Step into the mystical dimension of dreamwork and ancestral healing with Linda Schiller, dream expert and author of Ancestral Healing: Intergenerational Wounds through Dreamwork.
 

 
In this episode, our conversation focused on the profound ways in which dreams can be more than nightly stories—they can be portals for healing the wounds of our lineage and empowering future generations. Here are three transformative insights you’ll discover:

🔹 Dream Healing Across Generations: The discussion explored ancestral visits in dreams, where departed loved ones may offer support, guidance, or healing. A key theme that emerged was how the “felt sense” of presence in such dreams distinguishes true visitations from ordinary memories, opening opportunities for deep emotional connection and repair 00:00.

🔹 Epigenetic Inheritance and Resilience: One concept discussed was the science of epigenetics and how not just trauma, but also resilience, strength, and blessings are passed through generations. By working with dreams, we can access inherited patterns and intentionally transform pain into healing—offering light to ancestors and passing forward a legacy of wellness 04:32.

🔹 Rituals for Dreamwork and Collective Healing: Several points were raised, including practical steps for inviting ancestral dreams: keep a dream journal, set intentions before sleep, and practice dream incubation. Beyond personal healing, dreams connect us to the wider web of humanity, empowering each of us to contribute to global healing and the upliftment of all beings 25:24, 31:25.

Unlock the mystical potential within your dreams—honor your journey, heal the past, and shape a brighter future for yourself and the world. This inspiring episode offers guidance to help you listen to the wisdom of your ancestors and become a beacon of healing for generations to come. Don’t miss it!

 

 

Transcript:

Linda Schiller:
And the difference between a dream about someone who died and a visit is the felt sense of immediacy and presence that you have when you’re dreaming. So when something is a visit, people have like that frisson of they’re right here in the room with me that this isn’t just quote unquote, “just a dream.” This is actual the being and spirit of my relative.

Announcer: Welcome to Exploring the Mystical side of Life with your host, Linda Lang.

Linda Lang:
Hi, this is Linda Lang from ThoughtChange.com. We are Exploring the Mystical Side of Life once again this week. Today we are talking ancestral healing through the dream world. I have dream expert Linda Schiller with me. Welcome, Linda.

Linda Schiller:
Thank you. Nice to be here.

Linda Lang:
It’s a fascinating idea that we can actually do ancestral healing through dreams. How did that ever tweak in your mind that that was possible?

Linda Schiller:
Well, a lot of people talk about dreaming of or having visits from departed relatives, and it’s one of the most common themes that people report in dreams. “Oh, I had a dream and my mom was in the dream,” or “I had a dream and there was this person in the dream who looked like my dad, so I know it was him.” So there’s that layer of dreaming about a departed relative. And then in addition, I think it was 60 some percent, the Pew Research people report having visits from departed relatives in their dream.

And the difference between a dream about someone who died and a visit is the felt sense of immediacy and presence that you have when you’re dreaming. So when something is a visit, people have like that frisson of they’re right here in the room with me, that this isn’t just quote, unquote, “just a dream.”

This is the being and spirit of my relative who has come into my bedroom (or wherever it is you’re sleeping) to be with me with some message, with some gift, with some request. And because of these two phenomena around dreams, it’s very, very common to be able to work with either the visitor, him or herself, or the metaphor or symbol, or image of a departed relative, to either receive gifts and blessings and healing from them.

Or conversely, if we had a departed relative or ancestor who died in pain or in trauma, to be able to go and offer healing. How we do that is that in dream time, it is always now. There’s no past, present or future. Right/ We don’t dream yesterday this happened or tomorrow this is going to happen. It’s always right now.

This is happening in the moment. So we’re able to time travel in our dreams in an actual way that we can’t in our waking life. So that we can travel backwards and forwards in time through dream work to access what needs to be accessed, either to be received or to be offered to our past ancestors.

Linda Lang:
I think that’s fascinating to consider that the dream healing can go either way. I’ve often thought of deceased loved ones coming in, particularly in challenging times, to offer their support and perhaps their guidance. But to consider that you could also offer them healing for their past journey… And what about further back ancestral patterns? Genetically speaking, we inherit obviously physical traits, but we can also inherit certain patterns, certain psychological outlooks or emotional triggers, let’s say.

