Grandfather Grandpa Gramps

As can be seen in the following examples the grandfather is often a helpful, healing or supportive influence. Sometimes they are even spiritual teacher and guide. Grandfather is the highest in us. He is ones own inner light, the descending light.

Personal feelings connected with the grandparent; family traditions, such as established values or unconscious attitudes, spiritual values, old age and death.

Inner grandfather: Many people do not realise that they have an inner grandfather equally as powerful as an external grandfather. You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with or knowing your  grandfather, and they are what makes you the person you are. This is true even if your grandfather was never there for you – you still have all the memories of him not being there for you filed under ‘grandfather’. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner grandfather can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.  The inner grandfather can also signify what has been received via genes passed on or ancestral influences. See ancestors; parent integration

They are, in our dreams, often expressions of ones whole inherited past from all ancestors. In some dreams this can be an open door to realising much about the inheritance one received from the past. It is worth exploring. The grandparent can represent what you have come to know, what you have built into you of the divine spark of life, the radiant potential that is at your core. So you might say that the grandparent is the divine or infinite you know because of what you have drawn out of the infinite possibilities of everyday life. See The Conjuring Trick

I saw that fundamental to all living or cosmic processes are interrelationship and the building of dynamic networks. In a human sense the most basic of these is that between the two sex cells. In a relationship of mutual trust they split their boundaries and risk death to merge and share. At the next level of sharing, two people give of themselves in sexual relationship. Out of this a family group can grow, with its kinships and interdependence. At base, it only works well when a deep trust and mutual self-giving occurs. The trust and dynamic cooperativeness not only build bonds and a sort of organism of the group at a physical level, but I saw it builds then into an integral spiritual organism for survival in eternity.

I need to explain that to make it clear. At a physical level – if father hunts for food – mother cooks and cares for baby – while grandfather chops wood and grandma weaves a blanket – then the group is similar to the body where cells do different work, and so the community of cells exist in a way which not only enhances survival, but also creates something greater than the individual cells.

In working on a dream, I saw that my father’s shop brought forward the sense of my connecting with the previous two generations of my male family whose life was interwoven with the place. Namely my fraternal grandfather, my father, and myself. I was the culmination of those lives. Not only this but I had achieved manhood and had integrated their lives. I had not rejected or repressed what I had got from them, but loved it and furthered it. The shop was like my holy cave of the ancestors, my totem, which summarised the foundations and influences of my life, of myself. I had a wonderful sense of synthesising my forebears and lifting up what I had received.

“Psychic warfare can occur in any family situation. Psychic warfare is as often intra-sex as inter-sex. In respect to the significant women of his life, a man is likely to assume three roles—son, husband, and father—just as most women assume the roles of daughter, wife, and mother. Curiously, on the evidence of therapeutic patients, all six of these roles or images usually coexist in the mind of any individual after the age of five or six, three on the male side of the psyche, three on the female side. The crisscrossing loyalties and conflicts of these six images are intriguing in their complexity and significance.

Here are the ramifications as seen from the male side. In his return to childhood emotions the patient finds the one dominating figure in his early life, his mother. Most of his deep emotional concerns are centered on her. But unfortunately he is not the only male concerned with her. Two other men figure as important vectors in a tight little sociogram: his own father and his mother’s father. Certainly the patient as a boy fused with his father; and generally, if he knew grandfather at all, he fused to a lesser degree with him. On the male side of the patient’s psyche, then, there are three male fusion areas or images—the grandfather, the father, and the son—and all orbit about the central figure of the mother, who represents to each, in the role of daughter, wife, and mother, the various guises of the eternal female.

The patient may have some rather happy memories of grandfather. Their relation may have been intimate and untroubled in the way that life with father could never be. One patient recalled long visits to his grandfather’s farm where he could feed the chickens, go swimming, and be generally spoiled to his heart’s content. One day he was recalling a particularly delightful visit to the farm with his mother. At this point the therapist, a discerning soul, asked the patient a loaded question: “Where was your father?” At the word “father” the patient blanched and a pain shot down his chest. He realized for the first time that he had suffered guilt not only for going to the farm himself, but also for his mother’s visit. Both had been disloyal to his father. He recalled his father’s opinion of his grandfather, “a nosy old clod,” and his complaints at the mother’s frequent visits to the farm. And he remembered his grandfather’s snide comments about his father. The patient loved both of them; he was fused with each; and he now realized that by their conflict his loyalties were not only divided but his very sense of male self was split. Before he could relieve the pain and the psychic conflict it indicated, he was forced to analyze and understand the inevitable competition between his father and grandfather for the attentions of his mother.

Much later he discovered the torment of the division between himself and his father over the same woman. Only at the end of therapy did the relations between the three male roles or images become clear. The husband, who claims the strongest and most vital role with the wife, must fight off the two weaker contenders, his father-in-law and his son. These two, in the weaker sex-denied positions, tend to align themselves in a compact of the defeated.

Fortunately, in our actual relations as men, and in the split fusion images of our male psyches, all this conflict and dissension is not absolutely necessary. In reality, each male has his unique and irreplaceable position with the eternal female and within time has occupied or will occupy both the others. Knowing and accepting this, he need not try to play all roles at once with the same woman. A healthy male who has had his fill of the joys of sonship can relinquish that role without rancor to his children, while he takes up the rich pleasures of being a husband. And if these are fully satisfied he will not be so niggardly in granting that reward to another man with his own daughter while he enjoys with her the pleasures of fatherhood.

