I Have A Dream

 

    What is a dream? Some people may have an idea leading to their success come to them in a dream while sleeping. John Lennon wrote a best-selling song -- one of his most iconic solo works -- based on a dream he had. The chorus of "#9 Dream" repeats a nonsensical phrase he heard in the dream, "Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé," and the lyrics refer to the feeling of a dream being real: "So long ago/ Was it in a dream, was it just a dream?/Seemed so very real, it seemed so real to me." Beatles legend has it that Paul McCartney composed the melody for "Yesterday" -- the most-covered song in music history -- in a dream one night in 1964. 

          Director Christopher Nolan took the inspiration for his 2010 psychological thriller Inception from his own lucid dreams. The psychological thriller follows a dream thief (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a corporate spy, who steals dreams from the minds of CEOs and business tycoons. 

    Stephen King was hit by a minivan in 1999, while he was walking down a country road in Maine. While recovering from the collapsed lung and a shattered leg, the prolific horror writer began having vivid dreams. Those dreams formed the basis of the 2001 novel turned film Dreamcatcher. But it wasn't the only work of King's to be inspired by a dream. King has said, that his dreams help him to portray events symbolically in his writing.

    A field of cows inspired Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which, according to a calm.com survey, is one of the most important ideas that ever came out of sleep. In his dream, Einstein was telling a farmer about cows being surrounded by an electric fence, but the farmer saw something different. Einstein awakened with the realization that the same event could vary from different perspectives, and the theory of relativity began to take shape.

    Elias Howe was exhausted from his attempts to develop a machine that could stitch together fabric. Asleep, he dreampt that cannabils were preparing to cook him as they danced about waving spears—and the spears had a hole at the sharp tip. Eureka! That’s when Howe got the idea to pass the thread through the point of the needle instead of the end, explains author David Jones in his book The Aha! Moment: A Scientist’s Take on Creativity. 

    “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” This is how author Mary Shelley described the lucid dream that led to her classic novel, Frankenstein. 

    Unlike many of the other world-changing ideas mentioned here, the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde didn’t originate after a night of sweet slumber; the tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to Robert Louis Stevenson during a drug-induced nightmare. His dream-induced screams disturbed his wife, Fanny, who angrily woke him up. Startled, he said to her, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” The nightmare took a terrible turn when Fanny thought the first draft of the story was nonsense—and she burned it.  Stevenson feverishly rewrote the 30,000-word story over a three-day period. Sure enough, it ended up selling so well that the book lifted the Stevensons out of debt.

    According to psychoanalyst Carl Jung, our dreams can function on many different levels, from telling us which parts of our psyche are out of balance to anticipating our future needs. He also believed that most dreams operated on the level of stories, myths, and archetypes -- making them a wonderful source of ideas and inspiration. All human beings are also dream beings. Jack Kerouac, who composed a book entirely of his own dreams, once said. "Dreaming ties all mankind together."

    Dreaming is a natural brain function, and all human beings do it. But some people never remember their dreams, according to experts. Your dreams have meanings as well. Psychologists say that both men and women become sexually aroused while dreaming (even if the dream has no sexual content). Average amount of time spent dreaming per night: 1 1⁄2 to 2 hours. Some people dream during the day as well.

     There is another type of dreaming and dream. People have come to believe in the "Ameican Dream?" Over time, the phrase “American dream” has come to be associated with upward mobility and enough economic success to lead a comfortable life. Historically, however, the phrase represented the idealism of the great American experiment. If you ask most people around the world what they mean by the “American dream,” nearly all will respond with some version of upward social mobility, the American success story, or the self-made man (rarely the self-made woman).

     No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary defines the American dream as “the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.”

    The idea that every person, no matter their present circumstance, could become rich if they worked hard in America, was not the norm. For most rich people during that time period, with money and status, wealth had been passed down from generation to generation. You had to be born into wealth. And if a person who had not been born into wealth and status within the country became wealthy, their newly acquired wealth was looked down upon for being “new money.” The American dream opened the possibility for anyone to become rich and gain status in the country.

    Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had this type of dream for America. His speech about a dream and vision he had for America became famous. The I Have a Dream speech, is a public speech that was delivered by the American civil rights activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In the speech, King called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States.

    Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Dream” speech was a call for equality. It identified the faults of America and what measures were needed to make it a better place. A central theme throughout the speech was the importance of everyone being treated equally. His dream was a vision he believed was accomplishable if the effort and hard was put towards the goal.

    Successful people may have other things going for them as well. But they certainly have a vision. A clear dream, along with the courage to act and follow through, dramatically increases your chances of success. It has been said that if you aim for nothing, you will hit it every time! I couldn’t agree more. The Good Book says that without a vision, people perish. They run amuck. They live without restraint, giving their time and attention to whatever screams the loudest instead of what will get them ahead in life (Proverbs 29:18).

