Posts Tagged ‘dream dictionary interpretation’

Buildings Laundromat Laundry

This shows some way that you are changing or cleaning up your attitudes, represented by the clothes. Attitudes that need to be, or have been, cleansed; relating perhaps to unclean experience. See: Washing.

The washing machine can point to faults within you. A woman dreamt she was washing white clothes in a large amount of water while her friend Alice watched her from the background.

In this dream, Alice, the “friend” in the background, was the dreamer herself. Her own comments on Alice were that she possessed a great deal of spiritual knowledge, but applied little of it to her daily life. Therefore, the dream was urging her to greater application—represented by washing clothes in the machine. Clothes, according to Edgar Cayce, often represent a state of consciousness. Quoted from Dreams Your Magic Mirror.

It can be less dramatic and relate to washing away yesterday’s problems, or refreshing, restoring, making the best of what you have.

If you usually wash your items in a washing machine at home and are in the laundromat it could suggest you are washing your dirty items in public.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What was I washing, it could be a clue, so see items of clothes.

Did I succeed in washing the items?

Do I usually visit a laundromat?

See Easy Dream Interpretation; Settings in Dreams; Avoid Being Victims

 

 

Laundry Washing

Attitudes that need to be, or have been, cleansed. See: Washing.

Clearing negative feelings such as despair or self doubt; fears about health – neurotic phobias about ones own wholeness. Sometimes this is shown as a healing of past hurts or tensions, even a warming of cold emotions.

Hanging up washing: Allowing change to come into your life; letting other people see your new attitudes.

Lava

Deeply buried past experience which has pushed to the surface; heated emotions and sexuality; sometimes physical illness such as fever. Unconscious contents that have emerged under pressure and heat of emotion.

But the lava is often your own deep centre or core self pouring up its energy into your daily life. Jumping into it is a way to face and meet any fears connected with your huge potential. If you do it several times the fear or difficult feelings will gradually disappear.

Lava pouring over a landscape is a sign that huge inner changes are trying to emerge, and if not dealt with could cause difficulties.

 Example: I noticed that the river wasn’t water and that it was lava. I watched as the lava was emanating from the center of the river and I knew I had to cross it but I didn’t know how I could. Just then, to my surprise, an elephant’s trunk emerged from the lava. At first I thought it was dead, but then I learned it was alive and moving and beginning to ascend. My fear from the lava diminished as soon as I saw this and somehow I made it across. I wondered how the elephant was immune to the lava and admired its strength.

Example: I can remember being dressed as an heroic warrior running through crowds of people or soldiers who were trying to stop me. I pushed or knocked them aside and ran toward what was a huge caldera – the mouth of a volcano. It was hugely deep, and in its depths was a massive glow from volcanic lava. But I knew that this was the core of myself, so I ran and leapt into the void falling into what I knew or felt sure was the light at the core of my being.

Example: I realised that hell is hell and will never be anything else. I felt that there was some thing deeper and so I kept to a centre line, again there was no feeling and so I turned toward the god dream that I had. The look of total love for me in his eyes gave me the strength to trust my own process. I then went into fantasy, God holding my hand and picking up all the people and events in my life and placing them all together on a stone alter, which he then placed me upon and told me to surrender and allow myself to die. This I did and images of great water falls, and molten lava flows filled my being. Then the crisis broke through, and there I was in the kids home, the orphanage, as my father was leaving, I saw my self, or I should say my being go out to him. I felt that if I loved him he wouldn’t leave us. I then saw that I was already bonded to my mother and in that moment of transference there was guilt and I was caught in the middle, then he left creating a schism in which I was left in my spine with a personality on either side. Schizophrenia is the word that covers this state: Schizophrenia a mental disease marked by a breakdown in the relation between thoughts, feelings, and actions, frequently accompanied delusions and retreat from social life.

I then felt what I would call the primal scream emerge from my being and then I was through. I then saw the dogs as my anxieties that have taken up two thirds of my being constantly tearing me apart, also saw that as a kid I didn’t have enough information to redirect the energy elsewhere.

Example: I saw the whole village covered in lava. I explored it both watching panic as well as while all the people were asleep. Afterward there was a period of quiet where everything was still and then life came back…the soil was renewed and some of the people emerged from the village as new glowing beings in human form only not human as before, and others didn’t emerge at all. The past had been burned away – transformed and I intuitively knew that they were going to create a whole new village and community based on their new way of being…new ways of perceiving and doing things…all wonderfully new and evolved. I see these as aspects of myself and this whole process of change underway. Also, just after recording the dream I sensed that the lava erupting was really some kind of eruption of love from within that just needed to be allowed. ~DT

Useful Questions and Hints:

Was I frightened of the lava?

Did any emotions show during the dream?

Are you meeting any big changes?

See Summing Up – Questions – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Martial Art of the Mind

Lavatory

See: Faeces; toilet.

Lawn

Part of yourself that need frequent attention lest it becomes out of hand, overgrown. If you have concerns about what the neighbours would think of an unruly lawn, then this would figure as your dream association. It can also suggest feelings of relaxation or family life, maybe a play area. In some people’s dreams it links with their feelings of being exposed, to things like the rain, lightening and birds so suggests anxiety. See: Grass.

