Mother Mum Ma

Each of us has a fundamental, perhaps instinctive, drive to bond with a woman at birth. This has generated from millions of years of survival strategy. If that bonding does not take place, much of what would have been natural unfoldment and growth, cannot, or does not, take place. So mother sometimes represents this whole difficult issue of survival and what happened in those early years of trying to become independent of such extraordinary needs. Basically mother is the difference between life and death. See love

She depicts all that you have grown from and inherit in the way of what you express or deny in yourself. She is part of your body and is the foundations of your life experience. She is the problems and strength you have or face in life, so, your fate or karma. A compulsive urge toward something, perhaps the search for the light of understanding. The self we assume in our dreams or fantasy; the unconscious urge your being has to survive personal death; the hidden side of your mind. See: insects.

 Example: I saw something that had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created and shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself.

Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. The next example is from a woman whose mother was suddenly seriously ill and was rushed to hospital. The woman was only about four at the time and no explanation was given her – so she felt her mother had abandoned her.

Example: When the pain came from what I felt at the time as losing my mother, I thought it would break me to thousands of little pieces, I didn’t know pain could be so painful. It threw my body about, yelled from the guts of me, screaming to be out, to take form so it could be expelled from me. I cried for my mother, called for her, wanted her. I didn’t know why the person that loves me and the person that I love, suddenly, without any warning could just disappeared off the face of this earth. (She had contracted a serious illness and had suddenly been put into hospital.)

How could she do that to me if she loved me? One day I had Love and the next day I had Pain. But the pain didn’t stop, it went on for days and days and I waited in that pain for her to come back, to bring the love back into my life.

My father had emotionally cut off so no feed back, reassurance or help from him. The amazing thing was I endured the pain for many weeks as I loved my mother so much, but to feel my love was to experience the pain. Then the pain felt as though it was life threatening to Me, and still I waited for her to come with her love for me, Now my life was in danger, rather than die of the pain I made the decision to retreat way, way deep into myself. In my exploration, I felt it was very important for me to tell her why I cut off, it wasn’t that my love had died for her, I had waited and waited for her but I didn’t want to die, so I had to go.

At this point in my exploring, I crawled away from my supporters, backed off into a corner, but I still felt very exposed and vulnerable so I covered myself up with a blanket. I didn’t want anyone to see me. Why? Because I felt unlovable. That is IT. All these years I have felt unlovable. I have struggled for someone to love me. What must I do to be loved? Be a good girl? Be a good wife? But when they say they love me I don’t FEEL it. How can I get the feeling that some one Loves me?

This is the sort of pain many of us face without ever realising it. As the dreamer says, “I have witnessed others go through pain at being left as a child, for what ever reason. But, up until now, I have never been able to even get to the edge of that experience! Now I know why. I’ve had to do a lot of inner work to build myself, know myself to meet the pain that was there inside me, I just wasn’t ready for it before.”

General positive: Feelings; being given to, looked after, and fed; protection; feelings of dependence; ability in relationships; uniting spirit of family; how we relate to feelings in a relationship; strength to give of self and nurture; intuition.

General negative: Will based on irrational likes and dislikes; opinion generated by anxiety or jealousy; domination by emotions; lack of bonding; misery and pain resulting from the bad relationship with mother or the psychological injuries she promoted.

Explaining something to mother: In our relationship with our parents we unconsciously absorb an enormous amount of ethical and social ways of responding to life and people. So the dream explanation might be a way of trying to move beyond one of the conditioned influences. This is shown in the example.

 Example: I dreamt I was in the house in London talking with my mother. At first there was an overall feeling of not being good enough. I think this surrounded the fact that I had been sitting around reading, and not apparently working. This is in fact what I have been doing the last few days, and in my waking life it has been very refreshing. But in the dream I was trying to explain to my mother that this was not being lazy or good for nothing. That day, Friday, I had done fairly well on the stock market. On one of the sales, with a small investment, I had earned £80/ $160. In the dream I told this to my mother, and began to feel more positive.  Des.

Dead or lost mother while she is still alive: The mother love brings growth to the child, but must be interiorised by the adult. Through living without the mother within, there comes no inner security. If the mother was killed by you because she threatened your further growth then you must make a change. If you bring strength to your past, the mother must be resurrected. Through making your mother live within, there comes love from your own emotional security.

