Chest

Sometimes this points to a connection with your physical chest. But most often it shows what emotions, what memories and passions you are storing within you, literally in your chest. You may hide precious and loving feelings too, locked up, or shut away inside you.

This is often used in a way similar to a wooden chest – in other words a place to store emotions. So the chest signifies your emotions as a whole, but also how you are relating to them. Many dreams either include being shot in the chest or a weight on the chest holding the person down – maybe someone standing on the chest. Being shot indicates an emotional shock or hurt that, depending on the dream, can be very painful or needing attention.

The weight on the chest shows how feelings, emotions are so heavy they are holding you back from being easily active and outgoing.

Some dreams show things going into of being pulled out of the chest, and these indicate either influences enter your feelings and changing how you feel about things, or stuff that you have held within, old emotions perhaps, being drawn out.

The chest is a reasonably protected area because of the ribs, so in some dreams it indicates ones strength, defensiveness, or the ways you protect your ‘heart’ – your sensitive core of feelings. But it can also be used as an image of your pride or your positive and life giving feelings. The chest, with its inflow and outflow of air also shows your connection with others and the world through empathy, through your feeling links.

Man’s dream: Sense of social confidence and strength to meet the world – or lack of it, depending on how the dreamer feels in the dream.

If healthy: Positive sense of social recognition.

Woman’s dream: Ability to give of yourself; feelings about womanhood. See: breath.

Example: The heart pain – a pain right through my chest from front to back, or a general ache and pain in the chest – I have been suffering for some months now, I feel is tied up with this business of ‘opening up’ to my feelings.

Example: Feeling tired – exhausted – just lying drained of energy. I am conscious of people talking, saying I was ill. I thought I was just tired. Then asked what the matter was. I was told it was my heart, ‘dry and hard like a boiled egg’ they said. Found I couldn’t talk. Tried to write, wanted A. to know that I loved him, but the pen kept drying up. Finger and feet began to get cold. An icy coldness slowly spread all over my body. A liquid warmth was then all around me. I thought I was haemorrhaging. A needle was stuck in my left arm and my chest was being cut open – it didn’t hurt. There was a lot of activity. They said I had gone. I was trying desperately to let them know I was still there. Then I was in a bag and sliding off a table. The bag was tied above my head. Then from the confined darkness I was free. There was a brilliant light all around. I could still see the sack with a body still in it far behind me. I was incredibly happy and full of energy. Trish L

Often people go through a death and rebirth experience, as in the above dream. It is often a necessary thing as our old self, full of habits, emotions, thoughts and attitudes that were causing so much distress needed to be got rid of, so that a new self could emerge.

Idioms: Get it off my chest.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Is my dream indicating that I have been hurt – if so what has hurt my feelings recently?

Does the chest show me being proud and strong, or does it have signs of weakness – if so what are they?

Is this about the way I link with others – if so what am I realising?

Am I anxious about the health of my heart?

Am I showing some sort of defensiveness?

Try using Easy Dream Interpretation and meeting things I fear or dislike in my dream

Comments

-Olivia 2018-06-22 19:14:53

Hi there, i was wondering if you would please be able to help shed some light on the meaning of my dream, I would be very grateful.. in my dream everything was dark I could see no one but felt the pressure of being held down by a being on top of me, then I felt intense pain as a fist went through the side of my ribs trying to take my heart. My heart started beating strangely fast slow missing beats, I was crying as the pain was awful, I woke myself up crying out in pain and saying no dont take it. It now feels like my ribs and heart are physically bruised.

    -Tony Crisp 2018-06-26 8:01:24

    Olivia – I have had the heart beating strangely all my life, but only with slight pains.

    Did you feel intense fear when it happened? If so it could explain the great pain, for in dreams we enter a different dimension where our beliefs or fear become real – like virtual reality – with a vengeance.

    But you need to be checked out by your doctor to make sure.

    There is another possibility though because everything was dark, showing that you had broken through the usual barriers we build between our waking body life and the other dimensions of our life. In effect you may have entered wider awareness. In fact as our body is paralysed when we dream we also lose all sensations arising from our body senses – our eyes, ears, taste, touch and smell. In that condition we are bodiless and exist in darkness, but to maintain our confidence, as people get terrified when they get near to realising that they are fundamentally bodiless consciousness, we create a dream image of ourselves with a body. Out of that arises all the fear of death. See https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/dimensions-of-human-experience/

    Because many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking and it is a shock.

    When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, a tsunami, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear we will pass on. But otherwise it will continue to haunt us as something that will get you; or you feel uncertain even lost in facing it! But it is only our small self image, our ego that reacts because it feels powerless, even though in reality the Hugeness is part of our totality. It is the enormous potential you have within you, it is Life you are frightened of or have been ignoring. It often frightens us. We fear that our ego or personality as it is, will be lost, destroyed or overcome by the Hugeness. My experience is that nothing is ever lost, instead we are added to. See https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/

-Christian 2018-06-10 13:12:13

I awoke from a dream that I was shot multiple times. The only one I really felt was the one in the center of my chest. I scrambled around looking for an ambulance to take me to the hospital. It seemed like it took forever. There was blood coming out of the wound. I could feel the pain in my chest. When I awoke I couldn’t distinguish reality from dream. It really freaked me out. Any ideas?

    -Tony Crisp 2018-06-11 10:34:47

    Christian – You have carried your feeling reactions developed in your life in the body into your dream life.

