Posts Tagged ‘dream dictionary interpretation’

Black

This is the colour of the night, and so because it links with absence of light, opens us to what we can’t see or deal with in the dark – in what is ‘in the dark’, unconscious – within or around us. It is the experience, like sleep, in which the ego diminishes or melts back into unconsciousness. This relates to all those things you repress or avoid feeling or lack full awareness of in yourself and life. So the dream will probably include threats of some sort, or what is unknown, hidden or avoided. So this relates to your hidden fears or past hurts that have been buried and remain unconscious. In African traditions black is the colour of night, death, excrement, and illness. But our universe began in darkness, and light in dreams represents conscious awareness.

Black can depict what we feel is evil – in other words the unaccepted side of yourself, the parts of your nature you don’t want others to see, and you don’t want to admit even to yourself. It also may indicate depression, what is negative within you or from an outside influence. This includes feelings of secrecy, fear or things we fear, and anxious feelings about death. See The Con About Evil

Writing about the meeting with the darkness, Jung says, “The battle between the hero and the dragon is the more active form of this myth, and it shows more clearly the archetypal theme of the ego’s triumph over regressive trends. For most people the dark or negative side of the personality remains unconscious. The hero, on the contrary, must realise that the shadow exists and that he can draw strength from it. He must come to terms with its destructive powers if he is to become sufficiently terrible to overcome the dragon. I.e., before the ego can triumph, it must master and assimilate the shadow”.

 Example: ‘Black and grey – outpouring of thoughts and feelings I have pushed down, refused to look at or acknowledge, for most of my life.

Last year I got into the habit when doing JKZ’s Body Scan Meditation, of doing the following: there is a part at the end of the meditation where you imagine you are breathing in through the top of your head, through your body and out your toes, and then reversing the process: in through the toes etc. I liked to imagine the air and the energy I was breathing in was full of colourful sparkles – it made me feel good. Towards the end of December last year I almost stopped in my tracks when I did this and realised that I was breathing in thick blackness – in through my head, and filling my body. I thought “Why is this happening?” and then made an effort to start again whilst imagining clean air coming in.

A few days later I was wondering though – perhaps I should have just let the blackness fill me and see what happened. I thought of how most of us only want to experience what we see as the ‘good’ things in life – always pushing away the ‘bad’ – but we need to experience everything – to integrate it all. On New Year’s Day I woke up feeling so low and empty – life seemed so meaningless, and I resolved to breathe in the blackness during my meditation…’ This is what set in motion a process of change, which over the months since then, has led me to a deep acceptance of myself and my life – I feel transformed. Helen Black

Things like a black animal or black vehicle usually indicate that you are dealing with feelings or fears that you have previously kept buried or repressed. Their appearance in your dream shows you are ready to meet such feelings by allowing them to be experienced and acknowledged.

Example: I dreamt last night that a black Spanish fighting bull charged me. I climbed a high wire mesh fence, like that surrounding tennis courts. There I was safe, as the Bull charged again. It charged people. I came down from the fence trying to help divert the bull’s destructiveness.

Here the dreamer is meeting sexual feelings that he had always avoided in the past and still feels threatened by. As the dream shows, he tries to avoid facing these feelings, but in the end has to deal with them. The forgetfulness or repression of parts of ones experience is very clearly shown in the next dream.

I felt very close to the girl. She said, “Do you remember when they made you black all over?”  I said I couldn’t, and she reminded me of being a film extra, when, to cover up my bad skin, I was covered in black make-up to look like a slave. I then said, “You know, there are parts of my life I can’t remember.”

The connection in some dreams between feelings about death and the colour black are shown in the next dream.

Mike is dying. He is taking care of the old folks to gain merit because he knows he may soon be joining them wherever they are. He wants to be sure that they remember him kindly. The black road (death road=death row) has been incorporated into President Bush’s speech and is declaimed as death road or death highway in some of his speeches – as in ‘we want to protect you from death road or highway’. Of course, no one believes him as everyone knows that it is impossible to save oneself from death’s road. We all have to travel it eventually.

