What is “Dreaming Healthy Families?”
Dreaming Healthy Families is a global research project, with participants in countries around the world. We can change the world, one family at a time, starting with our own and expanding out, throughout our circles of influence. Dreaming Healthy Families is about sharing your night-time dreams with your family and having your children ask one or more character in your dream, like a monster, car, cat, or toothbrush, questions about life issues that matter to you. They make recommendations, if any sound helpful to you, you can decide to see what happens in your life when you put them into practice, and your children can help keep you on track! Each family member experiences being both interviewed and interviewer, in a fun process of self-discovery that clarifies misunderstandings, builds relationships, and heals families.
Dreaming Healthy Families is not limited to dreams but also to interviewing the personifications of life issues that matter to you, like a knife-like or burning pain in your back. Why not ask the knife or the fire if they have anything to say? Or perhaps someone is in the “pit of despair” or is trapped in an addiction. Why not ask the pit or the cage? If the knife, fire, pit, or cage make recommendations that make sense to you, why not let your family help you make any changes you want to make?
How did “Dreaming Healthy Families” get started?
Our world is in pain in many ways – from disruptions and degradation of nature to chaos in our communities and nations. The solutions that work best will be authentic, welling up within us, as if out of a deep inner spring, rather than imposed on us from the outside. At the same time, our individual path forward will speak to our collective development as one humanity.
Dreaming Healthy Families thinks of this authentic personal and collective course forward into health and wholeness as our own personal “life compass” that is deeper, stronger, and more authentically ours than our familial, social, religious, and political scripting. While all of these are important and have rightful places in our lives, our life compass is more foundational and trustworthy than what we want, and even our conscience and intuition, as we can all look back on our lives and see that those wants we were most certain were right and good sometimes turned out to be pastimes, excursions or disasters – not really about who we are and where we are going. Dreaming Healthy Families is a way to help you and your loved ones find your own unique song and sing it, to find your own unique dance and dance your way through life with those you meet.
Who Can Participate?
Dreaming Healthy Families is open to anyone who wants a happier, healthier, more harmonious family. It is not about changing our partners, children, or parents to conform to our expectations, but rather to support them by accepting them for who they are today and helping them find their own unique “next step” that feels right for them, and then providing them with whatever support they request that you can freely offer.
Dreaming Healthy Families is based on the concept of “paying it forward,” meaning that out of gratitude for the help that has been freely given to you, you share what has been helpful with others who might want to enjoy it with their own family. In that way, we help each other live lives directed by our life compass, and as families heal, so do our societies and culture, bringing light and a solid path forward to humanity. A wealth much greater than money is the reward for learning to coach one another and to invite other families to do the same.
If you don’t have a family or are single, or just want to try it first for yourself, no problem! The process works the same for individuals as for families. However, when you work with others you develop a support system based on mutual respect that will be there for you in the future, whenever you may need it, and you will be able to share your experience and expertise with other families who need help applying the recommendations they receive from their interviews. We are a human family; you do not have to be related to use Dreaming Healthy Families to create your own family of like-minded individuals all over the world.
For more information, contact joseph.Dillard@gmail.com
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