Posts Tagged ‘dream analysis’
Fare
What happens in the dream shows the price you are willing to pay, or avoid, to reach your goal. So the fare often involves getting the right attitude or stance. See: Ticket.
Farm Farmer Farmyard
This usually has to do with your relationship with your natural urges, the basic drives, such as sex, survival, social hierarchy, parenthood, the down to earth side of yourself; the area of your animal propensities where – territorial fighting, fighting over mate, etc. – are expressed. Being in a farmyard usually represents efforts to deal with the sensual, aggressive, or animalistic urges.
Care or expression of our natural drives such as sexuality, parenthood, love of fellowship; the down to earth side of self; area of our animal propensities where – territorial fighting, fighting over mate, etc. – are expressed.
Or you may sowing and cultivating something in your life that you should become more aware of. It provides and opportunity to cultivate and transform the “earthy” part of your nature into the higher impulses.
The farm may also be about what is cared for or grown in your life and activities – what care you take of your own natural energies and abilities. Problems on the farm can point out difficulties at the basic level of your life, such as troubles.
A farm is a place where one can work with the earth, where seeds/ideas can be planted. It can be place of peace and quiet or hard work depending on your feelings and associations. One can relax there because you do not have to dress up, and you are with animals and their natural expression
Farmhand: Can represent the hard work put into caring for your animal self. Also to tending to what is growing in your life – also the richness of the soil, meaning the basic work on oneself.
Useful questions and hints:
What is happening with my basic down-to-earth feelings and urges?
Does this include cultivation or husbandry in any way – if so what?
Are there any signs in the dream of not looking after my basic needs?
Farmer: This indicates feeling easy with your sexuality and the material world. The farmer depicts the practical down to earth feelings, the care of the ‘animal’ side of you, also what makes use of them, works them. This includes earthy wisdom, the sort arising from understanding what drives us as human animals. It might also indicate an easy reversion to earthy or instinctive behaviour, such as hunting to kill or unrefined sex. In terms of higher and lower nature – the sexual, digestive and motor muscles, and the mental, creative and imaginative self – the farmer is the controller or regulator of lower energies. The sensory impressions help to satisfy these forces.
Example: I was standing in the back garden of a house – one of a row of terraced houses. Each garden was fenced and ran down to a large drainage ditch. It seemed to be raining and water was filling the drainage ditch. The water was backing up into the gardens because something was blocking the ditch. It started rising up my legs. It was quite hot. I realised this was because hot water was running out of the baths and sinks in the houses. I felt I must get out of the gardens. Not only because of the water, but because of how people might feel if they saw me in their garden. I managed to find a way into a farm yard where I felt relaxed.” Ted F.
When Ted added his own associations to this the dream became fully understandable to him and read like this: I am going through a lot of changes at the moment – the garden. These are to do with allowing myself to have a warm but non sexual relationship with women. I have always been too dragged along by my sexuality in the past. Just a few days before the dream I was in a ‘growth’ group. I had made friends with a woman there, Susan, who I was warm with, but not sexually. The group work required some close physical contact, and I and another man worked with Susan. It seemed to me to go without complications. A while afterwards a woman in the group came to me and with evident emotion, said I had made love publicly to my lover, meaning Susan. I had certainly been physically close to her and had felt at ease, but the viewpoint and feelings of the woman’s accusations, coupled with her threat to expose me to the authority figure in the group, bowled me over. This is the hot water in the dream. The fences are the boundaries people erect between their personal life and what is socially acceptable. For some days, up until understanding the dream, I felt really blocked up emotionally – the blocked drainage ditch. I cut off any friendship toward Susan. When I realised that in the Farmyard – the acceptance of natural feelings without neat little boundaries – I could feel at peace, I was able to allow my natural warmth again.
Idioms: buy the farm; the day of the family farm; sell the farm.
Useful questions and hints:
Is the farmer shown as critical of me or am I in a good relationship with the earthy side of myself?