Black also sometimes indicate what is earthy, the source of life and growth. What is hidden in the unconscious or body can be powerfully transformative. Like compost, it is full of potentially life enhancing energy. Such black or hidden things often take time to clarify. They have remained in a condition of never having been felt or known fully, and so are unclear and pre-verbal. Knowing them means gradually understanding through experiencing them, and being able to describe and integrate them. There is often a complication here in ones progress, in that consciously you may have hidden or repressed, or been unwilling to accept, anything that was not judged good or positive. In this way the so called ‘bad’ is repressed and you become one sided and lacking wholeness. Therefore meeting the ‘black’ is important. Out of this fundamental earthiness the new person you can become can emerge. See: For blackbird, black hole, blackberries, black-tie, see respective

Black and white: The opposites appearing together. In ourselves the good and bad coexist, and one balances the other. So this would suggest such coexistence and balancing.

Black clothes or under garments: This usually points to hidden or unconscious feelings or sexuality. Black is also associated with a priest or the clergy, so might depict a religious or moral influence in some dreams.

A person dressed in black: This may represent your shadow, or less accepted characteristics. See: shadow.

Black people: If this is a true black person, see black people.

Shiny black: Rather like a crystal ball, this suggests looking into your intuitive perception of what lies usually unconscious within you, looking into the depths of yourself, perhaps beyond the boundaries of your personality.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

What is it I am on the edge of being aware of, or have been unaware of previously?

Are there anxieties o feelings I usually do not allow myself to feel fully – perhaps using defences such as smoking or alcohol to help push away?

Is there something emerging out of the blackness that offers new growth – if so what do I notice in waking that is new and living in me?

See Resistances and meeting things I fear or dislike in my dream.

Blackbird

Something, perhaps intuition, emerging from the unconscious. Bad news. Sometimes thought of as messengers of the dead. See: Birds.

Black Magic

This usually suggests you feel another person is thinking badly of you, plotting against you, or trying to undermine you in some way. Consider who this might be. Awareness of the situation most often robs it of its power. It is only when it is affecting you unconsciously that it has power, or if you give it power by being frightened. It is being unaware, or your fear, that gives such things any power over you.

The black magic in the dream can also either suggest you wish to harm someone, if you are the magician, or that you are frightened of hidden things influencing you. Fear is the thing to overcome.

Although thorough investigation of claimed injury or death attributed to black magic has shown the real cause to be malicious aggression or murder, scientific research into the deaths of people who were said to have died as the result of a curse or a voodoo ritual, has shown the victims to have died of fear.

Death through fear is fairly common, and is reported by some doctors in connection with surgical operations, especially in the past. In 1887 Dr. Crile had watched helpless as his friend, William Lyndman died of shock after amputation of both legs. My uncle also died of the shock of losing his arm. My uncle, like William had lost little blood, and no vital organs were injured. Crile went on to develop anaesthesia and blood transfusion to counteract death through shock. But some forms of shock appeared to be outside any physical cause. In 1898 Crile was on an army transporter off Cuba and examined a young officer who was delirious with fear due to facing his first battle. He was as deep in shock as if his legs had been crushed by a wagon as William Lyndman’s had. This led Crile to become interested in exopthalmic goitre, an illness which produces a similar type of anxiety condition. Despite the use of anaesthetics, no one had successfully operated on such a goitre condition. Every patient died. Crile discovered why when he attempted such an operation in 1905.

While under anaesthesia the patient’s heart rate rose to 218 and the body temperature rose to a dangerous level. Despite no physical injury or infection, the patient died that night with a temperature of 109.6 F. Crile realised from his previous observations that it was fear that had killed the patient. Therefore he told his next patient, a young woman who needed the goitre operation, that he was going to give her a simple inhalation treatment. When she breathed in the anaesthetic, she therefore thought she was having a ‘treatment’ not an operation. She was the first person to survive the operation for exopthalmic goitre. Crile called it “stealing the goitre”, and was so impressed by the influence of emotion on the body he constantly stressed the importance of self control, and taught that calmness is strength.

