Neck

The neck may indicate the way you connect your thinking (your head) with your feelings and sexuality (your body). Your neck is also the weak or vulnerable part of you, unlike the chest or head that is protected by bone, so any attack to the neck shows being influenced through your vulnerable feelings.

A woman who experienced a lot of neck pain and explored the underlying causes of this wrote:

Over the past few weeks and last weekend I got an opportunity to spend an extended period of time alone and relaxed during which I was able to tie the threads together, and understand what the throat and neck symptoms are about. I had been thinking along the lines of suppressing my inner creativity due to fear of censorship and that is one element, but I think the more fundamental is that the throat is constricting my experience of the environment, because I am scared stiff of what it will do to me. If I experience the outside world “raw”, it will evoke such strong emotions in me that I will be blown apart, annihilated, so I cut down what I experience of it and I try to manipulate it so that I cut out anything that will evoke painful emotions. S.

As the throat is the narrow channel through which we express or repress our emotions and reactions, it can become a site of great tension or pain. What S. is realising is that she is causing her neck pain through her ‘constriction’ in her throat. When S. tried to drop her controlling attitude she described what she met as follows:

I guess it’s a process that needs to occur bit by bit: you can’t turn over ingrained belief patterns all at once. The other day my neck tension became very painful and wearing and I felt very demoralised because I thought all my progress was an illusion. The next day I woke in a state of terror and anxiety but the tension had gone. “Good,” I thought, “I would rather have the terror”. And I have been trying to keep the terror and investigate it. It is the terror that I will not know how to deal with what life brings, or how to cope, and the resulting emotions will be overwhelming and ultimately blow me apart. So there are issues of self-trust, but I think that is because I am assuming that I’ll be using my father’s rules. I have to convince myself that if I use my rules, life will be a beach!

Problems with the neck often refer to the way the neck can act as a bottleneck, or of traffic jam for deeply felt emotions. In such a case you need to examine what feelings are persisting, what emotions or words you haven’t allowed yourself to say. As the neck connects the head-thinking, with the body-feelings and sexuality, the neck may refer to a split or non connection between these two main areas of your being.

To be strangled in a dream may be due to difficulty in breathing, feelings of being unable to express easily or say what you really feel. Some relationship situations leave people feeling that life is being choked out of them. To have your head cut off, is to have thinking divorced from feeling.

You can stick your neck out, which means to take a risk; have a lot of neck, or nerve or audacity. These meanings have arisen possibly from the head being severed in execution, or hanging, or strangulation. The neck is a weak point, and to offer it suggests confidence, fearlessness. So the neck may depict a certain attitude, such as confidence or caution. The neck is also the point up to which we can be easily immersed in water. Beyond that point there is danger. So it can depict what we can take in life, and what is more than enough.

Because the throat holds our organ of speech, the neck sometimes depicts our will, our ability to ask for what we want, and also our confidence, as when we use the idiom, ‘stick my neck out.

Back of neck: This suggest emotional energy that is largely unconscious and may be blocked. Our biological energy not only flows into movement, sex, digestion, etc, but also into being aware, feeling, expressing who we are and our potential. As described by S. above, this can be held back for various reasons. If it is not is flows up the spine into the head. It may then express through the mouth, or be experienced as an uprush of understanding or insights.

Head hanging off: Dolls sometimes lose their heads because they have been so abused by their owner, so this may link with feeling that life has so harshly treated you that you feel like a helpless doll being dismembered. See: Dismembered body.

This can also suggest ‘losing ones head’. See: head.

Held by back of neck: Some dreams show someone being held or carried by the back of the neck. This is probably a link with how we see cubs being carried, suggesting helplessness and dependence, along with being cared for.

Hung from neck: Quite a few dreams show someone, or yourself, hung by the neck. There are many possible things this might indicate. For one thing it definitely links with death or the possibility of death. Such a death might be the result of self sacrifice, as show in the Tarot card of the hanged man, or it might be as the result of social action – a cause and effect of things done; a punishment because of feelings of guilt.

However, many hangings are due to suicide, and so might in a dream reflect depression, loss of any pleasure in life, a retreat from pain, or feelings of hopelessness or guilt.

In some dream however, there is a different sense of the hanging. It suggests not a death but an almost complete suppression of the life in one. A strangulation of the flow of pleasure and creativity that would otherwise stream through one. In such a case the rope needs to be removed and a new way of relating to oneself developed. (For help doing this see Secrets of Power Dreaming

Gripping neck or strangled: This has connections with strangled the creative flow in oneself or another. It is a way of repressing or controlling ones natural responses and feelings. But it may be shown as being gripped or strangled by somebody else, and might therefore show how another person’s influence in your life has a strangle hold over how you express yourself, what you say, and what you do.

