Posts Tagged ‘dream analysis’
Salt
Value, goodness, luck, taste, adding spice to life. Something that transforms your experience. Salt also preserves. When Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt, it symbolised the desire to stop spiritual or mental progress. Salt here symbolises materialism, stagnation, lack of growth or change, preservation. Salt may also suggest friendship, good or bad luck.
The subtle qualities you bring to your activities that transform them from empty trivialities into meaning or savour; zest; may sometimes refer to the body’s reaction to salt. So the salt can suggest the subtle qualities you bring to your activities that transform them from empty trivialities into meaning or give them zest.
In past eras salt was thought to provide a barrier which evil entities could not cross.
Example: In the dream, I ran upstairs and looked out the window and realized that there was an entire circle of black barking dogs surrounding the house. I told the wife we needed to get salt and circle the house. (I have no idea in real life what this means). We took all this salt and put it all around the house and it seemed the dogs couldn’t cross the salt.
It may also point to your body’s reaction to salt. This because salt is at the root of a lot of health problems, especially heart problems, high blood pressure and migraines. See Migraine – Self Help
Salt has been used for centuries as a preservative and also a healer. Also a 19th-century treatment for the respiratory tract was the inhalation of salt. Galleries for spa guests were built above steaming salt pans. Besides the use of sulphur from a spring in the salt mountain and mud, mostly Bad Ischl salt was used as remedy. Also it can mean stopping the action of something as happened when Lot’s wife was turned into a column of salt.
The sea is the mother of life on our planet. We also have the ancient sea inside us as the water within us, which has the same saline level as salt from when life left the ocean. In dreams I see salt being a link with the ancient source of Life within us – for we are the very tip of the reaching branches of life – so tender.
Example: I am sitting in a car on the seat next to the driver. My window is open. I see people standing on the street and I take from somewhere outside of the car a handful of coarse sea salt or salt from a mine. I do not want the people on the street to see that I carefully manage to put my hand in my trousers, in order to not spill any of the salt, and I put it on my vulva. I know the salt is meant to heal and to bring the area back to life again. The area starts to tingle, especially my clitoris, the same feeling when a body part has fallen asleep and starts to wake up again after that.
Idioms: Above/below the salt – in or out of honour; salt a mine; salt something away; with a pinch of salt; worth one’s salt; salt into a wound; salt of the earth; a grain of salt; go pound salt
Useful Questions and Hints:
Does this indicate ‘adding spice to life’?
Is this about preserving something so that no change occurs?
Does this show good or bad luck (throwing salt over one’s shoulder for instance)?
Am I purifying or cleansing something in the dream?
Sand Sandstorm
Lack of security; passage of time; lack of emotion or nourishment; abrasiveness or irritations. If you are walking or driving on sand it can suggest resistance to, or difficulty in progressing. See: desert.
Sand is often a home or living environment for many creatures like turtles and crocodiles that lay their eggs in warm sand, or crabs and other sea shore creatures. Sandy beaches are also a place that millions of humans make enormous effort to spent time on. Depending on your dream, they could suggest a pleasant or unpleasant environment.
The holy men of the desert see sand as everything that is everywhere, and use it as a blessing when giving it to someone. When in a glass, such a gift of sand, if water is poured on it and drunk, it can be healing.
Sand is of course used as a building material and it might appear in a dream suggesting you are making changes and creating something new. Also used in some spiritual practices for healing purposes, or in Zen as an expression of something the rational mind fails to see.
Quicksand may suggest losing secure footing and sinking into one’s mess of emotions. It can also represent personal situations in one’s business or life that one is not in control of. It can also refer to the fact that your personality, your business or plans are not build upon a solid foundation – the house built upon snad. See Martial Art of the Mind
Sometimes a beach can represent an intangible experience, such as this man describes:
I felt the beach to be a meeting place for water, earth, air and sun – earth, air, fire and water. But the beach is not any one of them. It changes with the seasons and with the action of storms, of erosion and temperature. It isn’t the air, or the sea or the sand. It changes yet stays the same – the beach. Suddenly I felt this in myself, saying, “I am not anything. I change yet am unchanged. I am all things but nothing.” This gave me a very powerful sense of my own eternal spirit underlying all the changes of my body and personality. Robert.
