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Often, extremely strong feelings and images arise which reveal the deeper emotions we share and have toward these special people in our lives.
Our identities sometimes intimately comingle, and at other times come
up in sharp contrast in these dreams.
In them, we all seem to know and recognize each other. The dream, with its strange contours and storyline, is the perfect field on which to portray our “raw,” sometimes subtle and frequently multi-leveled feelings and emotions. Dreams are a pulse taken on the heartbeat of family life.
What we are seeing in actuality is a clinical manifestation of a seemingly shared field of affect, ideation, emotion, behavior and memory of experiences in which each member of the field
or system experiences events and emotions from a slightly different angle. However, all share a deeper resonance with each other member of the field. This might be described as a family unconscious dimension or level of our consciousness developed over long periods of time living together, sharing intimate family occurrences and emotional experiences. Dreams, in particular, given their emotional and even limbic resonance within us, and our shared intimate experiences, are a prominent crucible where these meet.
Over the past century plus, Freud
(1953) and others after him have demonstrated that dreams both obscure and selectively reveal what we deep down really feel and think about each other and ourselves. In the dream state, our hold on “reality” is not as well guarded as it is when we are awake. Our psychological defenses are, to a large extent, ablated and what appears to us as “reality” becomes very intense, visual and even somatically experienced.
Jung (1974) and his followers revealed that there are great spiritual energies, treasures and messages from the collective unconscious, hidden in the deeper river of dreams. This collective unconscious is that vast reservoir of
The dream, with its strange contours and storyline, is the perfect field on which to portray our “raw,“ sometimes subtle and frequently multi-leveled feelings and emotions. Dreams
are a pulse taken on the heartbeat of family life.
knowledge, wisdom, and experience collected by humanity through the ages. Both Freud and Jung took note of the unusual time distortions and spatial condensations fused with emotionality that occurred in the dream-work. Their work with dreams was largely a reflection on dreams when we are awake and what it means to the dreamer.
It has become clear however in the present age, based on replicated laboratory research, that we can not only reflect on, but can also consciously influence, the dreaming process as
it occurs much more than we had earlier thought. This is what is termed the lucid dream experience (LaBerge, 1985). We also know from laboratory- based anomalous research that
human information communication can proceed through channels not dominated by the traditional five senses of the waking state. Both Freud and Jung at different times acknowledged this in their clinical practice.
Finally, we also know from many replicated studies in anomalous research and reports by well- established clinicians in the field
that psi (pronounced sigh) occurs a good deal in certain kinds of dreams, especially between dreamers who share an intimate familial and/or other deep emotional bond, such as between analyst and patient (Ehrenwald,1978; Schwarz,1980; Jahn & Dunne,1987).
This is reported in the clinical literature repeatedly despite our modern skepticism that such events can occur. This has more to do with our current scientific epistemology than observed reports. It is currently theoretically inconvenient, but never the less an observed aspect of our reality and experience. Any number of these possibilities of communication can occur when we are dreaming because the “boundaries” between individuals within the family system change significantly in the dream state (Bynum, 2017). With an experienced shift in boundaries comes a shift in how we conceive of knowing anything. This
has personal and clinical, as well as theoretical implications.
Implications for family therapy
For example, after a sleep-filled night
in December, my wife and I mentioned our dreams to each other, as is our custom. I had dreamed a strange dream in which a “grandmother type” was trying to reach or catch me. She triggered mixed feelings in me, as to whether she was trying to protect
me or somehow “get me.” Also in the dream, the grandmother attempted to steal or cut off a pickle I had! Having
a somewhat Freudian lens, I made
note of the sexual aspect of this. I later woke with a slightly eerie feeling about the dream. On the same night, my
wife dreamed my grandmother had a necklace with a moon-shaped crescent locket, which fell partly from her neck and turned into a knife or sharp edge. My wife then wondered in the dream itself whether the grandmother was gay. While we both felt these dreams were odd, I noticed the correspondences in the grandmother images, the sexual feelings, and the act of cutting. These appeared in both dreamscapes. Neither of us had discussed grandmothers for
a long time and we could remember
no events recently that would
account for the dreams in terms of
day residue. In any event, the sharing
of these experiences fosters a certain “communicative intimacy” between
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