Large neck: This suggests power, the ability to survive or face threats and persevere. It also may indicate having an inner strength or bigness.

Small or thin neck: Vulnerability of some sort, maybe emotionally. It could also indicate lack of reserves as far as health or illness are concerned.

Idioms: Breaking one’s neck; breathing down ones neck; dead from the neck up/ down; neck and neck; neck of the woods; pain in the neck; put ones neck on the line; risk one’s neck; stick one’s neck out; up to one’s neck. See: throat.

Useful questions or hints:

Is the neck in any way threatened or attacked – if so what am I feeling vulnerable about or attacked by?

Is something or someone gripping the neck – if so am I, or my responses to someone else, causing me to hold myself back?

Is something stuck in my throat – is so what is it I am having difficulty saying or expressing – maybe in asking for what I want or need?

See Secrets of Power DreamingBeing the Person or ThingQuestions

 

Comments

-Xolani Mzaidume 2018-01-22 10:10:37

I dreamt of a baby hanging on my neck and going with him where we found many people eating heads and feets of a cow

-Xolani Mzaidume 2018-01-22 10:05:13

I dreamt of a baby hanging on my neck and we were going to where we found many people eating head and feet of a cow.
0720774522

-Jess 2017-08-31 20:30:37

I have had three dreams now where my neck has turned black . Almost like an old bruise . The last dream I was meeting someone whom I haven’t seen in over a year and was a big part of my life. We were meaning to have breakfast with a group of people. I had looked in the mirror and my neck had turned black and I had red what seemed to be bug bites . The red dots formed a line from my collar bone to my ear . It felt so real that I had to look to make sure it was all a dream .

-Claire 2017-07-06 4:48:08

Hi, last night I dreamt about a man, someone I really love. (In real life, we never met each other and he doesn’t even know me), but in the dream we knew each other. He was sitting next to me and I was having an ice cream, he took it away from me and took a bite, but suddenly he started coughing. So I gave light pats on his head, but he took my hand and started rubbing the end of his neck. I would be highly obliged if you could tell me what this means. Thank you. 🙂

    -Tony Crisp 2017-07-07 9:04:11

    Hi – It would help you to understand your dreams, if you would read – http://dreamhawk.com/news/summing-up/ 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

    Claire – In case you were wondering whether your dream meant you would eventually meet, I think it is a dream about you learning how to love and feel at ease with a man. The coughing while taking a bite out if your ice cream, in many cases this links with emotions that have got trapped and are trying to be expressed. The cough can be quite subtle, a nervous response to something your are anxious about.

    The neck is a vulnerable part of you, and the dream suggests that you, in sharing pleasure with a man are still feeling vulnerable. Here is an example of someone learning to get closer.

    Example: Back with my lover I felt, still young, inexperienced and a bit clumsy, but laughing and happy, the flow of pleasure to my lover, leading to a kiss. The deep internal pleasure of kissing gradually widened until it led to genital feeling. I realised so many things as this lovely gentle growth of feeling and flowing occurred. I realised that I and most teenagers have too much technical sex instruction, so it is portrayed as an erect penis entering the vagina.
    But I was seeing it wasn’t like that at all. First of all came the gradual relationship with my lover. As that deepened it led to touching, being happy together and kissing. The kiss, oral pleasure, was our first area of loving with our mother. From that original centre of pleasure, it grows into anal and genital pleasure. This was what was happening. Then gently the body began to move. But there was still no erection. The movement was the forerunner of the inner pleasurable urge to thrust and penetrate. So there was a slow and internal growth through escalating feelings, and not an outwardly ordained set of movements that led to “sex”!
    Please read http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/growing-up-to-love/http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-animus-jungs-view-of-the-male-in-the-female/http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/secrets-power-dreaming/

-Joe 2017-06-21 17:31:02

Last night I had a dream that my sister fell and broke her neck, possibly my fault. Also, recently had a dream that I had to slit her husband’s throat (actually his son in my dream, who was identical to him, but he does not have a son) to protect her. What could this mean?

-Charlotte 2017-05-04 10:56:47

Hi, my names Charlotte and I’ve just recently had a dream that I was talking to a friend about general life in my dream and then she started to become very nervous and tense I asked if she was okay and then she turned and started punching the fence very quickly looked around to me, ran towards me, grabbed me by the neck, lifted me up so high and plummeted my self to the ground in which I woke up! very scary moment and I’m not too sure what to think of it as it’s the first time I’ve vividly experienced something like that!

