History is filled with accounts of people who held fast to dreams - even when they contradicted the consensus of society. Often these dreams came in a state of awareness other than the normal waking consciousness. They have occurred in sleep, or in a state induced by trance, or after ingesting drugs, or after running for fifteen miles, or in looking at the earth from the surface of the moon, or in prayer. What the dreamers shared afterward was a new vision of the way things worked, or a new realization of connectedness with all things and everyone.

Mystical revelation and scientific insight from generations of dreamers point to alternate ways of looking at the world. The Hermetic philosophers of Greece and Rome saw thoughts as vibrational levels - energy exchanges that could change the physical universe. Christ challenged the troubled times of his era with a radical message of love, even for one's enemies. The mystics of Judaism followed the Kabbalah, a series of teachings said to have been brought to earth by angels. The shamans in widely scattered cultures saw illness as a result of disharmony in the sick person's world. Pythagoras developed a mysticism based on his vision that all things are numbers." Anaximander described the universe as one large organism supported by the cosmic breath.

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