Literal
If he takes off his garment in public and does not feel ashamed of his nakedness in a dream, it means that he will be credited for his honesty.
If the person is sick in real life, it means that he will recover. Ifhe is indebted, it means that he will repay his debts. Ifhe is seized with fear, it means that he will regain his peace. Nakedness in a dream also means injustice. Stripping a dead person of his shroud means divorce, loss in business, repentance from sins, or it could mean guidance.
(Also see Undress)... disrobe dream meaning
If belligerent or barking, this dream shows personal aggression and hostility.
Sleeping at your feet: Service, good friends, and gentle companions.
Good instincts. Dogs are believed to have a kind of second sight in judging people, or discerning spiritual presences (see Ghost).
Being bitten by a dog reveals quarrels between friends or family members.
Dreaming of a purebred dog, especially at a dog show, indicates a personal love of performance, possibly to the point of putting on airs.
Growling dogs warn of being surrounded by designing or unpleasant people.
A Cerberus (many-headed dog) counsels that you are trying to maintain too many loyalties, interests, or friends. When you spread yourself too thin, quality suffers.
Zoroastrian: Sagacity, vigilance, and fidelity. Consider how the dog is treated and where it’s seen for more interpretive value.
The afterlife: In Babylon, Greece, and Persia, dogs attended aspects of the great Goddess to the underworld where human souls slept, awaiting their next incarnation. This close affinity to death is why dogs are often credited with the ability to see spirits.
The ability to sniff out honesty and good character. In the Tarot, dogs sit at death’s gate to be sure the soul is properly prepared. Similarly, Egyptian mythology speaks of Anubis, the jackal-headed god, waiting in the underworld to judge newcomers with his nose. This is why the Egyptians packed their mummies in sweet spices!... dog dream meaning
If the jet was weak, then it may suggest that sexual desire is not matched by emotional commitment (or the other way round) A steady flow of water is probably symbolic of confidence in waking life.
In dreamland, springs can represent a source of untapped creativity and they can also hint at wisdom, because another name for spring is fount, suggesting ‘fount of all knowledge’. Wells in dreams can hint at emotional rebirth or good fortune, as wishing wells have been credited with wish- fulfillment for centuries. So if you dreamed of drawing water from a well, what is it that you long for? Because wells are sources of water, it could be that your waking life has become emotionally dry and that you are thirsting for a revival of feeling.... waterfall / fountain / spring / rapids / well dream meaning
Once upon a time not so long ago, an inventor was struggling with a major problem. His name was Elias Howe, and for years he had been trying to solve this problem, so that he could complete a machine he was building—a machine that would in time change the world. He was missing a small but vital detail, and, try as he would, he just couldn’t figure it out. Needless to say, Howe was a very frustrated man. One night, after another long day of fruitless work on his project, he dreamed he had been captured by fierce savages. These warriors were attacking him with spears. Although in the dream he was terrified he would be killed, he noticed that the spears were unusual looking: each one had an eye- shaped hole at the pointed end. When Howe woke up, it hit him like a brick: he had actually dreamed the answer to his problem. His nightmare was a blessing in disguise. He immediately saw that the eye of the spear could be an eye in a sewing needle, near its point. Elated with the discovery, he rushed to his laboratory and finished the design of his invention: the sewing machine. The rest, as they say, is history.
The list of what dreams can do for you seems endless. We’ve touched on a few of these benefits of dreaming in the preface and introduction. Now let’s go into a bit more detail. I want you to get really excited about your own dream potential. And, once you realize the possibilities, I think you will.
FAMOUS DREAMERS
The history of dreams is filled with stories of famous people who have called on their dreams for help, or who have received help unexpectedly from their dreams. Here are a few more interesting stories to illustrate the point:
The physicist Niels Bohr, who developed the theory of the movements of electrons, had a dream in which he saw the planets attached to the sun by strings. This image inspired him to finalize his theory.
The great Albert Einstein reported that the famous theory of relativity came to him while he was napping—a good reason for taking frequent naps!
Author Richard Bach, who wrote the bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, was stuck in a writer’s block after writing the first half of his now-famous novel. It was eight years later that he literally dreamed the second half and was able to complete his book.
Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman told reporters that his classic film Cries and Whispers had been inspired by a dream.