    Altruism or having altruistic dreams is the selfless act of helping others without expecting anything in return. It is often considered one of the defining characteristics of what it means to be human. The list of people in history who had dreams of helping others and the world at large is a short list. Their journey of following their dreams gives real meaning to they can’t go where you are going.

    Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of an America which embraced all of its people regardless of color and economic status and treated each fairly. Even though there were many people supporting his dream, there were many in opposition to his dream.

    Some of the major political leaders of the day spoke out in opposition to Martin Luther King Jr's dream and the demands of civil rights activists. Many prominent Democrats made the argument that African Americans should be happy with what they had, rather than asking for more.

    The majority of White Americans living in the South opposed King, but that reaction was not confined to the South. By 1966, a nationwide Gallup poll found only 33% of Americans had positive feelings about Dr. King. Seventy-five percent of Americans disapproved of the civil rights leader as he spoke out against the Vietnam War and economic disparity.

    White racial resentment was still a critical factor at that point. But Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s unfavorable numbers were at least 25 points higher in 1968 than in 1963, and his faltering appeal over the final years of his life was also a consequence of appearing to fall behind his times in some respects even as he was leaping well ahead of them in others.

    Martin Luther King Jr., born January 15, 1929, was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A Black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in the United States.

    King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his I Have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington D.C. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

    Dr. King met and lost friends and supporters while working to achieve his dream. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by national mourning, as well as anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the federal holiday was first observed in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and King County in Washington was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

    Dr. King understood the dangers of him fighting for social change and equality. He knew many people wouldn’t embrace his vision for a different America. He also knew there would be people who were not going to be able to be a part of his dream and that he may not live to see his own dream come about. The knowledge of where his dreams may take him did not stop him from dreaming and working towards that dream.

    There are people who dream and have the satisfaction of living to see their dream come true. There are some people who know they will not live to see the realization of their dreams. There are people who cannot go where you are going. Sometimes to your death because of your dream. They can’t go with you where you are going.

    Reach for as many personal dreams you can acheive. Hopefully, while acheiving personal dreams, you will reach for altruistic dreams which benifits humanity. HAVE A DREAM.

***THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM A WORK IN PTOGRESS: "    They Can't Go With You Where You Are Going"

Follow, share, and comment. Keep an eye out for future posts from this upcoming manuscript

 

Dreams + Vision Board

 Want to add another tool to acheiving success? Try a vision board.

    This is my vision board for 2024.

 

    You may have heard people refer to vision boards, but do you know what a vision board is and its purpose?

    

    Simply put, a vision board is a collage of images and words representing a person's wishes or goals, intended to serve as inspiration or motivation. Nothing more or nothing less. The great thing about a vision board is that they are as unique as every individual and individual dreams and goals.

    People are given the suggestion of cutting out images from magazines which represent goals they want to acheive or dreams they want to come to fruition. Words can also be used. The finale product should be a visual of what you would like to acheive and are working to acheive.

    The concept of vision boards is relatively new. Vision boards became popular after Rhonda Byrne's self-help book, The Secret, was published in 2006. Byrne introduced her readers to the idea that they could manifest their desires through the law of attraction, which is the idea that positive thinking will bring positive experiences into a person's life. 

    The law of attraction is a philosophy suggesting that positive thoughts bring positive results into a person's life. While negative thoughts bring negative outcomes. It is based on the belief that thoughts are a form of energy and that positive energy attracts success in all areas of life, including health, finances, and relationships.

    I chose to use real photographs and skills, in word form, I need to become a succesful writer. Let's look at my vision board again.

    My board begins with the word CAREER in the center and underneath, a picture of a publishing contract waiting to be signed. I want a writing career and for my work to be published. Oprah is represented twice on my board. I want my books to be on her book club reading list and I want to be interviewed for Master Class giving tips for success. Religion is featured twice in photograph form. Once for my continued reading of the Bible and for the Trinity to always be with me. The majority of my writing is Christian themed or mentioned. The word pray is also present. A world map is pictured because I want my writing to be read worldwide and a picture of a woman motivational speaker speaking to a packed audience is part of my board. I included bookstores I would like to see my work sold in along with being interviewed on Good Morning America. 

    Words play a significant role on my board such as, have a thick skin, refuse to quit, manifest, meditate, daydream, trust my gut, subscribers, visualized, destroy negative demons, commit, plan, multitask eliminate fear, post online, read, passion as fuel, and remove limits. 

