Chapter 2
PREDICTING THE FUTURE

MASS DREAMS OF THE FUTURE

Echoing the values of the dreamers in the Greek temples of Aesclepius, regression therapist Chet Snow and psychologists Leo Sprinkle and the late Helen Wombeck began a series of meditation workshops in the 1980s with 2,500 participants in an attempt to see if there was a consensus vision of the future. Some of the participants possessed intuitive talents. Wombeck and Snow’s subsequent book, Mass Dreams of the Future, presented the results of this study and some of the vivid, personal, mass dreams it recorded, which, when gathered together, make the landscape of tomorrow seem ever-present.

I AM AMERICA

Lori Toye is an average American who grew up in a small farming community in conservative Missouri. When she was in her twenties she had a series of visions that introduced her to some profound spiritual teachings.

Although she did not participate in the “Mass Dreams of the Future” workshops, she has meticulously detailed her many future visions. In fact, one of the maps Toye says she was shown in her mind is called the Golden City Map, which also identifies what areas in the United States may become centers of spiritual rebirth after certain land areas are submerged beneath the ocean and others rise. Some of these Golden Cities correspond to the areas identified as spiritual sanctuaries by the Mass Dreams of the Future workshop participants.

When her first dream about future Earth changes occurred, however, Lori was frightened and unsure what to make of it. “My work with Earth changes began with a reoccurring dream that started in the early ’80s. It was a very interesting dream,” she said. “Four beings in white robes came to me and gave me a map of the United States. But it was not a typical map. The map showed very drastic Earth changes.” At first these dreams unnerved her, Toye explained, and she remembered commenting to a friend, “‘This is a very scary thing.’ I was the mother of three small children at the time. It was very frightening for me, until my friend reminded me that prophecy says that after such changes we will have a golden age.”

The first map that Toye was shown was called the I Am America Map, which she shared publicly with the world in 1983. It shows a map of what the United States may look like “after this time of great change. Much of California is gone, the Northwest--Oregon and Washington--are gone. . . . They talked about the opening up of the Mississippi from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and opening up Texas into this new huge bay.” If you recall the midwestern floods of the late 1990s, 2007, 2008, and 2011, such a division down the center of the United States seems within the realm of probability.

It was this very same map that my husband, Dr. Bob Hieronimus, drew in the early 1970s as a result of a waking vision he had.

The devastating hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods in America and around the world, the increasing instances of typhoons, forest fires, earthquakes, droughts, landslides, and even tsunamis--such as the Indian Ocean tsunami that followed the Indian Ocean megathrust earthquake of December 26 in 2004 and took the lives of more than 230,000 people in fourteen countries--supports the reality of Earth changes from natural disasters, affecting where we live and how we live. The up to twenty million tons of debris crossing the Pacific Ocean from the aftermath of Japan’s March 11, 2011, 9.0 earthquake and tsunami shows another way in which the planet is all connected (as does the floating garbage in the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans.)

Toye continued, saying that the Ascended Masters, or the great teachers in robes who appeared to her, “said that global warming is now happening all over the world, and is a prelude to these coming Earth changes: global superstorms, high winds, greater extremes in all weather.” Unfortunately, three decades after this information was imparted to Lori Toye, ecological science studies are confirming these predictions about the effects of global warming, a topic I first covered in 1980.

When I interviewed Lori Toye for an update on her work in 2011 she stressed what she believed were the reasons behind her visions of the future. When they first started happening she felt like she was “working almost like a telephone, taking information. There were eighty sessions total. But I came to realize that the maps were also about changing our way of viewing the world. We have amazing power to change the world, simply by what we do today.” Toye was confirming what futurist John Peterson and others tell us is so: humans have an amazing capacity to shape the future by what we do today. This is a logical statement, but it is also a spiritual one. It affirms that how we look at the future is also shaped by our values and feelings, not just by information.

PROPHECY AND PERCEPTION

Toye emphasizes that the Earth changes shown to her may not occur as presented, depending on “what humanity does to address our genuine and critical environmental challenges. . . . What is clear is that these changes will occur to some degree so that a new consciousness can occur on Earth. It is very, very important for our evolution,” she believes. Indeed, historical records agree with the predictions of prophets, psychics, visionaries, and dreamers: catastrophic Earth changes and the birth of a new civilization go hand in hand.