Another writer, the well-loved British author Robert Louis Stevenson, was quite dependent on his dreams for ideas that he could turn into sellable stories. Stevenson has related in his memoirs that after a childhood tortured by nightmares, and his successful efforts to overcome them, he was able to put his dreams to work for profit.
A born storyteller (though he started out as a medical student), he was accustomed to lull himself to sleep by making up stories to amuse himself. Eventually, he turned this personal hobby into a profession, becoming a writer of tales like Treasure Island. He identified his dream-helpers as “little people,” or “Brownies.” Once he was in constant contact with this inner source, his nightmares vanished, never to return. Instead, whenever he was in need of income he turned to his dreams:
At once the little people begin to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre. No fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp are things bygone; applause, growing applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his own cleverness . . . and at last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry, “I have it, that’ll do!”
Stevenson wrote his autobiography in the third person, not revealing that he was the subject until the end.
Stevenson further states that sometimes when he examined the story his Brownies had provided, he was disappointed, finding it unmarketable. However, he also reported that the Brownies “did him honest service and gave him better tales than he could fashion for himself,” that “they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim.”
Stevenson’s Brownies are a perfect example of dream helpers just waiting to be called upon. A particularly famous example of the work of Stevenson’s Brownies is the tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As he explains:
I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being, which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. [After he destroyed an earlier version of the manuscript . . .] For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies.
Although Stevenson did the “mechanical work, which is about the worst of it,” writing out the tales with pen and paper, mailing off the stories to publishers, paying the postage, and not incidentally collecting the fees, he gave his Brownies almost total credit for his productions.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a British poet, was accustomed to taking a sedative derived from opium (legal in those days). One afternoon after taking a dose he was reading and fell asleep over his book. The last words he read had been, “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built.” When Coleridge awoke some three hours later he had dreamed hundreds of lines of poetry, which he immediately set to writing down. The opening lines of this poem—one of the most famous of all time—are:
Unfortunately for posterity, after writing only fifty-four lines of the two to three hundred he had dreamed, Coleridge was interrupted by a caller, whom he entertained for an hour. When he returned to complete the poem, he had lost all the rest of what he had dreamed! In his diary he noted that it had disappeared “like images on the surface of a stream.” Even so, he had written a masterpiece. This true story, however, emphasizes the need to record dreams upon awakening, a subject we will take up in chapters 5 and 6.
Not only artists and writers give their dreams credit for their ideas and inspirations, but many scientists as well (as we saw in the examples of Bohr and Einstein). Psychologist Eliot D. Hutchinson reports numerous cases of scientists receiving information through dreams and says of dreams that “by them we can see more clearly the specific mechanism of intuitive thought,” and that “a large number of thinkers with whom I have had direct contact admit that they dream more or less constantly about their work, especially if it is exceptionally baffling . . . they often extract useful conceptions.”
I personally can attest to this statement, as it mirrors my own experience writing books. For example, when I began work on this book about dreams, I noticed that my dream production immediately doubled; and I have had Stevenson’s experience of “little people,” whom I call my “elves,” and whom I write about extensively in my book for teens called Teen Astrology, telling about how they came to my rescue when I was quite stuck (see chapter 9, pages 249– 252 in that book).
One of the most astonishing as well as fascinating stories is that of Hermann V. Hilprecht, a professor of Assyrian at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1800s. It seems to be a characteristic of those who receive dream help that they have recently been working long and hard and are frustrated. In Hilprecht’s case, he was working late one evening in 1893, attempting to decipher the cuneiform characters on drawings of two small fragments of agate. He thought they belonged to Babylonian finger rings, and he had tentatively assigned one fragment to the so-called Cassite period of 1700 B.C.E. However, he couldn’t classify the second fragment. And he wasn’t at all sure about the first either. He finally gave up his efforts at about midnight and went straight to bed—and had the following dream, which was his “astounding discovery.”
Hilprecht dreamed of a priest of pre-Christian Nippur, several thousand years ago, who led the professor into the treasure chamber of the temple and showed him the originals, telling him just how the fragments fitted in, all in great detail. Although the dream was long and involved, Hilprecht remembered it all and in the morning told it to his wife. In his words: “Next morning . . . I examined the fragments once more in the light of these disclosures, and to my astonishment found all the details of the dream precisely verified in so far as the means of verification were in my hands.”
