Posts Tagged ‘dream dictionary interpretation’
Horns
Protectiveness or desire to hurt. It can show the animal in the human – as in the form of Pan, or it can indicate; sexuality or the penis.
Example: ‘I ran into a house and came face to face with a huge stag. It started eating my leg. I was pushing against his horns and managed to stop him chewing me.’ Jasmine C.
The first part of Jasmine’s dream, not quoted, is obviously sexual. Being eaten therefore suggests she is being consumed by her sexual drive.
Example: She started walking up to meet me and I saw behind her all the hill was covered in pink and white flowering trees in full bloom, it was very beautiful and I knew I had never seen it like that before. I opened the gate and the goat started to charge me, it was her way of greeting, I saw she had very long horns and said to someone who was standing with me now, “You must be careful as her horns can be dangerous but if you don’t get in the way she will not hurt you.”
Horns are used to warn of danger, but can also be used to express triumph. Since animal horns protrude from the head and are used for defense, so they can suggest a negative attitude.
They can represent hardened thought projections, thought-forms, the shape of long-held ideas. Horn projecting form a unicorn is an extention of the sexual drive that was blocked at the genital level and allowed to express the level of insigiht in the head. That is why the unicorn was only captured by virgins. It needs a virginal mind, one not controlled by preconceptions, to reach the higher levels of mind.
Idioms: horn in; Pull in one’s horns; lock horns with someone; take the bull by the horns; on the horns of a dilemma; toot your own horn; horny; don’t blow your own horn; horn of plenty; horny; Gabriel, come blow your horn; lock horns; pull in your horns.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Do I see the horns as dangerous or protective?
What sort of horn was it, sexual or musical or of a creature?
Have I ever kept my mind virginal by avoiding preconceptions?
See Inner World – virgin – Summing Up – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Horse Horses
There is not so much difference between the horse and the dog. They are both domesticated animals, and so represent urges and drives in ourselves we have learned to harness or direct. The big difference is that the horse can carry us and serve us in our labours much more powerfully than a dog.
For myself I feel the horse is the most beautiful and loved herbivore.
The dream horse also depicts or expresses our pleasurable energy and exuberance, the sort of enthusiasm or feelings of well-being that can ‘carry’ one through the day easily; dynamic sexual drive; the physical energy and life processes that ‘carry’ us around. As such it may also link with the life processe. Horses like other animals are quick to respond to love and danger. So they can be panicked and you can feel the effect of this part of you. See Mammal Brain
The energy that carry – or pull – us through growth and ageing, as happens when we dream of a horse drawn carriage or cart. Therefore in old age the unbidden processes which move us toward death may be depicted as the horse in a threatening or helpful role. The horse depicts human instincts that have been harnessed or socialised for generations, but have perhaps been let slide into non-use or crushed. It is also survival drive, sexuality, love, all yearning toward service, toward metamorphosis, all that has powerful energy to move us.
A horse or a man on a horse can sometimes signify a messenger or a message.
In his book Dreams and Dreaming, Norman MacKenzie says the horse ‘… is dynamic power and a means of locomotion; it carries one away like a surge or instinct. It is subject to panics like all instinctive creatures which lack higher consciousness. Also it has to do with sorcery and magic spells, especially the black, night horse, which heralds death.’ In a woman’s dream the horse can sometimes represent her relationship with a man and the power and strength she gets from that, as in the following dream.
Example: As I talked to the pale golden horse it felt more and more as if I was talking to a male companion who was in union with me. As I talked about my mother, she was standing before me in full anger and blaming me for bringing out the witch in her. H.
Example: A rather shadowy man in a building opposite to where I used to live as a teenager was introducing me to a new job. I seemed to understand that I was to do a milk-round. He led a small horse from out of the building. It was to draw a cart. When the horse saw me it ran to me and become very excited and loving, rubbing against me and licking me with a very long tongue. I was both pleased and slightly threatened. Threatened because it was so intense. At one point though we rubbed against each other with a degree of sexual pleasure.
I believe many young girls feel totally as if they are fully connected and loved as the photo illustrates.
But our dream horse can be a wonderful guide and mirror for us.
Example: I love horses too and they are great teachers, for they mirror what goes on inside us. I used to ride horses for many years and when I was not convinced about what I asked the horse to do, it would not consider me as its leader and was more likely to refuse to do what I had asked. Their sensing is perfectly developed. Anna, A few weeks ago I saw a documentation about Buck Brannaman. He says –
“Your horse is a mirror to your soul, and sometimes you may not like what you see. Sometimes, you will.” So says Buck Brannaman, a true American cowboy and sage on horseback who travels the country for nine grueling months a year helping horses with people problems.
Black or dark horse: Unaccepted passions; threat of death. The unknown parts of your tremendous energy arising out of unconscious processes. The dream horse represents the very long history we have had with horses, through peace and terrible wars there are very long associations we have with them. It shares all that with us and so can be realisations emerging from our long past. Or it can represent threatening changes. Riding a black horse can represent the amazing energy used to bring awareness of things that had been unconscious into consciousness.
Blinkered horse: Not allowing oneself to see what is happening around you; anxiety about life, or an attempt to control ones natural anxiety or panics.
Controlling the horse or fear of it: Trying to control, or fear of, feelings of love and sexuality, of our own natural drives and emotions that are powerful enough either to give us motivation in our activities, or drag us along unwillingly.
Dead horse: Serious loss of energy or motivation which could lead to illness or depression; an old and dying set of habits and motivations or way of life.
Falling off horse: Relating badly to ones urges and needs. This could result in tension, breakdown or illness.
Grooming a horse: Taking care of ones basic needs such as food, shelter, sex.
Horse and carriage: The natural processes of life that move us through youth to old age; forces that can move us, either from within or as natural events, but which, if we are relating well to the horse, we can guide in some measure. It can also indicate the inner power which brings thoughts to awareness, things you might be blocking to think about. The horses represent the power which draws the mind.
Horse dragging the dreamer along: Impetuosity of feelings; feelings dragged along by natural urges.
Horse loving you or expressing sexual feelings: The flow of positive and natural sexuality and warmth from within.
Horse race: The events of everyday life, and your relationship with people; everyday competition and where you rate yourself in it; what happens in the race shows how you are relating to opportunity, or how you feel about your accomplishments and being part of the ‘human race’.
Horse running freely: Allowing ones emotions or sexuality free reign; love of life.
Horse unwilling to move or carry: Your inner natural reaction is against the action or direction you are trying to go. Sometimes this is a warning that you should not go in that direction.
Horseshoe: Good luck, receptivity if prongs upwards; bad luck or lack of receptiveness if prongs downwards.
Large horse: Enormous energy.
New born horse: Emerging energy or new motivations.
Old or worn out horse: State of your feelings, perhaps worn out from overwork; may refer to a member of the family.
Riderless horse: Sometimes represents the death of someone, as in the following example.
Example: “I dreamed that I was awakened by the sound of a horse’s hooves in the street. I saw a white horse, with no rider, stopping at midnight in front of our house. I knew it came for my younger sister. I went to the door and opened it to call her, when suddenly I saw her coming down the stairs, all dressed in white. She did not say a word to me, but walked with stately steps down the stairs, through the hall, and out of the door. She mounted the horse and rode away. I woke up crying.” The woman’s sister died a month later.
Riding or leading horse easily: Good relationship with inner drives and emotions; the harmony between instinctive drives and personality.
Running away from a horse or horsemen: Fear of sexuality, which includes responsibility for parenthood and relationship. Fear of ones own strong desires or urges; avoiding the responsibility of directing ones own feelings and desires.
Sick or dying horse: Loss of health, energy, enthusiasm. Have a physical check.
Speaking horse: Realisation of what you are feeling but have not been aware of; expression of levels of feeling or body processes usually unconscious.
Strange or unknown horseman/woman: Message from the unconscious; a new opportunity or event.
