This is a long story I’ll try to make short.
During the initial awakening period in my teens, I had some strong dreams that seemed to show me scenes from my future.
OREGON
In one dream, I saw myself in the Pacific Northwest in the US, in nature and a community of people with a shared interest in healing and sustainability. When I woke up, I looked at the map and saw it was in western Oregon. At the time, I lived in Norway and had no interest in going to the US. I strongly disliked the US for political reasons and saw no reason to go there. The thought of living there seemed even further removed.
Forward six or seven years, and I am studying psychology at the University of Oslo. A friend of mine had discovered a scholarship we both qualified for that would allow us to study psychology in some countries abroad, and he happened to have connections in Salt Lake City. We had very little time to explore possibilities, and I saw that University of Utah had courses in environmental psychology, health psychology, and a systems orientations to psychology, which were all topics I were interested in.
We went there, I found Kanzeon Zen Center and moved in there, and later got married.
And even some years later, more than fifteen years after the Oregon dream, I found myself in Oregon in just the situation described in the dream. I didn’t plan to move there for its own sake. We moved there because the university there had the best program for the topic I wanted to study.
LATIN AMERICA
I had a similar dream during the same time in my teens.
In this dream, I saw myself in Northern South America, with a partner from there. I was at a small local school and had a role there. Not exactly as a teacher but as someone deeply involved and supporting the school and children. Here too, I saw the location on a map. When I woke up and looked in an atlas, it looked like Northern Brasil or somewhere in that general area.
Fast forward thirty years, and I meet a woman from Colombia. We get married, explore parts of Colombia, and buy land in the Andes Mountains. We accidentally meet a longtime friend of my wife who has a house in the same neighborhood in the countryside, and we end up living in that house for three months while they were away.
On the small road to that house, very close to our land, is a small school. And it’s the school from my dream. The hairs on my body stood up when I saw it, and do so again when I write this. It’s the same school.
The only difference is that in my dream, there were three buildings, and in reality – now – there is only one.
So we’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll get involved with that school somehow. Maybe we’ll build two more buildings. It certainly needs help, and I cannot imagine anything better than helping children get a good education and more opportunities in life.