Crile’s experience illustrates what can occur through threat of a curse or black magic. In our dreams we often portray something we deeply fear as an evil influence or person, or as an awful monster or ghost. Such fears usually relate to our own urges, such as anger or sexuality, but can be about any urge or thought that we have been led to feel is not permissible, or that we feel is downright evil. A demonic figure or environment might also be connected with very early babyhood experiences. The pain of birth is often depicted as hell or demonic influence in our dream symbolism. See: evil; witchcraft; The Con About Evil

Because the unconscious will use any belief system or cultural symbols we have absorbed to express a theme, the powerful images of witches or evil characters we see on films or in fiction are often used to depict important experiences. For example a dream in which a spell or curse is placed on one can portray the influence a painful experience has left on ones emotions. If you had been deeply hurt while in your mother’s arms, your unconscious would equate pain with being held close by a woman. This ‘cross wiring’ of associations could meaningfully be portrayed as a ‘spell’ which makes one feel frightened in the apparently loving situation. See: Victims; Dream Like a Computer Game; self hypnosis; spell.

Blacksmith

This might be connecting you with your deep creative powers and masculine strength, in shaping the metals of life, the possibilities of your nature. Forcefulness, material creativeness. See: Iron.

Blamed Blaming

Most likely a direct expression of feelings one has about being blamed or blaming someone else. Therefore the things to watch for in the dream are:

Blaming: What are you blaming someone or something else for? If you can clarify what it is, ask yourself if you are doing that in waking life, and how deeply you feel about the issue. How valid is the blaming? Is the blaming a way of avoiding responsibility or efforts to change?

While we are blaming someone or something we lose the power to direct our own life. This is because blaming is like saying, ‘What has happened to me is all due to ‘so and so’ or ‘such and such’. Each time this happens it does this to me.’ If we stop the blaming and wonder whether we can take charge of the situation, then we gain more power to change. For instance a child who blames its mother when it falls over its shoelaces, might never stop to learn how to do up its own shoelaces. It might continue to blame its mother for not doing up its shoelaces properly. In adult life that is a very incapacitating habit to have. See Victims.

Accepting responsibility for what occurs in your life does not mean self blame. Blaming oneself is as negative as blaming someone else. Seeing that effect follow cause is simply a way of learning how to bring about real and satisfying change in your life. It is a way of seeing result as a feedback of information as to how well your attitudes, activities and efforts worked. With that feedback you can change the attitudes or activities and gradually get better results.

Blamed: Do you accept the blame and feel guilty or a failure? If so it may show that you are taking on feelings of failure that will create guilt and conflict in you. There may also be excessive self-criticism arising. Perhaps there are things you have failed to see or accept, but feeling guilty isn’t the best way to learn and improve ones performance. Better to look at events as learning experiences.

A long-term study on the effects of pessimism and self blame was started in 1946 with 100 Harvard graduates. It showed an ‘impressive’ relationship between pessimism in twenty year olds, and poor health in middle age. With another study it was found that people who blamed poor performance on personal failings in general died younger than people who accepted slumps in performance as part of normal life.

Idioms: lay the blame; shoulder the blame; take the blame; to blame.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What part does blaming others or myself play in my life?

Can I begin to learn from experience rather than play the blaming game?

What can I learn from this dream and the blaming taking place?

Can you learn anything from the Plot of the Dream or even Easy Dream Interpretation.

Blanket

Physical or emotional comfort or warmth, or an attitude we can hide under/behind; an attitude or experience we are wrapped/rapt in. In this case the colour of the blanket would give a clue to what the feeling or attitude is. See: colours; bed.

Covered in blanket: Injury or feelings about death or withdrawal. A way of hiding what you are feeling or doing, or feeling a need to comfort yourself. It might even suggest a return to childhood feelings.

Electric blanket: Instant warmth. Fear of electricity for some people. A feeling of relaxation.

Red blanket: Often used in emergency situations so could have the associations of injury, accident or ill health; passion or anger. Sometimes it could indicate warmth.

Sharing a blanket: Intimacy; feeling closely connected with someone; sexual connection; wanting to be close to the person.

Wrapped in blanket: Slightly withdrawn or vulnerable; relaxed or passive; self comfort; feeling cold – lacking warmth; feeling injured, infirm or weak; hiding ones feelings or vulnerability.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What am I using the blanket for and what does that say about the way I am dealing with life at the moment?

If I am sharing the blanket am I easy with the intimacy indicated?

What colour is the blanket and what does that say about the attitudes or feelings I am wrapped up in? See colours.

