Posts Tagged ‘dream meanings’
Bath Bathing
For many people the bath links with feelings of being able to relax and spend time alone without demands from other people. Therefore it indicates relaxation; cleansing; wanting to ‘come clean’ or be rid of guilt.
Such cleansing could depict a change of heart or forgiveness where old feelings are washed away. To do this you may need to cry or release and ‘wash out’ long held emotions.
But some bathing dreams or fantasies often depict the bath as a form or ritual which is getting one ready for something, perhaps a new experience, or the deepening of ones experience in an important area of your life, such as sexuality. Such an initiation might involve the meeting with your feelings or fears about relationship or your life situation – perhaps meeting your own male/female self more fully.
Bathing also includes nakedness, and therefore vulnerability, the revealing of your secrets or things you are sensitive or ashamed of. This might embody marriage/relationship intimacy.
If you are in the bath with someone then it can suggest being immersed in an influence of some sort; deep sharing, perhaps blending of qualities.
Some dreams show bathing as a powerful change or renewal and may sometimes relate to feelings about life in the womb.
Also: Need to cleanse the body internally. See: baptism, swimming pool.
Bathing in a river: Being open to flowing feelings and urges within yourself; allowing yourself to be influenced from within by urges toward change or growth or expansion of awareness.
Bathing in the sea: Being open to a more universal – less self centred – awareness of your relationship with life.
Jacuzzi: A jacuzzi is often a shared experience; or if it is a big bath like Japanese bath it can be like swimming pool, a shared experience. What is shared would be shown by the events and mood of the dream. Also it is a massage and so can be extra relaxing, or irritating if you do not like it.
Example: Now the imagery gets more specific and I watch/experience an exquisite Japanese ritual of meeting, touch, massage, that is leading to sex. Several young women are with me in a large bath. They are not trying to be directly sexual, but are getting close, touching me, massaging, allowing me to feel their flesh near me. The beauty of it is in understanding how wise and artistic the whole approach is. I see it is to lead my awareness out of being bound by everyday affairs. It diffuses concentration on particulars of external life and gradually opens my senses to feel and allow pleasure. It helps the mind to drop fixation on externals and allow it to drop boundaries until one senses oneself as in a semi dream state. This allows sex to be not just a particular thing; not just a physical penetration or being entered, but something that connects you emotionally and mysteriously with another person, and to the huge mystery that is that person and oneself. Ones partner is not simply a human being, but the very essence of the female principle, merging with the male principle. Graham H.
Useful questions:
Can I define my relationship with the bath and the outcome of this dream?
Do I experience any change in this dream, and if so what is it?
If I am being cleansed, what am I preparing for?
If I am with someone who am I with and in what way?
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/dream-interpretation-example-one/
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 to wash or have a shower or a bath, in which case see bath/bathing.
Battery
Ones resources of energy or vitality. Problems with the battery might depict health difficulties or even worries about heart weakness. But dreams are a magic mirror that reflects our inner state and world. So any worries may only be a belief you have about yourself, and if you are worried it is shown in your dream exactly what it is – a thought and emotion that is using you vital energies unwisely.
Example: In a dream I realised that I had often held thoughts and feelings of ill health or that there was something wrong with my body. I saw into myself and could see how these feelings caused so much harm to the workings of my subtle energies that support health, and I felt so sorry for constantly doing that to myself.
Computer/laptop battery: This connects more directly with accessing your talents, your memory, your links with others, and maybe your work more than a general battery. So it is important to define what part the battery is playing in the dream.
Flat battery: Suggests lack of motivation; a run-down condition regarding health or emotional energy; lack of resources or motivation. Sometimes it shows a lack of confidence in what you are doing, indicating the feeling that you are not capable or not sure enough of what you do.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What is the battery energising – a car a torch? Whatever it is look it up to see what is being influenced.
Am I feeling in any way like the energised or flat battery?
How do I recharge myself?
See Life’s Little Secrets and Exploring Your Dream.
Battle Battlefield
This suggests either an internal conflict such as caused by struggles with ones own emotions or sexuality, or an emotional battle going on with someone else. It may be something you are fighting for; feeling under attack about. The struggle may be between unconscious drives, such as an urge to have a baby, and ones conscious decisions.
Sometimes an internal ‘civil war’ takes place between ones head and ones heart or intuitions. Conflict can exist between emotions involved in making a decision or the carnage going on in one through childhood trauma or painful birth experience. One can also fight against the awful effect of fears and doubts; memories. Especially if you have been in a battle scene in waking life.
We also sometimes feel the struggle and conflicting emotions involved in making a decision as a battle. The carnage going on in oneself through childhood trauma or painful birth experience is often dreamt of as a battle ground. See What we need to know about dreaming.
Fighting against overwhelming feelings, or a struggle against your fears and doubts.
If you have been in a battle scene in waking life, then the dream might be a revisiting of the terror or feelings involved in an attempt to heal them.
Example: I had several previous dreams of being a soldier moving up to the front with my fellows. Tonight I dreamt that we were now at the front and were ready for battle. Then suddenly the signal was given and we were over the top facing the enemy.
