Posts Tagged ‘dream analysis’
Ledge
Depending on what you feel in the dream, the ledge can show feelings or insecurity, risk or danger, as when you are balancing on a ledge and not feeling safe. Or it can be a place of safety or refuge as when you escape from something to the ledge, or find support there after a difficult climb or fall.
If you are standing or sitting on the ledge it suggests an insecure or precarious situation, even though it may give a wider or ‘bird’s eye’ view of things. It can also suggest you are at a place in your life where something that previously was unknown or unfelt, is now available or accessible. There are often feelings of fear or of falling in such dreams. The ledge can represent a difficult situation in your life.
Meeting someone or being with someone on the ledge shows a relationship that is difficult to avoid.
Example: I had a dream the other night about a cat upon a Tomb, and to pass this poor bedraggled cat you didn’t get much room. You had to walk a narrow ledge high up on a wall and if you looked on either side, you knew that you would fall. I crouched right down with head on knees and grasped a drainpipe tight. I knew right then that I was safe and shouted loud with fright. With shivering fear I called and called but no one seemed to hear. I rubbed my eyes and sat up tall I was so pleased to see there was no Tomb, no ledge at all…. just Moonlight on the bedroom wall.
Example: Dreamt I was sitting high up on the outside ledge of a building. I held some small object in my hand.
The ledge represents the precarious position you are now in. The past few weeks have been very difficult for you. You begin to feel this period is leaving you. The thing you held was the symbol of wholeness, or the whole. Leaving the ledge means leaving the precarious situation you have been in.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Did I feel fear or difficulty being on the ledge?
Was I able to have a good view of things?
Was I climbing and the ledge was a higher point I climb to?
See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Context/Theme
Leech Leeches
Something or somebody that is surreptitiously draining your energy. The leech might also, because of its past use in medicine, have the association with a healing process, In this case it might be showing the draining away of ‘bad blood’ bad feelings. See: Blood.
Our energy can be leeched away by emotional conflicts, or mishandling our own major energy expressions – unloving sex, emotions tied up with love, conflict over decisions, extreme worry about our children, consuming alcohol, chasing after fantasies, spiritual quests that lead nowhere.
Example: I realized I had been unkind to my dog by trapping it with the creatures, putting myself first, and felt guilty; I went back to my dog, which was on the verge of death from all the bites it had incurred. Somehow, the “wasps” had transformed into leech-like animals that were sucking out his blood; as I brushed them off, his hair fell off, revealing bloody naked skin underneath. Also, weirdly enough, he had leeches on his penis, which was engorged and sore and resembled my own penis.
Example: The winds kick up. An object that looks like a string green bean lands on my arm with a slap. It sticks on my right arm and begins the damaging process. It is like a leech. Henry’s wife grabs at it and pulls it off. It leaves a red open wound. She is relieved it was taken off quickly enough so that only minimal damage was done. She had saved my life.
Example: Let us not condone this way of life that sees us as merely statistics and units to be moved by advertising and other subtle pressures. Let us not buy into it by purchasing these lumps of farmed meat; chicken breasts from animals that have no natural life and whose normal cycles have been manipulated for sales and production. The profit motive unfortunately taints even those areas that attempt to be organic and to care for the land. Nature is only after protecting itself, it is not trying to make a profit. The profit motive is so built into many people that they cannot understand something that doesn’t have the same drive.
If you think about it, if you think about a woman’s body, every little bit of it is claimed by a commercial interest. From the moment she is born the commercial interests say, “She he is ours!” It is strange that we can’t see how we have locked nature in, trying to own it and gain a profit from it in every way we possibly can. The huge corporations and political organisations carefully design your food, your education, your hormones to move you toward exactly what they want you to be.
How do we detoxify ourselves from something that is so permeating our lives? How do we detoxify ourselves from our own society? Feeling these feelings, exploring these issues, meeting these very powerful influences arising from deep within me, the question I asked myself is, am I crazy?! Am I crazy, or am I just waking up? I am pro life. I don’t want parasites hanging on my back. I want to give my blood to my children, not to the parasites. I know I have a thing about, or feelings against, cigarettes and alcohol. I see them as very obvious ways that some of the big guys behind the corporations lead people toward a dependency that leeches away in them their will.
With eyes open you will see how so many people are trying to lead you by your fears, by your dreams, by your sexual drive. Ask yourself, where are they leading me? Basically they are leading you toward spending your money and putting it into their account. It is possible to say no. It is possible to make your own sexual decisions. It is possible to learn how to deal with your fear response, your fight or flight instincts. Who are you? Why let somebody else steal it? You would be angry and active if somebody stole your credit card or your cheque-book. How can you let them steal your real inner identity?
Useful Questions and Hints:
Do you have leeches on you or just see them in the dream?
Is there an indication of what the leeches are taking from you?
Are you fighting back?
