A Dream that Changed my Life

When I was ten years old I had a dream.

This dream has impacted my life since then in so many ways, I can hardly count them. It was an epiphany. I searched for ‘epiphany’ on google. I found the following.

1 — a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something. 2 — an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking. 3 — an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.

I also found this: Epiphanies are mental moments where we have instant clarity, which can turn into motivation to change and charge forward. But not all epiphanies are created equally. Some demand a deep inward search, and you’ll be stuck asking the tough questions to see what you are made of. As a plot device, epiphany often marks a turning point in the character’s psyche which leads to the eventual conclusion of the story. (https://literaryterms.net/epiphany/)

In addition, I learned this: Pope Francis marked the Catholic feast day of Epiphany, the day traditionally observed to commemorate the three wise men — or Magi — visiting the baby Jesus, by urging people to “follow their dreams.” During a Mass celebrated at the Vatican.

I don’t know whether my dream lasted ten seconds or a minute or five minutes. In Asia they say enlightenment is like a ‘flash of lightening on a dark night.” That ‘s what this dream was for me.

I was floating outside my body, looking down at myself at the age of thirty-two. I ‘knew’ I was going to be making my living as a public speaker, a university professor, a writer, traveling and helping people live happier and more successful lives. I saw myself doing a one-man play on stage before a live audience. I recently presented my one-person play, “Confessions of a Time Traveler” in three different Canadian cities.

Over the years, all of the situations I had seen in this dream eventually came to be physical events in my life. Some manifested in very positive and rewarding ways. Others became part of my personal reality in ways that were surprising.

Still others manifested more as a curse than a blessing. This last category always meant my getting over some sort of pain or loss. All of them required some effort to shift from negative to positive. Some of them weighed me down for years, until I learned to change the place the memories of these events occupied in my mind. Eventually I was able to see them all as positive learning experiences, from which I could continue to “draw water from the same well” as physicist Michio Kaku has put it..

This process of ‘changing something from a wound into a blessing is one of the processes I discuss in my book, “Mind, Time and Power!”. My website also has links to my You Tube channel.