The enemy the man was facing was his own fears and traumas from childhood. The willingness to be involved in the battle led to a breakthrough in which he relived a dramatic event from being in hospital.
Idioms: battle of the bulge; battle of the sexes; battle stations; battle your way through; battle ready; battle scarred; battle-ship.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What am I struggling with or in conflict with in my life or from the past?
Am I avoiding the battle or ready to see it through?
What is the battle about or who between?
See Life’s Little Secrets and Being the Person or Thing;
Dreams are Like Computer Games; Dream Yoga.
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Bay
Similar to beach, but the crescent shape sometimes depicts a woman’s sexuality and openness to mating; receptiveness. The bay is an area or environment in which you are near to the sea, suggesting awareness of your inner feelings and needs, or a closeness to what is natural. But the quality of this depends upon the condition of the bay. It might be a wonderfully light and attractive place or a place where boats are rotting and derelict. So this will comment on what is going on in you at the time of the dream. The bay is in most cases also a place to relax and be away from a work scene, so it offers opportunity to express in ways other than might be usual.
Boat sailing into bay: Something coming into your life; a new event or relationship. Arriving at a calmer situation in life, feeling easier because you are no longer ‘at sea’ about something.
Sailing across the bay: The passage of time or events; distance to travel, in the sense of covering ground in ones life.
Whales or other creatures in bay: Something important and deeply felt being realised or confronted. Usually this is about emotions or drives. See: Beach.
Idioms: At bay; keep at bay.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What expansive feelings have I encountered lately?
Am I changing my relationship with somebody?
Do I have a sense of opening to a wider awareness or pleasure?
Try Being the Person or Thing.
Bayonet
See: Arms.
Bazaar
Something we are hoping to find, or are looking for; making decisions about what we want – or the ways or difficulties in how we get what we want. The bazaar can also signify an unusual or exotic element of our desires, or opportunities that are unusual. See: shop.
It an also signify great creative talent. Or it can be a pun – bizarre.
Example: I was visiting the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, entrance to which was through a bazaar lined passage. We were given knives to protect ourselves. The mosque was lit solely by a huge furnace at one end. Devils were jumping up and down in the flames. My companion said “The fires of the Apocalypse”. Some Turks said they would kill us if they saw us again.
The bazaar here is a sign of the unusual and creative aspect of the dream, the dream refers to the dreamers experience prior to birth – the long passage and the Blue Mosque. The rest of the dream suggests the dreamer has fear of dying and defensiveness strongly linked with this. I imagine this would make him afraid of women at a very basic level of relationship. Any closeness beyond the superficial could lead to fear of losing his identity – i.e. death.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Have I been seeking something unusual, or that I feel I can’t find in my usual environment?
What feelings do I have about this bazaar, and what does that mean to me?
Do the events happening in the bazaar have significance for me?
It night be helpful to read Near Death Experiences and Being the Person or Thing.
See: Shop.
Beach
Family gatherings or relaxation and intimacy. Intimacy means that this can be a place of love, of meeting and mating with an important dream character or real person.
It can also signify a state of mind in which you are open to intuitions and emotions; the state of mind which is open to pre-verbal experiences, such as life in the womb, but links with waking consciousness and everyday life. So a link between the enormous opposites of our life, such as the deep inner mind and unconscious and our waking self. See Ocean Sea
A beach is also a boundary, or threshold, between your individual self and effort, and your potential in the universal processes of life and death. Therefore a barrier or threshold such as fear or lack of confidence can create. To deal with such a barrier – crossing the ocean – we have to exhibit new skills or courage. To go further we would have to swim or take a boat – so a change may be needed, new qualities must be developed.
What we do on the beach may also depict how we deal with changing from one environment – school, work – to another such as parenthood or retirement. The beach might be the place where aspects of the previously unknown meet us – out of the sea. It thus illustrates how we draw on, or avoid our own potential, our own long past.
It is also a place where we are both seen by and see, other people. So may relate to socialising and meeting people.
The awe we feel when confronted by natural forces may also be depicted by the beach, therefore our relationship with life, the simplicity of life and standing between the forces of primal life and the social human world, both of which we exist in.
If there are anxious feelings in connection with the beach: This may show a feeling of being exposed to other people’s scrutiny, or to the powerful forces we face in experiencing our own emotions, sexual drive and social pressures. See: sea.
Example: My dreams have the recurring image of water, which for me usually means the ultimate spiritual place. Around the time of my divorce, I tried my hardest to get to the ocean, but in a series of dreams that went on for months, all my efforts were thwarted: in one, a storm came up, and we had to turn back; in another, I got lost; in still another, I made it to the ocean but I was with my mother and didn’t have a suit. In still another, all the beaches were private property. In the last dream I had before I quit drinking, I dreamed I was at the beach with a lot of strangers, and there was this lifeguard on the beach. But he was patrolling the people on the beach and not the people in the water. To get onto this particular beach, you had to leave everything behind and go down to the water’s edge with nothing–not your towels or radios or coolers or even your suit. Once in the water, you could swim just as far as you wanted and you were completely unmonitored. ‘A’.