See Summing Up – Avoid Being Victims – Life’s Little Secrets – Beware of Love
Left and Right
Dominant side of body
Some other views of what it means to be left or right handed
The right and wrong
This is a description of left and right brain hemispheres
More information about brain hemispheres
We each have a side of our body and brain that we use more often and is dominant. So in the following descriptions you decide whether you are dominantly right or left.
Dominant side of body: The dominant, confident, conscious, exterior or expressed side of self. In other words it is your capable and active self which if working well is creative and doing most of the work. It is the hand we reach out with most often and use it in touching, leading with and sensing. Also it can indicate what we have been taught or absorbed about what is right or wrong. So correct social behaviour and morals.
Example: My mother is an emotionally positive person. What she feels is right. She has no doubts about the rightness of what she feels. Thus she is able to display a social temper, angering shopkeepers etc, (who she feels, or thinks), have done her wrong.
Dreams also use a play on what is right and left to illustrate polarity or opposites: But if you are left handed you might need to reverse the description.
The right – The ‘right’ choice at the time; the moral, right action; your conscious known self. Your external world of activity and environment; a secondary choice.
Right arm or hand: If you are right handed this indicates your active outgoing self, your conscious and capable skills such as you express with this hand and arm. It is the part of you obvious to others and yourself, your strength or lack of it. Injury or malformation of this arm indicates inability to be creative and productive in the outer world. It shows problems regarding manifesting or making real, what you wish or will to do.
The Left – parts of self that are unconscious or shadowy; the immoral, selfish, wrong action. Your internal world of feelings, memories and values. See You Are a Dual Being
Left arm or hand: The left is those supportive qualities, those strengths and traits that express in daily life underlying and making possible the action of the right arm. In other words they are the loyalties, the care and strength of support, almost unconscious energy we put into what we do with our right hand and arm – our outer activities. The left arm is the qualities that support outer activities and relationships. In a certain way it represents confidence, the absence of which would undermine all the external things we would be trying to accomplish.
Example: ‘On my right are three monks, on my left sits a beautiful, shapely blonde. I am in the centre and I see a road, which leads to the right and into a beautiful sunlit valley in the distance.’ From Dreams Your Magic Mirror by Elsie Sechrist, published by Cowles.
Here right and left represent not only choice between sexual pleasure and the dreamers sense of right and wrong, but also the polar opposites of inner life and materialism. Although in the dream there is a movement to the right, to find equilibrium we often have to take a way between the opposites, both of which are probably extremes.
Most of us interiorise our morals into our dream life. In other words, we take as a truth that what is important outwardly is also as important inwardly. So you are as upset by a dream as if it had actually happened in waking life. An example of this is a person who dreams their partner is having sex with another person. Such mistakes make us feel things that are ridiculous. This happens with the morals we live with, or by, and may be necessary in waking life, we try to make them fit to our much bigger and freer dream/inner life and that causes conflict because the two worlds are completely different. So right or wrong are very different in the different levels of our being. See Morals; Inner World
Some other views of what it means to be left or right handed
Left: If you are left handed, it suggests you have greater spatial sense, better intuitive sense and awareness of gestalts – i.e. arriving at meaning through putting together many small bits of information and feelings.
“In his book Right-Hand, Left-Hand, Chris McManus of University College London argues that the proportion of left-handers is increasing and left-handed people as a group have historically produced an above-average quota of high achievers. He says that left-handers’ brains are structured differently (in a way that increases their range of abilities) and the genes that determine left-handedness also govern development of the language centres of the brain.[29]
Writing in Scientific American, McManus states that, Studies in the U.K., U.S. and Australia have revealed that left-handed people differ from right-handers by only one IQ point, which is not noteworthy … Left-handers’ brains are structured differently from right-handers’ in ways that can allow them to process language, spatial relations and emotions in more diverse and potentially creative ways. Also, a slightly larger number of left-handers than right-handers are especially gifted in music and math. A study of musicians in professional orchestras found a significantly greater proportion of talented left-handers, even among those who played instruments that seem designed for right-handers, such as violins. Similarly, studies of adolescents who took tests to assess mathematical giftedness found many more left-handers in the population.
According to 2014 study right-handed people have higher cognitive skills, less behavioural and speech problems, less often have learning disabilities, and more often graduate their school. Quoted from Wikipedia
Example: I felt completely in opposition to this, and grabbed his hand with my right hand, levering it off the torch. This woke me because I was in fact struggling with my own left-hand. I had hold of my left little finger, and was bending it backward viciously. This amused me because it was so obviously a personal conflict – a struggle between my left and right hands, between my more refined and less refined self.
Example: I have had a few wonderful dreams lately. Very short though. In one I was leaning over a person who was sitting. It was my left arm that dominated the dream (I am right handed). It was gold and glowing. The other I reached into a glass of pure clear water with purple petals through it and I felt pure joy.
