Posts Tagged ‘dream analysis’

I

Wherever the word ‘I’ appears in your dreams, there may be an important description attached to it. For instance you may be saying ‘I wanted to climb the tree’. Or ‘I felt frightened’. Any such statements give direct information about what the underlying feelings or themes of the dream are, and should be noted. See: Want.

Ice

Being cold emotionally or sexually. It depicts what is meant by the term cold shoulder, where we shut off any display of warmth or compassion. It also therefore shows the dreamer as having ‘frozen assets’ in a personal sense. But often it means that the dreamer has shut off a part of themselves in a sort of cold storage – a freezer. Maybe suggests frigidity. Or the congealing, deadening effect of ice or snow on the intellect when it operates on its own without being related to ones feelings or to an active life. See: Cold; Glacier.

Are you frozen in beliefs you cannot or shouldn’t do what you really feel under the ice?

Using ice cubes could be a way of slowing down ones hot passions or calming ones anxieties that burn in you, a way of cooling down or keeping cool.

Body locked in ice, perhaps dead: Deadening of all our feeling reactions and enjoyment or motivation.

A hole in the ice: Is the ability to see the eternal, the cosmic ocean of Life, through the hole. This whole is a subtle play on the hole in self one can look through to the eternal. It is a hole made by melting ones past and pain etc frozen in the unconscious. But the hole also means that as one’s past problems melt, a wholeness occurs through which one is aware of the ocean of cosmic Life flowing through one.

Icicle: Frozen male sexual feelings.

Iceberg: Similar to ice, but may suggest frozen potential. It is being aware of aspects of yourself remaining unconscious or frozen in unconsciousness.

Parking place filled with ice and snow: It suggests that you are finding it difficult to find your place in life because you have not faced or released you talents, fears or truamas, because they are still frozen in being unconscious. Maybe your attitudes are frozen and inflexible and so you cannot access your potential.

Thawing ice: Can suggest a change in the way you feel – a cold attitude towards warmth. This could also be a release of emotions and old fears and love.

Thin ice: An uncertain situation. You are doing something that you should be aware of and it will not support you in what you are doing. Your attitudes and principles you are living by are not based upon what will support you.

 Example: I am visiting a country, probably Iceland. It’s nearing the spring there. I must walk across the ice floor. It’s dangerous. If I step on the wrong part, I’ll slip in. Guards come with me to hold on to me and point the way. They place cardboards and pillows when I should step. I tell them, “My balance isn’t good because of my ankles.” Off we go. I nearly fall in several times. We get to the side where I sit in a chair at a table. It is sitting on the ice!

The dream seems to be a play on the saying walking on thin ice.

 Example: There’s solid ice and snow all around. Everything is solid white. I’m blinded by the white ice and snow, I feel cold, I’m shivering and I think I’m close to death. Then all of a sudden a huge hand reaches out and grabs me. I recognize the hand. I stare at it for a few minutes. Then I grab the hand. I recognize the hand as the man I have just started to date. What does this dream mean? I’m confused about my relationship with this man, confused about my feelings.

The dream illustrates this shift of temperature and also the conflict and death of love or feelings that can be associated with coldness. But the shift in the woman’s feelings when she contacts a man.

 

Idioms: Break the ice; cut no ice; put on ice; tread on thin ice. See: cold.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Have I ever given anyone the cold shoulder or acted coldly?

What aspect of ice was my dream showing?

Could I in any way thaw the situation?

See Secrets of Power Dreaming – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Life’s Little Secrets – Allowing the Spontaneous

Iceberg

Usually the same as cold, or ice, namely that you may be holding back, freezing, your feelings about something. Or else you may have shut down on much of your sensitivity in life, perhaps to deal with loss, pain or disappointment. Such a huge block of ice may mean that an enormous amount of your energy and creativity is frozen along with your feelings.

The iceberg is often used in literature, and sometimes in dreams, as a symbol of consciousness. A little of your being you are aware of, like the ice above the surface. But the enormous bulk of self is invisible to view; beneath consciousness. See: Glacier

Icicle

Repressed sexuality.

Idiot

Lacking control of reason. Without development of logical mind. It may mean you are doing something stupid. Sometimes it represent intuitive knowledge or insight. If this is so you will probably feel the wisdom of the person in the dream. See: Madness; archetype of the fool.

