ABSTRACT
This chapter offers suggestions for the integration of the dreamstory into the larger storied life of the ethnographer. According to scholars of family communication, the family's engagement in storytelling is a central form of family-making praxis. Family stories are vibrant and critical communication events that produce family culture, define family history, feature family uniqueness, develop identity, and display and establish family values. The chapter seeks to center the praxis of accidental ethnography within the context of an unfolding family story of pain and loss, of secrecy and silence, and of the potential for the dreamstory to bring light to this project. Jung's books, Memories, Dreams, Reflections and Man and His Symbols, are enormously helpful for dream interpretation, as is any standard dictionary of symbolism. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung outlines his notion that dreams are the doorway or threshold to the unconscious.