Linda Schiller:
Right. So what you’re speaking of, Linda, is exactly one of the things I cover in the book when we’re looking at the epigenetics of inheritance, right? So there’s the literal inheritance that we get from parents, grandparents, great grandparents. You know, I have blonde hair, you have blue eyes. You know, we’re five foot something tall. So those kind of literal genetic inheritances. But we also inherit what’s called the epigenetic inheritances that go back infinitely through time, because the word “epi” means above or on top of. So this is on top of the gene.

So the events that happen to us, or to our ancestors in their lives, affect us and affected them. So they changed their response to life and to circumstances depending on what they’re living through. And therefore, they parent their children in a response to growing up in poverty, or growing up in a wealthy family, or growing up with violence, or needing to escape the home that they were living in, and their lifestyle and their personality is affected by these events. And they parent their children that way, and then the children parent their children that way, and so on and so forth, so that we get an inheritance of things that we never actually lived through, for better and for worse, through this epigenetic legacy.

And there have been studies recently that show what’s called a modulation in the gene itself, where it changes as a result of the experiences of our ancestors. And one of the things that I found fascinating was that every woman is born, is before she’s born as a fetus, has all the eggs they will ever have inside their ovaries already. So what means is that you and I were present inside of our mothers when our mothers were a fetus, inside of their mothers, our grandmothers. So in a very literal sense, we are connected to generations that we haven’t personally lived in.

Linda Lang:
That’s a mind boggling thought, actually. So if we were to offer some type of healing in our dream world, you’re talking about we’re actually doing this in a dream rather than consciously sitting and sending energy to our departed loved ones, Correct?

Linda Schiller:
Both. So if… and some people have studied lucid dreaming, which means that you’re aware while you’re asleep and dreaming that you’re asleep and dreaming. So that’s sort of a subcategory of dream healing. And there are books written about it, and there are methods that one can do to practice getting better at being lucid in their dreams. But for the majority of us, it’s about remembering our dreams, keeping a dream journal, writing them down in our waking life when we wake up, so that we can begin to track the patterns, the repetitions, the themes, and the stories.

And then when we have put together a pattern, for example, some kind of pain or trauma from the past, and we see that happening in our dreams, either directly or through symbol or metaphor, in our waking life, we can do what Carl Jung would call active imagination. And in our active imagination, in our waking life, we can send messages, energy, do various exercises that we send the healing back in time, consciously and purposefully, with intention, to our grandparents or our great grandparents. And because we’re in the dream, it’s always now when we’re doing dream work, when we’re awake, it’s still now.

So if we’re sending the healing and the energy and the light and the, and the spiritual connections back through time now to our ancestors and they receive the healing, it then goes forward in time as well. So, what they passed on originally as a legacy of pain or trauma, once it’s healed at the source, gets passed on to us in a healed way. And then we get to pass this on to our descendants, to our children, to our grandchildren. So they’re receiving the healed legacy rather than the traumatic legacy now.

Linda Lang:
Linda so often our dreams are very symbolic. So, how do we interpret that there is some healing that needs to be done? It can be so off the wall, some of the things that show up in your dream.

Linda Schiller:
So there are many ways to think about and work with a dream. And one is there’s two kinds of narratives in a dream. There’s the story narrative. What happened? Who are the characters? What’s the scene? What’s the happening things in the dream itself? And then there’s the emotional narrative.

And the emotional narrative is, how do you feel? What’s the emotional resonance, the emotional barometer in your dream? Are you feeling primarily good, happy, positive? Then that’s a nice dream. Are you feeling a little bit uncomfortable or uneasy, not terrible, but a little bit off? Maybe that’s a bad dream. If you’re feeling fear, terror, dread, to the other end of the spectrum, then we’re talking about a nightmare. So you pay attention to that emotional barometer in your dream to know whether or not healing is called for in a dream.

Linda Lang:
You know, you use the term that we are the dreams of our ancestors.

Linda Schiller:
So our ancestors and we ourselves, whether we have children or grandchildren, or if we’re teachers, or if we’re mentors to someone, or if we’re leaders in our community or virtual community in any way, we have hopes and wishes and dreams that we hope our descendants will pick up, will have, will actualize in their lives. And in that way, our grandparents said, “Wow, I really hope, I really wish that my children and my grandchildren and my descendants will have these blessings in their life, these gifts in their life.”