Do I have any sense of the needs of the ‘animal’ that carries me about each day?
What is the farmer doing, and what do I understand from that?
See – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions – Reptilian Brain
Fasting
To refrain from eating in a dream is to refrain from taking into yourself material opinions, ideas, ways of life. It is to concentrate your attention upon your own personal inner life and its growth. To refrain from acting from your desires, hungers, greed, ambition, sensuousness, and to allow Life to direct these faculties and harmonise your energies and cleanse you of mistakes and sickness. Withdrawal or turning away from natural urges such as hunger or sex. Not taking in what society, the world is offering.
Can symbolise living in a state of purity, rejecting negative thoughts. It could also be a way to allow new ideas. If you have a belief that fasting spiritualises you or cleanses your body and mind, then the dream is probably an examination of this.
Fasting can also be a discipline in which the dreamer has stopped their natural, and sometimes unnatural desire to eat, and can be a way of developing a better relationship with their instincts. Because fasting has the effect of lowering ones emotional and physical energy, and because some form or psychological difficulties such as depression are the massive use of energy, fasting for a week or a fortnight can cause the person to regain their balance emotionally.
It was, and still is, a way of silencing the mind and experiencing how the mind in its crazy thinking can cause anxiety, restlessness and mental breakdowns. The profound silence which is achieved can shown the person that the despair and restlessness they usually experience is the result of misdirection of their enormous energy.
Such fasting was a way to gain personal initiation. Individuals, through prayer, fasting and lonely vigils, sought from their dreams, a vision of their destiny as an individual, and an image to aid a personal link with the Spirit pervading all life.
A Native American dream the following:
Example: At the age of about sixteen a youth went alone to a place there he fasted for sixteen days. At the end of this time he suddenly heard a voice in the sky saying, “Take care of this man and let him end his fast.” Then he saw an old man of great beauty come down from the sky. The old man came to him, and looking at him kindly said, “Have courage, I will take care of your life. It is a fortunate thing for you to have taken me for your master. None of the demons who haunt these countries will have any power to harm you. One day you will see your own hair as white as mine. You will have four children, the first two and last will be males, and the third will be a girl. After that your wife will hold the relation of a sister to you.” As he finished speaking the old man offered him a raw piece of human flesh to eat. When the boy turned his head away in horror, the old man then offered him a piece of bear’s fat, saying, “Eat this then.” after eating it, the old man disappeared, but came again at crucial periods in the person’s life. At manhood he did have four children as described. After his fourth, “a certain infirmity compelled him to continence” and so had a brother and sister relationship wit his wife. He also lived to old age, thus having white hair, and as the eating of the bear fat symbolised, became a gifted hunter with second sight for finding game. The man himself felt that had he eaten the human flesh in the vision, he would have been a warrior instead of a hunter.
Fasting can also indicate a discipline in which the dreamer has stopped their natural, and sometimes unnatural desire to eat, and can be a way of developing a better relationship with their instincts. Because fasting has the effect of lowering one’s emotional and physical energy, and because some form or psychological difficulties such as depression are the massive use of energy, fasting for a week or a fortnight can cause the person to regain their balance emotionally. Fasting for one or two days a week can be healthy and is a way to keep trim.
A test-tube study showed that exposing cancer cells to several cycles of fasting was as effective as chemotherapy in delaying tumor growth and increased the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs on cancer formation. In one study, rats that fasted every other day experienced a delayed rate of aging and lived 83% longer than rats that didn’t fast.
Research shows that inflammation may be involved in the development of chronic conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis (4Trusted Source). Some studies have found that fasting can help decrease levels of inflammation and help promote better health.
One study in which 50 healthy adults showed that intermittent fasting for one month significantly decreased levels of inflammatory markers (5Trusted Source). Another small study discovered the same effect when people fasted for 12 hours a day for one month (6Trusted Source).
