By Douglas McLean
From the outset of the journey of writing her new book, Dreams and Everyday Miracles, Diana Snowden was beset with travails that would make the faint-hearted wither and the lion-hearted quake. Every step she took toward accomplishing her ten-year mission seemed daunted by challenges and obstacles that overcoming is as miraculous as the book Diana will present this Wednesday, December 21, 2022, from 2-4 p.m., in the Muskoka Room at the Huntsville Public Library. This will be its official launch.
On the eve of the winter solstice, that remarkable day believed by some to be the magical and symbolic rebirth of the sun, when the fading daylight hours are reversed and the days grow longer, winter’s darkness subsides, and the promise of spring’s renewal harkens, Diana will tell her tales of how dreams are often more than what they seem.
Diana’s story and the birth of her second book, Dreams and Everyday Miracles, began with a startlingly vivid dream about one of her sons, Jean-Andre, which she recounts in the book and will likely share at her book launch. “It was more profound than any I had had, and so I wrote it down, this was not my usual thing. I wrote it down and kept it in my heart for a long time.”
While on a trip to Florida, she began to review her notes and started to think about other dreams she recalled and she realized there were common factors – they were explicit and they were in colour, really vivid colour. She started writing out these dreams to keep a record and she really found herself enjoying the task, writing and remembering the details of these “technicolor” dreams. Unfortunately, upon her return, she lost the notebook that she had of all her recollections. When she told her son Joel, with whom she shared her special thoughts, he quipped for her to keep on dreaming and really paid little attention to their significance.
Nevertheless, Diana, a woman of strong conviction and religious faith, felt that these specific dreams warranted safekeeping and further investigation. In the meantime, Diana and her husband moved to Huntsville to care for and be close to her aging mother and stepfather. The following year, she returned to Florida and again began writing down from memory these dreams, but this time she used her husband’s computer, allowing her to email her notes to her home computer for safekeeping.
“There’s always something good that comes from something bad”, Diana shares, because now that she was typing her notes she began to remember stories that friends or acquaintances had given her about their dreams and another striking phenomenon – unexplained mysteries, appearances, and visions.
While volunteering at St. Mary’s School, in Huntsville, one of the other volunteers asked Diana if she’d ever had a dream, “that you can’t believe it happened?” Upon sharing her personal experiences, her co-worker suggested she write a book because of how interesting and penetrating Diana’s involvement was in the subject. Almost immediately, a team coalesced around Diana with the goal of producing a book about dreams and the puzzling interaction humans have with them.
Before Diana and her friends could make any progress toward a finished product, Diana suffered a series of life-threatening health issues, first with major heart surgery, which curtailed her writing throughout her recuperation, and then she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, requiring a long period of rehabilitation. Despite these inordinate setbacks, Diana continued to believe that this book was inspired by celestial guidance, rooted in her religious perspective and faith.
By this time, she had accumulated thirty to forty stories including her own, so she began in earnest to find a publisher and set the task in motion once again. In 2019, her mother became gravely ill and Diana undertook her personal homecare. With her mother so gravely ill, Diana suffered a restless, brooding sleeplessness that left her listless and overcome with a dark foreboding. Heaviness descended upon her mood and Diana was overwhelmed by sadness, which she could not attribute to any circumstances that she understood.
Her son, Joel, came for a surprise visit. He was especially close to his grandmother, Diana’s mother. He was much beloved by both. Even though his professional life and continuing education held an exciting, promising future, Joel seemed “out of sorts” and not his usual self. Queries about his well-being were met with nonchalance and Joel said his goodbyes to return to his home in Quebec.
On May 22 2019, Joel Snowden committed suicide. In reflection, Diana realized that her uneasy precognition, which she intuited was about her mother’s illness, was actually about her son. And when Joel died, she died inside – emotionally crippled and inconsolable.
Her quest to publish a book about life’s mysteries was shattered and she understandably sunk into despair. Unable to make sense of such a tragic incident, Diana broke down and declared, “I can’t do this anymore” and gave up, or so it seemed.
A devoted, outgoing person, Diana kept her practice of working in her church and volunteering. Through an event preparing a volunteer cookbook at her church, one of her valued friends encouraged her once again to tackle the book, offering to help edit the pages and pages of stories. With this assistance and that of her husband, they began the arduous task of assembling and curating these incredible tales of super phenomenal occurrences that everyday people encounter, whether in a dream state or other perceptive moments of awareness.
Through 2020, the pandemic and the departure of several editors, somehow Diana and her team prevailed, enduring what might only be described as a whirlwind of rejection, dejection, and corrections, to meet the demand of their publisher and book distributor.
Diana Snowden has had to face disproportionate trials and tribulations to create this work. Throughout its long voyage to competition, Dreams and Everyday Miracles, is a testament to the human spirit’s indomitable will to rise up, overcome, and ultimately find grace and solace in our common humanness, for all its mystery and unanswerable questions.
The book is available at: https://www.amazon.ca/Dreams-Everyday-Miracles-Diana-Snowden/dp/0969063520
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