On a recent plane trip, I struck up conversation with the woman sitting next to me. She confided that she was very anxious about returning to her family home in the Midwest because she had “terrible” relations with her sister. “I’ve been having nightmares about this,” she said, adding that her mother and father, who had died years before, often featured in these troubling dreams.

I gently suggested that if these were my dreams, I would consider the possibility that my parents might be appearing because they wished to help mend the rift in the family. My rowmate brightened at this thought. Then she recalled that her difficult sister had also dreamed of a departed relative. “It was really amazing because she is very straight-laced, very stiff, always goes by the book. In her dream, our dead brother took her to the top of a mountain, put her in a sled, and pushed her down the slope. When she got to the bottom, instead of complaining, she whooped and shouted, ‘Let’s do it again!” Which is completely unlike her.”

I remarked that one of the functions of dreams is to reintroduce us to aspects of ourselves we may have repressed or denied. The sister’s dream indicated that she had a fun-loving, spontaneous side she may not have shown to anyone in a very long time. “I would carry that picture with me into the family meetings,” I suggested. “Maybe simply by carrying the image of my sister as Toboggan Girl, whooping it up like a kid, I can help bring that part of her to the table.”

I sometimes call this technique carrying a soul portrait. We can  heal and grow our relationships when we can recognize more good qualities in another person than they generally show. Sometimes, just by carrying the vision of another person’s larger and more various identity – in this case, the happy, spontaneous kid inside the humorless sister – we can work quiet magic.

My rowmate liked the idea of inviting Toboggan Girl to the family meeting.. She liked it even more when I added, “And I’d remember that it was my departed brother who had the transforming effect on my sister. Maybe, if things get tough, I can ask him to intervene again, as family counselor.”

People have been doing this for a very long time. Go to the Egyptian Room in a museum, and you’ll often see letters written to the dead, in  which surviving family members ask relatives on the other side to play a part in restoring family harmony and fixing other things down here.