MEMOIR LOGO CONCEPT: The aleph and a Sufi mystic inspired my creation and design of the syzygy logo, which I initially based on the symbolism of the yin and yang.
But the concept expanded when I first saw the aleph in Judith Cornell’s
Mandala Healing Kit, My inexplicable attraction to it led me to incorporate it into my logo before I knew what it meant.
I later read that the “Aleph (the first letter of the sacred Hebrew alphabet) embodies the primordial, divine potential of the universe. ... Aleph contains all the universe’s potential and all of its emptiness simultaneously. Aleph represents a dynamic process of movement from unity to diversity and back to unity,” Jennifer Judelsohn, Songs of Creation.
And the mystic poet Rumi inspired me to use the fire and water concept after I read The Question. Here is an excerpt:
“The presence is there in front of me. A fire on the left, a lovely stream on the right.
One group walks toward the fire, into the fire. Another toward the sweet flowing water.
No one knows which are blessed and which are not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.
A head goes under water, and that head pokes out of the fire.”
LOGO ART: Cropped fire and water images from Free Images.
LOTUS LOGO: In spiritual and religious literature, “the lotus is a symbol for the macrocosm and the microcosm, the universe and man. The lotus represents the divinity of the cosmos as well as the divinity of man.
The lotus is the center of the infinite, omnipresent consciousness which connects with the consciousness of the universe. Through the intuition, one of man’s divine gifts, the spiritual student can see the infinite, omnipresent consciousness as the lotus flower within himself.”
LOTUS ART: Courtesy
Homestead, my website service provider. (Temporary art while I design of my own lotus logo.)
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My personal dream symbol/motif index, wanna be dictionary
The following is a list of symbols and themes that have frequently occurred in my dreams. As I research and analyze each of them, I will underscore the word indicating a link, where an explanation of my findings will be elaborated upon. As I have said, this dream dictionary can only have meaning for me. While we all share certain motifs in dreams, for example, flying or floating, as well as symbols, we must explore our own dreams for the meaning our individual souls are trying to convey. The index below is a very important leg of my personal journey to deciphering the specialized language of my own soul. And I make this list public to be used only as a sample for others who may want to start a similar log. (And, yep, to my surprise, “bathroom” is on the list.)
Above is a photograph of several objects that have symbolic significance to me. Most people can identify them, but no one can fully comprehend what they mean to me. Each of us has a multitude of such symbols laden with meaning particular to our individual experiences, situations, and feelings, and it is through these symbols that our unconscious seeks to communicate with us, whether to guide us or to warn us or to simply remind us who we are.
“It is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if someone could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol.”
Pictures worth 1,000 words, but symbols speak volumes in soul‘s language
All of the objects in the image to the right have symbolic significance to me. You can identify them, of course, but no one can fully comprehend what they mean to me. You can read what some of the stones and the lemon signify to me by reading my page on alchemy. Or I can tell you that the billiards key chain, for example, represents for me the fact I am a Life Path 4. But it also symbolizes, in part, the special bond I shared with my Dad, as does the stone that says Health. And the little leprechaun represents my seven-year marriage to Teddy, who I married on St. Patricks Day and who died in March as well.
I can tell you these things, but it is still not possible for anyone to know all the nuances and shades of feelings and meaning that these objects represent for me. We each have a multitude of such symbols that are laden with a mixture of meaning, which ultmately culminate into a unique language that only your individual soul can fully comprehend. This is the language that will enable you to interpret your dreams, that is, to be in communion with your soul. ♀ ♂
A
Abandon
Accident
Afterworld, the other side, another realm
Airplane
Alarm
Algebra
Apartment
Attic
Aura
B
Baby
Bar
Basement, cellar
Bath, bathing
Bathroom
Bathtub, tubs of water
Bed
Bedspread, cover, blanket, comforter (esp. dirty or cruddy)
Beer
Bees
Bicycle, bike
Bite, biting
Bird
Black man (black guy)
Blind
Blood
Blow up
Blue-tinged girl
Bomb
Boy (in dream, not generic)
Breasts
Bridge
Bugs
Building
Burn
C
Cage
Cake
Cancer
Candy
Can't see
Car
Cause and effect
Cave
Ceiling (or lack thereof)
Cellar
Chain
Chased, chasing
Child, children
Cigarette
Circles
Club (golf club)
Collapse
Crash
Crowding, v. crowd
Curtains, drapes (as in obscuring, hiding)
D
Dead silence/silent
Diner
Dirty, filthy, cruddy
Dog
Driving
Driver’s seat
Drowning
E
Earthquake
Electricity, electric, electric cord
Electrocute, electrocution
Elevator
Embryo
Emerge
Explode, explosion
F
Falling
Fear of height, of falling
Finding money, finding
Fires
Fish
Floods
Floor, or lack thereof
Food
G
Garbage
Gay
Geometric (shapes)
Girl (little)
Glow, glowing
Golf
Grandparents
Gun
H
Hair
Heavy-set woman
Helicopter
Help, want help
Hospital
House
Hurricane
I
Identity
Infant
Interpreting dreams dream
(or telling or reading a dream)
Invisible
J
Jail
Jealousy
K
Karma
Kill, killing, killer
L
Leaks
Lesbian
Lightning
Liquor
Lobby
Lost
M
Maggots
Mall
Marry, married
Mass
Math, numbers
Mess, messy, messes
Mirror
Monkey
Monsters
Moon
Motel, hotel
Moth
Motorcycle (bike)
Movie, play, TV, television
Mud
Murder, murderer
N
Net
Notice, no one seems/seemed to notice
Numbers
O
Ocean
Opposites
Other side, the (another realm)
P
Passive
Paralysis (physical phenomenon?)
