Blood

Very often it links with a feeling of being hurt or injured and of losing energy or the strength that enlivens you. But blood can represent pain, but also passions, deep feelings. It can refer to things that are deeply felt. We have passionate involvement with things. There are certain things that enter into us and cut us deeply. In some relationships we are opened up and we bleed even if the relationship is largely joyful, there still may be deeply felt and painful feelings in it.

Blood can also mean fertility as when it is connected with menstruation. It can be a painful cleansing and difficult period of releasing the old. The old dies away and leaves space for the new to grow. But blood give life and feeling to every partof our body. The inner meanning is that the Power of Life flows through every living creaure giving it/us consciousness.

In a more general sense blood can indicate one’s energy and sense of existence. In common language we link it with our family through feelings of connection or bonding, inherited tendencies – what we now call genes. It therefore includes inherited strengths and weaknesses of character. We say of such things – its in my blood.

Blood is often used as a symbol of universal life or power in ones life, therefore connection with humanity. Through this it depicts the universal pain or struggle met in human life, along with the possibility of injury and death. In ancient times blood was used as the first ritual sacrament. Later this was symbolised by red wine or red ochre. It was noticed that at times of great change, such as birth or death, blood often preceded the change. Blood was seen as the carrier of the spirit of life and character that lived in a person or animal. If we think of what genes now are known to carry, the untold generations of human life, with all its pain, tragedy and wonder, then blood was seen as carrying this collective human experience.

Blood is sometimes felt as a link with the unconscious forces and sub-personalities within. It is a doorway to the subtle world of the unconscious. This connection is perhaps obvious in that for thousands of years, the blood was seen as the substance that carried in it the mystery of inheritance of physical and psychological features. What we now call genes was represented by the blood, and this is still true in some dreams. The blood in a dream can be the doorway through which you touch your racial and family past. The blood brings to life within you the past lives of those who gave you your body. In quite a real sense they live within you as a great group of people, or influences that need to be integrated for you to become a true individual.

When we see blood on the earth or on someone’s clothes, it suggests great injury or death. Blood on the earth therefore marked the spot of either a great battle, a death or a deep wounding. As such it was a marker, a memorial or sign of the act. So this aspect of blood in our dreams must be remembered.

In cultures such as the Macedonian, where symbols were often thought of in terms of good or bad luck, light blood represented good news, dark blood bad news.

For women there is obviously a strong link between bleeding and menstruation. Therefore in women’s dreams involving blood, the blood may depict whatever feelings, pleasure, difficulties are associated with menstruation and the power of female fertility for the dreamer. But you need to look to the theme and drama of the dream to see if this is a correct connection.

Bleeding: Most often relates to emotional or psychological hurt, but can also depict physical injury, or presentiment of it. Emotional hurt could mean hurtful remarks, for instance being told we are not loved – these can sap our motive to live and may be depicted as blood. The bleeding might show a psychological injury, often from past trauma, which is causing you to lose energy or motivation.

Sometimes, as mentioned above, the blood can be a sacrament. As such it is not shown as emerging from an injury or wound but as nourishment, wine or bloody meat.

Blood flowing from a crack: Possibly menstruation or loss of virginity.

Blood on your hands: Shows you have hurt or even killed an aspect of yourself. See Blood on Hands

Blood on the ground: Someone hurt or dead.

Bloody clothes: Personal emotional hurt or injury, perhaps even death of someone.

Blood Sample: This can represent many things depending upon the rest of the dream. It could suggest and illness, a way of tracing your identity with DNA, or it could be a drug test.

Blood sucked from you or sucking from another: Feeling that you are losing your very life force to someone, or taking energy and life from someone else. Sometimes sex is felt as this. The umbilical connection in the womb is sometimes felt as the life giving connection that if cut off prematurely, is such a loss that expenditure of energy in sex may be felt as vampirism.

In sexual dreams: May refer to loss of virginity, menstruation or fertility; or hurt to sexual drive.