After about 8 hours of fasting, the liver will use the last of its glucose reserves. At this point, the body enters into a state called gluconeogenesis, marking the body’s transition into fasting mode. Studies have shown that gluconeogenesis increases the number of calories the body burns. With no carbohydrates coming in, the body creates its own glucose using mainly fat.
Eventually, the body runs out of these energy sources as well. Fasting mode then becomes the more serious starvation mode. At this point, a person’s metabolism slows down, and their body begins burning muscle tissue for energy. Although it is a well-known term in dieting culture, true starvation mode only occurs after several consecutive days or even weeks without food. So, for those breaking their fast after 24 hours, it is generally safe to go without eating for a day unless other health conditions are present. See this excellent video – https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01lxyzc/horizon-20122013-3-eat-fast-and-live-longer It gives full instructions.
I read somewhere that the Islamic festival of Ramadan was started to get the populace ready to fight and defend themselves during the daylight hours. The Islamic fasting is simply delayed eating.
But a straightforward way to fast effectively is to have a breakfast and then do not eat or drink alcohol or milk or caffeine drinks such as tea and coffee until breakfast the next day, which is a 24 hour fast. It is usually suggested the fast is best done for two separate days.
Useful questions and hints:
Am I consciously turning away from the material world and experiences?
If I am trying to delve more fully into my subtle nature, what is my dream commenting on that??
If this is about self-denial, what am I struggling with or against??
Is this about an eating disorder?
See Avoid Being Victims – Processing Dreams – Life’s Little Secrets – Dream Yoga
Fat Person
See obese
Father Dad
General positive: Your father is often the authority figure in your early life, and may represent this influence or power in you as an adult. Your dream father is a link with the patterns of survival behaviour passed on for generations. It was the attitudes of how to cope with social activity or work – the external world. But he is part of your creation.
He therefore also depicts the ability to be productive in the external workaday world. Depending upon what level of relationship you have developed with him, your dream father is the power of creative life in you, the power to do, to create, to transform; the power in you to grow and unfold your potential. It has to be remembered that the dream father is not an image of your external father, but of what you carry of him inside you; what you have managed to develop of a working relationship with the power he represents. So you may, because of difficulties with your external father, be in conflict with your internal father, and so be lacking your full power to transform and create. See Integrating Parent of Ex; Power Dreaming; Family.
The dream father may depict family or social conventions along with physical strength and protectiveness; the will to be and to do, and so your outgoing energies. As such he represent your confidence as you go out the door of your home into the arena of public life. A poor relationship with your external or internal father leaves you somewhat crippled in that area. But by working with your dreams on your relationship with your internal father this can be changed. See: Using Symbols to Change Life Problems; working with dreams.
General negative: Introverted aggression; dominance by fear of other people’s authority; uncaring sexual drive; feelings of not being loved, inability to be creative in the world, in your outer activity; inability to relate well to men. See: archetype of the father; man.
If there are feelings of abandonment then it can feel very emotional. Please see abandoned
Either represents the feelings you have about your father, or the characteristics in your nature that have arisen from this relationship; or can represent an authority figure. Can also stand for a teacher, or person by whom you are much influenced. Or else your own positive, protective qualities. How you relate to the ‘doer’ in you; physical strength and protectiveness; the will to be.
Example: Began to go into the back pain again. Words came about carrying feelings about on my back all these years. Get of my back. It’s my father. I wanted my father to be perfect like God. I wanted a strong, perfect father, not a human being.
Then I saw how I was trying to be the perfect father with my own children, instead of the human me. “It’s too much of a bloody burden being a perfect father.” I could see how this idea of drive to be the perfect father has directed a lot of my relationship with my children. In the early days I hated them at times because they showed me so often how human I was. Recently I still planned things out of that desire instead of letting what I want. Although lately there has been a swing to the human me. Yesterday I took them for a walk instead of a sauna. I do want to take them to a sauna some time, but yesterday I did not have enough cash, and to go would have been out of the perfect drive. Instead we went for a walk.