    The word BALANCE is important to avoide burnout and stress while working towards my dream It is in different colors and there is a reason behind using different colors. There are 7 chakras, each having its own indiviual color or either red, orange, gold, green, blue, dark blue, and purple. I want my chakras to be in balance and aligned. Algnment is important. One of Opra's famous qoutes state, "When my power (my mind, intellect, desire to learn, and seed plant) align with my personality and my gift I have to give, why I am here (alignment of personality and purpose), I will acheive my dreams (I added text in parentheses).

    Another part of my vision board is enjoy the process and journey and that is represented by my future tea cup puppy I plan to buy along with my convertable mini coupe. Even while we are putting in the hard work and time to acheive our dreams and goals, we must make sure we are enjoying today. Another element I wanted to add was my plans, once I have the income, is to open a fruit and vegatable market which also offers slads and seating ares to enjoy a healthy meal.

    76% of small business owners who've used vision boards and images to create their companies say their businesses are where they envisioned them. Oprah Winfrey, Jim Carrey, Will Smith, Steve Harvey, and Beyonce have used the technique of vision board to manifest their goals and have acheived great sucess in their respective fields by doing so.

    

 

Trump, Evangelicals, and Wealth

One thing you cannot escape is Trump in the news daily. The former president finds himself swamped in criminal charges. Even with all of his legal problems, people love and support him, especially Evangelicals. How can this be? Christianity teaches against sin which includes lying, corruption, mistreatment of your fellowman, adultry, and many more actions Trump has been accused of doing. Yet, the religious community continue to support him and seemingly even encourage his antics. Trump's potential to be elected president once again has many people on edge and scratching their head wondering who would want a "criminal" (illegedly) for a president?

While I was attending Seminary, we quickly glossed over a parable which seemed to imply it is okay to use your wealth in a way to gain favor from people even if its unethically done. WHAT? I couldn't believe what I was reading and all the professor could say was, "This is seen as a controversial passage scholars have been unable to agree on its true meaning." But what was clear was this one sentence, "I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:1b-9)." 

Scholars cannot agree exactly what was taking place in the parable. Was the manager decreasing the amounts the master's debtors owed their master gaining favor from the debtors so they would welcome him when he no longer had a job? Does the parable teach to use your position in life to gain personal favor from people even though the way you do it is wrong? Time to look at the parable in the Bible.

In Luke’s Gospel, many of Jesus’s parables are grouped together. In chapter 15, we find the “lost” parables, where Jesus talks about misplaced coins, lost sheep, and wayward sons. In chapter 16, Luke puts two parables together: the Parable of the Shrewd Manager and the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man.

The parable of the shrewd manager reads like this:

“There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’

“The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg- I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’

“So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

“‘Nine hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied.

“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’

“Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’

“‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied.

“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’

“The master (Jesus) commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:1b-9).

There it is. The manager was cheating his boss out of money to gain favor from people he soon would be on the same level with as far as economics were concerned. The parable is specifically talking about using position, authority, and MONEY, to gain favor from people.

Many are confused how and why Evangelicals support and encourage Trump. There is no doubt Donald Trump uses his position, authority, and money to gain favor from people. He has been likened to a mob boss in doing a favor to get a favor. While campaigning for president, he makes favorable, sometime obsurd, promises to his base of supporters. Donald Trump not only uses his worldly wealth to gain friends, he uses threats too.

Some Christians choose to interpret this parable as meaning it is fine to use shrewd tactics to gain godly outcomes as evidenced by the verse in the parable, "For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.," They see Donald Trump, a sinner, doing bad to bring about good. He is backed by Evangelicals with a clear heart because of his overturning of Roe v Wade, and favoring other causes dear to them and their Christian faith. He doesn't have to be good or use ethics to bring about desired Christian outcomes in their minds. He is crooked for Christ.

The above parable seems to show that OUTCOMES are more important than means one uses to achieve the desired outcome. This is a parable many are not familiar with and you can see why. When I first read it I could not believe cheating was being sanctioned, making friends held as important in such a way, and self gain at any cost being encouraged. Even if the passage is trying to say it is more important to have friends than to worry about money, it wasn't the manager's money to use to gain friends. The Bible is clear, greed is a sin and the love of money can impede your entrance into heaven, but this is a parable about dishonesty.

It is evident Trump's wealth is his value in his eyes. He lies about his monetary value all the time and is currently standing trial for inflating at times and deflating his monetary value at other times. Every chance he gets he asks his followers to contribute to his defese or campaign even when they have no idea how the millioaire is going to use the money sent to him. Maybe they believe they are giving their money to a kingdom cause and when it is gone, they will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. But Evangelicals support Trump. Go figure.

