Posts Tagged ‘dream dictionary interpretation’
Ladder
This shows you attempting get somewhere that is presently out of reach, difficult to attain, or perhaps involves risks and anxiety. Depending upon your feelings in connection with the ladder, it might show feelings of achievement through effort and daring.
The ladder is sometimes a symbol of social success or failure, so if there are such feelings involved, it would seem you are meeting feelings about social or work standing.
Freud also describes the ladder as a symbol of sexual intercourse, the rungs representing the physical movements of sex and the mounting orgasmic feeling represented by the climb.
Ladder Your feelings – whether anxious or secure – about reaching situations or opportunities in life that are new, presently out of reach, or not easily attained. Attainment through effort and daring. Or the heightening of insecurity, anxiety or feelings in life or sex – getting up – getting it up. Sometimes it represent reaching a new realisation.
Rungs: The separate stages or efforts or skill necessary to ‘climb’.
Example: I am at the fairgrounds in my hometown. People are all over carving stuff of stone. I go up a ladder to a second story and a woman there is even carving a cradle of stone. There is some type of art show they are getting ready for. Also a book has been published with several different stories by people but there is nothing of mine in the book. I don’t know any of these people except one man.
The woman has climbed up the ladder for at least two reasons. One is to get a better view of where she is in life, an understanding of what she has achieved, also to see of she has climbed higher is social recognition. The fact nothing of hers was in the book shows that she rates herself as not important.
Idioms: Top of the ladder. See also: stairs under house.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What was the ladder going to be used for?
Was I involved or just watching?
Did I realise anything new?
Was a relationship involved?
See Decision – Being the Person or Thing – Conditioned Reflexes – Characters and People in Dreams
Lagoon and Lake
The inner world of our feelings and fantasies; the unconscious. The mysterious waters are a powerful symbol of female sexuality, especially if the dreamer is male.
Sinking into: Becoming introverted; giving up on trying, or expressing oneself.
Looking into depth: Self awareness; looking into oneself.
Dirty water: Difficult feelings; being unsure of oneself; depression. See: water.
Drowning in a lagoon: Can indicate sexual difficulties. But it more likely shows the dreamer finding it difficult to deal with a rush of fantasies or feeling of losing touch with reality.
Example: I am watching a dirigible (blimp) full of people in the gondola trying to escape. It is shot down over a lake. I have a lot of problems getting through the soldiers who are surrounding this lake. Finally I succeed and I see that they are pumping the water out of the lake to get to a truck full of gold down at the bottom. When they have finally succeeded I realize that only a few people must have died as there are few or no signs of death around the scene.
This illustrates that deep within us in our unconscious is a great treasure if we are not afraid of death and can dive deeply into ourselves.
Example: I realise this was my place with them, to help them understand themselves.
They then asked me if I would get some water for them, as there was no water in the house. To get water one had to wade into the middle of the lake. They explained that only in the middle was the water suitable to drink. Even in the middle it looked murky, but I thought we could boil it. I waded in and suddenly realised that something strange was happening. Visions or hallucinations occurred stronger and stronger the further one went into the lake. I also realised that all the others had been in the lake and immersed in the visions. As I pressed on I knew that most people became so involved in the visions they lost grip of their purpose to walk on. I had the visions, but found I could maintain the decision to go forward – i.e. most people lost sight of physical surroundings and became absorbed in the visions.
The dream shows that because the dreamer was willing to help and because he could face his own inner difficulties, he could pass through the usual fantasies and neurotic influences and get the precious water.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What were my feeling about the lake?
Was there treasure to be found?
Did I manage to get under the surface?
See Being the Person or Thing – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Questions
Lama
See: Guru.
Lamb
This may refer to the childlike, dependent, vulnerable part of yourself. There are other possible meaning though, such as new life. This might link with your own child or childhood, and with innocence. See: Animal.
In Christianity the lamb has always been linked with Christ. As innocence and purity the weakness of the lamb has enormous power, and can defeat evil. In ancient societies who bred sheep, the spring lambs were a sign of survival of the often harsh and hungry winter. At last there was food. So the sacrifice of the lamb was linked with the feeling of being given life and redemption.
The childlike, dependent, vulnerable part of self; new life, and so perhaps ones own child or childhood.