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.
Dead parent in dream: Either the beginning of independence from parent; repression of the emotions they engendered in us; our emotions regarding our parent’s death; feelings about death. See: dead people.
Example: Dreamt that while talking with my wife I remembered that my son and I had murdered someone years before, and buried the body under a great slab of cement. After the murder the guilt – or rather the fear of being found out – was awful, but as each period of time passed, we gradually managed to lose memory of what we had done. But now I had remembered and felt the anguish of the guilt and fear of discovery. C.R.
When exploring his dream, he says: “I was led to a direct feeling link with my mother as the dead body. I saw, or felt, that when I cut off from her at 5 and attempted independence of my need for her, because of the pain she brought about in me, I had killed her as an inward figure in my life, and buried my feelings of need for her. The cement represented the energy I had used, the decisiveness, to bury her, to get her out on my life. I went on to recognise that killing and burying my mother, or my relationship with my mother, in that way was not in my own best interests. It was really an expression of my own lack of love and awareness of my best survival direction. So imagined I took the bone’s and carefully and reverently buried them, along with my father.”
Example: ‘My father was giving me and another woman some medicine. Something was being forced on us. I started to hit and punch him in the genitals and when he was facing the other way, in the backside. I seemed to be just the right height to do this and I had a very angry feeling that I wanted to hurt him as he had hurt me.’ Audrey V.
Sometimes a dream about our family is a literal statement in symbols, of what we sense is happening in the family.
Example: I was on a train with my family – wife, and two daughters. The train was derailed but nobody was hurt and we got off the train. I was walking in a field near the train. I thought my wife and daughters had got back on the train. Then suddenly another train smashed into the rear of the derailed train making it concertina into a heap. I wasn’t sure if my family were still on the train.’
Roger associated the theme of derailing with a change in direction – the change that was coming about through his children becoming independent. Some months later his wife and daughters left him. Divorce followed.
Example: The movements gradually led to feelings. These expressed a living connection existing between my ancestors and myself. This surprised me because I had years ago gone through the realisations of what I carried from my father and his fathers – the subjugation by church and state. But this was different. It was not that I was still carrying the attitudes and fears, rather that because I dared to step out of dependence and subjugation by authorities, deeper levels of influence of a transpersonal nature were being called out of my body. I experienced the sense of our family having lived for generations under fear – fear of death – fear of what people would do to us if we didn’t conform. My breaking away from such conformity was the activity that was squeezing it out of my body. It felt like changes had occurred in my body to adapt to that way of life.
Inner Father: Many people do not realise that they have an inner father equally as powerful as an external father. 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 father, and they are what makes you the person you are. This is true even if your father was never there for you – you still have all the memories of him not being there for you filed under ‘Father’. 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 father can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.
The inner father can also signify what has been received via genes passed on or ancestral influences. See ancestors: parent integration
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 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
Useful questions and hints:
How is my father portrayed in the dream – dominating – caring – distant?
What does this say about the ‘father’ influences I carry inside me?
Does my dream show what impact on my present life my father has?
You can go back into the dream and become your father, and have a conversation with him.
See Life’s Little Secrets – Being the Person or Thing – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Processing Dreams
Faucet
See: Tap.
Faun
See: Fairy.
Fax Machine
May represent things, ideas, a message, imagery, emerging out of the unconscious; the previously unexpected arising out of one’s contact with other people and society; communication with someone. See: telephone.
Useful questions and hints:
What was received or communicated with the fax?
What part does the fax/communication play in the dream?
Am I thinking or realising things that I have not taken enough notice of?
See Processing Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Using Symbols to Change Life Problems
Fear Frightened
To feel fear in a dream means that you have not yet developed abilities to cope with what is symbolised as causing the fear. One of the wonderful things about dreams if you work with them, is that they gradually show you how to deal with the parts of your nature that need to grow or to be healed. They show how to meet the parts of yourself that need release, or to be understood or healed. If it takes courage to meet these buried or painful parts of yourself, then your dreams will gradually take you on a journey that helps you to unfold your resources of courage. You will be enabled to face your fears, and in fact gain power and instruction from them.
