Posts Tagged ‘dream analysis’
Control Controlled Not Controlling
There is a huge area of ones conscious skills given over to various sorts of control. This starts from a very young age when we gradually learn not to mess our pants, and later to ride a bike and drive a car. Being out of control can open us to a great deal of fear, or even terror. Yet being able to let go of control is also tremendously important. Many of the things we meet in life we are unable to control – even our own heartbeat and life processes; for many their own emotions that make them victims to great pain. But many external things such as a relationship, sex, opportunity, losses, accidents and other people’s decisions confront us with areas that we cannot control.
Therefore it is important to define what your dream is describing if questions of control or lack of control are portrayed. See if you can discover what you are meeting, and what a wise stance to it might be.
Example: I was swimming in the sea and a huge breaker swept me up and started bowling me over and over and to start with I tried to keep myself upright and fight my way to the surface for breath, but then I just relaxed into the wave and let myself be thrown all over the place, waiting for it to pass and trusting that I could hold my breath for that long. Susan.
This dream illustrates both the attempt to stay in control, and then the letting go and being out of control.
Control and letting go of control also relate very fully to what we know about ourselves. This is because with too tight a control on what we allow ourselves to feel or experience we build a barrier against the re-experiencing and healing of old painful events, and also for the arising of new aspects of our potential to emerge. See: prison; Life’s Little Secrets
However, as a child we have so little control over people and the world around us that we sometimes become overwhelmed and feel helpless. In response our only control might be either to shut down our feelings so nothing can touch us; a flight into mysticism and magical thinking; or the defence of anger and violence, or the extreme of self destruction. If these feelings are powerful it is difficult to trust or love people you can’t control.
An example of a child’s reaction who had been left alone for too long, “‘I don’t want anybody near me. I’m dangerous. Keep away. ‘I’m three. I’m only little. But I’m dangerous. I will KILL YOU if you get near me. I’ll bite you or something.”
Controlling our urges is a necessary part of growing up, but if we do not also have times where we drop the control, we can become unhealthy.
There is a philosophy being promoted that you are fully in control of your life, and can get anything you set your heart on. While there is some truth in that, but it is also as unbalanced as saying that to have full control is the way to be. Letting go of control is equally necessary. There is a middle way. We certainly cannot control the Universe, but we can learn to work in greater harmony with the forces of nature and intelligences we are interwoven with. For example you have no control of your digestive process, the process that pushes you through the ageing process as you pass through childhood, adolescence, and into mature years and on to old age.
Carl Jung says that, “An ability to control one’s emotions that may be very desirable from one point of view would be a questionable accomplishment from another, for it would deprive social intercourse of variety, colour, and warmth.”
Example: I witnessed a conversation between a man and a woman, and the man says, “Religion; that’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”
And the woman he is accusing of this inability to face reality says, “You poor person! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest religion is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure. Have you never understood that? Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It is can be an active loving relationship. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – a sharing of bodily fluids – the very substance of life. Is that something you are afraid of?”
Controlling objects: A dam is an obvious symbol of control, as are handcuffs, chains or a rope. A prison, authority figure, police person, steering wheel, and lock or key. These are just a few things to give you an idea of what to look for.
Emotional control: In many dreams, and in life, we are often so connected with another person emotionally, so deep in dependence or fears, that in a real way many of our responses are controlled by the person we are dependent upon. See Ages of Love
Threats of violence are another way we might attempt to control of be controlled.
Example: With M, sleeping on a construction site near a sidewalk, like street people. She wakes me up in the middle of the night chanting some voodoo curses. It is very frightening to me. I think she plans to kill me. As I am trying to get control of her – trying to reason with her – she tells me all the bad things I have done to her in the past, to women. PGW.
Personal Control: While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we dream our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis
This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.
So, we have another powerful will that moves us. This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive or we are restricted by being tied down.
Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals.
Vehicle control: Many dreams about control involve driving or being in a car or public transport. In general the control or lack of it are about being able to stop or navigate easily. They indicate you life skills in dealing with people, social situations and opportunities; or more importantly beingin control of your own urges such as anger or sex. Being in control of your life does not mean being uptight and scared of letting go, it means you can express in any way that is suitable – control/letting go of control.
Some such dreams are also about sexual relationships and how much control you have. This statement from a dream illustrates this perfectly. “I’m out of control and I can only hope that as I merge into oncoming traffic, I don’t hit anybody. I do manage by luck, not skill, to merge successfully. BS” See: car.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What is it I am trying to control or is out of control, and what can I gather from that?
Am I controlled or controlling in this dream, ad can I see evidence of that in my life?
