The Man Who Dreamed of His Dead Father

Florida Lottery · $30 Million · 2006

The Dream

"My father came to give me something — but I couldn't see what it was."

In the African-American spiritual traditions of the American South, dreaming of a deceased ancestor who appears calm and gift-bearing is considered one of the most powerful omens of incoming blessing. The ancestor stands at a threshold — a doorway, a gate, the edge of a field — and holds something in their hands. In Abraham Shakespeare's case, relatives later recalled that in the weeks before his win, he had spoken of a recurring dream involving his late father: a man standing at a doorway, smiling, holding something extended outward. The object was always unclear, always just beyond recognition. But the feeling was unmistakable — it was something being given.

This dream archetype appears across multiple traditions worldwide. In Korean haemong (해몽) culture, a deceased elder appearing with a gift is among the top five omens associated with major fortune. In West African Yoruba dream interpretation, a calm ancestral figure represents protective energy clearing the path ahead. The specific image of a gift being extended — but not yet visible — suggests that the fortune is approaching but has not yet fully materialized.

The Days Before

A semi-literate truck driver's assistant. Someone else filled out his ticket.

Abraham Shakespeare was forty years old, working as a truck driver's assistant in the small Florida city of Frostproof — a community of fewer than 3,000 people in the agricultural heart of Polk County. He bought lottery tickets occasionally, not systematically. On the day of his win, a detail emerged that has since become one of the most quietly significant footnotes in Florida lottery history: Abraham could not write the numbers himself. He asked a coworker to fill out the ticket for him.

That ticket, filled in by someone else's hand, became worth $30 million.

Life After Winning

The gift that became a target.

Abraham collected a lump sum of approximately $17 million after taxes. The story that followed is one of the most documented cases of lottery exploitation in American history. Friends, acquaintances, and strangers arrived with stories, requests, and business proposals. A woman named Dorice "Dee Dee" Moore befriended him, inserted herself into his financial life, and over the course of two years systematically drained his accounts. In 2009, three years after his win, Abraham Shakespeare was murdered. His body was found buried beneath a concrete slab on a property connected to Moore. She was convicted of first-degree murder in 2012.

He had given away, or been taken from, nearly everything he won. His final bank balance, at the time of his murder, was reported to be nearly zero.

The Woman Who Felt a Golden Stillness

EuroMillions · £115 Million · 2019

The Sign

"For weeks before, I felt a quiet certainty. Something was on its way."

Frances Connolly did not describe a specific dream with clear visual content. What she described — to multiple journalists in the months following her win — was something that many spiritual practitioners and Jungian analysts recognize immediately: a sustained period of inexplicable peace that preceded a major life event. She used the phrase "quiet certainty" in several interviews. Not excitement. Not premonition in any dramatic sense. Just an interior stillness that something significant was approaching.

In Jungian psychology, this state is sometimes referred to as numinous stillness — a period in which the psyche has processed incoming information at an unconscious level before the conscious mind has any access to it. Jung documented dozens of cases in which patients reported this sensation in the days before significant events, both positive and difficult. The unconscious, he argued, does not experience time the way the waking mind does. It can, under certain conditions, orient itself toward what is coming.

The Days Before

A working-class couple. A routine purchase. A life-altering Tuesday night.

Frances and Patrick Connolly were a middle-aged couple from Hartlepool, England, living in Northern Ireland. Patrick worked as a factory floor manager. Frances was deeply embedded in community activism — volunteering, fundraising, showing up for neighbors in practical ways that rarely made headlines. They bought their EuroMillions ticket as part of a weekly routine — nothing special, nothing ceremonially purchased. The numbers were not chosen from a dream, not selected with any particular method.

On the night of January 1, 2019, they won £115 million — at the time, one of the largest EuroMillions prizes ever claimed by a British couple.

Life After Winning

The most wholesome lottery story on record.