Fear of something is usually an unconscious reaction like the action of pulling your hand away when you touch something hot. But that does not apply to the inner world of dreams, for nothing can actually hurt you in dreams, as they are like the virtual reality of computer games.
Example: I was walking past a large building site which had been excavated for foundations. Rain had filled the excavated pits and a large lake had formed. As I walked past I could see ancient primitive creatures rising out of the water. One of them, a large dinosaur, came toward me. I was scared and ran away. The dinosaur followed and started speaking to me. I couldn’t understand what it said.
I explored this dream and realised that through my internal digging into myself I had uncovered some feelings I had never met consciously before. The dinosaur speaking, I understood as my awareness of instinctive feelings, such as the anxiety, which I had suffered from a lot, and about the anger I felt toward my step children for not appreciating the work I was putting into building them a home and working to provide. Seeing these things helped me understand what was behind my difficult feelings and fears. For instance, I saw that fear is fundamental to all human experience, and I needed to meet it and help it to enter into the modern world instead of being repressed and remain in a primitive state where people cannot cope with it.
See Dreams are Like a Computer Game – Inner World – Nothing Can Hurt You in Your Dreams
See: facing fear; Avoid Being Victims; Martial Art of the Mind; emotions and mood; autonomous complex; wolf; pre-menstrual tension; processing dreams; Example under falling; Example under night journey – archetypes; Archetypes of Fear.
Feast
See: Food.
Feather
This may associate with the bird from which it came. It would therefore be different if it were a chicken feather or an eagle feather. In which case look up the bird of origin. In general however, a feather suggests a thought, an aspiration or ideal. Or an incrimination, white feather. Sometimes it is a symbol of achievement as a feather in your cap, or as used by Indian chiefs to represent courageous deeds or help given to the tribe. But a feather may also suggest something that is moved by every tiny puff of wind, every passing change – a feather blowing in the wind. See Birds; Eagle
In many cultures feathers represent the quality or beauty of the bird from which they come. So an eagle feather would represent strength, pride, fierce protectiveness, spiritual insight etc.; a peacock might represent beauty, self aggrandisement. So a feather might mean you have achieved the quality it depicts. In India they symbolise spiritual awareness; a black feather might depict the unconscious, or ability to explore it; a white feather in the past was associated with cowardice, but might also represent purity and wider awareness. Feathers also represent the ability to fly, to aspire, to lift up ones life from beliefs or fears that limit you; something easily blown by the wind – so non resistance, insubstantial.
White feather: During the two world wars, white feathers were given to men suggesting they were cowards because they were not fighting in the war. See colours for possible meanings for other colours.
In Britain during the First World War it was often given to men out of uniform by women to shame them publicly into signing up. In the United States armed forces, however, it is used to signify extraordinary bravery and excellence in combat marksmanship
The meaning obviously depends upon how the feather or feathers appear in the dream. Other associations might be suggested by the way feather is used in common language.
The wearing of feathers – other than in ladies hats – lets others know what qualities you have, what skills you have, or what remarkable deeds you have done. So the feathers of an American Indian brave would have a similar significance.
Because the peacock could shed all its beautiful feathers and then grow them again, early Christians saw it as a symbol of resurrection and immortality.
Example: Margaret dreamt there was a whole lot of downy little feathers falling from the sky and covering her, like snow. The sky was full of them. She had been watching a baby eagle very high up in tree tops flying from tree to tree. She felt it was looking for it’s mother/ parents. Then a man had caught the baby eagle by a string around it’s leg and Margaret was appalled and said to him, ‘You can’t do that. You must let it go.’ Then the feathers started to fall and Margaret felt that any moment now the irate parent eagles would arrive. They didn’t but she was with her back to a wall sheltering as best she could.