Struggling to control the horse: Fighting with ones urges and natural drives; difficulty in controlling ones emotions or sexuality.
The mare: femininity, receptiveness, fertility or a woman.
The stallion: masculinity, power and virility or a man.
This energy wave rises, but in fulfilling itself in genital sex the wave falls again, self-awareness with it. However, if the energy is released, and yet not allowed to spill out in the full sexual release, the energy keeps on rising – flying in fact – lifting awareness with it, until it becomes a vast awareness of life and death. The white horse can have a similar meaning. For instance a woman turning her love of her children into social caring suggests a way of expression that goes beyond personal drives or the instinctive urges toward personal survival. She ‘flies up’ into a wider social context. See: Cayce, Edgar.
In mythology Pegasus was born from the blood when Perseus cut off Medusa’s head. Pegasus then lived roaming freely until Bellerophon caught him with a golden bridle given him by Athena. Bellerophon went through adventures such as the slaying of chimera with the help of Pegasus. But Bellerophon tried to ride Pegasus to Mount Olympus (Heaven) but Zeus caused Pegasus to throw him off and fall back to Earth.
However Pegasus arrived at Mount Olympus where he served Zeus. The symbolic meaning of this is that when the uncontrolled and undirected processes of thought and intellect are stilled a new level of experience or energy is released. This new way of relating to sexuality or life energy can uplift or expand consciousness to the point where we arrive at cosmic consciousness. But the old human personality cannot manage this and falls away as a new being emerges. Chimera, the destructive and illusory view of life arising from a purely sensory view of life is killed in the process. See: cosmic consciousness.
Thrown from horse: It depends on who is thrown from the horse and why. In general though it suggests that the instinctive or spontaneous life force has cast off an attitude that is restraining it, or not dealing with it well. One dreamer who saw a man thrown from a white horse realised that it showed how, “The forces of restraint, moral, sexual, worldly active that I have been imposing on myself have been thrown off.”
Tied up horse: Inhibition; need for release of feelings and allowing freedom of expression to feelings and creativity.
Training a horse: Developing new habits; directing your energies in a socially acceptable way; learning to direct sexual and emotional energy.
Uneasy on ride: being taken for a ride; feeling ones emotions or natural urges are dominating.
White horse: Changing sexual drive into love and wider awareness; a meeting with expanded awareness of yourself.
Wild horse: Undirected energy; sexuality which might not take care of personal or interpersonal needs.
Working horse: The energy or motivation needed to work; how you feel about yourself, that you are only a work-horse, or perhaps treated as such.
The astrological sign of Sagittarius is depicted by the half human half horse. Sagittarius, the Archer, is a ‘Mutable’ ‘Fire’ sign. In it the free, unrestrained activities of Aries which became ‘fixed’ qualities in Leo, now become balanced and harmonised, and work toward high aims. It is represented in the Zodiac as a Centaur-like being, half human, half animal, turning to shoot an arrow at the ‘Scorpion.’ The Sagittarian is said to have high ideals and philosophy, prophetic insight, and the power that overcomes sin and death. |
In this sign the animal nature is ruled and directed by the human spiritual nature. The symbol of Sagittarius – half beast and half man represents this new emergence. The emergence of the human out of the animal, and the different sense that human beings have of themselves. It suggests a new type of human being in fact. If we look at the Zodiac from there on – Capricorn, we have the half goat half man figure – until we arrive at Aquarius, a fully fledged human figure. The human faculty is to transcend, to make that change. To switch across seasons, physiological changes, to actually attain consciousness. This allows us to look at the seasons, to adjust to them in a completely new way than the animal.
Example: ‘As I talked to the pale golden horse it felt more and more as if I were talking to a male companion who was in union with me.’ Alison B.
Alison’s horse is obviously portraying her feelings for a man, but also that motivating and active power in herself. The dream shows how easy and integrated she is with this.
Example: I was driving along Tottenham Court Road with my wife and my youngest son. As we neared Euston Road I saw the magnificent sight of hundreds of horses coming full gallop toward me. I knew it was a great horse race – something like the Grand National. There was every sort of horse – many riderless, all surging in a mass so thick there seemed no space between them. Then we were walking in the Covent Garden area, and it was still a market. I was crying openly at the wonder of what I had seen. Edward.
Edward’s tears are because his dream brought him a glimpse of something much bigger than his own small life. He touched the amazing flow of the energy behind the human race in its infinity of forms. Perhaps just lightly he experienced cosmic consciousness, the state of awareness that transcends ones own limitations of body and mind. But the dream also has elements of the competitive drive we feel as humans, and the struggle to know where we stand in relationship with others and the mass of other people we exist within.
Idioms: Back the wrong horse; from the horse’s mouth; don’t look a gift horse in the mouth; horse sense; you can lead a horse to water; wild horses; workhorse; horsing about; getting on your high horse; eat like a horse; back the wrong horse; beating a dead horse. See: spiritual life in dreams .
Useful Questions and Hints:
What is your relationship with the horse and what does this say about how you relate to your own motivating and energising drives?
Where is the horse taking you, or where are you directing the horse – this gives you clues to your direction in life?
Is the horse decidedly male or female – if so is there a connection with how you are relating to someone or yourself?
See Talking to Inner Self – Summing Up – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Martial Art of the Mind
Hotel
New areas of self. Attitudes in self that may not be permanent. States of mind or being in which you are lodging, holidaying, or passing through on your way to somewhere else. Luxury and ease.
A dreamt of hotel might also link with work or an opportunity you had; or even a sexual affair that happened. If it is temporary are you involved in constant activity with much coming and going of ideas.
When you stay in a hotel you temporarily transfer your feelings about territory to the room you hire. But you know it is only temporary, and so dream hotels often link with a situation you are in that will not last long, or that you are moving through. This may be in connection with work or relationships, or even the way you feel, depending on what else is in the dream.
The dream hotel may also be about feelings of getting away from pressures, demands and duties that you face at home. Or it can depict your journey, your shifting values.
For many people a hotel is a place of work. If this applies to you, then the other activities in the dream are commenting on your work situation or how you feel about it. If your main association with hotels is about holidays, then your dream is exploring your need to relax, and perhaps your hopes of what you might find in that relaxation. What is it you are looking for or hope for?
If you have used hotels as a place for sex, then ask yourself what your dream message is about that.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Have you worked or lived in a hotel for a long period?
Do you use hotels for holidays?
Have you been involved with hotels as a place to have a relationship?
Are you going through changes or uncertainty?
See Associations Working With – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions – Edgar Cayce
Hound
Something to do with persistence, or following clues or chasing something or someone down.
A hound can follow a subtle clue, such as a scent, and show you where to find it. People often use the word hound to mean someone is really bothering them, perhaps life a stalker. See dog
Example: S is trying to integrate A through sexual intercourse, but that is not the way this unification can come about. As A, that kind of union is no longer there for me to give and as A I am not honest in even this attempt to give her what she keeps hounding me for, so my anger takes over and I am not entering her in a loving way. This is not who I am, so as A I am violently ill with the contact of our bodies and souls, and this horrible green jealousy and envy of S grabs me and attacks me. I recoil violently as it wants to consume me, but I am an old soul and very strong and experienced, so I am able to wretch and expel it from my body.
Example: A large puma was in some bushes. I was encouraging my dog, but suddenly realised the cat was in a snare – its back left leg was in the wire. I called the dog off and went to try to take the snare off. I was apprehensive the cat might attack me. But it pulled loose by itself, the wire trailing from its leg as it ran up the hill. As it went I noticed it had a large moist vagina the size of a woman’s. Then two hounds began to worry something in the spot the cat had been. An animal was hiding in a blanket or cloth. I drove the hounds off and saw the animal was a huge anaconda or rock snake. I caught hold of it behind the head, but it pushed hard, but I could just about hold it. It seemed to understand what I wanted though, and folded itself back into the material.