Innocence; Christ, as innocence and purity; the weakness of the lamb has enormous power, and can defeat evil.
In ancient societies who bred sheep, the spring lambs were a sign of survival of the often harsh and hungry winter. At last there was food. So the sacrifice of the lamb was linked with the feeling of being given life and redemption.
Useful questions are:
Does this remind you in any way of your own child, childhood or a child – if so who or what?
Is there any suggestion of sacrifice in the dream, and what would that link with in your life?
What is your relationship with the lamb and what does that suggest?
Lame
The difficulty, or lack of confidence or strength you might face in making your way through the events of life. It can represent any impediment in your being that makes going difficult. Lameness can also represent uncertainty about how or where you ‘stand’ in life.
Lameness if often associated with the ‘wounded healer’ the one who in finding their own wholeness receives a wound that does not heal , and may cause them to be lame in one leg. See Archetype of the search for self
The symbolism of Jesus healing the lame man, Math. 11:5 is the power of wholeness healing the difficulty. The contact with our own wholeness enables us to face life with the energy and capacity each event demands instead of being ‘lame’ in the way we face people and opportunity.
Left leg: Weakness in the feelings and ideas out of which we gain support.
Right leg: Weakness in dealing with our external activities.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Do I feel an obstacle will hinder me from achieving?
Have I been wounded in myself in some way?
How have I dealt with the lameness?
See – Avoid Being Victims – Martial Art of the Mind – Programmed
Land Landed
Potential; the opportunities you meet to make yourself real in the world, to create something from within yourself. This might sometimes represent the undeveloped parts of your own nature that need attention and cultivation or character building.
A land of opportunity and freedom: This probably shows a turning point in your life, or it is about your future because you know deep down where you are going – to a brighter future.
A new land: This may require attitudes and activities which when we get there are no longer needed. The farmers who travelled West in America needed to drop their nomadic life once they had arrived. It can also be about a new area of you that has been uncovered – not unusual considering the amazing potential/possibilities we all have.
Difficulty landing: Difficulty achieving goal or making it real in a down to earth way; anxiety about where life events are taking you; or feeling out of control or not being in control; difficulties or fears about being in someone else’s hands.
Landing: It could be a landing from a sea journey or by air. By sea it could be about starting a life independently of others, or the end of a relationship. By air it means a new opportunity in a new place. Often such things take time to appear. See A Dream is Like a Seed
Land the job: Often this about something you wish to happen and is not about a reality. But if the dream has a feeling of success about it the wish might be true.
Land of subjugation: This about the way you feel or about the way you have been treated and so are shown in your dream. In our dreams we can fight back, even though there does not seem any hope for that in waking life. By learning to hit back in your dreams it often changes the situation you face. See Summing Up
Undeveloped pieces of land: This is a sign that you have a great potential that if you work at it will provide rich harvests. The opportunities you meet to make yourself real in the world, to create something from within yourself. This might sometimes represent the undeveloped parts of your own nature that need attention and cultivation or character building.
Example: The plot of land had something of the feeling of an allotment. It was well tended, and I had the sense the young man had been doing most of the work on it. The soil was rich but at the moment dry. A few shoots were just breaking the ground from hundreds of bulbs which had just started shooting.
Example: I went out to go downstairs. It was a huge staircase. Lounging at one of the landings were four youths. I knew that they were thugs intent on beating me up. It was too late to run away, so I charged at them uttering a terrible scream like a roar of fear to destroy their morale. The scream woke Brenda who woke me.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What was I doing in relationship with the land?
Was it cultivated or needing working on?
Where did I land and how did I get there?
See Martial Art of the Mind – Decision – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Landscape
Landscapes particularly depict your feeling moods and attitudes. They show what habitual responses of feeling you meet the world with. This is because in dreams you create your own surrounding and environment out of your unconscious attitudes, fears, or wisdom. These surroundings, like your dream houses, show what attitudes or feeling atmosphere you live in most of your life. See: Countryside.
If the landscape if urban, it often reflects whatever you feel about it. Do you feel a buzz of excitement or a feeling of being lost in a massive concrete jungle?
If the landscape is of natural surroundings, forest or open land, then it often reflects you own relaxed and natural feelings. Try using Being the Person or Thing
Gloomy: Pessimism; self doubt; depression; a gloomy view of life which could rob you of motivation.
