Wood

In general this is about things that have grown or developed in your life in the past and are now useful material to use in what you are making of yourself. It often indicates the intellect or intellectual information – material that in itself is not alive, but is nevertheless useful. For wood in the sense of many trees see Forest or Jungle.

Rotten wood: This often represents either a comment on things you are trying to create or build in your life, or are saying that your present thinking will not produce the results you want.

The following dream was last in the line of three other dreams about rotten wood.

My mother was telling me something about a warning of some kind, but I just could not see that it applied to me. There was something in the dream about a rotten piece of wood. Also something about flying white rats (squirrels?) or mice. These shot at one at enormous speed, and would somehow penetrate if one didn’t jump out of the way in time.

The warning was that of going the wrong way on a proposed journey. The very next dream starts to define what his journey is involved in.

Was coming up out of an underground station. On my left I noticed a brand new shop, like a chemist’s, but called Sexuality. I knew it was a new scheme, legal, smart, businesslike, but prostitution.

The mice that could penetrate one are minor irritations; fears and worries; the mousy or timid part of self; shyness; the activities within us – our house – which go on unconsciously, which might be important though small, or gnaw away at one. It can therefore represent a problem of some sort that needs attention; the sexual organ which goes in and out of a hole. So the rotten wood is feelings and thoughts that you are experiencing that will not produce the life you want on your inner journey.

Wooden things: The past, or structures of thought or behaviour you have built, which originally had life, but now may be habitual. Being ‘wooden’ lacking life or feeling.

Wooden room or house: A part of your nature that has been carefully cultivated or created out of past experience. See: Trees.

 Idioms: Babe in the woods; neck of the woods; out of the woods; touch wood, wooden head; a wooden performance.