An insight into this dream came from exploring it: The Puma somehow is my relationship with my wife and my own feelings. I have struggled long and hard with my sexual drive to be free of negative feelings. The snake is my own sexuality and masculinity or creativity. We work together now after initial struggle for control. I felt deeply loving toward my wife for being my companion and helper in this discovery of myself. It is an acceptance of my own physical delight and my own strength. See Reptilian Brain
Useful Questions and Hints:
Are the hounds or hound helping me or hounding me?
What do I or did I feel about the hound(s)?
Have I ever enjoyed seeing a dog tracking something?
See Mammal Brain – Summing Up – Associations Working With – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
House
For public buildings see Buildings or for other home things see Home. Also see house in my dream – parts of house like attic or windows.
A house nearly always refers to you, depicting your body and aspects of your personality. That is because it is what you live in – your body. This becomes obvious if, having visited friend’s houses you judge their character by the condition of the house. The following description of a man returning home gives a graphic example of this.
Example: When I arrived home and walked through the garden gate I noticed things about the garden I had never let myself see before. The untidiness and absence of care were no longer hidden by veils. Particularly the track I had worn across the small front lawn. It was worn because I used it as a shortcut instead of walking along the path. But then I arrived at the door, I knew suddenly that it was me. The door was me, and every scratch on its paint was a part of my life, reflecting my state. Opening the door I went into myself. The door and garden had already shocked me with my lack of attention to outer details. Now inside the house, the same things showed themselves in the state of my house, depicting my inner health.
We are all human animals trying to deal with and confronted by the complexities of modern life, with its subtle and ingeniously devastating values. A house is a modified cave. It is so easy to get lost in the jungle of values and forget that. As (primitive) humans, we may recognise what are the basic needs – food, shelter, and human and physical warmth. A cave without emotional warmth was deadly and even if it fitted the modern “values” was deadening. Love was a food that we all needed to face the outside world with outgoingness and pleasure. Without it there was no flowing radiating charge in us to transform the outer world into a place we could meet with courage. See Opening to Life
Thus if you take a large house with its many functional rooms, the library would represent the mind; the bathroom cleansing or renewal of good feelings; the bedrooms ones sexuality or intimacy; the roof your protectiveness or ‘coping mechanisms’. But these parts of the building may also be seen as different parts of your body. So going into any building suggests an entering into something within you, perhaps a searching or looking within yourself. So the structure of the building not only associates with your physical age and well-being, but also with the structure of attitudes and viewpoints built in your youth through your relationship with those around you. In a larger context, a house can represent a family tradition, the class the family is in the social hierarchy.
Example: When I identified with the house it took a while to really experience it as a living process rather than simply an intellectual interpretation. But when I did become the structure and experienced the extent of the house, I realised it as my body. But it was not my body as I had been taught to see it through my training as a nurse. I did not experience it simply as a biological process, or a physiological machine. I experienced it as an incredibly ancient thing, carrying or incorporating in its form and functions lessons of life gathered over millions of years of human and animal evolution. I felt that it holds within its darkness – the presently unconscious areas developed and lived in the past – enormous amounts of information or memories. We fail to be aware of these because our attention is so fixed on the world outside of us. But of course, even there, if we look carefully, we can see we are the result, our culture and language are the result, of the events and lives stretching back into the ancient past.
The house can depict a way we allow the world into our life, or exclude it, and the love or attitudes, the pain or hidden secrets of relationships. But a house is a massive symbol and it can link with many aspects of you and your life. So to really get from your dream house what it refers to you also need to ask yourself what type of house it is. For instance how old is it and how does that refer to your age and what period of social attitudes your were born in and influenced by. What social strata does the house represent and what environment does it stand in?
Then, in what way are you influenced by or developed from that social background. If we then go into the house, what is happening inside, and whereabouts in the house? This indicates things, feelings, past influences you are presently dealing with. As a person you have many facets and possibilities, and the various parts of the house depict these. The interaction between these facets are what make you who you are. Understanding them enables you to find your way through the things you face in yourself and the world.
Example: I started to identify with the building, and realise that I am the building. My body is the building. As the building, as my body, I realised that I have been built by many different influences. Not only have my parents contributed by their genetic make up, but also the environment I have lived in, the food I have eaten, the society in which I lived and its many chemicals and waste products all have been influenced in the building and shaping of my being. In fact in the dream the building appears strong, solid and functional.
To quickly find an entry in this long section click on the following links: Parts of house
abandoned house – ancient house – apartment or flat – attic – trapped in an attic – threat from attic – looking out from attic – hiding in attic –
Back of house – balcony/veranda – ballroom – bannister – basement – bedroom basement and cellar – snake in the cellar or cave – Bad smell – bathroom – big house – buying a house
childhood house – cellar – ceiling – chimney – corridor –
dining room – door – Back door – Black door – Door to strange landscape or world – Doorknob – front door – Leaving door open – glass door – shutting a door – side door – Someone at a door –
first floor – Floors of house – Floor – fortress – ground floor – Home – house – attackers or intruders from outside– house burnt or falling – cramped house – damage to structure – – Front of House – house known only in dream – haunted house – inside of house – kitchen in woman’s dream – kitchen – larder or fridge – living room – Looking back at a/your house – moving or new house – nursery
old or known house – other people in house – other person’s house – Outside the house and garden –
People or things coming from downstairs –
repairs enlargements or renovation – roof – Room – row of houses –
Secret or unknown room – Seeing your husband/wife/partner go in someone else’s house – Being in someone else’s house – Shelf – Stairs – Study or library
Things in the house – Toilet – Top floor or attic upstairs –
people or things arriving from
Abandoned house: Suggests it was lived in at one time and was then no longer used or honoured. It also has suggestions in a dream of things that have left memories. There might be things left there that would be useful. Sometimes there have been things done there that you are frightened of or regret.
ancient house: A very old house, especially if it is large, can depict what could be called past dwellings, or past lives involved in or connected with your present life. In general it depicts the past from which your present life has emerged, and the influences from which it arises.
apartment or flat: In general the same as house or home – below – but may have a slightly different significance if you have lived in an apartment or flat. Therefore the questions need to be asked as to whether the dreamer lived/lives alone in the apartment? Does the dreamer share the apartment with others? What was living alone or sharing like? These form the associated feeling states connected with the dream apartment. See Settings in Dreams
attic: The mind, ideas, memories, past experience; things that are out of sight or forgotten. See larger entry on attic
If trapped in an attic: a purely intellectual approach to life.
Finding an attic: pleasure at new ideas, discovering potential or wisdom from past experience, or you are dealing with things you previously thought were not important in your everyday life.
Threat from attic: Disturbing thoughts, or something connected with what you have hidden or forgotten.
Window or turret looking out from attic: Our sense of connection with the cosmos; wider awareness; intellectual view.
Hiding in attic: Escape from other people; retreat from everyday life. See example below.
Example: I was sleeping in an attic. A large dog was with me – a wolfhound like I used to exercise a few years ago. I and the dog would go out together. The dog was wild and free. I enjoyed being with it. together we did things like hunting which felt very real in the sense of not being artificial behaviour. Although I never washed I felt clean and healthy. Leon.
When Leon explored his dream he felt the attic was a place where he could exist but not be involved with people. The attic reminded him of the attic in a childhood house, where his mother never went because of the steep ladder. So he could go there and be alone, free of other people’s presence and influence.
Back of house: Usually represent the less public of viewed or private area of ones life. Where one can be more of oneself out of the public eye.
balcony/veranda: It can mean an attitude of looking down on people, maybe superiority but it could also be about not wanting to get involved or express who one really is. A balcony in a theatre is also a special place for important people, and also a dangerous place for young children. Veranda can be an outdoor place for entertainment or socialising, so can suggest an ability to express yourself and be sociable.
ballroom: See: ballroom.
banister: A feeling of security against falling or being hurt. Something that protects you; a protective barrier. See: the section on stairs under house and buildings. It might at time be a link with childhood memories where hurt was involved.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What part does the banister play in my dream, and what does that suggest?