When you love from your powers of anger they bring graspingness. When through strength the mother is brought to life within you, you can give love without feeling you are losing yourself. Through bringing your father to live within you, the lower powers are brought to fruitfulness in growth.

Divine Mother To meet or dream of the Divine Mother, or a beautiful old woman, shows that you have brought to life what lives and expresses through all life, all people. You must have experienced a great deal to do this, and must have experienced death in some way. Des has obviously been raised in a family environment in which hard work in a physically active way is seen to be a mark of character, and being unproductive a mark of laziness. In his dream he is with the inner impulse to judge himself as lazy that arises from his upbringing. See: great mother under archetypes; woman.

Hurting, burying or killing parent: In the example below Audrey’s height shows her as a child. She is releasing anger about the attitudes and situations her father forced ‘down her throat’.

To be free of the introverted restraints and ready made values gathered from our parents, at some time in our growth we may kill or bury them in our dreams. Although some people are shocked by such dreams, they are healthy signs of emerging independence. Old myths of killing the chief so the tribe can have a new leader, depict this process. When father or mother is ‘dead’ in our dream, we can inherit all the power gained from whatever was positive in the relationship.

Seeing parent drunk, incapable or foolish: Another means of gaining independence from internalised values, or stultifying drives to ‘honour’ or admire father or mother. 

Inner Mother: Many people do not realise that they have an inner mother equally as powerful as an external mother. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your mother, and they are a major influence in your early life, and in a few cases the child never becomes independent from its mother at any age. This is true even if your mother was never there for you – you still have all the memories of her not being there for you filed under ‘Mother’. 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 mother can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.  The inner mother can also signify what has been received via genes passed on or ancestral influences. See ancestorsparent integration

The mother love brings growth to the child, but must be interiorised by the adult. Through living without the mother within, there comes no inner security. See digest

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 own 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 Star 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.

Mother’s words or things said by mother: My next door neighbour, a man in his fifties, stood with me in my garden, which was alive with bees and bumbles, and he was terrified. He explained that one day a swarm of bees had settled in his garden as a child, and his mother had warned him to keep away. But a swarm of bees is drunk on honey – the happy juice – and will not attack or sting. But his mothers words were still active in creating fear even thought he was an adult man.

Mother’s are of course protective of their children and words spoken by her can leave permanent marks and ingrained thought patterns.

The first step is to become aware of your thoughts and part of maturing is to question them. 
Self-observation is a wonderful tool to “catch these thoughts”, because most of them are so ingrained that they run on “auto” mode in the brain. See Self Observation
With awareness you can enter the process of sorting out and so decide if you want to keep the thought/belief, release it all the way or transform it so it will resonate more closely and harmoniously with your inner being.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Was my relationship with my mother good, or with periods of awful misery?

How have I coped with the difficult episodes?

What qualities do I have from my mother – positive and negative?

If my mother is dead, how did I cope with it?

See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams –  Life’s Little SecretsTalking with the dead

Comments

-Silvija 2018-01-20 7:40:49

In my dream I was coming back home in early morning and saw my mother in bed, which was outside the house. I came closer, my mum was sleeping and talking in dreams, the only thing I’ve heared was – “it’s cold”. I tried to fix the blankets but underneath I saw tho hound dogs my mum was comforting or they were comfoting her. It was sick feeling, because dogs were very ill, skinny, both of them was with huge wounds and half eaten flesh (I’ve seen them before in my dream) and I looked at my mother- her body was half eaten too. I was horified and woke up sobbing. Recently I dream about ill dogs and mother very often. Please help me to understand it..

    -Tony Crisp 2018-01-22 12:56:20

    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

    Silvija – The dogs need to be understood, along with your mother, as parts of you – it is the way dream work. Many people do not realise that they have an inner mother equally as powerful as an external mother. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your mother, and they are a major influence in your early life, and in a few cases the child never becomes independent from its mother at any age. This is true even if your mother was never there for you – you still have all the memories of her not being there for you filed under ‘Mother’. 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 mother can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.

    For dogs see http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/brain-levels-and-dreams/#mammalbrain

    The dream seems to suggest that you are not taking care of your own instinctive animal needs. In a real sense you are riding an ancient animal, your body. Perhaps you have no idea how old you are, because most of us simply build our sense of who we are from our brains memories – but our brain is a new thing. Yet no plant or tree grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom in you. But that is not the brains wisdom, but like an instinctive wisdom, as shown in your dream.