    -Tony Crisp 2017-05-05 9:29:31

    Hi – I am stopping from answering your posts fully – but will try to give hints; sometimes long ones because I quote from masses I have already put online. Also, I need to take time to update the site – dreamhawk.

    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

    Charlotte – Nearly always when people dream about someone they know or a strange new person or situation they automatically believe the dream is about that person, situation, or animal. But when we think of our friend or partner our thoughts are not them – just our thoughts and feelings about them.

    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.

    You said you were talking to a friend about general life. Was it in an explorative way? Because dreams are very excited about Life, and that may be why your friend became so excited. See http://dreamhawk.com/news/the-tree-of-life-the-spine/

    But being scared causes changes in the dream – punching the fence show an action trying to break through it. The fence can indicate the natural barrier we have separating our personality, our awake self, and the huge forces that keep us alive and stand behind our existence.

    The rush up and down is often in dreams an experiences of going beyond the barriers we erect – but your fear stopped a full experience of it. . The reason that fear is experienced at such times I 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. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/going-beyond/

-Jody 2017-01-27 5:08:38

Dream a young child fighting to squeeze my neck, and I awaken with fright

-Emilu Sowinski 2015-08-03 11:30:40

I had a dream first of breath on the nack of my neck by a deceased ex, my sons father where it felt as if i were awake. It was the night of his birthday. Then, it was a dream of sex with what appeared to be sex with ghosts, many men, thd ex included. Super strange but kinda hot at the same time. I dont know, please help. I definitely do not understand the dream I just had!

-Rebecca 2013-11-24 23:37:02

Hi Tony. I have since a couple of years back sinceI was 17/18 had more and more symbolic dreams. Most of them I have been able to understand from your site but last night I dreamt that I was holding a baby and broke its neck… Can you help me?

-Rebecca 2013-09-22 20:56:01

Hi there, I had a dream that the guy that I like came running up to me and started strangling me. What I just read makes sense now!

-Marilyn Richards 2012-10-06 17:35:28

I had a dream that the man I like was blowing on the back of my neck. What does that mean?

-jo ann 2012-09-05 12:12:59

I had a dream last night that my date was bit on the neck by a charging tiger

-Craig 2012-07-25 15:46:41

Dear Tony,

I have reason to believe there may be some kind of ancient artifacts on my property and I went to sleep last night asking the universe to reveal to me where I should dig. My instincts have been telling me there are a couple of spots but one has a very strange, dark and twisted tree at the site overgrown with other things and it has the feeling of death and danger. This is not where I want to dig first. Strange as it may seem there may be the remains of a Nephilim dark lord there I am not prepared to disturb.
On the other hand I am very excited to dig in another spot about 100 yards away just near the house where I believe some 8 or 10 feet down could be a room or chamber or well which contains offerings to their gods. This is what I have felt inspired to retrieve.
So, I had a strange dream just before I woke up this morning and would appreciate your help interpreting it.
I was at a professional baseball game and I was standing to the left of a ‘friend’ though I never saw his face I did assume it to be someone I know, a man my sister had been married to for a couple of years but recently left, who loves the Texas Rangers. However there seemed to be little or no interaction between us.
It was the final inning and the home team (our team) was behind. The score was 12 to 14 but then, one by one we were scoring and soon it was tied up 14 to 14. We were far out in center field about half way up the stadium probably just above or below the box seat. Anyways, I heard the crowd roar and suddenly realized the ball was coming right at me and I had no time to react. I caught the ball in the neck with my chin and felt no pain at all just exhilaration and satisfaction. The crowd cheered and I took the ball in my right hand and tried to lift it above my head but struggled for a moment as if my arm had gone numb in the bicep.
The crowd began pouring out of the stadium and I eventually came out into the corridor where a young woman with dark rimmed glasses approached me clinging to her notebook or clipboard who as it turns out was the “batter’s” personal assistant and asked me if his phone number was on the ball and then told me I wasn’t supposed to have it. He had put the wrong number on the ball. I asked, “I have his personal cell phone number?” She gave me a disapproving look and then I looked down in my hands and realized I had left the ball in my seat and went back and picked it up off the floor. I looked and there were signatures all over the ball from the team of the opposition. I didn’t notice anything clearly but then I was amazed that the ball was taking on a new shape as it began to flatten out somewhat like a thick little pancake. Then I woke up.
Please tell me what you think the dream could mean.
Thank you.
Craig

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