Posts Tagged ‘dream dictionary interpretation’

Face

How your face appears in a dream points to how you see yourself, your self image, the fears or feelings, even anxieties you have about how you appear to others and yourself. It can also show the expression of or hiding of inner feelings and attitudes. It can be defined in two words – ‘identity’ and ‘communication’. This is because not only do most of us believe we are how we look, but also through our face we communicate to others what we feel and think. See Dreams are Virtual Realities

The face, especially if you are looking at yourself in a mirror, can also mean that you are facing yourself – facing up to yourself, or need to, ‘face yourself’. This dream often occurs when you are ready to really look at who you are and what facets of yourself you might be ignoring or even hiding. It is a sort of seld assessment or self analysis; but it might only be reflecting an aspect of you that needs attention and is usually about your inner world. See Inner World

Someone else’s face: How you see them and how you relate to them. What you feel and think suggest what your opinion of them is, and how you relate to them inwardly. The face could also point to what feelings and memories of them you carry within you. See Characters and People in Dreams

Blushing: Unconscious response to things. Feelings that you usually keep hidden, or are not usually aware of yourself. Often about strong feelings about another person you really like but are not showing, except for blushing. Something wrong with face: Sense of not being adequate; fear of how others see you. If it is someone else’s face it probably depicts how you feel about them, or your intuitions about them.

Changing ones face or head: Changing ones attitudes or decision about something; being uncertain or ‘two faced’. Having different aspects of your personality or seeing another side of yourself. Change the wording to fit seeing someone else with changing face – your to their.

Hiding ones face: Being ashamed of something; low confidence or uncertainty; being afraid of how others see you; hiding motives or feelings.

No face: This is probably what is called a shadow figure if you see it on another person – parts of your nature or behaviour that you usually keep hidden or do not admit to. If you are faceless then it could suggest either that you realise your real self is pure potential without particular characteristics, or you feel a fear of about loss of identity or uncertainty about who you are.

Example: Was looking in a mirror. Suddenly a shadow appeared on it. At first the shadow seemed threatening or frightening. Then I saw it was only a directive, a face,  figure with its arm and hand extended as if pointing. Looking behind me I saw that the shadow was cast by a featureless cat or animal. That is, its head was completely smooth, without eyes or ears. At first I thought it could not see or hear, but then realised it must be able to, as it was pointing to a man out in the rough sea. The man had a lifejacket on, so was in no immediate danger. But the sea was very rough. I went out and brought him in, dried him off, put him in my house to recover, then phoned the police in case they needed to know.

Here the dreamer was looking at himself in the mirror, and was directed to realise that although there wasn’t any immediate danger, he was fighting against heavy emotional forces. The dream tends to not directly tell us about ourselves, but uses another person of event to point things out to us. See Characters and People in Dreams and Exploring Dreams -Techniques to use

But being faceless in the role of a helper, guide or nurse can have a much deeper meaning. It suggests that it is an aspect of you that has given up its egotistic state of being important, a leader or even a saint. As such it becomes a Christ like figure who becomes a servant of Life – washing peoples feet. Such a dream figure is worth listening to.

Idioms: Blue in the face; egg on my face; face down; face the facts; face the music; face up to; face value; fill your face; flat on one’s face; face lift; fly in the face of; get out of my face; in your face; keep a straight face; long face; poker face; pull a face; save face; shut your face; two faced; wipe that smile off your face; written all over your face. See: head.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What is being expressed or felt here?

If there is change what is the change moving toward or expressing?

What character, qualities, or lack of them does the face depict?

See Secrets of Power Dreaming – Emotions and Mood in Dreams – Associations Working With

Faeces Feces Shit Poop

Considering that passing faeces is a natural function, in dreams it can suggest getting rid of emotions or toxins that need to be released or let go of. Like digested food, faeces can represent experience that was relevant but now needs to be let go of. Very often expresses feelings of repulsion or distaste.

Sometimes this indicates something you have produced and created; something visible that has come out of you. Apart from the meaning mentioned under Cesspool, that is, the corruptible parts of human nature that become manure for new growth, faeces can also represent money or riches, fertility.

In another sense, to pass faeces with feelings of relief means to be rid of worrying burdensome feelings, of tension, or sexual repression. While to be covered in faeces may suggest a fear of being outwardly repulsive, or to harbour self destructive thoughts and feelings.

To play with faeces is a return to infantile behaviour; but it may develop in the dream into a question of what to do with them, or how to use them. This is the beginning of using our basic, earthly nature, to creative ends and the shaping of self. Because babies often play with their faeces, and have a feeling connection with them to do with their self expression and self-giving, in dreams showing this it could refer to an infant level of exploration or self expression.

Example: One such memory that was a dream I experienced. I must have been very young because I had no feelings about it other than joy and pleasure. I was lying on my back cradled in my auntie Flo’s knickers and she was wearing them. Then she did a crap all over my body and that felt like a most wonderful and orgasmic feeling. I cannot remember anything beyond that wonderful feeling. As an adult I wonder whether the child mind does not have so many feelings about being dirty but revelled in the close physical contact and the shit.

Some dreams about faeces link with the body being clogged with toxins. This might show in dreams where faeces are everywhere and interfering with normal activities. Toxins might arise in the body through poor food, or through an allergy to something like wheat. So these dreams might be suggesting the physical need to have a healthy bowel.

From infancy we gradually learn to consciously control our bowel movements, and so excrement can depict either how we are controlling or the need to let go. This can link with the way we deal with money or how we give of ourselves. This is very important because we are told or taught how to control everything from our bowels, urine, anger, sexual feelings and ourselves, but we are not taught how to really let go of control and learn from life. See control; LifeStream

The Inca description of gold was ‘excrement of the gods’! Shit can of course produce wonderfully rich fertiliser.

If shitting on someone or something: Expressing desire to belittle them or to feel one’s superiority; heaping unjust accusations on someone; bringing something which appeared powerful into perspective.

Idioms: In the shit; feeling shitty; talking a lot of shit/crap; being shat on; being a shit. See: Toilet.

Useful questions:

Are there feelings I need to let go of?

Am I living in a way suggestive of being in a pig pen?

Does the dream suggest I am over controlling what comes out of me?

See: excrement – Associations Working With – Exploring Dreams -Techniques to use

Failure

The feeling of failure could arise because of comparison with others; competitiveness; or because of ones high aim missing its mark. Failure is the alternative to success. So the failure might be ‘because’. See: falling; or the Because Factor described in processing dreams.

 Example: ‘I was in a race riding a horse but couldn’t get to the starting gate in time. The others were way ahead of me jumping the fences. I couldn’t catch up, and one fence I came to grew to a huge height and was like a steel barrier. I couldn’t get over it and felt a failure.’ Ron S.

Ron had not done well at school; had not taken any particular training; no steady relationship or children. In his late twenties Ron looked at his friends with steady job, married with family, and felt a failure. From the dream he realised he was viewing life as a competitive race to succeed. This was stopping him from following his real interest, psychotherapy, which his family viewed as playing games. He could ride his horse into the fields and explore. He did, by going to America, training, raising a family.

Example: Dreamt I was driving to work in my car. Just as I was opposite our house a lorry – bread – hurtled out past a parked car, didn’t seem to see me, and smashed straight over me. I was left standing by the roadside, the car smashed away from me to about the size of a bike. My right leg was slightly encased in the smashed car. I thought I had lost my leg, but it was not smashed off, only bloody and perhaps broken.  I remained standing by the road and shouted for my wife to call the ambulance. I thought I would have to be in hospital for some time and quite liked the idea, and decided to meditate while there. I seemed to have an inner realisation about the crash. I knew that my karma had led me to death at that moment, but because of the work I had done at ashram over the past eight months, this had been escaped.  Now I asked my wife to phone my emplore and tell him I would not be going to work that day.

The man who dreamt this explore it and came to this view of  his dream. Going to work is the steady, persevering work on myself – the daily facing of difficulties and patiently pressing on.

The car is, because it keeps going wrong, my sense of failure (when I dreamt this the car was in the garage for repair). It is all the past things that have driven me, or carried me along out of a sense of failure.

The bread van was a connection with work. It was the great power which had been released by the persistent facing of myself, and which now smashed away the failure drives. This left me standing on my own feet, but outwardly insecure. The injured leg was the causes of the failure drives being revealed – my psychological inability to stand strongly on my own feet – my lack of confidence.

