What is a spiritual dream, and how would we know if we'd had one? I've had a number of dreams that I think of as "spiritual", but I don't know how many people with religious and spiritual interests would agree with me about them, or even whether I'll continue to think of them as spiritual all my life. There have been intervals of intense and vivid dreaming lasting for several years, and at least one decade of no dreams at all (that I remembered, anyway). I do think, however, that the dreams that I can remember clearly without even looking at my dream journal may have some "legs", in the sense that good wine has "legs", that is, lasting impact and possibilities of developing more depth and "flavor" as time goes on.

There was a dream of flying, when I was quite young, that has stayed with me for fifty years or more, maybe because it was so quirky: with my grade school class, I sat on a legless pingpong table which rose into the air to a level of about 6 feet and cruised through Central Park (skimming above the bridle path, in fact) in bright daylight, delighting us all. It was perfectly safe, so long as you didn't allow yourself to lean over the white line that ran down one long side of the table, about 2 inches in from the edge. So how could this dream have been "spiritual"? There were no angels, no joyful glimpses of dead but beloved relatives (to tell the truth, I didn't have any of those at the time), no awesome revelations, no celestial light - only a thrilling and joyous and slightly dangerous jaunt through my huge and magnificent childhood playground; but the spiritual message was clear even then: dare to try. You can fly! Maybe not very high or very fast or in glorious isolation, but by gum you can get up there and go!

This was, I believe, a message from my own higher self to the young and tentative me - do not fear, dare all even if it turns out to achieve less than everything! - and if that's not spiritual, what is?

Then there was the dream of meeting a man who was no longer alive in the flesh, and who, in fact I had never met in the reality of this life, and I'd just completed the novel that was to become the most successful of all my books. I tried to get in touch with a well-known paleontologist, naturalist, and poet named Loren Eiseley, to tell him how his wonderful book, "The Immense Journey", had inspired me to write a supernatural story that I wanted to dedicate to him - only to discover that Eiseley had died of a heart attack

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