BUY THE BOOK ABOUT THE BOOK CHAPTER EXCERPTS REVIEWS TOUR SCHEDULE MEDIA APPEARANCES PRESS KIT JOIN DREAM LIST AUTHOR BIO AUTHOR INTERVIEW READERS' COMMENTS DREAM FORUM CONTACT   Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Epilogue

Chapter 4 (Excerpt): DREAMS OF PERSONAL CALLING Healing Our Life Path "A people who do not dream never attain to inner sincerity, for only in his dreams is a man really himself. Only for his dreams is a man responsible -- his actions are what he must do. Actions are a bastard race to which a man has not given his full paternity." ---John Butler Yeats (in a letter to his son W.B.) What would happen if we followed the call of a Healing Dream? Would things fall apart, the center no longer hold? Or would our apportionment of life wax fuller, our inner and outer lives mirroring each other more faithfully that we've dared imagine? Would our trajectory suddenly have more loft, our fate more consequence? Or would we crash to earth, having trusted our waxen wings to the sun? What does a life that honors the dream look like? Career consultants say they have never heard so many people confiding their yearnings for meaningful vocation, for a life's labor that melds head and heart, for some perfect fit between inner being and outer circumstance. But it can be difficult to tease out the thread of true calling from a life- pattern woven by necessity or default, within a society that does not always reward integrity. We take chart a career path, only to discover we have drifted by invisible increments and via tangled byways far from where we aimed our sextant. But if in waking life we are actors on the social stage, delimited by norms, expectations, and personal history, in dreams we enter the realm of potentia. Here our spiritual challenge is restored, shown to be eternally existent. We may even find to our amazement (and dismay) that the yearnings of the Self can no longer be soothed with token gestures or placated by half-way measures. Even when we invoke pragmatism in defense of our daily choices, our dreams may refuse to bite their tongues; even after we have forgotten them, they remember us well. At night, they rap on the window to draw us from our abodes. Or bide their time, keepers of the flame, awaiting the right moment to ignite the soul and set our lives ablaze... Chapter 5: Dreaming Together