Chapter 1

Then, a minute later, he found another faulty assumption. In the waking dream the young girl had gone through a period of intense loneliness as a teenager in the convent.

As an analogy, consider the main concept of the 1993 movie Groundhog Day happening in a trance-induced virtual reality. In the movie, the main character finds himself trapped in a 24-hour time loop. Every day when he awakes it is the same calendar day. Each day he experiments with different ways of resolving his problems, drawing on his successes and failures from the previous attempts. When he finally works out a solution he truly likes, he gets out of the time loop.

One client, a middle-aged professional woman, Emily, was wrestling with whether to risk shifting the focus of her work to an area that held much more appeal for her, but that might alienate her from much of the conservative community where she lived. In one of her waking dreams she was a professor, Winston, and the administrator of a seminary. As the dream went on she narrated:

Soon after this comment in her narration of the waking dream, Winston died. Following his death, I invited Emily to revisit the decision Winston had made that day in the seminary office when he and Gilbert had argued. I suggested she implement an alternative decision and notice what difference it made.

Now, five years since that waking dream, Emily is well into the transition in her own work. She is still valued by her traditional referral sources despite having become much more open in her pursuit of this new direction in her career. The fear and apprehension that had plagued her for some time have gradually abated as she has given herself permission to pursue her true interests.

In waking dreams people can develop abilities and relationship skills they currently lack.

A recently divorced woman, Donna, brought her two children to see me for some help dealing with the fallout from the breakup of the family. In one of her individual sessions she had a waking dream in which she was the wife of a Southern plantation owner in the pre-Civil War period. In her dream, Donna’s husband had died young and left her with two children to raise and a plantation to manage. As she explored the remainder of Donna’s life in the dream, she experienced the confidence and competent manner in which she managed the plantation. She noted with some humor that the other plantation owners in the community, all men, did not take kindly to the undeniable truth that she was more successful than they were. Following her death in that dream, Donna had a strong sense that her own two children were with her to help her remain aware of her own competency as she deals with the stereotyped expectations of some of her professional colleagues in the traditionally male-dominated field in which she works.

This is particularly helpful for clients who have felt "victimized" in some way by life. Emily (see number 2) had not only been looking to move in a new direction professionally, she had also remained somewhat "stuck" following the death of her long-term partner. Previously she had experienced a number of other losses in her life. In her grieving over her partner’s death she wrestled with the unfairness that she always seemed to be the one who was left behind. In one of her waking dreams her partner appeared in the role of a spouse. In Emily’s role as the dream character, this time she was the first of them to die. Floating in the Light she decided that it was no easier to be the first to die than to be the one left behind.

She had had to deal with other losses as well. As the owner of a small business, Emily had suffered quite a financial loss when a trusted employee embezzled funds. She experienced the other side of this relationship in another waking dream in which Emily saw herself as a young man, Clark, who wanted to join the military. In the dream his mother was opposed to this. Over a period of about twenty minutes she related the following events in her dream:

Following Clark’s death, I suggested Emily do a life review and notice what she learned from this "wasted life."

Subsequent to this waking dream, Emily’s anger at the employee who had embezzled from her subsided considerably, and continued to abate in the months that followed. She still pursued legal avenues to the situation, but was able to do so from a much calmer perspective.

One woman, Jane, generated the idea of hearing her dream character whisper "purple" in her ear whenever she began acting jealous around friends or colleagues. While I monitored this over the next several months, she reported that not only had she heard "purple" on a number of occasions (reaffirming how much of a problem this behavior had been), but that many of her friends had commented on the positive shift in her interactions where jealousy was concerned.

In one waking dream a young woman, Betsy, saw herself as an old man, Stephen, sitting on a park bench. His wife had died, and he had no contact with his two grown sons.

