Cup

This is usually linked in some way with satisfying ones thirst. In other words the cup suggests either the fullness or absence of satisfaction and felt needs, or the circumstances the cup reminds you of. For instance a cup from home or family can associate with good or difficult times, or with a past or present relationship, and people we shared time with in a social way. Who you are with in the dream also suggests what feelings of satisfaction or need you are dealing with.

The cup can represent a receptive attitude or femininity and the womb, or receptivity and pouring oneself out as in prayer. In the saying “My cup overflows” – or cup of suffering, it suggests your inner condition. In this sense the cup is a receptacle, and can depict what you hold in yourself, or how you measure or taste or experience things.

The cup can depict feelings you are experiencing or giving, as in sharing  yourself or receiving something from someone else, as when a drink is given by someone or you give it.

A dream cup might be representing what is in it – tea, coffee, milk etc. Some dreams are about health and how your body responds to what you take in, so if there is a sign of this in the dream take notice.

Example: We start going. I grab at a Styrofoam cup with coffee, cigs, ashtray, etc. and put them in my lap. I am sitting on a car seat that is sideways to the rest of the seats. Hot wax (pink) spills on my pant leg.

This dream seems to show a very casual and hurried relationship with the cup.

Sometimes the imagery of the cup is used to represent the body and what we hold within ourselves – showing the quality, richness or emptiness of who we are or feel ourselves to be. It is important to remember that dreams depict what we feel or fear about ourselves as well as what we are beyond those fears or self judgements. As in the New Testament where Jesus asks that the cup be taken from him, the cup can show what we face in life and in our feelings at this time. Do we drink something bitter or enlivening?

Example: Through its I have grown out of the chaser of rainbow ends and mirages to one who can accept an imperfect world, my own imperfection, and take cups of water from shaking hands. I take my place as a man among mankind – not the saints. “When those Saints go marching in, I am not to be among their number.”

A broken cup suggests either you do not have a good inner feeling about giving or yourself to others, or about receiving. There is a problem involved somewhere in giving or receiving. Do you feel you have nothing to give or are unworthy of receiving?

Golden or precious cup: The core essence of you. This cup indicates that part of your nature that does not corrupt or ‘rust’ like your body and the things you might see as valuable in worldly goods. So it might therefore be shown in your dream being dug up, pulled out of the earth, or buried in ruins or ancient places. This shows the influence in you from the long past.

Carrying cups to others shows you serving or looking after the needs of others.

Measuring cup can link with care you are taking to be precise or ‘measured. Or it might say you are preparing something carefully or you don’t want to overdo something.

Overflowing cup can either mean you life is full and you have more than you need, or that you are wasting precious resources. What is being lost or poured out?

In another sense this represents your life energy and how it is being expressed. So it links with sexual expression, with emotions and how you express yourself outwardly.

Round Bottomed: Once filled you cannot put cup down until you have drunk all the contents. Drinking it may mean taking on something you like or do not want to face, so take care.

The quality of the cup shows how you like to present yourself to others or how they present themselves to you.

Two cups indicate sharing with another person in some way.

Idioms: cup of tea; cup runneth over; there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Essentially what am I giving or receiving with the cup?

What does the cup hold, and is that indicating what I am facing in my life?

Who am I involved with in this dream, and what is being given or received in the relationship?

See Techniques for Exploring your DreamsResistancesActive Passive

Comments

-Thabiso 2018-03-28 9:48:47

I dreamed my deceased mother held a deformed child and a voice out of nowhere asked me who the child looked like and I said the child looked like me. All the while my mother said nothing. In the dream the child was my mother’s

-Thabiso 2018-03-28 9:47:13

I dreamed that I was eating a chocolate, I went to the TV room and found a lot of people I didn’t know. I left the TV room for a drink and found out that my fiancé made 3 cups of tea and I was wondering who the third cup is for since there were just the 2 of us, I searched for my fiancé and she was nowhere to be found..

