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, from the inside out and from the bottom up, one family at a time, starting with our own and expanding out, throughout our circles of influence. 

“From the inside out,” means that change in our lives, families, and world starts with ourselves. 

“If it is to be, it starts with me.” 

If we want peace in the world we start by finding inner peace ourselves. 

“From the bottom up” means that our children are the foundation for our future world. As they access their emerging potentials and innate life compass they will be better able to escape the snares of the many cultural and social pressures that bear down on them. They will have a sense of what is real and right as a life path to follow. While Dreaming Healthy Families eliminates nightmares and provides understanding of dreams, it is fundamentally about changing the world, one child at a time. 

Supplementing our best judgment as parents and caregivers with a child’s innate wisdom

Most of us had difficult childhoods. We can recall ways that we were our own worst enemies, creating unnecessary problems, confusion, grief, and loneliness for ourselves. We can think, “If I had only known then what I know now!” 

The most fervent hope and desire of a loving parent is to save their child from the mistakes that they made. Based on this fear, parents teach a lot of rules. They want their child to develop “self control” and “self esteem” so that they will succeed in school and in life. 

As a result, parents easily project their fears onto their children. They can easily over-compensate by giving their child what they wanted, needed, and missed when they were children. If they grew up poor, they may shower their child with comfort and gifts. If they grew up scared and traumatized, they may go out of their way to protect their child from people and experiences that are important life teachings. 

IDL teaches caregivers and parents to seek the direction of the inner intelligence of each child. By accessing the innate emerging potentials and life compass of every child Integral Deep Listening, a form of Dream Yoga, brings each child’s future, integrated self into current reality. The result is that they develop an innate sense of inner direction to help them find their way forward, avoiding drama, bad habits, addictions, and interpersonal conflict. 

These are things every parent wants for their child, but lacking the tools, they often try too hard. Instead of practicing listening, in a deep and integral way to the inner wisdom of their child, they require compliance with rules and roles that children too often do not understand.

How did “Dreaming Healthy Families” get started? 

Dreaming Healthy Families has its root in the sociometry of psychiatrist JL Moreno, creator of psychodrama and most “action methods” in psychotherapy. Dr. Dillard applied Moreno’s sociometry to dreams beginning in 1980. He asked, “If we treated our dream characters as groups and asked them questions regarding their preferences toward one another and depicted those preferences as numerical data on a Dream Sociogram, what might we discover about dream group dynamics?” 

This research resulted in two books, Dream Sociometry and Understanding the Dream Sociogram.” It also led to the creation of Integral Deep Listening in the 1990’s, as a quicker, easier way to interview not only dream characters but the personifications of life issues. 

In clinical practice it was found that this process quickly eliminated nightmares and even post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias, panic attacks, and general anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders are essentially a parasympathetic fight or flight over-reaction to life stresses. They are the most common mental health disorder in our world today. The nightmares of children represent the early onset of this pervasive dysfunction. What can we do about it?

Our world is in pain in many ways – from disruptions and degradation of nature to chaos in our communities and nations. There are good, concrete reasons to live in fear. Vigilance means survival. However, experience teaches us that while some 5% of our fears will kill us if ignored, some 95% are unnecessary over-reactions that rob us of happiness, joy, and peace of mind. 

Evolutionary science teaches us that adaptation is a process of self-organization in response to life pressures. While in the physical world the pressures that motivate evolution come from the sun, underwater volcanic vents, tides, or the wind, in our world they largely come from the expectations and demands of parents, peers, bosses, advertisers, and governments – authority figures of all types. 

This recognition leads to the understanding that self-organization is most effective when it takes into account three factors, 1) the input of external authority; 2) our own experience, common sense, and intuition; and 3) interviewed emerging potentials that reflect the innate priorities of our life compass. IDL calls this approach to problem solving “triangulation.”  

The solutions that work best for a child will take into consideration external sources of objectivity (authority), our own best judgment (our lived life experience), and interior sources of objectivity (interviewed perspectives). The result of applying triangulation is an approach to life that is both realistic, in that it takes real exterior conditions into account, and authentic, in that it wells up spontaneously from within us, as if out of a deep inner spring, rather than imposed on us from the outside. Our individual path forward is then likely to 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 integrating into our life the priorities of our own personal “life compass,” priorities that are deeper, stronger, and more authentically ours than those of our familial, social, religious, and political scripting that get carried forward from generation to generation, regardless of their toxicity. 

While familial and cultural heritage is important and has a rightful place in our lives, our life compass is more foundational and trustworthy than what we want, or even what our families want for us. 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 life. IDL interprets “family” broadly. 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. 

While for children “family” largely applies to the culture, scripting injunctions and role modeling of our family of origin, as we grow up are presented by alternative models of “family.” Some of these are more healthy than others. Some of them are closer to what feels authentic for us than others. In the final analysis, it is up to us to sort through what aspects of our childhood scripting stand the tests of time and we want to keep and which ones we need to outgrow. In the final analysis, it is up to us to sort through which alternative “families” are healthy and which are not. 

Integral Deep Listening addresses this challenge by generating an interior family, called an “intrasocial sangha.” “Sangha” is a Buddhist word for “sacred community.” 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. 

To the extent that you find and cultivate both exterior and interior Sanghas you will generate a supportive culture that is stable, balanced, and stands the tests of time. Think about what a difference this would have made in your life if you had found that when you were say, ten. Think about what a difference that can make in the lives of children that you know.