Also in some dreams it is shown as a place to wait for someone, or even a place to love. It is often used in describing a house – Where horses and crumbly barns used to be, now there was a beautiful house, stone barns and lawns.

A happy feeling described as a party, wedding reception, or a celebration for guest taking place on a lawn.

There can be marks on the lawn as signs left of an activity.

 Example: ‘A flying saucer dropped a man on our lawn. He was seven feet tall and stood in a ring of light. The sky was vivid pink and a peculiar aeroplane flew over. It was the shape of a cross.’ Mrs A.

Example: I had found the secret way to Wonderland or Shangri-La. The baddies were coming to get us, so I led my wife and children down to the ground floor. There was a lawn with a hollow in it. We all jumped into this hollow, and I said the magic word, and we sank down into the earth. But the baddies were still after us. We walked along a road until we came to huge gates. This was the entrance to Wonderland. I said the magic word, Shazam, and the gates opened. We all went in, but two car loads of baddies got in too. But I felt it didn’t matter as I was sure the place would change them. I said the word however, and the gates closed.

Example: A girl and I danced on the sloping roof of a house. It was by the light of the moon, and the dance was a sort of exuberant twirling about. A horse that loved us, seeing us dance, wanted to be like us and share our humanness. A lawn sloped near to the top of a shed roof, and the horse jumped on the roof and tried to dance. But the roof sloped badly, and its hooves were too slippery, and it fell.

House lawns: It can show the state of your home life or personal habits through it tidiness, rough use or neglect.   

Lawn mower: A means if keeping the weed and undisciplined grass growth – the weeds of negative thinking or an untidy mind. Or it could indicate regular care.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

In what way was the lawn portrayed?

Was I with others – if so who were they?

Do I have or did I ever have a lawn – what do I rember about it?

See Associations Working With – Being the Person or Thing – Carry the dream forward

Lawyer

Often links with feelings of uncertainty or difficulty involving another person or group of people. You may be trying to clarify action to take in the dream, or sort out your feelings about an issue. The lawyer may also represent inner certainty or confidence, an authority figure, maybe even a desirable lover.

Laxative

Something you are doing, or can do, to loosen up tension, and release emotional blockages, undesired feelings, or memories. Or perhaps this is all too much and you need to slow down? So you can experience a laxative of the mind and emotions.

If you often think you need a laxative or dream of laxatives, it might mean you are worried that you cannot perform in some area of your activities.

 In the ageing process some people, because they are less active, and so do not need to eat so much, get constipated. This is because it needs a lot of food to stimulate the bowels, and without movement taking place often the stools tend to dry out. The bowel constantly draws water from the stools, so a mild laxative is a good tool to have. But a preoccupation with bowel function and laxatives was found in over 50% of patients aged 65+ yrs, suffering from a functional psychiatric illness, and was seen at far higher rates than a comparable group of elderly inpatients with physical illnesses.

 Example: What I see is that I don’t want to live in suburbia. As the positive feelings arise outside of the dependence on my family, I feel as if I want to move around and not tie myself to any one place for a while. I think this is possible at a practical level if we live fairly cheaply and possibly in poorer countries. I feel shut in and restless just sitting here writing. So living in suburbia has been like an effective laxative to get rid of some concepts I had of what would satisfy me. No doubt this will change again. One thing that burnt me up inside intensely during the height of my difficult feelings was that my whole life had been built around dependence.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do I suffer from constipation?

What does my dream say about the laxative?

Can I use the information in any way?

See Allowing the Body Speak – Life’s Little Secrets – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Lead

Metal: – Heavy hearted; a weighty situation; feeling burdened; materialistic attitudes. It might also represent something, perhaps feelings or situations that are malleable and can be shaped with only a little effort – or if there is a sense of danger or anxiety, it may be the poisonous aspect of lead you are dealing with. Ask yourself what you are taking in that is harming you. It may simply be opinions.

To lead: To feel sure in a way that creates confidence for less certain parts of your thinking and feeling to be motivated; some strong feelings or ideas that motivate you.

Following leader: An influence from something such as a belief or even a need to feel confident. The leader might therefore represent either the confidence or the need. See leader

To be on a lead: To direct something, as when you control your feelings, or give yourself certain boundaries to live within. To have a measure of control. Restrained or controlled urges; urges we have trained or directed; holding back or restraining or directing parts of oneself.

 Example: At the tip of the cliff is a band, and it seems like I’m now the lead singer/screamer of the band. We then start playing, and there is a huge gathering of people, all in dark clothing, at the bottom of the cliff rocking out to our music.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do I sometimes feel as if my limbs are as heavy as lead?

Have I ever dreamt of being a leader, if so how did I cope?

Have you a tendency to follow a leader – or are you a loner?

See Emotions and Mood in Dreams – Settings in Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming

Leader

May be the part of us from which we presently take our lead. Or parts of us we should take direction from, depending on dream.

