And that it will be your pleasure to magic up a seat for me that doesn’t currently exist on this flight.” He receives this statement matter-of-factly, with just the slightest twitch of the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth. It doesn’t look good, he regrets to inform me. I now pull rank, just a little, by mentioning that I fly a lot and therefore have priority status. Okay, that could help, but he can’t promise anything. I’ll need to check back later.
Twenty minutes later, everyone has boarded the plane except for the standby passengers, who now include me. They are closing the door when suddenly I am slipped a boarding pass, the one that shouldn’t exist. Soon I am in a middle seat at the back of the bus, my knees jammed uncomfortably against the back of the seat in front of me. And I’m feeling celebratory.
Maybe picking up on my mood, the fellow sitting to my left initiates a conversation. Soon he’s telling me his life story. Stan is a salt-of-the earth, blue-collar guy. He’s worked for thirty-three years for the same company, making and marketing fire prevention equipment, and they have treated him well and he feels confident that his pension will be there when he retires. It’s the thought of retirement that scares him. Three of his male friends dropped dead within six months of retirement. He’d like some help with this, and asks me, quite directly, what I would suggest.
“Tell me what you love to do,” I respond. “Tell me what you like to do for the sheer pleasure of doing it.”
He thinks about this for a bit. Then he says, “I love the water. I used to go scuba diving. I grew up near the water, on Rhode Island, where there’s a beach down the block whichever direction you take.”
“Are those the beaches you think of when you picture yourself at the water?”
He tells me he’s relocated to North Carolina because of his job, and there’s a beach he likes there as well.
What else does he like?
“I like being with family, with community.” He grew up in a big family, one of twelve siblings. They didn’t have much, but they had each other. “And I like giving back.” He explains that he and some of his brothers banded together recently to buy their parents a house. As I said, this guy is salt of the earth.
What else does he like? “I like the perfect martini,” he says with a naughty grin. “None of them sissy fruit drinks.”
I turn the discussion to skills. What is he really good at?
“Cooking breakfast.”
I’m surprised by his immediate, unconsidered reply. He recalls that as a kid he was often the one who took charge of getting breakfast on the table for his enormous family. “And I loved doing it. I liked the sense of looking after everybody. And I didn’t have to wash the dishes after cooking the bacon.”
What else is he good at? He knows a lot about preventing, containing, and putting out fires. He’s great in the water and behind a wheel on the road. He’s a team player and a connector.
After a while, I say, “I’m going to say a few things to you, and I want you to pretend you are listening to a description of a man you don’t know. Would that be okay?”
He’s intrigued. I start telling him a story about the passions and skills of a certain man, and his need to bring the two together. As I talk, I raise and lower my cupped hands, as if I’m juggling. As I raise my left hand, closer to the heart, I talk of passions, ranging from giving back and looking after a big family to drinking the perfect martini. As I raise my right hand, I talk of skills, from putting out fires to cooking breakfast.
“So what can you see that guy, who has this combination of passions and skills, doing in the second half of his life?”
Stan thinks for a moment, then says, “Owning and running a diner on the beach in North Carolina.”
“A diner. Really?”
“Yes, an old-fashioned family diner.”
“Where you cook three hundred breakfasts.”
“At least. And where they can mix up one mean martini.” There’s that naughty grin. “Hey,” Stan says, clapping me on the shoulder, “I gotta thank you. I’m feeling more juiced and mobilized than I’ve felt since I started dating. I’m already working out a business plan for the diner in my head, and I think I know the perfect location for it. I guess you’re in the wrong seat on the wrong plane all for me.”
He takes a pull on his beer and asks, “What are you going to do when you retire, Robert?”
“You know the answer.”
I wait for him to find it. “Oh — right — you’re never going to retire, because you love what you do.”
“That’s right. I think the great trick in life, wherever you are in the journey, is to do what you love and let the universe support it. When we do what we love, every day is a holiday.”
I was happy I was in the wrong seat on the wrong plane that day. The wrong plane got me to Seattle airport at the time the right plane was supposed to arrive, though my bag took another twelve hours to catch up with me.
I’ll put up with just about anything that has story value, and there was a great story here, one that I retold with gusto at dinner with my students at a training for teachers of Active Dreaming that night.
The story of the man whose dream turned out to be a diner by the beach is a taste of what you are going to find in this book. We do better when we are willing to meet the unexpected and improvise when our plans are screwed up. We do better still when we wake up to the fact that we go through life as synchronicity magnets, attracting to ourselves people and events according to the attitudes and energy we are carrying. When we are charged with purpose, our magnetism increases. When we are following our calling, we move in a natural field of dreams. We draw new allies, events, and resources to us. Chance encounters and benign coincidences support us and ease our passage in ways that are inexplicable to those from whom the spiritual laws of human existence are hidden.
What Stan and I did together on the plane is an everyday example of how we can help each other to grow dreams for life. At the end of that flight, he had his retirement plan, and I had the pleasure of helping him create it. Cooking breakfast for three hundred people in a diner might not be my dream for later life, or yours, but we must never judge how other people follow their chosen callings (as long as they do no harm to others or the earth). The trick is to do what you love and let the world support it. Active dreamers seek to turn all work into play, so that every day is a holiday.
Three Modes of Active Dreaming
Here’s an open secret: dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It’s about waking up. In ordinary life, we are often in the circumstances of sleepwalkers, going through the motions, trying to keep up with preset schedules and to meet other people’s expectations and requirements. We let other people determine what’s important. We let them define who we are and what we are able and not able to do and become. Ruled by habit and the need to get through the daily grind, we forget that our lives may have a larger purpose.
Dreaming, we wake up to a bigger story. The moment of awakening may come in a sleep dream, when we get out of our own way and it is easier for us to encounter something beyond the projections of the trivial