Man Male
In most cases an aspect of yourself – even in a woman’s dream – depending on the activity and character of the man in the dream. Any indication whatsoever in the dream gives a clue to what aspect of yourself. In the example below, the character of the friend, the role of the psychiatrist, and the feelings of the client, indicate which aspects of Bernard’s character are being dealt with. Therefore a man trying to rape a woman would be her fears about sex; a homosexual would depict those feelings; business man, ones work or business abilities; loving man ones feelings about love, and so on. See Characters and People in Dreams; Summing Up; Archetype of the Father; animus; male.
In general a person in a dream shows one of the dreamer’s character resources or problems, depending upon how they relate to it. Each character trait is a part of the person’s repertoire of behaviour. If they are at odds with the person in the dream or threatened by it, then the trait dominates them rather than they using it. An important point is that the dream image of the person or object summarises the trait. Through the image the dreamer can access the resources of the trait. One can call this an image of power. See Characters and People in Dreams
A man in your dream can also represent all the influences taken into yourself from the important men in your life as you matured from childhood. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words 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. You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship. Please read this wonderful example, it will show how much we take in from those we love or lived with.
Example: ‘I was walking down the steps of a house, leading into the front area of the basement. I was with a man, perhaps a friend. At the bottom of the steps a psychiatrist was talking to a male client. They were having a session there in the open. I sensed the man’s feelings of embarrassment and exposure. But I felt it was necessary to be thus exposed. i.e. the psychiatrist was purposely holding the session in the open so the man could learn to relax.’ Bernard O.
Bernard, a practising therapist, is all of the men in the dream. It portrays the interaction between different parts of himself. The ‘I’ walking down the steps is the active, fairly adventurous person Bernard sees himself as; the man following – a friend – is a man Bernard knows who has sexual difficulties, and represents Bernard’s own sexual hesitations; the psychiatrist is Bernard’s therapeutic skill used in his own life; the male client is Bernard’s difficult feelings when dealing with groups of people – the public, which he is trying to ‘expose’ or get to know and transform. The following example shows some of the difficulties of being a man.
Example: Added to this I learned not to trust a woman. My mother taught me hard and good that the person you loved could just give you away, that she could torture you to make you conform. It’s a fucking shit. When meeting a woman who professes love I tend to say inside myself, ‘Yeah, yeah, you love me. I’ve got it. Yes, sure you love me. Sure, I understand. Join the queue. I’ll believe it when I see the payments. I’ll look it up next month when the accounts come in. I’ll see what you paid in. Okay love? See you.’ Anyway this is the shape I am, part man, part woman, the love part of me twisted up. What about down there, the sex organs? Can we get a dollop of love going for this poor bugger? So I’ve been sad. Finished. Have a laugh. Join the human race, the multi gendered, many shaped, distorted human race. ‘What is the name of this game?’ Being a human being is a new one on me.’ Sam, it’s not good enough being like that, with a slightly bitter feeling about the world. Even if I have to say so myself, it’s not right. You’ve got a woman who’s full of love, and you just don’t know how to get it out of her.
I went to the toilet at this point and felt confused about my role. I could feel the strong attachment to the female mother role. I had learn it when I felt my wife was not giving love to my children, so I took on the mother role. I even tried to breast feed them. I didn’t want to give it up. I had enjoyed it so much and got so much out of it I didn’t want to lose it. But this left me feeling uncomfortable about living as a male and particularly living as a male with my wife. What sort of arrangement was it to live with a woman but prefer not to be a man – at least, not sexually? There was no way I wanted to lose my seed, my eggs. While in the toilet however, I realised I didn’t want to be stuck either in the male or female role, I wanted to be whole. The memory of my dream arose again and I said, ‘I want to be a man, I want to be a woman, I want to be the young boy, the old man. I want to be an animal and a spirit. I am all those things, and it is wonderful. I love it. So am I genuinely a 100% male, or am I a fucked up version because of what my mother did?
I asked this of myself and opened to my inner feelings to test the truth, to see if I was hiding something from myself. I felt as if I were taken into the temple of life before the ageless ones and animals and they looked at me. In their presence I felt I was wholly male. They ‘said’ to me, ‘You are a man. You fight alongside the rest of us. You’re in there with the men. You’re in the men’s pack.’ So I got my colours from the man pack. I want to find out whether I am truly a woman too. Have I got my colours from the women’s pack for caring for my kids? ‘Tony, you’ve got a vagina, there’s no doubt about it. You know exactly what it’s like to be a woman. You know what a woman longs for. You are a woman. You know all about the cycles and all the periods of growth through puberty, womanhood and old age. I can’t distinguish you from a woman. In fact you are a fucking fine woman. You trained for it.’