In A’s dreams the beach and sea appear to depict the barriers to returning to, or achieving a meeting with her own simplicity – herself without all the clothing and trappings of social life and anxieties. It is a coming home to our source.
This aspect of the beach, awareness of the essence of human life, is shown in the following example and the dreamer’s comments on his exploration of the dream.
I am standing on a steep hillside that slopes into the sea. I look across the sea, and the air is so clear I can see the far coast twenty miles away with amazing clarity. In fact it is so clear it seems to me I can see every detail of a rocky cove across the water. The clarity amazes me and it seems the cove is only a few hundred yards away. It stands out with all its many colours. I find it so impressive I want to run back to get my camera. I hesitate from doing this though because I wonder if the scene will disappear.
I explored this dream many times but I could not get a clear insight into what the beach arose from in my experience. Then, with the help of a friend, I reached it. When I came to exploring the beach again, at first it seemed as subtle and unreachable as ever. Then I began to define what I was as the beach – a meeting place for water, earth, air and sun – earth, air, fire and water. But the beach is not any one of them. It changes with the seasons and with the action of storms, of erosion and temperature. It isn’t the air, or the sea or the earth. It changes yet stays the same – the beach. Suddenly I felt this in myself, saying, “I am not anything. I change yet am unchanged. I am all things but nothing.” This gave me a very powerful sense of my own eternal spirit underlying all the changes of my body and personality. Robert.
The beach can therefore also depict the spirit that underlies all things. 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 spirit is the indefinable everything that underlies the particulars of life.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What am I doing on the beach, and what does this suggest about my relationship with my own simplicity or connection with my core self?
What is the weather like, and is that indicative of my feelings about what life is presenting me with?
What relationships are indicated and how successful are they?
See Settings in Dreams and Talking As.
Bead Beads
A single bead might suggest isolation. While a string of beads could refer to your connection with other people. See: Ball.
Beads can represent linked events, memories of past events or people. Perhaps an attitude you use to help yourself feel more attractive or confident. Feelings connected with things you value.
Beads are often used for prayer in some countries, as in Greece, in Buddhism and with the rosary. So the bead or beads might represent your attitude of mind in prayer, or what you meet from prayer or meditation. They might therefore indicate precious things you find in yourself. See: jewels jewellery.
When used for meditation it could mean you are concentrating your thoughts and therefore making your aim more powerful – rather like magnifying glass focusing the suns rays.
Beads are one of the earliest forms of jewellery worn by women and men, and I see them as ‘women’s magic’. For instance if a woman saw a pretty stone and hung it round her neck it would attract attention and make her more noticed and desirable. The same applies to men also. It is a simple magic but effective.
Beads can also often be seen as representing past lives, and the image is often used when talking about reincarnation, that our present personality is simply one bead on a whole string of beads.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Is this simply an ornament helping me to feel more attractive, or is it something precious?
Are there particular memories connected with this?
Do I feel this is an ancient or buried object from the long past?
What do I feel or say if I imagine myself as the beads(s)? For help doing this see Stand in Role and Using your Intuition.
Bear
Often people dream of a bear coming to attack them, but because all the images, people, animals, places we see in our dreams, are simply your own feelings, fears, hopes and wonder projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind as images, there us nothing to be afraid of. So, it makes sense to take the image of your dream person, thing or animal back into you and own it. In that way, you are actually meeting and dealing with the things about yourself you are not owning or conscious of. That is why dreams are often difficult to understand, because we are hiding things from ourselves. To do this you can use – Being the Person or Thing and it is helpful to read Levels of the Brain
Whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. Also dreams exress in a very ancient language, language that developed in ancient life forms before ever words were invented. The ancient languge is one that has taught youngsters by for millions of years by watching what mother or father fox, bear wolf did – all without words. This photo says it all – the family of bears are intently watching what mum is doing. they learn by seeing it, no words were spoken.
So the angry bear is an image of your own angry feelings that have not been expressed and are attacking you. We now know that such inturned anger can cause illness or depression.
Example: A huge black panther chased me. I fell and it clawed my back. It was about to chew my back to bite me. I didn’t know whether to relax or struggle. After being floored by the Panther I managed to get up. I later imagined being the panther. I allowed the panther to eat me, and I thus became the panther. Then I, as the panther, noticed feeling enormous temper – anger – hate. And I was amazed to see that my cousin Sidney was the cause of such powerful emotions. He was older than me and had mercilessly teased me as a child. The panther was my own feelings of anger, at last released.
But here is a very different example:
Example: I was standing on my patio and there was a bear inside the fence also there were children taunting the bear. I yelled at the kids to stop teasing the bear. Then all of a sudden the bear came towards me; it was a brown bear with its massive size and it stopped and looked at me. Although I was frightened I was courageous enough to pet the bears head, reaching over his large mouth to reach his head. Then, all of a sudden the bear lay on his back and I begin to brush my hand on his chest as to pet him in a downward motion, the bear just gazed at me.
A bear can have a similar meaning to elephant in the eastern countries – a tremendous force or energy, that if met badly can lead to conflict with your own nature and ill health, or if met well can be a tremendous protector and force for good.