Example: I drove a motorcycle through some impossible urban obstacles, like badly parked cars, and tight walls. Then I was sitting at home and scratched my head, felt pieces of sand stuck in my skull. I started removing them only to find more and more of them on my skull. I throw a lot of them in to a trash bin and the bin filled up all the way to the top. I even found some pieces of debris that I managed to remove.
You have become, or are becoming, aware of all the debris of past experiences and ideas that you are casting away. What a wonderful relief when it is finished.
Sand-bar: Attitudes you use to avoid being swept along by emotions. Or if in boat, then a suggestion of dangers or a chance to make a change, possibly from drifting in life.
Sand dunes: An area that may be near to the sea – a huge area of life and growth – but is itself not given to great growth. So it might indicate a life condition in which you are not changing and growing.
Sand storm: From the dream point of view, you are facing one of natures tremendous energy releases – your own nature in fact. Storms are caused by cosmic events – the action of the sun, the earths cycles influencing the wind. So something important, a force of Life itself is acting on your inner life. You may feel it is something to be avoided, but if you meet it without fighting it, it is your own enormous energy enlarging you. See Tsunami – Wind – whirlwind twister or vortex
Idioms: Built on sand; sands of time are running out; bury one’s head in the sand.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Was there any reference to shifting sands or you could sink in?
Did you feel any emotions in the dream?
Did you feel sand as in irritant or mess?
Does this illustrate time and the wearing away of things?
Do I feel like I am going through a ‘dry spot’ in life, where there isn’t much growth?
See Sea – Time – Life within Change and Constancy – Being the Person or Thing
Satan
The power of material values in life. The things in life we cannot control, such as anger, sex desires, ambitions, fear, worries, etc. Those things that lead us contrary to the innate nature.
Steiner has depicted these forces as dual, calling them Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer is the power of egoistic desires, pride, looking after self first. My work, my religion, my beliefs, are better than yours! All these selfish traits lead to inner conflict, conflict in the world, and are the work of Lucifer.
Ahriman is described as the power of ignorance, of reason without feeling values, of dry intellectualism, the emphasis of materialism and a science that leads to lack of aim, lack of contact with all life; an education that is full of facts, but without any wisdom or insight, that does not develop the power of intuition. See: Devil; Obsession; Demon.
Satellite
Communication with others and with your sense of wholeness. Link between physical and your extended nature. Sometimes a feeling of being isolated or disconnected, as in a relationship where you are treated like a satellite – all your activities having to centre around something or someone.
Communication between the more global or cosmic awareness of the unconscious, and our everyday waking self.
A satellite person: Often we make a satellite character of the person we “love”. In other words, we try to make them swing around us in the way that suits our emotional and physical needs. Notice how many people have breakdowns, depression, or even commit suicide when their partner leaves them, goes with another person or dies. It can depict feelings you have about being a satellite person. That is, someone whose life revolves around another person and their orbit.
Being attacked from satellite or UFO: Thinking and feeling has been split from realistic evaluation, perhaps because internal pain is scrambling communications. See UFO; Reaction to the unconscious; Alien
If in satellite: Might suggest loss of a down to earth attitude; global view.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What was your relationship with the satellite?
Was it influencing you or were you interacting with it?
Have you a satellite dish at home?
Sausage
Penis or male sexuality; down to earth experience. Something forbidden for some people if it contains pork.
Example: I laugh at the way the unconscious presents imagery. It is so wonderfully versatile, sensitive, artistic, crude – a master of imagery. The laughter is because the fantasy now presents me with the view of a hot dog/sausage being fried slowly in a pan on a stall. As I watch I feel/realise that this is the heating up of the male sexual feeling, getting one excited, the preparation for sex seen from a different perspective.
Example: In another she found herself speaking in a broad country dialect, although her normal accent was impeccable; and in another she discovered that the dinner she was about to serve consisted of sausages and baked beans. She felt insecure about because of her working class background, and resented her husband’s unthinking strain imposed on her. From Dream Power
Saving
This often indicates your sense of security, or the parts of your feelings or character that you hold in store or to not express. As such it can illustrate your potential.
There are many ways we save – money – food – water – energy/electricity – lives.
Having savings: Having a safety net in difficult times. Being wise in worldly ways. See
Not having savings: Like as squirrel who doesn’t save nuts during the autumn harvest season, it could face disaster.
