When We Were Gods: Insights on Atlantis, Past Lives, Angelic Beings of Light and Spiritual Awakening
by Carole Chapman

1
The Man of My Dreams

Have you ever had a dream that changed your life? Have you ever had a dream come true?

Everyone says they want to find the man or woman of their dreams. But what if it happened to you? What if you dreamt of a stranger you were supposed to marry—and then saw that person the next day? What would you do? Would you go up to them and say, “I just dreamt I’m supposed to marry you?” Or would you wait and watch, wondering what kind of person you had dreamt about?

I had the dream about five months after starting a job as photojournalist at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. My photographs of aircraft and spaceship models, lasers and research planes, test pilots, astronauts, and scientists were being published all over the nation and internationally. My articles appeared in NASA publications. It was an exciting time in my life.

The dream had come the night after my last date with a man who had asked me to marry him. I had declined. This was not easy to do because the man was a millionaire, and I was a single mom with three almost-college-age youngsters.

Little did I know that the dream was just the beginning.
Little did I realize that I had just begun an amazing spiritual journey into the unknown, and I was about to unravel one of the deepest mysteries of who we really are. The morning I awoke from that dream, I had no idea that something much greater than myself had been set in motion and my life would forever be changed.

At the time, the children and I lived in a little house on a street adjacent to the Chesapeake Bay. Among the four of us, we shared one bed: I slept on the mattress, the girls used the box spring, and my son spent his nights on blankets piled on the wooden floor.

When the children and I had moved to Virginia Beach from Phoenix, we could bring only what we could fit into our old 1970 three-quarter-ton Ford window van. After we packed our clothes, dishes, pots, books, typewriter, stereo, toys, and my camera, there was no room for any furniture.

Our most precious passengers were our little terripoo dog, Muffin, and our four cats. We couldn’t leave our beloved pets in Phoenix because they were a part of our family, and they gave us a sense of home no matter where we were or what happened to us.

My new job in Virginia, with a NASA contractor, paid enough for food, clothing, and school supplies, but we had to find our furniture on the side of the road on bulk garbage days.

It had not been easy to say “no” to my millionaire friend. He had taken me to lovely waterfront homes where he wanted us to live. How I missed having a nice home! We had had to leave Phoenix because our four-bedroom house with the in-ground pool had been foreclosed on when the children’s father didn’t pay child support for two years.

However, although we appeared to be destitute during those terrible years, our struggle to survive had brought us together as a family. The children and I had learned to trust and depend on each other. “One for all, and all for one,” we used to say.

We found that, over and over again, things would work out. For example, when I went back to school to get my degree, one of my fellow students happened to be a mechanic who insisted on repairing my old vehicle—in the parking lot of Phoenix College. I typed his papers in return.

It was as if the children and I were in spiritual training.
My ex-husband had done me a favor, because when he threw me out of his life, I landed in God’s arms.

When our air conditioning broke, we had to sleep on lawn chairs on the patio around the pool. As we fell asleep, the whole sky would be open above us. Sometimes we’d see a plane or a satellite traveling among the stars. Other times, there’d be heat lightning coloring the mountains that surrounded the valley. It was heavenly to slumber with a breeze fanning our sleeping bodies.

I’d come to appreciate even the smallest things—like being cool enough to sleep. The beauty and tranquility of the night sky will remain forever deep in my bones. I remember those nights under the stars, my children beside me, our dog and cats nearby, as one of the happiest times in my life. There is a remarkable peace to appreciating even the smallest things.

It was a time when I was closest to God, a time when it was easy to end each day with a prayer of thanksgiving: thanks that we had shelter for one more night, thanks that we had food for one more day, thanks that we had each other, and thanks that God’s world resounded with beauty, drama, and peace—a peace that passed understanding.

Therefore, although it would have seemed as if the millionaire was a gift from heaven for all the years we had gone without even the necessities of life, the children and I were not really as needy as we appeared to be. We had immense faith that we could triumph over anything.

So I could not say “yes,” because I did not love the man, although I admired and respected him. I did not want another marriage like the first.  I wanted a soul mate—a twin soul.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I suppose the dream telling me the man I should marry came because I had kept to my ideals and resisted being swayed by the temptation of living well financially. I was holding out for love.

The entry in my dream journal was dated March 28, 1990. The first part of the dream was about the actor “Godunov,” who played the husband destined to marry the single mother in the movie Witness. In the dream, Godunov had this “high up” house that he had designed, a black lab-type dog, and a dark-haired male friend with a dark-haired wife. There was a satellite that represented someone’s work.