Sometimes said to represent a possessive mother, and the feelings this has aroused. But in many cases the bear will represent a meeting with dangerous emotions such as fear, anger or being easily aroused. There might also be associations with independence, or strength. See: Dreams are Like a Computer Game; Animal.
Through television and the many ‘nature’ films which are now a part of our wider education, we can see that the bear is largely a solitary creature, capable of living alone and surviving. This, and its human way of standing and holding its arms out in a hugging posture, may be the major factors from which a ‘bear’ dream arises. In many dreams the bear is not at all harmful, and can be treated as a friend.
Through these we can also see the bear as a wonderful mother and protector.
We may therefore associate the bear with feelings about living alone or surviving by our own strength; it can refer to the confrontation with feelings we have about independence, or the meeting with strength and independence in someone else. It can confront us with massive or dangerous rage, such as ‘the bear with a sore head’. In this case it might represent your relationship with someone who is touchy or grouchy, powerful, possessiveness or smothering, as a parent or lover might be.
Also it might represent your relationship with someone who is a parent or lover; it could suggest a desire to withdraw or hibernate; the ‘animal’ side of our relationship with our parents; a play on words, such as ‘bare’, bare facts, bearing with something or someone, ‘bearing’ ones soul, bearing in mind, a ‘bearer’ of tidings, come to bear, overbearing, getting ones bearings, bear fruit or bear-hug.
If the bear is felt as aggressive and dangerous, ask yourself what in your own inner feelings do you feel is aggressive and you don’t want to let it get out into what you express. In other words. what is it that you habitually repress from being expressed – your anger?
It is best to let the angry bear be expressed in you imagination. You can do this by being the angry bear and let it loose – see – Being the Person or Thing
But the bear can also be like the Beauty and the Beast, in which the dangerous beast is tame with the influence of kindness. So the bear relates to person who can be kind, but could also be a dangerous when roused.
It could suggest a desire to withdraw or hibernate. Because of traditional cultural associations, and its ability to hibernate, the bear can represent the ability to die and be reborn.
As the bear rears its childrfen alone without any male about, if oyu have been in that situation it can reer to you. But whateveer else it represent, remember that is an image of our relationship with our own ‘animal’ side. Please see the following to understand this important feature – Mammal Brain
There can be a play on words, such as ‘bare’, bare facts, bearing with something or someone, ‘bearing’ ones soul, bearing in mind, a ‘bearer’ of tidings, come to bear, overbearing, getting ones bearings, bear fruit or bear-hug. Because of traditional cultural associations, and its ability to hibernate, the bear can represent the ability to die and be reborn.
Bear attacking: It could mean that you are feeling or dealing with anger in yourself or another.
But many people dream of being chased by a bear and maybe run in fear or terror from the bear. Not only in your own dreams, but other people’s, it is obvious that we take into our sleep and dreams all the fears, terrors we carry within us. The huge bear, tiger or frightening person they are terrified of is actually fears either inherited or are frightening experiences from the past. They are purely mental things that you haven’t faced, and are therefore the victims of – victims of your own fears. But in dreams in you cannot die – or drown, or burn or any other threatening thing. We make the mistake of taking our very real values from our outer life into our inner life of dreams. If a bear or critter is chasing you, it is only a dream image and so what are you running from? If you drop the image if the bear/critter what you have is a feeling or emotion such as fear. And why are you running like crazy from an emotion? Remember that nothing can hurt you in your dreams, but you can feel fear. See The animal in my dream
And do not think, “That monster is bigger and stronger than I am, and it is frightening!!” It is our thoughts and fears that create the monsters inside us. So of course you are stronger unless you cower in fear.
But that only refers to outer bears, not dream bears. In some northern towns a bear or polar bear can be a real danger, so in your dreams it may be about a threat you need to keep watch for – although it is a bear in your dream, it could be any threat.
It can also, like the following dream, show a fight against disease.
Example: I dreamt that I was my older brother. As him, and yet at the same time myself, I was trying to fight off an attacking bear. I was doing all I could to defeat it but there was no let up.
Two days later my brother suddenly died from a vicious virus he had contracted while doing his job as a taxi driver. I feel as if I were fighting the disease with him in the dream, but we both lost the battle.
Baby or toy bear: Often represents a child or a young dreamer.
Tame or loving bear: Many people have no fear of animals in their dreams but are like the examples below. Fear is caused because we mix up our dream life with our outer life.
Example: In my dream I was actually happy to see bears lying down at the entrance of my parent’s old house. They were all lying down there as if waiting for me. When they felt my presence they woke up. They were happy and groaning amicably when they saw me approaching them. And there were babies too! I never felt fear or any threat but happiness to see them … and I knew it was mutual.
Example: My dream was not frightful. My Bear dream and I were walking, he put his nose in my hand and nuzzled, we walked home, I went up to my door and Bear went next door and rolled around in the neighbors driveway and rested.
But as people are educated in the modern paradigm, many of us are totally out of touch with the animal that we are, and have never been able to raise it to love and protect us, and instead are often frightened of it when it appears on their dreams. As a child we are often told not to do things – such as do not get angry, or told to be nice to everyone, but the intuitive animal side of us feels and act on its superior insight – that would allow them to mature with our animal self intact so we grow up repressing it, and often miss the natural curiosity of our inner mammal.