Our relationship with authority figures, or the generally accepted ideas that people take to guide their life; the relationship with the leader might show how much responsibility we are taking for our own life; feelings of being responsible, as in parenthood or professional capacity.

Example: Working on the car dream I realised I have a pattern of destroying my own energy of expression if it does not succeed as well as I would like. As I worked today I felt the tremendous anxiety aroused by deciding a course of action that offers no certainty. I felt that leaders are those who can cope with high levels of stress situations. A successful person is one who can get into situations that place them in exposure, open to criticism, likely to fail, uncertainty, and to manage the stress and press on.

Example: ‘Walking alone along a road through a small town. I was heading for a place that a group of people, in a street parallel to mine, were also heading for. A person from the group tried to persuade me that the RIGHT way to get to the place was along the street the group was walking. I knew the street did not matter, only the general direction. The person was quite disturbed by my independence. It made him or her feel uncertain to have their leader apparently questioned. I felt uncertain too for a moment. Then I walked on and came to an open stretch of ground.’

Leaves Leaf

The living, growing part of you. The part that is still vulnerable because of its newness, or outworn (depending on colour of leaf) part of your thinking or feeling. You can also be blown like a leaf, suggesting separation from your roots and main growth; or you can take a leaf from someone’s notebook, thus following their example or idea. The leaves as a whole, if falling, can represent the end of your life, the passing ego that dies, but leaves the trunk, the process that gave life. See: tree.

The leaves on a tree may represent your personal life, this particular life with its many activities and desires, that may fall off the tree – die – but what gave it life continues to exist. The leaf may indicate something in you that is living, growing, or outworn (depending on colour of leaf). This may be part of your thinking or feeling. You can also be blown like a leaf, suggesting separation from your roots and main growth; or you can take a leaf from someone’s notebook, thus following their example or idea.

Leaves also can indicate new life that is flourishing and expanding, so a new part of you growing. It is also linked with the mystery of Life, as it emerges from unconsciousness into a new being. Often it is a deep cellular or inner growth

 Example: And I look upon the wayside flower, reaching through the grass, and see in its petalled face a peace and a great prayer, for flowers can pray. Within me I hear the echo of its worship. “I am here! I am here! Out of the dark into the light, I am here. Out of nothingness the mystery wrought me. Out of the pieces of its being I arise. In surety I live, until I die, back into the mystery, to be lived again, or be forever that which lived me.”

Example: Walking to the lake which was behind the huge rock column all in open ground and very swampy, we tried to cross. A tree trunk lay over at one point. Some people went to cross but one of them rocked the tree, and I think dislodged it. Now I looked back at the column, and was very surprised to see, on the strange design, little fronds of green leaves. The column was, I suddenly saw, a huge tree, and the leaves were sprouting at the top. To the right was another such tree, but smaller. The shape of these columns was like massive spacecraft cylinders pointed at the top. I believe I now looked across the hills, and saw a track leading off to where I seemed to know our home lay.

Example: The awakening interrupted a dream, which was extremely lucid and logical. I knew clearly, during it, what it meant. I was simply watching leaves, like a fern, grow and expand. As I did so I realised this was an expression of something taking place in my being. Namely, the vegetative (vegetable) forces had been released to greater or more powerful activity. It was very clear in the dream, but I quickly lost much of the accompanying knowledge. But I knew, or experience, that the release was linked with consciousness and will. In some way I cannot yet explain, the power of this process streamed through the will or consciousness, and awareness expanded as the leaf grew. In other words consciousness filled the leaf being grown.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Was the leaves growing from an old tree?

What were my feelings when I saw the leaves?

Were leaves falling or new grown?

See Sacred Tree – Summing Up – Writing it Down – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Leak Leaked Leaking

Wasted or lost energy; or something being allowed out or expressed. The energy leak might arise from any number of past traumas, using energy to keep them unconscious.

 Example: I am very dissatisfied at the lack of progress that has been made on the construction. It is nearly impossible to get to the 2nd floor, the plumbing leaks, many places are unpainted, etc.

Leaking roof: There is something about your attitudes or strategies you use to keep yourself feeling secure that is not working. The family atmosphere under which you all live is at fault, probaly in a minor way – unless the leak is enormous. So the leak in the roof suggests something that has attacked your sense of security.

Gas  leak: Because a gas leak could at times lead to an explosive situation, be aware of emotional situations. Gas can also indicate enormous energy release; or seomthing opoisonous but usually invisible entering your lfie.

Water leak: This can mean that your emotional energy is be used unwisely, possible through such things as anxiety or fear, especially if the water is coming through a ceiling or wall.

Energy leaks: Although we do not often think of our energy leaking out of us like water pouring away, dreams often show that we often have such leaks. These are usually shown as bleeding, as a pain in our body or even as holes in our body. The causes can be an attitude that is causing us to either block the usualy flow of our emotions or sexual energy, hurt of some sort such as an emotional shock, or that in some way we are ralting to our life process in a harmful way.

Idioms: Leak out – be revealed.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Does the dream clearly show how and what the leak is?