The Connolly story stands in remarkable contrast to Abraham Shakespeare's tragedy. Within the first year of winning, Frances and Patrick gave away more than £60 million — over half their winnings — to family members, close friends, charities, hospices, and strangers whose stories had moved them. Frances continued her community work. Patrick continued to wake early. They remained in the same part of the country, around the same people, doing variations of the same things they had always done.

In interviews given several years after the win, both Frances and Patrick expressed a version of the same sentiment: the money had given them more tools to do what they already wanted to do. It had not changed what they wanted.

The Numbers Written in Light

Mega Millions · $218.6 Million (⅓ share) · 2012

The Dream

"I saw numbers — not clearly, but as if written in light. I sat with the feeling."

Merle Butler, a retired financial professional from Red Bud, Illinois (population approximately 3,700), described in a post-win interview a dream in which he perceived a sequence of numbers — not sharply defined, but luminous, as if written in a glowing medium. He did not immediately act on the dream. He sat with the sensation of it, carrying it through the day. He did not run out and buy a ticket with those exact numbers. But he did feel, unusually strongly, that he should buy a ticket at all — something he was not in the habit of doing regularly.

Dreams of numbers appearing in luminous or fire-like form are documented across multiple dream traditions. In Korean haemong, fire appearing as warm, clean, and non-destructive is among the most celebrated fortune omens. In classical Western dream traditions, numbers that glow or pulse are associated with messages from the deeper self — an intelligence beneath the rational mind that processes patterns we cannot consciously access.

The Days Before

The jackpot that the whole nation was watching — and he almost didn't play.

In late March 2012, the Mega Millions jackpot had been rolling over for weeks, drawing unprecedented national media attention. It had grown to $656 million — at the time, the single largest lottery jackpot in American history. The entire country was buying tickets. Long lines formed at gas stations and convenience stores across all participating states. Merle Butler later described feeling "unusually drawn" to buy on a specific day, and specifically from a specific location, even though the rational, financially trained part of his mind told him that the odds were essentially zero.

The ticket he bought that day was one of three winning tickets that split the $656 million jackpot. His share: $218.6 million before taxes.

Life After Winning

Discipline as a form of spiritual practice.

Merle Butler's response to his win stands as a masterclass in what we at Aura-Lotus call fortune stewardship. He and Patricia did not come forward immediately. Under Illinois law, winners have an extended period to claim, and Merle used months of that time to assemble a professional team: estate lawyers, tax professionals, financial advisors, and a public relations consultant. Only after all structural protections were in place did the Butlers step forward. They remained in Red Bud. They did not give press interviews beyond the initial claim announcement. Their names virtually disappeared from public record within weeks.

By all available accounts, the Butler family's life remains stable, private, and intact. No addiction scandals. No divorce filings. No bankruptcy proceedings. No documented exploitation. In the landscape of catastrophic lottery stories, their outcome is statistically rare.

An Angel Placed a Key in Her Hand

EuroMillions · €190 Million · 2014

The Dream

"A figure made of light stood before me and placed an iron key in my open palm."

This account comes through Portuguese media reports filed shortly after the 2014 EuroMillions record win, at the time the largest in the lottery's history. The winner — described only as a woman in her 50s from a rural community in northern Portugal — chose complete anonymity, communicating with the press only through a family intermediary. Through that intermediary, she shared the following: approximately one week before her win, she dreamed of a luminous figure — described as angelic in character — who stood before her, reached out, and placed an old iron key in the center of her open palm. The figure said nothing. The key was heavy. She could feel its weight clearly. She woke immediately.

In European folk dream traditions — particularly in the Catholic communities of rural Portugal, Spain, and Southern France — a key given by a divine or angelic figure is among the oldest and most recognizable symbols of access to hidden treasure or unlocked destiny. The key does not represent money directly. It represents permission: the opening of something that was previously sealed. In many traditional interpretations, the dreamer who receives such a key is being told not that fortune is coming, but that fortune has been waiting — and the time of waiting is now ending.

