Readers of this blog know that I am very interested in so-called “visitation dreams” – dreams of the bereaved where the dead appear to the bereaved in dreams and look to be very much alive and then deliver a message of some kind. Research on the dreams of the bereaved is finally picking up a bit. A team of Canadian investigators recently published a dream content analysis of dreams from some 76 bereaved middle-aged individuals (see Black, DeCicco, Seeley, Murkar, Black, & Fox International Journal of Dream Research Volume 9, No. 2: 2016). The Canadian team reported that 67.1% of the bereaved sample stated that dreams of the deceased helped them believe more in an afterlife, 68.4% characterized their dreams of the deceased as “visitations”, and 70.9% stated dreams of the deceased helped them feel more connected with the deceased. With regard to common themes identified in dreams of the bereaved, a strength of this paper is that the authors … [Read more...] about Visitation Dreams II: Dreams of the Bereaved
Fox
Zero-Compassion Policy and Parent-Child Separation
As any parent knows, small children experience even brief separations from parents as highly stressful. Prolonged separations inflict lasting trauma and catastrophic neurological damage (Wan 2018). Yet under their “zero tolerance” policy, the Trump administration has forcibly separated well over 2,000 children from their mothers and fathers (Jordan 2018; Schallhorn 2018). This policy, better dubbed "zero-compassion," can result in deporting parents without their children and with no clear path for family reunification (Jordan 2018). The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, non-partisan family research organizations (such as the Council for Contemporary Families), and religious leaders have all condemned the separation of children and parents at the U.S. border (CCF 2018; Green 2018; Jordan 2018; Miller 2018; O’Reilly 2018). Why? Because needlessly taking a child away from a loving parent and placing them in institutional care is … [Read more...] about Zero-Compassion Policy and Parent-Child Separation