Betsy noted that Stephen seemed very resentful. She said, "He was just disappointed. Nothing went the way he wanted." Following his death, she reported the following discussion with him:

I suggested that Betsy ask Stephen what he would have to give up to let go of feeling so unlovable. He told her he would have to let go of his pride. Given the choice between being proud and alone or risking love, Stephen accepted my invitation to have his wife join him there in the Light. The client then reported:

I suggested that Betsy allow herself to experience this firsthand instead of from the third-person perspective. She continued:

I then invited Stephen’s parents to join him. Smiling, Betsy continued:

As we explored metaphorical connections between the dream characters and people in her own life, Betsy reported a number of parallels like those found in The Wizard of Oz. Stephen’s parents were representative of Betsy’s aunt and uncle; Stephen’s aunt and uncle were representative of her own parents. When Stephen was a child these relatives had been nice to him, but had moved away and he had missed them. There were more connections. His wife in the dream was a parallel to one of the Betsy’s grandmothers. His two sons in the dream were a parallel to two of Betsy’s sisters. Two more of her siblings were represented by Stephen’s brother and sister. Finally, a teenage girl whom Stephen had befriended as an old man in his neighborhood had personality traits of one of the Betsy’s nieces. As Betsy ended the dialogue with him in this waking dream, I asked if he had any other messages for her about all these people gathering together there in the Light with him. He told her:

Not only did the dream provide Betsy with an intense experience of feeling loved by so many people, it also let her experience the consequences of the alternative in the form of the lonely, bitter man sitting on the park bench. Notice how the dream took advantage of many different relationships from Stephen’s life, bringing the essence of those people into many different relationships in Betsy’s own life. Love is not just between soul mates. It is a feeling we experience internally that can arise from any relationship we nurture.

One of Emily’s (see number 4) other waking dreams provides an example of this. In this dream she is a young woman, Tarea, who grew up in a gypsy community in Europe in the 1800s. At age 16 she became pregnant by her mother’s boyfriend who subsequently left. She gave birth to a son who became very special to her: "I never cared so much about anybody." One day when her son was four years old, men on horseback rode through the camp to run them out of the area. Her son ran out to see what was happening and was killed by one of the horses. Until she died some 25 years later she never let anyone get close to her again (despite the efforts of several people who sought to help) because, as she said, "It hurts too much." On her deathbed, Tarea laid waiting for the darkness to come, but instead she said the Light came. With it came understanding:

I suggested Tarea and Emily meet and talk with each other.

We worked with the metaphor of the door as Emily had experienced it emotionally in her own life.

Asked about the benefits of keeping the door open or taking it down, Emily remarked:

This last point routinely becomes a gateway to what is often one of the most significant aspects of the therapy process. I believe our culture continues to value an emphasis on the five senses at the expense of an additional way of knowing: our intuitive sense. Facilitated by the guides and dream characters in a series of waking dreams, my clients re-learn how to recognize intuitive moments in their daily lives, and to again trust the accuracy of those intuitions. Perhaps facilitated by the unconditional love they experience when in the presence of their guides, they also learn to better differentiate fear-based thoughts from intuition. As they increasingly recognize and value ordinary hunches in day-to-day living, they find they can more easily sidestep or defuse situations that previously would have felt stressful. Life becomes more playful, more intriguing as "coincidences" are increasingly understood as more literally linked to their thoughts, feelings, and intentions.

As you read their stories, I hope their messages will have a similar effect for you. Pay attention to places in the book where something that you read seems to strike a resonant chord in you. Resist the temptation to just keep reading. Pause for a moment and sit with your feelings. Instead of trying to analyze their source, imagine giving yourself permission to turn a dial that allows you to experience these feelings even more intensely. Play with the possibility that it was no coincidence that you had the reaction you did to what you had just read. Invite your intuitive sense to elaborate on the message being conveyed by what you are feeling.

Most people who experience an NDE encounter some form of non-physical being or guide. As will be evident throughout the book, I personally believe that every person has one or more such guides who are available during life and not just after physical death. Whatever your beliefs about the form and function of guides, you can use unexpected moments of intense feelings as a kind of "affect bridge" to help you and your guide(s) communicate better with each other. Similar to leaving a message on a close friend’s cell phone without focusing on how the message actually gets there, imagine sending a message to your guide that explicitly gives him or her permission to use this window of opportunity to offer you guidance, suggestions, or support.