When I was twelve years old, in the sixth grade, I had just gone to bed when a quiet certainty came to me: I could look in on someone else who was already asleep and see what they were dreaming. I had never done such a thing before—and, interestingly, never again—but in that moment, I simply knew it was possible.
I closed my eyes, and immediately I was aware of someone dreaming.
In the dream, a baseball player stood atop a tall hill, striking baseballs with a bat, one after another. Then the scene shifted. Tires began rolling down the same hill. Then it shifted again—metal car parts, bumpers and fenders, crashing violently into one another at high speed, bending and twisting from the impact. The intensity of that final image startled the dreamer awake. Satisfied, I stopped focusing on anything at all and allowed myself to fall asleep.
The next day at school, during lunch, I was telling the boys around me about the dream I had watched. As I spoke, the boy sitting directly across from me suddenly said, “That was my dream!”
At that point, I had only described the first and last parts of the dream. For some reason, my mind seemed unable to recall the middle section involving the tires. So I tested him. I asked what had happened between the baseball player and the crashing metal.
“Tires rolling down a hill,” he answered immediately, without hesitation.
The moment he said it, the memory returned to me fully and clearly. I knew he was right. It truly had been his dream.
What amazes me most about this experience goes beyond simply witnessing someone else’s dream.
First, it could have been anyone’s dream in the world. Yet it was the dream of the specific boy I would be sitting across from the very next day—the first person to whom I would describe it. He wasn’t in my class. He wasn’t someone I liked or spent time with. I don’t recall ever sitting across from him at lunch before or after that day. How could the future have been known with such precision?
Second, why was I temporarily unable to remember the middle portion of the dream? That gap created the perfect opportunity for confirmation—proof that what I had seen was real and not imagined. Only after he spoke did the missing piece return to my awareness.
Taken together, these details suggest something far more deliberate than chance. It feels clear to me that this event was arranged as a learning experience—planned well in advance by an intelligence beyond ordinary awareness—to show me what is possible.