In order to truly explain the beautiful truth of why I'm doing this, I need to tell you an ugly story of loss.

When I was younger I thought my life was music and dreams. Both were harmonious and beautiful. Both were formed by the artwork and sounds that were all around me. My mother's paintings were thoughtful works, deep emotional expressions of her soul; a soul that lived the joy in a proposal, the hopeful cycle of life renewed, the pain of loss when our dad died.

My brother and mother played the piano, a modest upright tucked in our tiny studio office. I came to love Debussy's Claire de Lune that seemed to be my mother's favorite piece to play. My brother would put his hand on the keys, untrained, unable to read sheet music, and yet out would come the most compelling sounds — that made me think of light dancing on water. Sometimes pounding like rain and thunder, sometimes flowing as gently as a spring stream.

But then those chords of joy were abruptly and violently cut-off as our mother's life was taken.

I had to pack up the entire house of our childhood. My brother and I had to give away a lot of precious things — furniture, keepsakes, even my mother’s paintings. We still feel the loss of some of her best works that we used to see every day. The last thing to leave the house was our piano.

I can only imagine what it must have been like inside of my brother that day they came to take away that piano. Our hearts were already broken when we lost Mom so unexpectedly, and seeing that piano — the last note of what was truly us by the notes that tied us together — being pushed out that door was nailing shut the coffin on our vibrant family life that we were forced to bury.

Her art was gone. Her piano was gone. She was gone. And when her music stopped, so did my dreams. I couldn't find rest or sleep. My whole life was completely and utterly silenced.

If each of us pilots a ship that is our life, my ship was wrecked by this storm, and I was clinging to a piece of driftwood in the middle of a tumultuous ocean and I kept bobbing under.

Then — in the silence, in the wake after the raging tempest — my dreams stirred. At first they were shadowy and disturbed like the abyss of my life. But then something happened, something both dissonant and divine. My dreams remembered the art. My dreams remembered the music. My dreams remembered her, and if only for a moment, they held off their fury, let me breathe, and graced me with my mother.

Yes, my mother — who had been dead for months — visited me in my dream and gave me a resonant note of hope. She told me, "Go to the Catholic Church." With that message, God reached into my dark and stormy dreams, found my drowning soul, and salvaged dreary me.

Now, this is a story you'll read in greater detail in the preface of The Lost Art of Catholic Dream Interpretation, and I share it with you in my Masterclass, where I was able to do the story a modicum of justice. For now, just know... that when I told that dream to people important to me — those whom I looked up to — their advice was always the monophonic drone, "It's just a dream." And in my impressionable youth, I listened to them and tried to walk their atonal path.

In hindsight, had I ignored this bad advice, I would have entered the Catholic Church 10 years earlier. But instead, I chose to heed the critic and not the author. My conversion wouldn't come for ten long years. How I wish I had ignored that bad advice. How I wish I had listened to the dream, to my mother and to God, sooner.

Now. Now, that you understand what dreams mean to me... I can tell you the whole reason I want to give you these free gifts: I want to save you from listening to bad advice and wasting your God-given time. Because sometimes...