Am I near a dangerous edge in my life?
Is this something I have built out of my attitudes?
See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions – Summing Up
basement and cellar: Usually the things we have hidden from awareness in our unconscious. The example shows how Mrs L. has killed or repressed a part of herself. We might ‘kill’ ambition, love, sexual drive, and these be pushed into our unconscious.
But the basement or cellar also is the entrance to personal and transpersonal memories, our biological ‘unconscious’ functions, archetypal patterns of behaviour, subliminal or psychic impressions, the collective unconscious. Frequently it is the place we keep memories of traumatic events in our life. So a dark shape or intruder might emerge from ‘downstairs’. Our dark deeds or guilty memories are also in the basement.
A snake in the cellar or cave: Our psychobiological drive; the energy behind our growth and motivation which includes sex drive. Often experienced as our emotional or feeling drive or zest for life. This connects us with awareness of our evolution as a person.
Bad smell: emotions which could cause depression or illness.
Example: ‘I know I have killed somebody and their body is walled up in the cellar. The strange thing is I haven’t a clue who this person is. Various people visit my home and I am terrified the body will be discovered. In one of these recurring dreams the police actually investigate the disappearance of ‘the person’ and go into the cellar. When I wake from these dreams I always have the most terrible guilty feeling.’ Mrs P. L.
bathroom: If you are from the USA going to the bathroom can mean you want to use the toilet, in which case see toilet – or maybe you need wash, or have a shower or a bath, in which case see bath/bathing.
buying a house: See: purchasing a house.
chimney: Smoking; the birth canal; sign of inner warmth. Belching black smoke: The grim mechanised side of our culture centred on production instead of humanity.
corridor: No man’s land; limbo; in between state; the process of going from one thing to another. The corridor, because of its shape directs ones progress along it. So it is both limiting and yet gives opportunity to traverse a building quickly.
So if it has this feel in your dream it links more with the expression of your potential or energy. As such it is a channel for the energy of potential to flow through you, into the many departments or ‘rooms’ of you. The example may refer to the experience of birth – the birth canal. Such a corridor can also depict a sense of not being able to get out of a dissatisfactory situation. It may refer to a direction in life produced by circumstances, or even the female genitals. See: white. Many corridors in a building might suggest the complications and barriers that stand in the way of simple effective action or expression.
Example: ‘I’m trapped in a long passageway or corridor. I can’t get out. I’m feeling my way along the wall – there is a small light at the end of the tunnel, I can’t get to it. I’m very frightened. I wake up before I get to the end. Then I feel afraid to go back to sleep.’ Margaret.
door: Freud felt that a door, a keyhole, a handle, a knocker, all depicted sex and sexual organs. The first example shows this clearly. Knocking refers to the sex act, the cul-de-sac is the woman’s legs. But the image of a door has so many other ways of being expressed in dreams and is used very frequently. In the first example it represents the experience of discovering a new feeling state. For instance if one had always been apologetic and now became affirmative, ‘new doors’ of experience could well open.
Door – General meanings depending on dream: A boundary; the difference between one feeling state and another, such as depression and feeling motivated; a barrier to change or growth; the passing from inside oneself to exterior life; the feelings or attitudes, such as aloofness, we use to shut others out of our life to remain independent or private; being open or inviting; a sense of leaving an environment or relationship – escape; entering into a new work or relationship situation; entrance to a new life style, or a new phase of one’s life. Or conversely, an exit from one situation into another.
Back door: Our private, family life; our more secret activities; the anus.
Black door: The barrier that ones fears or apprehensions set up; the unknown, but perhaps imagined in a way that does not relate to reality. Going through the black door may therefore lead to a freedom from the limiting fears.
Door to strange landscape of world: Finding entrance to unconscious.
Doorknob: Turning point in opportunity, sexual or otherwise. The ability to make a change or to enter into a new situation. See: knob.
Front door: Public self; confidence; our relationship with people in general; a vagina.
Leaving door open: this can suggest that you remain ready and sympathetic to new ideas, a relationship, or to move in and out of a situation.
Glass doors: Invisible barriers in the way of your goals or possibilities; being able to see through to the possibility of change.
Grand house or stately House: Possibly represents either your inherited tendencies from your ancestors or your logn past; or your vision or ambitions for something you would like to happen. Remember that great things have always developed from people’s great ideas that they then work at making real – for the real is only our vision of the future that we put our life energy into building. See The House of the Ancestors
Shutting a door: Privacy; trying to find ‘space’ for oneself; the dismissing attitudes or tension we use to shut others out of intimate contact; repressing memories or feelings; decisively ending something.
Side door: Escaping from a situation or being indirect.
Someone at a door: Opportunity; the unexpected; new experience or relationship.
Example: ‘I find my way to a door and knock. It is at the end of the cul de sac. An old woman of about sixty comes to the door. Although old she is healthy and well preserved. Without a word I grab her in my arms and have sex with her.’ Patrick S.
Example: ‘I come up to a door which I’d never seen before, and on opening it, I came across another house fully furnished.’ Mrs R. F. Example: ‘I am being strangled from behind by a faceless man! I had gone down to lock my flat door for the night when I noticed the door was open. I hastily bolted it and ran upstairs, but unknown to me the intruder was already in the flat.’ Miss H.
Here the door represents the censorship the dreamer places between her conscious self and her sexual drives. In ‘strangling’ our own life drive, we ourselves feel cut off from life.
empty house: Suggest that you are feeling empty of purpose and perhaps are slightly without purpose. Or it could mean that you have a completely new beginning to be very creative with your life and direction.
first floor: (In this dictionary the first floor is called the ground floor)
fortress: See: castle.
ground floor: For all the ‘floors’/levels of a house see Floor
Home: Ones basic needs such as shelter, warmth, nourishment – but usually in the sense of what we have created as our basic way of life; the values, standards, goals we have accepted as normal, or are ‘at home’ with; as in the first example – the situation or feeling state in our home, which here means family atmosphere and attitudes; the state of feeling relaxed, being oneself because away from other people and what we need to be in relationship with them. Thus a sense of being oneself, or absence of concern over other peoples criticism.
In clarifying this dream symbol, it needs to be defined as to what the state of feeling was in the home, and whether one shared the space with others, and what this was like.
In a past home: Depicts the parts of our character or experience which developed in that home environment.
Someone else’s home: What we sense as the attitudes and atmosphere – or the situation prevailing in that home. So a young woman going to the home of her lover and his wife, shows her facing the fact of her lover’s home situation and commitment in marriage.
Future home: The direction you would like your life to take, or fear it might. See: house below.
Idioms: Bring something home to someone; close to home; come home to roost; home and dry; broken home; home truth; home is where the heart is; feel at home.
Example: ‘I was sitting in the living room at home and my mum was sitting there; like we do when we’re relaxing in the evening. From nowhere in particular my dad was there. He held his girlfriend in his arms and displayed her in front of us. She was stark naked. My mum tensed up, tightened her lips, and tried to look away. I felt acutely embarrassed for me, mum, dad and his girlfriend.’ Lynsay S. Example: ‘I am walking down a busy street when I realise all I have on are my bra and pants. Everyone is staring at me and I try to appear unconcerned but feel more and more embarrassed as I go on. Eventually the street and the people fade and I am alone in my own home and a great sensation of relief comes over me. I do not bother to put any more clothes on but wander about the house secure in the comfort people are no longer looking at me. Mrs S. C. This depicts the home as absence of demands made on us by other people or social rules – so the ability to be oneself.
house: If the house is one we know, live in now or in the past, what is said about home applies.
Attackers or intruders from outside: Social pressures or response to criticisms.
