Four times in my life I have been shown something while asleep that I could not explain when awake. I am an accountant by training and temperament, and I am aware of how this sounds.
Why I am careful about this
I spend my working life on evidence. I know the difference between a thing I can demonstrate and a thing I merely believe, and I try very hard not to mix the two in public.
So let me be exact: I am not claiming these were visions, and I am not asking anyone to treat them as authority. I am reporting what I was given, what I did about it, and what happened next. The reader can do as they like with that.
The first: a mother’s face
The earliest came not long after the evening in the chapel. What I retained from it was not instruction but recognition — the settled sense that the arrangement I had proposed at seven had been accepted, and that I was not managing on my own.
Nothing in my circumstances changed. Everything in my confidence did.
The second: languages
In the second I understood, without being told in words, that what I was being prepared for would not stay in Malayalam.
At the time this was faintly ridiculous. I was a student in Kerala with no prospect of leaving the state. Twenty years later the mission produces prayer in more than ten languages, and I have stopped finding it ridiculous.
The third: the world entire
The third was the widest — a sense of the world seen whole, from above, as one thing rather than as a collection of places.
I have thought since that this was less a prophecy than a job description. The strategic managerial positions I have moved into ask exactly that of me: to see the whole rather than the part. The dream and the day job turned out to be about the same faculty.
The fourth: the call itself
The fourth came during the pandemic, and it was the only one that felt like an instruction rather than a picture.
Record the Rosary. Share it. That was the whole of it, and it was small enough that we could obey it that same week without rearranging our lives. We recorded it in Malayalam at our own table so that our parents, shut in and unreachable, could pray along.
What I have concluded
I do not think any of the four told me the future. I think they told me the direction, and left the arithmetic to me.
That is the pattern I would report to anyone who asks. You are not shown the road. You are turned to face it, and then you have to walk.