Being right handed I found that my right side of my body has many more injuries of difficulties than my left side, and I feel this is because it faces and has to deal with more stress than my left side. I also felt that we unconsciously associate the different sides of our body with someone. I associate my right side of my body with my father and my left with my mother. Of course it could be anyone you are deeply rooted in.
To sum up – you may be more holistic, intuitive, aware of body language, synthesising, integrating, emotional, interpersonal, feeling-based, and kinaesthetic.
See Jill Bolte Taylors extraordinary experience when her usual ‘right handed’ personality was knocked out. See Interview with Jill Bolte Taylor.
The right and wrong
Most of us have been raised to believe in absolutes of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We are taught that there is a wrong way of doing things and a right way, and if we get it wrong we will be sure to end up a failure. But dreams have no fixed sense of right and wrong, like a baby which lacks any awareness of having an ego, lacks any sense of time and concepts such as approval or disapproval, right and wrong, the infant lives in a paradise where there is no (concept of) time or death. Without time it lives in eternity, especially while in the womb. It feels itself not an individual but an undivided part of an immense ocean of sentience. It and the animals are one. There is no striving or working to gain survival, no pressure to sexual procreate.
Dreams often show us this aspect of human consciousness existing beyond the opposites such as good and bad, right and wrong. When we access this view and accept it, it gives tremendous liberation to the dreamer, freeing them from restricting rigid concepts or habits of thinking, responding and relating.
In meeting a ‘big’ man in his dreams, a man who was not afraid of death, he met his own undammed life, his flood of loving sexuality, the strength to burst through social rules and regulations because love or life pushes. When we find it in ourselves, in dreams we don’t give a hang about bullets, death, right or wrong, because we have a sense of our own integral existence within life, and our own rightness and place in eternity.
Example: As I looked at my impressions and rising feelings, I saw how powerful has been the realisation that within ourselves we are nothing. That our real existence is formless and beyond conception. It is the realisation that frees us from the prisons of recrimination, of feelings of defeat, of ideas and words – even of constant failure. Being formless, there is no mood, no passion, no philosophy that can hold us. So we can slip away from the agony of guilt or self-judgment, we can laugh at the phantom of being right or wrong.
But it is a frightening realisation too. For it brings us to the realisation that nobody else creates the hell or heaven we experience life to be. Nobody else creates our love or smouldering vengefulness. We are alone in our creation. This is because if you were to say what a beach is, you could not say the sea was the beach, or the sky, or the land. None of them separately is the beach. The beach is the indefinable amalgam of them all. In just that way the Nothing is the indefinable everything that underlies the particulars of our life.
Example: In a dream a young man saw himself walking up a dimly lit cobbled street. The street was going up a hill, and on the left was a pub with two young men standing outside. They were holding pint jugs of bitter, As the dreamer drew near them, one turned to the other, looking at his bitter, and said, ‘Shall I let him have it?’ Being encouraged, he threw the bitter over the dreamer. Naturally the dreamer was very annoyed, and tried to brush it off his overcoat. He wanted to retaliate, but felt himself no match for these two, who walked back into the pub. Someone with the dreamer said that there was a policeman at the top of the bill, why not tell him. So climbing the rest of the hill. and turning to the right, he found the policeman and told him. The policeman very officiously took out his notebook and asked whether there were any witnesses. There were, but the policeman maintained his air of doing only what he was forced to do by law, which upset the dreamer and he walked away.
In exploring his dream, the dreamer realised that to climb a hill in real life is not only to expend energy, to face a difficulty, but also, if successful. to benefit by seeing the view from the top. A hill, in fact, gives him a wider view of things. So in climbing the hill he faced the energetic task of widening his opinions, rising above narrow limited views, he gained in growing up. In fact, he was going through a period of finding new ideas and outlooks. The pub and young men, on the left, represent the pleasure loving, down to earth, rough and ready side of himself. Something on the left of us in a dream usually means that it is unknown, or little used.
The dream was saying these parts of him are not expressed much in life. This is quite true, as the man was a quiet, serious person, religious and somewhat introverted. The dream shows that his pleasure loving outgoing side, due to his quiet nature was drinking the bitters of life, and in fact, this stifled side of his nature causes him to feel bitter about himself. He tries to ‘brush this bitterness off’, rather like one might say, ‘I feel depressed, but I’ll soon overcome it.’ Due to his retiring temperament, he does not feel he can face these other parts of himself. In a similar way, a person who inwardly wished to be noticed, might through shyness, not even he able to converse. Thus two parts of oneself may war against each other.
