Mother Mum Ma

Each of us has a fundamental, perhaps instinctive, drive to bond with a woman at birth. This has generated from millions of years of survival strategy. If that bonding does not take place, much of what would have been natural unfoldment and growth, cannot, or does not, take place. So mother sometimes represents this whole difficult issue of survival and what happened in those early years of trying to become independent of such extraordinary needs. Basically mother is the difference between life and death. See love

She depicts all that you have grown from and inherit in the way of what you express or deny in yourself. She is part of your body and is the foundations of your life experience. She is the problems and strength you have or face in life, so, your fate or karma. A compulsive urge toward something, perhaps the search for the light of understanding. The self we assume in our dreams or fantasy; the unconscious urge your being has to survive personal death; the hidden side of your mind. See: insects.

 Example: I saw something that had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created and shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself.

Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. The next example is from a woman whose mother was suddenly seriously ill and was rushed to hospital. The woman was only about four at the time and no explanation was given her – so she felt her mother had abandoned her.

Example: When the pain came from what I felt at the time as losing my mother, I thought it would break me to thousands of little pieces, I didn’t know pain could be so painful. It threw my body about, yelled from the guts of me, screaming to be out, to take form so it could be expelled from me. I cried for my mother, called for her, wanted her. I didn’t know why the person that loves me and the person that I love, suddenly, without any warning could just disappeared off the face of this earth. (She had contracted a serious illness and had suddenly been put into hospital.)

How could she do that to me if she loved me? One day I had Love and the next day I had Pain. But the pain didn’t stop, it went on for days and days and I waited in that pain for her to come back, to bring the love back into my life.

My father had emotionally cut off so no feed back, reassurance or help from him. The amazing thing was I endured the pain for many weeks as I loved my mother so much, but to feel my love was to experience the pain. Then the pain felt as though it was life threatening to Me, and still I waited for her to come with her love for me, Now my life was in danger, rather than die of the pain I made the decision to retreat way, way deep into myself. In my exploration, I felt it was very important for me to tell her why I cut off, it wasn’t that my love had died for her, I had waited and waited for her but I didn’t want to die, so I had to go.

At this point in my exploring, I crawled away from my supporters, backed off into a corner, but I still felt very exposed and vulnerable so I covered myself up with a blanket. I didn’t want anyone to see me. Why? Because I felt unlovable. That is IT. All these years I have felt unlovable. I have struggled for someone to love me. What must I do to be loved? Be a good girl? Be a good wife? But when they say they love me I don’t FEEL it. How can I get the feeling that some one Loves me?

This is the sort of pain many of us face without ever realising it. As the dreamer says, “I have witnessed others go through pain at being left as a child, for what ever reason. But, up until now, I have never been able to even get to the edge of that experience! Now I know why. I’ve had to do a lot of inner work to build myself, know myself to meet the pain that was there inside me, I just wasn’t ready for it before.”

General positive: Feelings; being given to, looked after, and fed; protection; feelings of dependence; ability in relationships; uniting spirit of family; how we relate to feelings in a relationship; strength to give of self and nurture; intuition.

General negative: Will based on irrational likes and dislikes; opinion generated by anxiety or jealousy; domination by emotions; lack of bonding; misery and pain resulting from the bad relationship with mother or the psychological injuries she promoted.

Explaining something to mother: In our relationship with our parents we unconsciously absorb an enormous amount of ethical and social ways of responding to life and people. So the dream explanation might be a way of trying to move beyond one of the conditioned influences. This is shown in the example.

 Example: I dreamt I was in the house in London talking with my mother. At first there was an overall feeling of not being good enough. I think this surrounded the fact that I had been sitting around reading, and not apparently working. This is in fact what I have been doing the last few days, and in my waking life it has been very refreshing. But in the dream I was trying to explain to my mother that this was not being lazy or good for nothing. That day, Friday, I had done fairly well on the stock market. On one of the sales, with a small investment, I had earned £80/ $160. In the dream I told this to my mother, and began to feel more positive.  Des.