-Aryi Peebles 2018-01-06 20:43:48

I had a dream that my partner and I were extending our relationship to a third party however my partner was not whom Im dating now she was like angelic almost she was of Light complexion, long brown hair, she had slanted eyes, she was thin and about ten years younger than I am so Im 39 she was 29. Happiness and jubilance spring forth from her face. I came out of the door and sge handed me a white cup of hot tea that tasted like sweet rose herbal tea but not quite the young wokan we were going to see I thought had it delivered but she didnt my girlfriend did. What she had on she was dressed in asian regalia she had on red wide bottom leg pants and a black cropped top and this tea that came to almost top of white styrofoam cup came to top. I felt a ton of love between the two of us. I dont know if it is someone I will meet or someone I used to know.

-Roy 2017-09-28 20:44:35

I saw today a set of cups round red in color and i think six in number a packet a delivery boy said its my gift i win it in a game or like this.beautiful floral draw on the cups.i unpacked it.another two coffee cups round big red color.plain outside.plates r there too.thats all.what its mean?

-jes 2017-09-03 22:10:14

I just had the most beautiful dream. I wish I’d written more of it upon waking, however I wanted so much to remember it, that i re’dreamt of writing it down before fully waking up, instead of actually doing it. i try to draw and paint a lot of my dreams but i am afraid i don’t have the proper tools for this one, right now! i thought i was writing it and i was, but only lucidly. now i can only describe the highlighting points, not the vivid detail i remembered before. as i’ve gotten better working with and understanding my dreams they have gotten more and more intricate and intense and i’m at a point of having a hard time keeping up. down down we go. there were actually two [three including the one where i was writing it all down, lol] and figure could be related. from the first, i remember hearing my mother in another room of a house yelling for me, saying ‘it hurts, jess’ and i rushed in to try to find her and she was sitting on her bed, or trying to get out of it and sat up, her roommate sitting in front of her, and then started peeing the bed in front of her, out of her mouth. they just looked at me. i didn’t know what to do, but felt panicked and obligated, ran to the bathroom, where i sat on the toilet and then started urinating from my mouth, into the toilet. i said ‘it just happened to me, too’
then the next one, which was far more pleasant, overall, found myself in some sort of ethereal swamp beach. it was dark, murky.. but also bright and glowing, if that makes any sense at all. there were things said which i cannot sadly not recall, and then someone was setting teacups in the water and they were floating away down the sparkling swampy stream. and then i found myself in the water, entirely weightless, on a beautiful ride, both floating on and under or through the water. there were life forms all around of which i have never seen anything like. in research, the closest description i could give would be akin to gliding through Ernst Haeckel’s artwork. and upon reaching a ‘corner’ of the stream, there were these, in particular, giant green colored puffy balls in the water and i somehow associated them in the dream with some kind of deadly fungus and the lazy river float turned into a bout of swimming for my life, upon which i thought i made it and started telling the story the writing dream. Then, on top of all that, upon ‘waking’, to where i am now, anyway, i walked to a local coffee shop and was looking at their bulletin board, as per usual, and found a new flyer up about a local shaman fellow re-named crow swimming away… and i had to laugh, as i just crocheted a full masked crow hat, and this week, have started wearing it in the cooler evenings. not sure what to make of it, but i feel some ideas. just figured i would share.. take care.

    -jes 2017-09-03 22:25:13

    actually! lol, come to think of it, that shaman fella looks quite a bit like you. or vice versa. and as i recall my mum also had a…geology professor named dr. crisp. i don’t know what his first name was. coincidentally small world?

