Female

A female in dreams often represents the more feeling, intuitive, irrational part of self. If it is someone you know, she probably symbolises your opinion and feelings about her, or what she has led you to feel. See: Girl; Woman.

But a female is not simply a human being, but can be the very essence of the female principle, merging with the male principle. So the dream female holds in it all that experience, all those patterns of behaviour, whether of the mother wolf with her cubs, or the eagle rearing its young. To touch such enormous wealth of experience is to be penetrated by the holy; something so beyond the limitations of our own small personality enters us and leaves its imprint.

Example: I had the experience of finding myself sinking deep beyond my personality, my conscious self, and facing enormous forces or beings I had never been aware of. It started with a feeling of dying, and after experiencing that I felt the presence of my dead mother. I saw her face as a young woman, my mother. But then with fascination I saw her face was one face amongst countless others. I began to realise that I was confronting something difficult to explain, something that was a reality at a level or a dimension I had not met or experienced before. It was a huge being which I began to see was capable of taking in and holding every mothers experience and person, and was itself a complete synthesis of all mothers, in fact She was The Mother of everything. It was difficult for me as a human being to grasp its magnificence. I realised in my own small way why people in every culture kneel before the images of this Mother. In some wonderful way She was my mother and yet behind and working through my mother was The Female. I saw too that every woman I had loved or dreamed of was a meeting with this Great Mother. Then, because I saw and felt in the presence of this Figure, hurts I had done to the nature of women, I wept and asked forgiveness. I was shown that it wasn’t what I had done to any woman, but the hurt I had given to the nature of womanhood, with its great drives and energies that make women want a child and love from a man. Then in forgiveness She took me into herself and I felt and still feel AWE.

“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female: . . . then you will enter [the kingdom].” Quoted from The Gnostic Gospel of Apostle Thomas