Going to hospital meant that in the healing of these causes or root problems, much more inner peace, or chance to enter deeply into self would arise. I would have died as a person, not being able to progress beyond this point, this problem, if it hadn’t been for the many things learned in giving myself to others and teaching LifeStream. If I had not followed the inner drive to start activities at Ashram, during which I learned to open up the whole inner mess of my life. I might not in this life have gained, developed or being given the necessary qualities  and tools to melt and pass beyond the problem. Not going to work is not having to work any longer in that way. It was now my choice.

Example: As I looked at my present situation, as I was wondering how to come to terms with being a second-class sort of person in a second-class life situation. I started thinking about all the potential and mental possibilities I have touched in the past. How could it be that I had come through so many things, grown beyond myself in so many ways, and yet at the moment I am locked in this apparent decay and decline? Has all the past been an illusion? Have I declined so much that all the power and wonder of my previous life is now lost to me?

I realised I had got into a negative feedback loop. I tried to find the way out of the loop. The only way out I could find was the realisation that the loop has no end. There is only one thing to do – stop it playing. Grab it and stop the crazy record. To help with this, to help grab the thing and kill it, I obviously would have to realise it as untrue. If I still believe the loop to be playing a truth, then I only strengthen the action. So for its cessation I need to realise that my sense of self is a constantly moving fragile thing that has no stable reality. I am not ANY ONE THING – so how can I be a failure, or a success, or great, or of no account, or any thought or feeling? No one thought or feeling can represent my reality. No feeling, or sense of myself, is anything more than a sense, a feeling, it is not ME. So how could this feeling represent some sort of permanent personal reality?

 

Useful questions and hints:

What do I feel I have failed at – compared with whom?

Who has told me in the past that I have not performed well enough?

In what way is failure shown in the dream, and can I recognise that in feelings?

See Associations Working With – Exploring Dreams Techniques to use – Life’s Little Secrets – Martial Art of the Mind

Faint

Fainting in dreams can indicate stress great enough to produce the faint response – a way of avoiding too much emotional pain, shock, great fear or avoidance. Some esoteric techniques cause a fainting if consciousness enabling the person to be aware in the world of the dead, the unconscious, and visions. This causes the rational mind to faint, and so brings about a condition in which one can contact one source, perhaps having a profound vision. This was the method of Jalal ad-Dīn Rumi.

In the ‘Bardo Thodol’ it says, ‘The common people call this the state wherein the consciousness principle (object knowing principle) hath fainted away.’ These teachings declare that if we cannot hold onto this condition, we drop into the next level, which is experiencing the effect of the Clear Light. If this is not possible to maintain, we drop into our karmic matrix. If this is not maintained, we become lost in images and ‘dreams’ arising from the karma we have gathered, i.e. our loves, hates, fears, and aspirations.

But you can have a faint marking, a faint sound, his presence was faint, be faint of heart, faint praise or faint recall.

See: Dizzy.

Fair Hair

Your conscious thoughts, awareness, light headed. See: Hair.

Fairground

What is happening to you at the fairground often shows your feelings about the enormous range of differences and activities you observe in human society. It therefore depicts the range of human fate – rich to poor, midgets to giants; the ‘swings and roundabouts’ of life. So you may be finding your way through the many things facing you, and it is wise to keep a certain amount of suspicions of others motives.

It could also suggest you want some fun and release in your life. See Amusement Park or Arcade

Example: For the past year I have had recurring dreams about fairground rides. Occasionally members of my family, including my father have died on the rides. When I’m on the ride I’ve survived, but I can sense danger all around me. This dream is beginning to bother me. I am 15 years old.

As we try to become independent of parents we dream of seeing them dead. If it is not murder, then the dreamer sees the parent or parents die. In either case, the child still faces life without them, and this seems to be the point of such dreams. So the example illustrates the quieter form of getting rid of a parent.

The fairground can also be a testing oneself to define self image. This because some rides need a certain amount of courage or ability to face new experiences. There is also great variety here, and so might point to the varied experiences we are meeting and trying to find our way through or understand.

The fairground also represents the ups and downs of life, its variety and uncertainties. There IS danger in almost everything we do in life. But there is also opportunity and the possibility of deep satisfaction. The challenge is what YOU will make of it? How will you play your part? Will you forever feel surrounded by danger, and thereby not fully express yourself? Or can you laugh and love while the ride goes on? The following example clearly shows the difficulties we face. See also: amusement park; Market.

Example: Whilst walking home with a boy we reached the end of the path. However there was an exit leading to an empty dark fairground. My friend ran off, leaving me frightened. I ran away and found a church. Inside a service was underway and I sat down. I realised though that everyone around me were zombies. A man pointed a gun at me and I somehow escaped.

It seems the dreamer may have had a difficulty with a boyfriend leaving her, or the fear of it. This has made her doubt the ready made images about love and marriage. The dark fairground has in it the sense of looking behind the bright lights to see the reality back of the glamour of things. I don’t know what age she is, but she is wondering what life has to offer you without a male. Because of those feelings you wonder if there is comfort in traditional religion. But the people you see using this approach are, in your mind, doing things automatically without questioning. But the end of the dream is important though. It suggests the whole dream arose out of her hidden fears of being hurt in a relationship.

Useful Questions and Hints

Where there parts of the dream you had intense feelings?

Did you feel fear or pleasure in the fairground?

Were you alone or with someone?

See Processing Dreams – Being in Control – Exploring Dreams Techniques to use

Fairies Fairy

Natural forces or processes, such as electricity, gravity, cohesion, magnetism. The unconscious tends to express such forces pictorially as ideas are portrayed in most dreams. But the fairy might also be a process or realisation within yourself. It can also refer to something that is completely impractical or a fantasy.

The fairy can represent the desire to believe in the magical despite a feeling of its loss. There is an overall sense in the Western mind and psyche that God does not exist – ‘God is dead’. For many people this leads either to a dry intellectual relationship with life, or a feeling of something missing. And as a society we may attempt to deal with the dryness or sense of loss with alcohol, meaningless social rituals, drugs, excessive ambition to grasp money, mental illness or breakdown between self and society. Aniela Jaffe says this is a retreat of consciousness. The ‘magic’ of a living contact with our own core self is dead. See Core

Fairy tales: Are the language of the unconscious and dreams. The meaning of them has been forgotten by modern humans, yet it is an important language because it reveals secrets of the inner life of humans that they ignore to their detriment. To quote from Dreams the forgotten Language by Erich Fromm, “For the people of the past, living in the great cultures of both East and West, there was no doubt as to the answer to this question. For them myths and dreams were among the most significant expressions of the mind, and failure to understand them would have amounted to illiteracy. It is only in the past few hundred years of Western culture that this attitude has changed. At best, myths were supposed to be naïve fabrications of the pre-scientific mind, created long before man had made his great discoveries about nature and had learned some of the secrets of its mastery.”

Unfortunately this forgetfulness has led to the crazy world we live in today, in which countless thousands are constantly on anti depressants and do not know how to cope with life.

Useful questions and hints:

In what way does the fairy exist in the dream and how do I relate to it?

Is this some sort of wish for a magical thing to be real in my life?

If I imagine myself as the fairy what do I experience?

See Inner World – Simple Truths – Clicking On – Myths Legends and Fairy Tales in Dreams

Fakir

The irrational rather than reasonable self. The part of you that does things for no logical reason. See: Guru.

Fall Fallen Falling Fell

Some dream researchers suggest falling is one of the main themes in dreams. In the sample used for this book, the words fall; falls; fell; falling, occur 72 times in a 1000 dreams. The words find; finds; finding; found, occur 297 times. Whereas the words connected with looking and seeing occur 1077 times.

Falling indicates a loss of confidence. a threat to usual sources of security such as relationship, source of money. Also falling can link with your social image such as loss of face or sustaining beliefs. It often involves tension, loss of social grace or moral failure – such as falling into temptation.

Sometimes it is about coming down to earth from a too lofty attitude or even sexual surrender. Apart from insecurity, falling might at times point to the dropping away from or pulling back from outer worldly activity. We can in fact ‘fall’ in love, with all its pleasures and pain, its ups and down. And as the idioms show at the end of this entry you can fall in many other ways.

During our development or growth we ‘fall’ from our mother’s womb when ripe; being dropped by a parent must be our earliest sense of insecurity and we fall many times as we learn to stand and walk. As we explore our boundaries in running, climbing, jumping and riding, falling is a big danger. At times it could mean death. Learning to walk down stairs is a great achievement for a baby, and has very real danger and fear of falling. See: stairs.