Sowing Your Seed not Wild Oats

All human beings are blessed with a special gift from their creator, the ability to reproduce. While thinking about humans reproducing, I began to wonder why the male sperm is called a "seed" but a woman's egg is not called a seed and the significance of that distinction. I also wondered why men had a longer window to sire children than women. Sperm is the male reproductive cell and is derived from the Greek word sperma (meaning “seed”). A sperm cell is the male sex cell. The word sperm is derived from the Greek word σπέρμα, sperma, meaning "seed". This sperm is a very minute cell present in all men. 

In animals, female gametes are called ova or egg cells and male gametes are called sperm.  When an egg cell and a sperm cell unite, the two combine to form an embryo or an unborn, developing organism. Approximately 200 million to 500 million spermatoza (also called sperm or spermatozoans), produced in the testes, are released per ejaculation.

It may come as a shock but sperm can survive within the female reproductive system for a week! There is a strong desire of the seed to produce life. Sperm are tenacious. The female's egg is viewed as passive. Just hanging out for a while waiting for a sperm to come along. In early reproductive thought, the female's contribution to the formation of life was seen as minimum and downright dismissed.

Four centuries before Christ, Aeschylus wrote: “The woman you call the mother of the child/ is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed. …The man is the source of life — the one who mounts.” The general idea was that the womb provided merely a soft field in which the male seed was sowed. Then in 1672, a Dutch physician named Regnier de Graaf found ovaries full of eggs in a number of mammals, and although he couldn’t find any eggs in humans, he was convinced they must be there somewhere. It would take 150 years and a microscope before anyone would confirm the notion. 

It is unimaginable now to believe people thought only a man could create life. People in past history believed the man alone with his ejaculation at the end of the sex act put a baby inside the woman. The newly formed child was 100% his own creation because he mounted the woman, entered her, and made a deposit. In all honesty I can see it being a plausable assumption before the advancement of science. MEN CREATE LIFE ALONE. Not arrogant at all.

It wasn’t until Antony van Leeuwenhoek sprang up from his marital bed to spread his semen on a microscope in 1677 that anyone saw them. Sperm were first observed in 1677 by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek using a microscope. He described them as being animalcules (little animals), The first person to discover where babies come from, strictly speaking, was a German biologist named Oscar Hertwig. In 1875, working at his microscope in a Naples, Italy laboratory, Hertwig dabbed a drop of sea urchin semen against the gelatinous surface of a sea urchin egg. “Moments later,” according to science journalist Edward Dolnick, “the nucleus of the sperm cell came into view, inside the egg…and then—before Hertwig’s eyes—the two nuclei fused into one. No one in history had ever seen the process of fertilization play out.” 

It was not until 1875 that a German scientist finally put the sperm and the egg together conceptually.

So why then is sperm seen as a "seed?" In farming the land is prepared for the seed to be planted and eventually grow. The seed has to be placed into a forvorable medium and environment to sprout and grow. Even though a woman has an egg, half and the same cell containing DNA to create a totally new human, her "egg" isn't placed into anything by her to sprout and grow. The sperm penetrates the egg. This is one thing (seed) going into another thing (egg) like a plant "seed" must go into the "soil." 

You may say the egg is planted within the uterus which can also represent fertile soil. But the egg just being IN the uterus does not generate or grow. The female egg is more so the representation of fertle soil and the uterus is the enviromental condition condusive for the seed to sprout and grow. Women do not plant seeds. The female egg is singular like a large field would be singular while the male's sperm is numerous just like a farmer would plant several seeds in the hope at least one (or several) will germinate. The man has millions of seeds and a long time to sow the seeds. His potential to reproduce on a large scale is assured by his daily sperm count. Thus the saying a man is sowing his seed and a child is his seed, meaning from his seed (sperm). Women do not refer to their children as their seed.

With the sperm being half of the miraculous ingrdients needed to form life, it is important for men to have healthy viable seeds. Studies have found men who ejaculated 21 or more times per month had a  lower risk of prostate cancer compared to those who ejaculated 4–7 times a month. Researchers theorize that frequent ejaculation clears the prostate of irritants or toxins that cause inflammation and contribute to prostate cancer.

A healthy lifestyle and diet are important. Foods to increase sperm production are dark chocolate which is a powerful aphrodisiac. Dark chocolate contains L-Arginine, an amino-acid which works by increasing nitric oxide, which essentially dilates blood vessels and promotes blood flow to your sexual organs, enhancing sensation, satisfaction and desire. Oysters which contain zincan essential mineral that plays an important role in improving testosterone levels as well as sperm production. Also on the list of foods good for sperm health are eggs, bananas, spinach, asparagus, garlic, and carrots amongst others.