Sunny: Hopeful; optimistic; something to look forward to. Life-giving.
Recurring scenes: Habitual attitudes with which you approach situations.
Recurring scenes of past residence: A stance or attitude you developed from that period of your life.
Recurring landscapes: Areas of our feelings or psyche we often return to or experience.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Do you ever go to a place to recover or feel good in?
What sort of places do you avoid and why?
Have you ever felt the presence of something more than human there?
See Conditioned Reflexes – Meeting a god – Being the Person or Thing – Emotions and Mood in Dreams
Lamp
Your focussed attention and what it reveals. See: Light
The lamp seems to represent awareness, consciousness or way of viewing life that gives insight into what would otherwise be missed in the darkness of ordinary sight.
Lamps were originally with flames lighting a wick, so were like a small fire that lit ones home or way. Because of the wonder ancient people felt for fire and light and because it was for them a symbol of their life, needing fuel/food to keep it alive, it was felt as having special or magical qualities. Thus the story of Aladdin’s magical lantern.
This gave rise to the eternal flame that must always be kept alight, and represents the eternal that lives within the transitory human body. Fire was not only essential, but sacred to the ancients. Whenever the Greeks emigrated to foreign lands, they brought a portion of their home fire with them as a link to their homeland. Similarly, women leaving their family at the time of their marriage brought part of the fire from their mothers’ hearth to their new home. It is a very important inner link that exists within our dream life. See conjuring trick
Lamps are also representative of enlightenment, awareness, insights, perception.
Lamps also symbolise birth, as in lighting a lamp or candle and death extinguishing a lamp or candle. In a dream, these may represent phases of your life or influences that are either coming into being or passing away.
Seven lamps or seven candle are also often used in dreams, and represent the story and mystery of life. See chakras; kundalini
Example: I am in a very cramped office talking about a light or lamp that I have in my home. My office mates don’t think I have this lamp, but I have had it for a long time. They are surprised and happy. It seems to have some religious significance.
The dreamer obviously is dreaming about his inner light, which he has had for along time, even though his outer life – the cramped office – does not show what he has.
Example: I was peeling brown paper off a hanging lamp, it came away very easily. I was saying to my self, There it looks much better, gold and shining, instead of brown paper all over it.
The woman is discovering that under her rather tatty exterior she has an inner light that is golden.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What am I seeing or discovering by the light of the lamp?
Do I feel any inner or religious feelings about it?
Am I using the lamp to throw its light on something?
See Myths Legends and Fairy Stories – Being the Person or Thing – Life’s Little Secrets
Language
Communication, and therefore understanding or misunderstanding. The unconscious often uses mysterious or foreign languages to express what lies within yourself that has never been thought about or put into words. Much of your most fundamental childhood experiences were pre-verbal, and so only accessible as powerful feelings and feeling responses. Even from babyhood you can make profound decisions about what you will reject or accept. These decisions are formulated entirely as profoundly potent feeling responses. Dreams sometimes express these, and intuitions about your own wholeness, as strange words or a mysterious language. If you play with the sounds and let them develop what they contain can become verbalised.
But everyday language is often taken by people as if the word they use to describe a cat or a person is somehow the cat or the person. But such words are simply sounds we use that are different in hundreds of world languages, and in no way give us any real understanding of the cat or the person. They are simply sounds we make to indicate to others that we are trying to tell them something we have seen, or are refer to. that we have given the sound ‘cat’ to.
See: language – foreign or strange; Language And Dreams – How it Flows; Using the Voice.
Lantern
Unlike lamp, the lantern is usually significant of what shines out from yourself, perhaps as feelings, understanding, or wisdom. Also, it is the insights or understanding that you use to guide you in your life journey. See: lamp; Light.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What am I seeing or discovering by the light of the lamp?
Do I feel any inner or religious feelings about it?
Am I using the lamp to throw its light on something?
See Myths Legends and Fairy Stories – Being the Person or Thing – Life’s Little Secrets
Larder
Hungers; sensual satisfaction; your store of memories or feelings that satisfy or nourish you. See: Eating; Food.