And they think about that, whatever the circumstances they’re currently in. Like, if we think right now of all over the world, all the places where there’s war and pain and trauma and starvation and climate change and flooding and you name it, everyone living now is saying, “Wow, I hope this gets resolved and I pass on to my children a better, peaceful, healed, happier world.” So we’re doing that now. And our ancestors did the same thing. So we are, in a sense, because all of us today, anyone who’s listening and watching this podcast, our lives are infinitely better. If we’re in a position where we can sit and watch a podcast, our lives are infinitely better than many, many people in the world.

So we pass on the hope that our children receive these blessings and that the people who are still suffering receive the blessings of a better life. And that’s what our ancestors did for us. So that we are actually living the hopes and dreams of our ancestors. Particularly if they were suffering, their hopes and dreams were that we’d be able to sit someday and watch a podcast and have enough to eat.

Linda Lang:
And like you say, there’s so much going on in the world right now, it just reminds me how important it is that we do our healing work right now, without even considering what we’re passing on to our children and our grandchildren. But when you add that into the pot, its potential for profound change is incredible.

Linda Schiller:
Just like there are many layers in the dream, in our waking life, there’s our physical body, there’s our emotional body, there’s our thinking, cognitive body, and there’s our whole energetic level that what we feel, sense, react to emanates out from us into the world and, of course, most directly to the people around us. So in very literal sense, we are projecting sort of whatever our belief systems are and our emotions are. They go out and touch the people around us.

Linda Lang:
Many of our ancestors had some very traumatic experiences. So we’ve inherited that in some way, shape or form, and it can play out in different ways. What about the good things that happen in life?

Linda Schiller:
Well, see, that’s what’s so wonderful, is that if we can inherit pain or we can inherit trauma, we can also inherit resilience, we can inherit strength, we can inherit blessings. And Diana Fosha, who is the founder of a type of psychological approach called AEDP, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy… but that doesn’t matter as much. What her core message is is that we’re all hardwired for healing. Our systems want to move toward status, toward healing, toward wholeness.

And if we embrace that idea and that attitude, and we intend and we put our intentionality toward healing, then we inherit the good stuff as well. Just like we might inherit, you know, our grandma made the best pot roast in the world and we’ve inherited her recipe. We can also inherit her positive outlook on life or her ability to, you know, laugh even when things are difficult and have a good sense of humor. We can inherit those things too.

Linda Lang:
Well, it reminds me of a dream I had many years ago where my mother-in-law, who’d crossed over, came and offered to help me, and we had a pretty challenging relationship while she was in body. And it was so interesting because, you know, our unconscious, our subconscious, is very active while we’re dreaming. And in my dream, I took a step back and she said, “Oh, you’re not ready yet.” And then poof, she was gone. And it was one of those dreams where it really felt like a visitation and I’m like, “Come back,” you know, but she hasn’t come back yet. So I don’t know, we’ll see.

Linda Schiller:
So you know, Linda, that’s really interesting because sometimes our departed loved ones or relatives, no matter what our relationship was with them, will show up sort of spontaneously and sometimes they have to be invited. Back in the day, you know, people used to go knock on their neighbors doors and visit. We don’t do that quite so much anymore. So it’s sort of like that with our departed loved ones. You had a spontaneous visit and you said that it was a kind of a challenging relationship in life. But when she came to visit you some years ago, she had something to offer you.

Linda Lang:
Yes, she was offering to help me. I don’t know what she was offering to help me with.

Linda Schiller:
Yeah, yeah. So your instinctive reaction was kind of like, whoa, step back a little bit. Because you remembered what it was like in waking life. So she probably said, “Okay, Linda’s not ready yet to receive this offer.” She might be waiting till you’re ready. So I would be really curious to find out what would happen if you spent the next couple of nights before going to sleep saying to your mother-in-law, “Hey, (whatever her name is), thank you for that visit before. You’re right, I wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t quite know how to receive it. But I’m ready now and I’d like to receive your offer of help.” And I betcha she’d come back.

Linda Lang:
That sounds like a really fun experiment and I’m gonna try it. Really, really interesting. Thanks for that, Linda.

