Dear Folks,
“The boundary of sleep is an ocean, [and] our dreams the waves that interconnect [us],” writes Edward Bruce Bynum in “Families and the Interpretation of Dreams,” which offers particularly good news in these balkanized times. Even if we are divided in our waking lives, the realm of the collective unconscious unites us. Indeed, the work of Spirit is to un-divide systems and individuals, to invite integration of every kind in every way it can be imagined.
Bynum’s work centers on the dreams that people share, especially among and between the members of a family. He shares predictive dreams that anticipate a personal event, prophetic dreams that may have an impact or bearing on a community, visitation dreams that feature deceased family members, and the appearance in dreams of existing relatives who report having the same dream as the dreamer.
His book is grounded in “what all of us have roots in: some form of family life and a nightly dream cycle.” He addresses individuals who are interested in seeing how their own lives are reflected in their dreams, and interestingly, how their lives are reflected in the dreams of others. Because we live in an intimate web of family and self, our dreams understandably take their images from that web of relationships. So, Bynum invites the “awakened” dreamer to not only understand the images the dreams present, but to wonder how their images can heal both the dreamer and her system(s).
“The collective dreams of ancient peoples are expressed and lived through their myths,” Bynum writes. So he locates the origins of modern dream work, not in Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung (whose work he connects to the “ice caves of Europe!”), but much further back, to the sunny, generative delta of Egypt, which he calls the African cradle. Because humanity initially evolved on the African continent, the “deepest and oldest aspect” of our collective narrative is rooted there, as is the birth of human consciousness.
He coins a term “personalism” to convey the ancient, African experience of integration: of individual with group, the material with the spiritual, the living with the dead, and finds modern manifestations in Voodoo, the Christian communion of saints in which the dead have commerce with the living, and the goals of psycho-spiritual work. Instead of merely reacting to a dream, the dreamer is taught to take ownership of the dream, and approach the beings, forces, and situations within it “as an active presence” in the dreamer’s life. In dreamwork, ritual and ceremony, the “ancestors” still live and offer a pathway to healing.
Bynum concludes with this powerful image:
“Death is the escarpment between realm and realm, the dream [is] the bird that flies from each to each, ignorant of the illusion and boundary we keep during the waking state. This is how we keep the dead in our memory. This is how, near our own death, we become lucid, take flight, and are greeted in luminosity by the dead.”
“And so we dream into the dream of matter and energy beyond our human dreaming until all mind and boundary are completely dissolved and transcended and we dream ourselves into the infinite lifeblood of God.”
Dreams are rooted in human imagination, and our ability to imagine is what enables us to have empathy for others. I can never walk in your shoes, but I can be curious about the load you carry, what your shoulders and heart feel like, and how your feet may hurt. So it is true that our dreams seek to un-divide us, to acquaint us with each other and our own deepest selves, and to invite us to the source of Being where all of us dwell.
Love, David