In some dreams a character who is either mentally impaired, or actually insane may confront you. There are several possible meanings. Firstly he or she can represent parts of your emotional and mental development that have been held back, either through trauma or lack or stimulus. Another possible meaning is that there are areas of you that have not recovered from childhood hurts, and these are often presented as insane because they are not integrated with the rest of your personality. And occasionally the apparently mad person has a great deal of wisdom, and their madness is simply because they do not comply with reason. See: archetype of the fool-clown-trickster.

Example: Two of the dogs – perfectly harmless and friendly when not hunting, were coming close to me and trying to lick me. They had huge mouths. I got very angry with one man, a farmer type, who I thought had been careless in the way he was urging the dogs to hunt children. I swore at him in public, calling him something like a ‘fucking idiot’. There was a large public gathering and I wondered what the public would think of me swearing.

Example: Ethan says to me, “My daughter had a dream about a jury. What can it mean?” I say, “You idiot! She is the jury and the judge!” He says, “But what does it mean?” “It means,” I speak slowly and witheringly, “that she is feeling guilt. She is sitting in judgement of herself.” He sits back and looks sad and guilty. He’s aware that he’s partially at fault. Barb Sanders

Example: The feelings of embarrassment became very strong. I had the image of a hidden part of a house being opened and the idiot child being brought out from the house, to the enormous embarrassment of the family. I had to talk to myself saying – Brian, this is not any fault of your own. It came about because of the circumstances of your birth and how your mother felt about it. Your mother constantly looked for signs of strangeness in you. All her sister’s gave birth to such big heavy babies, so she felt unconsciously you were odd. But people accept such things now. So there is no need to carry this sense of shame any more. People forgive so much.

But I feel like I am constantly protecting my slightly malformed baby. All day and every day I am protecting my internal baby – and I feel something similar for young son’s vulnerable aspects. Talking to myself again I say – “It sounds like you are protecting your idiot son. You don’t need to be ashamed.” Nevertheless I acknowledge that for years I have felt that I am not a normal person. Am I okay. I even asked my wife yesterday if I was okay as a husband – what sort of husband am I? She never really answered my question. She never does. I don’t know why. She will never acknowledge it. I think my mother always felt I wasn’t quite right, as if there was something to be afraid of. In the dream I had about her I say to her, look mum it’s okay. She collapses and I have to pick her up. There is always the question – Have I got a weak body? Have I got a weak mind? What is the problem? Have I got some hidden deficiency or illness that I am not aware of? She must have carried the guilt of not producing a ‘normal’ i.e. big baby for years. Right until she saw me grow up. I feel she carried it right on until I was producing kids. Then she dropped it.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Am I attacked or haunted by an idiot – if so can I offer it love and healing?

What feelings and thought have I harboured or been told about being an idiot?

How do I react when face by an obvioiusly backward or idiot person?

See Inner World – Summing Up – Avoid Being Victims – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Idol

Some material thing. money, women, work, pleasure, that directs your energy and actions. Something, or somebody you worship. False basis from which to direct life.

Igloo

A cold and perhaps unloving home environment. Also the womb; frigidity; a sense of uncaring parental influence. See: ice.

An igloo could also suggest a safe and warmth of a protection against the cold; a home midst the cold world.

Or a place of shamanistic initiation wherein through trials you find who you are.

 Example: A small child sat on the ground outside a small cave like igloo, with a few  rocks in the foreground – and a feeling of barren hard surroundings and lines would slowly come down from the top of this scene like a television on the  blink. and as I watched this scene I knew that one of the lines would mean the end for the child. It was like Russian roulette. The tension and fear increased  as more lines came down.

Example: I want to be true to me. I want to live apart from the external voices that pull at me. I want to nurture my core. This is my act of inner will: the seed of my life that sprouts in the compost of despair. I seek my Big Dream. I seek to meet the eternal ones. I seek the vision that will guide my life. Had I been an Eskimo, I might have been dragged on the shaman’s sled to a secluded igloo where I would be left to starve and freeze for a month. There I might experience a symbolic death, receive a guiding vision for my life and open a permanent channel for inspiration.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do I feel trapped in a cold environment, or am I the cold one?

What am I feeling in connection with the igloo?

