Are dreams real?

On Sunday night, or more correctly, sometime early Monday morning, I had a dream where I was teaching a class. The class went as usual, which meant that during the part where the students were reading each other, I had some free time. Normally, I'd stay and sort of check in on how folks were doing, but this time, I went out to my car to see if everything was ready for the meeting I had after the class. My trunk was open and someone had stolen my laptop, which meant that I no longer had the necessary info and had to cancel the meeting. The good news was that I ad backed everythign up, and wasn't even upset.

Clearly, what was important to me about the dream was not what happened in class, so when I woke up I didn't really remember that part.

Here's the funny thing:

On Monday afternoon, I got the following email from a woman who was in one of my classes a couple of years ago:

"Last night I had a dream and you were a character. You came up behind me.. I was in some kind of classroom setting... you looked at me seriously... the classroom became silent... you put one of your hands on my right back shoulder and the other on the front.. I let out some tears and I remember feeling a release, yet without a conscious focus on what it was or why... then you disappeared and the class continued..."

So were our dreams just the fragments of what we can remember in normal waking consciousness of an alternate reality (the astral plane?) that we both shared?

Can you clean water with your intention?

Yes, water and living things give off small amounts of light (their auras?). Yes, you can photograph this -- with special equipment. And yes, intention can change the light given off by water. Check out the photos here:

Results of the Clean Water Experiment:Of glowing light and alchemy | The Intention Experiment

5 Surprising Reasons to Love Rain

Winter (aka the rainy season) has just begun in northern California, so I though I'd share some unexpected reasons to love rain:

1. Rain helps you breathe freely - My Dad, the allergist, was fond of pointing out that rain washed pollen out of the air, so asthmatics could breathe better. I'm sure it washes pollution out of the air the same way.
   
2. Rain cleanses your aura - All moving water gives off negative ions, and negative ions clean your electromagnetic field, aka your aura.
   
3. Rain relaxes you in several ways:

• Negative ions have been shown to relax people - it's part of why people love being by the ocean or by rivers, and again, rain is moving water, so it's giving off negative ions.
  
• The white noise of falling rain relaxes you.
• Humans have been programmed through history to relax in the rain. Pre-historic hunters couldn't hunt much in the rain -- the game was holed up somewhere trying to stay dry. Traditional farmers couldn't work well in the wet fields when it rained. So we have a lot of history of staying inside our caves, huts or homes when it rains and just hanging out. That would lead our bodies to relax naturally.

Neuroscience Insights into Culture & Prejudice

As we've known in NLP for a long time, you can change your own automatic reactions:

"The work... also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.

"Many of the studies presented here concerned the way we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds. The anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese brains activate when people see members of their own group endure pain, but they do so at much lower levels when they see members of another group enduring it. These effects may form the basis of prejudice.

"But a study by Saaid A. Mendoza and David M. Amodio of New York University showed that if you give people a strategy, such as reminding them to be racially fair, it is possible to counteract those perceptions."

Op-Ed Columnist - The Young and the Neuro - NYTimes.com

How to Be Miserable

This is the perfect statement of what NOT to do:

Manifesting Money -- or, Be Careful What You Ask For

This might sound over the top, even for me, but I swear, every word of this is true:

I really enjoy cooking. I like working with my hands, I love seeing a successful result from the work -- and I love eating the fruits of my labor (pun intended)! So last Saturday afternoon, I had a marathon cooking session (chicken broth, wild rice & vegetable soup, polenta, a huge chopped salad, 2 beer-can chickens, healthy refried beans, and chocolate bread), to turn the farmers' market's bounty into meals for a week. As you can imagine, this took about 4 hours -- and I was having a great time!

I was in the kitchen alone for the entire time, with all the doors closed. The door to the back deck was closed because it was really blustery, the door to the dining room was closed because my husband was working in there, and didn't want to hear the noise of me banging around in the kitchen, and the door to the hall was closed because if it's open when I cook, our overly sensitive smoke alarm goes off.

My husband and I were the only ones in the house.

My clothes had no pockets. I was in and out of the refrigerator constantly, in particular, using the vegetable bins which are at the bottom of the fridge. This meant that I saw the floor in front of the fridge regularly, and it was empty (okay, a little dirty, but empty).

After about 3 hours of cooking, there was a $20 bill, neatly folded in fourths, sitting on the floor directly in front of the refrigerator!

I questioned my husband -- had he been in there the one time I went to the bathroom? No. And furthermore, he asked how the twenty looked on the floor. I told him in fourths, and he said, 'couldn't have been me -- I fold my bills in half', pulling a wad of greenbacks out of his pocket to show me.

There is a skirted sofa in the kitchen, next to the fridge, but even if there had been a twenty under there, how would it have gotten out? Remember there was no real air motion, because all the doors were closed. There is nowhere else a $20 bill could have hidden.

So I conclude that somehow I manifested the twenty!

Why would this be?

Well, my guides have been telling me for some time to chill, to quit working so hard (I've noticed that it does not seem to produce any significant result). And when I thought back, I realized that for several years (though I stopped a couple of years ago), I had done the following affirmation:

"By being who I am, and doing what I love, I now prosper beyond my wildest dreams."

Perhaps, by doing this affirmation, I was precluding succeeding by working hard! Because if you love what you do, it doesn't feel like work. For me, doing sessions with people and teaching classes doesn't feel like work, at least not often. But all that marketing stuff -- definitely work! So maybe, by working hard at things I don't love, I preclude the kind of prosperity which I simultaneously affirm.

I guess the question is this, does an affirmation preclude what is not consistent with it, e.g. 'by being who I am and doing lots of things I hate, I now prosper beyond my wildest dreams'? I'm beginning to think so. After all, I was having a great time, cooking, which in my book is kind of f*#cking off, and there was the $20.

I have to admit that the idea that, having done that affirmation, working hard is a bad idea -- really challenges me. (I grew up with that old Protestant work ethic.)

Now, how do I manifest a $10,000,000 cashier's check? :)

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

If we weren't looking for patterns where we didn't know they existed, how would science ever appe?

Mind - How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect - NYTimes.com