VIOLENCE

If you have a dream where the conflict contains gruesome, explicit images of violence, try to relate these to your waking life.

If you can’t think of any waking parallels, consider the identity of your opponent in the dream? Is this someone you recognize or is it a hidden part of yourself? Was your opponent serious or light-hearted? Was anyone hurt in the dream? Was the conflict resolved and how so? Any violence in dreams is a reflection of your own inner feelings about yourself and sometimes about the situation around you. Seeing yourself as a victim of self-imposed violence suggests self-blame, perhaps related to the end of a relationship or the death of a loved one, both of which you may feel could have been avoidable had you had acted differently. Dream violence towards yourself may also express low selfesteem, self-loathing and destructive urges that should be dealt with before they erupt into waking life.

If, on the other hand, you are lashing out at others in your dream, this may reflect your struggle to fight the undesirable impulses within yourself. Violence towards an old person can indicate resentment against authority. Violence towards a child may indicate the dreamer’s inability to accept and express the child within themselves.

If you dreamed that you were attacked or threatened with attack, it may be a warning of an attack in waking life. This may not be a physical attack but an attack on your integrity or character.

(1) If in a dream you behave violently towards a person or animal, some deep-seated anger or resentment is indicated, particularly if such behaviour recurs in your dreams. The cause may be frustration of a basic desire. Guilt-feelings caused by a desire that was (perhaps wrongly) felt to be illegitimate may be accompanied by anger, either directed outwards against someone (perhaps a parent) who forbade the fulfilment of the desire, or directed inwards against yourself as a form of self-punishment. Therefore, if in a dream you are a victim of violence, this may be a symbol of your tendency to punish yourself.

(2) Even where the violence is obviously directed towards someone else, it may indicate anxiety. For example, a man who dreams of cruel sex with a woman is almost certainly afraid of women and afraid of - guilty about - his own sexuality. The cause of the guilt and anxiety needs to be uncovered, even if it means seeing a psychotherapist.

(3) A violent explosion - volcano, bomb, etc. - will usually mean that some part of you is frustrated and ready to wreak havoc in your life if you continue to deny it expression.

See also Bomb, Volcano.

NB Our violence is caused by emotions taking us over; and such emotional take-overs are the result of frustrated healthy desires.

If you dream that you have violent behavior, it could be that you are harboring hidden feelings of resentment towards someone who is impeding your progress. On the other hand, you could be denying something inside you. This dream shows you that you should be more tolerant of your feelings and accept the failures that occur to you. Contrarily, you will repress too many emotions.

If you are the victim of violence in the dream, it is trying to say that you are punishing yourself and you consider yourself guilty of something in real life. In the case that it gives you the sensation that everything is going against you, you should not lose hope, because your luck will change soon.

The significance of this dream is the opposite as it suggests.

If you are violently attacked, superstition foretells better times.