The dream goes on to show the dreamer’s present conscious efforts to deal with the conflict leading to bitterness. The policeman is on the right, representing his more conscious attitudes. The policeman usually represents our sense of right and wrong, conscience and law-giving. So the dreamer, in his efforts to deal with his attack of bitterness, tries to use his morals, his sense of right and wrong. But this side of himself is shown as unsympathetic, only really worried about the rules, and the dreamer realises he will not be helped by that attitude. He has to find a wider view which includes the aspect of himself which includes both the good and the bad and finds a middle way.
This realisation might lead to going the way of the razors edge, which depicts any behaviour or attitudes that are one-sidedness and would lead to imbalance within the individual. But at the same time it is not about being perfect or a saint, but a balanced and whole human being with very wide choices. Walking it we balance between the opposites facing us. See The Mountain Path
“Environment is a tremendous thing in the world, and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory, one makes room in heaven for all sorts of souls, notably an occasional street girl, who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.” Stephen Crane
This is a description of left and right brain hemispheres
The left and right in the brain
The right and left hemispheres of the brain to generalise, if your approach to life is dominated by your left brain hemisphere, which is largely rational and analytical, your best way of learning would be in learning facts in a sequential and logical order.
If you are largely a right brain person your approach to learning would be to understand details by gaining an overall picture of what you are studying. The details then fit into this concept of the whole and make sense to you. You would also be more open to learning through your feelings and intuitions, and through hands on experience. You would be more about living in this present moment. It thinks in pictures and learn through experiences of our body. This explosion of information comes through our senses, and our right brain forms a picture informing us of this present moment. We are energy beings connected to each other through these amazing inputs.
The left brain experiences life completely differently, and it is almost like two different people living in one body. It sees things linked on a long line connecting our past with our future.
This side of the brain takes in the enormous pictures and experience of the present moment and reviews them in enormous detail and then categorises them, organises them, then protects them into the perceived future and forms an impression or picture of our immense possibilities.
Also it is what gives us identity and says, “I AM”.
More information about brain hemispheres
In a very real sense each of us have two distinct ways of relating to and perceiving the world and the people around us. This is because our brain is split into two hemispheres, and each hemisphere has very different ways of dealing with incoming information and its different abilities. But it has other divisions also. See Levels (Brain)
On a recent radio interview a man and woman were described who created lively musicals. The way they worked and how they were such an amazing team were discussed. The man would lie on a couch and let flow with ‘stream of consciousness’ ideas, and the woman would write down what was said, but pulling it into structure and careful use of appropriate language.
This is almost a direct expression of how the left and right brain lobes can work together if we can easily access their different abilities. In people with a healthy brain the two halves of the brain work like two people in a happy and creative partnership. Each of the partners can perform its own special tasks most of the time, but each is able to take on, partly or fully, the skills of the other when necessary. This may be necessary in people who have experienced brain damage.
Although research has not arrived at definite classifications of what the lobes of the brain deal with, in general they are as follows:
| Left | Right |
| LogicalAnalyticalSpeechQuantitativeFact BasedPlannedOrganisedDetailedSequential | HolisticIntuitiveBody LanguageSynthesisingIntegratingEmotionalInterpersonalFeeling-BasedKinaesthetic |
Although if we are healthy we are not dominated by just one side of the brain’s action, we nevertheless may be oriented to left or right, logical or intuitive.
In terms of creativity the left brain follows rules of logical thought and does not easily move beyond the boundaries of what is rational. Its talents are in organising, planning and sticking to the task in hand, and in rational analysis of facts rather than feelings and speculations.
The right brain follows a more holistic approach, gathering many diverse bits of information and experience and leaping beyond the obvious to arrive at an insight into the nature of the situation. Its talents are in being aware of body language, the feelings involved in a relationship or situation that are influencing it behind the scenes. It takes all our life experience and summarises it into a grand view of who we are, our life journey and place in the scheme of things. See Using Your Intuition; Opening to Life; Arm Circling Meditation.
In fact, this last aspects of the right brain gives us a clue as to what your ‘brain type’ is and how you approach life. The left brain subject will have a sense that their life is not part of a grand scheme of things, but is subject to the agreed and rational rules of the dominant science and social rules of their culture. The right brain subject will know from their inner awareness that their life is part of the way the cosmos works, and has emerged out of a timeless continuum carrying all ages of the past into their present existence.
Returning to the theme of creativity, in test carried out through the 1970’s and 80’s, subjects who were known to be creative were given tasks calling on non rational thinking. EEG’s of their brain activity showed the right brain flooded with electrical signals. Less creative subjects given the same task showed much less activity in their right brain lobe.
One researcher, Martindale, noted that we mostly associate efficient performance with the ability to focus attention and be highly ‘awake’. Martindale observed that brain activity during such times showed cortical arousal is linked to the ability to focus attention. But he also saw that creative subjects diffused their attention when performing creative tasks. They were able to shut down concentrated focussing and diffuse their attention at will. In this way they created a mental state that perhaps can be likened to listening, or what I have elsewhere called a ‘keyboard’ state of mind and body, in which they are open to any inflow or up flow of experience. Martindale noted that this un-focusing process, rather than dampening mental acuity, actually enhances it. See The Keyboard Condition
Connecting this with dreams, our night time drama tends to express these different facets of us in the different characters we meet. The following dream clearly shows a ‘right brain’ character bringing something to the dreamer’s attention that his usual left brain way of looking at life would probably have missed.
