Friday, May 27, 2016

When a dreamer gave me notes from a lecture by my second self


I know that my dream self often travels far ahead of my waking self, scouting possible roads into the future, gathering skills and experience beyond my current level. I quite often feel that I am forever seeking to catch up with him. Sometimes others who have encountered him make that easier by bringing me reports I can trust. On one occasion, a very wise woman was able to give me notes she made from a lecture he gave in her dreams, and I was able to apply those notes immediately in writing a book. Here's what happened:

Some weeks after leading one of my five-day adventures at the Esalen Institute, I received a note from one of the participants, a highly intelligent, spirited lady, a person with two PhDs who had explored consciousness in many ways. "I want to thank you for that wonderful lecture you gave last night."
    I checked the date. I had not given a lecture that evening anywhere in consensus reality. I had already intuited what she was telling me. She had attended a lecture I gave in one of her dreams. The woman from Esalen reported that in my lecture, I had listed, "very clearly and elegantly", five reasons why we misinterpret dreams about the future. I had written them on a whiteboard in view of the group. 
    This gave
me shivers. On that very day, I was laboring over a chapter in a book that was later published as Dreaming True. 
The chapter was titled "When Dreams Seem False" and on the first page I was developing a list of the five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream messages about the future. I was satisfied with my statement about the first reason we get these messages wrong. But I was not yet content with my formulation of the other four reasons, or the order in which they should appear on the page. 
     I emailed the woman from Esalen. I asked her, "Any chance you kept notes from my lecture, or could reconstruct what I wrote on the whiteboard?" She responded within a couple of hours, sending me her version of Dream Robert's five points. They were expressed with admirable brevity, very much in my own style. Borrowing from my dream student's notes, I was able to compose the opening section of that chapter with almost no editing.

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