Cage

A place of restriction and oppression. Dreams • In interpreting a cage in an internal dream, I would not see a positive connotation to it unless your enemies were in that cage! In dreaming that you are in a cage or being held captive, it would represent your lack of freedom.

• This would indicate that you are bound either by your circumstance, by your past or by some form of oppression.

The enemy keeps you in bondage while the Lord gives freedom.

• The mind can often be a cage in that it restricts you. Your analytical mind could be stopping your progress.

A cage also represents fear, which could indicate being bound by a fear of the past that has been exposed again in your life.

• In personal experience I have seen people in cages and the Lord has told me that they have put themselves in the cage. One such case was a woman who had a fear of opening herself up to the Lord. I saw her in a cage and the Lord being able to only pass small objects through it to her.

The interpretation was that because she had closed off her heart to the Lord out of fear, He could only give her small blessings because of her restriction.

• Visions • I could not find a positive connotation for a cage in Scripture either.

A cage in an external dream or vision speaks of the deceit and devices of the enemy.

It is a warning of a trap that has been set, or it is a word of knowledge that the person you are ministering to is in bondage.

• Jeremiah 5:26 For among my people are found wicked [men]: they lay wait, as he that sets snares; they set a trap, they catch men.

• 27 As a cage is full of birds, so [are] their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and become rich.

• It is a place of evil and a place where the enemy and his evil works abound Revelation 18:2 ...and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

See also: Bars, Prison.

(1) The cage may symbolize the (felt) restrictions of your present life situation. But the restrictions may be self-imposed, albeit by means of unconscious processes - for example, internal prohibitions arising out of irrational guilt-feelings.

(2) Some part of you may be crying out for liberation. (For repression and suppression) Wild and dangerous animals are kept in cages.

It is likely, therefore, that what is caged in your dream is a part of you that frightens or disgusts you by its animality. Refusal to accept that you belong to the animal kingdom may result in your living in your head entirely, with the body - primitive energies and drives - locked out of consciousness. But a disembodied head, cut off from Nature’s vital energy and Nature’s wisdom, can only lead to trouble. Particularly in the West, where for two centuries even religion has rejected Nature (the feminine side of God), we desperately need to get closer to Nature, not remove ourselves even further from it.

(3) On the other hand, a bird in a cage may represent frustrated spiritual aspirations. Perhaps you are spending too much time and energy in work that brings you only money. Any contradiction between

(2) and (3) is only apparent. You can’t climb - even to spiritual heights - without your body, without the primal energy and wisdom of your unconscious. To attain the ‘higher’, first go ‘deeper’. The liberation - uncaging - of our deeper psychic contents so that they become pan of our conscious equipment will enable us to transcend the limitations of our past and present.

Ill

CANDI h

If you see yourself caged, it is a sign that the unconscious wants to express its complaints, since you are subjected to heavy repression by the conscious. You have become a very strict judge of yourself and limit your acts and thoughts too much, which prevents you from expressing yourself freely. However, if wild beasts are caged, you have to interpret this dream as the retention of inner conflicts that torment you, in which case this oneiric image has some similarity to the previous (in which you are locked in a cage).

If you are put in a cage with wild animals, the dream is warning you that you are in danger of an accident.