I soon found there was lots more to this than I’d envisaged

When I was starting LivingNow magazine in Australia I was given so much help. I was a ‘babe in the woods’ when it came to publishing. I thought because I could type, talk on the phone, and write, that was all that was necessary. I soon found that was not so. Thankfully, for the first few years, I was given a dream each night with answers to the problems I’d had that day, or that I was about to face. It was like having a business mentor who guided me each night.

Here are a few paras about my dream help at the very beginning.

For the first few months of 1989, I was busy preparing things in readiness to publish the magazine.  All the while, I had dreams to tell me things to do, and it soon appeared that, when my dreams were showing me as pregnant, they were actually talking of the expected delivery of the magazine. Then I birthed the baby, and then he was a toddler (but this was in the dream state and before the magazine actually eventuated — so it was then telling me things that needed to be done in readiness to nurture the baby). 

One night, the dream I had showed me in the bathroom of a small airport cleaning the face of the toddler, preparing for the take-off. Then I heard the plane beginning to taxi down the tarmac – so I ran out, dragging the toddler with me. As can only happen in dreams, the pilot stopped, threw down the steps, and we were able to board. The meaning I got from that was that I’d spent too long on preparations and needed to get the magazine airborne.

We'd sold our house for this!

So I sped up things and announced I’d be publishing the first magazine in June, 1989. However, a few days before the advertising deadline, I had only two or three ads. I freaked out and figured that I needed to give people yet more time. So I advised my advertisers that I’d be holding it over another month. However, a week or so before the next deadline, things were hardly any better. I was panicking since we’d sold our house for this. And we’d felt so sure that all signs pointed in this direction. How could this be happening?

The problem explained  in my dream

I asked for a dream that night and got this one:

I was a kitten who had climbed too high and too far out on the limb of a large old tree. The people underneath were my prospective advertisers. They really wanted to help the kitten, but were frightened to do so for fear of losing their flesh when the kitten fell.

So I made the decision to de-claw the kitten (ie, take the pain out of advertising): I made all display ads half price and all line ads free. This was enough to make a 32-page magazine, and this is what we published – at a huge loss – in July, 1989.

I could never have published the magazine and kept it going for so long without dream help.

However, looking back, I can see so very many dreams that I misinterpreted. It's all too clear now that I was being warned quite often not to proceed on a certain course.

I now see that the reason I couldn’t see the meaning properly was because of my inner bias and my old stories (blockages) which gradually came to light over the 27 years of my publishing the magazine.

BTW, it’s no longer available online because my daughter and her partner, who bought it from me, have changed the title and the focus. However, if you are interested to read some of my all-time favourite articles (from thousands we published), you'll find a couple of dozen here. Enjoy!