    But humans live in two very different dimensions. The one most people identify with is the three dimensional physical world of the body. There a lot of rules to learn in this world; when very young we learn not to touch hot things; not to rush out into a road with moving cars. But as adults we have learnt not to step out into space while at a height because we will fall and have a major injury or die.

    The second dimension is totally different and is experienced in dreams or deep mental activity. It will surprise many people to realise that in this dimension you have no physical body – the body died – although most people are so locked into thinking that their reality is their body, that they create a body image of themselves.

    In this dimension we are in a wider awareness, in this wider awareness you leave the limited view of the three dimensional world most of us are trapped in, and enter a world beyond time and space. So forget the clumsy explanations of telepathy and precognition, for they are explanations from the body’s limited senses. Beyond time we are aware of all time, past, present and future – all at once. So we do not look into the future, but are it. Our body life is to learn important lessons by being locked in time, space and our body, with its gender and limitations.

    Also whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.

    So what fears did you carry with you into your dream? I see you live in the USA, where being shot at is a real worry. In dreams we often practice what we could do in dangerous circumstances, and you sought out an ambulance – a good response in waking life, but a cause of great anxiety in dream life. It might help to read https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/secrets-power-dreaming/ and https://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/masters-of-nightmares/

-Joy 2018-05-11 18:31:15

Last night I had a dream that I was asleep. when I awoke my head was underneath the covers and all I can see is a mans chest. I tried to see who it was.. Like trying to moving in my dream to see his face… Then something weird happed and I awoke out of the dream and out of my sleep at 4:27am this morning. I’m curious on what this signifies.

-Alicia 2018-05-06 17:12:45

I dreamed someone was trying to break into my dad’s house. I and another girl I’m not sure who she was ended up in my dad’s back yard. A old family friend I nolonger speak to bc he stole from my husband shot me in the uper part of the right side of my chest the bullet went completely through but killed me. Didn’t know what that might mean.

-Corina Odom 2018-04-12 14:42:14

My dream was in a mall, when my sisters friends, had burst open with these type of shot guns and then started to shoot up the place,so i hid under clothes that hanged on the wall. i cant remember if someone was getting hurt or something, but i for some reason reached out and barely grabbed the bottom of his pants, he turned around, and my first reaction was to block my heart, so when he and i think some of the people that was with him, shot me in my stomach, i pretended i had died by rolling over on my shot front, then it had went to some other place, and i had survived , but i still had the scars of the shot wounds.

-Lya 2018-02-05 13:32:18

This morning I woke to a dream about me having a large cut on my chest that reached all the way to my abdomen. The cut wasn’t bleeding, nor the the injury hurt. The cut was also deep. Deep to the point where my organs were showing. I saw my heart, Intestines, and liver. Another physical characteristic that changed was my collar bone. ( I’m a bit larger irl, so a visible collar bone was different). Not only was it visible, but it was protruding( It was the cause of me being split open to begin with)

-Jaley 2017-06-25 19:10:14

Last night i had a dream, that a man was licking in between my breasts and licking up on top of my breasts aswell, all while looking into my eyes. The dream felt so real that i woke up to the feeling of the mans tongue on my skin and the feeling of being watched. I am pretty confused and still sort of scared, what does it mean?

    -Tony Crisp 2017-06-26 10:27:53

    Hi – It would help you to understand your dreams, if you would read – http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/questions-2/#Summing and also http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/features-found-on-site/ which has so much information in.

    Nothing can replace your own ability to understand your dream. With a little effort you can do this by practising what is described in – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson or http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/getting-at-your-dreams-meaning/

    Tony

    Jaley – The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations.

    We have to remember that having a personality with self awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self awareness was an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does.

    So, dream images are ways of communicating via our association’s not actual things or people. In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects, and places of our dream. Therefore, our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene.

    This happens with the morals we live by, which may be necessary in waking life, but we try to make them fit to our much bigger and freer dream/inner life, and that causes conflict because the two worlds are completely different. So, in dreams about sex we do not have to live by the same small moral world often necessary in waking life. In dreams, we experiment emotionally and sexually, so dreams often stand in place of actual experience. In doing so we expand our mental and emotional life without any danger or consequences. Through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally.

    So, your sexual drive is simply expressing as the man licking your breast. It is you watching yourself. You were scared because the mental and emotional world you live in has not expanding to allow a bigger range of feelings and experiences.

    For example a modern view of the personality says that our mind is made up of many modules which are quite distinct. These modules, such as the sexual drive and the ability to speak, usually function in a way which is reasonably integrated. But many areas of dissimilarity are evident if we closely observe the workings of our own responses to life experiences. Because we each hold certain ideas about ourselves – our self image – things we do which do not express this self image may shock or even frighten us. Actions arising from a module of oneself which does not express our accepted self image, may give rise not only to fear, but also a sense of evil, or being possessed by evil.

-Andi 2017-03-21 15:32:22

Needing an outside perspective on this: I had a dream last night that was difficult to interpret. I was lying in bed as I was in reality, with no shirt on my back. I looked to the left and someone had come in with an incense stick in hand and lit it and put it in a container on the nightstand. Another being climbed into bed next to me and put their hand or hands over my heart. I felt pressure and I felt some what scared because it felt so real and I didn’t know what was going on. I then yelled out hey which startled me to wake and find myself confused. I have felt my guides around me a lot lately and I am attempting to allow myself to awaken I just didn’t know if you could help me interpret this dream?

    -Cieran Kay 2017-04-24 8:16:47

    Did you ever read up about sleep paralysis/ astral projection.

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