So if you have a loving animal dream you have a very good and healthy relationship with your inner animal. See Levels of the Brain and Summing Up
Three bears as with father bear, mother bear etc.: Family situation or parental relationship.
If hint of money in the dream: might refer to ‘bear market’.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What were your feelings and interactions with the bear? (For instance were you avoiding, running from cooperating with, watching from a distance – and where does ‘avoiding’, ‘running from’, ‘cooperating’, or ‘observing’ enter your life at the moment?)
If you imagine yourself as the bear in your dream, what do you feel and experience?
See Stand in Role; Processing Dreams; Summing Up
Beard
Male sexual power and virility. This depends on the age of the person and the situation in the dream. For instance stubble on a teenage boy suggests he is moving into manhood, or even to hide their adolescent acne. But a beard can also suggest carelessness – as when someone hasn’t shaved, or a mask if someone uses it to hide their youth. Or even a way of life that does not conform, or like a backwoodsman.
Sometimes the link is with a war veteran, suggesting a long exposure to conflict and extreme living conditions. I feel that a lot of elderly men grow a beard because they are not so worried about their social standing now and also because a feeling of tiredness about doing the ritual of shaving ever day. Many women feel that beards are a form of hiding or affectation, but they ought to try shaving every day, or in some cases twice a day. Shaving takes a slice of time out of ones life, and also whether electric or wet, shaving for some men leaves them constantly with sore of cut skin. See: Hair.
Example: Awoke in a girl’s room. She was there. I had a two-day growth of beard, and I went into the bathroom to shave it off, but didn’t manage to. Then made love to the girl, after spanking her. Felt great peace.
Here the beard obviously links with strong male feeling and sexuality.
Example: At that moment two young boys came into the room/area. They were like choirboys or trainee priests. One of them came straight to me and and my wife and sat on my lap, cuddling up like one of my own children. The man and I were emotionally stirred by such an open expression of needful contact and love. The boy appeared to be naked. I held him firmly in my arms. I felt strength in him and said, “I can feel the manhood growing in you.” I felt a noticeable increase of the strength in him. My hand touched his chin. There was a stubble of young beard there. I said how I was aware of his body growing into manhood. I was aware of us adults sharing the experience deeply.
This is an expression of soft love, and encouragement for the emerging youthfulness in the dreamer, and also the union of religious feelings into a wholeness. The dreamer had been held back in his actual expression of love and sexual feelings. The beard here shows the beginning of his development of his body moving toward manhood.
Cutting off beard: Making a change; feeling more certain about your manhood; or uncertainty about manhood, depending on dream. It can also suggest a fuller meeting or self expression, and uncovering of who you are. In some cultures it might suggest leaving behind traditional religious beliefs.
Very long beard: Sense of eternal or long life.
White beard: Wisdom or experience gained through long life, and perhaps an awareness of life beyond the senses.
Useful Questions and Hints:
How is the beard portrayed?
Could it indicate hiding something?
Does the beard represent wisdom?
What can you gather from the Plot of the Dream and also from Processing Dreams.
Beast Bestial
An animal of extraordinary power or a creature causing great terror is a feature of many dreams or nightmares. The figure may be partly human, or an animal which has strange characteristics, or perhaps it is a figure which never quite declares itself, remaining unseen but causing or projecting great fear. In some dreams the beast takes the form of a prehistoric creature.
When explored in any depth such dream images are realised to be an expression of powerful internal emotions, responses and drives which have in most cases previously remained unconscious. The reason for this lack of expression in conscious life is varied. It may be that painful childhood experiences created a block, or fear surrounding some basic drives such as anger, sexuality or self expression. Or maybe you were raised to be afraid of certain ideas, creatures or even fictional characters. Therefore major areas of ones potential are withheld and become symbolised by the beast. That such a beast appears threatening and aggressive, or even bent on ones destruction, is a simple statement of the way we relate to the forces of our psyche that are bound up with it. For instance if we have been made terrified that our parents will desert us, the expression of our need for love may create this terror. So the beast, in itself, is usually not a thing of terror. The awful feelings are what we experience in connection with what it signifies. If you drop the dream image and look at the feelings underlying it you will get a better insight into your dream. See Animal
As this terror originally occurred in early childhood at a time when our developing identity was very fragile, or during later traumatic events, the force of such feelings are often life threatening as far as our growing identity was concerned. But similar repression may surround the strength of our own sexuality or basic driving forces. See What You Carry into Your Dreams.
As many of us are not at ease with our emotions and irrational urges, to meet this ‘beast’ may not be easy even as an adult. This would mean feeling the intensity of our childhood emotions and fears, reappraising them, and integrating the information gathered from such an experience. The information might well include insights into why we avoided certain life situations, or why strong feelings were evoked by seemingly simple events. The example below gives some small insight into this. The information is told by a woman who helped Margaret work on her dream.