Basement: See: basement.
Bedroom: See: bedroom
Big house: People often dream of a very big and grand house, and often feel it is not theirs, but everything in a dream is created by your own thoughts, fears, and genius. It depicts the many different departments and areas of yourself you could explore, also your ancient past can be open to you if you enter your dream house.
The big house is a sign that you are much bigger and have more space/potential than you presently believe or know. You need to explore that potential and develop it, for you are a miracle of life, and nobody fully understands what we are. So see Being the Person or Thing
While awake we often think we have a view of what we are based on other peoples opinion of us, our parents lack of interest in us and their comments, that may have made us feel small and insignificant, or even our own view of ourselves, what our body looks like. And so often we have a diminished view of ourselves. But being alive is a miraculous and amazing thing – probably the most amazing thing in the universe.
Our astronomers are searching everywhere to find life on other worlds. In one way that is ridiculous. We spend enormous amount of money and time in such searches on other planets and yet forget that we are living beings with enormous – even infinite – potential and do nothing toward caring for and helping each and every one to unfold their potential.
Burning or falling down: Big changes in attitudes; leaving old standards or dependencies behind; sickness. See: Last example in falling.
Cellar: Similar to basement – what is unconscious or below ones usually level of awareness. Also may still have associations to do with ‘below stairs’ referring to what is beneath one or a lower class. Also in the cellar or basement one is near to the earth, the primordial forces of nature, what moves beneath ones ‘street level’ personality. The basement can also link with what your present personality has been built upon, your past or family and cultural influences. If there are no walls to the cellar, or tunnels leading from it, it shows an openness or connection with influences beyond your own personality.
Ceiling: Protection, security, against the life’s difficulties. Something above your head, or out of reach. The attitudes or beliefs you use to protect your identity, the height or range of your imagination, or your mental limit or boundary. If you live in a flat with people above you, the ceiling can mean the things other people do that enter your life, interfere with it, or even damage you in some way.
childhood house: It refers to feelings or incidents. sometimes traumatic, that occurred in your childhood years.
Remember that a house nearly always refers to you, depicting your body and aspects of your personality. This becomes obvious if, having visited friend’s houses you judge their character by the condition of the house. See Children’s Traumatic Fears
Chimney: Smoking; the birth canal; sign of inner warmth. If belching black smoke – the grim mechanised side of our culture centred on production instead of humanity.
Cramped house: Feeling of need for personal change; feeling restricted in home environment or in present personal attitudes.
Damage or structural faults: Faults in character structure; hurts such as broken relationship; bodily illness.
Dining room: Appetites; social or family contact; mental or psychological diet.
First, and other middle floors: Internal needs, rest, sleep, hungers; the trunk. See floor for fuller description.
Floor and floorboards: Basic attitudes and confidence; what supports you and you may take for granted, such as health, good will of others, the house you live in. The floor often appears without much emphasis in many dreams. This suggests it is depicting the present situation or environment you are in. For instance first floor or second floor would suggest a different situation in which the events of the dream are taking place. Front of house: Our persona; facade; social self; face.
Ground floor: Practical everyday life, sexuality; hips and legs. It can sometimes suggest real love because all live has to be grounded, it has to be expressed unless it is brought down to earth. See floor for fuller description.
If it is a house created by the dream: Ones body and personality in all its aspects.
Haunted house: This usually point to a troublesome memory or experience that still ‘haunts’ you. But sometimes it can be something very real met, as follows:
Example: I believe there were other people in the huge attic room with me. Then the scene changed and I was walking up the several flights of stairs to get to the attic room. I was holding a small dog in my arms – one of those rather flat nosed toy dogs. When I arrived at the attic I put the dog down. But now the attic was empty and dark. I could feel my hair stand on end and my skin ‘crawling’. Actually I feel it all again as I write this. The feeling arose because there was an unformed dark shape creeping around at the far end of the room. The dog was really afraid and came into my arms. Then the dark creature leapt at me, transforming into a massive mouth with huge fangs and awful demonic face. Immediately I leapt at it in the same way and smashed against its face with my own huge fangs. This utterly disarmed it because it had felt, in its primitive way, to terrify me. It surprised me too that I could so immediately transform into a monster when necessary. Then I approached the dark form, back in its original condition, trying to find out what it was and why I had met it in that way. Gradually I experienced its situation. It had originally been a human being, but had gradually lost its humanness and become this slinking darkness. I was slowly able to help it realise that it could once more take the path to become human if it wanted to. Then it asked me how that could be done. I told it that first of all it had to come out of this dark and empty place to mix with people. The human environment created a different surrounding and influence that would penetrate it and help it to change. It also asked me how I knew about its condition and how I could transform into its own monstrous form. I told it I had once experienced that condition, and that’s how I knew it was possible to come out of it.
Inside the house: Within oneself.
Kitchen in woman’s dream: May refer to pride in the ability to create a home and contribute something valuable to the family. See: cooking.
Kitchen: Creativity; nourishing oneself; mother role; diet.
Larder: Hungers; sensual satisfaction; your store of memories or feelings that satisfy or nourish you.
Living room: This is the mental and emotional space you live in. Your dream will usually give you a pictorial version of what you have created within yourself, what you exist in and its quality, space or despair. It might also refer to personal leisure or ‘space’ to be oneself and everyday life.
Looking back at a/your house: Shows you looking back upon yourself, upon your life. What you see if a summary of your life at that time/
Moving or new house: This can either refer to a radical change in the way your attitudes and feelings create a sense of the world around you, or that you are in process of being changed by circumstances and events, and therefore deals with the difficulties or excitement/plans in facing the change. Certainly it reflects some sort of personal change, most likely to do with the way you live your life.
Example: Joan had a dream as an 11 year old child and has had it 20 times over the past 40 years. When she was 11 her family moved from a wonderful big country home into a small city road. She didn’t want to move house and didn’t have anyone to share her difficult feelings about not wanting to move. So, never having expressed her feelings the dream kept recurring. Example: The difficulty of facing change is also reflected in the dreams Diana still has as an adult. She dreams her children are always young and her parents always as they were when she was young.
Nursery or child’s bedroom: Feelings about your children; ones own childhood feelings and memories.
Old House or house previously lived in: A previous set of values or way of life, sometimes even a suggestion of influences from lives previous to your present one. This can have very deep meaning, as it can show the influences from your past that are still active in you; it can mean influences from your ancestors and your far past.
Other people in house: Different facets of dreamer, or person or people involved quite deeply in your life. Therefore a stranger entering your house would suggest a new relationship.
Other person’s house: Another person’s life. If you go in the house, it shows you getting involved with that person, perhaps being a part of their life – as for instance entering a relationship. If you are watching someone else go in the house, it suggests an awareness of that person, or an aspect of self, being involved in another person’s life. See entry below on seeing partner go into someone else’s house.
Outside the house and garden: Extroversion or the relationship with environment.
People or things coming from downstairs: Influences, fears, impressions from unconscious or passions – or from everyday worries.
People or things from upstairs: Influence of rational self.
Purchasing a house: In general this may relate to making a decision to change, or wanting a change in your life or circumstances. Purchasing something in a dream also often involves the process of deciding or being uncertain. The decision making is to do with clarifying what you want, what you would like. See: purchasing.
Repairs, enlargement or renovation: Reassessment or change of attitudes or character; personal growth.
Roof: The philosophy, beliefs or coping strategies we use to protect yourself from stress. The roof can also suggest how you are dealing with the energies of emotion, and whether your ‘house’ or personality, is sound.
Standing on a roof: Heightened awareness. See: spiritual life in dreams
Mending roof: Developing new coping strategies; feeling vulnerable; developing the qualities on your life that lead to wholeness.
Leaking roof: Need for new coping strategies; a suggestion that you need to deal with personal problems.