Out of this we create the ways falling is used in dreams. By learning to meet our insecurities, perhaps by using Secrets of Power Dreaming we can dare more in life. This is in essence the same as meeting the fear of falling off our bike as we learn to ride. If we never master the fear we cannot ride.

Example: ‘I am sitting in a high window box facing outwards, with my son and a friend of his on my left. I feel very scared of falling and ask my son and his friend to climb back into the building. I feel too scared to move until they shift.’ Trevor N.

At the time of the dream, for the first time in his life, Trevor was working as a full time freelance journalist. His wife was out of work and his frequency of sales low enough to cause them to be running out of money. The building behind felt like a place he had worked in on a nine to five basis, so associated it with security. Falling was fear of failure, getting in debt, dropping into the feelings of self doubt and being incapable and feeling inadequate. In fact it was just a fear, and he went on to develop secure work.

Example: ‘I was on a road which led up to the hospital I was put in at three. I felt a sense of an awful past as I looked at the road. Then I was standing on the edge of a precipice or cliff. My wife was about four yards away near the road. I stepped in an area of soft earth. It gave beneath my weight and I sank up to my waist. I realised the cliff edge was unstable and the whole area would fall. I was sinking and shouting to my wife to help me. She was gaily walking about and made light of my call for help. I cried out again. Still she ignored me. I shouted again for her help. She took no notice and I sank deeper, the ground gave way and I fell to my death.’ Barry I.

Through being put in a hospital at three without his mother, Barry had a deep seated fear that any woman he loved could desert him. The cliff edge depicts the edge upon which a lot of his life is lived – a point of insecurity about relationship. His fall is the loss of any sense of bonding between him and his wife out of this fear. His death is the dying of his feeling of love and relationship, and the pain it causes. Understanding these fears Barry was able to leave them behind in later dreams and in life.

Example: I am falling down a cliff. In the dream, I know if I hit the bottom I will die. (I’ve been told by dream ‘experts’ that this is so.) I hit the bottom – my body is splattered on the ground, but ‘I’ am floating through the air thinking ‘How strange! I’m supposed to be dead! But I’m alive and free.’ Ingmar Bergman.

Example: ‘Near where I stood in the school gymnasium was a diving board, about 20ft. off the ground. Girls were learning to dive off the board and land flat on their back on the floor. If they landed flat they didn’t hurt themselves – like falling backwards standing up.’ Barry I.

The school is a learning situation. Once we learn to fall ‘flat on our back’ – i.e. fail – without being devastated or ‘hurt’ by it, we can be more creative. Dreams like this take falling into realms beyond fear. The following examples illustrate this.

Example: ‘As I prayed I realised I could fly. I lifted off the ground about three feet and found I could completely relax while going higher or falling back down. So it was like free fall. I went into a wonderful surrendered relaxation. My whole body sagging, floating in space. It was a very deep meditative experience.’ Sarah D.

Sarah has found an attitude which enables her to soar/dare or fall/fail without being so afraid of being hurt or dying emotionally. This gives a form of freedom many people never experience. This does not arise from denying or suppressing fears.

Example: ‘I was standing outside my mother’s house to the right. The ground in front had fallen away. The house was about to cave in. I felt no fear or horror. Instead I was thinking about new beginnings and the possibility of a new house.’ Helen B.

Helen is here becoming more independent and leaving behind attitudes and dependency.

Example: I saw that I was lying on a bed. … Observing my bed, I saw I was lying on plaited string supports attached to its sides: my feet were resting on one such support, my calves on another, and my legs felt uncomfortable. I seemed to know that those supports were movable, and with a movement of my foot I pushed away the furthest of them at my feet – it seemed to me that it would be more comfortable so. But I pushed it away too far and wished to reach it again with my foot, and that movement caused the next support under my calves to slip away also, so that my legs hung in the air. I made a movement with my whole body to adjust myself, fully convinced that I could do so at once; but the movement caused the other supports under me to slip and to become entangled, and I saw that matters were going quite wrong: the whole of the lower part of my body slipped and hung down, though my feet did not reach the ground. I was holding on only by the upper part of my back, and not only did it become uncomfortable but I was even frightened. And then only did I ask myself about something that had not before occurred to me. I asked myself: Where am I and what am I lying on? and I began to look around, and first of all to look down in the direction in which my body was hanging and whither I felt I must soon fall. I looked down and did not believe my eyes. I was not only at a height comparable to the height of the highest towers or mountains, but at a height such as I could never have imagined.

… I thought of what would happen to me directly I fell from my last support. And I felt that from fear I was losing my last supports, and that my back was slowly slipping lower and lower. Another moment and I should drop off. And then it occurred to me that this cannot be real. It is a dream. Wake up! I try to arouse myself but cannot do so. What am I to do? What am I to do? I ask myself, and look upwards. Above, there is also an infinite space. I look into the immensity of sky and try to forget about the immensity below, and I really do forget it. The immensity below repels and frightens me; the immensity above attracts and strengthens me. I am still supported above the abyss by the last supports that I have not yet slipped from under me; I know that I am hanging, but I look only upwards and my fear passes. As happens in dreams, a voice says: ‘Notice this, this is it!’ And I look more and more into the infinite above me and feel that I am becoming calm. . . .I see that I no longer hang as if about to fall, but am firmly held. I ask myself how I am held: I feel about, look round, and see that under me, under the middle of my body, there is one support, and that when I look upwards I lie on it in the position of securest balance, and that it alone gave me support before. And then, as happens in dreams, I imagined the mechanism by means of which I was held; a very natural, intelligible, and sure means, though to one awake that mechanism has no sense. I was even surprised in my dream that I had not understood it sooner. It appeared that at my head there was a pillar, and the security of that slender pillar was undoubted though there was nothing to support it. From the pillar a loop hung very ingeniously and yet simply, and if one lay with the middle of one’s body in that loop and looked up, there could be no question of falling. This was all clear to me, and I was glad and tranquil. And it seemed as if someone said to me: ‘See that you remember.’ And I awoke. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, 1879

Tolstoy’s dream is a wonderful example of the subtle balance between fear and confidence that goes on in each of us constantly. Not only does it illustrate the loss of confidence, but also how it is regained – by fixing on a different mental image. The strange and fascinating thing is that the immensity above and the immensity below are equally awe-full. Perhaps the difference between fear and confidence is that although we may be faced by the same situation, when there is a movement from the feeling of falling, or being out of control, to the feeling of rising or flying and therefore being more in control, our relationship with the world totally alters.

Example: I am walking along a road with my family. There is a large pit ahead and my mother falls into it. I wake feeling very disturbed. A few weeks later my mother died. Sarah B.

Here the pit obviously deals with Sarah’s sense of her mother’s impending death. This enabled her to face the event with greater balance when it happened.

Example: If I but let go, and let the moan of pleasure cry out, and fall, and fall, and fall, into that immensity and fall until there is no more falling – for we fall only in space in moving from one place to another; but here there is no beginning or end, no landmarks to pass or space to cover – then I will have gone wonderfully, ecstatically mad. I would be so mad I could love you; so mad I could give everything; so damn blissfully crazy I need never again hold on to anything, to anyone, to any moment, any past, any future – any – any – anything!

Occasionally: If we use fantasy and thought to get away from the ‘real’ world’ or if we use entertainment, alcohol, socialising, to escape from inner pain and conflict, when these distractions are taken away and reality breaks through again there is a sense of falling and threat. So falling may depict this fear of being faced with our own inner feelings.

 

A person falling: Wish to be rid of them; or anxiety in regard to what they represent.

A child or son falling: See: baby; son.

Falling into an abyss or pit: Fear of failure; fear of meeting ones own depths of feeling and the hidden side of oneself; anxiety about some form of death. It can often be a way of facing fears involved in falling, and can be met by imagining yourself falling into the pit or abyss. See Falling – Secrets of Power Dreaming

Fear of falling: This may refer to anxiety about falling into old patterns of behaviour or past depression and difficult feelings. But of course it can still link with the other definitions of falling such as failure or lack of confidence.

House falling down: Personal stress; illness; personal change and growth due to letting old habits and attitudes crumble. Sometimes it is about leaving an old way of life behind and starting a new one.

Going fast to an edge and falling: Could mean overwork and danger of breakdown of health.