While we explored Margaret’s feelings and memories connected with the dream symbols, she told me that her man friend prodded an old childhood pain which he didn’t know about. Margaret and her son had been with him and his mother for a good weekend camping. She told her son he could go play in the park while they packed the car and they would pick him up on the way out. They were all in the car and drove to where the son was and called him, he saw them and started to run towards them and then the man friend drove the car forward as if to make out they were leaving him behind. Margaret burst with pain and anger.
Example: I had a strong fantasy of the human head that had been cut off coming alive. It was me and what I had done to myself, torn my body and head apart trying to find a solution to my pain. Then I saw flesh on its cheeks. Then it was like a native mask made of various things, and feathers. The feathers predominated in the fantasy. The mask kept breaking up, leaving only a few feathers, as if it or I were all nothing. I remember saying – “There is not even a mask, it’s just a few feathers!”
With enormous certainty I realised that there was no cure for my sickness and I had struggled in vain. It was a tremendous blow – and I gave up. I mean I gave up hope, everything, and simple lay there and my whole body and mind became still.
Then I had a vision of one feather tied to a twig by piece of wool, blowing in the wind – a feather blowing in the wind. This was very stable and persistent in the fantasy. Everything resolved back to the feather blowing in the wind. It seemed like a Red Indian symbol, perhaps tied to the suspended body of the dead, but I could not understand.
Then it came to me that I had to listen in deep stillness – not think, not seek to understand, not struggle, just listen. My whole being entered into silence, gently listening as one might listen to the rain falling on a lake. Then suddenly it was known – the feather blowing in the wind – the sound of one hand clapping – the essence of human existence. Open against the sky – emptiness – enormity. I was healed.
Feather blowing in the wind: Suggests the caprices of fate; the strange contradiction of human life with its helplessness, and yet at the same time the wind and space the feather moves in suggests the infinity of the cosmos which is fundamental to our existence.
Feathers flying or falling: Possibly refers to a fight situation – feathers were flying.
Growing new feathers: Becoming a new person; undergoing great personal change; growth; in the past this was seen as a sign of resurrection or new birth.
Idioms: ‘feather in ones cap’; light as a feather; feather blowing in the wind; feather bed; feather ones own nest; birds of a feather flock together.
Useful questions and hints:
What do I feel about this feather and what does it suggest to me?
Do I connect this to a special talent or skill in my dream?
Does it indicate an achievement, as in ‘feather in my cap’?
Am I feeling blown about like a feather in the wind?
See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams; Questions; Life’s Little Secrets
Fee
The price to be paid. For instance, the price of maturity is greater responsibility. Or the price we have to pay for not living in-harmony with our innate nature is sickness or unhappiness. There is a Spanish saying, Take what you want in life, and pay for it. The fee can therefore symbolise what you will have to pay for your desires, aims and activities. See: Fare; Ticket.
Feet Foot
Your basic psychological support system, therefore the attitudes and ideals you use to get around in the world. Feet are also your ability to balance. Where you place your feet in the dream can also indicate whether you feel secure in your present life situation, or whether you are finding conditions, ‘footholds’, to advance or make changes.
In the bible it says, “The feet are symbols of desire. They must be bare: drawn out of everything temporal and mortal.” This suggests that our feet can represent our desire or motivation, and to take our shoes off means we are willing to drop our own purpose and follow the urge from our core instead of desires for things that pass away. The feet may therefore indicate your involvement in all things physical, and all the beliefs and viewpoints that are dependent upon it. (The Bible can be seen as collected folk wisdom that is venerated, and so can be disconnected with any religious organisation).
To dream of feet might also suggest your sensitivity to your present life situation, whether it is rough going or not.
Our feet can sometimes be linked with roots, in that we stand upon the earth with them. As such they are the way the lowest or most primitive in us is transformed, just as roots lift up earth in the process of transforming it into living cells.
