I’ve been writing in this space about the ways the world gives us messages through synchronicity and symbolic pop-ups, some of which can be so in-your-face that even the dullest imagination finds them hard to miss. To categories like Vanity Plate of the Day and Crazy T-Shirt of the Day, I find I must now add Stuffed Toy of the Day, because of a charming incident on the plane that brought me from JFK airport to Stockholm overnight on Wednesday/Thursday.

I noticed that the little Swedish girl behind me had a huge stuffed tiger in her lap. She was delighted to introduce him when I asked. She then brought out, from under the tiger, a second stuffed toy – her sheep. I told her I was delighted that she had created a peaceable kingdom where the tiger lies down with the sheep. I had told a fierce favorite story about the tiger and the sheep at the end of my last workshop, so I was also noticing a life rhyme.

At Stockholm’s Arlanda airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Tallinn, I was struck by a line at the top of a piece of graphic art on a wall near my departure gate:

Dreams are snapshots of the future.

Exactly! Every active dreamer comes to know this. I wish that statement was on the wall of every shrink and dream analyst who looks only for the personal subconscious in dreams.

When I arrived at Tallinn, the friend who is coordinating my Active Dreaming workshop drove me to a hotel at the edge of the beautiful Old City, with a view over the towers and spires. The hotel is in a converted factory complex named (in 1856) for Ilmarisen, a hero of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, who operated a magic mill that groud out stupendous quantities of grain, salt and money. In my room, I found an elegant card on my bed with this thought in Italian and English:

E il momento di cominciare a sognare

It’s time to start dreaming

After 20 hours of travel, I am very ready to dream in the magic mill!