Critically, she told her daughter about the dream the morning after she had it. Her daughter remembered this clearly and confirmed the conversation when the win was announced a week later.

The Days Before

The same numbers she had played for years. Nothing different. Everything different.

She played EuroMillions with the same set of numbers she had been using for years — a combination with personal significance, as is common among regular players. She purchased her ticket as part of her normal weekly routine, at the same location she had always used. There was no special ceremony, no deliberate choice made on the basis of the dream. She checked her ticket while seated in her kitchen on a weekday morning, reading the numbers off a television broadcast. She thought she had misread them. She called her daughter to look.

She had not misread them.

Life After Winning

The winner who almost no one noticed had won.

This woman's post-win life is documented primarily by its silence. She is one of the rare cases of genuinely successful lottery anonymity. What filtered through her intermediary in the months following the win: she donated substantially to her local church and to several community infrastructure projects in her village. She paid off debts and mortgages for multiple family members. She did not relocate. She did not change her daily routines significantly. Most strikingly, she did not stop her part-time work for nearly a year after the win — continuing to show up to a role she had held for more than a decade.

He Dreamed of Rain That Turned to Gold

El Gordo (Spanish Christmas Lottery) · €88 Million · 2011

The Dream

"The rain fell silver at first. Then I opened my hands, and they were full of gold."

El Gordo — The Fat One — is the world's oldest and largest lottery by total prize pool, held annually in Spain every December 22nd and watched live on national television by virtually the entire country. For many Spanish families, buying a décimo (a tenth-share of an El Gordo ticket) is as much a cultural and familial ritual as it is a gamble. The numbers are drawn in a slow, operatic ceremony in which children from a Madrid school sing each number and prize in paired voices — a tradition dating to 1812.

In 2011, a man from Granada — whose identity was protected by Spanish privacy law — reported through a local newspaper that in the days before the December drawing, he had experienced a vivid dream in which he stood outside in a rainstorm. The rain fell silver-colored initially. Then he raised his open hands to catch the rain, and the drops that landed in his palms turned to gold on contact. He woke with a feeling he described as certeza tranquila — quiet certainty.

Rain that transforms into something precious is a particularly rich dream archetype. In Islamic dream interpretation traditions, which have deep historical roots in Andalusian Spain, rain is almost universally a symbol of divine blessing — abundance falling from a source beyond human control. Gold rain appears in classical mythology across Greek, Hindu, and Norse traditions, almost always in the context of divine gift-giving. The transformation occurring in the dreamer's own hands suggests agency — the fortune does not merely arrive; the dreamer participates in its reception.

The Days Before

A ticket bought twenty years in a row. The same number, every December.

The Granada winner had been purchasing the same El Gordo number — or a tenth-share of it — every single year for twenty years without winning anything of significance. This is not unusual. Millions of Spaniards do the same. The emotional and psychological weight of two decades of non-winning is substantial, and many people in such situations begin to buy more as a form of superstitious escalation, or stop buying entirely out of resignation. He did neither. He continued to buy one ticket, the same number, every year. In 2011, that number was drawn as one of the major prizes.

His share of the 2011 El Gordo: €88 million.

Life After Winning

Twenty years of patience, and then a very quiet Tuesday.

The details available about this winner's life after El Gordo are limited by Spanish privacy protections and by his own apparent disinterest in publicity. What was reported locally: he purchased a larger home for his parents, paid off his mortgage, set up small funds for extended family members, and took a long vacation. He did not quit his work immediately. He did not move to another city or country. A neighbor quoted anonymously in the original newspaper profile described him, eight months after the win, as "exactly the same person, just visibly less stressed."

Perhaps the most notable element of this story is its context: twenty years of faithful, unspectacular consistency. He was not a man who chased fortune dramatically. He was a man who showed up, quietly, year after year, for two decades — and one year, the fortune showed up back.