Do you feel pains or difficult feelings are a leak of your evergy?

Is there any solution shown in the dream?

See Energy Sex and Dreams – Active Passive – Avoid Being Victims

Leather

Basic or instinctive responses, instinctive drives, or toughness. If wearing the leather as a coat for instance, it might suggest feelings about fashion, animal welfare, or that you are expressing yourself in a fundamental way. See: animal.

 Many dreams in which leather features indicate quality or even wealth. But it depends whether it is a leather jacket worn by men who have a thuggish feeling or a person showing quality. So it depends on the context – Context/Theme

 There are some image clichés, such as men or women dressed in black leather – meaning they are possibly dangerous or adventurous as in the film Matrix; the gay men’s leather pants, showing their identification with homosexuality.

 Example: When I rang his doorbell, instead of him coming to the window, it was my brother and 3 other men who were all dressed as stereotypical ‘gay men’ leather pants, handcuffs etc lol……in real life, my ex accidently set my budgie free which never returned and I think my brother is ‘in the closet’. Is this dream just because of real-life events or could there be another meaning?

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

Is it a cliché image in my dream?

What do I feel about the leather in my dream?

Do I disagree about using animal products?

See Key Words – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Questions – Being the Person or thing

Ledge

Depending on what you feel in the dream, the ledge can show feelings or insecurity, risk or danger, as when you are balancing on a ledge and not feeling safe. Or it can be a place of safety or refuge as when you escape from something to the ledge, or find support there after a difficult climb or fall.

If you are standing or sitting on the ledge it suggests an insecure or precarious situation, even though it may give a wider or ‘bird’s eye’ view of things. It can also suggest you are at a place in your life where something that previously was unknown or unfelt, is now available or accessible. There are often feelings of fear or of falling in such dreams. The ledge can represent a difficult situation in your life.

Meeting someone or being with someone on the ledge shows a relationship that is difficult to avoid.

 Example: I had a dream the other night about a cat upon a Tomb, and to pass this poor bedraggled cat you didn’t get much room. You had to walk a narrow ledge high up on a wall and if you looked on either side, you knew that you would fall. I crouched right down with head on knees and grasped a drainpipe tight. I knew right then that I was safe and shouted loud with fright. With shivering fear I called and called but no one seemed to hear. I rubbed my eyes and sat up tall I was so pleased to see there was no Tomb, no ledge at all…. just Moonlight on the bedroom wall.

Example: Dreamt I was sitting high up on the outside ledge of a building. I held some small object in my hand. 

The ledge represents the precarious position you are now in. The past few weeks have been very difficult for you. You begin to feel this period is leaving you. The thing you held was the symbol of wholeness, or the whole. Leaving the ledge means leaving the precarious situation you have been in.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Did I feel fear or difficulty being on the ledge?

Was I able to have a good view of things?

Was I climbing and the ledge was a higher point I climb to?

See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Context/Theme

 

 

 

Leech Leeches

Something or somebody that is surreptitiously draining your energy. The leech might also, because of its past use in medicine, have the association with a healing process, In this case it might be showing the draining away of ‘bad blood’ bad feelings. See: Blood.

 Our energy can be leeched away by emotional conflicts, or mishandling our own major energy expressions – unloving sex, emotions tied up with love, conflict over decisions, extreme worry about our children, consuming alcohol, chasing after fantasies, spiritual quests that lead nowhere.

 Example: I realized I had been unkind to my dog by trapping it with the creatures, putting myself first, and felt guilty; I went back to my dog, which was on the verge of death from all the bites it had incurred. Somehow, the “wasps” had transformed into leech-like animals that were sucking out his blood; as I brushed them off, his hair fell off, revealing bloody naked skin underneath. Also, weirdly enough, he had leeches on his penis, which was engorged and sore and resembled my own penis.

Example: The winds kick up. An object that looks like a string green bean lands on my arm with a slap. It sticks on my right arm and begins the damaging process. It is like a leech. Henry’s wife grabs at it and pulls it off. It leaves a red open wound. She is relieved it was taken off quickly enough so that only minimal damage was done. She had saved my life.

Example: Let us not condone this way of life that sees us as merely statistics and units to be moved by advertising and other subtle pressures. Let us not buy into it by purchasing these lumps of farmed meat; chicken breasts from animals that have no natural life and whose normal cycles have been manipulated for sales and production. The profit motive unfortunately taints even those areas that attempt to be organic and to care for the land. Nature is only after protecting itself, it is not trying to make a profit. The profit motive is so built into many people that they cannot understand something that doesn’t have the same drive.

 If you think about it, if you think about a woman’s body, every little bit of it is claimed by a commercial interest. From the moment she is born the commercial interests say, “She he is ours!” It is strange that we can’t see how we have locked nature in, trying to own it and gain a profit from it in every way we possibly can. The huge corporations and political organisations carefully design your food, your education, your hormones to move you toward exactly what they want you to be.