      -jes 2017-09-03 23:26:16

      one more note, as i just recalled the previous night was eventful as well! and there was more urine.
      i dreamt that i was living outside, and had a small sort of a camp area set up, and these three young blonde kids found my camp, which made me a bit uneasy, and then more and more people started coming up into my camp space from all directions, and all ages, but many children. i looked over my shoulder to the left and saw a man from behind down below doing laundry and hanging up a t-shirt and something else, and a bottle of a cleaning product labeled ‘spic and span’ on a table beside him, and found myself wondering where he’d come from. then i looked back to my area, and it was completely infiltrated by what seemed to be a huge [15 or so] family and saw that one of the first children, a young boy, was squatting and urinated on my bedding area, which was on the ground. i said “hey! that’s where i’m sleeping! stop that! what are you doing?!” and he just stared at me, and then i looked to who i presumed to be his mother, kneeling around the foot of my bed space, fondling my blankets and what not, watching it all happen, asking her ‘is that your child? are you just going to sit there?’ and her response was ‘i’m obviously not dealing with a grown adult but a deranged piano dealer’ to which i was just baffled and racking my brain trying to figure out who these people were and what to do and how i was going to wash my bedding before nightfall. and then i woke myself up. ay

    -Tony Crisp 2017-09-05 8:19:36

    Hi – It would help you to understand your dreams, if you would read – http://dreamhawk.com/news/summing-up/ and also http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/features-found-on-site/ which has so much information in.

    Nothing can replace your own ability to understand your dream. With a little effort you can do this by practising what is described in – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson or http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/getting-at-your-dreams-meaning/

    Tony

    Jes – I have heard of talking a lot of crap, and getting pissed, but never expressing a lot of piss.

    Never having explored the root of such a dream (as in http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson ) I have to guess at its meaning. The nearest I can get is ‘gushing’ out of you. So I wonder if your mother and you are prone to gushing verbally when excited?

    The next part is easier. The weightless floating and the strange life forms are what some people experience when in dreams they explore the intricacies of their body. One has a view of microscopic parts on oneself.

    Example: A non-physical being explained to me that the cell like structures I had seen deep in the earth as I dreamt, represented cells buried in my body. The being explained to me that the cells formed vestigial organs. It told me that in fact there were several such vestigial organs in the body of humans. These clusters of cells throughout the body were what remained of organs developed by long past races. The people in those races had lived with an awareness quite unlike our own, limited as it is in most of us to only what we can experience through our physical senses. In those races the organs that in us now are only vestigial were fully functioning. This allowed them to be aware of dimensions completely outside the range of our five physical senses. Those races lived in the physical world and other dimensional worlds at the same time.

    Please realise that dream images are like icons on a computer screen – you have to ‘click’ on your dream images to make them come alive. Thinking about them doesn’t work. You need to open yourself to the magic of them. To make them into the wonderful gateways they are you may have to learn certain skills. i.e. the link above.

-Heaven 2017-04-15 21:00:32

Dream: I was sitting at a table and my crush was on the other side. We both had a cup, picked it up and each said, “Hey here’s my name on it” but the outside of the cup was scribed with a cyper of some sort. Also the cup was empty. What does this mean?

-Ally 2017-03-20 2:42:31

What does it mean when you experience a dream (actually night terror) of someone holding a cup, then just dropping it?

-Naomi 2017-03-09 12:27:50

Please help. I had a dream that I jumped in a lake and came up to see my ex-boyfriend. Then all of a sudden I was in my grandparents old house surrounded by famiky but my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend was there. I couldn’t talk so I found a cup. But everytime I found a cup it was dirty. Even after trying to wash it. Then I made him chose between this girl and myself and he ended up walking away from me. I’m just confused as to what it can mean. I’m married and have a baby now. Some of the babies things were in my dream but not him and not my husband. Please help. I’m SO confused.

    -Tony Crisp 2017-03-10 11:01:34

    Hi – I am stopping from answering your posts fully – but will try to give hints; sometimes long ones because I quote from masses I have already put online. Also I need to take time to update the site – dreamhawk.

    It would help you to understand your dreams, if you would read – http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/questions-2/#Summing and also http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/features-found-on-site/ which has so much information in.

    Nothing can replace your own ability to understand your dream. With a little effort you can do this by practicing what is described in – http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson or http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/getting-at-your-dreams-meaning/

    Tony

    Jumping in a lake, in dream language means you entered deeper into your own awareness/mind. See http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/the-unconscious-2/

    Of course you came up in a mental state – grandparents house, family, ex and his girlfriend; for you were deep inside you, where people are not those in your waking life.