Linda Schiller:
Sure.

Linda Lang:
Linda, what do you say about people who are adopted, or who maybe are in some way disconnected, disowned even from their family?

Linda Schiller:
So those are two related but different scenarios. You know, my daughter was born in China and she’s adopted. And when we went to China to bring her home, she was a year old. I was sending her an energetic connection, and so by the time we got there, we were, we were already connected. And she is very, very clear that she is our daughter, and we’re very clear that she is our daughter and that we honor both of her family legacies. So what I tell people when there’s adoption in the family is to share that information with their children in an age appropriate manner as early as possible, and to really honor both the birth family as well as the adopted family as part of your child’s legacy and part of your child’s life, really. So that’s sort of the adoption piece. And then someone who is sort of disowned or choosing to be outside their family, there’s a cutoff there.

So there’s a legacy of pain, right? There’s a legacy of isolation, there’s a legacy of trauma. If it’s just that person, or to look in their family tree, what’s called a genogram, to see is there any history of cutoffs, of disownment, of secrets, of things not talked about? Because the philosophy of earlier generations is don’t talk about it, we’ll pretend it didn’t happen. We don’t talk about those kind of things, whatever those kind of things are. But we know that secrets actually fester if they’re not spoken of. So someone might be living a legacy of whatever the hurt was in the current generation that has them be cut off from their family. It might be that they’re carrying through an older family pattern as well. And if they can talk to people in their family and find out if there’s a history like this, then there’s the potential to heal both the current rift and the previous one. And sometimes people need to not be in touch with their family for very good reasons.

If there was abuse, if there was horrible neglect, if there was mistreatment, then it’s in their well being not to be connected on any regular basis with people who have hurt them badly. If there’s no ability for a rapprochement, for a healing, for a connection, if that’s the case, we still honor the family that they came from and ask that person to take whatever gifts there were, whether it’s they have a strong, healthy body or whatever it was that they can connect with their family is positive and own that even while protecting themselves, if they still need to, from current contact, if they have people in the family who are not able to meet them from a place of healing.

Linda Lang:
And I would suspect that in the world of energy, they could use their energy and intention to bring healing, even if it doesn’t reopen the door to connection.

Linda Schiller:
Yeah, absolutely.

Linda Lang:
Now, with adoption, I’m kind of curious if, say your daughter, for instance, now she has different patterns because she’s lived the bulk of her life with you. So would any of that healing automatically go back to her birth family?

Linda Schiller:
Well, it was an interesting question, so I think yes. And there’s another piece, so I think automatically, yes, because all kids who are adopted, there’s a question, why? What was it about my family? And some kids say, you know, “What was it about me? Why wasn’t I wanted?” If that can be reframed to, “Why wasn’t my birth family able to care for me?” That’s a whole different question than, “why wasn’t I wanted?”

So, “why wasn’t my birth family able to care for me?” has a lot of different answers, depending on the circumstances. It removes the shame and stigma of “what’s wrong with me” to “my family wasn’t able to care for me so the best they could do is allow me to be adopted into a family who could care for me.” So that in and of itself is a healing message for the child or the adult, as well as to their birth family where they can send back consciously or unconsciously, this, “I understand. I no longer blame you. I hold you in light. I forgive you, if I blamed you” and that can be done unconsciously. And that can be done consciously.

Linda Lang:
Would you consider if something was coming up in a dream, that now is the time to do the healing on it? So if something isn’t coming up in a dream, does that mean it’s not quite ripe? Or can we still positively impact those patterns?

Linda Schiller:
Oh, sure. Because dreaming isn’t the only way we get information about something. That’s just one way. So there’s dreams that we have when we’re asleep… and then there are two other things. One is what I call dream adjacent waking experiences. I kind of coined that phrase. And, and that means things in our waking life that alert us to something a little bit outside of the super concrete in the moment, like a deja vu or a synchronicity. A synchronicity is like an uncanny coincidence. When we get those things in life, when we have a symbol that shows up for some reason…

I’ll give you an example. For some reason, a certain bird comes and shows up at your house all the time. When my dad died, a cardinal came and tapped with its beak on my mom’s window every day for a week after he passed. And she was convinced that that was him saying, “I’m still here, I haven’t really left you, I’ve come from the other side, just to let you know.” And that lasted for a week. Never before and never since. So that was, to her, a sign. And we’ve embraced that in our family that the cardinal is that sign for us.