Up until then, Hilprecht had been working only with drawings. Now he traveled to the museum in Constantinople where the actual agate fragments were kept and discovered that they fitted together perfectly, unlocking the secret of a three-thousand-year-old mystery by means of a dream!
How did this happen? Clairvoyance? Magic? Who was the priest? How was it that Hilprecht seemed to make contact in a dream with someone who had lived so long before him? We will never know the answers to these questions; but we do know from the professor’s own words that this is exactly what happened to him. (It makes you wonder whether Professor Hilprecht was in the habit of paying attention to his dreams!)
No doubt one of the most famous dream sources of scientific discovery was experienced by the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé, when he was attempting to understand and model the molecular structure of benzene. Like Professor Hilprecht, Kekulé had been searching for the answer for many years and was totally immersed in the problem. He told of a dream he had while he napped in front of his fireplace one frigid night in 1865:
Again the atoms were juggling before my eyes:
My mind’s eye, sharpened by repeated sights of a similar kind, could not distinguish larger structures of different forms and in long chains, many of them close together; everything was moving in a snake-like and twisting manner. Suddenly, what was this? One of the snakes got hold of its own tail and the whole structure was mockingly twisting in front of my eyes. As if struck by lightning, I awoke.
This dream led Kekulé directly to the discovery of the structure of benzene, which is a closed carbon ring. A dream had presented a realization that served to revolutionize modern chemistry. Later, reporting his discovery to his colleagues at a scientific convention in 1890, he remarked, “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then we may perhaps find the truth.” Not the sort of comment one generally expects from a scientist!
Here is the story of another scientist. Otto Loewi, who won the 1936 Nobel
Prize in Psychology and Medicine for his discovery of how the human nervous system works, credited this discovery to a dream. Prior to Loewi, scientists had assumed that the body’s nervous impulses were the result of electrical waves. However, in 1903 Loewi had the intuition that a chemical transmission was actually responsible. But he had no way to prove his theory, so he set the idea aside for many years. Then, in 1920, he had the following dream:
The night before Easter Sunday of that year I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o’clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at three o’clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory and performed a simple experiment on a frog’s heart according to the nocturnal design:
Its results became the foundation of the theory of chemical transmission of the nervous impulse.
Interestingly, Loewi had previously performed a similar experiment, which combined in his dreaming mind with the new idea, creating the successful result. This is an excellent example of the ability of dreams to combine with previous dreams, or with actual events, to produce fertile new ground.
These are some of the stories of famous people who have used dreams to solve problems, enhance creativity, and even make money and win important prizes. They are all evidence of the vast human ability to make use of dreams. As you draw upon your own dream life and develop skills in both dreaming and interpreting your dreams, you will become an advanced teen dreamer. Think of your dreams as a school where you are continually learning new skills and developing new aptitudes, reaching ever higher levels of achievement.
As you pay conscious attention to your dreams, and then use your dream symbols in your waking life, you will be integrating yourself, creating the greatest artwork of your life: your whole and unique Self.... what dreams can do for you dream meaning
Ancient art and literature are crowded with references to dreams. For thousands of years dreams have been credited with supernatural or prophetic significance by the majority of the world’s spiritual traditions. The Bible, for instance, makes it clear that dreams are divine messages and this explanation for dreams was shared by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, all of whom also believed that dreams had healing powers.
Certain cultures, such as the Australian Aborigines and many African and Native American tribes, have always believed dreaming to be a way in which an individual can enter into the collective spirit memory. To this day, dream pooling plays an important role in those societies where tribal members gather together for the purpose of interpreting dreams. Another view is held by the Inuit of Hudson Bay in Canada, who believe that when a person falls asleep and dreams, their soul goes wandering.
The Egyptians are thought to have been the first to develop a system of contrary dream interpretation; a positive dream, for example, predicts misfortune and a nightmare predicts an improvement in waking fortunes. They produced the earliest known dream dictionary, written approximately 4,000 years ago. Now called the Chester Beatty Papyrus, it came from Thebes in Egypt and is kept in the British Museum.