Example: Margaret dreamt there was a whole lot of downy little feathers falling from the sky and covering her, like snow. The sky was full of them. She had been watching a baby eagle very high up in tree tops flying from tree to tree. She felt it was looking for it’s mother/ parents. Then a man had caught the baby eagle by a string around it’s leg and Margaret was appalled and said to him, ‘You can’t do that. You must let it go.’ Then the feathers started to fall and Margaret felt that any moment now the irate parent eagles would arrive. They didn’t but she was with her back to a wall sheltering as best she could.
While we explored Margaret’s feelings and memories connected with the dream symbols, she told me that her man friend prodded an old childhood pain which he didn’t know about. Margaret and her son had been with him and his mother for a good weekend camping. She told her son he could go play in the park while they packed the car and they would pick him up on the way out. They were all in the car and drove to where the son was and called him, he saw them and started to run towards them and then the man friend drove the car forward as if to make out they were leaving him behind. Margaret burst with pain and anger.
The underlying cause of this was that her own parents had split up and neither of them wanted Margaret to live with them. She had therefore been looked after by her grandparents. The event that crystallised her feelings occurred one day when her Grandfather had, on the Grandmother’s instructions, driven Margaret, who was 7 years old, to the edge of the town, told her to get out and started to drive away. This was because she wouldn’t eat her breakfast. She still carries the pain of that day. She told her father many years later and he was very angry with his own father for doing that to Margaret. She says – Anyway, it came out again when we were looking at the dream. The male friend grew up with an alcoholic father who has just died, but he says he hasn’t any trauma to deal with??
The theme of the beast is very important in women’s dreams, but may hold a slightly different theme than in men’s. This difference is illustrated by the story of Beauty and the Beast, in which a young girl meets and lives with a powerful beast. The story emphasises the girl’s relationship with her father as a counterpoint to that with the beast. It suggests that a young woman meets a different kind of love when she leaves the affection from and for her father. To become fully a woman and mother, she must discover the deeply animal urges which underlie the personality and social traits she has developed so far. These urges are not at all uncouth, but are certainly primitive. They open her to experience deep sexual longing, and the power to give herself with passion to her children and to her man. Thus she allows in herself something forbidden in her relationship with her father – an erotic and procreational love.
Overall the beast represents the forces in our personality out of which we emerge into social and intellectual life. Unless we make friends with our beast there may always be conflict in us between the rational and non-rational. We existed as a beast for millions of years before the sort of consciousness which led to personal awareness emerging. Self-awareness is still very new and vulnerable. It needs the greater depth and inner wisdom of the beast to survive. See: The Rock Beast
The beast in us has a healthy fear of much that goes on in today’s world. Fear is a guardian that protected ancient beast from uncountable dangers for millions of years. Although it appears like a great and ancient beast, it is full of mystery and magic. It has brought about living beings in incredible variety. It has possibilities we cannot even guess at. Within itself it holds the secrets of creation and destruction, of sleep and waking, of the intricacies of mind and spirit. It has unimaginable power and tenacity. It is beyond us and yet intimately of very core of self. We relate to it, we enliven it, we call it out or imprisonment by every act we do.
Here is an extract from the dream-work of a man exploring a dream about snakes which he feared would attack him.
Example: As I imagine myself to be the snakes I have a distinct feeling that for millions of years I have existed as an animal. As human beings we often reject the animal in us. I see the meaning of the snakes. The snakes are so powerful. They are urges in all of us, to be felt if we are not afraid of them. The urges they depict can become a part of our everyday life. A man is somebody who has all that power there but it is under control. I have been brought up to feel one is supposed to be meek and mild or something. It was not socially acceptable to growl a bit.
I am a mixture of a beast and this awareness of self. WHY? WHY? (I feel like a wordless animal which has just got awareness). Intellect is developing and can ask these questions but there is still the powerful beast here. Why has this happened to me? Why have I woken up from being an unconscious animal and become conscious? What is this all about? It feels like it ought to be a swamp outside the window now – or a jungle.
I am a man! What is a man? What is it to be a man? I really feel this isn’t a way to be. It is too strange to be a man. I am really something odd. It is odd being a man. It is frightening. I am not like the other beasts. The other beasts haven’t got this difficulty of self awareness. They don’t carry this difficult thing – self awareness. They don’t carry the difficulty all the time. Why should I be different? I don’t like it. DON’T like it.
There is something I am looking at which is to do with how human beings got to be in the situation they are in today. Part of it is this feeling of wanting to turn back – wanting to go back to being unconscious – to being asleep. A lot of them did it. They turned back. Hundreds and hundreds turned back. That was the story of Noah. Hundreds turned back because they didn’t want to bear consciousness. Huge numbers of people attempt it today with drugs or suicide because being aware is so difficult.
But of course many of us still do it today because they avoid meeting anything that personally faces them with their own childhood emotions or the animal that they are.
Useful Questions and Hints:
How am I relating to this beast, and can I change it by meeting or being it?
Is the beast trying to communicate with me in any way?
In what ways am I trying to escape from or defend myself from the beast – in other words what do I use to repress this in myself?
For help relating to the beast, see Stand in Role also see Acting on your dream.
Beaver
Is often associated with industriousness and independence. The beaver is also a great planner and builder, offering great protection and care to their young. The word beaver sometimes has sexual connotations – the sexual organs. If there is emphasis on the beaver dam, then it may suggest either conserving your energy and emotions, or holding back feelings, depending on the dream action.