In the next part of the dream, I saw a stage. In the spotlight center-stage, stood a tall, husky man with reddish-blonde hair standing with his back to me. As if on a turntable, he slowly rotated until he was facing me. I liked how he looked. He smiled a soft smile at me.

When I awoke, I assumed that my dream was telling me I had made the right choice in not marrying the millionaire. There was someone better out there for me, the proverbial plenty of fish in the sea, represented by the man in the second part of the dream.

I’d been keeping a dream journal for years and knew that dreams sometimes used words cleverly. In this case, “Godunov” sounded like and probably meant “good enough.” Therefore, my unconscious most likely was telling me that somewhere out there was a man who might not be a millionaire but who was, nonetheless, “good enough” for me.

It never occurred to me that the man in the dream was a real person I was about to encounter.
You can imagine my astonishment when I walked down the cafeteria aisle next lunch hour, tray in hand, and I saw a man standing with his back to me filling his glass at the water fountain. I had been scanning the tables, looking for the friends who usually ate lunch with me. Searching for a familiar face, I was surprised to discover that this man at the water fountain looked like someone I had met before. He was a big man with a broad back and was wearing an orange-brown corduroy jacket which set off his reddish-blonde hair. As I walked by, my eyes at the level of his elbow, I glanced up at his face. It was the man in my dream! And I found him wildly attractive!

My heart pounded madly. I almost dropped my tray. I wanted to shout, “What were you doing in my dream last night?” But instead, I thought, “Hold onto your tray!” I was afraid I might faint. It took all my concentration to act normal in this cafeteria of hundreds of people.

I turned away, not wanting to stare. My breath came in short, quick bursts. I could feel my face redden and little beads of perspiration appeared around my mouth.

I didn’t know what to do.
There are no etiquette manuals describing the proper behavior upon meeting the man of your dreams. There are no talk shows bringing dreamer together with dreamee. There are no articles in women’s magazines telling how various people handled their first encounter with a man they’d just dreamt was their future husband.

I found my lunch friends and sat down, hoping my heartbeat couldn’t be heard in the next county.

“Carole, what’s wrong?” said one of my friends. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Uh, low blood sugar I guess.” I didn’t know what to say.  And so I said nothing more about it, talking about anything and everything else—yet all the while looking over to where he sat. The only clue to my state of mind was a slight tremor in my hands. I felt like a young girl in the high school cafeteria.

When I got home that evening, I wrote in my dream journal: Just saw the man in my dream. He has a mustache and is chubbier—but nice. Looked at his hands—no ring.

You would think that now that I had found him, we would soon be living happily ever after. Sorry, this is a true story, not a fairy tale.

To begin, I was afraid. What did this mean, literally meeting the man of my dreams? What was going to happen to me if we got together? Was I in the grip of some kind of destiny?

For the next several weeks I watched him in the cafeteria, wondering what kind of man I had dreamt about. Was he a research scientist, an engineer who worked in the wind tunnels, an inventor, a technician, a test pilot, or support crew for our research aircraft? He often sat with work buddies, laughing and telling stories among themselves.

I kept waiting for him to recognize me, to be drawn inextricably toward me. Certainly, if he was the one I was destined to marry, wouldn’t he be out there looking for me also? Shouldn’t he feel my presence nearby? But he seemed totally oblivious to my existence.

The trouble with dreaming about the man I was supposed to marry was that he hadn’t dreamt about me!

Time went by, and I became more and more reluctant to approach Mr. Good Enough, the Man of my Dreams. I consoled myself that he probably wasn’t the right one. Likely all the details—the house, the dog, the best friend and the satellite—were probably false, and this man was probably a lucky look-alike. Maybe I had unknowingly seen him in the cafeteria before, and my unconscious had put him in my dream. In any case, I didn’t want to appear a fool by approaching him.

I began to think that the dream had been a strange anomaly—perhaps just an indication that dreams can be real. In any case, I didn’t see him again. Always mindful of my figure, I began eating at my desk and walking during lunch hour. Although I often had to take photographs in many of the more than 40 facilities throughout the Center, our paths never crossed. I never had to interview him or work with him during a press conference. Eventually I totally forgot about the dream, the man, and my attraction to him.

For about a year I dated many eligible men I met at both NASA Langley and the adjacent Langley Air Force Base. But after a year, I hadn’t found anyone I liked in a special way. I didn’t want just anybody. After all, I had turned down the millionaire. I wanted a soul mate, a twin soul, someone who was like the other half of my puzzle, a man whose destiny was intertwined with mine from the beginning of time.

