About Me — Jennifer Dunne

A mystical agent of reality change. And math nerd.

The hardest part of writing an introduction is not what to say, it’s what to leave out.

In order to create a compelling narrative, there must be a through-line, a direction in which one travels, facing adversity and achieving against all odds. Yet life is rarely like that. It’s messy, chaotic, and random; filled with things that seemed like good ideas at the time.

So here’s a through-line, talking about what brought me to start posting on Medium. A look behind the curtain.

Drowning and lucid dreaming

When I was young — about 8 — we went to visit our cousins who lived on Long Island. They took us to the beach, where their son was going to show my brother and me how to body surf. The waves were too high to body surf safely. I went into the water anyway, and got knocked down and caught in the undertow.

I was lying on my back, pressed into the sand, with maybe an inch of water above my face. I could clearly see the sunlight, and more importantly air, on the other side of the water. But the shifting sand gave me nothing to push against. The undertow was too strong. It pressed me down with more force than I could counter to break through to the air.

My last conscious thought was that people said drowning was a peaceful way to die. It wasn’t. It was frustrating.

Fortunately, my uncle had seen that I’d gone down and not come back up. He waded into the surf and pulled me out. I quickly regained consciousness, and was told sternly that the ocean was off limits for the rest of the day.

That night, I dreamed I was drowning. As I relived the fear and frustration, I noticed that my lungs had just taken a breath. They’d filled with air, not water. So I wasn’t really drowning. I was dreaming that I was drowning.

That was the first night I experienced lucid dreaming — where your rational mind interrupts your dream to say, “Hold on a second. This can’t be happening. You’re dreaming.”

I’ve been lucid dreaming ever since. The side effect of this is that I can count the number of nightmares I’ve had in my life on one hand. Unless whatever I’m dreaming about scares me so badly that I bolt upright (which has happened 3 times), the lucid dreaming takes over. It shifts things around in the dream so that it’s no longer scary.

You know the dream where something is chasing you, and you’re trying to run away, but you’re running in slow motion? As soon as I realize I’m dreaming, I’m able to move at full speed. Or a monster comes up and says politely, “You dropped this.” Or I stop running and whatever I thought was chasing me runs on past, because it was never after me at all.

As a result, I believe that reality is a good bit more fluid than is commonly accepted.

Telepathy…yes, it is

Being of a rational and scientific bent — my favorite subject, and my undergraduate degree, was mathematics — I of course performed experiments to test the nature of reality. My tool was a Kreskin’s ESP game I’d found at a garage sale.

Most of the time these experiments fell out the way you’d expect, based on random chance.

However, one of the times, my friends and I were trying clairvoyance. Two of us would sit back to back. One would draw a picture, and the other would try to draw the same thing. The others would watch, to be sure no cheating happened.

As I sat there, staring at my blank page, my vision was replaced with a vision of my friend drawing a circle on her pad of paper. I saw her hand moving, as if I was looking through her eyes. It was almost as if it was a video clip, repeating over and over, until I got it.

Unfortunately, that was all I got. I made up the rest of the picture around the circle, and was completely wrong. But she had started her picture with a circle, in the same place I’d seen it on her pad.

So I knew that telepathy was possible. I’d had first-hand experience of it.

I learned to use tarot cards, and discovered this was an excellent way to tap into telepathy. I may not be able to predict the future, but I am excellent at bringing to light the hidden thoughts of people I am reading for. Everything from abusive husbands and untreated alcoholics, to an investment from a venture capitalist.

I stopped doing readings, because I got tired of people always crying. I’d spend 5 minutes giving a reading, and 25 minutes trying to comfort someone who was sobbing their heart out. That wasn’t fun.

The more light-hearted side of this is that I’ve been banned from playing the game Pictionary by my friends. They say it’s cheating if you guess what someone is about to draw before they actually draw it. :-)

Manifesting my own reality

If we can shift the nature of our dreams, why not shift the nature of our reality? It seems perfectly plausible to me.