Dead or lost mother while she is still alive: The mother love brings growth to the child, but must be interiorised by the adult. Through living without the mother within, there comes no inner security. If the mother was killed by you because she threatened your further growth then you must make a change. If you bring strength to your past, the mother must be resurrected. Through making your mother live within, there comes love from your own emotional security.

When you love from your powers of anger they bring graspingness. When through strength the mother is brought to life within you, you can give love without feeling you are losing yourself. Through bringing your father to live within you, the lower powers are brought to fruitfulness in growth.

Divine Mother To meet or dream of the Divine Mother, or a beautiful old woman, shows that you have brought to life what lives and expresses through all life, all people. You must have experienced a great deal to do this, and must have experienced death in some way. Des has obviously been raised in a family environment in which hard work in a physically active way is seen to be a mark of character, and being unproductive a mark of laziness. In his dream he is with the inner impulse to judge himself as lazy that arises from his upbringing. See: great mother under archetypes; woman.

Hurting, burying or killing parent: In the example below Audrey’s height shows her as a child. She is releasing anger about the attitudes and situations her father forced ‘down her throat’.

To be free of the introverted restraints and ready made values gathered from our parents, at some time in our growth we may kill or bury them in our dreams. Although some people are shocked by such dreams, they are healthy signs of emerging independence. Old myths of killing the chief so the tribe can have a new leader, depict this process. When father or mother is ‘dead’ in our dream, we can inherit all the power gained from whatever was positive in the relationship.

Seeing parent drunk, incapable or foolish: Another means of gaining independence from internalised values, or stultifying drives to ‘honour’ or admire father or mother. 

Inner Mother: Many people do not realise that they have an inner mother equally as powerful as an external mother. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your mother, and they are a major influence in your early life, and in a few cases the child never becomes independent from its mother at any age. This is true even if your mother was never there for you – you still have all the memories of her not being there for you filed under ‘Mother’. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner mother can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.  The inner mother can also signify what has been received via genes passed on or ancestral influences. See ancestors: parent integration

The mother love brings growth to the child, but must be interiorised by the adult. Through living without the mother within, there comes no inner security. See digest

Many people are lost and feel as if they cannot more, are trapped, even by past loves. But in fact the more people we can ‘digest’ or accept as part of our own experience, the more freedom we have. Each person we have within us in this way is a new space, a new area or space to live in.

Example: Then I slowly became aware of a deeper sense of the discomfort. It was a feeling of being stuck in one place and not being able to move. It wasn’t anything to do with moving physically but was as an awareness. It felt awful and I tried to move but couldn’t. The only way of describing it was as if we are all made out of the same stuff – as an example concrete – and as such we filled all space. So the little space I filled could not move because all around was filled by others. I felt really stuck and wondered what I could do, but there seemed no way out of it. Yet I could not believe this was really how things were.

Most of this was spontaneous thoughts and movement through the experience, so that was how I was led to thinking about my cousin Sid again, and his situation of being constantly linked with his mother even after he died. Then I realised that I was linked with Rita, and in feeling that I realised that I could move in at least two positions – me and Rita – because of the loving connection I felt.

Then came a flood of realisation, every person I had loved was another position I could be in; and then I knew all the animals I had loved and even people I had a casual relationship with. But there was even more because in dreams and sessions I had become or encountered amazing things, people, creatures, the Star Beings and others. I knew then that I was FREE to go anywhere and be almost anything, because their life pattern was now part of me.

Mother’s words or things said by mother: My next door neighbour, a man in his fifties, stood with me in my garden, which was alive with bees and bumbles, and he was terrified. He explained that one day a swarm of bees had settled in his garden as a child, and his mother had warned him to keep away. But a swarm of bees is drunk on honey – the happy juice – and will not attack or sting. But his mothers words were still active in creating fear even thought he was an adult man.

Mother’s are of course protective of their children and words spoken by her can leave permanent marks and ingrained thought patterns.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Was my relationship with my mother good, or with periods of awful misery?

How have I coped with the difficult episodes?

What qualities do I have from my mother – positive and negative?

If my mother is dead, how did I cope with it?

See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams –  Life’s Little Secrets – Talking with the dead