CHAPTER 3

The Wolf's Lesson

What's today's lesson? I asked my inner voice.

All creatures are creatures of God.

One of my early lessons came on the morning of May 31, 1982. I only had 74 out-of-body experiences to my credit, so I was still a little afraid of them. This lesson was about fear, and it took the form of a dream.

I was trying to induce an OBE, but I fell asleep instead. In my dream, I was near my Minneapolis home, walking toward the back door. Oblivious, I had passed by four dark objects, and now I turned to see what they were. What I saw stopped me in my tracks. The objects were the biggest, blackest, meanest wolves I had ever seen. At first the wolves were calm, but now they could sense my fear, and my fear convinced them of their superior position. The wolves reacted instantly, lunging toward me with their white fangs barred and hate burning in their eyes. Terrified, I raced to the screen door of the porch and darted inside. The wolves were still snapping and growling on the other side of the door as I stood on the porch and pondered my situation.

After a long time, the wolves calmed down. Then I heard my brother coming home. He saw one of the wolves and he mistook it for a big black dog. He patted it on the head and started walking to the porch. The wolf growled, and I told my brother to hurry, that they were vicious wolves. He ran to the door and the wolves attacked him, but he made it inside safely. After a while, the wolves went away and we timidly ventured outside. In a few minutes, the wolves came back and attacked again, but I was ready for them and dashed inside again. As before, I barely managed to escape their blood-thirsty jaws.

Again, I waited for the wolves to leave, then I cautiously went outside again. When I was distracted, the wolves came back. This time, one of the wolves cleverly got behind me and blocked my way to the door that had been my safe haven. I looked back at the wolf that blocked the way to the door. I knew for certain that I couldn't retreat. The wolves circled me, growling, planning how best to devour me. I looked into the eyes of two wolves, reading them, judging them. I could see the hate in their eyes and I knew they wanted to kill me, but I sensed now that something was holding them back.

Then I looked at the wolf closest to me. It was a female, and much bigger than the others. She was the alpha of the pack, and she kept the others at bay. The huge female wolf looked at me with a terrible, fierce look in her eyes. She raised her left paw toward me, as if asking me to make the next move.

I looked deeply into her eyes, and my mind reached out to hers. When my mind touched the she-wolf's mind, I felt a kind of empathy. Impulsively, I stooped over and took hold of her paw with both of my hands. Upon touching her, I was flooded with emotions. My fear was overwhelmed by a deep understanding of the wolves, and I was filled with a powerful love. This was not a personal love, but a deep love of great friendship.

As my love reached out for this wolf, I could feel the wolf's love returning to me. The emotions I felt were indescribable. I got down on all fours and I embraced the black wolf the way wolves do. I stood up on my knees and the wolf stood up on her hind paws and we embraced again, this time in the manner of humans: we hugged. Then I got a telepathic message from her. She told me that as long as I was the wolf's friend, her peers would never harm me. I knew that I would be her friend for life. The dream ended there.

I had hoped to induce an OBE that morning to learn more about the out-of-body state. What I got instead was a dream that had a lot of hidden messages. My inner voice helped me to interpret them:

• Giving in to fear is giving up control.
• Fear feeds on itself. Being fearless dispels danger.
• If you try to run away from fear, it always comes back.
• The key to conquering fear is to understand it. Understand its motivations and mechanisms.
• The only solution to fear is to face it, embrace it, and love it. Love can overcome it.
• Once conquered, your greatest fears can become your greatest allies.
• Reach out your mind to others, and you may discover that we are all creatures of God.
• If you send out your love unselfishly, it always returns in some form.

In our modern society, we are often taught to disregard dreams as meaningless subconscious garbage, but this dream was more. This dream reminded me of stories I had read about Native Americans seeking spiritual guidance through a solitary journey they called a "vision quest." Were the wolves real astral beings sent to teach me a life-lesson? Perhaps. The messages were important regardless of the source.