How do we detoxify ourselves from something that is so permeating our lives? How do we detoxify ourselves from our own society? Feeling these feelings, exploring these issues, meeting these very powerful influences arising from deep within me, the question I asked myself is, am I crazy?! Am I crazy, or am I just waking up?  I am pro life. I don’t want parasites hanging on my back. I want to give my blood to my children, not to the parasites. I know I have a thing about, or feelings against, cigarettes and alcohol. I see them as very obvious ways that some of the big guys behind the corporations lead people toward a dependency that leeches away in them their will.

With eyes open you will see how so many people are trying to lead you by your fears, by your dreams, by your sexual drive. Ask yourself, where are they leading me? Basically they are leading you toward spending your money and putting it into their account. It is possible to say no. It is possible to make your own sexual decisions. It is possible to learn how to deal with your fear response, your fight or flight instincts. Who are you? Why let somebody else steal it? You would be angry and active if somebody stole your credit card or your cheque-book. How can you let them steal your real inner identity?

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do you have leeches on you or just see them in the dream?

Is there an indication of what the leeches are taking from you?

Are you fighting back?

See Summing Up – Avoid Being Victims – Life’s Little Secrets – Beware of Love

Left and Right

Dominant side of body

Some other views of what it means to be left or right handed

The right and wrong

This is a description of left and right brain hemispheres

More information about brain hemispheres

We each have a side of our body and brain that we use more often and is dominant. So in the following descriptions you decide whether you are dominantly right or left. 

Dominant side of body: The dominant, confident, conscious, exterior or expressed side of self. In other words it is your capable and active self which if working well is creative and doing most of the work. It is the hand we reach out with most often and use it in touching, leading with and sensing.  Also it can indicate what we have been taught or absorbed about what is right or wrong. So correct social behaviour and morals.

  Example: My mother is an emotionally positive person. What she feels is right. She has no doubts about the rightness of what she feels. Thus she is able to display a social temper, angering shopkeepers etc, (who she feels, or thinks), have done her wrong.

Dreams also use a play on what is right and left to illustrate polarity or opposites: But if you are left handed you might need to reverse the description.

The right – The ‘right’ choice at the time; the moral, right action; your conscious known self. Your external world of activity and environment; a secondary choice.

Right arm or hand: If you are right handed this indicates your active outgoing self, your conscious and capable skills such as you express with this hand and arm. It is the part of you obvious to others and yourself, your strength or lack of it. Injury or malformation of this arm indicates inability to be creative and productive in the outer world. It shows problems regarding manifesting or making real, what you wish or will to do.

The Left – parts of self that are unconscious or shadowy; the immoral, selfish, wrong action. Your internal world of feelings, memories and values. See You Are a Dual Being

Left arm or hand: The left is those supportive qualities, those strengths and traits that express in daily life underlying and making possible the action of the right arm. In other words they are the loyalties, the care and strength of support, almost unconscious energy we put into what we do with our right hand and arm – our outer activities. The left arm is the qualities that support outer activities and relationships. In a certain way it represents confidence, the absence of which would undermine all the external things we would be trying to accomplish.

  Example: ‘On my right are three monks, on my left sits a beautiful, shapely blonde. I am in the centre and I see a road, which leads to the right and into a beautiful sunlit valley in the distance.’ From Dreams Your Magic Mirror by Elsie Sechrist, published by Cowles.

Here right and left represent not only choice between sexual pleasure and the dreamers sense of right and wrong, but also the polar opposites of inner life and materialism. Although in the dream there is a movement to the right, to find equilibrium we often have to take a way between the opposites, both of which are probably extremes.

Most of us interiorise our morals into our dream life. In other words, we take as a truth that what is important outwardly is also as important inwardly. So you are as upset by a dream as if it had actually happened in waking life. An example of this is a person who dreams their partner is having sex with another person. Such mistakes make us feel things that are ridiculous. This happens with the morals we live with, or by, and may be necessary in waking life, we try to make them fit to our much bigger and freer dream/inner life and that causes conflict because the two worlds are completely different. So right or wrong are very different in the different levels of our being. See Morals; Inner World

Some other views of what it means to be left or right handed

Left: If you are left handed, it suggests you have greater spatial sense, better intuitive sense and awareness of gestalts – i.e. arriving at meaning through putting together many small bits of information and feelings.

“In his book Right-Hand, Left-Hand, Chris McManus of University College London argues that the proportion of left-handers is increasing and left-handed people as a group have historically produced an above-average quota of high achievers. He says that left-handers’ brains are structured differently (in a way that increases their range of abilities) and the genes that determine left-handedness also govern development of the language centres of the brain.[29]

Writing in Scientific American, McManus states that, Studies in the U.K., U.S. and Australia have revealed that left-handed people differ from right-handers by only one IQ point, which is not noteworthy … Left-handers’ brains are structured differently from right-handers’ in ways that can allow them to process language, spatial relations and emotions in more diverse and potentially creative ways. Also, a slightly larger number of left-handers than right-handers are especially gifted in music and math. A study of musicians in professional orchestras found a significantly greater proportion of talented left-handers, even among those who played instruments that seem designed for right-handers, such as violins. Similarly, studies of adolescents who took tests to assess mathematical giftedness found many more left-handers in the population.

