Issue 123, November 2008
Horse eyes
©Jane Teresa Anderson, November 2008
Every week, I interpret a dream for our This Week's Dream page. (Update, 2010: You can now see these in my 101 Dreams Interpreted free resource. We no longer feature a This Week's Dream page.) The dreams were collected through our public forums, a few years back. Are you checking in every week to read these and learn more about dream interpretation, or are they passing you by? Here's a sample, 'Horse Eyes'.
ANGELA'S DREAM, 'HORSE EYES'
I was curled on the ground quite fearful. A blond horse was about to come down on my neck with its hooves.
I peered up at it, uncertain whether or not I should catch its eye. The deliberation was while the hooves were in the air over my head.
I caught its eye. It looked angrier. But I couldn't tell if I'd done the right thing or not. I woke up before the outcome.
I'm wondering if the horse is passion energy? In a dream only days before that, words came, saying, 'You have the passion. You just have to think.'
INTERPRETATION
Animals in our dreams often represent our instincts and raw energies. Your dreaming brain has picked a blond horse to represent the instincts and raw energies you were experiencing at the time of your dream. How would you describe the energy of a horse? How would you describe its instincts? What do you feel is the difference in energy between a blond horse and a black horse? Have you ever owned or ridden a blond horse? How would you describe its energy or personality? Ask yourself these kinds of questions to identify what instinct or raw energy this horse represents for you personally.
You mention passion. Many people see horses as passionate creatures. Perhaps passion is the instinct and energy your dream horse represents.
In the dream, your horse was angry. And it seemed even angrier than you had thought when you caught its eye. Or did it get angrier because you looked it in the eye?
What makes a horse – or a person – angry? If your horse does represent passion, why isn’t it running and expressing its passion for life? Why is it angry? Why aren’t you running and expressing your passion in some area of your life? Why are you angry? What is thwarting your expression of your passion? Why is anger the only recourse? Do you feel unable to let your passion flow? Is there something you need to say, to speak up, to open communication channels so that you can free your passion?
The neck is a communication channel. It houses the throat, the voice box. It’s the place from which you can speak out. But if it’s crushed – by a horse’s hooves or by anything – you cannot speak out, cannot communicate.
The neck is also a communication channel, symbolically, between the head and heart, as it is midway between the two. You can imagine your thinking (head) and your feeling (heart) meeting and melding here to create a balanced viewpoint which you then communicate.
But we do not know whether the horse’s hooves were going to come down on your throat, because you woke up before the outcome. Seeing the horse’s anger, acknowledging it by meeting it ‘eye to eye’ might have been sufficient for it to pull back.
What anger did you need to acknowledge at the time of this dream? How did this anger relate to your passion? Does acknowledging (admitting) this anger free you up to express your passion more? Is it enough to see that anger has been causing you to hold back, and can you now let that anger go, and get on with flowing with your passion without anger blocking your way? Or does admitting this anger free you to express it in some way (write about it, speak it, sing it) so that it energises your passion?
At the start of your dream you are in fear. Being curled on the ground you were in the foetal position. So this fear either goes back to childhood or drives you to seek comfort in pre-birth experience –the ultimate safe, comfort zone. You are on the ground – perhaps feeling grounded, definitely not getting anywhere.
The horse was going to come down on you with its hooves. That’s three references to the ground or down – ground, down, (feeling ground down?) hooves (hooves are the horse’s contact point with the ground). Everything in the opening sentence of your dream is about being grounded or ground down by fear and being about to be crushed by your passion which is feeling angry. Why do you fear your passion? Why is your passion angry with you for feeling fear and staying grounded, not getting anywhere?
There’s wonderful courage in your dream when you peer up at the horse. Dreams do use word play – I wonder if this is a peer issue. Have you felt thwarted or belittled by your peers? Do you feel like a fearful child (foetal position) compared to your peers? When you gather the courage to peer at this angry passion in your dream, are you gathering the courage to face your fears and allow yourself to be equal to your peers?
There’s that moment of deliberation in your dream, when the horse’s hooves were in the air, over your head. At the time of this dream, what were you pausing to deliberate? What was “in the air” (undecided) for you? What seemed “over your head” perhaps? Deliberation, a moment to pause and look this angry passion in the eye, may have saved your neck and head from being crushed.
Do you let your anger (unspoken, neck-crushing, passion-crushing anger) crush your thinking? Putting that another way: are your thoughts, and how you act on them, affected by your angry passion? You may not be expressing your anger (or your passion) in the world, held back by fear, but your dream suggests these energies are expressing themselves internally, crushing your thinking. Your dream suggests that a moment to deliberate, a moment to think, a moment to courageously acknowledge and admit anger, perhaps in a peer issue, may change the outcome.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that changed outcome saw you riding that horse, all anger gone, working with it to express passion and get somewhere rather than get nowhere though fear?
Isn’t it interesting that this fits with your dream of a few days before, where the words that came to you said, “You have the passion. You just have to think.”
When you look into a person’s or animal’s eyes in a dream, you are meeting yourself eye to eye (I to I) since everything in a dream represents something about you, the dreamer. Whenever you meet yourself eye to eye, you know yourself more deeply. Knowledge is wisdom and power. Instead of fearing your angry passion, pause, deliberate, think about how it is operating in your life, affecting the way you think, then notice how doing this inevitably changes how you respond, what you do next.
In the dream you couldn’t tell whether you’d done the right thing or not. Where did you feel this in your waking life in the day or two before the dream? This gives you a clue, as this was a situation where you did begin to face your fear, anger and passion. In doing this you stepped out of your comfort zone, and opened yourself to a possible new outcome. What previously felt to you the ‘right’ thing to do had shifted – your old right and wrong goalposts had changed. Isn’t it amazing how fear determines what we believe to be right and wrong?
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Visualisation:
Harness your passion by harnessing your dream horse. Visualise yourself back in the dream, only this time look the horse in the eye, watch him stop, think, and replace his hooves on the ground as his anger dissipates and drains away into the earth. Visualise yourself standing up and springing onto his back, holding his harness, whispering soothing words to him, then riding off together as one with your horse, as one with your passion. Summon up all the positive feelings you would like to feel when you allow your anger-free passion to take you to where you want to be.
How often to do this:
Do this visualisation 20 times a day for a week, ten times a day for the second week and twice a day for the next month.
How does this work?
This practice ensures that change occurs for you in the best possible way – a positive healing transformation. Your dream expressed your waking life situation using dream language – the language of your unconscious mind. By reliving the dream with changes, or by transforming one of the dream symbols (or by reliving and intensifying the dream in the case of a dream with a positive ending) you are using vision and feeling to reprogram your unconscious beliefs.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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