Honoring Our Namesakes: When Waking and Sleeping Dreams Collide

“Merrily, merrily merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

Welcome Dreamers,

What does it mean when our waking and sleeping lives coincide?  When the inside dream and the outside dream reflect each other? The doubling of an image or theme in dreams, or when waking life and sleeping life overlap generally means, “This is something doubly important to pay attention to”, and that your psyche and the muses aren’t satisfied that a nudge on only one plane is enough. Here’s an example of ancestor dreaming and the call of spirit.

Some families have the tradition of naming children after their parent or grandparent, often with “Jr.” or the 2^nd or the 3^rd tagged on, providing a continuity of the first as well as the last family name. In Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jewish tradition, however, a child is never named for a living relative, but rather after the relative who most recently passed in the family. It was thought to be bad luck to name a person after a living relative, that it might steal the soul that was still living in another body. The naming is to honor the deceased, keep the memory alive, and to provide a sense of continuity in the family. For instance, I know that I was named after a great uncle Louie. I know nothing at all about this man except that he was my grandmother’s brother, and his name began with an “L” which is why mine does, but it still connects me to my maternal line and history.

Sometimes we know more about the person we are named for, and their legacy haunts us. This is the case for Ruby. Some years ago, Ruby told her dream circle that she had known all her life that she was named after her Aunt Ruby who had committed suicide. In this case, since both were women, she got the exact same name (my parents couldn’t name their girl child Louis though at that time). She told us that she had searched Ancestry.com a few years ago for more information on her.

More recently were having a conversation about ancestors showing up in our dreams, and Ruby had a frission of recognition, and felt a sense of presence, that her aunt was there and was asking something from her.  This year, on the day of her own birthday, an obituary or an article about her aunt showed up spontaneously in her in-box from Ancestry! It described her aunt as a warm lovely person who had a hard life and had lost a child and had an abusive husband.  It also was entitled, “Deep River Woman Dies”.  Apparently, that was the name of the town she had lived in. What a provocative title with many layers of potential meaning.

Ruby had the felt sense that the synchronicities of the obituary showing up on her birthday with information she had not known about before, and then us talking about this topic in dream group later that week was a message from her aunt trying to reach her. The spirit of her namesake needed or wanted something from her. She was carrying this name for a reason and had been given an opportunity to heal the legacy of her aunt.

      We were all struck by the title of the article. As I invited Ruby and the group to reflect on it, we wondered about reframing “Deep River Woman” as her spirit name.  Was/is she a water spirit that runs deep, and runs through more than one generation? Given her hard life, and hard end of life, perhaps our Ruby was being called to heal or release the spirit of her namesake. And in doing so, she, and all of us who have an ancestor who suffered, whose name we carry or not, can bring healing to them and ourselves and stop from carrying the pain forward to subsequent generations. So, we ask: “What is needed here? What ritual or action can heal and raise a soul across time and space?” It can be one small symbolic action, or an ongoing ritual, or sometimes something large and public. We start small and doable.

Giving charitable contributions in someone’s name is one way to honor and raise their soul. Visiting their gravesite is another. Sometimes it is simple to drive to the next town to visit a grave, sometimes it might mean traveling to a foreign country to do so, a larger commitment that takes more planning and effort. In Jewish tradition when we visit the grave of a departed loved one, we leave a small stone on the gravesite to mark our visit and remembrance of them.

     Often the ritual act needs to involve our body in some physical way. There is an exercise borrowed from Diane Spindler’s Gentle Reprocessing, an adaptation from EMDR. In it, we stand on a bridge over a river, carrying small or large stones representing that which we want to release to the flowing waters. We can do this literally or in the imaginal realm. Holding the virtual or actual stones, as we send them over the bridge we name and release “Pain”, “Suffering”, “Abuse”, “Trauma”, “Poverty”, “Displacement”, “Neglect”, “Loss”, “Grief”, etc. – whatever it is that we are holding on to that isn’t actually our own, or is ours, but it is time to let go of it and heal and move on. As we watch the swift deep waters of the river carry the stones away, we can say a prayer or blessing of deliverance or release to accompany them downstream around the bend of the river, and out of sight.  Try this yourself. After doing this exercise, you may be amazed as how much lighter you feel.

Blessings on you and your ancestors and descendants,

Linda