Pee, urinate
Photograph
Plug
Poison
Poop, shit
Privacy (or lack thereof)
Puppet
Puzzles
Q
Quadrangles (rectangles)
R
Rabbit
Rape
Rectangles (quadrangles)
Reflection
Restaurant
Revelation
Rock/rocks
Roller coaster
Rough terrain
S
Sacred food
Sacred water
Searching
Sex
Shambles, crumbles, crumbling
Shell
Shoot, shot
Shopping
Shower
Sickness
Smoke, smoking
Sphere
Spills, spilling
Stairs
Stalker, stalking
Stones
Swing, swinging
Symbols
T
Tennis
Texas
Theater
Toddler
Toilet
Train
Traffic (jam)
Transform, transformation
Trash
Tree
Trying to make something fit
Twin
U
Urinate, pee
U-turn
Underwear
Unstable
V
Vagina
Vomit
Vehicle
W
Warn, warning
Water
Wedding
Wet
Wheel
Windmill
Window
Work
Wound
Wrist watch
Have pen, journal
handy when you wake up
I usually head right to the dining room when I wake up, so I always have a pen and journal handy there. You might prefer to keep a pen and journal on your nightstand or in the bathroom. Sometimes the mere sight of my journal will spark a dream recall.
Electronic search capability saved my life
Although I usually handwrite the first draft of my dreams (so I don’t forget them while my system boots up), I have found it invaluable to key them into my electronic dream journal, adding affiliated notes and associations as soon as possible.
I once woke up with a dream that really shocked me, in which my husband had murdered me. With
a quick search in my electronic dream journal for words like “kill,” “murder” and “blood,” I soon realized that he had been stalking me in my dreams, trying to kill me for at least two years. (This realization also prompted me to start naming my dreams so that such patterns would be easier to spot without having to reread whole dreams.)
Rather than fly out
of bed, stop and think
In the morning—rather than jumping out of bed, thinking about what time it is or what’s on your agenda or flipping on the T.V. or planning what to wear or eat—try to train yourself to stop, just lie there, and think, think, think. What were you just dreaming about? And then mentally poke around for any impressions or fragments that might still be lingering in the back of your mind. If a dream starts to occur to you, try to stay focused on the idea until you can get to your journal.
Write down as much of it as possible. If you do not have time to write out the entire dream, at least write down a sentence or two and hope it will be enough to trigger recall of the dream later.
Oftentimes I can only recall a single fragment that seems so ridiculously insignificant that I am tempted not to bother writing it down, so I have to push myself. And more often than not, something—perhaps about the process of putting the pen to the paper, I really don’t know—but that little tidbit suddenly blossoms into a full-fledged scene or even a stream of scenes.
I have also found that even stopping for a second to turn on the coffee pot or to boot up my computer can create just enough of a distraction to wipe clean from my mind whatever bit of dream residue was left. Therefore, jot down at least the main idea—even if it’s just one word—before you do anything else.
Make note of dream feelings, associations
Rather than simply writing out the content of your dreams, note how a dream makes you feel emotionally and physically. Did the dream scare the crap out of you or did you think it was nonsense? Did you feel angry or passive or bold or aggressive? Did you feel indifferent or loving? Did you feel guilty or resentful? Were you on the defensive or offensive?
Also note any physical sensations you experienced in the dream or upon waking, such as the texture of an object, or how something tasted or smelled or sounded or looked. Also note if you were sweating or felt sexually aroused or felt nauseous, to name just a few. In addition to noting any feelings, also note any immediate associations you make to the dream in
brackets following the text. For example, “I had these ongoing dreams of witches getting burned at the stake all night.” [Last night I fell asleep during a movie about the Salem witch trials.]
Naming dreams helps spot recurring themes
After I missed my husband’s repeated efforts to kill me in my dreams, I began to name them with generic but descriptive titles. I do not name them to be clever or creative; I name them so I can glance several months of dreams in minutes by scanning the titles.
In addition to helping me to quickly spot patterns, naming my dreams has improved my dream recall over the long term. Perhaps periodically reviewing the pithy titles is enough to refresh my memory as to the specifics of some dreams, which provides me a greater familiarity with my dream patterns and their symbols and themes over the long term. (You will find that it is quite unsettling to read a dream you wrote a month or two earlier and have no recall of it whatsoever. It is as if a stranger wrote it.)
Create personal dream index, dictionary
Start an index of common themes in your dreams. For example bathrooms have been the star of my dreams for the last two nights, and that is where most of the action occurred—in bathrooms, lots of bathrooms. So I searched the term “bathroom” in my electronic journal and am astonished at how many time this year alone I have dreamed of a bathroom. My psyche is obviously trying to tell me something. I do not know what yet, but awareness of recurring themes can help you to narrow your focus as you explore and try to interpret your dreams. ♀ ♂
Tips help improve dream recall, pinpoint vital themes
IN PRODUCTION
Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols
Personal dictionary deciphers dream symbols
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