Perhaps Acting on your dream will help, or Being the Person or Thing.

Blasphemy

A denial or cursing or your own innate self or latent possibilities. A turning of the will away from the possibility of direction from within.

Bleeding

Most often relates to emotional or psychological hurt, but can also depict physical injury, or presentiment of it. Emotional hurt could mean hurtful remarks, for instance being told we are not loved – these can sap our motive to live and may be depicted as blood. The bleeding might show a psychological injury, often from past trauma, which is causing you to lose energy or motivation.

Sometimes the blood can be a sacrament. As such it is not shown as emerging from an injury or wound but as nourishment, wine or bloody meat. See blood.

Blood flowing from a crack: Possibly menstruation or loss of virginity.

Blood on the ground: Someone hurt or dead.

Bloody clothes: Personal emotional hurt or injury, perhaps even death of someone.

Blood Sample: This can represent many things depending upon the rest of the dream. It could suggest an illness, a way of tracing your identity with DNA, or it could be a drug test. It needs to be explored to be sure. Try using Talking As or Processing Dreams

Blood sucked from you or sucking from another: Feeling that you are losing your very life force to someone, or taking energy and life from someone else. Sometimes sex is felt as this. The umbilical connection in the womb is sometimes felt as the life giving connection that if cut off prematurely, is such a loss that expenditure of energy in sex may be felt as vampirism.

In sexual dreams: May refer to loss of virginity, menstruation or fertility; or hurt to sexual drive.

See archetype of blood.

Idioms: After ones blood; bleeding heart; bleed someone white; blood boil/run cold; blood brother; blood is thicker than water; blood letting; blood money; blood on ones hands; blood out of a stone; blood relative; blood sucker; blue blood; cold/hot blood; draw blood; fresh blood; in the blood; in my blood; ones heart bleeds; out for blood; sweat blood; taste blood; young blood.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What part of my body – or the body – is the blood coming from, and what does that suggest about any hurt I may be suffering? (Look up part of body).

What is my relationship with the blood in terms of what I feel, my interaction or how I deal with it?

What can I understand from the theme and drama of the dream in terms of my life giving processes?

See theme; drama. Also Processing Dreams.

Bleach

Perhaps a healing process of cleansing old hurts or feelings; an attempt to ‘clean up’ ones emotions or attitudes, especially if applied to clothes; pain.

Bleak

Unfeeling, difficult emotionally. This sometimes connects with past times of pain..

Blessing

A release of the positive energies into outer life.

Blemish

A sense of not being good enough, or a fault in how you feel about your public image. See: Skin; stain.

This can indicate a fault, an imperfection, in whatever it is in regard to in the dream. Or something that spoils the appearance in some way.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Is this referring to you?

What do you feel about the blemish?

Do you feel as if you are in some way not as good as you should be?

Use Talking As or Easy Dream Interpretation to get more insight into the dream.

Blind Blindness

An inability or unwillingness to understand or agree to something. An inability to see something about yourself, or to be aware of what your intuition is telling you.

Unwillingness or inability to ‘see’ something; losing sight of something; not seeing traits which we don’t like about ourselves or others or feelings of not knowing or being clear about where you are going in life. Could also suggest moving into things or a relationship you do not understand; feeling lost or vulnerable; concealing something from yourself or others.

Eric Ackroyd, in his book A Dictionary of Dream Symbols, points out that within our psyche we usually know where we are going, and have a wider picture of our life. So blindness would suggest a refusal to see what we innately know. We may therefore need to seek this insight by considering what experiences or attitudes hold us from being clear about what we want to do and be.

Idioms: Blind impulse; none so blind; turn a blind eye; blind leading blind; blind alley. See: eyes.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What is my dream suggesting I cannot or do not want to see?

If someone else is blind in my dream what are they failing to see – or what are they aware of that I am not?

If I imagine being in the dream and seeing, what will I see?

For help doing this see Stand in Role or Easy Dream Interpretation.

Blister

Some irritating or injurious experience; something that has gradually produced hurt in you over a period of time; attitudes that attempt to protect from further hurt.

Things also blister as in the following dream – quoted from Our Dreaming Mind.

