Dream Symbols

• Accident: Often a sign of dealing emotionally with real accidents. A warning that mirrors fear. Also a suggestion of being inattentive towards everyday affairs. This could also be a “preventative dream” that emotionally replaces troubling events or experiences in the real world—difficulty and problems that you feel you cannot handle. An accident may also be a symbol for orgasm. According to author Jack McGuire, there are four difference levels or stages of this symbol: 1. Tendency towards self-punishment 2. The feeling that life or a specific situation is out of control 3. An expression of rage and fear 4. Mistrusting the situation in the dream that led to the accident


• Blindness: Danger! You are not seeing something or you’re avoiding taking responsibility for something or reflecting on something. You are unaware. Appearance gives no clues. Are you looking for new insights?


• Cage: A symbol for narrowness and being deprived of freedom. On the other hand, this dream symbol can have positive meanings, particularly when the cage is seen from the outside. Then is usually is a symbol of protection and taming (of wild urges). In addition, the cage can also seem like fencing, because fences create protection, giving you the peace you are seeking.


• Dying: According to psychoanalysis, wanting to get even with someone.


• Eating: Grounding, taking something in, being touched by sensual pleasures. In the widest sense of the word, it always points to emotional or spiritual food.


• Falling: A warning not to be such a realist. This symbol often appears in dreams during times when a person has difficulty achieving orgasm and during acute midlife crisis.


• Guinea Pig/ Gerbil/ Hamster: Emotional functioning and sexuality are made trivial, diminished, and viewed from a distance. As children are given guinea pigs as pets, and they build up a relationship to them, hence guinea pigs represent the beginning state of the development of emotional functions.


• Heart: Physical vitality, love, and courage, but also the organ of suffering.


• Insects: Deeply rooted unconscious content. Almost always a sign of nervousness and unconscious fears.


• Juice: Fruit, joy and health. Juice usually refers to life and energy.


• Knot: Symbolizes complications, unsolvable problems, and entanglement. Warning of being emotionally tied in knots. Undoing knots means the end of entanglement.


• Ladder: Overly organized development. A symbol of the connection between the unconscious (below) and the conscious (above).


• Marriage Ring: Separation or longing for a relationship.


• Naked:
  Often the dreamer fearing the truth. Or, naturalness, openness, and honesty, but also poverty and impertinence.


• Office: Professional activity, work feeling of comradeship. One’s own office points to your working habits; someone else’s office may refer to the fact that you are looking to others for guidance in your work.


• Pearl: A symbol of the mature soul and completeness of the emotional experience. Pearl also refers to domestic help and “the good soul.”


• Quicksand: Getting lost in emotions. Treacherous dangers, lost insights, insecure emotions.


• Reed: Be careful—quagmire and mud. Either it is difficult to get ahead or the reed points to protection; you can hide in reeds, and you can also cover your roof with them.


• Shield: Protection. Something behind which one can move freely and organize an attack. It is also a place where the soul can retreat.


• Tattoo/Tattooing: Courage, boldness, and masculinity. To display an eccentric and sensual Self in skin.


• Underworld: Mythological symbol of the unconscious—the dark or shadowing gods of the deep.


• Vomiting: Undigested concepts and emotions are being expelled, cleansed. Letting go of unwanted emotions.


• Water: Can be interpreted on 5 different levels: 1. on the sexual level 2. on an emotional level where your own emotions are perceived as undifferentiated and flowing 3. as a fear of flooding, being drowned by the unconscious 4. as a feeling of going with the flow 5. as a feeling that life is chaotic This symbol is also the desire for a totally new orientation.


• Yeast: What drives us; the important, small things in life.


• Zero: A sexual image, nothingness, triviality, less often also death, quiet, and completion.