Am I seeking to find great changes in my life?

See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Summing Up – Jesse Watkins Enlightenment – Methods of Awakening

 

Ill Illness

Dreaming of illness is often a way of showing you that you have painful feelings or feelings of anger or resentment which are held within that need to be attended to. Often these feelings were experienced and not fully felt at an earlier period of your life, and now need to be healed or released. At the very least they need understanding. Do ask yourself though, if this is the way you get love, by being ill.

Sometimes however, dreams about illness show the early signs of breakdown in your body. If you are having worrying dreams, have a check-up with your doctor. Tests have shown that men with serious illness have often dreamt about death, and women with such illnesses have dreamt about breakup and separation.

Occasionally illness depicts the way we attempt to get love or attention – by being ill; sometimes relates to our actual physical body, but quite rarely; also may show our intuitions about the physical condition of someone else.

If there is any feeling of illness connected with that part of the body, if there is anything to be ashamed of, if there is anything hidden, then by bringing yourself back to the whole it will be revealed and healed. Life will touch it and lift it out of you. We need to be aware of the feelings of defeat and of failure that feedback into our system and are often causes of illness.

Even our thoughts that our body or part of it is ill can be an awful thing if held onto for some time. For our body is as sensitive as any animal, and our thoughts can cling and destroy. We need to say sorry to our body for making it feel unclean or sick. Open it to the life that flows through you and it will clear away those influences.

Strangely, for both the Africans and Artemidorus, the dreams of illness and death signified the opposite, recovery. I believe this was to give them a release from fear of illness. The same is employed in many so called dream interpretation books, they give not a meaning of a dream, but good or bad luck suggestions. See: infection; body; mental illness.

 Example: I can’t ask for what? Love? I can’t ask for love so I killed myself to get it. I could see a lot of truth in this. How I felt I couldn’t go and get a girl, but would act as if I were sick or miserable to get love, how perhaps much of my illness in the past was a desperate plea for love.

Example: Yes, kaleidoscopic patterns were moving and changing faster, speeding up and getting lighter. First of all just colour, movement and intensity, then it burst into a direct awareness of energy in my being vibrating faster and faster. I could feel it moving each side of my spine, actually vibrating. It got more and more intense until suddenly it felt like the energy had cleared all its pathways and was vibrating at tremendous speed without barriers.

What does it do? What can be done with it? I could be a lot more frightened and self-destructive with that amount of energy. If I used my energy toward creativity and life enhancement, then that’s what the energy would do. It could heal or cause illness, give peace or restlessness, wisdom or folly. It would fill whatever one put before it

In fact it cleared so much pain, darkness and anxiety out of my soul, I felt a peaceful joy shining from me and obstructed by the anxieties I have felt of late. It brought clearness, calm confidence, open warmth.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Did your dream define an illness or just that there was an illness?

If you are worried that you might be ill see a doctor.

Can I see that my fears of illness are usually simply fears that do me no good?

See Norman Cousins – Life’s Little Secrets – Avoid Being Victims – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

 

Illusion

Wrong idea, false opinion, deception, wrong conclusion.

Immaculate Conception

The dream of becoming pregnant from a light, a glowing bolt, or a spirit, often occurs. This shows you being in a state of mind in which you have dropped rigid ideas, or ‘preconceptions’ and been open to the mystery of life. This is in fact your potential, and the pregnancy is the process of giving birth to a new type of awareness or approach to life. Sometimes we deny or neglect the new child and it miscarries or passes away. But such a child is often miraculously tenacious.

The conception is immaculate, or virginal, because your state of mind is without pre-conceptions. See: conception; pregnancy.

When you manage to let go of what you think God or Life is, what you believe yourself to be, or what you are convinced is so about yourself and the world, then you are ready to receive something new.  Then, that divine conception can take place in you that enables that which exists beyond the barriers and boundaries of your own ego to gain a foothold in you.  Then you become pregnant with new life and eventually give birth to the More of yourself in the way you live and act. This conception and the following birth will become known to you in some way.  It will be felt, or maybe shown to you in a dream.

Deep within us, when we have opened to Life as a virgin, in the cellar or cave of our unconscious, among the beasts of our instincts, and physical energies, the New Life tentatively begins its growth to consciousness, to birth. The star and the stable are the highest and the lowest in us uniting in this wonderful task.

