2nd of January 2016

... I was 25 when I had this dream. 

A year before I'd lost my mum to pancreatic cancer, a short illness that had given her 6 months to say goodbye to everybody and everything, and was at the beginning of what the philosopher Neil Kramer would call a 'light awakening'.  After my mum passed away, perhaps looking for some deeper meaning to all the chaos, I began noticing coincidences with numbers and objects. I'd read books and then would come across similar ideas or names that very same day or i'd go and order Chinese food and get a ticket number with my very specific lucky number on it (157) and marvel at all the people who had come and bought chinese before me and the series of choices I'd made that day that had led me to the take away at that precise moment.  For the first time in my life I began to question reality.  Perhaps there was more to reality than the mechanical model I'd been educated to believe.

Unsure of what these coincidences meant I began to look into esoteric teachings and specifically energy medicine. Coincidentally (or not), this was about the same time when things such as The Secret were becoming popular and quantum mechanics was being used to point out the profound mystery of things we thought we're concrete and certain.

So, when I had this dream, its significance was far more profound than it would have been 2 or 3 years earlier in my life.  Maybe it really was a prophetic message?  When your perception of reality comes into question anything is possible.

In August 2007 I went to Scotland to volunteer as an assistant teacher in a secondary school.  I was thinking of being a teacher but at the same time I had also been reading books by an ex-teacher called John Taylor Gatto who eloquently pointed out the serious flaws in our education system and how it was actually making us less intelligent (one of his books is called 'Dumbing Us Down'). When I arrived at the school I was dismayed to see that what he said was true.  It was my first experience of systematic failure that was almost impossible to tackle as an individual.  Any freedom I gave the kids in my classes, e.g. leaving their coats on, chewing gum, or doing things that actually interested them, created a ripple affect of problems as the children were then faced with the rigidity in other classrooms.   

After 4 months I decided that my energy was better put elsewhere and before I solidified into a systemic cog and, got 'teacher face', I left.

I just couldn't get this dream out of my mind.  If we only have 10 years left then I better do something about it.