Edward Bruce Bynum - The Dreamlife of Families: The Psychospiritual Connection

For my sons,Elijah Jordan and Ezra Sage;may they also dream themselvesinto Light.

The Dreamlife
of Families

Healthy families dream together. This is the essential good sense of The Dreamlife of Families, which carefully amasses evidence that family members dream of each other and for each other and may have shared adventures in deeper realities accessible in dreaming. He helps us recognize the vital function of crisis telepathy, in which we receive alerts about emergency situations that prepare us to handle them and sometimes to contain them. Bynum grounds his study of family dreams in an understanding of the vital role of dreaming in human evolution. He gives us the science of the dreaming brain while recognizing that the brain is within the mind. He encourages us to expand our understanding and practice to aspire to the continuity of consciousness called Yoga Nidra in the East. I recommend this wise and heartening book.

ROBERT MOSS, AUTHOR OF CONSCIOUS DREAMING AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF DREAMING

The Dreamlife of Families presents a novel approach to working with dream-based family interrelatedness. Drawing on a broad range of ancient beliefs, the book emphasizes African traditions especially, which are less known to modern psychology than those of ancient Greece or China. Bynum writes with a level of scholarly sophistication such that dream psychologists, family therapists, and other clinicians will learn much from the book. However, its also clear and entertaining and will engage families who want to utilize this approach to dreams to enrich their relationship.

DEIRDRE BARRETT, PH.D., PSYCHOLOGIST ON THE FACULTY OF HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOLS BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE PROGRAM AND AUTHOR OF THE COMMITTEE OF SLEEP

An effective case that nocturnal dreams can be interpersonal communications between family members. The numerous examples that Bynum provides make for fascinating reading while providing a convincing argument. I recommend it for anyone interested in dreams or the deeper levels of their own psyche.

WILLIAM M. BOYLIN, PH.D., SUPERVISING PSYCHOLOGIST AT THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY HOSPITAL IN MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

A beautiful and visionary book. Bynum explores the world that lives between private and public spacethe unconscious of the family. He shows us how this understanding can be applied to healing and therapy. Fascinating read for the professional and lay reader.

LYNN HOFFMAN, ACSW, AUTHOR OF FOUNDATIONS OF FAMILY THERAPY

This book guides us to true connectedness in the family. A must-read for the serious family worker or member.

JAYNE GACKENBACH, PH.D., COAUTHOR OF CONTROL YOUR DREAMS

FOREWORD

Does Your Family Need a Catalyst?

Dare you push yourself into the family dream as part of the familys life? Dare you read research series and clinical data that might at first seem to be above your own head and even appear to disorganize the way you think of the family organism itself? This brilliant clinical investigator shares both the cross-cultural and the mythical sophistication of an old professional student. His thinking is clear, his writing is explicit and detailed, and his area of expertise is immense and global. We know about the family web. We are each flies captured in that web, the strands of several or maybe even many generations.

As Bynum presents the current data from the dream laboratories in a long series of dream stories, one begins to glimpse an expanded field of dream experience. The exploration of the shadows of life from many cultures and many families expands our view of family forces and the bodys intimate reverberations from this organisms coordinated dreaming. Dreams can be healing factors as well as diagnostic signals to the body of the individuals and to the family itself. His Family Dreams Research Protocol has resulted in many fascinating expansions of dreamlife. In addition to his presentation of clinical data and his healing assessment protocol one also sees the powerful stimulus and force arising from his creative theory constructs. To integrate dreams, culture, science, family dynamics, mythology, and psychoanalysis is really mind-boggling. I loved having my mind boggled. I think you will too.

CARL A. WHITAKER, M.D.

DR. CARL A. WHITAKER (19121995) was a physician and psychotherapist and a pioneer in the field of family therapy. Many of his theories are presented in the seminal work The Family Crucible, which he wrote with Dr. Augustus Napier (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

INTRODUCTION

The Labyrinth of Dreams

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST

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 intrapsychic 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 psychokinesis (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 favorable 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 themselves 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 anyway there are good reasons for rejecting the majority of such reports.