I had read about twin souls and soul mates in books such as Soul Mates by Jess Stearn and Twin Souls: Finding Your True Spiritual Partner by Patricia Joudry and Maurice D. Pressman. A soul mate can be anyone with whom you have had a close personal relationship in a past life. We all have many soul mates. Often a soul mate relationship is full of conflict because the people come together to work out problems they each carry from previous lifetimes. I felt I’d had enough of that kind of relationship in my first marriage.

Whereas you can have many soul mates, only one of them is a twin soul or a twin flame, as Elizabeth Clare Prophet calls them in Soul Mates and Twin Flames: The Spiritual Dimension of Love and Relationships. A twin soul is a person whose connection with you is at a deep soul level. Some sources say that the twin soul is actually one soul split into a male and a female half. Other sources say the twin is a separate soul but has chosen to take the same path with your soul right from the beginning.

Whatever their origin, the basis of a twin soul relationship is supposed to be one of mutual helpfulness. Although there might be some smoothing of rough edges, karmically speaking, in a twin soul relationship, the two souls carry a feeling of having come home to each other. I wanted this kind of relationship, and so I prayed for a twin soul.

I’d heard about the 40-day prayer in which you thanked God for what you wanted as if you had it, in the name of Jesus the Christ. The prayer included the caution, “If it be Thy will,” so that if you wanted something that might be harmful to you or others, God would protect you from yourself. Therefore, in my case, I prayed: “In the name of Jesus the Christ, thank You that I have found my twin soul, if it be Thy will.”

You need to pray this prayer consistently for 40 days. If you miss even one day, you have to start all over again. The number 40 is supposedly a powerful Biblical number—Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness, 40 days in the ark for Noah, etc.

I decided that since I hadn’t yet found my twin soul the conventional way, I was going to try the 40-day prayer. Evidently nothing would happen until the last day or two—there was something powerful about consistently praying the same thing for 40 days.

Well, I began to pray. I did fine for about 20 days, and then I forgot a day so I had to start all over again. Unbelievably, on the 39th consecutive day of the prayer, I was in the cafeteria for some reason and literally ran right into Mr. Good Enough, the Man of my Dreams. I was in a hurry, running around a pillar, when I smashed into this immovable wall of chest. I screamed and jumped back. He grabbed my upper arms so I wouldn’t fall and then released me gently. “Sorry,” I mumbled at his chin, too afraid to look him in the face, my heart pounding in my ears. He smiled—that same soft quiet smile I’d seen in the dream. I ran.

Ever hopeful, I went back to eating in the cafeteria. I’d often see him looking at me. So that’s what it took for him to notice me. I had to run into him! I’d smile over at him. He’d smile back—just like in high school. However, it never went further than a nod or a smile. Maybe he was as shy as I was. However, because of my prayer, I felt that, in spite of all the bashfulness in the world, I would have to eventually approach him.

This time it was an obligation to God. You don’t ask for God’s help, get it, and then throw it away. And anyway, God had already given me the dream about this man a year earlier. I had prayed “if it be Thy will,” and if this was God’s will, I had better do it!

I hadn’t always been comfortable with the phrase “doing God’s will.”
In fact, for many years I had felt it was stupid and frightening. Who was this God, anyway, that I would do His will rather than what was best for me? From everything I’d known about God, especially the awful stories about Him in the Old Testament, He seemed to be a pretty heartless fellow.

However, over my years of spiritual searching, I had come to realize that God was personally mindful of me. I saw how the trials in my life, such as those devastating years in Phoenix, were actually learning experiences. Moreover, at a time when many families were floundering, my children and I had become inextricably closer because of our hardships.

So I had come to see that there was a greater knowingness guiding my life, an intelligence that had a larger picture than I did and that was deeply concerned with my survival and happiness. In fact, “God’s will” began to mean something bigger than me, that knew more than I did, that cared for me profoundly, and could anticipate my needs better than I could.

Therefore, since it appeared that God intended that I get to know this man, I felt that I needed to carry out God’s will to the best of my ability. I was also curious to see if the rest of the details in the dream were correct.

Finally one day when it seemed safe—there was hardly anyone in the cafeteria, and he was alone—I waited until he left the building, and then, as inconspicuously as possible, I walked quickly to catch up with him.

“Hi,” I said.

He turned slowly, as in the dream, to face me.
I had never looked up-close at his face before. There was an amused look in his eyes as he glanced down at me. He had the most amazing sky-blue eyes.

“You thought I was someone else,” he said as he made that soft smile I liked so much. His voice was a satiny baritone.

