After dinner, my father ran to the barn and searched relentlessly. The knife was nowhere to be found. In the late hours, my grandmother came out to the barn and told him it was time to go to bed, that he had searched enough. As she put my father to bed, she told him to ask his dreams to show him where it is. My father closed his eyes and prayed that his dreams would do so.
After falling asleep, my father dreams this:
He sees himself get up out of bed and walk out into the pasture. He goes along the fence line, counting fence posts. When he gets to a certain number he reaches up and feels the top of the post. Here he finds the knife, out of eyesight.
My father jolted awake from his dream and, in his pajamas, ran out to the pasture, counted fence posts, and when he got to the certain one reached his hand up. Just as in his dream, the knife was laying on top.
Lesson Five:
Dreaming is a part of the True Self. It is what extends us beyond our physical self; dreams hold the past, present, and the future. We can ask them a question and they will answer it.
From my father’s dream, I learned that our Dreaming Self is bigger, reaches further, and knows more than our waking self. I learned that we can ask questions of our dreams, and that our dreams will answer them. This told me that we have a special relationship to our dreams, and that this relationship is important. I understood that dreams are a part of us that is watching, and talking to us, in a different way from the part of us that is always doing something, but that both parts can talk to each other. And I learned that the watching part of us is very intelligent and can always be trusted.
If we close our eyes and look inside, we will see.
Chapter Two:
My Grandmother: Example of Living the Vertical
This is a short chapter, but an important one. It is about my grandmother. While my father laid the foundation for understanding the active, manifesting aspect of dreaming, my grandmother laid the foundation for the quiet, receptive, mysterious, and spiritual aspect.
I introduced my grandmother to you in the last chapter. She was my father’s mother, the one who instructed my father to dream the location of the knife that he had lost.
Unlike my father, my grandmother spoke to me about several night dreams. She thought that night dreams were important and that they came from God. Some of them she thought of as prophetic. In others, she met and talked with family, both alive and deceased, and she saw these dreams as offering an in-between space where these meetings could occur. Her dreams became more frequent in her last years on this planet, especially those in which she talked with deceased family, and these she took at this time to be signs that she was preparing for her own crossing over.
My grandmother was very active in her church and very spiritual outside of the church. The church was more than a physical location with scheduled events; for her, it was a living part of her relationship with God, which was seamless and ever-present. She lived in ongoing communion with God.
My grandmother ran what was called a Prayer Tree. Hers was the name at the top. When anything would happen in town that warranted prayer, my grandmother was called. The beleaguered person would spill their worries and grandmother would listen. When finally they were done, she would ask the other person to close their eyes and pray with her. She prayed intently.
As soon as my grandmother hung up from praying with the person, she would consult the next level branch of the tree, which had five names. She would phone each of these people and tell them what had happened, who needed prayer, and for what. They would each say a prayer together. Then the prayer was passed. Each of the five people my grandmother called had five more names under them to call, and so on.
The Prayer Tree calls happened swiftly, with prayers multiplying and zipping through town within the half-hour once my grandmother had set the Tree in motion. I have seen my grandmother stop to pray mid-meal, in a bathrobe, and before coffee had even been made if a call came in for the Prayer Tree. It was priority.
Along with hearing my grandmother’s night dreams, I was also told a story many times throughout my childhood. The story happened before I was born, and it is about my grandmother’s stepson, my Uncle Charles, who was in the military in active duty during World War II.
My grandmother was known for her cakes, both in the family and, famously, in the town. They were delicious, and my Uncle Charles loved them, especially her fruit cake. One morning during Uncle Charles’s station, my grandmother woke up and felt very strongly she needed to send Charles a cake. She set to work baking, working all day long with single-focused intention. She said prayers and then she shipped the cake.
We are told by Uncle Charles that the day the cake arrived he was so excited that he hid it from his bunkmates because he didn’t want to share any of it with them. When lunchtime came, Uncle Charles pretended to be sick. He told his bunkmates to go on, that he was just going to lie down for a little bit. Once they had all gone on to the mess hall for lunch, Uncle Charles pulled out his cake and lay down on his bunk to eat it. At that moment, the base was bombed. All of the men in the mess hall were killed. My Uncle Charles and only a few other men from the base survived.
I learned several things from my grandmother’s stories and examples that have informed my dreaming life. The first is that our relationship with God, our ability to step into the vertical reality, is intimate and immediate. We are able to access this at any time, and dreams are a part of that relationship. When my grandmother spoke of her dreams, she spoke of them as if they were an equal reality, just different, and in the present. In a similar way, prayer was never formalized; it was simply done as conversation.
Lesson Six:
The dreaming world and the waking world are distinct and yet the same. We can access the dreaming world at any time. This means we can access our relationship with God at any time.
When my grandmother woke up knowing she had to bake the cake for Uncle Charles, she did it as one continuous movement, dreaming to awake and bringing the dream into the waking moment. I learned from her that there is a waking world and a spiritual world and they are distinct and yet the same, one on top of the other.
Once, my grandmother told me that love can be a prayer. I understood that to mean that all of our actions are both physical and spiritual. When my grandmother baked the cake for Uncle Charles, she did it with love and intent, and then let it go. It seemed to me that her experience of the spiritual, dreaming world as one that is always present is what allowed her to do this.
With my grandmother also came a glimpse of the intuitive aspects of dreaming. She did not know why she felt she needed to bake the cake for Uncle Charles, she just knew she had to do it. She did not dismiss her knowing—she accepted it as important. She stayed in relationship with it by responding to it. She never missed the miracle.
Growing up, I respected this kind of intuition and paid attention to it. However, my first real test for this lesson came just after graduating from college.
I had left my hometown and moved to Dallas, where I was sleeping on the couch of some friends from college while looking for a job. I had been interviewing at length, focused on my goal of obtaining a job selling syndicated television shows. I had stayed in touch with the contacts I had made at NATPE and met with them regularly. Each of them told me I had to get a job selling advertising time for a local television station first, in order to gain the experience I needed to move up into selling syndicated programming.
My thought at the time was that I would move anywhere to work in order to gain this needed experience, so I set up interviews in Dallas as well as other cities. I began to notice in my interviewing process that with some of the stations I met with I felt bright and open in my body; with