Read The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination for Free Online

included checking for damage to sidewalks caused by the spreading roots of the city's shade trees. Broken concrete is expensive to repair and a frequent source of injuries to pedestrians. Work crews in Santa Monica were being sent out with chain saws to cut down mature ficus trees.
    One night after work Valeriano dreamed of a bouncy, flexible sidewalk that solved the problem. “In my dream, sidewalks were all bending and twisting, but there was no cracking. I woke up and said, ‘Wow! Elastic sidewalks! I wonder how we can make them?’”
    He did not know how to enact the dream until his health club, during remodeling, installed rubber tiles as flooring. This inspired Valeriano to look for a company willing to develop a prototype for a rubber sidewalk. The tiles were made from recycled auto tires, and the city of Santa Monica tested them by having bicyclists, Rollerbladers, and women in stiletto heels, among others, do their worst.
    Five years later, rubber walkways were being tried out in sixty American cities. The rubber was saving the shade trees and pedestrians' footing. Rubber walkways were installed in April 2006 around the willow oaks on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington, DC. The kids liked the bounce — though they find it's not so easy to carve your initials or draw on the pavement in chalk.
    Solve It in Your Sleep
    Here 's a plan for any night of the year:
    Before you hit the sack, write down an intention for the night. A simple way is to fill in the blank in the following statement: “I would like guidance on. . . .”
    Make sure you are ready to record whatever comes to you — and be ready to do so whenever you happen to wake up, because the big messages often come at unsocial hours. Many great discoveries are made between 3 ?? and 4 ??, which is also the hour (according to some surveys) when most babies are born and most people die.
    If you wake up and you do not recall any dream, relax. Wiggle around in bed. Sometimes a dream comes back as you get your body into the position you were in when you were dreaming. If you still don't remember a dream, write down whatever you are thinking and feeling. You may find you have the gift of the dream — a solution or an inspiration — even if you have lost the content of the dream.
    On a spring morning in 1905, Einstein woke up with a theory that revolutionized science, the Special Theory of Relativity. He had told a friend the previous day he felt he was on the verge of a huge breakthrough but was not sure what it was. In the morning, he had all of it, fresh and sparkling in his mind. There is no evidence Einstein remembered the content of his dreams from that tremendous night, but he received their gift, and it changed everything.
    The lesson is clear. Whatever problem we have to deal with, from the carpool schedule to a scientific Theory of Everything, we can solve it in our sleep .

2. DREAMS COACH US FOR FUTURE
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
    Our dreams are constantly coaching us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us on the road of life. It's possible that we rehearse everything that will take place in the future in our dreams, though we forget most of it.
    Across human evolution, dreaming has been a vital survival mechanism. It is likely that in the days when our ancestors were naked hominids without good weapons, their dream radar — their ability to scout across both space and time — often enabled them to avoid becoming breakfast for saber-toothed tigers and other hungry predators.
    A recent theory posits that dreaming prepares us for challenges by putting us through frequent workouts in threat simulation , helping us to develop the reflexes and responses that will get us through.
    This is good, but I suspect our relationship with the future in dreams is much deeper and more important than this. I believe that in dreaming, we have access to the matrix in which the events and circumstances that will manifest in our physical lives have their