It was the ancient Greeks, however, who first proposed the theory that dreams were not from some external, divine source but internal communications, or the divine spark within. Plato (427-347 BC) suggested that dreams were expressions of a person’s hidden desires, whilst his pupil Aristotle (384-322 BC) speculated that dreams shared similar themes and were not divine oracles but coincidences. It was the ‘father of medicine’ Hippocrates (460-377 BC) who proposed that dream symbols reflect the state of the dreamer’s body—for example, fire denoted indigestion—and should be regarded as valuable diagnostic tools.
The first fully-fledged dream researcher to focus on dream symbols and dream themes was a Roman living in Greek Asia Minor called Artemidorus (AD 138-180), who wrote a book about dream interpretation that is still in print. As far as Artemidorus was concerned, dream symbols had certain meanings but the most important aspect of dream interpretation was the symbols’ personal significance to the dreamer, along with the dreamer’s personal circumstances.
In much of Europe, even though the early Christians respected dreams for their spiritual significance, the repressive control of the Roman Catholic Church put a stop to any attempts at dream interpretation. By the fifteenth century, dreams were regarded as no longer significant or important. Even a century or so later, Shakespeare called them ‘children of the idle brain’. This school of thought persisted into the eighteenth century, when dreams were still thought to be meaningless.
In the early nineteenth century, when the restrictive influence of the Church began to wane and members of the German Romantic movement—in their quest for spontaneous expression—rediscovered the potential of dreams, a revival of interest in dream interpretation began to trickle into the mainstream with the publication of popular dream dictionaries such as Raphael’s Royal Book of Dreams (1830). The stage was now set for Freud and Jung; two men who continue to have the greatest impact on the way we interpret dreams today.... a brief history of dream interpretation dream meaning
aisle, in a: difficulties and misfortune wil beset you.
altar: aspire to a spirituality fundamental to al life.
anthem in, hearing an: your prayers are being answered on your wel -planned work.
blasphemy in a, committing: use violent protest rather than practical action.
building, a: are loved by God, love him back.
several: happiness is buried too deep beneath your material ambition.
built, being: wil surmount difficulties while remaining true to your innermost thoughts.
catechism, preaching from the: distinction of your future position.
reading, a, manual: activities in a lucrative position.
receiving oral instruction: you can accept strictures behind advancement.
caving in: have deep feeling of regret that you have lost faith in God.
choir, singing in the: a surprise visit of an old friend reveals lover’s disloyalty.
hearing a: a lack of tolerance for one another leads to gloom.
Christening, attending your child’s: wil achieve hopes and desires.
friend’s, a: contentment with new life.
godparent, being a: be decisive in taking advantage of favorable opportunity.
communion, going to: wil receive many blessings.
children: guidance wil be received through your third eye.
crucifix, praying to a: you wil receive high honors.
hanging a: wil be involved in troubles you wil blame on others.
deacon, a: your actions wil be severely criticized.
decorated, fully: wil receive an inheritance of spiritual nourishment if you atone.
during mass, in: your approach is tentative for fear of refusal.
entering a: your making amends wil be received with kindness.
hearing a dispute in: conflict between daily life and spiritual values.
heresy, being accused of: wil assert yourself and gain stature in community affairs.
Holy Communion: wil make a friend who wil stand by you for life.
Judgment Day, at: are resigned to pay for your sins and be credited for your conduct.
parish, of a: there are no clouds in your future.
praying in: wil be kept from the wrong path if you cooperate with the family.
priest in, being with a: harbor guilt and shame for breaking important rules.
Sabbath, observing the: wil participate in the ritual.
reveling in the: wil mock the very truth of your life.
sacrilege, committing a: wil suffer much misery.
salvation, institution, joining a: a rude awakening for your family.
Savior, praying to the: desires wil be granted in the future.
granting wishes: spiritual healing has been earned, prayers are answered.
seated in: wil change habits, with the strength of spiritual forces.
talking in: friends are envious of your relationship with the forces of life.
vicar of a, talking to the: people wil cause anguish.
yard, being in: a sense of what is fundamental to al life and death.
others in a: cycles of life and growth, reproduction and interdependence. ... church dream meaning
Julius Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon is attributed to a dream in which he saw himself in bed with his mother (Mother Rome, the seers told him). His assassination was foretold in his wife’s Calpurnia’s dream. ‘She held him in her arms, bleeding and stabbed.’ Another Caesar, Caesar Augustus, is said to have walked the streets as a beggar because of instructions he received in a dream.
St Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscan Order because of a dream in which Jesus Christ spoke from the cross, telling him to ‘go set my house in order’.
Dante relates that the whole story of The Divine Comedy was revealed to him in a dream on Good Friday in 1300. When he died in 1321, part of the manuscript was lost. His son Jocojso found the manuscript after a dream in which his father showed him where to look.
Genghis Khan is reported to have received his battle plans from his dreams. He is also reported to have been told in a dream that he was a chosen one.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem, ‘Kubla Khan’, was written upon awakening from an opium-affected dream.
Robert Louis Stephenson believed that his best stories came from his dreams. He reported that the theme for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was derived from a dream. He also reported other breakthroughs in his writing that came from his dreams. He suffered as a child from nightmares and learned to control his dreams to change the nightmares. He said he used his dreams to revise plays and stories while asleep.
Abraham Lincoln dreamt, days before his assassination, of great cries coming from the East Wing of the White House. When he investigated, he was told by soldiers on guard that they weeping for the president who had been assassinated. Days later, his body was held in state in the East Wing so people could pay their last respects.
Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz was a chemist working on the chemical structure of benzene. He reported that he got fed up with his data, which made no sense interpreted as a ‘long string’ molecule. He was dozing in his comfy chair when he was startled by the image of a snake biting its own tail. He woke and worked out the mathematics of the benzene molecule as a ring rather than a long string.
Guiseppe Tartini (Italian violinist and composer) composed one of his greatest works, ‘The Devil’s Trill’, as a result of a dream he had in 1713. In the dream, he handed his violin to the devil himself, who began to ‘play with consummate skill a sonata of such exquisite beauty as surpassed the boldest flights of my imagination. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted; my breath was taken away, and I awoke. Seizing my violin I tried to retain the sounds I had heard. But it was in vain. The piece I then composed...was the best I ever wrote, but how far below the one I heard in my dream!’
Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, wrote that he got the core idea, the breakthrough concept, from a dream. It was a nightmare. He had been captured by cannibals. They were preparing to cook him and they were dancing around the fire waving their spears. Howe noticed at the head of each spear there was a small hole through the shaft, and the up and down motion of the spears and the hole remained with him when he woke. The idea of passing the thread through the needle close to the point, not at the other end, was a major innovation in making mechanical sewing possible.
Niels Bohr reported that he developed the model of the atom based on a dream of sitting on the sun with all the planets hissing around on tiny cords.
Paul McCartney heard a haunting melody in one of his dreams, confirmed that none of the Beatles had heard it before, and wrote it down. It became the tune for the famous song, ‘Yesterday’.... famous dreams dream meaning
being in: warning of future idleness caused by the ramification of past sloth.
children: persecution by an enemy wil be inflicted on your progeny.
others: learn from your mistakes or they wil repeat on you.
farmer in: a good harvest is promised, as is the difficulty of accomplishing it.
having a, in the chest: financial gains are at the expense of others’ lives.
ears: malicious gossip about you causes others to turn against you.
feet: your troubled foundations cannot sustain growth.
heart: a camouflaged solution to the reenactment of an il icit passion.
legs: running away is no longer an option.
shoulders: others are outflanking your success and being credited for them.
stomach: pleasant social activities can be overdone.
teeth: are trying too hard to defend your decision, rather than revisiting it.
throat: you can’t swal ow the acceptance of opposing views.
having a painful delivery: death and rebirth.
having pains all over the body: your success is causing a strain on your system.
lovers dreaming of: their love is secured, yet rejected lover wil defame you.
severe: others would have you feel guilty for doing what they could not.
man in: business prospers if you stop inflicting pain on others.
woman: suppression of painful memories.
sailor in: the level of tension at sea reflects actual pain. ... pain dream meaning
digging up roots: the source of your problems wil surprise you.
and finding truffles: are ingenious at making a profit.
eating: return your extended health to its point of origin.
plants, of: sickness wil soon come unless you nourish yourself.
pulling, of plant from ground: others are credited with your ideas.
teeth, of children’s: do not weaken to friends’ desires or a child’s plea.
own: do not give any money on credit.
pulled, having: a deep-seated pain is exposed.
trees, of: wil have a difficult task to accomplish.
uncovering: your abilities need to develop with rapid effectiveness. ... roots dream meaning
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