 Example: I am a male and dreamt I was lying in a cellar. I was myself, yet at the same time, I was my wife and another woman I loved. I was in labour, and after a time the baby was born. It was a boy, a wonderful child. The membrane covered part of its face and I pulled it away. The baby then began to breathe, and looked about, fully conscious and very alert. Then, to my wonder, it spoke the name of Jesus, and said, ‘It is gone’.

When asked what was gone, the beautiful baby replied, “The other ego, where has it gone?” I seemed to know exactly what it meant. The baby had been part of the cosmic awareness, of universal consciousness, and was now but a babe; and I said, “The cosmic still exists within you, to become known as you grow”. I then carried the baby from the cellar upstairs, and knew it to be a holy and wonderful child.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Did the baby speak soon as it was born?

Have you prepared the way for this to happen?

Are you aware that a new phase of your life has begun?

See The Inner Path of Christ – Summing Up – Entering the Silence – Virgin

 

 

Immersed Immersion

See: Baptism, or Earth, depending upon what you are immersed in.

Impotence

Often an expression of anxiety of some sort. In which case it will help to clearly define what triggers the anxious feelings. It could be fear of sexual incapacity. A sense of lost of manhood or womanhood, masculinity or femininity. Feeling of being weak, unable to express yourself, or to impress others with feelings or ideas.

Imprisoned Handcuffs

You can be imprisoned by an idea, or a fear, or even a moral code. See if you can discover what it is you are doing to hold yourself back.

In attempting to develop a relationship, we may be trapped by feelings of dependence upon what our parents want, or wanted, us to do or be. If you fear failure, you may not be meeting the challenge of the new, so be imprisoned by the fear. Such feelings as being an outsider, unwanted, resentful, can also imprison us in particular situations.

We are often imprisoned by a state of mind, by a fear, or by ignorance. In attempting to develop a relationship, we may be trapped by feelings of dependence upon what our parents want us to do. If we fear failure, we will not meet the challenge of the new, so be imprisoned by the fear. Such feelings as being an outsider, unwanted, resentful, can also imprison us in particular situations.

But fear of death is a number one form of imprisonment, and feelings that your body is you is just as high on the list. See imprisoned by my body. Also cage or cell; escape; trapped.

Handcuffs: These are usually seen in crime films or sex scenes, so may in some way depict either your desire to be made ineffective physically or feeling it is happening to you against your will, see if you can find the feeling of being made ineffective in daily life. If you are handcuffed with hands in front of your body, you are still in a position to be very dangerous if you care to – a quick bang on the throat can down anyone. If your hands are cuffed behind you – it doesn’t matter in dreams because it is your own feelings that create the dream image of being made a captive. So, start feeling like you are in charge of your emotions and nothing can keep you handcuffed. See Secrets of Power Dreaming

 Useful Questions and Hints:

In what way do you feel restricted or frustrated?

Have you ever found a way out of those feelings?

What does your dream tell you about imprisonment?

See Prison – Avoid Being Victims – Life’s Little Secrets – Edgar Cayce

Inarticulate

Feeling a lack of power or authority when confronted by others. Difficulty in expressing yourself, or in defining ideas. Fear of saying something stupid, or being thought a fool for your opinions. Indecision, conflicting ideas, perhaps arising from ridicule, criticism or punishment during your early years. Sometimes a result of conflicting ideas or urges.

Because we are a flow of energy, and that energy can be expressed as movement, sex, hunger, emotion, self expression through our voice, intellectual insights and cosmic consciousness, we can be blocked in the way our energy is expressed. Being inarticulate is a form of blockage. The blockage can be caused by such an enormous amount of causes, but there is a way of letting your energy flow in your voice. Try the method outlined here Using the Voice

 Useful Questions and Hints:

Have you ever had insights into what causes your difficulty?

Has there ever been times when all restrictions fell away?

Can you break through by expressing excitement as in the technique of the voice?

See Norman Cousins – Arm Circling Meditation – Life’s Little Secrets – Methods of Awakening

Incense

An atmosphere you may be spreading by the way you think or feel. It can indicate the power of prayer, of meditation, invocation and loving, devotional thoughts sent to the highest in you. So can be seen as a power in you that is being used.