    When you think about a friend or a person you meet, you are only taking in your thoughts, impressions and feelings about them. 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 are what makes 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.

    It is about the inner world if your feelings, and has nothing to do with your exterior husband or child. It deals with the influence of your memories. Obviously he couldn’t choose between you and the other girl because you were still locked into waking type world.

    The cup is your ability to receive and hold what is received – an inner ability. Obviously it is not clean enough for you to receive clearly, thus the mixed up dream. See http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/using-your-intuition-1/

-Sean 2016-12-17 12:51:05

I’ve got a bit of a doozy, and it kind of confused and concerns me…
I get this glass cup that’s holding a really small, human male- like creature that’s sitting on a stone and for a while, all it did was drink the water in the cup that was surrounding it. A little background before I continue ( the water in the cup is brownish, almost like it came from a dirty pond or something. prior to this specific moment in my dream, I was driving home from “school” which is somewhat detached from the rest of the dream, but somehow relates to everything else that happened because that’s how my brain works.) Continuing on, I notice that the creatures water is running low so I would tilt the cup up towards its lips so it could drink, then sort of turn the water around in the cup to see if he would react but it didn’t seem to care that much because it would still make the gesture like it was slurping water even when he wasn’t. Suddenly, I set the cup up right but I’m now walking into my house where it’s a bit noisy and I notice as soon as that happens, the creature stops. Then for some odd reason I have a random chicken (cock a doodle…) go off. It’s eyes open and I see a purple lights in them. I instantly set the cup down. The creature then breaks the glass while tripling in size, then turns into a monster with sharp teeth and screams. I wake up, then go right back to sleep and meet up with some friends to ask for their help because I just realeased a creature that can hurt a lot of people.
FYI, this is honestly a semi normal dream for me, if you can decipher this, you are amazing…help!?

    -Dean 2018-04-05 6:51:33

    Sean. Your dream is symbolising your sexual energies and how you use them. The cup is the recepticle or reserve of creative energy. The ‘monster’ represents part of your psychology or ‘ego’ which is sometimes in control of how this energy is focused or used. Smashing the cup or spilling the cup means wasting your vital creative energies and damaging your energy reserves.

    Correctly observed that the misuse of this energy does ‘hurt’ people, yourself and others. Don’t worry thats pretty normal for people in this day & age. But it shows that the higher part of you wants to change.

      -Tony Crisp 2018-04-06 8:37:05

      Thanks Dean – Tony

-Valencia 2016-12-01 23:42:28

I had dream of so many empty mug cups. They were all very large mugs looking like the ones sold in Starbucks but they were in different colors and patterns. They were all empty like brand new. And one of them had the cup holder broken. What could this dream mean? Please help.

-Aaron 2016-03-18 21:53:55

I Drempt of the rolling up a Tim Horton’s cup and instead of it saying “win” or “please play again ” it said “why?” I also noticed I had old bank notes in my wallet from the early 90s. No longer in circulation. I saw a statue of a turtle with a small baby turtle on its nose.

-Mzk 2015-10-30 11:31:42

I dreamed I was cleaning but it wasn’t my house but the coffee cup I was moving I know as coffee is made in it everyday like clock work its from my house but it’s still full with undrank coffee and as am taking it to the sink it keeps splashing on the floor that by the time I got to the sink it was empty

-Angel 2015-10-28 2:32:21

My Dream: My mother who I don’t speak to runs into me in a park, neither of us are happy to see the other. I open my arms and say “Just do it.” and she begins throwing ceramic mugs at me. They shatter each time they hit my body. It barely hurts. What does this mean?

-AnnaP 2015-07-10 14:06:30

Dream: I’m at work (serving at restaurant) trying to get order out, but nothing is ready at the same time. The food gets cold. I m embarrassed and ashamed and don’t want to go out. There is a large flask of ginger, mint tea I pour into cups that I find have holes in them. The liquid runs out.

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