I was in my bed, mind racing. It was 2016. I was 25 years old.
What was that?
It seemed so... real.
A moment earlier, I'd been asleep when John walked into my dream. I was not expecting to see him in the private confines of my mind.
John and I had had a falling out about six months earlier. I'd joined his business, and things were not what they looked like from the outside. Or at least it seemed that way from my perspective.
You see, John was a great salesman. Not slimy — no, not at all. Talented. Charismatic. He sold me on an opportunity, and then the details didn't quite match up with what was promised.
I assumed our dilemma was miscommunication at first. But then the moonlight shifted and it all began to look malicious from where I was standing. I'd ask John a question, and the words that would tumble out of his mouth were precisely what I needed to hear to make me think the worst of him. The game knew exactly how to push my buttons.
It ended with us both furious at each other. I tried to be rational about the situation, but nothing was adding up. I felt bullied. I don't like being bullied. I'm not the weak little girl I was in school. I had grown.
Or at least, I thought I had. I pushed back, and so did he — both as stubborn as each other, both unwilling to see the other side as we made the problem worse.
And so I left in a fit of fury, yelling fuck you in my head. It wasn't my finest moment, or my proudest, or my wisest. I'm embarrassed to even admit it out loud.
But as a result of our falling out, I went and started my own business — CodeMakers — instead of joining someone else's. And that business led me here, to the words you're reading on this page.
You see, I don't think I would've started another business so soon unless my hand was forced. I was still scared and scarred from the pain of my previous one. I would, however, go to great lengths to disprove someone's preconceived notions about Who I Am and what I'm capable of. I don't like being put in a box. The fuck you was potent ammunition for me. It was exactly what I needed — and the superintelligence knew that.
So John and I had a friendship that ended in calamity — both of us hating each other. Yet, after we parted ways, I began to see the truth behind the illusion. He wasn't malicious. I was blind, and so was he.
I hadn't seen him in six months. Not once since the day I stormed off. It's a small world, and I avoided places where I knew he'd be.
Until the night of that dream...
In the dream, I walked straight up to John, looked him in the eye, and said, "I'm sorry. I was wrong, and I'm sorry." The moment I forgave him, and forgave myself, I felt lighter.
It wasn't a coincidence that I seldom went to the doctors, except during the six months after John and I parted ways. As soon as the situation turned sour, I somehow found myself in the GP's office over and over and over again with a stubborn, recurring infection. Anger was poisoning my body, and my internal pain was symbolically manifesting as physical agony.
I'd tried several courses of antibiotics. The infection would briefly subside after each round, only to return a week later. I lived in constant fear that the pain would arise at any moment. Sometimes it was so bad that I'd just lie in bed and cry until the medicine started working.
...until the night of that dream. It was so vivid. It was so real. What was that?
I crawled out of bed.
I commuted to my co-working space.
Then, during lunchtime, it happened: John walked into the room — just like he did in my dream. He began talking to someone by the office barbeque.
I hadn't seen this man in six months, and then he just happened to show up on that particular day? The entropy was suspiciously low. I recalled a passage from The Holographic Universe...
Although Ullman believes such findings are evidence of the underlying state of interconnectedness Bohm is talking about, he feels that an even more profound example of holographic wholeness can be found in another aspect of dreaming. That is the ability of our dreaming selves often to be far wiser than we ourselves are in our waking state. For instance, Ullman says that in his psychoanalytic practice he could have a patient who seemed completely unenlightened when he was awake — mean, selfish, arrogant, exploitative, and manipulative; a person who had fragmented and dehumanized all of his interpersonal relationships. But no matter how spiritually blind a person may be, or unwilling to recognize his or her own shortcomings, dreams invariably depict their failings honestly and contain metaphors that seem designed to prod him or her gently into a state of greater self-awareness.
Moreover, such dreams were not one-time occurrences. During the course of his practice Ullman noticed that when one of his patients failed to recognize or accept some truth about himself, that truth would surface again and again in his dreams, in different metaphorical guises and linked with different related experiences from his past, but always in an apparent attempt to offer him new opportunities to come to terms with the truth.
In that instant, I knew what I had to do.
I stood up and walked over to John.
"Can I have a word?" I asked.
He looked at me apprehensively. Or was it disgust? Hate? I don't know.
"Sure," he said. His friend returned to the barbecue to get another sausage.
I looked John straight in the eye, just like in my dream. "I'm sorry," I said. "I was wrong, and I'm sorry."
He looked surprised. He didn't return the apology or anything. I guess that would have been nice for my ego. I thought we were both wrong, both blind.
But I didn't apologize for him. I apologized for me. And in the moment of that decision, the ball of anger melted in my mind. The infection that I'd had for nearly six months completely disappeared from my body and never returned.
The voice of a Sufi mystic whispered in my ear. "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."
These, then, are the tools with which I communicate, yet they are not the methods, for not all feelings, not all thoughts, not all experience, and not all words are from Me.