No roof: If not a threatening dream, suggests no barrier between personality and psychic or spiritual awareness; a sense of connection with life or wider awareness. If threatening, feeling invaded by forces outside oneself, or disturbing emotions if raining.
Roof garden: Spiritual or mental growth or flowering of new ideas, insights or abilities. See: Last example in window.
Room: A particular feeling state – for instance the room might feel sinister, warm, spacious, cold, etc. – so depicts such; womb; your life situation if it is a room you are living in. In this sense the room can depict what difficulties, what traps, what poverty or richness of life you are living in. Sometimes a room, because of its spaciousness represents the amount of potential or opportunity one has. The ‘containing’ quality of a room may also depict involvement in ones mother. The décor of the room usually suggests how you feel about the quality of your life.
Bare room: This may suggest you feel your life lacks comfort, or the joy of your own created environment. It can also suggest potential.
Entering another room: Entering a new experience or phase of your life, a new feeling.
Room without doors or windows: May represent the womb and life in the womb. What is happening in the room may show the state of a pregnancy, or feelings about pregnancy; feeling trapped.
Secret room or finding of extra rooms: A common dream theme – recognition or discovery of previously unnoticed aspects, abilities, fears, or traits in oneself. If the discovery is distressing, this may reflect a feeling of a change in ones status quo which is disturbing.
Example: ‘There was a room in my house I had never been in before. It was filled with water and had three kittens submerged in it. While in the room I didn’t need to breath.’ Audrey P. The room here represents Audrey’s childbearing function – her womb. The room can therefore depict mother or qualities of mothering.
Row of houses: Other people. See: entries on room; roof; stairs; wall; attic.
Seeing your husband/wife/partner go in someone else’s house: This may suggest your partner has the tendency to move into another relationship. This may be only your fears, but it may show you sense a growing distance in your relationship, and the possibility of your partner going elsewhere.
Example: I was with my husband down some back alley ways – behind houses – all a bit grey looking and maybe evening light. We were looking for a way through and my husband suddenly took off down a very narrow alley through a wooden tumbled down fence and was gone. I tried to follow but when I got through the fence I felt my husband went through the house that was ahead. It was a strangers house and I just couldn’t make myself walk up to it, open the back door and go through it – what if someone saw me or asked me why I was in their home uninvited – I imagined that the owner was a young oriental woman – and I wasn’t sure IF my husband HAD gone that way or down another alley way. Kate.
Some months later Kate’s husband went to live with another woman. Shelf: Possibly your memories, of something that is a part of your everyday awareness; something that is accessible in terms of your using it or remembering what it represents. See: ledge.
Someone else’s house: Moving into it suggests you want to be like them or want to be near them or even love them in some manner.
Shelf: Possibly your memories, of something that is a part of your everyday awareness; something that is accessible in terms of your using it or remembering what it represents. But principally the way you display or store things that are either precious to you or things, memories you store that still have importance,
Stairs: See stairs
Study or library: Mental growth; mind.
Things in the house: Aspects of ones feelings and makeup.
Toilet: Privacy; release of tension; letting go of emotions, fantasies or desires which we need to discharge. See: toilet.
Top floor or attic: Thinking; the conscious mind; memory or memories, things that haunt you; the head. See: attic.
Walled garden: With high wall it is not only a defense about intruders, but also a private area where you can sunbathe with or without clothes, or be a private person. See wall
Windows: Ones outlook on life; how you see others. See larger entry on window.
Useful questions and hints:
What is happening to the house – changing – decorating – exploring – and how does that apply to me?
What does the quality, age and areas of this house describe about me?
If I describe myself as the house what do I say?
If I am exploring new areas of the house, what am I finding?
See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions – Using Symbols to Change Life Problems See: For fuller insight into house – House in Your Dream; Basement, Stairs, Window, Glass, Door, Furniture.
Housework
The cleaning out of non functional – negative – attitudes, thoughts and experience; keeping our internal house in order, perhaps by taking time to clarify or define motives, opinions and feelings about others.
Dreams are one of the major ways our inner process tries to do this old housework of cleaning up our inner problems or conflicts. But because we resist it the process cannot complete itself even though we are asleep. Think of nightmares for instance. They are the major way the dream tries to present us with things that have really disturbed us, and most people wake trying to distance themselves from such feelings as fast as they can.
The earliest dreams we may recall are usually dealing with the housework of the present – the tangles and pains of childhood and infancy. Piece by piece they emerge into awareness to be known and integrated.
But sometimes such a dream may connect us to a long past during which our forebears did such tasks and left in us the heritage and urge to keep our living place clean and healthy. When found these are wonderful things to find is us – the urge to prepare good food; the urge to look after the life around us in our garden and help it grow to beauty; the urge to care for and love all the children in our care, even the wonderful companions of our life – the cats and dogs of our existence.
Example: I’m carrying two heavy bags home from school. A teacher doesn’t help me. I am at home, now a mother with children moaning for their tea. I can’t go to bed unless I complete my housework. I’m on a sinking ship like Titanic, jump overboard, divers helping others avoid me. I cry out for help, but they ignore me. I’m a disabled single parent with 2 teenage children.
I am hearing your cry for help Elizabeth. The sinking ship tells me you are near to emotional collapse. However, at a distance I am wondering if – a) From your schooldays you felt nobody supported you so you got into a victim role. b) You consistently take on too much and push yourself too hard. c) You have asked for help but have found no response. Do any of these apply?
The two bags are your children, who you have no help to carry. The dreams describe the man in your life as apparently strong, but in fact doing nothing to help. What can you do though? Certainly stop pushing yourself so hard – or learn to relax the feeling of constant pressure. Make a long term plan to gain help from your children, to share the load. As a mother you are an important person and no mother should live in a society that makes a mother feel such stress. So be like a tigress and stand up for you rights.
Example: Sometimes we dream about balking at doing housework. This usually (if not factual) indicates a refusal to clean one’s spiritual house, for we are often unwilling to face the fact that we have fallen short of living up to our ideals, or what we know to be right and good. A good case in point is the woman who said she used to have beautiful dreams until she began to ask for guidance. After that her dreams became so ugly and frightening that she decided she didn’t want guidance! She had begun to discover some of these hidden rooms of her own mind and soul and she didn’t like what she saw. So she stopped looking. Quoted from Dreams Your Magic Mirror by Elsie Sechrist
Useful Questions and Hints:
In what way does the dream show you involved in housework?
Most animal keep their ‘house’ clean, even pigs. Do you have trouble with housework?
What does the plot of your dream depict?
See Plot of the Dream – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Habits – Edgar Cayce
Hunger
Your need for what sustains you, emotionally, mentally or physically. We sometimes lose hope, faith or strength, and this hunger represents the inner need felt at such times. See: food.
Often points to things you unconsciously yearn for, but have either repressed, denied, or been unaware of. Your needs, or demands, physically, emotionally and mentally. You may feel the need for success or fame just as acutely as the need for sex or food. See: eating
The solar plexus also links with hunger, the longing to be held, desire to give of yourself, or to be at the real or figurative breast. If these urges have been hurt, we may feel pain in the solar plexus and tend to hold ourselves back from active social expression or intimacy in relationships.
Example: As I walked past the shops, having fasted for days, I found a sudden great enthusiasm for a packet of figs, as if they were wonderful, and I ought to buy them here and now. Then, thinking about this, I thought, “But I have a packet of figs at home, and do not need any more yet.” It was only then that I realised how the whole train of thought and desire had arisen from my hunger. With other shops also, the same thing happened. I was led to consider buying foods, without at all realising where the urge had arisen from, and to see this only later.
It seems likely, considering the above, that other things we repressed, such as our sexual needs, love and our need for something more from your life, also emerges subtly into consciousness in a similar way as hungers.