Through this understanding of the three male images a man can not only maintain smooth and harmonious relations in his family life but achieve liberating integration of the male side of his psyche. The father, husband, and son in him need no longer be split into warring complexes, but joined in their mutual attraction to the eternal female, each taking his turn at the game of love in time, each enhancing the value of the other. Then a man can become proud and grateful for his manhood and find joy and love for womanhood.”  Quoted from LSD Psychotherapy by W. V. Caldwell.

Example: Now I dreamt grandfather on my father side, was dying. I went to his deathbed scene and hugged him, seeming to merge into him, and there was much love. Stood back and saw a younger man was acting the part of grandfather. He was a crook. The impostor began to dictate grandfather’s will. He said, “To my grandson I leave one potato.” I realised an attempt to do me out of my heritage was underway. I went in other ruins searching for the real grandfather, but only saw accomplices of impostor. Not sure if I found grandfather.

In exploring the dream I worked this out to mean I was looking for the real me, the heritage of my basic self.

Example: I feel the presence of my grandfather. The corridor comes out to my own front yard. My grandfather draws my attention to a cloud through which shines a beautiful golden sunbeam. My grandfather tells me that the sunbeam represents love, the greatest power in the Universe, and that I have to learn to love and accept the circumstances of my life, forgiving and understanding those who I feel short-changed me. If I can do this, he tells me, I can use this power to help others and I myself would develop more rapidly. In my dream I was aware of my body in bed. The sunbeam came through the roof and hovered over me. I could let it enter my body if I wished. I allowed the beam to enter my being, and it did so at the base of my spine and moved up my back and came out the top of my head in a shower of sparkling golden light. I felt the soothing warmth of it and allowed £t to enter again. I felt inspiration and joy, and awakened with tears of happiness streaming down my cheeks.

Example: I am a Kaw and Osage Indian. My paternal grandmother was over 3/4 Osage Indian and my maternal grandfather was full Kaw Indian. I always knew my grandmother saw things. She knew things. After her death in 2001, I was 22, I started talking to my aunts about my dreams. As in, my husband and I lived in Alabama for a year. A month and a half before our lease was up. My grandmother came to me in a dream. She told us to prepare to leave now. I woke up and told my husband this. We gave our 2 week notice that day. When we were pulling out of town, there was a mandatory evacuation for the island. I knew then that I had something. I have had a lot of similar episodes since. I would really like to work to make this happen a little more with more meaning. I know some things, and have several deceased family members that I talk to on a regular basis, but I need to get more out of them. I don’t think that this is the way to put it, but I want to know more. Please help if you can.

Example: When I was 17 I met a guy and quickly became involved. I met his grandfather only a couple of times during our relationship before he passed. He had raised my boyfriend; he had only sons and grandsons. Never had there been born a girl in their bloodline. About six months after we started dating, his grandfather died. I went to the funeral with my boyfriend. Shortly after I had a very vivid dream of the funeral. As I walked to the casket to view the body, the grandfather raised up looked me right in the eyes and said, “You take care of my baby girl.” The next week we found out we were pregnant. I did give the first girl born to that bloodline!

Example: A woman dreamed that her paternal grandfather was a Rabbi and that together they found an altar in the basement of a temple. This woman, who is Jewish, does not have an active faith. She did, however, have a great love for her grandfather who had been an Orthodox Jew and had gone to Israel when she was age 20. When I asked her what she might want to do now that she found the altar, she responded that she wanted to bring it up into the sanctuary. So I asked her to do some active imagination, to close her eyes and to see the altar in the sanctuary. When she did, she saw her grandfather in a yarmulke, standing with his arms outstretched praying over the altar. When I asked her what he was praying for, she answered that he was praying for her and that she felt very touched and supported by this gesture of his. Then suddenly she opened her eyes and recalled a childhood memory: when she was six and a half, she had scarlet fever and was expected to die. This very same grandfather at that time brought a prayer and prayed it over her; afterwards, she recovered.

Another side of a grandfather while we were exploring a woman’s dream. While we explored Margaret’s feelings and memories connected with the dream symbols, she told me that her man friend prodded an old childhood pain which he didn’t know about. Margaret and her son had been with him and his mother for a good weekend camping. She told her son he could go play in the park while they packed the car and they would pick him up on the way out. They were all in the car and drove to where the son was and called him, he saw them and started to run towards them and then the man friend drove the car forward as if to make out they were leaving him behind. Margaret burst with pain and anger.

The underlying cause of this was that her own parents had split up and neither of them wanted Margaret to live with them. She had therefore been looked after by her grandparents. The event that crystallised her feelings occurred one day when her Grandfather had, on the Grandmother’s instructions, driven Margaret, who was 7 years old, to the edge of the town, told her to get out and started to drive away. This was because she wouldn’t eat her breakfast. She still carries the pain of that day. She told her father many years later and he was very angry with his own father for doing that to Margaret. She says – Anyway, it came out again when we were looking at the dream. The male friend grew up with an alcoholic father who has just died, but he says he hasn’t any trauma to deal with??

Useful Questions and Hints:

Was I on good terms of bad with my grandfather?

What was the dream saying in its theme or plot?

Was there any sense or communication with grandpa?

See Talking with the dead – Life’s Little Secrets – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Edgar Cayce