According to 2014 study right-handed people have higher cognitive skills, less behavioural and speech problems, less often have learning disabilities, and more often graduate their school. Quoted from Wikipedia

 Example: I felt completely in opposition to this, and grabbed his hand with my right hand, levering it off the torch. This woke me because I was in fact struggling with my own left-hand. I had hold of my left little finger, and was bending it backward viciously. This amused me because it was so obviously a personal conflict – a struggle between my left and right hands, between my more refined and less refined self.

Example: I have had a few wonderful dreams lately. Very short though. In one I was leaning over a person who was sitting. It was my left arm that dominated the dream (I am right handed). It was gold and glowing. The other I reached into a glass of pure clear water with purple petals through it and I felt pure joy.

Being right handed I found that my right side of my body has many more injuries of difficulties than my left side, and I feel this is because it faces and has to deal with more stress than my left side. I also felt that we unconsciously associate the different sides of our body with someone. I associate my right side of my body with my father and my left with my mother. Of course it could be anyone you are deeply rooted in.

To sum up – you may be more holistic, intuitive, aware of body language, synthesising, integrating, emotional, interpersonal, feeling-based, and kinaesthetic.

See Jill Bolte Taylors extraordinary experience when her usual ‘right handed’ personality was knocked out. See Interview with Jill Bolte Taylor.

 

The right and wrong

Most of us have been raised to believe in absolutes of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We are taught that there is a wrong way of doing things and a right way, and if we get it wrong we will be sure to end up a failure. But dreams have no fixed sense of right and wrong, like a baby which lacks any awareness of having an ego, lacks any sense of time and concepts such as approval or disapproval, right and wrong, the infant lives in a paradise where there is no (concept of) time or death. Without time it lives in eternity, especially while in the womb. It feels itself not an individual but an undivided part of an immense ocean of sentience. It and the animals are one. There is no striving or working to gain survival, no pressure to sexual procreate.

Dreams often show us this aspect of human consciousness existing beyond the opposites such as good and bad, right and wrong. When we access this view and accept it, it gives tremendous liberation to the dreamer, freeing them from restricting rigid concepts or habits of thinking, responding and relating.

In meeting a ‘big’ man in his dreams, a man who was not afraid of death, he met his own undammed life, his flood of loving sexuality, the strength to burst through social rules and regulations because love or life pushes. When we find it in ourselves, in dreams we don’t give a hang about bullets, death, right or wrong, because we have a sense of our own integral existence within life, and our own rightness and place in eternity.

 Example: As I looked at my impressions and rising feelings, I saw how powerful has been the realisation that within ourselves we are nothing. 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.

But it is a frightening realisation too. For it brings us to the realisation that nobody else creates the hell or heaven we experience life to be. Nobody else creates our love or smouldering vengefulness. We are alone in our creation. This is because if you were to say what a beach is, you could not say the sea was the beach, or the sky, or the land. None of them separately is the beach. The beach is the indefinable amalgam of them all. In just that way the Nothing is the indefinable everything that underlies the particulars of our life.

 Example: In a dream a young man saw himself walking up a dimly lit cobbled street. The street was going up a hill, and on the left was a pub with two young men standing outside. They were holding pint jugs of bitter, As the dreamer drew near them, one turned to the other, looking at his bitter, and said, ‘Shall I let him have it?’ Being encouraged, he threw the bitter over the dreamer. Naturally the dreamer was very annoyed, and tried to brush it off his overcoat. He wanted to retaliate, but felt himself no match for these two, who walked back into the pub. Someone with the dreamer said that there was a policeman at the top of the bill, why not tell him. So climbing the rest of the hill. and turning to the right, he found the policeman and told him. The policeman very officiously took out his notebook and asked whether there were any witnesses. There were, but the policeman maintained his air of doing only what he was forced to do by law, which upset the dreamer and he walked away.

In exploring his dream, the dreamer realised that to climb a hill in real life is not only to expend energy, to face a difficulty, but also, if successful. to benefit by seeing the view from the top. A hill, in fact, gives him a wider view of things. So in climbing the hill he faced the energetic task of widening his opinions, rising above narrow limited views, he gained in growing up. In fact, he was going through a period of finding new ideas and outlooks. The pub and young men, on the left, represent the pleasure loving, down to earth, rough and ready side of himself. Something on the left of us in a dream usually means that it is unknown, or little used.

The dream was saying these parts of him are not expressed much in life. This is quite true, as the man was a quiet, serious person, religious and somewhat introverted. The dream shows that his pleasure loving outgoing side, due to his quiet nature was drinking the bitters of life, and in fact, this stifled side of his nature causes him to feel bitter about himself. He tries to ‘brush this bitterness off’, rather like one might say, ‘I feel depressed, but I’ll soon overcome it.’ Due to his retiring temperament, he does not feel he can face these other parts of himself. In a similar way, a person who inwardly wished to be noticed, might through shyness, not even he able to converse. Thus two parts of oneself may war against each other.

