Drum

This may represent your heart, depending on the dream content. In some dreams it is obviously about sexual tension, intercourse or masturbation. Or it can be an expression of natural rhythms of the life processes in you and around you, and how you are in rhythm or not. The drumbeat is also occasionally linked with the primitive in us being called out. See: music; musical instruments.

Drums in dreams can also suggest an ability to change your state of mind as in initiation. Drum music can also indicate marching in a crowd, suggesting being moved by the same beliefs or feelings, or else marching to a different drummer.

If you are the drummer it might mean you are calling attention to yourself or creating a beat for others to follow. Or drums might relate to war drums to raise emotion and get one to follow the community direction.

The drum can sometimes indicate the chest, as in the following example as he explored a dream.

Example: “It’s about strength. So much concern about being strong. So much care taken over all this (body; this because he was very weak as an infant and developed anxiety about his health). I’ve got to keep it strong. All the vitamins and good food I eat are taken with the effort to keep it strong. I’m working away at it even in my own kitchen, working, working, keeping its strong.”

All this came as direct realisation without images. I saw how I took so much care of my body. Then words came, but without insight. “It’s all in my chest. It so rigid, like a drum, and I am pushing something down, forcing it down, keeping it down in my chest. I kept it down so good. So much, all down in my chest, for so long. Like Mr. Hyams, a great big barrel all puffed up, a head on one end and legs on the other. Deadness in the chest. It’s fear. So much fear. Oh God. Go through fear. So much fear through pride.”

Example: I invite the audience to the ballroom. I’ll play the piano and the Cary Grant type gypsy owner will add accompaniment with the musicians. I go to the ballroom and some follow. I sit at the piano and play a beautiful classical piece. A drummer came and joined me. Then we improvise a reggae piece. Then I’m playing a dance number. Lots of people are dancing. It’s a success.

It is recorded that Quetzalcoatl’s priests would bang a drum in the morning and in the evening in reverence to Quetzalcoatl. At that time merchants could leave the city and visitors could enter Tenochtitlan. The drum of Quetzalcoatl may be compared with the flute of Tezcatlipoca. The drum separated night from day. The flute was heard at night. The sound of the flute was shrill and anxiety followed it’s music.

Example: Six years ago, I became a member of the Bwiti. I had heard about ibogaine from an assistant in an anarchist bookstore in New York. On a magazine assignment, I went to Gabon and took iboga in an initiation ceremony. It was one of the most difficult, yet rewarding, experiences of my life. I had heard the substance described as “10 years of psychoanalysis in a single night” but, of course, I did not believe it. As the tribesmen played drums and sang around me until dawn, I lay on a concrete floor and journeyed back through the course of my life up to that point, witnessing forgotten scenes from childhood. At one point, I had a vision of a wooden statue walking across the room and sitting in front of me – later, I was told this was “the spirit of iboga” coming out to communicate with me. See Intro to Ibogaine

Idioms: drum up; follow a different drum; follow one’s own drum; beating one’s own drum; drumming up a storm.

Useful questions:

What influence if any has the beat of the drum on me?

What is happening to the drum and what is my connection with it.

Is there any suggestion this might be about my ear-drum?

Can I feel it as my heartbeat?

Did the drimming put me in a trance state or induce initiation?

See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Reaction to the unconscious – The Life Will