Angels
This can indicate the positive side of relationship with your mother, or it can be about your religious concepts. Sometimes it deals with feelings about or insight into death or even a need for a parent figure to guide or instruct in decision making, such as wisdom arising from your wider awareness. The Hebrew word for angel is malak, meaning messenger. As a symbol it would therefore represent your intuition of a wider truth than that encompassed by your present personal experience.
Traditionally there were many angels, and some of the greatest were said to be messengers for particular things, like the angel of death, or the angel of love. Such old concepts still hold sway in our unconscious, so it is helpful to consider if the angel in the dream has some particular quality, or is communicating a particular message. Also consider whether you are in accord or in conflict with the angel. If in accord it suggests that some deeply felt intuition is accepted by you. If in conflict then something that is powerfully influential deep within you is being rejected and is creating an internal conflict.
Angels do not need wings to fly, but the church has added them and also the image of a male god up in the sky. Also most angels are shown as female, but again that is make believe.
Example: Dreamt I was dead and was now an angel, but I was asleep. I seemed to be a separate witness to this, watching my sleeping angel self. The angel self also seemed to be neither male or female.
This story, which was told to me by a doctor who witnessed it from beginning to end in the small Idaho hospital where it happened. A woman hed given birth to a baby with severe complications. When the child was delivered, he was found to have a severe brain hemorrhage.
The child spent several months in the intensive care unit of this small town because the mother did not want to transfer him to a large city where she would not be allowed to spend full time with him. Doctors decided not to encourage her to move the child since they felt the injuries were so massive that no treatment would be possible.
The child had severe cerebral palsy secondary to brain damage and a seizure disorder that had shown up on an abnormal EEG. These are afflictions from which children simply don’t recover. If they survive infancy, they spend their lives severely retarded.
The doctors told her their prognosis, but still the mother stayed with her child. By all accounts she was with the boy almost twenty-four hours a day for several months. Perhaps it was the strain of the ordeal or sleep deprivation that led to what happened next.
Late one night, she said, a Being of Light came into her hospital room. Later she described it as having the shape of a person, but not the features of either a male or a female. It glowed with a cold, gray light as though light were being beamed through an ice cube.
“Your son will be all right,” the being said.
The woman said that she felt as though love were being poured into her body. “It was marvelous.”
The next day she shared this vision with her medical team. She was especially excited because the being had assured her that her son was going to be normal. Could they please do another EEG to see if anything had happened? They repeated the brain-wave test and came up with the startling results: normal. The child had made a full recovery.”
“That the Divine is the same in things greatest and least, may be shown by means of heaven and by means of an angel there. The Divine in the whole heaven and the Divine in an angel is the same; therefore even the whole heaven may appear as one angel. So is it with the church, and with a man of the church. The greatest form receptive of the Divine is the whole heaven together with the whole church; the least is an angel of heaven and a man of the church. Sometimes an entire society of heaven has appeared to me as one angel-man; and it was told that it may appear like a man as large as a giant, or like a man as small as an infant; and this, because the Divine in things greatest and least is the same. ” Eckhart
In a real way, because dream images arise from our own potential and are in some way expressions of us, angels are about the conscious use of our own faculties without the waving of magic wands. There is no need to attempt conjuring of spirits or angels. We are an expression of life and as such hold all possibilities within us. So, the question is, how can we work with ourselves here and now, with our own psychological and biological processes? How can we help our being to heal itself and move further? See messengers
Well, even if we take that point of view, it is still helpful to enlist the help of such dream images. After all, dreams link with a very deep part of us, a part not limited by logic, thinking and the past experience. As Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”. So, use your imagination and follow it where it leads. See Travelling Your Dreams and Using Visualisation.
Example: Then I was involved in the second group and at some point felt that I needed to demonstrate the ability to fly. So, I ascended into the air and flew around the room. Hardly anybody took any notice of this except toward the end one small boy with large brown eyes was looking at me out of a large window somewhere above the hall in which the play was taking place. He was leaning against the glass looking at me. So, I looked him straight in the eye and rose straight upwards with the most wonderful feeling of exhilaration shared with the child.
Then I became lucid and began to shift the dream in a particular direction. Firstly I brought the man and his wife together with myself in a communal embrace. Then together we lifted off into the air in flight, and in front of the children performing the play we did the most beautiful and colourful aero acrobatics. As we did these we were able to produce coloured lights flowing from us. Then in the end I created a great ball of coloured light that I broke into angels flying in the air and descending to touch the watchers. Then again into the ball which shattered into tens of thousands of coloured and shining pieces that gently fell like snowflakes touching those watching and disappearing into them sharing the wonder and beauty I felt flowing through me.
Example: Dreamt I was dead and was now an angel, but I was asleep. I seemed to be a separate witness to this, watching my sleeping angel self. The angel self also seemed to be neither male or female.
Example: Before I knew I was ill with cancer I dreamt that an angel came to me and explained that before we are born we are all angels and are without limitations. When we are born we take on a life of the limitations of our body in order to learn something important to us. Then when we die at the end of that life we return to being an angel. All the limitations of life then disappear again.’
Idioms: Guardian angel; like an angel; on the side of the angels; fools rush in where angels fear to tread. See: religion and dreams.
Useful Questions and Hints:
How does the angel appear and how?
What is my own belief about angels?
Am I aware of receiving a message or information?
Did the angel, even without words, communicate something to me?
Use acting on your dream to explore the wonder of it.