The dream goes on to show the dreamer’s present conscious efforts to deal with the conflict leading to bitterness. The policeman is on the right, representing his more conscious attitudes. The policeman usually represents our sense of right and wrong, conscience and law-giving. So the dreamer, in his efforts to deal with his attack of bitterness, tries to use his morals, his sense of right and wrong. But this side of himself is shown as unsympathetic, only really worried about the rules, and the dreamer realises he will not be helped by that attitude. He has to find a wider view which includes the aspect of himself which includes both the good and the bad and finds a middle way.

This realisation might lead to going the way of the razors edge, which depicts any behaviour or attitudes that are one-sidedness and would lead to imbalance within the individual. But at the same time it is not about being perfect or a saint, but a balanced and whole human being with very wide choices. Walking it we balance between the opposites facing us. See The Mountain Path

“Environment is a tremendous thing in the world, and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory, one makes room in heaven for all sorts of souls, notably an occasional street girl, who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.” Stephen Crane

This is a description of left and right brain hemispheres

The left and right in the brain

The right and left hemispheres of the brain to generalise, if your approach to life is dominated by your left brain hemisphere, which is largely rational and analytical, your best way of learning would be in learning facts in a sequential and logical order.

If you are largely a right brain person your approach to learning would be to understand details by gaining an overall picture of what you are studying. The details then fit into this concept of the whole and make sense to you. You would also be more open to learning through your feelings and intuitions, and through hands on experience. You would be more about living in this present moment. It thinks in pictures and learn through experiences of our body. This explosion of information comes through our senses, and our right brain forms a picture informing us of this present moment. We are energy beings connected to each other through these amazing inputs.

The left brain experiences life completely differently, and it is almost like two different people living in one body. It sees things linked on a long line connecting our past with our future.

This side of the brain takes in the enormous pictures and experience of the present moment and reviews them in enormous detail and then categorises them, organises them, then protects them into the perceived future and forms an impression or picture of our immense possibilities.

Also it is what gives us identity and says, “I AM”.

More information about brain hemispheres

In a very real sense each of us have two distinct ways of relating to and perceiving the world and the people around us. This is because our brain is split into two hemispheres, and each hemisphere has very different ways of dealing with incoming information and its different abilities. But it has other divisions also. See Levels (Brain)

On a recent radio interview a man and woman were described who created lively musicals. The way they worked and how they were such an amazing team were discussed. The man would lie on a couch and let flow with ‘stream of consciousness’ ideas, and the woman would write down what was said, but pulling it into structure and careful use of appropriate language.

This is almost a direct expression of how the left and right brain lobes can work together if we can easily access their different abilities. In people with a healthy brain the two halves of the brain work like two people in a happy and creative partnership. Each of the partners can perform its own special tasks most of the time, but each is able to take on, partly or fully, the skills of the other when necessary. This may be necessary in people who have experienced brain damage.

Although research has not arrived at definite classifications of what the lobes of the brain deal with, in general they are as follows:

 

Left	Right
LogicalAnalyticalSpeechQuantitativeFact BasedPlannedOrganisedDetailedSequential	HolisticIntuitiveBody LanguageSynthesisingIntegratingEmotionalInterpersonalFeeling-BasedKinaesthetic

Although if we are healthy we are not dominated by just one side of the brain’s action, we nevertheless may be oriented to left or right, logical or intuitive.

In terms of creativity the left brain follows rules of logical thought and does not easily move beyond the boundaries of what is rational. Its talents are in organising, planning and sticking to the task in hand, and in rational analysis of facts rather than feelings and speculations.

The right brain follows a more holistic approach, gathering many diverse bits of information and experience and leaping beyond the obvious to arrive at an insight into the nature of the situation. Its talents are in being aware of body language, the feelings involved in a relationship or situation that are influencing it behind the scenes. It takes all our life experience and summarises it into a grand view of who we are, our life journey and place in the scheme of things. See Using Your Intuition; Opening to Life; Arm Circling Meditation.

In fact, this last aspects of the right brain gives us a clue as to what your ‘brain type’ is and how you approach life. The left brain subject will have a sense that their life is not part of a grand scheme of things, but is subject to the agreed and rational rules of the dominant science and social rules of their culture. The right brain subject will know from their inner awareness that their life is part of the way the cosmos works, and has emerged out of a timeless continuum carrying all ages of the past into their present existence.

Returning to the theme of creativity, in test carried out through the 1970’s and 80’s, subjects who were known to be creative were given tasks calling on non rational thinking. EEG’s of their brain activity showed the right brain flooded with electrical signals. Less creative subjects given the same task showed much less activity in their right brain lobe.

One researcher, Martindale, noted that we mostly associate efficient performance with the ability to focus attention and be highly ‘awake’. Martindale observed that brain activity during such times showed cortical arousal is linked to the ability to fo­cus attention. But he also saw that cre­ative subjects diffused their attention when performing creative tasks. They were able to shut down concentrated focussing and diffuse their attention at will. In this way they created a mental state that perhaps can be likened to listening, or what I have elsewhere called a ‘keyboard’ state of mind and body, in which they are open to any inflow or up flow of experience. Martindale noted that this un-focusing proc­ess, rather than dampening mental acuity, actually enhances it. See The Keyboard Condition

Connecting this with dreams, our night time drama tends to express these different facets of us in the different characters we meet. The following dream clearly shows a ‘right brain’ character bringing something to the dreamer’s attention that his usual left brain way of looking at life would probably have missed.