Incense burning in many cultures, including Western Christianity (Hindus, Buddhists) is tied to purification and sending prayers up to Creator/God on the smoke. smoke arising from incense or joss sticks is connected with thoughts or pleas rising from people to deity, and as a form of cleansing, in many cultures. This pot for burning incense is to cleanse and raise the vibrations of the church.

Many people waft the incense over them as a sign of cleansing. This probably is a form of autosuggestion, for movement can represent an intention. It the case of lighting incense or using its smoke as a cleansing, it is the intention that is the great mover or cleanser. If the person can consciously feel the intention the movement is not necessary.

In India the ash from incense or joss sticks in temples is sometimes seen as holy and as having special powers of healing or prosperity, perhaps in a spiritual fashion. This ash carries the influence of the guru into ones life, and at the same time reminds one that physical life ends in such dust.

In the East the incense in the past was probably burning leaves of marijuana, and so there was an actual power to shift consciousness.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

What did you feel about the incense?

Did it influence you in nay way?

Was it used to create an atmosphere of for healing?

See ASC’s – Magical Dream Machine – Processing Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming

Incest

Usually reappearance of infantile urges which have not yet developed, due to a fear or guilt, into more expansive expressions of sexuality. If these urges can be accepted in the dream, they usually begin to mature into adult sexuality.

Such dreams very seldom refer to physical incest, but to the desires we carry from infancy to possess or be in control of the love and body of our parents. As a baby we have a sense that nothing exists outside of ourselves – therefore everything should obey our desires. That it does not – that parents do other than we need of them is a shock that is a part of maturing.

Our infant emotions, uncensored by social rules and self consciousness, are enormously powerful, and wherever unsatisfied or unresolved are stored unconsciously. If we are to integrate the potential energy locked in these areas, we must meet some of the incestuous desires and transform them into adult love. Also from the child’s view it is at one with its mother and father, and has no sense of separation from them. This changes as it begins to become independent from its mothers influence. Then there is a longing to be one with the mother again, a longing for its lost world.

What is normal or approved in one culture is generally widely endorsed within it, but similar deeds may be seen differently in a second culture. But incest taboos seem to exist in every culture. The fact that taboos against incest, which develop naturally in a birth-family situation, may be absent in the stepfamily. Experts say that even if no one intends to behave in a seductive fashion, there is a possibility of sexual attraction between teenagers and their stepparents or step-siblings. Such feelings can be very threatening, especially to youngsters, and parents should be aware of this hazard. Such attractions may call for counselling.

However, we see from the numbers of incest between fathers and mothers and their children, that this is a huge problem in some families. A woman in a therapy group boasted about how she encouraged sex between her young son and herself. So it is not simply a problem between fathers and daughters.

“Sexual abuse is one of the most devastating forms of child abuse. Studies show that the majority of the offenders are trusted family members. Incest often goes unreported because its victims are warned not to tell, or if they tell they are not believed. Experts. define sexual abuse as not just forced sexual intercourse but “any sexual activity or touching that the perpetrators try to keep secret.

Whether the. child molester is a stranger or a family member, it’s important that a concerned adult listen closely to what a child may be trying to say about his or her abuser. Parents should focus on their child’s need and concerns, and they should remember that reacting hysterically can often be more upsetting to a child than the incident itself; but react they must, for the abuse has to be stopped.” Quoted from ABC’s of the Human Mind published by Readers Digest.

 Example: Presents the case of a 25-yr-old woman who was sexually abused as a child and had severe amnesia for the abuse. The case exemplifies the connection between intensity of amnesia and the event of early sexual abuse. It illustrates some of the long-term effects of untreated sexual reconstructing and reintegrating the traumatic memories of incest and their associated effects. In order to help the S forget and let go of trauma, a narrative was woven around the structure created by recovered memory fragments, and from such material as dissociative behavior, dreams, repetitions in life of patterns related to abuse, and transference. After 8 months of treatment, the S’s drinking, depression, and nightmares decreased significantly.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Is my dream of sex with a parent enjoyable or traumatic?

Does the dream and its realisations shock and disturb me?

Are their symbols like sex with and old man or woman in the dream?

See Techniques for Working your Dreams – Martial Art of the Mind – Life’s Little Secrets