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PERSPECTIVES
partners. It also has more direct clinical relevance.
While on a post-doctoral fellowship at a psychiatric institute that specialized in family therapy, I had the opportunity to study the dreams of the families I saw in therapy. I asked some of them to keep dream logs for me. They did not share the dream logs with each other. To my surprise, I discovered that recurrent transactional patterns and behaviors were reflected in the dreams of each family member who kept the dream logs. This was especially true when the family was going through a crisis or some other intense situation. I noted the simple fact that these families were often living in the same place, including the same house and rooms for decades and sometimes for generations. They were often in similar sleep and dream cycles at the same time of the night. Certain coordinating tendencies could be seen. It became very clear in clinical sessions that the major emotional issues in the family were each reflected in slightly different ways in each family member’s inner landscape. In a certain sense, each family member’s dream life reflected the dream life of each other family member.
In one family therapy session, we worked with the following recurring dream of a 15-year-old girl. She dreamed that she “escaped” from her parents’ house and jumped into their car. As she drove away, the father would run toward her, but never manage to quite catch her. The closer he got, the faster the car went. Finally, the girl fully escaped him only to run headlong into a telephone pole and kill herself. In this family’s therapy sessions, the themes of autonomy and separation with a great deal of anxiety occurred repeatedly. The daughter fought continually with her parents over her own intense involvement with a young man of whom the family did not approve.
She felt rebellious and dominated by her parents, in particular her father. However, when she stayed away from home too long, she began to experience
somatic problems and wanted to “lose” herself in male companionship.
Another dream by the girl’s 12-year- old sister revealed a similar theme. The younger girl dreamed that a large “awful” man ran around screaming
at her mother, her older sister, and herself. Finally, the man stepped on
all three, but did not kill them. The dream recurred several times. The family that provided this dream series was composed of a father who had a manic-depressive illness, an extremely religious, compulsive mother, and two teenage girls. All three women in the family had psychosomatic problems, such as stomach cramps, persistent gas pains, migraines, and frequent depression. While the clinician made use of these observations for himself to help the three female patients “bond,” he did not confront the parental unit out of concern they might prematurely terminate treatment. There was already concern that therapy itself was against their religious orientation. Another clinician may well have gone in another direction.
When the same symbol appears in more than one member’s dream, it may reflect a family’s unconscious synchronous symbology. The following two-dream series was reported by
a clinician whose family was not in therapy at the time, but had an interest in dreams. It reflects a basically healthy family struggling with somewhat difficult but normative issues.
Alaska driving
The children and I are being driven north in a white station wagon (similar to my parents’ when I was a teenager).
I open the back right-hand door while the station wagon is in motion. When
I see a metal guardrail approaching, I quickly pull the door closed so that it won’t impact. Afterwards, I reopen the door while the car is still moving, and jump out with a child in my arms, as if I’m going to “save” this child. I run up the hill into a parking lot with multi- sized buildings, which seem to be under
construction. As I look back, I see my children, Vic and Theresa, walking along a median of grass and trees. They are stopped by a man who hassles them, but they are able to get past him and come along towards me. After I awoke,
I guessed the “child” I was rescuing was the “child-self” who had experienced those nightmares in the earlier dreams. Before I had a chance to develop this line of thinking further, Theresa, my daughter, related her dream of that night at breakfast and I recorded it. Theresa was 9 and Vic was 13. I had never mentioned my dream to either of them.
Our old car
Theresa, Vic, dad, and I get into two cars—our old blue and white Mustang and dad’s blue Honda. Vic got into the Mustang and so did I, and dad got into the Honda Accord. Vic drove the car and I was curious how he was doing
it, and why. I suggested to Victor that we wait for dad but he said “no,” so we kept on going. Then I heard an engine start; it was dad in the Honda. I said, “Vic, stop!” and he called “No.” Then finally, we came to a construction site; the building was almost done. There was a desert in front of it, like sand. I opened up the door, got out on the curb and was running. Then he stopped and I closed the door. Soon, dad came up and he stopped and got out of the car. He scolded Vic for driving off and he scolded me for getting out of the car while it was still going.
There are many other examples. In working with families in therapy and others, I noted that certain coordinating tendencies including psi events often occur in a variety of situations. Different families naturally had different styles and certain families communicated this way, albeit irregularly, with each other through dreams. Some families rarely,
if ever, did. I found this a very exciting discovery, and as I talked with others, I found out more and more people have had the same kind of experiences in their families, too.
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