The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships (38 page)

BOOK: The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships

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Such an exercise can clarify or complete issues it brings up. We discussed in chapter 3 how this practice, called re-dreaming, can enhance your ability to interpret and be complete with what the dream brings up for you. In the case of dealing with the death of parents, re-dreaming can help you complete the grieving process in a concrete way. The following dreamer, Sharon, was able to do this a year and a half after her mother died.


Let Her Go


I'm at a large meeting. I see Mom there. She is leaving, being hoisted up in a wheelchair into a van. I think she could come to lunch with our family before she leaves. I feel ambivalent, but I go ahead and ask her. She says, "Of course," and she is lowered back down. I go to get her, and wonder how I'm going to manage it all. I feel anxious.

Sharon had been very close to her mother and was having a hard time coming to terms with her death. After having this dream, she realized she was ambivalent about letting her go. She could see from the dream how she was causing herself and her family anxiety and added difficulty by pulling her mother "back down" into their lives, when perhaps sheand even her mother herselfwas ready to "leave." She saw that she didn't have to take care of her mother anymore, that she could "let her go.'' Sharon changed the dream so that she could see her mother ascending to heaven, looking radiant and saying, "I'm ready to go now. I love you. Be well, my darling daughter." Tears came to Sharon's eyes as she said out loud, "Goodbye, Mother. I love you. God be with you.'' Sharon continued to think about and miss her mother, but her grief no longer consumed her. She could let go of the sadness and anxiety and replace it with a beautiful image from her dreamwork.

Other dreamwork techniques for dealing with the loss of

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parents, such as guided fantasy and dream incubation, are described in chapter 11. You may also come up with ideas of your own. Let your feelings and your dreams guide you. Though your parents may be gone in waking life, they are always with you in your dreams.

Dreamwork With and About Siblings


The Forest of No Return

I'm standing on a beach with my parents and younger brother. I run off chasing my brother through the woods that are right behind the beach. They are dark and forbidding and remind me of the "forest of no return" in one of my favorite childhood movies. I'm running in effortless leaps, and my brother runs as fast as he can to stay ahead of me. I can hear my mother cautioning us not to go too deep into the woods, but already she sounds far away.

This dream represents several of the major issues that we all face in growing up with brothers or sisters: competition and rivalry, role definition, separation, and reconnection. It also illustrates how we tend to project on our siblings the very things we do not like to face in ourselves. To some degree, we all have something of everyone in ourselves; this may be particularly the case with our brothers and sisters, who share our genes and our home environment. Perhaps because of the intense nature of this closeness, we tend to avoid or complain about our siblings.

For example, Pam, who had the above dream, had grown up and long since moved away from the world of childhood (represented by the beach) into the unknown territory of adulthood (the forest of no return). There was still a part of her, however,

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symbolized by her younger brother, that continued to struggle and push herself. She had noticed this characteristic in her brother before (running "as fast as he can to stay ahead"), complaining about it to both him and her mother. "It was only after having this dream," she said, ''that I acknowledged the very same aspect in myself. Now that I recognize it I can do something about it in my own life."

Pam's dream also made her aware of her brother as an individual and his own struggle to grow up. As children, their relationship was marked by competition and teasing, and they continued to fall into those old patterns whenever they were together. Pam shared this dream with him the next time she saw him. They agreed to work to change this pattern and created a vision of being friends as mature, supportive adults. This resulted, she said, "in the first closeness and real sharing we had ever experienced together."

Even though brothers and sisters may not feel very close while growing up, they still have to deal with separating from each other as adults. For some, depending on their family dynamics, this may be as difficult as dealing with the loss of a parent; for others, they may be surprised by the impact their brother's or sister's leaving has on them. This latter reaction was the case for one teenager named Howard, who had been attending the same school with his younger sister, Susie for years. When Susie decided to go to another school, he seemed to take it all in stride until he had the following dream shortly before his graduation.