Peter, whose dream this was, had been experiencing a debilitating psychosomatic illness at the time of the dream, causing pain where the tentacles ran through his chest. The shell is his defences against feeling his own hurts, fears and inner conflicts. The dream shows him contacting a strength which is not afraid of his internal battlefield or conflicts and can show ways of healing real human problems. The healing rests upon the dreamer’s conscious action, not Christ’s, suggesting the dreamer must take responsibility for his own situation. Peter realised he had been avoiding his own internal battles but felt he had found a strength - in the Big Man - which would support his efforts to find healing. In fact, he met his conflicts and grew beyond his ailments.
The cause of Peter’s conflicts was because his love for his children and his wife was split by his love for another woman. The Christ he met was his own undammed life, the flood of loving sexuality, the strength to burst through social rules and regulations because love or life pushes. When we find it in ourselves, we don’t give a hang about bullets, death, right or wrong, because we have a sense of our own integral existence within life, and our own rightness and place in eternity. This removed his fear of being hurt which enable him to experience his enormous inner battlefield and so live out his painful feelings. See
https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ Tony