Example: One day on exploring a dream I realised that all my life I had worked for money, and in all those years I was no better off financially. In fact, I was always in the red. With the realisation came the insight that I could get money to work for me. I started by my wife and I saving as much as possible. I saw people in super markets piling bottles of alcohol and other unnecessary expenses – one we couldn’t afford. So gradually we saved a £1000 – enough to enter an investment fund. Gradually I learned how to make money work for me. I learned gradually to keep my expectations simple, and not invest in chancy things. Today I am earning enough to live on. I made money work for me. See Funding
Example: I was saving up a great deal of anger to let loose against – for her getting me in another such situation again – since she was the one who had parked the car there this time and I simply had been there by accident. I was also angry because she had left the car open with a suitcase half full of junk in the back seat and the keys in the ignition. When I had left the cop, he was looking through the suitcase in the back seat.
Example: I stop at a gas station where an admiral is giving a speech to car load of Air Force people for saving our lives. He comments that he still believes in the draft. This officer apparently had been on the plane with us.
Idioms: saving for a rainy day; a stitch in time saves nine; save a bundle; save face; save your bacon; save your skin/neck
Useful Questions and Hints:
What is happening in the dream about save or saving?
Can you learn anything from the dream?
What are your feel about saving?
See Poverty – Money – Being the Person or Thing – Meeting yourself
Saw
Energy to reshape old attitudes; wordplay on SEE; sex as the relationship meets hesitations; masturbation; criticism, cynicism, a questioning state of mind. Enquiry. Cutting remarks or experiences. See masturbation.
Saxophone
Self expression, spontaneity.
Scabbard
The body, the sheath of soul. If empty it could suggest either death or an empty threat.
Scald
Mostly about pain, or a deep hurt, possibly caused by emotions, or a hurtful display of emotions. It can also indicate telling off, or be told off, so criticism.
The agony of birth begins a bank account of pain which grows until death. This account is limited to no one kind of currency but includes a wide range of all denominations extending from the aches, burns, and stings of the body to the humiliations, guilts, shames, terrors, and doubts of the psyche. The knowledge—indeed the scalding memory and horror of those pains—remains in the psyche demanding relief. It is hard for consciousness to recall them; ordinarily it absolutely refuses. But in sessions they can come back unbidden in full and excruciating intensity.
Deep within the subconscious, at the boundaries of identity, lies an ambiguous hinterland where the polarity of subject and object becomes flexible and miscible. There the rudimentary identity, in an effort to rid itself of pain, seeks to reverse the polarity of damage and project it out onto “other.” By a trick of symbolic manipulation, it strives to become the hurter instead of the hurt, the destroyer instead of the destroyed. The primitive identity assumes that in giving pain to another, it has given its pain away. In reality it has only shifted the destructive consciousness from the self and projected it into the mental limbo of psychic not-self within the brain. Actually, the consciousness of pain has been temporarily repressed, nothing more.
Scales
Dreaming of scales may indicate a search for or giving of justice. Also suggests personal conscience or trying to make a decision – weighing the information, so fair play and trying to find a balance.
If your birth sign is Libra – the Scales, it is a “Cardinal” “Air” sign. It denotes the kind of mental activity that ‘‘judges; weighs – up’’; “balances”; “harmonises”; “adjusts”; “pacifies,” etc. Its judgements are not the quick, intuitional decisions of “Aries; they are arrived at usually after certain vacillation, consideration and balancing up of ‘‘pros and cons’’; but when arrived at they are just and fair.
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Libra is not prone to “take sides” in a partisan manner, but aims at drawing a true line of justice between opposing opinions. It is the “reasoning” sign. Its essence is harmony or “repose” – using that word in the sense it is used when we speak of a satisfactory musical composition or any work of Art: “an attained satisfaction” – “peace.” It is figured in the Zodiac as a pair of Scales. |
Scaling a wall or mountain indicates achievement if successful, or effort without satisfaction if it doesn’t succeed. Getting higher can show you trying to escape from something, or getting a higher or better view of where you are in life, and maybe where you are, or want to, go/going.
Scales on fish may represent the shining thoughts and feelings that make up the innermost self.
Example: I see a path close to the mountains and I take it. It was sloppy and I figured out I can move faster if I skate (ski) it with my legs. I start to scale the mountains by skiing just with my legs. The path is winding and beautiful, I decide that I can enjoy the moment a bit but I was determined to find my way to my car.