Example: During the week, while at work, a spontaneous and powerful reverie began concerning being clear. It was as if I strongly experienced this quality of feeling of being a poof. It was just one feeling among the many that make up my nature, but I had never before felt it clearly like this. It made sense of my years of difficulty in relating to girls and women. I remembered so many incidents; the time the woman approached me at the Oasis swimming pool, and I recoiled in shock. The girls I had met and never touched or been a ‘man’ with. The redhead I walked around Soho fair with – the second Helen – and the sexual advances that shocked me because of their frankness. Also all the homosexuals I met and attracted. Also of having that (as Janov puts it) fag feeling. As all this rose into consciousness I felt such deep gratitude to life, God, for this healing activity as I felt it flow out of me and began to feel like an actual man.
Here is another view of being a male:
Example: The message to males is – you have a dick, and that is because you are a creature of evolution. You are an animal. Don’t deny that. You are an animal. You are beautiful living animal, and if you deny that, deny the source of your own life. Denying your animal is like denying the wellsprings of your being. Out of the wellsprings you will seek a mate. You will seek somebody to give your seed to. If you are seeking a male, honestly, your river of life has been diverted. There has to be polarity before there can be union. Therefore seek the foundations of your being. That may be painful. It may take you on the journey of memory out up your amnesia. “Except if you become as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Your journey, it will they take you back through your childhood to your beginning. Take the journey. When you have taking the journey reclaim your feminine. This is not an acting out of the feminine by changing your body or wearing different clothes. It is an actual shift within yourself so that you know yourself as a male and as the female. Build her and become one with her.
Example: In entering the dream imaginatively and followed the woman through the water, now with my feet there. She turned to climb a small hill on the right and I followed her. As I did this I experienced a very wonderful feeling. It felt as if light were beginning to shine out of me as if I had a glowing aura. When we reached the top of the hill we were arms about each other, and I had the glorious sense of being wholly myself – wholly a man. I sensed that I had reached a new level of manhood by more fully accepting myself, by more fully giving and allowing more of myself to be available to others. It felt to me as if manhood is a glory, a shining out of life itself through a particular person.
But often in being a man – or woman – and defining an identity one can meet many pitfalls. Below is a mans exploration, in his fifties, of finding his manhood.
“When these emotions quietened I began to feel as if I were waiting for something else to happen. I didn’t know what to do in relationship with those around me in my group. Was there something I needed to BE, some role. I couldn’t find it. The waiting I identified with the sense I have of waiting to discover the ‘important thing I am going to do with my life’ – which I never find. Then the questions arose – what do you do to be a man? If I’m a man, and I’ve grown to that point, what do I do now? What does a man do with other people, how do you do it? I’m new to it so am just finding out. As this too passed I began to feel that perhaps one didn’t need to DO anything in particular – just to be there as myself. This came about because I turned to each of the people and realised that I was a different person with each of them – so who was I? Pete wasn’t anything in particular, yet was anything. So in the end I could be with the group and feel empty inside yet feel I was being something with each person. In other words, I am wonderful opportunity to be anything and everything, not just some stereotype of manhood – or womanhood, but a real alive and multifaceted being”.
Example: I remembered how I had felt about the girls and contributing all of my efforts, and earnings and time. I had felt really angry, and I got back into this feeling. Almost immediately I began to go deep into the feeling. I was somewhat slumped in the chair. I was angry because I was a beast/man, a wild beast, who had, for the sake of my wife’s children, disciplined my urges towards going to work every day to a job that did not interest me. I had restrained my desire for rest and pleasure. I felt enormous resentment that I had to restrain myself while they lived largely unrestrained. One child had not giving even a token of help when I had passed her, had brought this to a head. Also another holding on to the electricity money as I held my hand out to take it had led me to feel I was an outsider, alone in trying to work out what needed to be done, alone in disciplining my desires for pleasure and not using my money for myself. Yes, I said, as a beast it is natural to grab what we can for ourselves. She is an animal like myself. She too has the urge to grab and hold on. It is natural in a human child.
