Dreaming My Way to My Family

Dreams really do come true!

I've just returned from a heart-full week in Washington state where I visited, for the first time ever, my long-lost brother and his family. Two dreams led me to my family and I wrote about this in the newly published Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and Premonitions. Sometimes the healing trajectory of a dream can span decades.

The first dream arrived in 2001, in the form of a waking inner voice experience that literally told me to go to ancestry.com. There, I met my fathers's first wife, Helen, and she was doing genealogy research for her family, including my brother Mark. I didn't know about Mark until I was well into adulthood, and we had never met. Helen shared interesting information about my family, and I was happy to meet her. Life went on.

Then, in 2007, dream number two came. I dreamed I was discussing how to have a healthy relationship with a dream character who was supposed to be one of the brothers I grew up with. But it wasn't his face. In the morning the inner voice nudged me to Google my grandfather's name. A photo of a high school football team from 1913 appeared, and I burst into tears as I recognized the face I had just dreamed. Remarkable...my father had been a foster child during the depression and I had no exposure to his family, and no idea of what my grandfather looked like. The ancestors were calling, and I picked up the trail.

Which led me to my first brief meeting with my brother just a few years ago. And to our wonderful extended visit this week, where I experienced the love of family that I didn't know my Soul was seeking.

Really, if you get an inner nudge from a dream or a hunch, follow it. It may be just the thing. And try not to wait. I realized today...if I hadn't poked around ancestry.com when I did, the small window of opportunity to answer Helen's call may have been lost. And if so, I would never have found my family.