Menstrual blood: All women’s blood, flowing onto the earth, during her menstruation, is the miracle of Life, creation and death. Every woman who allows her blood to flow, takes part in the life of the Great Mother, as she and every menstruating woman, allows the death if the old and the birth of a new possibility for the continuance of life on Earth – a great and miraculous act. See archetype of blood; bleeding; Great Mother.

Old or dark blood: Can sometimes be understood as ‘bad blood’ existing in the dreamer – bad feelings or old grudges.

Transfusion of blood: In dreams such transfusion can show the fusion or atking on of the  physical forces of the body from which the blood was given. Also indicates the taking on of the relative level of health or imbalance, even the ideas and ideals of a person. It suggests a very strong link or love from one person to another.

This is similar to taking in your thoughts, impressions and feelings about the other person. So many people do not realise that they have an inner person equally as powerful as the external person you know. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by meeting or living with them, and they change you and make you the person you are. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner person can appear in dreams because you still carry the memories or impressions of them, and so they influenced what you hold within you.

One way of understanding such links as can happen in a dreamt of  blood transfusion, is to see it as  a direct linkg with theinner quality of the donor. If you had a transfusion from a sick person whose blood was full of viruses and toxins it would pull down your own system. If you yourself were lacking blood, then the transfusion could be life giving. But of course we are speaking of emotional, mental and spiritual factors that pass through this link. So the toxins that pass are not of viruses, but of greed, lies, anger and violence, or even insidious desire to control. Or on the positive side, the expanded awareness that lifts us from shadows into a greater vision and experience of life.

Pak Subuh, an Eastern spiritual teacher, says that when a couple have sex the inner psychic content of one passes to the other. He says that whatever forces of mind and emotion exist in the one pass to the other. In this way if we have many sexual partners we take from them influences from their inner life. He suggests that having sex with a prostitute who has absorbed the inner life of many men of dubious character is like opening ones subtle self to the dross and influence of those lives. Just as one needs to thoroughly wash ones body if you had worked in a sewer, you would need to clean your soul of such influences.

But transfusions have been known to link people in strange ways. In recent years people who shared blood  through a transfusion shared thoughts, dreams and information.

A woman used the Seed Group method describes what she experienced.

Example: Then I started to tremble and shake. My whole upper body was shaking uncontrollably. I let it happen. I wasn’t frightened, I felt safe in knowing that this is what my body needed to do. It continued for what seemed several minutes. As I shook, I recalled that shortly after birth, I was given a blood transfusion. My parents’ blood types weren’t compatible – three earlier siblings of mine had been born and died a day or two after birth. Convulsions now, more then mere shaking. The coming into life, but not being compatible with my interior chemical make-up. Shaking as they transfused my blood – draining me of my blood, my own blood which fought against itself, being replaced with a foreign blood that would give me life. No wonder I was scared in that shell. The process of life and death innate in me from the moment of my conception. Fighting against myself. That which would fight for my life (the antibodies) would be the death of it.

The shaking stopped. A sense of peace pervaded my physical self. I was still positioned on my knees, but the sense of having put those roots down first gave me the foundation to withstand the shaking. I had no idea of what this experience would be like (and definitely not like this), but I seem to have gotten rid of something stored in muscle memory.

Idioms: After ones blood; bleeding heart; bleed someone white; blood boil/run cold; blood brother; blood is thicker than water; blood letting; blood money; blood on ones hands; blood out of a stone; blood relative; blood sucker; blue blood; cold/hot blood; draw blood; fresh blood; in the blood; in my blood; ones heart bleeds; out for blood; sweat blood; taste blood; young blood.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What part of my body – or the body – is the blood coming from, and what does that suggest about any hurt I may be suffering? (Look up part of body).

What is my relationship with the blood in terms of what I feel, my interaction or how I deal with it?

What can I understand from the theme and drama of the dream in terms of my life giving processes?

See: drama; Acting on your dream