    It needs to be fed on food that has not be formed by a factory, such as white flour, white sugar, and white rice all robbed of their natural vitamins and minerals. The animal you also needs exercise, some sort of sexual experience, and a reason for living. The dream suggests that you have kept yourself badly depleted of all these. Maybe se https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/category/healthy

-Martina 2016-06-03 2:12:05

I had a dream where I was cooking with my mother in a kitchen created by the dream. She was younger than she is now. It was a nice, warm feeling. Later I went to sleep on a loveseat in her home and a shadowy man figure above on a second floor grabbed the blanket I was wrapped in and was trying to lift me up to where he was. I fought very hard and was screaming for my mother. I was trying to scream so loud, I woke myself up… heart and adrenaline beating. What could this possible mean?

-Sam 2015-06-16 13:31:46

I was wondering if you could help me out with this.

I’ve had a few repeating dreams now where my mother as I get into a fight because she’s being cruel to me in one way or another: she calls me fat, or judges what I’m eating, or if I am sexual she shames me. I always get angry in the dream but at the same time feel hopeless and try to reason with her, like she is supposed to love me because she is my mother.

I wake up feeling horrible. I know I am working through self-acceptance and body image issues. (female), but I never know how to respond to these painful dreams or move them along…

Thank you

    -Anna - Tony's Assistant 2015-06-17 7:53:20

    Dear Sam – I take it you have read the “Inner mother” part of this article too
    http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/mother-mum-ma/#InnerMother
    You wrote “I always get angry in the dream but at the same time feel hopeless and try to reason with her, like she is supposed to love me because she is my mother”.
    In some dreams anger is expressed, but it is accompanied by a sense of frustration or feeling hopeless because the anger brings no satisfaction. This may indicate it is still linked with childhood dependence, when our personal well-being was intricately bound with our parents, and we depended upon them for our good feelings.
    I salute you for working through self-acceptance and body image issues and part of the inner work is to explore different approaches – in dreams and in waking life – and learn what does NOT work.
    See also http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/self-observation/
    You can try a different approach using Power Dreaming and for instance gently ignore this inner critical voice.
    So while awake and relaxed imagine yourself back in the dream and continue it as fantasy or a daydream and move it toward satisfaction. Alter the dream in any way; experiment with it; play with it, until you find a way to fully feel at ease with it. In doing this you must not ignore the feelings of resistance and spontaneous emotion and fantasy that may occur. Satisfaction comes only when you have found a way of integrating these into your conscious imagining.
    See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/secrets-power-dreaming/
    Good Luck!
    Anna 🙂

      -Sam 2015-06-20 11:04:19

      wonderful, thank you for the feedback! I will try visualizing.

        -Anna - Tony's Assistant 2015-06-20 13:05:06

        🙂

-lee 2015-03-26 21:52:37

I dreamt of my mother’s death. She is in an aged care facility in reality and has dementia. In my dream I went to a nursing home and found my mother’s bed in her room to be stripped with bedding left unmade, her personal belongings still in room. There was no sympathy or real concern from staff. I am planning to visit my mother soon and wonder if this has any relevance.

-Dawn schultze 2014-12-15 15:26:06

I don’t understand why I dream about my mother who has passed more then ten years ago.And of her boyfriend that lived with us that died more then twenty year ago.please can you help me to understand thank you.

    -Anna 2015-02-20 12:51:03

    Dawn 🙂

    I wonder if some outer event triggered a memory inside of you, which you have not fully digested and integrated yet?
    Please read
    http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/digest/
    QUOTE
    _______________________________________
    So if you are troubled by dreams of your ex or a past experience, the best way to deal with them is to work on integrating the influence left in you from it. You can do this by thinking about the dreams about your experience and drawing on all you got from him or her or it. So I would suggest you integrate all the good and bad things. Try doing this by taking the dream images of your experience and pulling them back into your body. Yes, literally making them one with you. Do this slowly and allow any feelings that arise. This may sound strange but all the images in our dreams are projections from you inner world onto the screen of our sleeping mind; so taking them back into you is like owning them and integrating them. It is called honouring what we learned, bad or good, from the relationship. Think of it like digesting something. In a relationship, whether a feeling relationship or one in which you are learning something, you often absorb things from the person or event. You might take in such things unconsciously, as you did many things from parents and from the culture you were raised in. So the process of absorption in a dream may refer to such influences you are taking in.
    _______________________________________

    Good Luck!

    Anna 🙂

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