Example: The scales are also such a deep symbol that was imprinted on us early in our climb into self-consciousness. But we projected it into the heavens as an astrological sign. We do not see it in our everyday lives much now, but only a few years ago it was everywhere seen representing fair dealings, justice, pay back, the measure of your soul – remember Shakespeare and the pound of flesh.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Are the scales weighing something – if so what is it indicating?
Do the scales in any way indicate judgement – if so what is it?
What balance are you trying to find in yourself?
See Archetype of the Paradigm – Being the Person or Thing – Conditioned Reflexes – Identity and dreams
Scar
Influences still remaining from past hurt and being visible in the way you live or relate. Past experiences that have left a mark. See Example under white.
Sometimes the scars are left by the culture we live in and the splits it leaves between our life, economics, sex, religion and science. They are all at odds with each other and cause conflicts within us. Josef Breuer stated that forgotten traumas, painful incidents that had left a psychological scar, were responsible for what was at that time called hysteria. It was, Breuer wrote, the undischarged emotional energy associated with these forgotten traumas that were the root cause of hysteria. Using hypnotic techniques, Breuer helped some patients to re-enact, and thus recall, the original traumatic incident. In doing so the emotional charge was released. The release and remembering or integrating, was called catharsis or abreaction. If there is still a scar in adulthood from lack of bonding and warm love it leads to great vulnerability in relationship, and an urge to never quite make a full connection with anybody unless dealt with.
Example: I am standing in my wife’s garden. A ferret (one we had set free after trouble over them with neighbours – the ferrets belonged to my son) came down the garden to me. It was plump and healthy. I picked it up to look at it, and saw an enormous scar running the full length of its left side. I realised that although it had survived, and was well, it had been an incredible struggle, and was scarred for life. Then I realised that my son had hid the other ferrets somewhere. Patrick.
Patrick’s son had kept a female ferret as a pet and mated it so it had pups. The ferret, Blanche, was a very playful and loving animal, though prone to get excited and aggressive if food was around. One day Blanche and her babies escaped from their cage and attacked the neighbour’s chickens so Patrick hid them in his large building. They once more escaped from their enclosure and got under the floorboards of the multi-storey house. All but one of them were retrieved. But that one lived under the floorboards for six months, managing to survive somehow with water and food without being fed by Patrick. Patrick tried to humanly catch it in a cage, but although it entered the cage until it triggered the trap, it fought so enormously to get out it managed to escape from the metal cage.
Patrick had to eventually poison it as it was beginning to gnaw electric cables. The ferret therefore became for Patrick a symbol of survival against enormous odds, so represented the great injuries he had sustained in his childhood and his survival of them. But also it showed his loving relationship and care for the natural and instinctive level existing in him during babyhood. It shows how, as an adult, he had listened to and cared for that instinctive life in him through working with his dreams. The hiding of the other ferrets expressed how Patrick hid this sensitive caring side of himself from others because he had been hurt enough in childhood, and was now suspicious of how others would deal with that side of himself.
Example: I was looking at my right forearm which was bare. It was very brown from the sun, and at the top of the forearm near the elbow was a white slash. This surprised me and I ran my finger across it, and it felt something like a scar because the skin was slightly raised. The main thing about the slash was its intense white. It was so white it is difficult to know whether it was shining like light, or was simply incredibly white. Miche
In this dream Miche felt the whiteness was a very noticeable part of him, representing hurts (the scar) that had been transformed by hard work and skills (the right arm) and were now apparent to other people. Useful Questions and Hints: Were scars disfiguring you or a dreamt of subject? Where did the scars appear on the body? Have you felt scared by events or experiences in your life? See Body – Parts of – Trauma – Being the Person or Thing – Life’s Little Secrets .
Scarab
Eternity, continuity of life, the soul, the transmuting influence. See: Alchemist.
Scarecrow
Having no life, no spirit, empty of feelings, of worth. An illusion,
Scent
See: Odour.
School
Your attempts or desire to learn, or what you learned at school – not lessons but interrelationships, class structure, competitiveness, authority, mortification, group preferences, etc. The school can represent habits of behaviour or feeling reactions developed during those years – puberty occurs at this time, and confronts you with many new feelings, choices and drives, and that was a part of your ‘schooling’.