Example: I was on a plane or a journey. On my right sat an American, very flabby, with a paunch. I was eating an apple, (I had been on a fruit fast during the day), and my elbow sometimes touched the American’s paunch, it felt lifeless, lacking vitality. I told him he ought to eat only apples for a while, and all the dead flesh would fall off him. Then a young Chinese man came to me and pointed out a line marked on my apple, on the green, less developed side. He said every apple had such a line if one looked, and under the line was a hair, “the hair of discontent.” He said this was poisonous, and best not eaten. I slid my fingernail under the line, and pulled out a long hair. I thought this was wonderful, and that I had been given real wisdom of the East. Ian R.
In fact, Ian was far from content with his life at the time, and it led him to look critically at other people. The wisdom from the East – the left brain global view of life – pointed out how poisonous this was.
Here is a dream illustrating a very different stand:
Example: I was walking home at night under a magnificent starry sky. I thought perhaps this was the Milky Way, as I had never seen it before. But there were distinct edges to the massive concentrations of stars forming the shape of people. I felt very enthusiastic and uplifted by this sight and wanted other people to look at it. Then I seemed to be at home, perhaps where I used to live as a child, and my father was there. I told him about the figures and wanted him to look, but he seemed quite uninterested. I also felt somehow that he was locked into an intellectual cynicism that could see no wonder in the stars. To him they were simply random shapes in the sky. To me they expressed something that, perhaps, I would find it difficult to put into words, but nevertheless was very moving at a deep level. Heather R.
Heather uses her father to depict her more rational way of looking at the world. Nevertheless, the dream shows balance as Heather herself feels the impact of what she has seen.
As is often the way, the right brain tends to express in symbols, as it does in dreams, but it takes the focussed enquiry of the left brain to work like a detective to unravel the clues and bring the creative impulse into real clarity and fruition, something that wasn’t happening in Heather’s dream. Exploring the dream would provide the creative spark between the intuitive and the rational. See: Characters and People in Dreams for further description of dream characters; brain.
Idioms: Two left feet; keep on the right side of somebody; in one’s right mind; in the right; mister right; set somebody right; right hand man; right in the head; start on the right foot; give one’s right arm; the customer is always right; right away; bark up the wrong tree; get up on the wrong side of bed; push the right buttons; play my cards right; darn right; dead wrong; don’t get me wrong; don’t go wrong; heart is in the right place; you’re wrong; you’re in the wrong.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Do my dreams make reference to turning right or left?
Or are there mentions of left or right sides of my body?
Do I often feel a big difference between what is right and what it wrong?
Is there any suggestion of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the dream?
Do you have a fixed idea of what is right and wrong?
Or do you have a more mobile view allowing you to make fewer judgements?
See Razors Edge – Acting on your dream – Ox Herding – Dream Yoga – Summing Up – Jesse Watkins Enlightenment – Identity and Dreams
Left Behind
If you are the one who is left behind, it suggests either that you feel rejected, or have a sense of not being the same as other people, or perhaps that you want to go your own way. If you leave someone or something behind, it might mean you are ready for change of some kind. That is, ready to let go of something or someone that may have been important at some time. In some cases this suggests changes in a relationship, if the person left behind is your partner. If what you left behind was your handbag – purse, see Bag.
Oneself left behind: Feelings of rejection or inadequacy; sense of waking up to what you have not done or experienced in life, as Patience does in her dream below.
Leaving something or someone behind: Leaving the past behind; break-up of relationship.
Example: ‘In my dream I woke up and had the feeling that a lot of time had passed. I felt I had lost all this time. A group of friends I was with had gone ahead, left me behind, and I wondered if I would ever catch up.’ Patience. C. Example: I had a dream where I was excluded from a party and left behind to care for everyone’s dogs. I locked them in the garage along with a baby that was dropped off. I found out the baby was my ex-husbands (my husband in the dream) and no one would tell me who the mother was. Anyway I put the baby in a box and left it there. It was not crying, it was quite happy actually.
So your dream husband was all the things you absorbed in the relationship and after the divorce. Therefore the father of the child is the good things you got from the relationship. And the reason no one would tell you who the mother was is because you are the mother of your own dream child. So something good has arisen now out of the past. Maybe you have digested something about the relationship that now opens up a new part of you – the baby. Perhaps you parked the baby in the garage because you did not realise its importance in your life – for it is important.
Idioms: Fall behind; put it all behind me. See also: bag.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Have I ever felt left behind or missed the bus or plane?