In the Native American Indian traditions the beaver was often seen as a holy animal, and occasionally offered great wisdom to the dreamer. If the beaver speaks to you in the dream, it may be expressing innate or unconscious information or insights you have that are becoming conscious.
Because the beaver is equally capable underwater as well as above it, it can suggest bringing past memories, or thing that were not known or experienced into awareness
As a dream animal I am one with the Earth and all its creatures, so anything I learnt can be of great use. See Mammal Brain.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Is there any suggestion of working hard in the dream, and how does that apply to me?
If the beaver communicated something what was it?
Am I gathering a deeper insight into the forces of nature in my life?
You can learn very personalised insights into your dream animal by using – Being the Person or Animal.
Bed
There are many associations you might have with bed – rest, sleep, unconsciousness, sexual pleasure, relationship, dreams, escape from the world into sleep. Try to define what feelings or attitudes are involved with the bed, and ask yourself where they apply to your waking life.
This is an important symbol to understand. It often shows exactly what you are doing in the subtle areas of relationship. So can link with your close relationships, intimacy – an intimacy in which the qualities of the other can become part of you and a blending take place. Such a blending is not only that of you and another, but your known and presently formed self with what you hold within and latent.
But a bed is the place you sleep, so in a spiritual sense might be depicting your sleeping self, the parts of you still unconscious and not awake to who you really are and the issues needing attention in your life.
The bed also obviously relates to sexual pleasure, rest. the holy place in which we meet oneself and or another person deeply and passionately. But it can also suggest desire to get away from the world, to withdraw into oneself, to be passive.
Example: I have a two-pronged needle with red liquid. I know it will hurt him. I didn’t want to but I had to inject him. He yelled in pain. He turned on the bed, writhed around, and threw himself around. I snuck up and finished the dosage. He yelled in mock anger. He grabbed me. We tumbled to the floor. He started to make love, wildly, lovingly. Later at the table, an ugly woman with horrible eyes, glazed, hazy, and blue, came in. Said to him, “So there’s the louse.” I gave her a straight look. I said, “Just leave him alone!” Anger. She steadily looked at me. Another woman, possibly my mother watched the tense scene.
It can depict sensual rather than sexual contact; sickness; privacy; the testing place of the relationship. Sometimes it represents sleep and meeting our unconscious – or torture – because in bed we may be tortured by insomnia, worries, physical pain. See Bed Partners.
Our life situation – made your bed, now lie on it. Bed is one of the commonest symbols in dreams.
Bunk Bed: May link with childhood or sharing ones space. I guess if you slept in a bunk bed you will have many personal associations too. See Associations Working With
There a lot of mentions of bunk beds in my dream collection, but they all suggest a space in which children are on holiday or sharing. Only one has any mention of sex and that refers to unexpressed adolescent sexual desires.
Double bed: A relationship. The events that surround the bed image will give an idea of what the state of the relationship is. Sleeing alone in double bed shows either that you do not have a partner, or are not interested in having one. Or it could simple mean you enjoy your own space.
Top bunk bed: Usually in regard to someone who is top dog or you respects, like an older person. But some times to put the younger person on top.
Lower bunk bed: Easier to get in and out of. Your dog or pets find it easier to share with you. But depends what associations you have with it.
High Bed: Possibly relates to feeling either secure from things like mice on the floor, or anxiety about being high up. Height often links with either of these, or depicts a commanding position.
Hospital Bed: This is usually connected with healing, even though there may be some pain or scary bits in it.
Sometimes one dreams of a dead relative or friend in the hospital bed and they are alive again. This is probably a mixture of a real communication and the dreamers beliefs. See Symbols and Dreams.
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In the example below the man is wrestling with his desire for pleasure and his sense of commitment; but also, whether he will keep his pleasure for himself, or share it with his wife. See: Example in contraceptive; bed wetting.
Example: ‘I sit on a bed. Near me, looking at a book I am holding is a woman I know, Jane. I realise as we talk that her foot is touching mine. As my wife is on my left across the room I feel uncomfortable about this. Now Jane has her left hand on my penis. I have only underpants on. The contact is pleasant and undemanding, but I feel more and more ill at ease. I feel Jane is not having any respect for my relationship with my wife and start to tell her so.’ Mr B. S.
Example: One day as I stood raging at the bars of my prison I suddenly realised that my years of shouting had availed nothing. The only person who was upset by it was me. I was the victim of my own anger and turmoil. It was as if I had been haunted all my life by ghosts of anger and passion. I dropped the attitudes or ‘ghosts’ and was free of them. Years went by and one by one I recognised and dropped other habits of emotion and thought that had trapped and tortured me. I realised I could be totally free within myself.
One morning I woke and sat up on the mattress on the floor that was my bed. The last ghost of inner entrapment fell away. A fountain of joy opened in my body, pouring upwards through me. It was so intense I cried out. My cell mates called a warden because they thought I had gone mad. They stood looking at me as I experienced radiance so strong I felt as if I must be shining. I was aware my joy poured into them, although they thought I was possibly insane. I could sense the enormous change in me influencing them, and I knew it couldn’t help but change them also. I realised that I might never be released from the prison, but it didn’t matter as I had found a fuller release than simply walking the streets. Even though remaining behind prison bars, I would still be touching people’s lives deeply. Nothing would ever be the same again.