Mary’s dream of the “blistering paint,” often turn out to be concise metaphoric statements of as-yet-unfulfilled aspects of the dreamer’s fundamental “life task,” or the “deepest value conflict” in his/her life, not just in the moment, but over the entire span of time that the dream has been recurring.

In the group work with Mary’s dream, it was suggested that maybe she had grown up in a repressed home where the spontaneous expression of feelings was not allowed and had to be covered up with white paint. If strong emotions began to bubble up, the thin veneer of social politeness might blister and possibly peel away. The family image would be tarnished if feelings trapped beneath the surface heated up and became visible. Mary was stunned by these comments but recognised their validity. Suddenly she found herself flooded with previously repressed memories about specific incidents of physical abuse and emotional trauma from her childhood. These were memories that had been totally blocked from awareness during the intervening years. She realised that she had internalised the adult fears that her family’s social position would be destroyed if someone were to find out the family’s guilty “secrets” about her abuse. Mary was therefore expected to “whitewash” them. Although this technique of coping with the abuse may have been necessary during childhood, it was no longer appropriate and was preventing her from feeling comfortable with emotional expression and intimacy.

As a result of these insights, Mary began to talk about the family situation with her adult siblings and found out that each one had been abused, but had suffered in silence and guilt because they had assumed they had been the only one. As a result, the family members experienced tremendous relief, although this was accompanied by feelings of grief and anger. Once the members began to exchange honest communication, the whole family’s pattern of neurotic behaviour began to change. Harold and Mary felt that they obtained very significant benefits through exploring the meanings of their dreams. Taylor feels that such benefits are potentially available to all of us. Here is how he characterises the potential payoff from working with your dreams:

Useful Questions and Hints:

What is irritating or painful for me at the moment, and what does the dream suggest I can do about it?

Has there been a build up of pressure about something in my life that I am now ready to deal with?

Do I feel any discomfort in my body – if so, is the dream warning me of a physical problem?

See Easy Dream Interpretation or Talking As

Blizzard

An internal conflict or great unrest; feelings of disturbance perhaps to do with coldness in a relationship; feeling emotionally battered or threatened. See: Weather.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What is happening at the moment to cause me to shut down emotionally?

Am I feeling conflict or unrest or disturbance about something?

What emotional coldness am I meeting?

To help with understanding such emotional disturbance see Victims and Life’s Little Secrets

Blockage Blocked

Usually depicts restrained or held back emotions, energy or thoughts. Common areas of blockage are the throat, where words or feelings can be blocked by tension or restraints such as anger or helplessness; the chest, most often the store of emotions perhaps from many years ago; the genitals where we might block desire, hunger and the basic movement of our body toward pleasure.

The blockage might be shown in our dreams as a river being dammed, a traffic jam, a piece of machinery clogged, or some part of our body not functioning smoothly. Talking about the dream images and feelings associated with the dream with a sympathetic friend can help to release the block. Occasionally such a dream shows a problem in the body itself. So if the dream has that sort of feeling have a health check. See the example under blister.

The following description illustrates the origins and way to release such a blockage.

A friend told me he had a discomfort in his throat that had lasted for some weeks. He had been to the doctor, fearing cancer of his throat, but had been told there was no physical problem there. So we decided to sit together and see if we could penetrate what the discomfort was about.

I suggested he feel the discomfort and then make any sound that expressed what he felt. He slowly began to cough and moan. Gradually he began to experience emotions that led him to shout and express anger. As the feelings and anger mounted he could see what it was he was holding in his throat. He told me that his father had worked all his life at a gasworks shovelling coal to produce gas. This exposed him to excessive coal dust, and eventually he died from the lung problem this produced. So his anger was about how a man could be used in that way in an uncaring industry. But also, as his father was dying, the doctor asked him if he should give his father an injection that would lessen his pain and that would cause him to sleep till he died. He agreed to this, but his personal pain was that he had not told his father how much he loved him before he died, and all those feelings had been blocked in his throat. So with much crying and many declarations of love, he felt the blockage clear.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Where does the dream show the blockage is – and where in my body or mind does that point to? See body.

Does my dream suggest any way I can free the blockage?

If I imagine myself clearing the blockage while awake, can I feel a change in myself?

To help with this see carry the dream forward also Arm Circling Meditation.