As the idioms below suggest, we mention feet a lot in our everyday language to indicate attitudes, motivation or lack of it, and how well or badly we are coping in life and relationships.
Barefooted; To be in contact with reality, your real life situation. Might also suggest rough going if walking is hard. Of course, in some cultures it could mean poverty.
Loss of foot or feet: Incapacitated in making moves, or in being independent or self-motivated; in the Oneirocritica, c.AD 350, it says that to lose ones feet points to a barrier in regard to a planned journey.
Muddy feet: This suggests that you are mired in attitudes that are very material or very practical and have lost sight of your other dimension of being.
Washing feet: Is not only a sign of caring for yourself or being cared for, but is also a statement offering you a new life that is free of the worries and fears of the everyday physical world.
Example: When I asked how it could be possible that such love could be a part of my life I wept as I received the response. It was that we must learn to wash somebody’s feet. I felt this very deeply. I saw that it wasn’t simply a case of taking a flannel, a piece of soap and washing off the dirt from someone’s feet. That is not what it is about. That is not what it’s supposed to be.
To touch such love is painful and I was weeping as if in agony. What is it to wash somebody’s feet? I don’t understand. I am listening but I don’t understand. I feel it but I cannot grasp clearly what is meant.
Then I was told that the person who washes somebody’s feet is the servant. You have to realise, first of all, that you are a servant. You are nothing more. You are not proud, you are not above somebody else. You are a simple servant of life. And yet you are life – that grand mystery of life. Like the grass, life can be trodden under foot. You have to realise that before you can really touch anybody with that great love.
Idioms: back on your feet; caught flatfooted; cold feet; drag your feet; fancy footwork; feet of clay; footloose; grass grow under; itchy feet; jump in with both feet; heavy foot; land on your feet; put my foot down; put your foot in it; pussy-foot around; put your best foot forward; put your foot in your mouth; set foot in; shoot yourself in the foot; sweep you off your feet; take a load of your feet; two left feet.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Do any of the idioms suit the situation in the dream – if so what does it suggest?
If my foot or feet are damaged, in what way is my ability to progress or ‘stand’ in waking life difficult?
Am I in good or difficult ‘standing’ in my life – if difficult can I imagine changing it?
See Associations Working With; Inner World; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Fellowship
Unity between varying parts of yourself such as intellect, emotions, senses, sex. For often our reason does not agree with our passions, and our emotions lead us differently to our spirit.
Female
A female in dreams often represents the more feeling, intuitive, irrational part of self. If it is someone you know, she probably symbolises your opinion and feelings about her, or what she has led you to feel. See: Girl; Woman.
But a female is not simply a human being, but can be the very essence of the female principle, merging with the male principle. So the dream female holds in it all that experience, all those patterns of behaviour, whether of the mother wolf with her cubs, or the eagle rearing its young. To touch such enormous wealth of experience is to be penetrated by the holy; something so beyond the limitations of our own small personality enters us and leaves its imprint.
Example: I had the experience of finding myself sinking deep beyond my personality, my conscious self, and facing enormous forces or beings I had never been aware of. It started with a feeling of dying, and after experiencing that I felt the presence of my dead mother. I saw her face as a young woman, my mother. But then with fascination I saw her face was one face amongst countless others. I began to realise that I was confronting something difficult to explain, something that was a reality at a level or a dimension I had not met or experienced before. It was a huge being which I began to see was capable of taking in and holding every mothers experience and person, and was itself a complete synthesis of all mothers, in fact She was The Mother of everything. It was difficult for me as a human being to grasp its magnificence. I realised in my own small way why people in every culture kneel before the images of this Mother. In some wonderful way She was my mother and yet behind and working through my mother was The Female. I saw too that every woman I had loved or dreamed of was a meeting with this Great Mother. Then, because I saw and felt in the presence of this Figure, hurts I had done to the nature of women, I wept and asked forgiveness. I was shown that it wasn’t what I had done to any woman, but the hurt I had given to the nature of womanhood, with its great drives and energies that make women want a child and love from a man. Then in forgiveness She took me into herself and I felt and still feel AWE.
