A Reason to Believe
September 26, 2022The other night, I dreamt about the International Criminal Court (ICC). During the dream, I thought about how I used to work for Northwestern University’s Center for International Human Rights. There—as part of my job—I was in regular contact with the ICC and other UN initiatives.
Two nights later, I dreamt about my old boss from when I worked at Northwestern. I woke from the dream thinking about him, and later that same day, I was reminded of him yet again when my husband excitedly told me that he’d just bought an original recording of the musical Evita on record. I didn’t know he cared about having that record or that he was searching for it, but when he told me, I immediately thought again about my old boss because when I left the Northwestern for New York, he got me a going away present: tickets to Evita on Broadway.
In the ten years since leaving Northwestern, my former boss and I haven’t stayed in touch, and I haven’t had any dreams about him, my old job, or the ICC. But for whatever reason, during the week of September 19th, they all kept coming up, floating into my mind while awake and asleep.
And then, on the morning of September 22nd—the very day after I dreamt about my former boss and my husband bought the Evita album—I woke to see the following announcement on the NPR homepage: “After 16 years and 3 convictions, an international tribunal closes down in Cambodia.”
My eyes widened. The timing felt uncanny because, you see, my old boss had helped create that tribunal. He ran a digital publication called the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor, and during my time at Northwestern, I was involved with updating the monitor and regularly booking travel to and from Cambodia to help support the trials. I hadn’t thought about any of this in many years, but here I was, dreaming about it and thinking about it, just as—unbeknownst to me—it was finally reaching its conclusion.
Before seeing the NPR article on the morning of the 22nd, I hadn’t heard anything in passing about the trial coming to a close. I don’t believe that the news had seeped into my subconscious from words crawling on a TV screen or anything like that. In other words, the timing of the dreams and the Evita purchase appeared to be complete coincidences coinciding with the timing of the tribunal’s conclusion, but really, I think they were the result of a very real phenomenon that exists in the world and that I often experience.
Like the time I dreamt that an old friend was preparing to propose to his girlfriend. He and I hadn’t spoken in seven months, but after the dream, I had to reach out. I texted something along the lines of “you were in my dream last night with some exciting news 🎉.” He laughed as if my text was totally normal, not at all a surprise—he’s known me a long time—and then he told me that the very night of my dream, he was on a plane, returning home from visiting his mom in California. There, he’d picked up the family ring, and he was indeed preparing to propose.
How could I have known?
To me, it seems as though certain information is just out in the world, invisibly moving through time and space, and somehow, I’m subconsciously tuning into it.
When I told my husband about the ICC dream, the dream about my old boss, the Evita synchronicity, and the Cambodia news, he said: Okay, so say you are seeing into the fabric of the universe or something. To what end?
And that’s when I confessed, I wonder the same thing!
With the tribunal experience in particular, I was like, Okay, why?
Why am I tapping into this? Is there a reason or is it just some residual thread from my work ten years ago, something that still binds me to these events whether I realize it or not?
Of course, I’ve also learned that the why doesn’t necessarily matter all that much. Sometimes the why isn’t clear in the moment, but later becomes clear, and sometimes, it’s never clear, and maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the One Big Point to all of this is as simple as this: Everything is connected. Connected in ways we don’t totally understand and often don’t appreciate or even recognize. Connected in ways that are affecting our lives despite our lack of awareness, and there is beauty in the connection. There is magic and awe. There is so much more to this world than we could ever possibly totally understand so don’t start thinking you’ve got it all figured out and you know what’s coming, because you don’t.
Maybe the point is simply humility.
To remember how little we know and also how much more we can access and experience (and often subconsciously do).
And maybe, as I told my husband when he asked—To what end?—the reason is to help us believe.
For in the great invisible fabric of our interconnected world, I’m able to become conscious of real things happening in the world that no one has told me about, things I would have no way of knowing about given our current scientific understanding of what’s possible, and in the fabric of all the things I see happening—things like news from the ICC and friends preparing to propose—I also see events related to something called God and something called Heaven. Again and again. I see them.
I see them despite never having been raised to believe them.
I see them despite being an atheist for most of my life.
I only started to believe—as much as I can believe in anything—because I see them.
And if all of the other mysterious knowings in dreams and beyond are pointing to real events—if we are to accept this—then logic follows that there is at least a very real possibility that these other events I’m seeing—the events in the invisible, ethereal layers of reality—are also real. They too are happening. They too exist.
Maybe there really is something called God.
And there really is something called Heaven.
And all of this is part of our beautiful, mysterious, interconnected reality.
And there is reason to believe.