Who have I left behind in my life?
What was the situation of being left in the dream?
Did I leave anything important?
See Habits – Because Factor – Avoid Being Victims – Active Passive
Leg Legs
This points to the things that support you in life. Your support may depend upon parents, job, money, religion, friends, your own confidence. Sometimes an event occurs, or we receive news, that knocks away our support or self confidence, and dreams represent this by a problem or injury to your legs. Legs can also depict the ability to get about in life. Ambition for instance, may give us drive and confidence to stand up and do something in life. If your business fails though, ambition may crumble, represented by your legs being kicked away from you, or being injured.
It helps to know which leg, because although most of us are aware if being right or left handed, but few people realise that this applies to legs also. It makes a difference in interpretation. See: Left; Right; Growth
Dreaming about your leg or legs usually connects in some way with what motivates you, the emotional and physical strength you use to get about in life. To have one’s legs knocked out from under one means loss of confidence and ability to carry on with life.
Although you may depend upon someone like partner or parent for support, or on work or position for self value, ultimately the legs represent your own emotional or conceptual support system. So in your dream about leg or legs you may be considering what state your own confidence, your own self value is in. When trying to understand legs in your dream See: lame.
In some dreams legs are shown as having the qualities of roots, and bringing strength from the earth. This shows you drawing on deep reserves of your strength and wisdom from your connection with the Earth’s processes and chain of life. See
Example: ‘My Mother asked me to go and buy some butter for her. A chain on my left leg prevented me from going very far. I look down the road and see my Mum, Dad and my four brothers in the back of a car. I wave and call and they drive right past me, going over the chain I am wearing on my leg.’ Lorraine. LBC
Example: I was in a very loving relationship in which I had developed powerful emotional links with D. We communicated many times each day while apart at work, etc. But one day there was no communication. I felt tremendous anxiety and emotional pain and shock, really frightened that she had dropped me. In fact she hadn’t, but my fears were very real and difficult to deal with. A real shock.
Having no legs: This shows a serious lack of confidence or the inability, perhaps sometimes, to stand up for yourself.
Injured leg or legs: Feeling insecure or unable to stand up for yourself, or to be independent.
Left leg: If you are right handed this indicates that your less dominant or less conscious motivation, the emotional and physical strength you use to get about in life is involved. (Reverse if you are left handed.)
Right Leg: If you are right handed it indicates that your dominant or conscious motivation, the emotional and physical strength you use to get about in life is involved. (Reverse if you are left handed.)
One leg shorter than another: This links with whether you are right or left handed. If you are right handed, then the right leg represents your outward activities, and your left represents your feelings and attitudes – possibly vice versa if you are left handed. So a short left leg would suggest you lack confidence, therefore your outer activities are not fully supported. If it is a short right leg, then you have not developed enough skill or strength to be outwardly as effective as you are capable of.
Putting hand on leg: An approach to sex, or a warm friendly sign.
Smooth or hairy legs: Smooth legs show a more feminine strength, hairy a more masculine.
Trying to run but legs will not respond: This may simply be because while dreaming all your voluntary muscles are paralyzed so do not respond to you attempts to move. Or you feel as if you do not have the ability to do what you are asking of yourself.
Another reason might be because you are trying to go in a direction you feel anxiety about, or have no desire for. See: paralysis while asleep.
Idioms: a leg up; cost an arm and a leg; felt like I had a ball and chain on my legs; I couldn’t stand up for myself; last legs; leg over; leg work; legless; didn’t have a leg to stand on; my legs went to jelly; my legs were paralysed; on his last legs; pull your leg; tail between his legs.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Are my dream legs/confidence shown to be healthy, or do I need to work on them?
Am I ‘standing up’ well, or do I need to work on my confidence?
Where are my legs taking me in the dream, and how do I relate to this while awake?
See The Life Will – Acting on your dream – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Lemon
Possibly symbolises the feelings of bitterness, sourness. In some nations the lemon also has strong associations with health, so it might show a suggestion to use for your health.
Length Long
The length of something in a dream usually signifies its duration or perhaps its importance. The size symbolises its impact upon you. If something is very long, it might also link with boredom or loss of interest.
Dreams often take a long time to really become a recognisable part of your life. They are like a seed, it is something that comes from a deep part of you; it is something that is working upwards toward being conscious. As such it often, like a seed, takes time to break through to the surface, and then it has to grow. See How it Flows
Some experiences stretch time until it seems there is no end to it. Like an endless journey we cannot see where it leads. That often happens when we confront a childhood experience where time in the child’s mind doesn’t exist. See Programmed
As can be seen from the examples below, length and long appear in dreams in many ways.
As can be seen from the examples below, length and long appear in dreams in mnayt ways.