 Example: I was on a plane or a journey. On my right sat an American, very flabby, with a paunch. I was eating an apple, (I had been on a fruit fast during the day), and my elbow sometimes touched the American’s paunch, it felt lifeless, lacking vitality. I told him he ought to eat only apples for a while, and all the dead flesh would fall off him. Then a young Chinese man came to me and pointed out a line marked on my apple, on the green, less developed side. He said every apple had such a line if one looked, and under the line was a hair, “the hair of discontent.” He said this was poisonous, and best not eaten. I slid my fingernail under the line, and pulled out a long hair. I thought this was wonderful, and that I had been given real wisdom of the East. Ian R.

In fact, Ian was far from content with his life at the time, and it led him to look critically at other people. The wisdom from the East – the left brain global view of life – pointed out how poisonous this was.

Here is a dream illustrating a very different stand:

 Example: I was walking home at night under a magnificent starry sky. I thought perhaps this was the Milky Way, as I had never seen it before. But there were distinct edges to the massive concentrations of stars forming the shape of people. I felt very enthusiastic and uplifted by this sight and wanted other people to look at it. Then I seemed to be at home, perhaps where I used to live as a child, and my father was there. I told him about the figures and wanted him to look, but he seemed quite uninterested. I also felt somehow that he was locked into an intellectual cynicism that could see no wonder in the stars. To him they were simply random shapes in the sky. To me they expressed something that, perhaps, I would find it difficult to put into words, but nevertheless was very moving at a deep level. Heather R.

Heather uses her father to depict her more rational way of looking at the world. Nevertheless, the dream shows balance as Heather herself feels the impact of what she has seen.

As is often the way, the right brain tends to express in symbols, as it does in dreams, but it takes the focussed enquiry of the left brain to work like a detective to unravel the clues and bring the creative impulse into real clarity and fruition, something that wasn’t happening in Heather’s dream. Exploring the dream would provide the creative spark between the intuitive and the rational. See: Characters and People in Dreams for further description of dream characters; brain.

Idioms: Two left feet; keep on the right side of somebody; in one’s right mind; in the right; mister right; set somebody right; right hand man; right in the head; start on the right foot; give one’s right arm; the customer is always right; right away; bark up the wrong tree; get up on the wrong side of bed; push the right buttons; play my cards right; darn right; dead wrong; don’t get me wrong; don’t go wrong; heart is in the right place; you’re wrong; you’re in the wrong.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Do my dreams make reference to turning right or left?

Or are there mentions of left or right sides of my body?

Do I often feel a big difference between what is right and what it wrong?

Is there any suggestion of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the dream?

Do you have a fixed idea of what is right and wrong?

Or do you have a more mobile view allowing you to make fewer judgements?

 

See Razors Edge – Acting on your dream – Ox Herding – Dream Yoga – Summing Up – Jesse Watkins Enlightenment – Identity and Dreams

 

Left Behind

If you are the one who is left behind, it suggests either that you feel rejected, or have a sense of not being the same as other people, or perhaps that you want to go your own way. If you leave someone or something behind, it might mean you are ready for change of some kind. That is, ready to let go of something or someone that may have been important at some time. In some cases this suggests changes in a relationship, if the person left behind is your partner. If what you left behind was your handbag – purse, see Bag.

Oneself left behind: Feelings of rejection or inadequacy; sense of waking up to what you have not done or experienced in life, as Patience does in her dream below.

Leaving something or someone behind: Leaving the past behind; break-up of relationship.

 Example: ‘In my dream I woke up and had the feeling that a lot of time had passed. I felt I had lost all this time. A group of friends I was with had gone ahead, left me behind, and I wondered if I would ever catch up.’ Patience. C. Example: I had a dream where I was excluded from a party and left behind to care for everyone’s dogs. I locked them in the garage along with a baby that was dropped off. I found out the baby was my ex-husbands (my husband in the dream) and no one would tell me who the mother was. Anyway I put the baby in a box and left it there. It was not crying, it was quite happy actually.

So your dream husband was all the things you absorbed in the relationship and after the divorce. Therefore the father of the child is the good things you got from the relationship. And the reason no one would tell you who the mother was is because you are the mother of your own dream child. So something good has arisen now out of the past. Maybe you have digested something about the relationship that now opens up a new part of you – the baby. Perhaps you parked the baby in the garage because you did not realise its importance in your life – for it is important.

Idioms: Fall behind; put it all behind me. See also: bag.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Have I ever felt left behind or missed the bus or plane?

Who have I left behind in my life?

What was the situation of being left in the dream?

Did I leave anything important?

See Habits – Because Factor – Avoid Being Victims – Active Passive