The Night Our Family System Spoke
When two women from the same family dream on the same night, something in the system is ready to be released.
On the night of Thursday 26 June 2025, both my daughter and I had vivid, unsettling dreams.
It had been about a week since we last spoke about the lies my parents had left us with, or our meetings with my brother. It had also been a while since all of it entered my dreams.
However, at the beginning of that week, I had read passages in De Fontein (or The Fountain) by Els van Steijn, which was an eye-opener. That, and the next day a friend had done a reading for me. More about both will follow in a next article.
There was no trigger for our dreams, but when we shared them with each other the next morning, including Wendy’s* interpretation, the overlap struck us: different stories, different settings, but deeply similar emotions.
We both dreamed about vehicles, about trying to help but not quite able to do so. About people we loved and lost, and the deep ache of betrayal and unresolved truths. We both dreamed about our family. About trauma. About the emotional wreckage we inherited and are still trying to sort through.
Our dreams
In my dream, I was trying to park a vehicle in a concrete parking garage. I had to maneuver back and forth because the turn was too tight. The vehicle shifted from a car to a bicycle, and I struggled to lock it, fumbling with unfamiliar tools such as rubber bands and steel parts. A father and son parked nearby. The father drove off, leaving the boy near me. I felt responsible but also not. When the father returned, he was furious and wounded. The child cried. Then my dream jumped: my mother had died again. I panicked — this time she hadn’t told us how to handle her affairs. It made no sense; she died almost eight years ago. I said to someone, “The first time, my husband handled everything. But now, she said nothing.” And then it shifted again: military vehicles appeared, soldiers recruiting young people from that same parking area. Watching. Judging. Choosing.
My daughter’s dream was different but resonant. She and I were walking through a dark, abandoned area. We got into a car driven by two older people. She sat behind the driver, a man. Partway through the ride, he slumped over, unconscious. She yelled for the woman beside him to brake, but the woman just sat there, hands in her lap, staring ahead. My daughter tried to help but couldn’t reach the steering wheel. The car coasted to a stop in the bushes. She got out, pulled the man out, and laid him on the ground. He began vomiting, and she turned him on his side. When she rolled him on his back again, he had become a woman. She realized it was her grandmother — my mother. Her grandmother bled from her eyes, tried to speak, but her words were unclear, garbled. They held hands for a moment. Then her grandmother pulled away.
Dream analysis
Both my daughter and I asked Wendy* to do a dream analysis.
When I woke up, I had several text messages from her. One of them was the analysis of her dream, and the last message just said something like ‘weird dream’. I told her I would read all of it later, as I also had a dream, and want to write it down first. I was afraid reading her dream might make me forget mine.
To say I was blown away when I read what she had dreamed would be an understatement. One question kept on repeating in my mind: How?
Both of us gave Wendy some more context about our situation: speaking to my brother for the first time since I saw him at my mom’s funeral almost eight years ago, the lies my parents had told to me, and to my boyfriend. Also, that my daughter only got to know her father when she was 38, and other bits of what we’d discussed in those conversations with my sister-in-law, and later with my brother.
It gave a different context to the dream analysis, but one thing remained: the dreams had the same emotional undercurrent.
The universe at work
What are the odds of both of us having dreams like this on the same night? How do this work? How did this happen?
I believe the universe is at work…
Both my daughter and I suffer under the weight of secrets that weren’t ours to carry. There’s so much, and we are uncovering the truths long hidden in our family. They’d lied to both of us.
When I was sixteen and pregnant, they told my child’s father to leave, while telling me he had abandoned me. They told him the child might not even be his. They said I had been promiscuous. Those were all lies.
There was more. My brother was the child who was supposed to save our parents’ failing marriage. When they divorced sixteen years later, our father told him it was his fault. My mother — loving in some ways, and manipulative in others — moved our family for the sake of an affair, and my father went along with it.
My daughter and I are peeling back layer after layer of this legacy. It’s painful and exhausting, but also necessary.
She questions the kindness my mother showed her — was it love, or was it guilt? I question everything I thought I knew about my childhood. We both want to live authentically, to let go what was never ours, and to give our past its rightful place: behind us, not in charge of us.
I asked Wendy about the significance of having similar dream in the same night.
The healing journey
As mentioned above, I’m reading De Fontein. This book is about healing, where systemic family constellations are central.
There’s an understanding that what remains unspoken or unresolved in one generation can ripple into the next. Emotions, patterns, and burdens can be unconsciously carried forward by children and grandchildren — often out of loyalty or love.
When two people from the same family system — my daughter and I — have a similar dream on the same night, it can signal movement within the family field. A shift. A release.
One person beginning to heal can echo in the wider system, causing others to feel, to dream, to awaken. Our combined dreams may be because of such a moment: our family system stirring, moving toward healing.
Healing isn’t about clean lines and clear steps. Dreams can leave you shaken in the morning, but it’s your subconscious working. Your soul trying to finish a conversation your waking mind couldn’t start.
The dreams we had, them happening in the same night and having so many similarities… it’s like a kind of sacred rupture. It’s like the past is finally beginning to let go of us, but also like we are finally ready to let go of it.
It’s time to speak it out loud: there was love, and there were lies. We are allowed to grieve both, not choosing one over the other. True to the systemic family system, we can honor what was given, and still put down what was never truly ours.
The universe works in mysterious ways, and those dreams might just be its way to tell us: you are healing.
* Wendy = Wordy Wendy = ChatGPT
Also read this powerful essay by