Example: Dreamt last night that my dog went to the toilet and passed a large piece of three ply wood, like a long sided triangle, about eight inches long. As I looked at it, I thought, “My God, old Tramp really is tough, he has swallowed that, and now he’s passed it through none the worse.”
Example: I see an elephant fixed by harnessed to other elephants. He catches my scent, and with terrible power charges along a narrow riverbank that is at the back of dwelling houses. Two other elephants are dragged helplessly with him, but all, by some miracle, stay on the ledge, though his rush is frightening to watch. I, with two others, enter the front of the pub. It is old and long out of use, rubbish and rubble lying everywhere. Over the rubble, from the rear, the elephants trunk reaches out for me, and we touch with real love, and unafraid.
Example: So smitten are we that we cannot bear to have our children near us long, but must leave them behind, buy them a toy to stifle any attempt they may make to relate with us, shut them in a room or a school or any damn place so long as we don’t have to face them as they are. To take hold of their natural stream of life and twist and kick it until it is so well and truly buggered it hurts itself.
Example: I was in a prison cell with two other men. We ate, slept and defecated in the cell. I was standing at the bars of the cell, and had the impression of having 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. Suddenly I realised that my years of shouting had availed nothing. The only person who was upset by it was myself. I was the victim of my own anger and turmoil. I dropped the attitudes and was free of them. Years went by and one by one I dropped other habits of emotion and thought with which I had trapped and tortured myself. 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. So intense was it I cried out. The cell mates called a warden. They stood looking at me as I experienced a radiance so strong I felt as if I must be shining. I was aware my joy poured into them, although they thought I was mad. Nothing would ever be the same again. Andy.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Was it a long way I travelled or could I see a long way – what was my dream showing me?
Was it time that was stretched or was it your vision of things?
Do I feel as if I am alone and a long way from others?
See Jesse Watkins Enlightenment – Habits – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Lens
Concentration, focusing of attention or understanding. May also represent something becoming bigger, or more important.
Leopard
Sometimes represents libido or sexual drives that appear as threatening. It also depicts anger, passion – in caring or protecting, spitefulness and power of response. That is, responses without too much thought.
As with any of the big cats, anger, temper; spitefulness, cruelty; courage; passion – even passion caring for your children. Because of the leopard’s spots, which can be seen as eyes, the leopard has represented The Great Watcher – i.e. wider awareness. See: wider awareness.
Useful questions are:
What attitude or feelings is my dream leopard expressing, and how does that relate to me?
If I imagine myself as the leopard, do I feel anger, power or fear? (For help doing this see Stand in Role under peer dream work.)
Is it a male or female leopard and what does that lead me to feel or associate with it?
What is my relationship with the leopard and what does that suggest?
Leper
Uncleanness, disease, decay, loss of social acceptance, or feelings of being unloved and unacceptable.
Leprechaun
See: Fairy.
Lesbian
See: Homosexuality.
Letter
Communication or lack of it. Feelings, intuitions or hopes in regard to something received from another person, or a group of people, Hoping to have contact with or news from a person or company. News of opportunity, or love coming to one.
This is about the giving or receiving of feelings and thoughts. But is it a letter received, a letter waited for, a letter already sent and regretted or answers hoped for? If you can look at your dream and see what your relationship with the letter is, then see where this applies to your waking life, you will have a direct connection with what the dream is dealing.
If you dream about old letters, who are they from and what do they say? They are probably connected with memories and how they are still influencing you – or a relationship that is still meaningful.
What is it you are waiting for in your waking life? What do you want from someone else? If you know, perhaps there are more direct ways you can go about getting results. Or perhaps your dream gives some indications.
Who are you writing to and what are you saying? Is it something you have thought about and said already, or is it something new? Sometimes your dream letter reveals things you might not say generally.
If the letter is not opened it usually refers to things you know but have not let yourself really become aware of. Try opening the letter and observing what you feel or think.
Blacked edged: News of or feelings about death.
Letter from particular person: Thoughts about or intuitions concerning the person letter is from; unrealised feelings about sender; hopes – perhaps to have contact with person.
Opening letter: Realising something; receiving news; sexual intercourse.
Unopened letter: Feelings, thoughts or intuitions that have not been made conscious or recognised; opportunity that has not been taken up or recognised yet; virginity.
Sending a letter: The thoughts or feelings you radiate to others, perhaps unconsciously. A prompt to contact the person you are posting the letter to. Desire to be in contact.
Waited for letter: Hoped for confirmation of love, friendship, plans.
Example: I had felt something of a past traumatic incident arising, and had phoned my wife saying to her that I felt something strange going on and deeply needed to know when she might be coming back. She said she would let me know. So I waited for a telephone call, a letter, some indication, having pleaded with her for this support. Nothing came. No call. No letter. No support. Then the crack widened and all hell broke loose from within me.