Large
If something is big it usually says you have a lot of feelings about it, or perhaps you feel threatened by something. It can also mean it is important, or you feel inferior to whatever it represents. See big
How important we see something, or what feeling impact it has on us, or how we feel in relationship to the person or object.
Importance, or to do with a relationship – as when we feel small beside somebody with a ‘big’ reputation.
Idioms: Big of somebody; big brother; big fish/noise/wheel/shot; big guns; big head; go down big; big time; too big for shoes; big time.
Late
Feeling you have left something too late or you have missed out on something. Or perhaps you realise you have not acted quickly enough to avert a situation or take advantage of it. It can also mean an avoidance of responsibility.
Lather
Cleansing, or fuss, working ourselves up into a lather.
Laugh Laughing
Release of tension, effort to sympathise or calm, ridicule of another or self, taking things lightly, misunderstanding, depending on dream. Sometimes much laughter can hide tears or sadness.
A spontaneous eruption of joy, merriment or sense of the ridiculous. Sometimes a form of mockery at the expense of others. Release of tension; attempt to put others at ease; ridiculing or feeling embarrassed by some aspect of self; taking things lightly; attempt to hide the truth. Sometimes much laughter can hide tears or sadness.
Fast full breathing is an accelerator. It speeds produces the sort of physical state of excitement, high activity and high emotion such as laughing or crying. It reduces the muscular and psychological barriers we may habitually hold to prevent ourselves openly expressing emotions through the physical movements of sobbing or laughing. This is why it is used a great deal in popular therapy movements such as Rebirthing and Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork. Its use may produce the release of long held emotions or spontaneous fantasy, including powerful body movements and emotions.
Laughing also gets rid of seriousness or stiffness of soul, as this description shows “I tell them that I sense too much unnecessary stiff seriousness here. Such a situation only imprisons mind, I say. I ask the group to get up and move to the sunny part of the room, where I am standing. As a perfect example and symbol of the whole teaching I suggest that everybody kick each other in the butt. I ask them to not forget, as they are doing this, about mutual respect and the oneness of everything. I call it a lesson in perfect connection and liberation. With every passing moment of this unusual activity the feeling of stiffness disappears, being replaced with a sense of mutual understanding and fun. At first it is just myself, but after a short while all of us in the room, burst out laughing loudly while carefully kicking each other in the butt. I stagger with laughter in the middle of the room, watching the other people also laughing intensely. I see how they are enthusiastically raising their long colorful dresses, jumping around on one leg while aiming hearty kicks with the other. They jump and kick each other, laughing, while the sunlight shimmers on the rainbow-colored patterns of their costumes.” Quoted from Working With Dreams By Marek A. Kowolik
Example: There was a young girl on the bus who seemed equally confused. She was either Hawaiian or of Asian descent. I couldn’t tell. Then the bus driver, a man, turned around and laughed maliciously, like he wasn’t going to stop the bus or crash. Finally we came to a narrow cobblestone street, and I grabbed the girl by the hand and jumped off the bus.
Example: I pushed down and “plop,” the baby was born. “My 4th one,” I thought, “so it was easier.” I lay there exhausted. The doctor, who only stood there, didn’t even catch the baby. For that matter, I didn’t even see him. I just knew he had to be there. The nurse started to do the after birth things. The man pushed my table around fast, in circles. It made me dizzy and frightened. I cried out and clutched the table. They laughed. “Don’t be so silly,” they said. The nurse then repeated it. She rushed me on the table across the gym to the opposite wall. I got off the table. They were taunting me.
Example: I felt terrified (I realised afterwards it was terror that I was dying). Then I remembered reading about experiences such as this and was laughing uncontrollably through release from terror.
Example: I realised that our real existence is formless and beyond conception. It is the realisation that frees us from the prisons of recrimination, of feelings of defeat, of ideas and words – even of constant failure. Being formless, there is no mood, no passion, no philosophy that can hold us. So we can slip away from the agony of guilt or self judgment, we can laugh at the phantom of being right or wrong.
Example: I can remember that in the dream another person and I, a male but very indistinct and shadowy, were facing mythical creatures in some sort of odyssey. A strange sort of crocodile or alligator type creature was supposedly attacking me. I had mixed feelings about this. Partly I felt there was nothing to fear about the creature, but another feeling was that it might be able to do some damage. In fact it was biting me across my chest, but all I felt was a very strong tickling feeling that made me laugh.
