Esther had concerns about her boys, one of whom was adopted, the other biological. They were drifting apart and in the wake of her anticipated death, she worried about the disintegration of the family. Relishing being able to share those concerns with a memory artist, and deliver her message symbolically and non-verbally to her sons’ “emotional brains,” we set to work right away. We chose three ways in which there were more similarities than differences. Both had birthdays just days apart. Both had speech processing issues. And both looked so much alike when they were children. While in reality the boys were several years apart, I asked Roger, her husband, to find me childhood photos when the boys seemed to share facial features and skin tone. Such is emotional truth ….
After Esther died, Roger shared his thoughts about the dreamscaping process:
The prescriptive power of your results was that both my sons carried the photo around with them (one recently put it on the refrigerator) and it’s still my desktop screensaver. My youngest recently showed me a photo and said, “Oh this is where my dreamscape came from.” I had ceased to remember the dreamscape as a montage of photos. Within a month of being exposed to it, I had forgotten. The details about the chronological age of the boys didn’t matter. Instead, it became an image that combined memories of my wife with my sons, 8 years of time condensed into one image. What it gave to me, in a two-dimensional form, was a look at the embrace of three souls.