As I sat, the anger weld up and burst out of me. I roared out, “Why should I go on holding myself back day after day, year after year, disciplining myself, when my wife’s kids mock me, like a caged beast. I’m a man – I could tear them apart with my bare hands – but I’m caged. My body straightened up and I sat direct and full of angry power. Gradually this is softened. I wanted to create an area of protection for my and my wife’s children. But I do want some help from the children.
Big man: Ones basic beliefs or attitudes to life which test out against reality. The bigness is the certainties which arise from this, and therefore the sense of strength.
Dreaming the man is looking at other women or leaving: Usually the fears about being a decent husband, or simple an expression of a man’s desire for a woman.
Inner man: Many people do not realise that they have an inner male equally as powerful as an external male. A woman or man may have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your a male, a boyfriend, a husband or son, and they are what makes you the person you are. This is true even if your male was never there for you – you still have all the memories of him not being there for you filed under ‘male’. 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 male can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.
Many people are lost and feel as if they cannot more, are trapped, even by past loves. But in fact the more people we can ‘digest’ or accept as part of our owm experience, the more freedom we have. Each person we have within us in this way is a new space, a new area or space to live in.
Example: Then I slowly became aware of a deeper sense of the discomfort. It was a feeling of being stuck in one place and not being able to move. It wasn’t anything to do with moving physically but was as an awareness. It felt awful and I tried to move but couldn’t. The only way of describing it was as if we are all made out of the same stuff – as an example concrete – and as such we filled all space. So the little space I filled could not move because all around was filled by others. I felt really stuck and wondered what I could do, but there seemed no way out of it. Yet I could not believe this was really how things were.
Most of this was spontaneous thoughts and movement through the experience, so that was how I was led to thinking about my cousin Sid again, and his situation of being constantly linked with his mother even after he died. Then I realised that I was linked with Rita, and in feeling that I realised that I could move in at least two positions – me and Rita – because of the loving connection I felt.
Then came a flood of realisation, every person I had loved was another position I could be in; and then I knew all the animals I had loved and even people I had a casual relationship with. But there was even more because in dreams and sessions I had become or encountered amazing things, people, creatures, the alien beings and others. I knew then that I was FREE to go anywhere and be almost anything, because their life pattern was now part of me. Then with a rush of wonder, I realised that the more people and creatures I loved, the bigger I became. See Digest
Man giving birth to a baby, or dreaming a woman is pregnant: In dreams we are no longer limited by our bodies, so men often dream of giving birth to a baby. The baby is often the synthesis if the mans life – the best he has out into a new form – the baby. If it is a woman pregnant in a mans dream, it is still his baby because he dreamt it.
Man in woman’s dream – man she knows or loves: Feelings, worries about relationship; your summary of what is happening, or what you fear will happen in the relationship with your man. In either case it is still information about the relationship. The simplest meanings a man in your dream has, is that it portrays your relationship, your feelings about, or responses to, a relationship with a man.
Man in black: Usually represents something we fear or a part of us we are largely unconscious of, but is coming to awareness if we allow it. See shadow; Being the Person or Thing
Man in woman’s dream: Fundamentally about the dreamer’s relationship strengths or difficulties, either with a particular man, or with men in general. A woman’s ability to question conventional behaviour and social habits; her strength to look with insight into her own life and change it thereby – but not her feeling values, emotions and intuitions. It can be her creative or business ability in the world and power to be competitive and challenging. Or her defence against ‘just knowing’ out of the power of her emotions and inbuilt prejudices; depending on how she deals with the male figure, it show her ability to meet a male. So it may show her feeling the power of her womanhood and meeting the man with strength, or her lack of self assurance along with the difficulties this produces. See Archetype of the Animus
Older man: Father or ones accumulated experience and wisdom; perhaps even wisdom from the unconscious if man is white haired or holy; sometimes, if you are male, it is the person you can or will grow into.
Primitive, coarse, wild, ape or half animal man: Urges which have not yet been integrated and socialised, usually pertaining to sexuality in today’s social attitudes or natural social feelings at odds with present attitudes. He can also represent energies that have been pushed out of place by something – instinctive aggression and sexuality entering the rational mind for instance.
Two men: Might be triangle situation.
Idioms: Man to man; be a man; front man; hit man; make a man of; odd man out; right hand man. See: Family; Woman; Ages of Love
Useful Questions and Hints:
Have you found what you associate with the man in your dream? Does he remind you of your father?
Is he a dream character, so maybe your way of exploring your sexual self?
See Working with associations – father – apeman – Being the Person or Thing