“No,” I replied, “I dreamt about you.” (Later he told me this was the best line he had ever heard.)

He invited me to his office. His name was John Chapman. We talked. I remember being so nervous that I sat sideways, only turning toward him with my face. He, on the other hand, sat comfortably, rocking slightly on his squeaky government-issue wooden swivel desk chair. He faced me squarely, his legs relaxed and apart, his hands on his thighs. After we talked awhile, he told me that I was one of the most interesting women he’d ever met.

After that, we occasionally had lunch together in the cafeteria. I found out that the details in the dream had been correct. He did have a “high up” house—built up on pilings because the house was so close to the coastal flood plain. Had he designed the house himself? Sort of. He found the design in a book and altered it to his liking. He wondered how I knew these things, since no one from work had ever visited him.

I also found out he had a black lab-type dog. I didn’t need to ask about his friend because I’d already met him in the cafeteria. The man was swarthy, with dark hair, and his wife was dark-haired as well.
The satellite? Although John wasn’t working with satellites when I first met him, he changed to Atmospheric Science after we were married. He now makes simulators for satellites.

One interesting aspect of our relationship is that when we were first dating, he told me that he kept having this feeling of déjà vu—as if he had met me before and already knew me. I had read that this was one of the signs of soul mates meeting. It gave me confirmation that he was feeling a sense of destiny with me as I was with him.

While dating, we also discovered that we had many things in common, especially our love of the outdoors—sailing and swimming. We often met at lunch hour for a swim.

When he asked me to marry him, about a year after I’d first approached him, he startled me by asking if I would feel the same way about him if I hadn’t had the dream. It took me two days to think this over.

I thought about an incident at the ocean when I’d come close to drowning while caught in surf at a sandbar. John had rescued me. Financially, I was also drowning. My salary was just not enough to care for myself and the children. Although at first it rankled my pride, I had to admit I needed John’s strength and stability. I also thought about all the fun I had now that he was in my life. Because of my heavy responsibilities raising the children by myself, I’d become so stern. He brought sunshine into my life. And I was madly in love with him. I said “Yes.”

Don’t get the idea that being married to the man of your dreams is like a fairy tale in which we live happily ever after. We are still human beings—imperfect by definition. During premarital counseling with our pastor, we learned how all of us choose a mate who will help us work out the unfinished business of our childhoods. Let’s just say we fit each other’s agendas. In addition, I believe we have had many lifetimes together and are still working out some hurts and misunderstandings.

However, this is like no other relationship I’ve ever had before.
For example, when we were first dating, John took my daughters and me to the State Fair. The main thing I wanted at the fair was that John would kiss me at the top of the ferris wheel, my favorite ride. However, I wouldn’t even ask him to ride the ferris wheel with me because I didn’t want to pressure him. When we reached the midway, John did not choose to go on the ferris wheel. So I stood in line by myself. Just as I was about to step on, John got on the gondola with me.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“I don’t care what ride I’m on as long as I’m with you,” he replied.

Things were looking up, I thought. Maybe I’d even get that kiss at the top.

But, when the ride attendant put three surly prepubescent boys in the seat across from us, my heart sank. They looked like the type of kids who would carry sling-shots in a Mark Twain novel. John squeezed his 6’4” large-boned frame behind the safety bar and put his arm around me. I focused my gaze to the side of the boys because they had fixed their eyes on us.

As the aroma of caramel corn wafted around us, we started our ascent on the ferris wheel. Neon lights glowed below in the gathering dusk. From my vantage point high on the ferris wheel, I could see masses of little children, clutching balloons, tagging along beside their parents. Young women jostled their boyfriends who carried giant stuffed animals won at carnival games, and school-aged youngsters squealed and hooted on the rides below us.

I enjoyed the ferris wheel ride. It felt good sitting in the gondola with John’s arm around me. I almost managed to ignore the surly-eyed youngsters sitting across from us. Too soon the ride came to an end.

As the attendant let passengers out of one gondola after another, the ferris wheel would stop for awhile and then move a space and stop again. We moved slowly until we were right at the top with a magnificent view of the fair. Now that the ferris wheel moved slowly, the rude young men especially focused their stares at us. Well, I thought, I’m never going to get a kiss with those brats staring at us.
Just then, John pulled me close and whispered, “Let’s blow their minds.” And he kissed me long and sweet.

So that’s what it’s like being married to the man of my dreams. Sometimes—not all the time—but every once in awhile, somehow, as if he can read my mind, he fulfills my dreams.

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