Change is valuable: The case of the buffalo nickel

When people tell me they can't remember dreams, I sometimes tell them to go out into the world and dream with their eyes wide open, by paying attention to signs and symbols and synchronicity around them. This often produces interesting results right away. Quite frequently, paying attention to synchronicity reopens the connection to dreams. 

There is a mirror relationship between dreams and meaningful coincidence. Dreaming, we get out there: we travel beyond body and brain into other realities, sometimes to a personal movie production studio where dreams are made to bring us awake. Through the play of synchronicity, powers of the deeper world poke through the curtains of our everyday perception with the same design: to bring us awake to a deeper order or events and life possibilities.

Looking through my journals just now, I found this pleasant little incident involving a woman who didn't remember dreams but found a waking dream just round the corner after I suggested she might look for one. 

I gave an evening talk to a large and highly enthusiastic crowd at a store in Mountain View, California.

When I moved to a table to sign books a woman told me, when she reached the head of the line, "I find what you say fascinating but I never remember my dreams."

I reassured her that she was not alone. Dream drought is endemic in our society.

"What can I do?"

I gave her a few simple suggestions. "Give yourself a juicy intention for the night. Make time to linger in bed and see what comes back. Be kind to wisps and fragments. Keep a journal. Write down something every day, even if there are no dreams. "That way you are saying to your dream producers, I'm, here. I'm ready to listen."

I scrawled an inscription in her book. May your best dreams come true - and may you remember them.

I said, "There is something you can do right now, tonight. You can let the world speak to you in the manner of a dream. When you leave the store, tell yourself that the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception will be a message to you from the world, a kind of in-your-face dream symbol."

She looked a bit skeptical as she went out.

She rushed back into the store while I was still signing books. 

"Look what I got!" She held out her palm to show me a Buffalo nickel (one of the old "Indian Head" nickels retired from circulation in 1938). "I got it in the change at a Chinese take-out place. Do you know how rare this is?"

I said, "My one liner-would be, change is valuable."

 She clapped her hands, delighted. "Yes! Change is worth a lot. I guess I am going to dream now."