Example: I noticed a large rag doll on the floor. I seemed to know the doll belonged to Joan, and was unconsciously used as a substitute for her deep hunger for a son. I held out my hand to the doll, with love, and it came alive and crawled to me. It came to me as a lonely child might come into ones arms hungering for love. I held it close to me, and Joan came over and I held her too. Then all barriers seemed to melt, and everything disappeared from view. All that existed was me as a united being and consciousness. It was, I felt, beautiful.
A person describes their experience of this hunger.
I had been exploring my inner world and here I took time to eat. I had prepared some oats before starting. When I ate them I experienced the most wonderful awareness of hunger and absorbing, not just the oats, nuts and seeds, but also the environment, and all that I had learned and taken in from the woman I loved. I mean by this the total environment, earth, air, water, culture, history, people. I felt like a hungry animal, cramming food in my mouth, loving it, and knowing I was feeding Life as well as myself.
I felt that if we have the courage, we are a firmament of experience. By exposing ourselves to experience, and allowing ourselves to really feel the pleasure, the torment, the passion of what we meet, we are feeding Life. But we are more than a mouth, we are also a way of gaining insight, of integrating experience, and that is the real food of Life.
I felt this is the real human work on the planet – consciousness, integrative sentience. This, I felt, is certainly my work, my function. It is to feel, to experience, to cry, to laugh and certainly to love. But in the midst of all that, to connect, to learn, to ask why or what, to gain insight and knowledge even if that is a struggle. Life, ones life, places, are situations where we can feed. Life says, “Take this in! Take this in! Experience, feel, ferment. Then show it to me. You are my digestive organ.”
Useful Questions and Hints:
What to you long for?
Is what you hunger for shown in the dream?
Have fulfilled your dreams or longings?
Do you feel hunger emotionally or is sexual attraction?
Is it a hunger and need of the body or of the soul?
See Learning to Allow Yourself – Inner World – Exploring Dreams Techniques to use – Hungering
Hurt
Have you been wounded by what other people have said or done? Is there some event from the past that still hurts in some way?
But nothing can actually hurt you in your dreams. It is like a very dramatic film that you are fully immersed in and playing all the parts; you can feel everything but when finished you are the same without any physical hurts. Of course you may feel fear, or even terror, but they are all your own responses to the images you have conjured. If you learn to face such fears then they will not longer frighten you. We are alone with ourselves in the world of our dream. If we can acknowledge and admit that our terrors we dream are actually our past hurts or fears that we have not faced presenting themselves for us to heal; that the ghosts and demons that can rampage about our night are embodiment’s of our fears and ideas presented to us as truths; that our wonderful visions and insights are an expression of our own infinite potential, then we can walk a pathway to finding what we really are.
We have lost touch with the natural world and do not honour it as part of our life as many native peoples do, and this we can learn from our inner world, our dreams. We do not tend to the hurts we feel as a natural animal that we are, are so become sick in our soul – a soul that we deny we have. See Summing Up
In our waking life it is good to recognise that our actions and deeds can cause others to feel hurt and change the way they feel – even lead them to feel traumatised. See Avoid Being Victims
We need also to see if it is us causing the hurts we feel. I recently asked a man who had experienced enormous pain through, as he felt, being misused by a woman friend. When I pointed out that this was the woman’s normal behaviour that he himself had described to me, so why was he hurt by it, he said that she should have been more caring for his feelings.
I then asked him if perhaps he was asking her to act like an adult while he maintained the emotional level of response normal in childhood – namely blaming someone else for his hurt. In response he again justified himself by saying that it was normal to feel hurt from such an action. See Ages of Love
Example: I was getting ready to leave and this dark haired guy told me I couldn’t leave, I felt scared and was going to leave anyways, he pulled out a pistol and shot me in the stomach, I fell down, but there was no blood. The thoughts in my head was, “OH NO”. Next thing I remember is that I was still on the floor in the same place and I got up and I remembered being shot but I didn’t seem to have any pain or blood and was moving normally etc. I started looking for a way to leave I was sneaking around trying not to get noticed so that I could get out of there w/o the shooter guy seeing me.
The interesting thing in the example is that even though she could see no hurt came from being shot, yet she was still scared of the guy with the shooter. And it is overcoming such fears that can release you from terror and hurts that haunt us. But here are some dreams where the dreamer feels no fear.
Example: I was in a large motor vehicle with perhaps three or four other men. The vehicle was like a very large lorry or removals van. We were driving along an unpaved road in slightly mountainous or rugged countryside. As we were driving along we became aware of a huge vehicle trying to overtake us. This had caterpillar tracks on each side of it like some tanks. It was immensely wide and going very fast. We pulled over as far to one side – the left – of the road as we could to allow it to pass. But as we did so we got too near the edge of the road and went over a precipitous drop. Quite a long period of the dream was taken up with the experience of falling. We seemed almost to go into freefall, a weightless state, because the fall was so long. It was long enough for me to think many thoughts about death, whether death would be instantaneous. I was not aware of any sense of fear or terror, simply an awareness of falling and what it might mean. Then we had crashed and I was still alive. I then had a memory of standing at the bottom of the huge drop waiting for someone.
As can be seen, when there is no fear there is no hurt or terror. Also even when there is terror in the dream there is no hurt. Like the computer game, you can get up again and continue the game – of life – until you learn to overcome your fears and go up to the next level of the game.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What in fact am I frightned of getting hurt by?
Do I realise that the inner world of dreams is totally different to the outer world? See Inner World
Can I face my fear of being hurt in my dreams?
See Facing Fear – Karma – Martial Art of the Mind – Avoid Being Victims
Husband
It can depict 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 it can be 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 or lost husband or he disappears: Many 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. If you wonder whether your dream was a premonition, it is more likely a form of practising the loss, so it does not come as such a shock when or if it does happen. The greatest shocks occur when we have never even considered the event – such as a young child losing it’s mother – an event that has never been 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 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.
Example: My husband and I go out somewhere together, mostly in a town or built up area. After a while I lose him, and even though we arrange to meet at a certain place, he’s never there when I arrive. I’m looking everywhere and desperately asking passers by if they have seen him. The sense of loss and panic is awful and people keep saying “Yes, he is over there, or went that way.” I never find him.
Dead husband: Your memories and remaining emotions about your husband. Sometimes a meeting with him. See Dreaming of Death
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, a vision or a 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.
Death of husband: If you think about your husband, do you think it is him. No, it is your feelings memories and emotions you feel. That is exactly the same with dreams. It is not your husband you are dealing with directly, but your fears and feeling, your emotions and anxieties.
So dreaming or his death you have been exploring your feelings about him dying. It is not a prediction, and many women dream of their husband dying, and feeling of what it would be like without him. Rather that than never have face his death before it happens.
Example: I had a really horrible dream last night. My husband died. In the dream we were sleeping and when I wake up in the dream I realize that my husband is lying next to me as if he were still sleeping, but he’s not sleeping he’s dead. He died while sleeping. In the dream it’s horrible and we don’t bury him, I cremate him and I go every where with his ashes. I cannot let go of him and I feel so much pain because I won’t see him anymore, hear his voice or feel him. I woke up from the dream crying and turned around and hugged him and kept crying I felt so scared and I felt a lot of pain; it took a while for him to calm me down, I couldn’t stop crying. Right now typing this makes me get a chocked up feeling just thinking about what I felt in that dream makes me feel horrible (in the sense that I might lose him) I hate it and I feel scared. What could that dream mean?
It means that the woman is facing her feelings and anxieties about losing him. But losing him means the loss of support and companionship, of dreams of their future.
Inner husband: Many people do not realise that they have an inner husband equally as powerful as an external husband. 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 your husband, and they are what makes you the person you are. This is true even if your husband was never there for you – you still have all the memories of him not being there for you filed under ‘husband’. 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. Such an inner husband can appear in dreams because you are deeply influenced by what you hold within you.
Other woman’s husband: One’s own husband; feelings about that man; desire for a non committed relationship with less responsibility.
Sex with husband: 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.
