Sometimes, one dream is enough to change your life, if you believe it

By David McElroy · June 6, 2012

What kind of dreams do you have? I’ve always been fascinated by mine, even though I’ve never figured out whether they’re just nocturnal patterns of nightly neuronal weirdness or if there could be something deeper about them. I read something Tuesday from a man who’s certain that his dreams are meaningful, because a dream he had when he was 16 years old changed his life.

I don’t know much about this guy. He lives in Great Britain and was a loser early in life. Nobody expected anything of him, including himself. Well, I’ll let him tell his story, which he told Tuesday on a message board:

I was written off at school when I was 10. The teachers at this massive school decided that there was nothing that I could learn and it was pointless to try and teach me. I followed the lead and paid no attention in class. Life was pretty bad at home so to get attention, I’d ruin class for everyone else. Parents would ask the school for their kids to be in classes where I wasn’t. No future.

At 16 years old, I’ve somehow scraped through my exams with the minimum grades required and into senior class. And I have the dream.

I’m in a room, stone pillars with oak panels, old, worn, antique furniture. There’s a lead lined lattice window, and I climb onto something, struggle to open it, and look out – I’m looking over the spires of Oxford. I’m at Oxford University!

What am I doing here? I shouldn’t be here? Oh. My. God!

I woke up crying, tears running down my face, went to school and paid attention, contributed in class, asked question after question after question. I studied like my life depended on it, got my grades and went to University (not Oxford, but one of the top ten in the UK). I’ve since worked in some amazing companies in amazing jobs and currently work in the City of London, right next door to St Paul’s cathedral.

It all happened because of that dream. When everyone else had given up, including me, something deep inside knew I wasn’t an idiot. It showed me a different world, and my world changed.

Perhaps your dream is showing you what you can do, who you can be, what can be yours.

Most of the time when we talk about our dreams, we’re meaning the things we most want out of life — our biggest goals and aspirations. But what if they’re sometimes the same as what we dream at night? What if our minds are trying to tell us something, even when we don’t think we’re ready to listen?

I’ve never had a dream that’s changed my life, but I’ve had plenty of dreams that made me wake up and wonder what my unconscious might be trying to tell me, because some dreams have just felt important, even if I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why. But I want to point something out about the story the man just told you.

When you listen to his story, you can tell that he clearly believes the dream changed his life. But the truth is that the dream was more like an ink blot. There was nothing signifiant about the specifics, as far as we can tell. He might have interpreted it to mean that the dream represented other people mocking him about what he would never achieve. There are a dozen different interpretations he could have given to it.

But he chose to believe it meant something positive. He chose to use it as a turning point. The real lesson here isn’t that we should wait for random mysterious dreams. The lesson is that we can change our lives when we decide we’re ready to. Nothing changed about his outer life. When he awoke from that dream, something had changed inside — and he became the person he had always been capable of being.

You don’t have to wait for a mysterious dream. You can have a waking dream. You can decide who you are and what you want to be — and you can turn yourself around anytime you really want to.

Whether they’re your sleeping dreams or your waking dreams, they don’t matter until you bring interpretation to them. Only you can do that. And only you can decide when to do it. So have a dream — sleeping or waking — but determine in your will that you’re ready to make your dream come true. It worked for a 16-year-old loser. It can work for you.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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