‘I am back at school on the first day of the new school year. At this point it can vary slightly, but I always feel out of place, usually because I am older than the other girls now or – most common – because my uniform is incorrect and it is time for assembly – I went to a very strict convent school. There is always some feeling of panic and quite often loneliness.’ P. H.
P. H. is still uncomfortable about who she is as a person. The influence of the school years still nags at her that she ought to be other than she is. Not having a nature that easily conformed, she was led to feel isolated and an alien.
There can also be ‘higher learning’ and this is not about maths and language, but about life skills, about love and how you connect with your own wholeness and potential, and the universe in which you are intricately embedded.
In a few dreams school refers to feelings of rejection or aloneness due to the stress faced by many children on leaving their mother for the first time to attend school.
Authority: School and teachers were authorities outside of your family. How you dealt with probably colours your whole adult life.
Classroom: Study, relationship with authority, or whatever sense of yourself was engendered by school. Maybe you need to ask yourself what you actually learned at school. Also the life lessons you are learning at present.
Graduating: The tests you have met in life and relationships and the entrance into greater skill or maturing this has produced. It might suggest the sense you have achieved adulthood, or the skill leading to adult independence. It probably also associates with your feelings of personal of value.
Gymnasium: Taking risks in learning something new, or practising new skills, perhaps needing daring. It could also apply to physical health.
Library: Your knowledge and learning ability, or stored information such as memories. It can show you touching the vast reservoir of unconscious information and insights you hold
Places in school: Particular abilities you have, lessons you learned, or associations with that room.
School clothes: Social attitudes or moral rules learned at school. Perhaps pressure to conform.
School friend: Your attitudes developed in school, as you are ‘meeting’ them in the present. The positive helpful and supportive things you got from you school years or learn by being with your friend.
Can sometimes refer to feelings of rejection or aloneness due to the stress faced by many children on leaving their mother for the first time to attend school. See the third example.
Example: ‘I am back at school on the first day of the new school year. At this point it can vary slightly, but I always feel out of place, usually because I am older than the other girls now or – most common – because my uniform is incorrect and it is time for assembly – I went to a very strict convent school. There is always some feeling of panic and quite often loneliness.’ P. H.
P. H. is still uncomfortable about who she is as a person. The influence of the school years still nags at her that she ought to be other than she is. Not having a nature that easily conformed, she was led to feel isolated and an alien.
Example: ‘In the bathroom area, a school class was being held, so I had to wait for my bath, steam would be bad for the books. I didn’t have any soap with me but I was going to wash my hair and could use the shampoo.’ Leonie K.
Leonie is getting rid of attitudes or a self image developed at school, shown as shampooing her hair. The new attitudes of letting off steam would not have been acceptable at school. Idioms: Of the old school; tell tales out of school; old school tie; well schooled. See: Schoolteacher and Headmaster under Roles.
Example: Working on a dream with P. The dream included reference to a school. Children were on their way to school and waving good-bye to their mothers. I was surprised at the intensity of emotion P. displayed when she looked at the saying good-bye, and then suddenly realised that this was the child’s first taste of leaving home, saying good-bye to mother.
School Uniform: This usually expresses your feelings about the time you were at school, orwhat you feel about being at school, or being the age to be in a school uniform.
So the uniform also holds in it the possibility of the dependence, the desire to ‘get out of a uniform existence’, the desire to excel or escape, you experience or may have experienced at school.
The uniform may simply also link with learning something – what did you actually learn at school – what life lessons, perhaps learned by the experience rather than the lessons?
Shelf: Possibly your memories, of something that is a part of your everyday awareness; something that is accessible in terms of your using it or remembering what it represents. See: ledge.
Idioms: Of the old school; tell tales out of school; old school tie; well schooled. See: Schoolteacher and Headmaster.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What did you feel about the uniform either in the dream or in real life?
What is happening in the rest of the dream as a comment on the uniform?
What was your experience of school like and what did you get from it?
Is it a school I went to?
If so what are my feelings about it?
What was happening at the school?
Were there special relationships at school?
Am I feeling the desire to learn, or am I involved in learning at the moment?
If this is about life skills, if so what have I learned?
Are there particular themes here – competitiveness, bullying, authority, punishment?
See Learn – Learning the brake, gears and accelerator – Identity and dreams – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Characters and People in Dreams – Acting on your dream