Seeing things falling or falling on you: Sense of danger or change in regard to what is represented.

If you imagine things falling at you, your instinct is to feel careful or suspicious that you might get hit. This suggests you feel anxious about ideas or events that you feel will badly influence you – maybe public attitudes or opinions.

See: house; abyss; chasm. See also: flying.

Idioms: break your fall; fall apart (at the seams); fall asleep; fall behind; fall between the cracks; fall between two stools; fall flat on my face; fall for; fall for that; fall head over heels; fall ill; fall in line; fall in love; fall into a trap; fall into my lap; fall off the wagon; fall on deaf ears; fall on your sword; fall short; fall through; fall through the cracks; fall to pieces; let the chips fall where they may; pride goeth before a fall; the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; the bigger they are the harder they fall; the wheels fall off; wheels fall off; fall-out.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Did I actually fall in my dream, and if so what did I feel?

Was I near a hole or an abyss, or at a great height, and what was the outsome?

Did someone else fall?

Where you hurt in a fall?

See – Avoid Being Victims –  Characters and People in Dreams – Exploring Dreams Techniques to use – Facing Fear

Fall

Season See: Autumn.

Family and family relationships

Family represent values, attitudes and emotional or social responses we have absorbed from our family; the acceptance or tensions we feel in relationship with family contact; the support or pain we feel from parents and siblings.

When you think about your family or any member of it,  you are only taking in your thoughts, impressions and feelings about them. So many people do not realise that they have an inner family equally as powerful as the external person you know. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by meeting or living with them, and they change you and make you the person you are. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or family. Such an inner family or member can appear in dreams because you still carry the memories or impressions of them, and so they influenced what you hold within you.

Even if that family is damaged and hurt we are still a part of it. It still satisfies us and our need for connection. As blasted and tormented as our family life may be, that is a whole family. Our attempts to make that good are our spiritual life. Our attempts to make that good or to contribute towards it in some way, also are our spiritual life. It is an initiation as an individual person into the fact that ones life is a part of a larger life and a larger community.

From our family we learn most of the positive and negative patterns of relationship and attitudes towards living, which we carry into daily events. Father’s uncertainty in dealing with people, or his anxiety in meeting change, may be the roots of our own difficulties in those areas. If our mother is unable to develop a feeling contact with us, we will lack the experience of being able to love unless we learn it in other relationships.

Example: They curse and cry until all their disillusionment and rage and heartbreak is dispelled. But then finally they see their parents as they really were.  One patient looked back at her domineering neurotic mother and for an instant she saw her surrounded by all her flaws and all her virtues. And for the first time she found forgiveness and understanding for the flaws, and gratitude for the virtues. Her mother was not a goddess, not even a very good mother, but she was the woman who had borne and nourished her. Without denying the pain she had suffered at her mother’s hands, the patient could now say, “Yes, that woman is really my mother, and I am really her daughter.” And in accepting this reality which neither she nor anyone else could change, she discovered an almost mystical joy. Then she looked at her incompetent, rather befuddled father and thought, “This is my father; I shall never have another,” and again the radiant warmth and gratitude surrounded her. For the first time, her psyche, done with its wandering to the far lands of illusion and denial, had come home to accept the real terms of its existence, and had found peace in them. Quoted from LSD Psychotherapy by Caldwell.

Our maturing process calls us to in some way meet and integrate our childhood desire, which includes sexual desire, for our parent of the opposite sex, and rivalry mingled with dependence, with parent of the same sex. Even a missing parent, the mother or father who died or left, is a potent figure internally. An absence of a father or mother’s love or presence can be as traumatic as any powerfully injuring event. Our parents in our dreams are an image, full of power and feeling, of the formative forces and experiences that created our identity. They are the ground, the soil, the bloody carnage, out of which our sense of self emerged. But our identity cannot gain any real independence while still dominated by these internal forces of our creation. Heraclitus said we cannot swim in the same river twice. Attempting to repeat or compete with the virtues of a parent is a misapprehension of the true nature of our own personality. See: individuation.

family group: This indicates the whole background of experience which makes up our values and views. This background is made of thousands of different obvious and subtle things such as social status; amount of books in the home; how parents feel about themselves; how they relate to life outside the family; whether dominant roles are encouraged; what nationality parents are; what unconscious social attitudes surround the family i.e. the master and servant, or dominating employer and subservient employee roles which typified England at the turn of the century. All these things still colour many attitudes we carry in us perhaps unconsciously.

Simply put: Our internal ‘family’ of urges and values; the overall feeling tone of our family life – security, domination, whatever it was; the unconscious coping patterns of the family.

Parents together in dream: Our general wisdom; background of information and experience from which we make important decisions or gain intuitive insights – negative or positive. Parents also depict the rules and often irrational disciplinary codes we learned as a child which still speak to us from within, and perhaps pass on to our own children without reassessment. These include everything from DON’T SPEAK WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL to MASTURBATION WILL KILL YOU.

Hurting, burying or killing parent: In the example below Audrey’s height shows her as a child. She is releasing anger about the attitudes and situations her father forced ‘down her throat’. To be free of the introverted restraints and ready made values gathered from our parents, at some time in our growth we may kill or bury them in our dreams. Although some people are shocked by such dreams, they are healthy signs of emerging independence. Old myths of killing the chief so the tribe can have a new leader, depict this process. When father or mother is ‘dead’ in our dream, we can inherit all the power gained from whatever was positive in the relationship.

Seeing parent drunk, incapable or foolish: Another means of gaining independence from internalised values, or stultifying drives to ‘honour’ or admire father or mother.

Dead parent in dream: Either the beginning of independence from parent; repression of the emotions they engendered in us. It can be our emotions regarding our parent’s death. To see them dead faces you with being without them, something you need to do at some time in your growth toward independence. Facing feelings about death. See: dead people.

Example: ‘My father was giving me and another woman some medicine. Something was being forced on us. I started to hit and punch him in the genitals and when he was facing the other way, in the backside. I seemed to be just the right height to do this and I had a very angry feeling that I wanted to hurt him as he had hurt me.’ Audrey V.

Sometimes a dream about our family is a literal statement in symbols, of what we sense is happening in the family.

Example: I was on a train with my family – wife, and two daughters. The train was derailed but nobody was hurt and we got off the train. I was walking in a field near the train. I thought my wife and daughters had got back on the train. Then suddenly another train smashed into the rear of the derailed train making it concertina into a heap. I wasn’t sure if my family were still on the train.’

Roger associated the theme of derailing with a change in direction – the change that was coming about through his children becoming independent. Some months later his wife and daughters left him. Divorce followed.

Father dad daddy General positive: Your father is often the authority in your early life, and may represent this influence or power in you as an adult. He also depicts the ability to be productive in the external workaday world. Depending upon what level of relationship you have developed with him, your dream father is the power of creative life in you, the power to do, to create, to transform; the power in you to grow and unfold your potential. It has to be remembered that the dream father is not an image of your external father, but of what you carry of him inside you; what you have managed to develop of a working relationship with the power he represents. So you may, because of difficulties with your external father, be in conflict with your internal father, and so be lacking your full power to transform and create.

The dream father may depict family or social conventions along with physical strength and protectiveness; the will to be and to do, and so your outgoing energies. As such he represent your confidence as you go out the door of your home into the arena of public life. A poor relationship with your external or internal father leaves you somewhat crippled in that area. But by working with your dreams on your relationship with your internal father this can be changed. See: using symbols to change habitual life problems; working with dreams.

Father General negative: Introverted aggression; dominance by fear of other people’s authority; uncaring sexual drive; feelings of not being loved, inability to be creative in the world, in your outer activity. See: archetype of father; man.

Dad’s Curse and Mum’s Curse:

mother She depicts all that you have grown from and inherit in the way of what you express or deny in yourself. She is the problems and strength you have or face in life, so, your fate or karma.

General positive: Feelings; being given to, looked after, and fed; protection; feelings of dependence; ability in relationships; uniting spirit of family; how we relate to feelings in a relationship; strength to give of self and nurture; intuition.

General negative: Will based on irrational likes and dislikes; opinion generated by anxiety or jealousy; domination by emotions; lack of bonding; misery and pain resulting from the bad relationship with mother or the psychological injuries she promoted.

Each of us have a fundamental, perhaps instinctive, drive to bond with a woman at birth. This has generated from millions of years of survival strategy. If that bonding does not take place, much of what would have been natural unfoldment and growth, cannot, or does not, take place. So mother sometimes represents this whole difficult issue of survival and what happened in those early years of trying to become independent of such extraordinary needs.

Explaining something to mother: In our relationship with our parents we unconsciously absorb an enormous amount of ethical and social ways of responding to life and people. So the dream explanation might be a way of trying to move beyond one of the conditioned influences. This is shown in the example.

Example: I dreamt I was in the house in London talking with my mother. At first there was an overall feeling of not being good enough. I think this surrounded the fact that I had been sitting around reading, and not apparently working. This is in fact what I have been doing the last few days, and in my waking life it has been very refreshing. But in the dream I was trying to explain to my mother that this was not being lazy or good for nothing. That day, Friday, I had done fairly well on the stock market. On one of the sales, with a small investment, I had earned £80/ $160. In the dream I told this to my mother, and began to feel more positive.  Des.

Des has obviously been raised in a family environment in which hard work in a physically active way is seen to be a mark of character, and being unproductive a mark of laziness. In his dream he is dealing with the inner impulse to judge himself as lazy that arises from his upbringing. See: archetype of the great mother; woman.

Whether brother, sister, daughter or son, the most general use in our dreams is to depict an aspect of ourselves! It is almost universal to believe with great conviction that our dream is about the person in our dream. A mother seeing a son die in her dream often goes through great anxiety because there lurks in her a sense of it being a precognitive dream. Virtually everyone at some time dreams about members of close family dying or being killed. Lots of mother’s dream this and their children live till eighty. But occasionally children do die. Is the dream then precognitive, or is it coincidental? See Characters and People in Dreams

Example: ‘I was walking along a rather dusty track carrying my younger son who would be around 10 months old and I was feeling rather tired. Suddenly I met a man who stopped to talk to me and commented I looked rather weary carrying the baby. He said, come with me and look over this wall and you will see such a sight that will gladden your heart. By standing on tiptoe I could just see over the wall and the sight I beheld took my breath away, it was so beautiful.’ E.

Here J son depicts the weight of responsibility she feels. The beauty is her own resources of strength in motherhood.

Example: ‘I have just given birth to twins and they lay on the floor. We started to care for them. My mother took them to the Doctor for his advice while I went to see my married sister who has two children. I met them there with the twins so that my sister could give her opinion on the babies. She had recent experience of childbirth and could tell us if the babies were good specimens.’ Miss E.

Miss E. has no children of her own, so she is uncertain of her own capacity to have and raise them. The mother depicts her own mothering abilities, which seek confidence from an authority figure. Her sister is her own nearest experience of childbirth. So out of what she has learned from observing her sister, she is assessing her own qualities.

Most often the family member depicts the qualities in ourselves which we feel are part of the character of the person dreamt of. So the passionate one in the family would depict our passions; the intellectual one our own mind; the anxious one our hesitations. Having done this, can you observe what the dream depicts? For Miss E. it would be questions regarding motherhood.

Example: ‘My daughter told me the only positive part of my work in a helping profession was with a woman who had turned from it to religion. There followed a long and powerful interchange in which I said she had as yet no mind of her own. She was dominated by her mother’s anxiety, and the medical rationalism of her training. When she had dared to step beyond her own anxieties to integrate the lessons of her own life, then I would listen again.’ Desmond S.

Desmond was divorced and struggling with his own pain and guilt about leaving his daughter while still a teenager. His daughter depicts this conflict between his feelings and his rational self.

ancestors The intricate web of cultural and family influences, physically and psychologically, that your body and personality arose from. If it is a particular ancestor, then the personal associations with that person need to be explored. For instance an uncle may have been renowned for womanising, so would represent that tendency.

Ancestors can also link with deeply buried tendencies we have unconsciously inherited from the long past. Sometimes they point to the karma we are dealing with – the difficulties or traits that arise in our life, that we cannot honestly see have been developed or collected in this lifetime.

Example: While on a post-doctoral fellowship, I had the opportunity to study the dreams of families in therapy. To my surprise, we discovered that recurrent patterns of interaction and behavior are reflected in the dreams of each family member. This was especially true when the family was going through a crisis or some intense situation.

We noted the simple fact that families are often living in the same place, including the same house and rooms for decades and sometimes for generations. They are often in similar sleep and dream cycles at the same time of the night. Certain coordinating tendencies could be seen. It became very clear to us that the major emotional issues in the family were each reflected in slightly different ways in each family member’s inner landscape. In a certain sense, each family member’s dream life reflected the dream life of each other family member. Edward Bruce Taub-Bynum, Ph.D

Any seed we plant doesn’t grow completely new, it doesn’t start from the beginning again but from the millions of years of the plants existence. So the seed is a sort of summary of the plants whole history. And the tree or plant that grows from a seed is a summary of the whole history of it, but it would feel unique and new if it were conscious. In fact it is new, but it carries within it the whole experience of its past, and will pass this on to seeds it produces. Obviously if you were a seed and planted you would feel you are completely new and unique; so it is with us humans, we carry our whole past within us unconsciously. And we touch that unconscious history if we are open to it. See: dweller on the threshold.

aunt To some extent an aunt is a role model. We gather from their success or failure strategies for our own life. Whatever feelings we have about them, whatever we think of them, the dream will use this to illustrate something for you. So consider how you would describe your aunt, what sort of person she is, and how you feel about her. The dream will be using her image to illustrate the role you see her in. If she is a success, ask yourself what in yourself you are facing regarding success. If you feel she is a failure, ask yourself what of your own feelings about failure you are facing.

boy See boy

brother Oneself, or the denied part of self, meeting whatever is met in the dream. These may include rivalry, anger, feelings of persecution, love and admiration, authority, or an outgoing ability to deal with the world.

If you don’t have a brother, it most likely depicts an aspect of your personality illustrated by the dream character, or your male characteristics.

In woman’s dream – younger brother: Outgoing but vulnerable self; rivalry.

Older brother: Authority; one’s capable outgoing self; or feelings of persecution.

In man’s dream – if younger brother: Vulnerable feelings; oneself at that age. See: boy; man.

Idioms: Big brother; brothers in arms; blood brother.

cousin Probably represents your opinions or feelings about that person. See Characters and People in Dreams

Cousins are often an easy way to try out sex or love with, as in the examples. This is because we have often shared a lot of time with them, they are family and we feel easy with them.

Example: It came to me how badly I had wanted my cousin Sylvia sexually when I was a teenager. Yet I could not but feel guilty about my desire, for being a cousin. But the guilt was easily relinquished, and I saw myself as I had so badly wanted, going in that little patch of hair. I got a lot of sexual pleasure out of the experience, and it passed. Something interesting I learned from it was that the taboos in regard to the family are built into us, even to the point of me not even allowing a fantasy for all those years.

Example: Down a steep hill. In a house. I had to give a man (cousin Abner or Nate) a shot. A two-pronged needle with red liquid. I know it will hurt him. I didn’t want to but I had to. He yelled in pain. He turned on the bed, writhed around, and threw himself around. I snuck up and finished the dosage. He yelled in mock anger. He grabbed me. We tumbled to the floor. He started to make love, wildly, lovingly. Later at the table, an ugly woman with horrible eyes, glazed, hazy, and blue, came in. Said to him, “So there’s the louse.” I gave her a straight look. I said, “Just leave him alone!” Anger. She steadily looked at me. Another woman, possibly my mother watched the tense scene.

Of course it could go the other way of feeling hatred, not love.

Example: I was a soft crab, under a stone on the sea-shore. With infinite starvation, and struggling, and kicking, I had got rid of my armour, shield by shield, and joint by joint, and cowered naked and pitiable, in the dark, among dead shells and ooze. Suddenly the stone was turned up; and there was my cousin’s hated face laughing at me, and pointing me out to Lillian. She laughed too, as I looked up, sneaking, ashamed, and defenceless, and squared up at him with my soft useless claws. Charles Kingsley – from Alton Locke, 1850.

Being with or following a cousin can mean you identify with the way they are and are copying or learning their style. We all are actually all the time learning from or absorbing things form other people or even animals – that is how we learn and grow.

Dreaming of a dead cousin can be an actual communication with them. In which case see Dreaming of Death. But it can be a way of showing an aspect of you, symbolised by your cousin. As already mentioned see Characters and People in Dreams.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What was my last interaction with my cousin, and what feelings or attitudes do I have about that?

Do I have sexual feelings about this cousin, and if so how do I handle them?

What is the character, strengths and weaknesses of this cousin, and how do they apply to me?

See The Dream as a Code – Emotions and Mood in Dreams – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

daughter One’s relationship with the daughter. The daughter, or son, can represent what happens in a marriage between husband and wife. The child is what has arisen from the bonding, however momentary, of two people. In dreams the child therefore is sometimes used to depict how the relationship is faring. So a sick daughter might show the feelings in the relationship being ‘ill’.

In a mother’s dream: Often feelings of support or companionship; feelings of not being alone in the area of emotional bonds; or one’s feeling area. Responsibility; the ties of parenthood or oneself at that age. Your own youthful urges, difficulties, hurts, which may still be operative.

A comparison. The mother might see the daughter’s youth, opportunity, and have feelings about that. So the daughter may represent her sense of lost opportunity and youth – even envy; competition in getting the desire of a man.

In a father’s dream: The state of the marriage. One’s feeling self; the feelings or difficulties about the relationship with daughter; the struggles one’s own feeling self goes through to mature. How the sexual feelings are dealt with in a family situation – occurs especially when she starts courting. Can represent ones sister; parental responsibility; one’s wife when younger.

Someone else’s daughter: Feelings about one’s own daughter or feelings about younger women.

Death of daughter: This can sometimes suggest you are losing your daughter because she is becoming independent. But it can signify feelings of great loss, or the end of something such as a relationship.

Example: ‘I am standing outside a supermarket with heavy bags wearing my Mac, though the sun is warm. My daughter and two friends are playing music and everyone stops to listen. I start to write a song for them, but they pack up and go on a bus whilst I am still writing. I am left alone at the bus stop with my heavy burden of shopping, feeling incredibly unwanted.’ Mrs F.

Such dreams of the daughter becoming independent can occur as soon as the child starts school, persisting until the mother finds a new attitude. See: child; woman.

girl See girl

 

grandparents Personal feelings connected with the grandparent; family traditions, such as established values or unconscious attitudes; spiritual values; old age; death.

The grandparent can also represent what you have come to know, what you have built into you of the divine spark of life, the radiant potential that is at your core. So you might say that the grandparent is the divine or infinite you know because of what you have drawn out of the infinite possibilities of everyday life.

husband Depicts how you see the relationship with your husband; your relationship with your sexuality; sexual and emotional desire and pleasure; how you relate to intimacy in body, mind and spirit or habits of relationship developed with one’s father.

Example: ‘My recurring dream – some disaster is happening. I try to contact the police or my husband. Can never contact either. I try ringing 999 again and again and can feel terror, and sometimes dreadful anger or complete panic. I cry, I scream and shout and never get through! Recently I have stopped trying to contact my husband. I managed once to reach him but he said he was too busy and I would have to deal with it myself. I woke in a furious temper with him and kicked him while he was still asleep.’ Mrs G. S.

The husband here depicts Mrs S’s feelings of not being able to ‘get through’ to her man. This is a common female dream theme, possibly arising from the husband not daring to express emotion or meet his partner with his own feelings. For Mrs S. this is an emergency. Although the dream dramatises it, there is still real frustration, anger, and a break in marital communications.

Cannot find husband or husband dying: Many middle aged women dream of ‘losing’ their husband while out with him, perhaps shopping, or walking in a town somewhere. Sometimes the dream portrays him actually killed. Mrs A. D. wonders if her dream was a premonition. It is more likely a form of practising the loss, so it does not come as such a shock. The greatest shocks occur when we have never even considered the event – such as a young child losing it’s mother – an event it has never practised, not even in fantasy, so has no inbuilt shock absorbers. As most of us know, men tend to die before women, and this information is in the mind of middle aged married women. Mrs A. D. may have unconsciously observed slight changes in her husband’s body and behaviour, and therefore readied herself.

Example: ‘I dreamt many times I lost my husband, such as not being able to find the car park where he was waiting, and seeing him go off in the distance. I wake in a panic to find him next to me in bed. These dreams persisted, and then he died quite suddenly. He was perfectly healthy at the time of the dreams and I wonder if it was a premonition of me REALLY losing him.’ Mrs A. D.

Dead husband: Your memories and remaining emotions about your husband. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship.

The example below illustrates the ‘psychic’ meeting some women experience. In anything of an apparently psychic nature, we must ALWAYS remember the unconscious is the great dramatist. It can create the drama of a dream in moments. In doing so it makes our inner feelings into apparently real people and objects OUTSIDE OF US. While asleep we lightly dismiss this amazing process as ‘a dream’. When it happens while our eyes are open or we are near waking, for some reason we call it a ghost or psychic event. Yet the dream process is obviously capable of creating total body sensations, emotions, full visual impressions, vocalisation – what else is a dream? On the other hand, the dream process is not dealing in pointless imaginations. Many women tend to believe they have little sexual drive, so it is easier for G. L. to see her drive in the form of her husband. But of course, her husband may also depict how she felt about sex in connection with his ‘sexual appetites’. It is a general rule however, that our dream process will dramatise into a past life, or a ‘psychic’ experience, emotions linked with trauma, or sexual drive, which we find difficult to meet in the present.

Example: ‘My dead husband came into my bedroom and got into bed with me to make love to me. I was not afraid. But owing to his sexual appetites during my married life with him I was horrified, and resisted him with all my might. On waking I felt weak and exhausted. The last time he came to me I responded to him and he never came back again. This happened three times. The last time I don’t think it was a dream. I was not asleep. I think it was his ghost.’ G. L.

Other woman’s husband: One’s own husband; feelings about that man or desire for a non committed relationship with less responsibility.

Sex with husband: One can fairly safely say that our dreams are not so much about how the world and other people actually ARE, but rather how we see or passionately FEEL people or the world are. Of course our feelings and views may be very accurate, but one must always be aware of the variance between what one has created out of ones own inner life and vision, and how others people see themselves or events actually are.

Therefore the sexual dream at best is a wonderful indicator of how you, the dreamer, are feeling about your sexual and emotional relationship, or what one longs for, at the time of the dream. At worst it depicts all one fears might happen or be happening.

Example: I dreamt I was laying in bed with my husband. I felt a sexual attraction and flow, something I hadn’t felt for a while in our relationship. I reached out to him expressing this but there wasn’t any response from him. So I talked to him saying that I had reached out to him sexually and in his body response I had felt there was no attempt to meet me. He replied that in fact that was the situation as far as he was concerned – that he was indeed saying no. Jo K.

 

Jo and her husband had lived for a year without any sex at all prior to the time of this dream. This had not been an unhappy time. Far from it, they had achieved a lot of peace and warmth without tension. On talking about her dream with her husband, he felt that he wasn’t saying no to her sexually. Indeed, his stated reason for not reaching out to her was that for years it had always been him making the approach to her. This had led to his feeling he was imposing something on her and as this was unpleasant he had stopped any attempt at sexual relationship. So Jo’s dream was really about how she saw her husband rather than what was actually happening.

relatives Including uncle, aunt, cousin, nephew, niece etc. Usually an aspect of oneself relevant to the character of the person dreamt about. Sometimes represents one’s family traditions – unconscious attitudes, conventions, or even talents, which are part of the unique psychological and social environment a family provides. See Characters and People in Dreams

sister Feeling self, or the lesser expressed part of self; rival or feelings of kinship.

In man’s dream – younger sister: Vulnerable emotions; rival for love of parents.

Older sister: Capable feeling self.

In woman’s dream – younger sister: One’s experiences at that age; vulnerable feelings; rival for parents love.

Older sister: Capable feeling self; feelings of persecution.

See: girl; woman.

Idioms: Sisters under the skin.

son The condition of the marriage. Extroverted self; desires connected with self expression; feelings connected with son; parental responsibility.

Mothers dream: One’s ambitions or hopes for his potential. Hopes. State of your marriage – see first example below.

Father’s dream: Yourself at that age; what qualities you see in your son; your own possibilities; envy of youth and opportunities; rivalry.

Someone else’s son: Feelings about one’s own son; feelings about younger men.

If dreaming of dead son: see dead people.

Death of son: A mother often kills off her son in her dreams as she sees him make moves toward independence. This can happen from first day of school on. But the death of a son also signifies feelings of great loss, or the end of something, perhaps a relationship, or something that meant a great deal to you. See second example below. See: boy; man; first example in falling.

Example: ‘My wife and I were walking out in the countryside. I looked around suddenly and saw my four year old son near a hole. He fell in and I raced back. The hole was narrow but very deep. I could see water at the bottom but no sign of my son. I didn’t know whether I could leap down and save him or whether it was too narrow. Then somehow he was out. His heart was just beating.’ Richard H.

Richard had argued with his wife in such a way he feared the stability of their marriage. The son represents what they had created together – a child – a marriage. The marriage survived, as his dream self assessed it would.

Example: ‘I am on a very high bridge over an extremely wide and deep river with steep banks. My son does a double somersault over the railing and falls into the water. I think he is showing off. I am unable to save him. My son is eighteen and has started a Structural Engineering Course at University.’ Joyce H.

The showing-off suggests Joyce feels her son is doing daring things with his life, and the relationship in its old form is dying. It is about being able to let go of her son as he becomes independent – which she may face as early as play school. A daughter may not pose this problem as women often feel a daughter will remain a friend, whereas their son may find someone else to love. The dream is therefore a way of either feeling the shock or learning to make the break emotionally.

the triangle The example shows typical flow of feeling toward another male. The other male here depicts Joan’s desire to be attractive to other men. This is a danger signal unless one fully acknowledges the impulse.

Example: ‘ There were three of us. My husband, a male friend and I, all riding small white enamel bikes. My husband proceeded slowly, first, with his back to us. Then my friend followed. Suddenly my friend ahead of me turned and gazed fully at me. He gave a glorious smile which lit up the whole of his face. I felt a great sense of well being surge through me.’ Joan B.

uncle To some extent an uncle is a role model. From their success or failure you gather strategies for your own life. Whatever feelings you have about him, whatever you think of him, the dream will use this to illustrate something for you. So consider how you would describe your uncle, what sort of person he is, and how you feel about him. The dream will be using his image to illustrate the role you see him in. If he is a success, ask yourself what in yourself you are facing regarding success. If you feel he is a failure, ask yourself what of your own feelings about failure you are facing. See Characters and People in Dreams

 

widow See: widow.

wife Depicts how you see the relationship with your wife; your relationship with your sexuality; sexual and emotional desire and pleasure or how you relate to intimacy in body, mind and spirit. I could also indicate your feeling, intuitive nature or habits of relationship developed with one’s mother.

Example: ‘My wife was trying to get me out of her life, and out of the house. It was as if she were attempting to push me into a feeling of tension and rejection which would make me leave.’ David P.

Out of childhood experiences in which his mother repeatedly threatened to give him away, David was finding it difficult to emotionally commit himself to his wife. In the dream his wife represents these feelings, so he sees her – his anxiety and pain – pushing him to break up the marriage. David ‘broke up’ the relationship with his mother by breaking his emotional bond with her.

Example: ‘I was standing with my wife at the end of the garden of the house I lived in as a child. We were looking over the fence to the rising meadow beyond. She said, ‘Look at that bird in the tree there.’ On our right, in a small ash tree, an enormous owl perched. It was at least four feet high, the biggest bird I have ever seen. I recognised it in the dream as a greater hooded owl, which was not native to our country. I was so excited I ran into the house to telephone someone – zoo, police, newspapers? – to tell them about the bird. I cannot remember contacting anyone, but felt the bird was there in some way to meet me. Also it was hungry and looking at next door’s bantams. So I wondered what I could give it to eat.’ David P.

This shows the positive side of David’s relationship with his wife. The garden represents the behaviour boundaries which arose from his childhood. But he is growing – the garden – and looking beyond them through his marriage. The amazing bird is the deep feelings he touches because he has a mate like any other natural creature. Out of his mating he becomes aware of drives to build a home – nest – and give himself to his mate. These are natural and are a part of his unconscious or spiritual nature. The bird is a hooded owl which can see in the dark – the unconscious – meaning David is realising things he had never ‘seen’ before. The bird is masked, because David through loving is learning to put his ego aside, which is a necessity for touching the wider dimension of life or the unconscious. The hunger of the bird shows an intimate detail of what David has learned from his wife. She had been working as a waitress and bringing home pieces of chicken for him, saved from her own meal. The spiritual side of David wants to develop this quality of self-giving, which his wife’s love had helped him see.

Example: ‘I have been a widower since Jan. 1979, having married in Oct. 1941. I continually dream I am in London where my business was. I am walking the streets with my wife and suddenly I see her ahead of me in a yellow rain coat and hat. I call her and try to catch up, but suddenly she vanishes. In spite of calling and searching I cannot find her.’ Douglas G.

This is a common theme dreamt by widowers or widows – disappearance of spouse. Douglas has ‘lost’ his wife. His dream shows the paradox of love after death of partner. His love is still there years after her death. He is possibly still trying to love his wife as an externally real person, so his feelings can make no connection. To meet what actually remains of his wife, within himself, he would need to face his own internal grieving, emotions, and ALL THE FEELINGS, MEMORIES, ANGERS AND BEAUTY, which make up the living remains of his wife within him.

the first wife or ex wife This may be dealing with the things you met or learned in that relationship, but it can also represent a past way of life, something you have left behind or are leaving behind. The dreamer in the example below is now feeling easier about her husband’s first relationship. The first wife represents her sense of competing for her husband’s affections, even though his ‘first woman’ was dead.

Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love someone. In other words the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship.

Example: ‘I was with my husband and our three children. About two or three yards to our right stood my husbands first wife – she died about a year before I first met him. I remember feeling she no longer minded me being with him, so I put my arms around him from the back, and felt more secure and comfortable with him.’ Mrs N. S.

See: Brother; Father; Mother; Sister.

Famous People

Dreaming of famous people may indicate desire to be noticed and acclaimed.It can poin to one’s own potential, often unacknowledged, and projected onto dream character or a parent; depending on how you relate to the famous person – your own ability to accept yourself as respected. Your desire ambitions and efforts to become successful.

Because the person you are dreaming about represent qualities in you, the person may, because of their life or role, represent a particular quality such as courage, love, ‘ruling’ drives in life, authority, etc. If you think of the person in a particular role or scene, this will probably be the major clue to what they represent – such as the lover who leaves – the father who sacrifices, etc. See Characters and People in Dreams

Famous people can be seen as social guinea pigs. Collectively we expose them to enormous amounts of money, sexual opportunity, drugs, alcohol, and tremendous social and commercial pressures. Then we examine every part of their life to see how well they cope. Millions then identify with the image they portray of how to deal with reality at its best and worst. The famous person in our dream might therefore represent our coping mechanism.

Example: ‘A film star I admire came and lay beside me in the night. He told me he loved me and would stay with me. I knew he was living with a woman who had borne his child, but he told me he was going to tell her he was leaving her. In the morning we walked along the road where I live, to tell the woman.’ Sharon.

Sharon processed her dream and saw the film star as her own strength and determination to further her career as a dancer. Being 18 she was faced with the decision of whether to become a wife and mother – the other woman – or put those urges into her work. In her dream she chose to be fully involved in her dancing.

Actor/actress: One is acting a role; wanting attention; deception.

Film/stage/TV star: May be what is described above under famous people, but if the star has a particular quality, the dream may use them to denote this characteristic, such as love, treachery, courage, etc.

King: Father; thinking; authority; power to command.

Pop star: Similar to what has been said about famous people, but might also carry feelings to do with intense teenage sexuality or need; what you hold as an ideal or idol; a role model; egomania.

Queen: Often one’s mother; a feeling or drive ruling your life; wanting approval, or even sex.

See: king; queen; actor/actress/acting; theatre.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What was I feeling or doing in relation to the famous person?

Was I the famous person – if so how did I feel?

What do I associate with the famous person?

See Associations Working With – Inner World – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming

Fare

What happens in the dream shows the price you are willing to pay, or avoid, to reach your goal. So the fare often involves getting the right attitude or stance. See: Ticket.

Farm Farmer Farmyard

This usually has to do with your relationship with your natural urges, the basic drives, such as sex, survival, social hierarchy, parenthood, the down to earth side of yourself; the area of your animal propensities where – territorial fighting, fighting over mate, etc. – are expressed. Being in a farmyard usually represents efforts to deal with the sensual, aggressive, or animalistic urges.

Care or expression of our natural drives such as sexuality, parenthood, love of fellowship; the down to earth side of self; area of our animal propensities where – territorial fighting, fighting over mate, etc. – are expressed. 

Or you may sowing and cultivating something in your life that you should become more aware of. It provides and opportunity to cultivate and transform the “earthy” part of your nature into the higher impulses.

 The farm may also be about what is cared for or grown in your life and activities – what care you take of your own natural energies and abilities. Problems on the farm can point out difficulties at the basic level of your life, such as troubles.

A farm is a place where one can work with the earth, where seeds/ideas can be planted. It can be place of peace and quiet or hard work depending on your feelings and associations. One can relax there because you do not have to dress up, and you are with animals and their natural expression

Farmhand: Can represent the hard work put into caring for your animal self. Also to tending to what is growing in your life – also the richness of the soil, meaning the basic work on oneself.

Useful questions and hints:

What is happening with my basic down-to-earth feelings and urges?    

Does this include cultivation or husbandry in any way – if so what?  

Are there any signs in the dream of not looking after my basic needs?

Farmer: This indicates feeling easy with your sexuality and the material world. The farmer depicts the practical down to earth feelings, the care of the ‘animal’ side of you, also what makes use of them, works them. This includes earthy wisdom, the sort arising from understanding what drives us as human animals. It might also indicate an easy reversion to earthy or instinctive behaviour, such as hunting to kill or unrefined sex. In terms of higher and lower nature – the sexual, digestive and motor muscles, and the mental, creative and imaginative self –  the farmer is the controller or regulator of lower energies. The sensory impressions help to satisfy these forces. 

Example: I was standing in the back garden of a house – one of a row of terraced houses. Each garden was fenced and ran down to a large drainage ditch. It seemed to be raining and water was filling the drainage ditch. The water was backing up into the gardens because something was blocking the ditch. It started rising up my legs. It was quite hot. I realised this was because hot water was running out of the baths and sinks in the houses. I felt I must get out of the gardens. Not only because of the water, but because of how people might feel if they saw me in their garden. I managed to find a way into a farm yard where I felt relaxed.” Ted F.  

When Ted added his own associations to this the dream became fully understandable to him and read like this: I am going through a lot of changes at the moment – the garden. These are to do with allowing myself to have a warm but non sexual relationship with women. I have always been too dragged along by my sexuality in the past. Just a few days before the dream I was in a ‘growth’ group. I had made friends with a woman there, Susan, who I was warm with, but not sexually. The group work required some close physical contact, and I and another man worked with Susan. It seemed to me to go without complications. A while afterwards a woman in the group came to me and with evident emotion, said I had made love publicly to my lover, meaning Susan. I had certainly been physically close to her and had felt at ease, but the viewpoint and feelings of the woman’s accusations, coupled with her threat to expose me to the authority figure in the group, bowled me over. This is the hot water in the dream. The fences are the boundaries people erect between their personal life and what is socially acceptable. For some days, up until understanding the dream, I felt really blocked up emotionally – the blocked drainage ditch. I cut off any friendship toward Susan. When I realised that in the Farmyard – the acceptance of natural feelings without neat little boundaries – I could feel at peace, I was able to allow my natural warmth again.

Idioms: buy the farm; the day of the family farm; sell the farm.

Useful questions and hints:

Is the farmer shown as critical of me or am I in a good relationship with the earthy side of myself?  

Do I have any sense of the needs of the ‘animal’ that carries me about each day?  

What is the farmer doing, and what do I understand from that?  

See –   Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions – Reptilian Brain

Fasting

To refrain from eating in a dream is to refrain from taking into yourself material opinions, ideas, ways of life. It is to concentrate your attention upon your own personal inner life and its growth. To refrain from acting from your desires, hungers, greed, ambition, sensuousness, and to allow Life to direct these faculties and harmonise your energies and cleanse you of mistakes and sickness.  Withdrawal or turning away from natural urges such as hunger or sex. Not taking in what society, the world is offering.

Can symbolise living in a state of purity, rejecting negative thoughts. It could also be a way to allow new ideas. If you have a belief that fasting spiritualises you or cleanses your body and mind, then the dream is probably an examination of this.

Fasting can also be a discipline in which the dreamer has stopped their natural, and sometimes unnatural desire to eat, and can be a way of developing a better relationship with their instincts. Because fasting has the effect of lowering ones emotional and physical energy, and because some form or psychological difficulties such as depression are the massive use of energy, fasting for a week or a fortnight can cause the person to regain their balance emotionally.

It was, and still is, a way of silencing the mind and experiencing how the mind in its crazy thinking can cause anxiety, restlessness and mental breakdowns. The profound silence which is achieved can shown the person that the despair and restlessness they usually experience is the result of misdirection of their enormous energy.

Such fasting was a way to gain personal initiation. Individuals, through prayer, fasting and lonely vigils, sought from their dreams, a vision of their destiny as an individual, and an image to aid a personal link with the Spirit pervading all life.

A Native American dream the following:

Example: At the age of about sixteen a youth went alone to a place there he fasted for sixteen days. At the end of this time he suddenly heard a voice in the sky saying, “Take care of this man and let him end his fast.” Then he saw an old man of great beauty come down from the sky. The old man came to him, and looking at him kindly said, “Have courage, I will take care of your life. It is a fortunate thing for you to have taken me for your master. None of the demons who haunt these countries will have any power to harm you. One day you will see your own hair as white as mine. You will have four children, the first two and last will be males, and the third will be a girl. After that your wife will hold the relation of a sister to you.” As he finished speaking the old man offered him a raw piece of human flesh to eat. When the boy turned his head away in horror, the old man then offered him a piece of bear’s fat, saying, “Eat this then.” after eating it, the old man disappeared, but came again at crucial periods in the person’s life. At manhood he did have four children as described. After his fourth, “a certain infirmity compelled him to continence” and so had a brother and sister relationship wit his wife. He also lived to old age, thus having white hair, and as the eating of the bear fat symbolised, became a gifted hunter with second sight for finding game. The man himself felt that had he eaten the human flesh in the vision, he would have been a warrior instead of a hunter.

Fasting can also indicate a discipline in which the dreamer has stopped their natural, and sometimes unnatural desire to eat, and can be a way of developing a better relationship with their instincts. Because fasting has the effect of lowering one’s emotional and physical energy, and because some form or psychological difficulties such as depression are the massive use of energy, fasting for a week or a fortnight can cause the person to regain their balance emotionally. Fasting for one or two days a week can be healthy and is a way to keep trim.

A test-tube study showed that exposing cancer cells to several cycles of fasting was as effective as chemotherapy in delaying tumor growth and increased the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs on cancer formation. In one study, rats that fasted every other day experienced a delayed rate of aging and lived 83% longer than rats that didn’t fast.

Research shows that inflammation may be involved in the development of chronic conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis (4Trusted Source). Some studies have found that fasting can help decrease levels of inflammation and help promote better health.

One study in which 50 healthy adults showed that intermittent fasting for one month significantly decreased levels of inflammatory markers (5Trusted Source). Another small study discovered the same effect when people fasted for 12 hours a day for one month (6Trusted Source).

After about 8 hours of fasting, the liver will use the last of its glucose reserves. At this point, the body enters into a state called gluconeogenesis, marking the body’s transition into fasting mode. Studies have shown that gluconeogenesis increases the number of calories the body burns. With no carbohydrates coming in, the body creates its own glucose using mainly fat.

Eventually, the body runs out of these energy sources as well. Fasting mode then becomes the more serious starvation mode. At this point, a person’s metabolism slows down, and their body begins burning muscle tissue for energy. Although it is a well-known term in dieting culture, true starvation mode only occurs after several consecutive days or even weeks without food. So, for those breaking their fast after 24 hours, it is generally safe to go without eating for a day unless other health conditions are present. See this excellent video – https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01lxyzc/horizon-20122013-3-eat-fast-and-live-longer It gives full instructions.

I read somewhere that the Islamic festival of Ramadan was started to get the populace ready to fight and defend themselves during the daylight hours. The Islamic fasting is simply delayed eating.

But a straightforward way to fast effectively is to have a breakfast and then do not eat or drink alcohol or milk or caffeine drinks such as tea and coffee until breakfast the next day, which is a 24 hour fast. It is usually suggested the fast is best done for two separate days.

Useful questions and hints:

Am I consciously turning away from the material world and experiences?

If I am trying to delve more fully into my subtle nature, what is my dream commenting on that??

If this is about self-denial, what am I struggling with or against??

Is this about an eating disorder?

See Avoid Being Victims – Processing Dreams – Life’s Little Secrets – Dream Yoga

Fat Person

See obese