The Woman in My Dream

While Trees for Life was still in its embryonic stage, I was having an array of dreams. Many dreams were short and choppy. A few were long, multicolored and detailed. Some were like a saga over several days—it was obvious there was a thread between those dreams. 

I had a distinct feeling I was traveling to some other dimension where something was being revealed to me, but I was not understanding the message. After several months of frustration, I figured out that I didn’t know the language of the dreams. I needed to learn the language or find a translator, or both. 

Fortunately, I found a small group of dream enthusiasts that helped interpret dreams for its members. The leader of the group was a keenly insightful, intuitive, and wise person, devoid of any self-interest—a seer and a sage. I became a regular.

Soon after joining the group, I was visiting a friend in Des Moines, Iowa, where I woke up with a vivid and powerful dream. Without a doubt, it was a message being communicated to me, and I needed an interpretation. That was also the day our dream group met in Wichita. I drove 400 miles back to Wichita that day and made it to the meeting just as the group sat down in a circle.

My turn came soon. I closed my eyes and related my dream: 

I had an urgent need to relieve myself. I went outside and realized I was in my parents’ home in India. I squatted on the old, Indian-style toilet, and blood started to pour out, along with my innards. It was gory. The blood was bright and shiny red, as if to draw my attention. “It is new blood,” I said to myself.

I stepped out of the bathroom, but now there was no courtyard as before, just an empty room. Something luminous entered the room. I realized I did not have any clothes on and became self-conscious. My body was transparent.

I looked at whatever had entered the room. It “formed” into a woman. She was also naked and transparent. Light was emanating from her body, which was dazzling to the eyes, so I could only see her face. It was white, which reminded me I was in my own home in Wichita. The features on her face left an impression on me.

“Here is power,” the woman said to me.

There were no words … only thoughts were being communicated in total purity. 

The reaction from me was immediate and sharp.

“No,” I vigorously shook my head. The depth and strength of my reaction left no doubt as to my intent. I did not want power.

 The woman just stood there as if she knew the answer even before she spoke. As I looked at her, I woke up from my dream . . . 

Just as I finished the last line in relating the dream to the group, my eyes opened involuntarily and what I saw startled me.

 “You were the woman in my dream!” I pointed to a person sitting across the room from me. It was so sudden that it came almost as a shout. She was a new face in the group that I had never seen before.

“You were the one saying that to me in my dream!” I repeated. 

She laughed.

“Yes,” she confessed. “That is the second time I came to you in your dreams.”

There was a long pause. Everyone was transfixed. 

“However, you did not get the message the first time. That’s why the second dream and why I am here now,” she explained. She continued talking, relaying her message. 

“They are saying you are off by one-eighth of an inch. You are not that far off, but you cannot open the lid unless you make that little adjustment.” She twisted her hands as if opening the lid of a jar.

“It’s very small, but necessary.”

There was silence in the room. Even though all eyes were on her, I felt as if they were on me. I felt a tinge of resentment. She was a first-time visitor to the group and didn’t know anything about me or my background or Trees for Life. I had done everything in my power and now someone had come to lecture me on what I was not doing right. She even seemed to know my inner thoughts—my dreams. Resistance popped up in me, and I sealed my inner thoughts hermetically. She was not about to get any reaction from me. As it turned out, the woman did not need any feedback from me. 

She continued. 

“Your hesitation is about money. You do not want to ask people for money. This is their way of participating, but you are blocking them. You are not ready to receive them. There is some bad experience with money in your past that is stopping you. You must become aware of your blockage and cleanse it. There are many people waiting to join, and you are holding them up.”

I knew she was right. She wasn’t the only one telling me about a possible blockage.

A woman who I had literally bumped into at the door of an office downtown told me she saw something green around me, growing like grass. “Ah! It’s money coming from the grassroots,” she uttered, surprised.

On another occasion, I had picked up a couple hitchhiking on a highway on a bitterly cold morning. The woman seemed to know everything about me and told me not to back out of what I was doing because of money.

“Help is on the way,” she said. 

While visiting a bookstore, a young woman popped up from behind the bookshelves and told me to go north for help. 

“People are waiting for you,” she said. 

Even though this event at the dream group was strange and abrupt, I knew that the woman from my dream was correct. 

She introduced herself as Margarey. She was from Haiti and had come to Wichita a few days before to convey this message to me. Her husband of Lebanese descent was a businessman in Port-au-Prince. Margarey became a part of our group. Within a few days, she enrolled for a course at Wichita State University, got a room at the dorm, cultivated a host of friends, and gave interviews on the radio. We met often, in the dream group and also for lunch and other social occasions. After a few months, she disappeared from Wichita. 

That dream and Margarey’s message was timely and had a great impact on me. She made me realize my attitude toward money: I am not a beggar. My fear of poverty, often disguised as pride, was holding me back.

I was under the illusion that money was something concrete, something somebody had to have and had to give or not give. It was part of the biggest illusion foisted upon human beings—that we are separate individuals. It’slike saying my hands and knees are different from each other and have to take care of themselves, when in reality, they are part of the same body. When my knee gets hurt, it has a guarantee that my hands will respond and my whole body will respond. My knee does not have to go out begging to the hand and say, “Please help me.”

I came to understand that, when anything happens, the vibrations are felt in the universe, and the appropriate response comes. And it is not as individual atoms that this person or that person comes and helps. The help is coming from a Source beyond us. We are all agents of the same sound.

Margarey taught me that power does not come to one who has personal hang-ups. To get rid of those hang-ups is not a genteel, intellectual understanding. As the dream showed, it is a bloody and gory exercise, one I had already experienced by the time I met her.

I felt as if I had been asked continually to jump off a cliff, seeing the earth coming up fast and fearing I was going to crash and die. But something always happened to break that fall. My fear of poverty was so entrenched that this same scenario had to be repeated again and again in close proximity before I got the message: fear is merely fear, with no power of its own. 

I have a friend who was tricked into attending a ceremony in which people walked on fire. Inspired, he took off his shoes and successfully walked on those red-hot coals. To prove to himself the reality of that incident, he walked on hot coals in more than 100 other fire-walking ceremonies.

My condition was similar. A young volunteer once asked me, “How can you work with such poor people and be able to sleep at night?” 

I was not being presumptuous when I replied, “To become a candle, one has to lose the fear of being usurped by darkness.”