Example: Someone had brought him a letter in which were several sheets. On one of these there was a portrait of a former teacher, whom he much admired, holding a torch. Another sheet looked like a big invitation card, seemingly addressed to this same teacher, and having on it the words ‘Request for your Presence’. On the back of a third sheet the teacher had drawn the picture of a liner, and his voice could be heard saying: ‘Here are the cabins you are having, eleven, seventeen and twenty-three.’ As he spoke, he marked them off on the side of the ship, eleven at the top, seventeen further down and nearer the stern, and twenty-three still lower and further aft. The boy then awoke, feeling very unsettled and thinking, ‘I must ask mother which cabin we are going to have.’
The associations came at once and without any hesitation. The three numbers were connected with three different people. Number twenty-three reminded him of a friend of his own age with whom he used to play about in the streets, picking up the fag-ends of cigarettes and smoking them. Number seventeen was connected with another boy friend, who was cheeky, fat and lazy, and loved ragging about. They used to go on camping expeditions together. Eleven was the number of his own home and made him think of his mother.
The dream sketches the possibilities before him. He looks for his teacher’s help in planning the future, and the teacher appears holding a torch in his hand to clarify the situation. There are three directions in which the boy can go. The lowest and least worthy way is to become a guttersnipe, picking up fag-ends in the street. On a higher level, he can become a playboy like his fat friend and live an easy and self-indulgent life. Or, finally, he can follow the urge represented by his mother, one connected, as he explained, with ‘music, mechanics and ideals’. He decides to ask his mother which way to go. Quoted from The Way Within by Wyatt Rawson.
Idioms: chain letter; French letter – condom; letter perfect; love letter; dear john/jane letter saying she/he is with another person; poison pen letter; red letter day.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Was there a message you understood?
Do you depend upon communications for you well-being?
Do you write to people often – and if so for what purpose?
See Being the Person or Thing – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions
Level Levels
In some dreams much is made of different levels, or of a particular level. The meaning can differ vastly depending on the context. The different levels may deal with feelings of class, superiority, worth or power. Or they might suggest different levels of response, such as a mental response, a gut level response, a sexual response, etc.
When the levels are in a building: This often refers to the different ‘levels of ones personal experience such as physical sensation – ground level (first floor in U.S.A.); sexual feelings – can be middle floor or ‘downstairs’; emotions – upper floor; the head and thinking – top floor; memories, being apart from other people – the attic. These building levels might also suggest levels of importance, or clarity-practicality.
Levels can also show the fear and difficulty one faces in making a change from one way or level of life to another. For instance we may have lived life as a nine to five worker, and so we see the world through those needs. But a totally new way or level of seeing and responding might suddenly open, as when we become self employed or out of work. In dreams this might be that a hole opens suddenly, and we see another world going on below, or above us. Or a person appears out of nowhere from another level. Sometimes with shock we realise life has many other ways of being. Perhaps we even explore them. See: Levels in Waking andDreaming
Levelling
Smoothing feelings or pains. Making the going easier.
Librarian
Faculty of memory or contact with universal mind. The creative or linking process of your mind. It can link with research, finding answers to questions you have.
A library has films and tapes, so it might suggest ways you either entertain yourself, or are finding ways to block out feelings that trouble. So a librarian could be the guiding, knowledgeable or parental influence in your life.
Example: Someone I know is raped and sodomized by someone I know. I am a policeman and I don’t know what to do. I am the one who commits the rape and sodomizes Wandee, a librarian at our school. When someone – the police, her mother? – comes to investigate, I see there is a pictorial illustration /representation of what I did (the writing is on the wall, so to speak). I try to cover up so they don’t see it – it is a poster on the wall, about top of the bed level opposite the bed in the bedroom.
Although I don’t want to admit it to myself I know that I am guilty. I just couldn’t/wouldn’t or didn’t control myself. Like not being able to control myself trying to see my wife’s customers undress in the bedroom.
Example: I go to the library, walking through the streets thinking, “I can write a story about a country I’ve never been in! I can do it.” I go in the library to reserve a room to do my research. The librarian leaves, is busy. I call up and reserve a room for Sunday, very pleased with myself because the librarian said there weren’t any available. I start to write it into her reservation book and realize I’ll get in trouble, so I wait until she returns and fess up to using her phone, etc.
Example: Mary who is also a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, had come to him with a disturbing dream in which she’d had sex with a man who, she said, she heartily disliked because he was such a terrible liar. Mary then confessed that she’d recently been guilty of lying herself. She’d borrowed the tape of a lecture from her local library in order to duplicate it, but had wiped it instead. and then handed it back without admitting what had happened. Her dream had highlighted the fact that she too, was a liar.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What was my relationship with the librarian?
Did I find what I was looking for?
What sort of figure was the librarian – stern, helpful, etc?
See Characters and People in Dreams – Being the Person or Thing – Martial Art of the Mind