The bed and the prison are very powerful symbols in this remarkable dream. The prison that he was in and felt he would remain in is his body, the source of and also the way of release from his entrapment. The bed that he woke from is the bed he had been ‘asleep’ on for so long – the bed of self torture and illusion.
Here is another example of bed from a very different viewpoint.
Example: I was in bed. There was a knock at the front door. Brenda answered it. I heard a scuffle and a man’s voice. He was assaulting my wife. She was struggling and said I would come, and the man laughed. I got out of bed and got my gun. I went into the room and rammed the rifle barrel in his face. Brenda got clear. He said I wouldn’t have the nerve to fire the gun, still slightly mocking. I said, “Wouldn’t I!” And swung the gun like a club, smashing it on his head. He ran out into the street and I threw the broken gun after him.
In this dream the dreamer woke up from being a rather passive person to being one who took charge of the situation.
Example: A headmaster called me into his study. He showed me a top to something like a small Buddha figure. I realised that it was mine from the long past, and I had lost it without even realising it. I tried to remember the details of having owned it, but could not. The headmaster did not give it to me. He then took me to a room with a bed in it. On the ceiling were marks from ejaculations. I then recreated the scene, and saw Les on the bed in sexual abandon. Then I was with an old lady in an attic. She was saying that she preferred people not to get friendly with her rather than be friends then leave her and hurt her. As she talked we seemed to get nearer and nearer, as if the words were on the surface, and underneath the words was an attraction to each other. In the end I went to her and we fell back on the bed together.
Again the body shows that the dreamer had forgotten and lost something precious and was unconscious of it. Les was his association with his sexual ability and he realised that was how he had lost the Buddha figure. At the end of the dream there are difficulties about relationship, but they are passed through.
Idioms: Bed of nails; bed of roses; go to bed with; make one’s bed and lie on it; test bed.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Is there any sign of this being about relationship issues?
Is this about or hints of sexual pleasure?
Is there indications of or desire for rest or escape?
See Ages of Love – Dream Characters – Simple Dream Interpretation.
Bees
Collective activity or working as or within a community, hard working or self sacrificing. The bee is not separate from its quest for nectar – in other words the bee is the whole wonderful connection between you, your work, the people you are connected with and the harvest of experience you gather from your life.
Because bees build fantastic egg laying colonies which the use to give life to thousands of life forms, I sense tha if you dream of bees working a hive, entering a hidden hive, or a swarm, it my be about your own cellular health in a positive way.
But because bees can sting you might be avoiding being stung – so avoiding pain, avoiding being stung by being taken advantage of.
If you dream of a bee stinging you it can suggest either that you have been hurt/stung in the past, or you are still reacting to being stung by someone’s hurtful remarks. Or else that you need to careful of hurting others with your remarks or criticism. But some things such as stinging remarks or even relationships tend to get under your skin, as in the following example.
It might also be a pun on being busy, busyness, business, or are you working yourself to death like bees do. Can be a “stinger;” a pun on “be-ing,” or beingness, “to be or not to be.”
Because bees produce honey there is a suggestion that bees can harvest a sweet and satisfying experience, and suggests what you have gathered from your life experience. honey
Example: I dreamt this morning that a bee found a crack or slit in the skin of my throat (right side of my neck below the ear) and worked its way in, burrowing itself beneath my skin. I didn’t see the slit, but it must have been there, however microscopically small, because it managed to burrow itself in there. It found an opening and worked its way inside the flesh of my neck. Next thing I know either more bees did the same OR the bee managed to reproduce itself inside me, because the mass on my neck grew larger like a large tumour. Inside I could feel the movement and buzzing of these live bees inside my neck, beneath the skin. I had a large lump on my neck, it was a mass of 20-50 bees growing and living there. Like a cancer that was alive and kicking, taking up residence.
Example: Later, in daylight I noticed a hornets nest in the side of the house. The next door neighbour’s son knocks it off and hornets enter the house and stung me. I angrily show the neighbour and son the huge watery swellings. I clout the boy for stirring up the hornets. I had held my arms above my head and the swelling decreases. Now, with lowered arms I see a bubbling up of skin spread up my arms to chest, then to my entire front. I have no apparent sexual organs because I am covered in a wafer of dead skin. My wife looks at me and has no feeling of caring, and does nothing to help. She is telephoned by another man. I see him and her at the same time. He says for them to go off together, and gives the impression of how sexually adequate he is, and how inadequate I am. I feel so hurt and angry I decide to leave my wife for good.
Idioms: a bee in her bonnet; the bee’s knees; queen bee; honey bee; honey of a bee.
Useful Questions and Hints:
What do I know about Bees and how do I feel about them?
Can I recognise any signs of being hard working and self sacrificing?
How about the unconscious life processes going on in my own self?
See Being the Person or Thing – Avoid Being Victims
Beer
See: Alcohol.