To live as wide-awake dreamers, concious of the deeper logic of events, we want to notice what rhymes in a day. Here are some examples from my travels to Chicago on Thursday.

When I arrived at my home airport, I saw that an elderly woman had fallen down the escalator. It appeared that passengers behind her on the moving steps had broken her fall and that she had escaped serious injury. They had stopped the escalator for her and she now sat stunned halfway up, with paramedics rushing to assist. The scene made a strong impression on me. I had never previously seen someone who had fallen down an escalator.

On my first flight to Baltimore-BWI, another elderly woman kept asking nervously whether her wheelchair would be waiting for her on landing. As the plane made a somewhat bumpy landing, she got up from her seat and started weaving uncertainly along the aisle. A male flight attendant raced to her from the front of the cabin faster that I had ever seen airline crew move, and got her safely seated and buckled up.

I noticed a theme for the day emerging in these rhyming scenes, involving elderly people needed support and help. I thought about all the seniors in our aging society who need care and attention and may be missing some of their faculties.

Changing planes at BWI, I stood in line at the Southwest gate. A little girl close by was crying and pleading with her mother. “I gotta go! I gotta go now!” Her mother snapped at her, “I took you to the rest room and you didn’t do anything. Now you have to wait.” “But please mom, I really gotta go!” The little girl was only three or four years old. Tears were streaming down her face and her body was shaking. Her mother absolutely did not want to know, bent on keeping her place in line (on Southwest you don’t get seat assignments; you get a place in line that determines when you board.)

The little girl kept sobbing and pleading. Now her mother started yelling, “You’re a liar! Your’re telling lies. You do not need to go. Stop lying!”

A collective shudder moved through the rest of us in the Southwest line. I could feel all of us now willing the mother to heed her child and stop terrifying and shaming her to the point where she might have to pee on the floor. Startled, the mother stopped yelling, quivered – then grabbed her daughter’s hand and led her briskly away to the rest room. She lost her place in the A seating, but got on with the Bs, which seemed a trivial price to pay for doing the right thing.

This got me thinking about all the things that can happen in a childhood to drive some part of the child’s spirit away. When I got to Chicago, I met a highly intuitive woman for lunch at Gioco, a fine trattoria in a part of the Loop that is being happily rescued from a seedy and derelict recent past. She started telling me about work she had done with a woman who had suffered profound emotional and physical damage at age seven, when she had tried to tell her mother that she had seen a maid in their wealthy household stealing things. The seven-year-old’s mother had flown into a rage, screaming, “You’re a liar! Your’re telling lies!” When the child insisted on the truth of her story, her mother, still yelling, “You’re a liar” picked up a poker and hit her so hard she broke two ribs.

“You’re a liar,” I echoed. “That’s what the woman in line at Southwest was yelling at her child today. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a mother yell that at a young daughter. Now I’v eheard it twice in a couple of hours.”

That evening, I led a class introducing the core techniques of Active Dreaming to a full house at Equilibrium, a lovely small center in the beautifully converted former Dearborn train station in downtown Chicago. I asked for a volunteer to tell a dream so I could demonstarte the Lightning Dreamwork process for quick and fun dream-sharing, always resulting in action.

Rebecca, the volunteer, told a dream as a story with great panache. At the start of her dream, she was a gladiator in a Roman arena. Then she noticed that her adversary was a little old gray-haired woman. Disgusted with the nature of the projected combat, she whisked the old lady out of the arena and into a rest room where she got her cleaned up, then boarded a train with her – in a time switch – and took her away on a journey that the dreamer felt would result in a “graceful death.”

Another life rhyme. When I commented on the dream, I told Rebecca that exactly one week before, I had stood in the Roman amphitheater in Nimes in southern France, the scene of many gladiatorial contests and in recent times of bull-fights. I had been so revulsed by the sense of cruelty and bloodshed that I had been unable to stay in that arena for more than a few minutes. The dream story repeated another, even more current, rhyme: the need to protect and guide the elderly.

Mark Twain supposedly said, “History may not repeat itself but it rhymes.” This has the quality of one of Mark Twain’s snappers, but the history professor in me is compelled to note that there is no firm evidence he actually said this. However that may be, one of my rules for navigating by coincidence is: Life rhymes. We want to develop poetic consciousness to observe how this works and develop the field perception this will give us.

Inside the Roman amphitheatrer at Nimes, once the scene of many gladiatorial combats. I took this photo on March 3, exactly one week before I heard the dream of refusing a gladiatorial combat in a workshop in Chicago.