So there’s those kind of dream-adjacent experiences. And then also simply as we grow in our own lives and as we become more conscious of our internal world as well as the outside, hopefully we’re doing our own healing, we’re doing our own thinking, we’re gaining an awareness. And we just say, “Hey, you know, it’s been too long,” or you know, “there’s something unfinished,” or “there’s something I’m not complete with.” And we come to that realization. And sometimes we do that on our own. But often we need help and assistance, whether it’s therapeutic, whether it’s in a group setting of some sort, whether it’s a community basis, whether it’s a spiritual mentor. Because one of the core principles of healing is, we don’t have to do it alone.

We’re not meant to be alone in our life. So we might connect with other helpers who can help us get to a place where we say, okay, these, either relatives or friends who are still in my life today, or people who have passed who I have a grudge against or who I don’t understand why I’m still mad at them, or I do understand why I’m still mad at them. We can work with others to help us let it go and move forward.

Linda Lang:
So do you have any dream rituals that you could suggest that might help people trigger ancestral dreams, or even just the exploration of what needs to be healed?

Linda Schiller:
Great question. So, yes, there are many different things that you can do to encourage and offer, as we talked before about offering an invitation. So if you want to have an inviting environment, so to speak, for your relatives, your ancestors who departed to come through in a dream, start with honor your dreams, right? Because if you don’t really care about your dreams, if they don’t really matter to you, you are less likely to remember them. So start with have an orientation that this is a way of knowing, another way of knowing that’s just as valid as our waking life. So that would be number one. Following that, have a dream journal. Have something where you’re literally writing down, right? Have a little book, you know, right by your bed where you can write down the dreams that you remember. And nowadays, some people prefer to record something on their phone or to type something.

If you record as opposed to write, I encourage you to write it down later. Because there’s something more powerful about transcribing it into handwriting that kind of anchors it more solidly, and lets you work with both the physical act of writing and the visual of seeing the words that are additional modalities besides just the hearing of your own voice. So write them down. And then before you go to sleep at night, if you have a desire or a request to connect, to have a visit, to heal, to get information, to get some blessing or direction, ask for it. This is called dream incubation, where before you go to sleep, you think about, and perhaps you write a couple of sentences or a couple paragraphs, depending on your mood, in your dream journal of what you’d like to have an answer to or a dream about, and hold that in your mind before you go to sleep.

Chances are extremely high that whatever dream you have will be connected with what you requested. And if you don’t remember the dream right away, that’s okay. Just keep incubating until you get a dream that you remember.

And if you get a dream, let’s say you asked for, you know, “I want to know how my mom is doing. I haven’t seen or heard from her in my dreams. And I kind of was worried about her because she was really sick before she died,” or whatever it is. And you want to have a confirmation or a connection. And you get a dream that’s really unclear to you, and you can’t make head nor tails out of how your dream is connected to what you asked for. Ask again, but ask in a different way and ask for greater clarity. Tell your dream muse something like, “Thank you so much for sending me a dream. I really appreciate it. I. But it wasn’t clear enough to me. So please send me a dream that’s really, really clear that lets me know the answer to this question that I’m asking.” And chances are very high that within a day or two, you’ll get a clearer dream that is easier to unpack the symbolism of, to discern what it’s about.

Linda Lang:
I would just add to that, Linda, to ask that you remember it absolutely right. I had the example of incubating a dream, and I asked for a dream that had meaning to me and that I remembered it. It was so interesting because in the morning, I knew I had a dream. I was there, but, you know, I couldn’t remember any of it. And then something, and I don’t even know what it was, but something in my environment triggered the memory of this very long, epic dream, and it instantly came all the way back. I mean, it was just an incredible dream. It probably took me six pages in my dream journal to write it out. But it just goes to show you how your subconscious can partner with you when you tell it what you’d like, right?

