To All the Dreamers Who Miss Home

December 2025

My dear ones,

I want to share with you a story, a childhood snapshot of creating reality: dreams, the way back home and realizing potential.

I've loved cameras for as long as I can remember, ever since I was a child. I was so drawn to them that I would dream about them at night.

In Haifa, the city of my childhood, whenever my parents went to the market, I always wanted to go with them. Along the market there were several photo shops, and I would stop there and simply refuse to leave. My parents, who over time got used to this routine, would leave me in one of the shops with one of the salespeople. The salesman would sit me on a high stool behind the counter and show me cameras whose every detail I already knew in theory, and I, with a sparkle in my eyes, listened eagerly to his explanations, thrilled to examine and operate them up close.

It's important to understand: cameras once had a different aura. They were a precious item, something worth at least two monthly salaries, if not more. It was not an object everyone had, or that everyone had the means to get.

One day my parents picked me up from the photo shop after making their way through the market. We got into the car, and there something so ordinary and so extraordinary happened at the same time: my parents asked me a technical question about cameras. Of course, I answered right away without blinking. They insisted I was wrong. They really dug in and told me, “Ran, that can't be…” And I said with confidence, “Yes, it can.”

Our discussion turned into a bet proposed by my parents:

If it turns out you're right, what would you like to get?

And without thinking twice, I answered: a camera.

They looked at me with a smile and accepted the challenge.

After checking with the salesman at the photo shop, it turned out I was right.

My parents were people of honor. Honor mattered more to them than money.

So even though it amounted to a “mini mortgage,” they managed, with great effort, to get me a new professional camera and a set of lenses.

In time, that camera allowed me to earn a living as a young teenager, and later as a photographer of sports, children, babies and events.

If we go back for a moment to that historic visit to the market,

I remember that the moment the bet was proposed, I knew.

I knew I had a camera.

What's more, when I finally had the camera in my hands, it wasn't really a surprise. I felt a sense of déjà vu, what's called “Future familier.”

How did I know I had a camera even before I held it in my hands, and against all odds?

Children up to about age 14 are professional dreamers. Since their personality is still under construction in those years, they live in their midbrain; that is their main home.

When we grew up, we were “kicked out of the house,” out of that part of the brain and into the world of shared conventions we call society. A world of “What time is it?”, “Did you bring it?”, “Is that responsible or irresponsible?” and “This is allowed, but that is forbidden.” We return home only on the occasions when we feel we have permission.

For example, when we fall asleep at night, meditate, take mind-altering substances, or sit outside watching the clouds for half an hour during a break at work. Ever since we left, we have longed to return home.

The story about the camera is meant to remind us what it feels like to come back home.

I teach people to return to the place where they once lived. We have all been there, at least everyone who was once a child.

In this process, the thoughts of the past and the consciousness of the past are what give birth to the present, which is the future of the thoughts of the past.

You are invited to stop and read that sentence again.

Accepting what is, is an act of taking responsibility for the thoughts that created it.

How do we do that? We rise above everything we were, for the sake of everything we want to be.

Because if we don't rise above what we were, we will keep feeling guilty tomorrow too, keep being angry tomorrow too, keep being afraid tomorrow too. Why? Because we refuse to cut the rope of yesterday's thoughts.

If we want to accept everything happening now without judgment, we need to understand that who we are in this moment is not who we truly are, but only an aspect of what we were.

The only way to real change is to decide today to come back home. To start entering the midbrain not at random, while sitting in the park, but on a regular basis.

Every day, morning, evening and noon, for at least about 20 minutes, sit and create a new dream, create a memory from the future. A dream that is a fantastic memory, one that on the one hand makes no logical sense at all and at the same time feels so right.

To days of fulfillment.

With love,

Ran

Gifts for the Soul

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