Once there was a poor labourer called Issam. One day, his employer gave him a clay pot full of clarified butter, called ghee, which he was to take to the next town to sell.

"If you do this, I will give you two rupees. If you drop the pot, you will have to pay for the ghee yourself."

Issam loaded the pot on the donkey and set off down the road. As he went, he wondered what he would do with the two rupees. In those days, everything was very cheap and one rupee would buy 25 chickens. That's it, he thought to himself. IÕll buy chickens. They will multiply by tens, hundreds. I will sell them and buy goats. They will multiply and I will buy sheep and a big farm. I will become a merchant just like my employer. I will buy a house, marry and have children!

The more he dreamed about his future the more excited he became. He didn't notice the stone in his path. As he tripped, his donkey jumped and the pot of ghee slipped, fell, and crashed to the ground. Utterly humiliated, he returned to his employer and confessed what had happened. The employer was angry and shouted, "You've lost my week's profit!"

"But master," exclaimed Issam. "You have lost a week's profit but I have lost my chickens, my goats, my sheep, my farm, my house, my wife and my children!"

Adapted from "The Mystery of the Mind" by S. Muktananda in Your Sacred Self by Wayne Dyer.

A new year brings new dreams and, if they are anything like Issam's, they are full of great excitement, expectations and promise. This year, they need to be. After the roller-coaster ride of 2002 that reduced dot.coms to dot.bombs, tech stocks to road kill and escalated the tension between Bush and Hussein, January needs to usher in some new, enlightening and visionary perspectives, not to mention peaceful ones.

  New beginnings, new opportunities, a chance to start again, to review, to go the next step, and to make plans for new goals are all the traditional January dream diets. But wide-awake planning is everything. Issam had it figured out from first chicken to first child. Luckily, if it's horse related, you don't have to stretch that far but, for anyone competing, a nicely planned dream would be crafted from shaping up and getting into condition to shipping out for competition, schooling show style. No need to overload the dream plan with Olympic Gold in Athens yet.