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.
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. See Surviving Love and Relationships
Useful Questions and Hints:
Is the dream in any way an expression of what I feel or fantasise?
What is the dream dramatising?
Does it express our present state of sexual relationship?
See Difficult Relationship – Dead Partner or Ex – Identity and Sex – Ages of Love
Husk
The face value, the outer quality under which may hide beauty, nutrition, wisdom. It can also relate to past hurts which have been released, but which leaves the ghosts of their influence in you.
Hyena
Because of old and stereotyped beliefs about hyenas, they probably depict an attitude of living on other peoples vulnerability or weakness; taking advantage of someone or being taken advantage of; underhandedness; messenger or bringer of death; feeling parasitized. In fact the hyena is a resourceful hunter and pack animal, and the spotted hyena, the one we mostly see, kills 95% of its food, so is not a scavenger.
But remember that anything you dream of is a projection of your own feelings, attitudes or fears. So it is worth asking yourself what traits of yours are shown in the dream.
Example: Hi-I had a long dream that involved interaction with a hyena last night. I was at work in the greenhouse with my friend/boss and a big huge animal was walking around and it was sniffing around about to head into the woods and then it turned and sniffed us from a far and we said “It’s a hyena!” in amazement and then tried to close the greenhouse doors slowly but it came through the sides of it through a little tunnel; everything was really slow, we moved slow, the hyena moved slow. We were both bracing ourselves a bit for a rampage or charge; we both just stared and waited and it came right to us slowly just sniffing and it went out the door. We were very relieved but it started coming back through the side again and I started packing things into the hole that it came through but it got through again-it was not fierce or fast, it was just walking very deliberately and slowly. It came again into the greenhouse, shuffled past us and then it morphed into half-man and he proceeded to take a bunch of our food, packing his bag full of our stuff and talked about how he lived right down the way and how convenient that he now has a nice food supply, it felt like he was mocking us, that he knew he was stealing from us but didn’t care. We were pissed but he was very nonchalant.
Then later I was at some type of party and I started telling someone about how there was a hyena that showed up at my work and how it took all our food and that it was going to now continue to take our food and I was pissed and I was telling them my plan, I was going to either shoot it or get rid of it somehow. And the guy to my side started smiling slyly and said “I am the hyena, don’t you recognize me?” and at that moment I did recognize him to be the one who the hyena had morphed into. And I turned to him and said “oh yeah, well I don’t appreciate….” and started telling him how I felt about how he was taking advantage of us. I found him to be kind of charming.
We started to take a walk and I babbled on about how he couldn’t just take our stuff like that and he just listened. He seemed to like me and like listening to me. And at one point he would softly touch me as we rounded a corner. We brushed up against each other a couple times. I was enjoying his company, enjoying that he was listening to me. I did not judge him to be dangerous or bad, I just didn’t want him to take our food and mess with out stuff; and I understood that different animals have different habits and ways of living. It was very mysterious penetrating dream. Very visceral. I Googled hyena dream and came up with a whole slew of nonsense. And then I found yours, thank you.
As can be seen from this dream it starts of from the stereotyped attitudes mentioned; that of taking advantage of other people. But it soon becomes clear that the dream is examining human/animal attitudes. Then it is realised that “different animals/people have different habits and ways of living.” See Animals
Useful Questions and Hints:
Does the dream hyena shows traits that you can idenitfy as your own?
Can you recognise that you yourself are an animal?
How do you treat or feel about the animals around you?
See Levels of the Brain – Animal Children – Life’s Little Secrets – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Summing Up
Hypnosis
Being influenced by the suggestions of who or what hypnotises in the dream. Becoming receptive and surrendering to the hypnotic symbol. Whether this is good or bad must depend upon who or what it is in the dream to which one surrenders control. In a symbolical sense generally wrong unless consciousness is maintained during the hypnosis, but must depend on the dream contents. See LSD Hypnosis Meditation the Dream; Self Hypnosis
I
Wherever the word ‘I’ appears in your dreams, there may be an important description attached to it. For instance you may be saying ‘I wanted to climb the tree’. Or ‘I felt frightened’. Any such statements give direct information about what the underlying feelings or themes of the dream are, and should be noted. See: Want.
Ice
Being cold emotionally or sexually. It depicts what is meant by the term cold shoulder, where we shut off any display of warmth or compassion. It also therefore shows the dreamer as having ‘frozen assets’ in a personal sense. But often it means that the dreamer has shut off a part of themselves in a sort of cold storage – a freezer. Maybe suggests frigidity. Or the congealing, deadening effect of ice or snow on the intellect when it operates on its own without being related to ones feelings or to an active life. See: Cold; Glacier.
Are you frozen in beliefs you cannot or shouldn’t do what you really feel under the ice?
Using ice cubes could be a way of slowing down ones hot passions or calming ones anxieties that burn in you, a way of cooling down or keeping cool.
Body locked in ice, perhaps dead: Deadening of all our feeling reactions and enjoyment or motivation.
A hole in the ice: Is the ability to see the eternal, the cosmic ocean of Life, through the hole. This whole is a subtle play on the hole in self one can look through to the eternal. It is a hole made by melting ones past and pain etc frozen in the unconscious. But the hole also means that as one’s past problems melt, a wholeness occurs through which one is aware of the ocean of cosmic Life flowing through one.
Icicle: Frozen male sexual feelings.
Iceberg: Similar to ice, but may suggest frozen potential. It is being aware of aspects of yourself remaining unconscious or frozen in unconsciousness.
Parking place filled with ice and snow: It suggests that you are finding it difficult to find your place in life because you have not faced or released you talents, fears or truamas, because they are still frozen in being unconscious. Maybe your attitudes are frozen and inflexible and so you cannot access your potential.
Thawing ice: Can suggest a change in the way you feel – a cold attitude towards warmth. This could also be a release of emotions and old fears and love.
Thin ice: An uncertain situation. You are doing something that you should be aware of and it will not support you in what you are doing. Your attitudes and principles you are living by are not based upon what will support you.
Example: I am visiting a country, probably Iceland. It’s nearing the spring there. I must walk across the ice floor. It’s dangerous. If I step on the wrong part, I’ll slip in. Guards come with me to hold on to me and point the way. They place cardboards and pillows when I should step. I tell them, “My balance isn’t good because of my ankles.” Off we go. I nearly fall in several times. We get to the side where I sit in a chair at a table. It is sitting on the ice!
The dream seems to be a play on the saying walking on thin ice.
Example: There’s solid ice and snow all around. Everything is solid white. I’m blinded by the white ice and snow, I feel cold, I’m shivering and I think I’m close to death. Then all of a sudden a huge hand reaches out and grabs me. I recognize the hand. I stare at it for a few minutes. Then I grab the hand. I recognize the hand as the man I have just started to date. What does this dream mean? I’m confused about my relationship with this man, confused about my feelings.
The dream illustrates this shift of temperature and also the conflict and death of love or feelings that can be associated with coldness. But the shift in the woman’s feelings when she contacts a man.
Idioms: Break the ice; cut no ice; put on ice; tread on thin ice. See: cold.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Have I ever given anyone the cold shoulder or acted coldly?
What aspect of ice was my dream showing?
Could I in any way thaw the situation?
See Secrets of Power Dreaming – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Life’s Little Secrets – Allowing the Spontaneous
Iceberg
Usually the same as cold, or ice, namely that you may be holding back, freezing, your feelings about something. Or else you may have shut down on much of your sensitivity in life, perhaps to deal with loss, pain or disappointment. Such a huge block of ice may mean that an enormous amount of your energy and creativity is frozen along with your feelings.
The iceberg is often used in literature, and sometimes in dreams, as a symbol of consciousness. A little of your being you are aware of, like the ice above the surface. But the enormous bulk of self is invisible to view; beneath consciousness. See: Glacier
Icicle
Repressed sexuality.