Example: I feel like a powerful ape at the moment. I am not holding myself back in regard to my fellow creatures. I am ready to fight, play, love, laugh. All the different bits of me are available. This wonderful experience of existing, of being alive with all the powers of a living creature – physical strength, emotions of anger, tenderness, passion and sexual excitement, curiosity, awe and wonder in meeting life and the stars.
Idioms: a barrel of laughs; don’t make me laugh; for laughs; laughing gas; laughing stock; get a laugh; have a laugh; hollow laugh; laugh in somebody’s face; laugh it off; laugh up ones sleeve; laugh on the other side of your face; laugh your head off; laugh yourself sick; laugh yourself silly; kill ourselves laughing; laughing stock; the laughing stock
Useful Questions and Hints:
What type of laugh was in the dream?
Do you laugh often?
Do you have fun in your dreams?
See Avoid Being Victims – Dream Yoga – Using the Voice – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Launch
The committing of self to some direction or project. The launching of new venture, a new interest. The start of something, such as a relationship. It can at times also suggest the finishing of something and allowing it to have independent existence, as with a child being launched into university or work.
The launching of a boat or ship, if it is the launch of a newly built vessel, it indicates planning and work that is now coming to fruition. If it is a large ship the work involved has been enormous and includes many other people your launch touches. It is a major thing you are doing and has enormous outcomes. Launching a boat can indicate desire for a new departure, and frequently holds in it exciting adventures.
Launching into space is often about something with a carefully planned goal. Space is endless and so involves much desire or interest in what the goal is. If there is no planned goal then it is like letting go and falling, and falling , and falling into that immensity, and fall, until there is no more falling – for we fall only in space, in moving from one place to another, but here there is no beginning or end, no landmarks to pass or space to cover. When we dream of space we dream of opportunity, the opportunity to explore, to build in the space, to explore our imagination in creativity. See space
Launching a study suggests the beginning of a new view of yourself or a new talent, and exploration of the new.
Launching into another dimension of life. We often fail to see the many dimensions all of us live in and how we often fail to see or recognise them. Yet each of the dimensions gives us a different view of ourselves, our life and its possibilities. It is obvious that as we leave childhood and enter into adolescence our whole view changes, and it opens up tremendous changes such a sexual feelings, desires and ambitions and longings – a whole new dimension of experience. Many dimensions we do not enter because we do not believe in them or do not have the courage to explore them. We all have an inner world that includes creativity, imagination, the unconscious and the reaches of consciousness. Life itself is often not explored except as an intellectual idea – yet life is the most miraculous thing that any of us can conceive of. And are you not an expression of Life, which had it genesis in the unknown? Have you ever asked yourself the question Who or what am I, and really answered it, avoiding all the ready made answered we are fed that are really no answer at all – none that satisfy us.
Anger or violence that can be launched into an attack, or explode as powerful emotions.
We have not learnt to launch ourselves upon the waters of our inner self. See Inner World
Example: Driving on this road fast, I suddenly I find myself launched into space and make a spectacular, bone rattling drop and crash to the highway below. Later, I make a joke with the people I am working with, asking how many of them want to go sailing because for a few moments there I really felt like I was sailing thru space.
Example: Then I went to sleep and dreamt I was in charge of a ship … this was a sailing ship on land … it had to be launched down a very steep slope but straightened up and floated .. it was going through a terribly high stormy sea and I was steering .. I was outside the boat, swimming, holding on to its prow, yet steering it…. There were people on the boat dependent on me as I steered it and kept it afloat…. It turned right round in the water, faced the wrong way, but I pulled it round and kept it going …
Example: Then I was flying out of the window of a very tall building. I flew around the rooftops and came to one with a sort of tunnel in it. I went in and down on a large shaft. It led to a room where a sort of school was held. The children were watching screens, like the new “learning machines”. We all now seemed to know that there was a dangerously high level of radioactivity. Everybody except myself seemed to go, and I knew that the shaft was a spaceship, and I set about trying to launch it to save myself and family.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Into what was I launched and what was my reaction?
What was I faced with, and could I cope with it?
Have I launched any thing new recently?
See Jesse Watkins Enlightenment – Edgar Cayce – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Questions