How Did I End Up in a Documentary About Consciousness?

Part 3: The Pattern I Couldn't Ignore

After the experience with Matt, I found myself paying closer attention.

Not because I suddenly believed I had stumbled into something mystical.

Quite the opposite.

I wanted to understand what had happened.

I was still looking for ordinary explanations.

I just wasn’t dismissing everything quite so quickly anymore.

So I started keeping notes in my phone.

Not a journal.

Not pages of profound insights.

Just a running list of things that made me stop and think, Well...that was odd.

One morning, the sound of my alarm pulled me out of a peaceful dream.

Before I even opened my eyes, one word was repeating in my mind.

Dosha.

Over and over.

Dosha. Dosha. Dosha.

It wasn’t part of the dream.

It wasn’t something I had been thinking about before I fell asleep.

It was simply... there.

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and typed the word into my notes before I got out of bed.

Later that afternoon, curiosity got the better of me.

I opened Google.

Dosha.

It was real.

A Sanskrit word used in Ayurveda, the traditional system of Indian medicine. It refers to the fundamental energies that govern the body and mind.

I stared at the screen for a minute.

I had never studied Ayurveda.

As far as I knew, I’d never even heard the word before.

The most logical explanation was that I’d encountered it somewhere years earlier and forgotten. Maybe I’d heard it on a podcast. Maybe I’d read it in passing. Our brains store an astonishing amount of information without us realizing it.

It was strange.

But one strange experience doesn’t make a pattern.

A few weeks later, it happened again.

Another unfamiliar word.

Shiva.

Then later, another.

Then another.

Each time, I’d wake up with a word repeating in my mind. Each time, I’d discover it was something real—usually something I’d never knowingly encountered before.

I still couldn’t explain it.

Then the words became names.

One night, I had two completely different dreams.

The only thing they shared was a single name.

Marcella.

The next day, I mentioned it while talking with someone about my dreams.

“Who’s Marcella?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I laughed. “I’ve never even heard that name before.”

Her expression changed.

“My grandmother’s name was Marcella.”

She went on to tell me that the day before, completely out of the blue, she’d been thinking about her grandmother. It stood out because they hadn’t been especially close, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d even thought about her.

Neither of us knew what to make of it.

I added another note to my phone.

Around the same time, I had another dream that seemed entirely unremarkable.

It was filled with Indian people.

No message.

No conversation.

They were simply there.

The next morning, my first client arrived.

He was a young boy who had been adopted from India.

For a moment, I just stared at him.

The dream from the night before came rushing back.

As I worked with him, I had the unmistakable feeling that his ancestors wanted him to know they were with him. That although he had been separated from the family and culture of his birth, he had never been separated from their love.

I can’t explain why I felt that.

I only know that it felt as real as any thought I’ve ever had.

I told his mother about the dream and shared what I had been feeling during our session.

Tears started streaming down her face.

She thanked me and said she was deeply grateful to receive the message.

I couldn’t explain what had happened.

I only knew that I couldn’t ignore how often these moments were beginning to occur.

None of these experiences proved anything.

On their own, each one could be explained away.

Coincidence.

Memory.

Pattern recognition.

A remarkably creative subconscious.

Maybe all of the above.

I still don’t know.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped asking, How do I explain this away?

And I started asking a different question.

What if curiosity is more important than certainty?

That question changed everything.

Because once I gave myself permission not to have all the answers, I found myself exploring questions I’d never imagined asking.

Questions about consciousness.

Questions about intuition.

Questions about where ideas come from.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the first person to wonder.

The more I read, the more I discovered that some of history’s greatest musicians, scientists and writers had described remarkably similar experiences.

Paul McCartney has said he woke up with the melody for Yesterday already playing in his mind. He spent weeks asking other musicians if they’d heard it before because he was convinced he must have unconsciously borrowed it from someone else.

Keith Richards kept a cassette recorder beside his bed. One morning he discovered that he’d recorded the guitar riff that would become “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” followed by nearly an hour of snoring.

Chemist August Kekulé credited a dream of a snake swallowing its own tail with helping him understand the ring structure of benzene—one of the most important discoveries in modern chemistry.

These weren’t people claiming to be psychic.

They were artists, scientists and innovators describing moments when their greatest ideas seemed to arrive rather than be consciously created.

I wasn’t ready to draw any conclusions.

But I couldn’t stop asking the same question they had.

Where do ideas come from?

That question would eventually lead me to books I never expected to read, experiences I never imagined having and, ultimately, to a man named Robert Monroe.

A man whose work would change the course of my life.

Another thread from my heart to yours.