Linda Schiller:
Absolutely. And in addition to what you did so beautifully on your own, if you wake up and you have this felt sense of, “Oh, I had a dream, but I can’t remember it,” there are things you can do to recapture your dream, to remember it. When you wake up, hold very, very still. Because when you move, right? You sit up, you get up, you take a shower, you, you shake the wispy smoke of the dream, and poof, it’s gone. So, for starters, if you can hold still, or if you’ve already gotten up, can you go back to bed for a minute? And ideally, this, this never fails to amaze me, if you put your body back into the same position you were in when you were asleep, you will have what’s called a body memory of the dream, because your body will reclaim the memory of the last position it was in. So that’s one of my favorites.

And the other is if you’re lying still and you can’t quite remember, but, you know, it’s like on the edges of your consciousness, you can reach out and grab, like, the edges of your dream and kind of wrap it around you. And sometimes that will bring it back into your conscious recollection as well.

Linda Lang:
What a beautiful metaphor for your unconscious mind, right? Just beautiful. I think that’s a great tip about the body memory. I know myself at night if I’m in a dream, and I just feel like I need to roll over, if I roll over, I’m out of that dream. But if I catch myself and roll back, I’m right back in that dream.

Linda Schiller:
That’s fascinating.

Linda Lang:
We’re so interesting, aren’t we? There’s one more thing I’d like to cover before we wrap up, and it has to do more with global wounds rather than family wounds. Is there a way that we can work with our dreams to help humanity?

Linda Schiller:
Yes. So we dream in multiple layers of connection and meaning. And among other things, I’ve put together a system that’s based on the mystic system of the Kabbalah that has four layers of potential meaning. And it’s used when we read sacred text, but I also applied it to dream work. It’s called the PaRDeS system. And literally the word pardes means orchard, but each letter stands for a word In Hebrew, that’s an acronym. So the four layers are the…

Linda Schiller:
The P is for Pshat, or simple. The R is for Remez, or hinted at. The D is for Drash, or to reveal or chase after. And then the S is Sod, or secret. At one layer of our dream is the storyline of the dream itself. So what you see is what you get. This is the dream. That’s all it means. You can enjoy the dream, you can be upset by the dream, but that’s it.

So the second layer, the hinted at layer, is when you put attention on the dream and you start to get associations. So your initial associations will include things from your daily life, from your immediate environment, things that are in your world at the moment but are connected to you. So that would be the second layer. And there’s more detail in all these layers, but I’m making it brief. The third layer of the Drash means to pursue or chase after; so this is the revealed layer. So when you start working with a dream and you start peeling back the layers, then you find the connections to a wider environment, deeper into your past, meanings that were not easily accessible or apparent when you first looked at the dream. So we’re starting to get toward this more global and transcendent potential of the dream.

And then the final layer, which is the Sod, or what’s called the secret layer. This is the layer of world healing. This is the layer of transcendence where our dreams are simply a dot in the ocean of the world dream and we’re connected with all and everything. We live on planet Gaia, right? We live in this world, and we’re all interconnected, and our dreams can carry us through and forward to heal not just our own lives, but to spread that potential healing out into the world as well. And this is the principle that many native and indigenous peoples lived with. And the honored medicine men and women and the shamans of these tribes were the ones who were the best dream understanders and interpreters, and could dream not just for the individuals, but could dream for the tribe and the world as a whole.

So we can continue that tradition as well as we expand our consciousness to include. There’s a phrase in Hebrew called “tikkun olam,” and it means “healing the world.” So we can live with that intentionality of healing the world with our dreaming as well as ourselves.

Linda Lang:
Beautiful. Linda, tell us the name of your book.

Linda Schiller:
So the newest book, the third book, it’s called Ancestral Dreaming: Healing Intergenerational Wounds through Dreamwork.

Linda Lang:
And where can we send people who’d like to know more?

Linda Schiller:
Oh, great. If you go to my website, which is LindaYaelSchiller.com that’s L I N D A Y A E L S C H I L L E R. There are links to all of the books, and plus, you could find out more about me, if you’re interested.

Linda Lang:
Perfect. Thank you so much for being my guest today.

Linda Schiller:
Oh, my pleasure. You’re very welcome.

Linda Lang:
And thank you for listening to this week’s edition of Exploring the Mystical Side of Life. If you enjoy our conversations, remember to subscribe, share with a friend. It really helps this channel. Come Visit me at ThoughtChange.com. Pick up your copy of Learning to Listen, and we will see you again next time. Bye for now.