How do I, or can I, deal with this, and is there any suggestion in my dream?
See Opening to Life – Arm Circling Meditation – Life’s Little Secrets – Dream Yoga
Convent
This might suggest introspection, or some measure of retirement or withdrawal from external activities. It is important to see if such withdrawal arises from anxiety or decisiveness. The convent may of course relate to your past experience and feelings connected with it, or your religious beliefs. But convents link with the feminine principle in you, especially the receptive female principle opened to the highest in you.
The convent can depict a particular state of mind, an empty or virginal receptive condition in which a wider life than that of your own personality can express or be known. See: virgin birth; Church.
So in this sense the convent can be an area in which you explore or define your relationship with your wider possibilities or potential.
Entering a convent can suggest either that you seek deeper acquaintance with the wider life mentioned above, or that you want respite from everyday life and its demands. For a man entering a convent it suggests he is gaining a fuller awareness of his female receptivity as it is opening to the wider possibilities within – or that he seeks non-sexual relationships.
If you were educated in a convent it could have very different meanings. You may have been trained to impose restrictions on yourself that put you at odds with your natural feelings and intuitions. A woman brought up in a convent describes this influence as follows.
Example: It complicates things because it means that I have had to seek outside indicators to guide my choices in life instead of being guided by what feels right to me. As a child I got the message that what made me feel good was bad, and what I felt excited about tended to be forbidden. The confusion comes from being brought up in a convent.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Is there a sense of discovering something deeper or fuller, or a sense of restriction and confusion in the dream?
Am I seeking to discover the wider awareness and opening to Life?
Am I looking for quietness and time to be myself at the moment?
See Religion and Dreams – Identity and Dreams – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Convict
This may be depicting anti-social urges, or feelings of being trapped, perhaps by your own undirected emotions and reactions to events. It may also show how you are holding back some of your own feelings and urges. See: Prison prisoner.
Being an observer in a prison is probably about being aware of parts of your nature that have been repressed or constrained in some way. But there is also the element of social judgement here, perhaps suggesting that your own or other people’s judgements have led to the controlling or denial of things you would otherwise feel free to express. This situation might include strong desire to be free, or resentment about what has ‘imprisoned’ you.
The things that imprison us in life might be old behaviours unconsciously learned from parents or imprinted by events. These might be things like a rigid moral code; terrible feelings of inadequacy or lack of confidence; guilt or feelings of worthlessness or pointlessness. Seek in your dreams for ways of being free from such restraints.
Example: I was in a prison cell with two other men. I felt it was in Spain somewhere. We ate, slept and defecated in the cell. I was standing at the bars of the cell, and had the impression I had been in the prison for years. I was shouting and cursing the people who had put me in the prison, full of hate and self pity.
One day as I stood raging at the bars I suddenly realised that my years of shouting had availed nothing. The only person who was upset by it was me. I was the victim of my own anger and turmoil. It was as if I had been haunted all my life by ghosts of anger and passion. I dropped the attitudes or ‘ghosts’ and was free of them. Years went by and one by one I recognised and dropped other habits of emotion and thought that had trapped and tortured me. I realised I could be totally free within myself.
One morning I woke and sat up on the mattress on the floor that was my bed. The last ghost of inner entrapment fell away. A fountain of joy opened in my body, pouring upwards through me. It was so intense I cried out. My cell mates called a warden because they thought I had gone mad. They stood looking at me as I experienced radiance so strong I felt as if I must be shining. I was aware my joy poured into them, although they thought I was possibly insane. I could sense the enormous change in me influencing them, and I knew it couldn’t help but change them also. I realised that I might never be released from the prison, but it didn’t matter as I had found a fuller release than simply walking the streets. Even though remaining behind prison bars, I would still be touching people’s lives deeply. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What is it I feel I have restrained, or is being held back?
Dows my dream suggest what it is in terms of my needs or feelings that has been controlled?
Is the dream suggesting any way freedom can be arrived at?
See Life’s Little Secrets – Dream Yoga – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
See: Prison.
Cook Cooking
The cook might be illustrating practical life skills to make your life experience palatable, such as the means of dealing with life. Or caring for yourself, in the sense of adjusting life situations. This might also link with motherhood or responsibility – of feeding ones family. It can also portray reproduction.
The active and practical side of our nature that can transform inedible aspects of a relationship or situation into something that satisfies us; the sense of responsibility that ‘feeds the family’; female reproductive ability – puts one thing in the oven – sperm and ovum – and out comes something else – baby; need for, or ability to nourish oneself and provide for physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs.#
Cooking: As in the example, ways we transform ‘inedible’ or ‘unpalatable’ aspects of our life. This also might suggest you are working with ideas, possibilities, to create something, a project perhaps, that will satisfy you in some way.
Cooking is also about nourishing oneself by your own efforts. It links with satisfying a hunger, creativity, your ability to make something new out of the varied opportunities or experiences you have.
If you are cooking for others it shows you giving of yourself, but particularly giving something that you have put together, created, realised or learned to manifest in your life.
If you are being cooked for, then it shows you absorbing and being nourished by what someone else is providing you, or giving you in a relationship.
In some dreams cooking reflects how you feel about yourself in a relationship or in life. Do you do well or is it a burnt mess? Such dreams might reflect how people important to you criticise you, leaving you with a sense of failure.
Example: My eldest son looks at the sweet – a soufflé which has wine in and is really special. He says he is not eating that – in such a tone of disgust and goes away. I burst into tears and look at it all, such a failure. I wake crying so much it’s quite a while before I can stop. MCM.
If your cooking is good but not appreciated it suggests you give the best of yourself but do not feel appreciated.
Example: ‘I saw piles of French loaves. On picking one up I saw that although the crust was crisp, the inside was runny wet dough. I wondered if cooking would make them usable.’ Derek L.
If you are cooking for someone: This may show you giving some form of nourishment or yourself to someone. See: Oven.
Pots and pans: What enables you to prepare and change food to something that is attractive and edible – your cooking skill or otherwise.
Idioms: chief cook and bottle washer; Cook the books; cook someone’s goose; cook up; what’s cooking; too many cooks spoil the broth; cook your goose; cooking up new ideas.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What is it I am taking and transforming that will provide my needs or nourish me?
Am I here in a caring and giving role with others, or am I being provided for by someone – if so who?
Am I appreciated or appreciating in the dream?
See: food; kitchen under house and buildings; pot or pan; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Cookie
Pleasure, perhaps connected with childhood. If you are making the cookies, it might suggest caring for your own needs or those of other people.
If cooking: Nourishing yourself; satisfying a hunger; creativity. It may also be your ability to make something new out of the varied opportunities or experiences you have. Depending on the dream, it may also indicate giving of yourself. See: Cook.
Copper
Warmth or firmness with warmth. Copper is something durable yet soft and impressionable. It is a great heat and electrical conductor, and is sometimes linked with love through its astrological connection with Venus. Because it is so often used as an alternative aid with arthritis as a bracelet, there may be some link with this.
Copper pipes are used to carry water, and so if it is a water pipe in your dream this is in some way showing how you direct your emotions or energy.
Copper is not considered a precious metal, so in some dreams it is used to suggest something of low value, as with some currencies that use it for low value coins.
In some countries ‘copper’ is also linked with the police. In the past the word was used to describe a large pot made of copper for heating and washing clothes in, a ‘copper’ that was suspended above a fire. Copper plates were etched to print with as well. Such associations might be used in a dream to suggest old fashioned, or past ways of doing things.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Is my dream about value, if so where am I placing my sense of value or lack of it?
Does the dream have a feeling of the past about it, and if so what do I associate with that, or with that period?
What are my feelings about the copper, and where do I find those feelings in waking life?
See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Plot of the Dream – Because Factor
Coral
Beautiful inner experience, ideas, inspirations, or intuitions. Something that develops naturally out of sight, or in the unconscious.
Cord
May be similar to chain or rope – restriction or connection, but also support. It often depicts the feeling bonds and connections we have with another person or situation, so it can indicate the umbilical in the sense of dependency that hold us. This is then like the umbilical cord that gave us life, but needed to be severed when we were ready to be independent. See: navel; umbilical cord. Again the support aspect is involved here, as without the support of the umbilical cord we would not have lived.
For some people, a cord around the neck linked with their difficult birth, in which their umbilical cord was wrapped around their neck.
There is another cord of great significance to us, and that is the spinal cord, so if the dream relates to the body it might have that significance. See spine
Cord might also have the associations of holding things together, or making secure, or limiting, as when one is tied with a cord. But because of the connections and holding things together that cords can perform, it can sometimes be used to show people working together, or some form of cooperation. The maypole is a symbol of this universal connection between all things. In this sense cord can relate to electric wire and its possibility of linking with a source of power – healing, energy, wisdom, power of life and death. The word chord can be seen as having a similar meaning to this – harmony. This aspect of cord is show in some ancient initiations and myths in which a cord guides the person through darkness or a labyrinth.
Cords also extend or connect with things, either in a way of control, limitation or influence, as when a thin cord holds a dog in control, or in the sense of enabling us to do something at a distance. See: rope; chain.
Breaking the cord: Becoming independent of parents or authority figures – often anger or resentment is directed at the person we are dependent upon. The independence we gain might be from our own fears and hesitations, and also at the expense of what supported us at the time.
Idioms: might be a play on words as in ‘struck a cord’; in accord; vocal chords; communication cord.
Useful Questions and Hints:
In what way am I relating to the cord – connection; control; dependency or support?
Am I relating to other people in my dream, if so in what way?
If the cord restrains me, what does it feel like if I remove the restraints?
If the cord connects me, what am I gaining or losing through the connection?
See meeting things I fear or dislike in my dream – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming
Core
The most important part of anything; a person, a machine, an organisation, a fruit, is the core of it. An apple is an example: the core carries the seeds, that are the most important thing as far as life is concerned. The same goes for the person who may believe their body, the external them, is the most important, but it is their core being that is the most important and carries their essential self. Basically your core is the deepest and most real part of you. Unlike your personality or everyday self which constantly shifts and changes, your core can never be dissected.
During the months of uterine life you went through the whole process of evolution in a condensed form. From a single celled creature you developed into a multi-celled being, then on from that into a fish like creature with gills, then a creature that could move and have focused feelings and responses to experience, a mammal form. Recently (2003) scientific proof, through the ultrasound scan, has shown that the unborn baby responds to sound, smiles, and shows all the features that are evident after birth. That mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without any logical thinking, any conscious effort or participation on you part except perhaps being careful what you ate, drink and what you are at your core.
You share that journey from conception to birth in kinship with all the other life forms that exist with you on this earth. But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins.
A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience.
No plant or creature 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 or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.
Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts. To explore and find your core see Opening to Life
| Nevertheless, even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence. Without it you would immediately cease to be. In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part. Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process. However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process.
For each of us are immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood, and there are more stages of growth beyond adulthood. And as we passed through these changes we died to our old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future. |
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So at night when you sleep, we return to our core self, and that brings healing and restoration. As we withdraw from awareness of our dense physical and we enter the transcendent experience of our core, the worn out cells, the tiredness we feel, which is the result of experiencing our body and the world, is healed. So sleep and the return to our core, and the action of the core on our waking consciousness through dreams, is vital.
Example: I remember that I was rather lonely and sad for no particular reason and I was going on a date with myself to the planetarium. In the dark planetarium, the stellar night sky covered the dome like a real night sky. There was a grand zooming out process. Starting with a person in a house to his city, to his country, continent, the earth, the solar system, our Milky Way galaxy, and to Local Group (the cluster 10), to supercluster and at last to the observable universe. Watching the earth and our galaxy disappearing into a point as the zoom gets larger into the cosmos, I was overcome with a surging emotion in my chest. Instead of deepening my despair, a grand sense of relief overwhelmed me, a sense of gratitude, a sense of the Holy. It is hard to describe or explain. Opening the knots in my heart, tears surged up because… it was so beautiful. I was infinitely alone yet infinitely not. Coming out to the streets of NYC, everything and everyone was a wonder. We are utterly insignificant in the scheme of things. And I was elevated. The Earth is so beautiful and our lives are so precious in its fragility. Quoted from Grace Park, Honors Seminar Spring 2003 – Modern Physics and Myth – A Dream within a Dream
As human beings we have investigated and probed the core process to the point where we understand some of the ways in which it works, and some of the ways in which we can co-operate with it or interfere with it. Nevertheless that Core still remains largely a mystery. In fact with the development of the new investigations of physics, such as quantum mechanics, the mystery deepens. See Quantum Physics
Core Experience is an everyday part of your life. Without it your heart would not beat, your food would not digest, your immune system would collapse, and the miraculous interplay of transactions and processes that take part within your body and consciousness would cease. Nearly all of us take this for granted. It is fundamental to our existence. But mostly we remain unconscious of any real meeting with our core. Many of us have no sense of the wonder and transformation this experience can bring. Also there are many things about our Core that are often not understood or are misunderstood, that at our core we are male and female, and also we are not fundamentally our body. Sometimes these factors are simply overlooked, or not recognised as being deeply important. See Water Wonderland
In religious beliefs this was called the spirit.
Example: Observed from the original all-encompassing self, the normal adult personality or self is a complicated, unpleasant contraption, loaded with superfluous gears and pulleys behaving in countless perverse ways which lead people to depression, anxiety and confusion. “Why all this complication?” asks the primitive mind. The split into self and non-self, with all the evolved gradations in between, betrays that original wholeness and delivers the mind to anxiety. Small wonder then the enchantment of mysticism, when the burden of self has vanished and all things rejoice in unity. How many ravishing accounts of transcendental experience owe their peculiar charm to this primitive condition? All is one, feels the child. All is one, says the mystic. Both child and mystic are at once very close to the center of their own psychic nature, and as far as they can get from objective truth. When a person looks into a mirror and sees his father, when the mystic feels at one with the universe, or when a couple in the ecstasy of orgasm feel their souls mingle—we may call it fusion, and refer thereby to the expansion of the walls of identity from the conscious ego to the subconscious self. “Subconscious self,” however, does not mean any magical universal entity, but simply the sum of mental content which, although it is a hundred, perhaps a thousand times greater than the conscious ego, is still within the consciousness of the subject.
Freud said that the process of dreams was trying to release sexual feelings, but the conscious self was often resisting the action through guilt or shame. That is an example of two wills working against each other. In other words the Conscious will opposes the Core will or Life Will. This is an important point so I will reiterate it. You have two levels of will. You have a conscious will and you have a will arising from your Core. So at times your core will may be opposed by what you as a person wish for, fear, feel or decide to do. See Waking Lucid Dreaming; The Life Will; Touching Your Core Self; Centre; We are Paralyzed; Archetype of the Animus and Archetype of the Anima
The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations; we take many sorts of pain killers to deal with ourselves. Things such as alcohol, coffee, medical drugs and street drugs, and yet we are still prone to break down, as can be seen by the number of people who need antidepressants or are totally lost in themselves. See Opening to Life
While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis
This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.
For simplicity I have called this experience, of what is actually waking lucid dreaming, ‘LifeStream’. It would take us too far out of looking at dreams to explore it, but it can be studied within these features: LifeStream–People’s Experience of LifeStream – Life’s Little Secrets – Arm Circling Meditation – Journeying Beyond Dreams and Death
This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will in us wants. So the only way to express what is good for us is in dreams when our conscious will is largely passive or we are restricted by being tied down.
Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals. Meeting your core self – the Life Will – in dreams such as seeing an alligator or crocodile, a whale or being in or seeing lava pouring up, are signs of meeting your real core. Often people feel frightened and try to escape it. This is because our personality is a very small and vulnerable thing and breaks down in depression, emotional pain and many other ways, and as it meets its inner vastness it often becomes scared. Opening to the Core; The Unconscious; Reaction to the unconscious
But in the end none of that is the core. Our identity as it is shown in many dreams is not a formed thing like our body. In its essence it is not even male or female, but both. Summarising such dreams, it is the sense of bodilessness, aloneness, loss of power and loss of our sense of identity, which bring so much fear in our dreams.
There are antipodes of human experience. At the tip of one is focused, self determining self awareness. At the tip of the other is unfocused void without focused identity which occurs in sleep. Strangely enough we experience both each day in some degree. The first while awake – the second when we sleep. Yet to face the second with consciousness feels like all the horrors of death and loss.
But facing it is important, especially in the second half of life. Although the unconscious carries the dark images we have of death, it also provides what feels like certainty about an existence which transcends death to those who experience it. This is presented as an awareness of existing eternally as part of the very fabric of life. In one form or another this is what those who dare to confront the dark images of death find beyond them.
Example: To my amazement a huge living and wondrous circle appeared on the wall. It was full of movement, everything dancing in time to music. At the very centre of the circle was emptiness, nothing, a void. Yet out of this nothingness all things emerged. There were plants, animals, people, hills, rivers and mountains all coming to birth. They danced out in their own individual movement, yet each unknowingly was part of the whole wonderful and intricate dance which made a great pattern and movement in the body of the circle. All danced to the periphery and there turned and moved, still in their ballet, back to the centre. At that centre they plunged into its oblivion again. But at that very moment new life sprang from it to dance once more.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Do I feel as if I have experienced my core?
What does my dream indicate about the core?
What can I extract from it?
See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Life’s Little Secrets
Cork
Usually associated with keeping afloat, therefore to do with you ability to keep positive in perhaps difficult circumstances. But it also is usually part of the experience of opening a bottle. This might refer to being uncorked – in other words being allowed to be active after a quiescent period; the release from pressure from being ‘bottled up’; or even celebration of some kind.
Cork is also used for insulation, soundproofing, and also as a pin board for notices. So if these themes are in your dream, ask yourself how they apply to you.
Cork is the natural bark of a tree, so your dream might be using this association with you having a protective layer around you.
If floating: Confidence, perseverance, high spiritedness, the ability to rise above circumstances, or win through troubles.
If in bottle: Feeling compressed, or perhaps in a bottle neck situation where your progress is impeded. Keeping something preserved or unavailable.
Example: Now I’m walking to take the form to the office and I’m walking on a “carpet” of sticks and twigs and hollow cork bark and pussy willows which have been sorted carefully so each kind of thing is all in a row. I pick up a cork bark still in the shape of a branch and admire its beauty. I admire the work that went into laying all the pussy willows out together in a row.
Useful Questions and Hints:
In what way is the cork appearing in my dream, and how does that link with my present life and feelings?
Is this about keeping afloat – and if so in what way am I experiencing that at the moment?
Am I keeping something bottled up – if so what is it?
See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Avoid Being Victims – Life’s Little Secrets
Cormorant
Intellectual ideas that have the power to dig deep and bring up unconscious wisdom. Because the cormorant is used to dive and catch fish, it suggests you are practising some form of introspection or self examination.
Corn Wheat
Whether this is corn on the cob or wheat, it probably links with a harvest, a reward from work done. It also suggests fertility, nourishment and a sense of fullness. In some dreams it may represent sustenance or strength in times of need or trial. Occasionally wordplay for corny.
The seeds of corn also have the power of life and growth in them unless they have been processed, as happens with white rice and white flour, which has thus rendered them ‘dead’. They can thus indicate your potential for personal growth, but this usually links with a power within yourself, the power of Life itself, that has the ability to move you and unfold your potential. This inner activity links your independent life with the whole.
Because maize/corn was eaten at nearly every meal, and because it was therefore life sustaining even in difficult times, it was seen as holy – a sustainer, giving fertility and therefore a link with the giver of All Life.
This is often about your own growth toward becoming a woman or man, for wheat is such a universally eaten food, and so is often used in dreams to represent the harvest of our life experience, our power of personal growth or its lack and also what we manifest with our life or growth.
Example: But a force caught me and turned the process from regression to growth. Now I was growing into a baby, a child. I was a seed of wheat opening with the power of growth pushing my being to expand and change. My penis was like a tree. When it was large enough others could shelter under it while they grew. The power of the ‘Thing’ into which I had fallen then spoke to me. It said that if I came to it each day in the same way – i.e. surrendering my ego – then it would grow me. The creative power would then realise itself in me through my growth.
The maize cob sometimes has a similar meaning – the many connected with the One – because of the way the kernels crowd on the cob. It also depicts fertility and plenty, and in some dreams the penis ready to impregnate. According to one version, the Mayan gods mixed their own blood with maize flour in order to create the first people, and to consume maize was literally to consume divine flesh, as Christianity sees bread as the flesh of Christ..
This is the same story told by Christian beliefs when we get to the basics of them – i.e. God created everything, so eating any living food is eating God.
Not eating the corn, or walking through the area in which corn grows, can suggest that you are not yet able to, or ready to, harvest or integrate, the potential and inner riches that are there for you.
Corn husk suggests either that you have got the richness from the corn already, or that there is nothing left for you, so emptiness.
Grinding corn shows you getting at the essence of what you have harvested of experience over the years of this life and others.
In some ancient rituals spiritual death and rebirth were linked with corn. This because in planting it for a new harvest it was buried and died to its old form. In dying in this way, the initiate was able to experience the power of Life or God, out of which their life had originally sprung. Planting corn might therefore either indicate your potential being released, or the conception of a baby or new phase of your life.
Example: During a major operation I dreamt I saw my little daughter – dead for many years – standing in a corn field. When she was actually buried the cemetery was skirted by a corn field, and later in life, coming to terms with this early death of a child, I imagined my daughter walking into the corn field. In the dream I walked into the corn field. My daughter was waiting for me with her arms held up. I put my arms to her and we greeted each other smiling. At that point I felt it wasn’t time to die yet, turned and walked out of the corn field. Ken Sprague.
Ken recovered from a serious illness and lived for several more years.
But a few people have an allergic reaction to wheat, and your dreams may reflect this. “People with a wheat allergy have an abnormal immune system response to at least one of the proteins that exist in wheat. Exposure to wheat can lead to breathing difficulties, nausea, hives, bloated stomach, and an inability to focus. In some people, anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic response, can occur.” Quote from Medical News Today. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
Useful Questions and Hints:
Is there any indication in my dream of harvesting or gathering – if so what am I gaining the benefits of at the moment, or what is coming into my life from past efforts?
Am I aware of an influence in my life that is like an inner growth from my core?
Do I feel as if I am facing or experiencing a spiritual death as an old self dies?
See Life’s Little Secrets – Meditation with Seed – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Use Body
Corner
If in a corner of a room or building, it can show you feeling trapped or restricted – or as in the second example, a hidden or little admitted aspect of oneself. Occasionally such boundaries or restrictions might produce a sense of snugness or security. A dark corner suggests an attempt to become unaware, or lack of awareness or insight.
A corner is also a turning point or perhaps a meeting place.
Example 1: ‘I was afraid the thugs would corner and attack me.’ Pauline B.
Example 2: ‘I went into an obscure corner of the cloakroom and hung up the coat – then I went through the pockets.’ Mrs R. E.
Corners are sometimes used in dreams to depict things that have been cast aside or forgotten, perhaps even things hidden or previously unconscious. If not that, then to do with things that are side issues, not central in your life or awareness. Occasionally it shows you doing things without great care or skill, as with the phrase ‘cutting corners’.
There is a type of corner that appears in several dreams. Something threatening, terrifying, or haunting/ghostly appears in the corner of a ceiling, as in the example. The suggestion in the dream imagery is that the fear is in the mind of the dreamer or those around him/her. Concepts or beliefs we hold – such as the devil – and give energy to become actual living presences within us, especially in our imagination and dreams. See Inner World
Example: I walked past the photo stat. room. Two girls came out into passageway, TERRIBLY distressed and spoke of Satan. I went into room and saw Satan in the upper corner leering down and mocking head and shoulders. I calmed the girls and everything became okay. Mr. A. A.
When a street or projected room corner: Approaching the unexpected or unseen. Therefore the possibility of meeting new experiences. This also might indicate taking care.
Because you have the possibility of several directions here, it might involve indecision or making a decision. If you are standing on the corner then you are exposed to public gaze and unplanned events.
Someone going around a corner: This suggests there are things they do that you do not know about, or they are acting independently of you. Obviously this is often as aspect of yourself. If someone or something appears from around a corner it shows someone or something coming to your attention, or into your life.
Beyond or around the corner: The unknown or unexpected. Things you are not aware of or you hide from yourself.
Idioms: Cutting corners; drive somebody into a corner; in a tight corner; knock the corners off someone; turn the corner; hole in the corner affair.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Am I trying to stay out of the limelight at the moment by hiding in a corner?
How am I relating to the corner – is it turning a corner (new direction in life); waiting on a corner (hoping for contact and friendship); or cornered (feeling trapped)?
What are the main feelings in the dream, and what part are they playing in my life?
See Associations Working With – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming
Corpse
Feelings or actions you have denied. For instance you might kill your love for someone if they hurt you. This could be shown as a dead body in your dreams. Some feeling, such as sympathy, forgiveness, that we have deadened. We may say, Why should I forgive them, they don’t deserve it, and this attitude can prevent parts of our inner feelings living or expressing consciously. Fear of death; desire to see someone dead, or out of the way.
Usually in these dream you, the dreamer, have killed or murdered the corpse you see in the dream. Often it is a part we do not want to know about because of traumatic pain associated with it, or because it is because of the pain we felt about that part of us. See murder
In a few dreams the corpse represents feelings about disease, human vulnerability and mortality.
Example: It was something like a semi detached and sited on a slope. I was outdoors and I think felt or knew that we had just taken over this house. But I felt uneasy as if something from the past was linked with it.
Then I was at the back of the house, on the part sloping down from the back wall of the house. I noticed things covering what turned out to be a big hole dug against the back wall, deep into the soil. This was where I felt most ill at ease about the place. The hole had been covered with bits of board and other odd pieces of junk. I lifted these at the left of the hole and looked in. Sticking out from the side of the hole, about three feet down was the dead body of a young man. I could see the back of his skull had been smashed in. But although he had obviously been under the soil for some time, and had now been uncovered, the body was still in good condition, being slightly dried out or mummified.
I felt really guilty and connected with the body, as if I had been part of his murder, and was wondering frantically what I could do to hide or get rid of the body. Part of the problem was that pulling it out risked being seen with it.
In ‘being’ the body in the dream the man said, “But it wasn’t until I got into the role of the dead body that any depth of feelings emerged. Almost as soon as I was in the role of the dead body I began to think about and feel things connected with the way I had killed my sexuality as a teenager. Gradually these feelings deepened and I was describing my feeling hatred in regard to sexuality and how the masses were pulled along by their genitals into some sort of conformity and performance. I felt anger and loathing for what I felt at the time were the cattle human beings were. At the time I despised and hated them. I also felt repugnance at the way people talked about sex or appeared to enjoy it. It has to be understood that in that period in history in the UK, most of sex was depicted in terms of smut, dirt, animal desire, hidden pornography, or loveless fucking. I wept deeply, at times hardly able to breathe, with the pain of seeing what I had done to myself. I said sorry over and over. I saw that I need not have killed my love and sexuality, but could have expressed it in a tender and loving way.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Have I killed this body – if so what am I killing or denying in myself?
If I imagine myself as this body what do I feel or connect with in myself?
Do I know the person who is dead – if so what is my relationship with them – have I removed them from my love?
See: Being the Person or Thing – death – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Dead Body
Corridor
No man’s land; limbo; in between state; the process of going from one thing to another. The corridor, because of its shape directs ones progress along it. So it is both limiting and yet gives opportunity to traverse a building quickly. So if it has this feel in your dream it links more with the expression of your potential or energy. As such it is a channel for the energy of potential to flow through you, into the many departments or ‘rooms’ of you.
The example may refer to the experience of birth – the birth canal. Such a corridor can also depict a sense of not being able to get out of a dissatisfactory situation. It may refer to a direction in life produced by circumstances, or even the female genitals. See: white. Many corridors in a building might suggest the complications and barriers that stand in the way of simple effective action or expression.
In some dreams a corridor has many doors leading off it. These doors are the many facets that you have but maybe have not been explored. So it is worthwhile imagining yourself entering them. See carry the dream forward and last example..
Example: ‘I’m trapped in a long passageway or corridor. I can’t get out. I’m feeling my way along the wall – there is a small light at the end of the tunnel, I can’t get to it. I’m very frightened. I wake up before I get to the end. Then I feel afraid to go back to sleep.’ Margaret.
The above is an example of a typical birth dream, or of someone feeling really trapped. The following is about the dreamers neurosis caused by his mixture of religious fervour and restrained sexual feelings.
Example: There were many closed doors behind which, I knew, were women living as enclosed nuns in the life of prayer. But I felt there was much mental illness contained in what they were experiencing. This recalls another previously unremembered dream in which I wandered a corridor where there were cells of nuns living an enclosed prayer life.
Example: A man dreamt he was in the dim entrance passageway of a house. It was not a welcoming place. When he let himself experience the feelings involved in the dream, he realised the corridor described how he had unconsciously felt about himself. He had held back from sharing himself with other people because he felt dull and uninteresting – like the passage. The positive side of the dream was that although he had not developed a fascinating exterior life, he/the corridor had great depth. This encouraged him to take the risk of allowing more people into his life. The passageway, leading as it did from the front door to the house interior, was an excellent symbol of the part of his own character which connected his own inner feelings and qualities with the people he met.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What is my relation with the corridor?
What do I feel about the corridor in the dream?
Is it a known or unknown situation.
Try Talking As – Processing Dreams or Easy Dream Interpretation
Corruption
Many things that we do or fail to do are not an expression of our best. We may not stand up for something we believe in deeply, or because we are hiding something, we become involved with people who abuse or manipulate us. This leads to a sense of something rotten and corrupting within us.
For instance you may not have the strength to say no to someone who is manipulating you through your sexual desires or fears. This means you also become involved in that person’s deviousness and corruption too. A basic reason for this might be that there is something about yourself you do not have the courage or strength to admit. This passive lie opens you to being influenced in ways you later regret, or leaves you open to responses to others that disturb you. For instance you may feel inadequate as a man or woman for some reason. Hiding such an inadequacy leaves you weak and open to corruption or manipulation. Dreams often illustrate this situation by something rotten or down at heel. See: dirty
However, the corrupt sometimes holds treasures. It is when things break down and rot that new growth can come. Great energies are released as things break down. The precious is sometimes found in the most low – or revealed by it. Corruption is, after all, a necessary part of our healthy body. Corruption in our bodies is part of digestion. By breaking down through rotting it releases the nutrients and then what is not wanted is passed out.
In fact we need the corrupting influence to continue living. In every moment of our life we face the possibility of death. In fact we only live because we are constantly dying. Our body is all the time dying as thousands of cells die, and in doing so the new and living body can continue. “Our bodies renew themselves every day: stomach cells renew every five days; our skin cells are replaced every month; the skeleton is replaced every three months; the raw material of DNA is replaced every 6 weeks; our brain cells are completely new every year. The whole body is replaced every two years. Every cell in your body listens to your self-talk and out-pictures the results”. Quote from The Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton
Useful Questions and Hints:
What is it that is corrupt in your dream, and what does that indicate in your life?
Are there unredeemed parts of your personality – angers, malice, desire to hurt or control?
Does the dream show you in relationship with someone, if so what is suggested?
Do I see anything shining through this – if so what do I get from that?
See Life’s Little Secrets – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Digest – Maggot – The Beggar