The Dreamlife of Families (The Psychospiritual Connection)

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Our dreams, the most intimate part of us, form the truest expressions of our feelings and emotional beliefs about the world. Our dreams also reflect the complex connections of our unconscious minds with those of our families and close friends, connecting us through our dreams to loved ones near and far, living and passed on.

Integrating traditional dream analysis with family psychology, clinical science, and parapsychology, Edward Bruce Bynum, Ph.D., ABPP, details how our personal unconscious is interwoven into our larger family unconscious. He shows how these dream life connections and patterns are as old as humanity itself, exploring ancient dream traditions from around the world. He explains how the dream life of a family can be viewed as a shared field or hologram, where each family member is enfolded into the dreams of the other members. This shared reality reveals itself in family and personal illnesses, in nightmares and unusual dreams, and during critical times such as crisis, pregnancy, conflicts, and medical emergencies. It also reveals itself in cases of simultaneous shared dreams and telepathic and precognitive dreams, explaining why so many people have dreams in which a family member appears to say good-bye, waking the next day to discover the same loved one has passed away. Sharing clinical case studies from his Family Dream Research Project, the author shows how the intimate labyrinth of our dream lives is always flowing beneath the surface of our waking lives, shaping and influencing our relationships and our deep core experiences. He reveals how dreams can be healing factors as well as diagnostic signals, detailing how dream work can aid in both family and couples therapy.

Showing how our family's dream life connects us to our ancestors and weaves us into the messages we send to our children's children, the author offers an opportunity to identify personal and family patterns, heal our psycho spiritual selves, and 'grow our understanding of our own minds.

EDWARD BRUCE BYNUM, Ph.D., ABPP, is a clinical psychologist and former director of the behavioural medicine program at the University of Massachusetts Health Services. The author of several books, including Dark Light Consciousness, he is currently in private practice at the Brain Analysis and Neurodevelopment Center in Hadley, Massachusetts.

Who of us has not had a profound experience in our dreaming life that had some deep intuitive connection to our waking life? Who of us has not had a dream of a lover or a relative or a friend that expressed precisely the nature, the depth, and the tone of our relationship to them? Who of us does not feel, at least while dreaming, that dreams are an authentic voice in our deep sleep life? This book is about individual or intra-psychic dreams and also about family dreams or family-related dreams. It is about how such dreams affect our minds and bodies in both health and illness. It is also about those occasional dreams of members of the same family that express an uncanny intimacy or that share common themes, patterns, or images. Sometimes there is even apparently direct communication of information in dreams between family members. The ancients had many names for it. Today it is understood to be one of several forms of paranormal or anomalous communication known as extrasensory perception (ESP) or telepathy. Other forms in this family of unusual phenomena are clairvoyance, the awareness of a previously unknown physical environment by anomalous means; precognition, the similar awareness of a future event; and psycho kinesis (PK), the alteration or movement of physical objects or processes by anomalous means. They are collectively referred to as psi or paranormal phenomena.

Sigmund Freud himself was always ambivalent about this area of investigation. At one point the founder of psychoanalysis confessed that

it is an uncontestable fact that our sleep creates favourable conditions for telepathy. . . . Telepathy may be the original archaic method by which individuals understood one another, and which has been pushed into the background in the course of phylogenetic evolutionary development by the better method of communication by means of signs apprehended by the sense organs. But such older methods may have persisted in the background, and may still manifest them-selves under certain conditions.

Then in another instance he completely rejected the whole idea:

You know that by telepathy we mean the alleged fact that an event which occurs at a specific time comes more or less simultaneously into the consciousness of a person who is spatially distant, without any of the known methods of communication coming into play. The tacit assumption is that this event occurs to a person in whom the receiver of the message has some strong emotional interest.... I need not emphasize to you the improbability of such processes, and any-way there are good reasons for rejecting the majority of such reports.

And then again at other times Freud admitted, "it is probable that the study of . . . (psi) will result in the admission that some of these phenomena are real . . . my personal attitude toward such materials remains one of reluctance and ambivalence."' It was a major disagreement with Jung.

**Contents and Sample Pages**