“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female: . . . then you will enter [the kingdom].” Quoted from The Gnostic Gospel of Apostle Thomas
Fence Barrier
A barrier. Difficulty in yourself. It is either something which bars your progress or expression, or is used as a protection from things outside yourself, or from things getting at you. If you are sitting on the fence, it shows you attempting to avoid decision or action.
In many dreams a fence or wall also suggests social barriers, the attitudes and feelings people express to keep others at a distance, to keep a separation between those of different social, religious or economic class. This sort of fence may also depict tension or conflict, as was expressed by the Berlin wall between two opposing powers. It can indicate the natural barrier we have separating our personality, our awake self, and the huge forces that keep us alive and stand behind our existence. See The Tree of Life – The Spine
The fence often depicts our fear, which is an enormous barrier to progress in our life, also our sense of social barriers, class barriers, or the attitudes we use to segregate the sexes, races or classes in work, opportunity or relationship. It can represent the need for privacy; territorial feelings; the social rules we use to give each other respect, or the de-fences we erect to ward off what we fear as danger of hurt.
Also our boundaries or fears in relationship or society which might prevent us daring to express ourselves or be creative.
Stretched wire mesh fence: May represent the tension or stress that is holding one, or trapping one in anxiety – see third example. See: wall.
In the first example the fence depicts the social boundaries we feel in approaching each other, especially if there is a class, wealth or authority difference. In the second dream, Arthur relates to the fence as a protection, in just the same way one might if a feared bull were loose in a field. In this case the fence is used to depict the things we do to avoid what frightens or threatens us.
Example: ‘I saw that we had got into a fenced off area where the gentry landowners parked their cars while they went shooting. I could see the landowner in his car beyond the fence, looking angry that I was in his property. I thought I would break through the fence with the elephant I was riding, but then saw a low area which the elephant easily stepped over.’ Arthur P.
Example: I was on a road and noticed that a magnificent elephant had appeared. It had enormous tusks and ears, the latter being powdered with blue dust and adding tremendously to its impact. As it was coming in my direction I was frightened and began to run. I ran off the road, over a fence into a field. I thought the elephant would be stopped by the fence. It wasn’t. It walked straight through it after me. Arthur P.
Example: We have then been caught and are in a sort of prisoner of war camp. At some point I see my sister and her boyfriend -Tony – going in and out of the camp through the wire fence. Tony has cut a slit in the wire and bent it back on either side so that they can slip in and out as they choose. Although they are seen nobody actually seems to be able to stop them. They ignore the words as if they aren’t directed at them (like you can’t go out, or stop). Louise W.
Louise comments on the dream, saying ‘One of the things I found when working on the dream was that when I was the wire fence I was stress itself. An image that went with it was that I was spread and stretched over the fence.’
Example: I dreamt last night that a black Spanish fighting bull charged me. I climbed a high wire mesh fence, like that surrounding tennis courts. There I was safe, as the Bull charged again. It charged people. I came down from the fence trying to help divert the bull’s destructiveness.
Here the dreamer is meeting sexual feelings that he had always avoided in the past and still feels threatened by. As the dream shows, he tries to avoid facing these feelings, but in the end has to deal with them because they had been destructive in his life.
Idioms: Rush one’s fences; wrong side of the fence; sit on the fence.
Useful Questions and Hints:
How is this fence presented in the dream, and how am I relating to it?
Am I ‘sitting on the fence’ about a decision or to avoid something?
Is this fence a barrier or protection against something getting at me, or keeping me away from a situation?
Do I feel offended about something, as in someone ‘crossed the line’?
See Secrets of Power Dreaming – Associations Working With – Habits