It started in my 20s. My best friend and I had been reading a science fiction series featuring an all-powerful warlord. We joked about what a horrible job it would be to be his personal assistant. We gave sample commands to this (invisible) personal assistant.

And they happened!

So, of course, I needed to test this out. What sort of things could I ask for and successfully get? In general, it was something that was possible but unlikely, and that I had no immediate way of getting.

The most spectacular instance of this was when we were visiting San Francisco. We wanted to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. According to the map, the town of Sausolito is on the other side of the bridge, and has a ferry back to San Francisco. So our plan was to walk across the bridge, then take the ferry back from Sausolito.

About half way across the bridge, I started limping. I had trashed my knee in a skiing accident as a teen, and ever since, the muscles are prone to giving out if I overwork it. My friend asked if I wanted to turn around and go back — it would be the same distance as going all the way across. I insisted that I wanted to walk across the bridge.

When we reached the parking lot at the far side of the bridge, we discovered that Sausolito was, in fact, just down the hill. But there was a 10 foot chain link fence topped with barbed wire to prevent people from trying to get down the hill. Instead, you needed to go 5 miles down the road and take the Sausolito exit.

I collapsed on the scenic stone wall around the parking lot. I was spent. I’d barely made it across the bridge. No way could I walk 5 miles. I’d be lucky if I could even make it back across the bridge.

“What do you want to do?” my friend asked. She meant, start back across now, or rest a bit first.

I said, “I want to take a taxi back.”

“We’re in a parking lot at the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge! Where do you think you’re going to find a taxi?”

I lifted my head, and looked at the entrance to the parking lot. A moment later, a taxi pulled in and drove up to a tour bus. Two middle-aged tourists got out. They’d apparently missed the departure from Fisherman’s Wharf, and had caught up to their tour group at the next scenic destination.

“Over there,” I answered. The surprised cabby happily gave us a ride back to the city. My friend was less happy, and kept grumbling about a “valuable life lesson, shot to h*ll.”

We’re on a mission from God

Yes, that’s a quote from The Blues Brothers.

A few months ago, my husband suggested that I try meditating. He’d practiced Transcendental Meditation for 30 years, and had found a new teacher who taught what my husband considered “perfected TM”.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d never had much luck with the “sit quietly and focus on your breathing” kinds of meditation. My mind wandered too much. But I had great results doing a deep meditation while walking through a labyrinth, timing my affirmations to my breath and movements. So I thought a meditation focused on repeating words might be okay.

I was quite surprised when I did not experience a movie screen with images on it, as I’d been told was common. Instead, I was transported to another realm, where I interacted in full, surround-sound 3D with people and things. The people I interacted with most were the Hindu gods Krishna and Radha. They gave me lessons on the nature of reality, the purpose of our existence, and other interesting things.

Do I think they were the actual gods, speaking to me? It’s possible. Or, they may have been manifestations created by my higher self, as a means of communicating with my conscious mind. I think that option’s more likely. The third choice is that they could have been hallucinations, although since they were limited to the meditation sessions and never tried to influence my actions in any way, I think that is unlikely.

In one of the meditations, Krishna showed me a scroll with all the roles I played written on it. Daughter, Sister, Student, Wife, etc. He said that I could add any role I desired to the scroll, and it would be the next one I fulfilled. With no hesitation at all, I wrote “Teacher”. When the meditation was over, I tried to figure out the best way that I could be a teacher. Since I’ve always been a writer — I wrote my first “book” when I was 4, followed by 16 more published as an adult— it seemed like the best way to teach would be by writing.

I could have written more books, but they take a long time to write, and you don’t get much in the way of feedback for how they’re impacting people. So I decided to start blogging.

I created my own publication, Getting Ready for the New Day, to house the sort of productivity, self-improvement, and relationship advice that I wanted to teach. I split my articles between that publication and other publications, such as Curious, The Writing Cooperative, Start It Up, and Illumination.

And now you know what goes on “behind the curtain” of my Medium writing.

If you’d like to read more of my writing, some of my favorite articles are: