Posts Tagged ‘dream dictionary interpretation’

Gorilla

Very often, especially in women’s dreams, the gorilla represents the woman’s father. At least, the aspect of him she may not be able to come to terms with. In particular sexual urges that she has not really accepted and integrated.

But the gorilla can also be used for powerful instinctual forces that we either struggle with or learn from. As such it confronts us with the feelings and drives that lie underneath our conscious personality and may sometimes erupt or confront us in a variety of ways. This is because the mammal is part of our heritage. See https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/brain-levels-and-dreams/#mammalbrain – https://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/animals/

Example: My 16-year-old daughter is under some tension as 0-levels loom. She has dreamt that she is in our living room looking through patio windows. In the next door neighbour’s garden she can see a huge gorilla rampaging up and down. She is terrified it might get over the fence, particularly when she realises that it is trying to reach a baby gorilla which is in our garden. Eventually the parent finds a way out into the street but the baby tries to get into the house and cannot because of the patio window.

This dream shows that your daughter is heading towards mature sexuality and parenthood, not suffering pre-exam tension. In the language of dreams, anything moving towards you, such as the baby gorilla, shows a part of yourself rising into consciousness. At adolescence the procreative urge, connected with both sexuality and parenthood, moves from obscurity into the main living area of your life. That’s why your daughter is in the living room witnessing animals in a parent/child relationship. The restraining patio glass indicates that she’s holding off these natural urges. Learning to deal with ourselves at such a time of change is similar to learning how to drive a car. When we start we may feel anxious that the power we are handling in the car may run us into a wall. As a maturing personality strapped into the driving seat of our body, we meet waves of sexual impulse, storms of emotional reaction, and avalanches of ideas and sense impressions. The social pressures to compete in school exams and make decisions about career and future are a considerable load to hear. Some young adults suppress their inner urge to mature in social and sexual relationships, because they feel they cannot deal with them as well as the demands of schools. Perhaps that’s what your daughter is doing unconsciously. There is a suggestion that your daughter has no opportunity at home to discuss the biological and emotional changes she’s experiencing. Figuratively speaking, why not help your daughter to let the gorillas into your house?

Example: I had a very unusual dream the other day. I was outside somewhere with my dad when I spotted a guy. I thought he was very nice but my dad said or did something which upset him. He was misunderstood. Suddenly I was trapped in a room somewhere with this boy who had morphed into a gorilla. We were both very upset and he was distraught because we couldn’t be together for some reason related to my dad’s behaviour. We were affectionate towards one another it was a very happy feeling but also sad and frustrating at the same time. Suddenly this guy/gorilla embraced me and I could see that the top of his head had suddenly morphed back into that of a guy. I could see his brown hair and I stroked it for a few minutes. In this dream I was in love with him. There were strong sexual feelings involved but it didn’t go any further than that.

I have a strong feeling that the dream is about the unconscious influence your father’s opinions have on your way of relating to and being with guys. Usually we do not realise how our own views express what our parents feel until we meet exactly what you are meeting now. It isn’t that your father really means to influence you – or even if he does, you need to honour your own growth. That means you will gradually find the strength to have your own life – at least I hope you will. The beauty and the beast is the fairy story you are enacting in your dream. The young girl has to transform her love for her father to what seems – or is judged to be – raw sexual impulses – the beast. We have a crazy educational system that does not really honour the fact that young people are going through a tremendous change, and it needs to be recognized, and it happens during a time when we are pushed to study for school.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What is my relationship with the gorilla in the dream, and what does this suggest about the way I am relating to my own primal urges and responses?

If I am afraid of the gorilla, what exactly am I trying to get away from in life?

Is the gorilla communicating anything to me – if so what?

If I imagine myself as the gorilla, what do I feel and know?

See Mammal Brain – Summing Up – Animal – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Gourd

Female sex organ. See: Cup.

Government

Either the rules by which you govern your life, or exterior influences you feel governed or influenced by which it is governed, or the inner forces that govern your health, well being. In each case it would probably be wide influences, not from an individual.

But in some dreams the government or its agents are out to get you, and that suggests a feeling that there is no escape. But such dreams are like a computer game with full surround virtual reality. In such games you can be killed a thousand times and yet you survive to deal with the monsters again. That is unless you learn a way through and go on through the levels. But unlike those games there is a wonderful intelligence behind the dreams we have, and if you listen and learn from it you will find a real mastership – not a false one of running from any fear or repressing anything that threatens you.

What you can do is to deny that the agents or government have any power over you – as it is your dream, there is no one except you in the dream, so you can turn the tables on yourself. See – Summing Up

Example: On going indoors the man, now as a police inspector, led me down to the basement, and pointing to the corner of the room (that I had used as a darkroom) asked me how, “That got there?”

I forget what it was, but felt unjustly accused. The inspector got two toughs to hold me and was going to drill my teeth out with a hand drill, and beat me. I was terrified and fought back, kicking one in the testicles. But could not break away.

Then I feigned madness and regression to childhood to avoid further torture. Seeing this, one of them lead me away to a house in Crackerlands to kill me. I set upon him and knocked him out, took his gun, thought of killing him, but did not.

Being free, I wondered what to do. Where to get away, go back with the gun, or what? Suddenly I thought I had better go back and hand myself over again. In a flash, as soon as this was decided, I saw through the whole set-up. The thugs felt that they were part of a huge crime organisation, worldwide in scope. Like the war underground resistance, no section that knew other than their leader. But in fact their leader had no higher authority than himself. So I went back, gave them the gun. They rushed me but I made no effort to struggle. This shock them far more deeply than any attempt to escape. I then explained that I was no longer afraid, because I saw how petty and futile they were. This broke their power and the dream finished.

Here is a clear example of how changing your view of the ‘enemy’ can change your whole dream and you can face the fear.

Gown

See: Clothes.

Graduation

The tests you meet in life and relationships; entrance into a new life; the sense of achieving adulthood, or the skill leading to adult independence; probably also associates with your sense of value.

Gramophone

May symbolise memory, due to it being a record player, and replays or records the past.

This may also literally refer to records. That is, memories of your past, perhaps even past lives. Records might also link with whatever you feel about particular music or artists. See: cassette.

Grape

Because grapes can be used to make alcohol, they often have a special significance, and are very ancient cultural symbols, they often indicate an influence that changes the way you feel.

The grape is often seen as representing harvests and sacrifice. Sometimes we see images shown on the media of a sexually desirable female eating or offering grapes/herself. So at  times they may be linked with wealth, or a way of life that is based on having power over others.

They also depict fruitfulness, fertility, but perhaps fruitfulness of a spiritual kind. So a woman dreaming of them, especially near her belly can assume she is pregnant. But they also signify pleasures of the world, drinking, sex, wealth, and conversely, in Christianity they signify the blood of Christ. That means the essence of human experience. The collective human wisdom. Sometimes the are seen as a sign of health.

Wine was originally just the juice of the grape. It was the fluid, the blood that runs out of the grape when you crush it. The juice of the grape is its life that it gives you freely. It is the blood of its being it lets flow and gives to you. It does this to perpetuate its seed. But this act of survival is done in a way of self-giving. That is why the grape and its juice has become a symbol of the eternal life, the blood of Christ, the love that flows out to us from God and from the ancient beings. They constantly give of their body to us. The grape is therefore a symbol of our relationship with God. See: alcohol; coffee.

The experience of countless human lives has been linked and transformed into a vast sea of wisdom and heightened awareness. It is this we ‘drink’ when we touch our own union with the ocean of awareness that is our spirit. See: blood.

Example: A thirty-seven-year-old woman, who for three years had been trying unsuccessfully to conceive, dreamed of looking down and seeing huge, ripe bunches of grapes growing from her belly. She knew she had finally conceived.

Useful Questions and Hints:

How do I see or use grapes?

Do I like or dislike them?

Am I seeing them as a sign of a good harvest?

See Energy Sex and Dreams – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Processing Dreams

Grass

This is mostly about the power of growth, growth which has the ability to happen anywhere. It was also noticed by ancient rural people that weak things such as grass and babies, though vulnerable, still arrived in the world year after year.  Sometimes can mean overgrown thoughts and feelings that need cutting. Multiplicity, countlessness. The innumerable thoughts that can spring up. It can also link with pot.

By overgrown thoughts I mean that sometimes a person allows thoughts and speculation arising from lead the person to confusions and emotional pain. A woman I was talking to grew up in a family which led her t o constantly have to watch what was going on and not spoken about in the family. There was a hint of danger which made her constantly try to think about what the family would do, how it would effect her, would it lead to more emotional suffering – all which led her to create her own emotional suffering.

Cutting grass and weeds:  Things have got out of hand and need attention.

Flattened grass: A sign of some activity taken place on it, people or animals on it, or a flood.

House lawns: The state of your home life or personal habits.

Long green new grass: Your growth sprouting up anew.

Example: I go to a young man’s table. I lay down on the grass in front of it and hug the grass lovingly. This is a way of telling him I understand and accept his beliefs. He responds by hugging the meadow grass on his side. We talk. He asks me out, says he’d take me to town if I wanted, after work. I accept, and confess I’d like to see some of the tourist thing like the Paul Bunyan monument.

Idioms: Grass is greener; grass grow under your feet; grass is greener on the other side of the fence; snake in the grass.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Is the grass green and healthy or dry suggesting something not growing?

What were the surroundings to the grass?

Was the grass marked by signs of activity?

See – Settings in Dreams – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Active Passive

Grave Graveyard

This depicts our thoughts and feelings regarding death. It may relate to your family heritage of attitudes or traditions. Sometimes, but not often, such a dream is about contact with the dead. But more frequently things in our life we have ‘buried’. It can also refer to melancholy feelings about life or feeling ‘different’ to other people; or even a relationship, which we think is ‘dead and buried’. See: burial; cemetery; tomb.

For a number of people in their dreams the grave is also a place of transformation as shown in the following examples. It can be consciousness resurrected out of the grave of deadening materialism, out of the mirage of the profit motive or the fanfare of the identity supermarket.

“Men have collected stones since the beginning of time and have apparently assumed that certain ones were the containers of the life-force with all its mystery. The ancient Germans, for instance, believed that the spirits of the dead continued to live in their tombstones. The custom of placing stones on graves may spring partly from the symbolic idea that something eternal of the dead person remains, which can be most fittingly represented by a stone. For while the human being is as different as possible from a stone, yet man’s innermost centre is in a strange and special way akin to it (perhaps because the stone symbolises mere existence at the farthest remove from the emotions, feelings, fantasies, and discursive thinking of ego-consciousness). In this sense the stone symbolises what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience – the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable.

The urge that we find in practically all civilisations to erect stone monuments to famous men or on the site of important events probably also stems from this symbolic meaning of the stone. The stone that Jacob placed on the spot where he had his famous dream, or certain stones left by simple people on the tombs of local saints or heroes, show the original nature of the human urge to express an otherwise inexpressible experience by the stone-symbol. It is no wonder that many religious cults use a stone to signify God or to mark a place of worship. The holiest sanctuary of the Islamic world is the Ka’aba, the black stone in Mecca to which all pious Muslims hope to make their pilgrimage.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.

Example: Hello Tony, I want share this with you as well. Dream: death: Rebirth for me is my title of my dream. I was aware of myself and I was going downwards, descending. It was like I was dying and I could see myself descending down like into a grave. As I was doing this I realized that I would be in complete darkness. No light. As I was watching this I was aware I started ascending upwards as well. As I was doing this I realized that I had changed and my entire body even my face was changing. In all of this changing I saw my face change as well. I was the same Dona but with a different body. I was seeing myself and I was very young very beautiful with blonde hair. I was aware of being so happy looking. I was smiling and I had on a long blue grown that looked like Victorian style. I was very rich looking as well. I was aware I was very happy with my new self. Then I had this dream vision. I was aware of seeing the kundalini appear to me on her own as the beautiful cobra. I was aware of her pose and she was erect and upwards with her hood wide open. Her colors caught my eye. She was black on her back and her stomach was solid white. Which to me is like the colours of yin, and banshee was standing there looking at me and I was doing the same. She only wanted me too know she was there with me it seem. She didn’t say anything nor was her mouth open either. I think the colors mean too me that the male part and feminine are balanced. She did not try to hurt me or scare me or make me afraid of her. She was very calm with me as she stood in front of me facing me. I was very calm and not afraid either. Tony this is an awesome vision of her I saw and the beauty of her is awesome. I am so thrilled she is my inner guru and my guide with so much love for me. Thank you for letting me share this with you.  See Banshee and Kundalini

But there is another side to grave, the terrors we meet when we are frightened of our own demise.

Example: As I did this, the door to my right creaked open, and two black men entered. They looked as if they had risen out of a grave, almost as if the flesh was hanging of them. I was very frightened as they came towards me with their arms reaching to me. So I made the sign of the cross, and said one of the words of power used by the group. At this the two black men disappeared. I felt, not only great relief, but also as if my knowledge had given me some power. I suppose, once more, there was some smugness, as if I was strong enough to meet anything. So I lay back in bed ready to sleep. As I did so, once more the door creaked open, and in came the black men. This time none of my waving of hands in the sign of the cross, and all my magic words, stopped them. They reached me and their hands went around my throat to strangle me. I woke up screaming and terrified.”

Over a period of time the man was able to face these fears and discover what they were in reality. He says, “It had taken me that long to meet what were my own terrors. And what I gradually uncovered was that the terror was about my own sexual urges that I had forcefully buried. Those black men were my own natural urges that I had pushed into the grave of my unconscious; natural urges that I had turned inwards against myself. I even more slowly realised that there is nothing evil in our us, but forces in us that have been turned into a direction that is negative. All the holy words cannot protect us from meeting ourselves and what we have done to ourselves. The church has educated us to believe that there is so much evil in us and the film industry has deepened that.”

Example: “I really want to let everyone know something,” she said. “C. S. Lewis once said that life is a public performance where you learn about life as you go along. This is a model for me. We learn the way to be as we do it. We make mistakes. We keep missing life. We learn that we die as we live, but our expectations are in death. We bring forth the expectations we have about death in our dying. If we expect them to be shitty and full of suffering, that’s how they will show up. It’s the mood and tone and pattern that we re supposed to have sex in. The real sex is the sex between two people as they invent it right then. Mostly, I say, like sex death is not the way we expect it to be. Unfortunately, we act it out the way we have been taught (both in sex and in death). It’s too bad because it could be quite spectacular, quite amusing. The fact is we should leave ourselves open to see what’s possible with death. Otherwise, it’s such a cliché’. So here’s the thing and it’s rife, and there’s plenty of opportunity to do it wrong. I’ve learned so much, in actual fact, about my living and dying and about my to-be death. My death is right on schedule. It’s me who isn’t.” Quoted from Death Dreams by Kenneth Kramer

Example: Though he had left her well provided for economically, after his death she felt she had no emotional resources to live on and was too old to find any. Drink, and acting as custodian of mementoes from the past—her husband’s clothing, his toothbrush and other possessions—were her only interests, aside from speaking of him as often as possible, almost as if he were alive.

She brought with her to her session a pipe that had been her husband’s favorite and which she often looked at and held when she wanted to feel especially close to him.  Finally, she closed her eyes and reported that the pipe was “getting warm” and then that she had the feeling of holding not the pipe but instead her husband’s hand. She now experienced the first of many vivid memory sequences during which she “relived” with intense emotion a great many past events. Her husband seemed “real as life” and she wept with joy at his “return from the grave.”

She then began to talk to her husband, telling him how much she had missed him since his death, how difficult life had been for her, and how their friends had abandoned her since she had started to drink. To the guide’s inquiry, she explained that the sense of her husband’s presence was “completely real” and that he listened “very seriously” to her discourse and sympathized with her plight, but managed nonetheless to convey the idea that he “didn’t really approve” of the way she had been behaving. She fell silent, and finally reported that the pipe was only a pipe again, that it was growing cold, and the sense of her husband’s presence was becoming very faint. Then, however, it returned once again—a presence so powerfully felt that she thought she could “reach out and touch him.” She felt her husband smiled at her lovingly, conveying “whole worlds of encouragement and strength,” then slowly turned his back and walked away. Then the sense of presence was extinguished and somehow she knew that he would “come no more.” The pipe now was “cold and lifeless” in her hands and had “nothing more to do” with her husband. “At long last,” she said, he was “gone. Dead. Really dead. He has made me understand that and I have got to accept it. That is what he would want me to do. Quoted from LSD The Problem Solving Drug by Stafford and Golightly.

In the above the woman is led to realise the awful condition of being so dependent on her husband. In talking with him he led her to see her mistake and stop wanting him with her in the body.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Am I frightened of dying?

What does the grave in my dreams make me feel?

Can I imagine being in the grave to see what feelings it provokes?

See Summing Up – Life’s Little Secrets – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Edgar Cayce – Near Death Experiences

Gravity

Being held down by physical appetites, material ambitions, worldly philosophy. Weighted down by worldly experience.

Green

Most of the plant kingdom is green, and so many dreams use it to depict something in that you is connected with growth, potential for growth, or capability of fruition and regeneration. A green living thing might emerge from apparently lifeless earth, suggesting a new living direction or feeling is emerging in your life.

These positive associations are linked in some dreams with healing or positive change, and green is often found mentioned in dreams about heaven.

The negative associations are with envy or jealousy. Also when things go mouldy they often go green, and slime or infected mucous is green, so at times green may mean something is bad or likely to undermine your health or positive feelings.

Many growing things are green before they ripen or flower, so green might also suggest not yet being ripe or lacking experience.

Because traffic lights use green as a ’go’ sign, in some dreams it can suggest a positive yes to decisions or directions you are taking.

There is an obscure but sometimes relevant connection for people who are working to unfold their inner qualities. The green leaves of plants are instrumental in allowing light to become the energy in transforming the mineral forces of the earth into living tissue. So in some dreams the green is used to show how your own process of opening to the forces of Light and Life are transforming your lower or less conscious levels of self into greater consciousness and expression. In all it is about transformation. See Life’s Little Secrets

Sometimes a dream snake is green, and this shows the possibility of great inner growth, healing and change, depending upon your relationship with the snake. See: snake.

Blue green: This indicates healing or change coming from within or from a spiritual dimension.

Dark yellow/greens: Evil intentions; growth of negative attitudes; sickness; envy; jealousy.

Greenish grey: Pessimism and lack of enthusiasm or ‘colour’ or satisfying growth in your life.

Idioms: Green fingers; green with envy or jealousy; green eyed monster; green light; green – naive.

Useful questions:

Do I sense the feeling quality of green in the dream – is so what is it?

Am I meeting changes and personal growth or healing at this time, and in what way?

If there are negative feelings in connection with the green, what of such feelings can I note in my waking life?

See: Colour.

Grenade

Anger, violence, explosive emotions. See: Bomb.

Grey – Gray

This sometimes indicate feelings of living an unhappy or colourless dull existence, a daily round without excitement or stimulus, or morbid or serious thoughts. Sometimes it suggests officiousness or officialdom.

Grey is the mid point between black and white, so in that sense depicts balance or calmness, but it can also indicate lack of clarity, indecision or blurring of distinctions. Like fog, it suggests not being able to see clearly. The grey could mean not judging myself, as in the past you might have got caught up in black and white thinking about yourself.  It could also mean invisibility or a way of protecting yourself.

Artemidorus wrote that, “.. a sky that is gray, gloomy or full of clouds, signifies failures and afflictions. In fact grey or gray is often used in language to indicate such feelings, as in the following sentence, taken from Castle’s Dreaming Mind. “If a dreamer needs to be sensitised to how gray, confining, or confusing his or her outlook is toward life, dreams may be cast in sombre,  prison-gray  tones  or the dreamer may wander around in a fog.” These states of mind can lead to ill health or at least a lowering of excitation and energy in life. An extreme example of how grey indicates difficult feelings is seen in the following dream.

Example: I have had a series of dreams which feature grey people standing beside my bed, and each time I have woken myself up by screaming, with my heart pounding, my being unable to move. JS

With grey hair it has several possibilities depending on the tone of the dream. It can link with maturity, wisdom or gathered experience. But it can also point to ageing, the loss of faculties with increasing years, and the path to death along the avenue of diminished interest or sparkle in life.

Grey clothes suggest neutrality or lack of ‘colour’, or in some dreams officialdom. But as with the grey colours worn by puritans, it can also suggest a moral stance, an avoidance of extremes or vivid passion. Such a stance might be one of avoiding full relationship or involvement in life. It might also suggest lacking anything more than a ‘bread and milk’ diet sort of life.

But some dreams describe grey in a powerful and exciting or enjoyable way. One dream includes a ‘beautiful, grey, old time car’. Another has a grey carpet that reminds the dreamer of home and comfort. Silver grey is sometimes felt to have these positive and life giving qualities.

Idioms: A grey world; a grey area; grey matter (brain); grey power.

Useful questions:

Is the dream environment I am in a grey one, and if so what aspect of my life does it reflect?

Does my life lack colour at the moment, and if so in what way?

Is this grey in the dream depicting my own feelings, or is it how I see the environment I exist in?

See: Colour – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions – Processing Dreams

Grotto

See: Cave.

Ground

See: Earth.

Group

This shows how you feel about being one of a crowd, and what sort of strategies you use for dealing with a group – whether a follower, a leader, a quiet introvert, or an extrovert.