Cats

Cats have several commonly observed meanings that translate pretty easily between waking and dreams. Traditionally, cats have symbolized intuitive or magical powers. The former may be a herald to trust intuition. The latter may be a fantasy on your part to acquire witch skills or to investigate occult matters.
Of course, your own cat may simply appear in your dreams as a member of your daily life.

Theft

Ask anyone who has been a victim of theft and they will undoubtedly tell you how horribly violated they felt by the experience. In early childhood, we learn that to take a toy from another is taboo. Likewise, having a toy taken away hurts our feelings. However, sneakiness and acts of theft are common dream images. Whether you are the thief or the victim, there are several interpretations to explore.
As a thief, you could be feeling a lack of resources or an unfairness about the distribution of resources. For example, if you dream of stealing essentials -- bread, food, items needed to survive the dream environment -- you may see yourself as a pauper. In waking, this may play out as behavior that isolates you or leaves you feeling as though you have no choices.
However, dreaming of stealing from people you know may reflect a perception that you feel their lives are better than yours, even though you do not perceive them as better people.
As the victim, fear of loss seems to be a possible theme. The suspect list in the dream will help refine this further. If you are the victimized and the stolen items are central, then material loss is creating anxiety. However, if the lost items are of secondary importance to the suspect, you may feel as though someone you know is violating or taking advantage of you. Still, it is important to consider the objects taken and their significance to you. What the objects symbolize for you may indicate the area or life where your boundaries are being violated and help find solutions to reestablish yourself.

Prison

Entrapment is a common and interesting dream event. While some would also classify it as troubling, the flip side of being stuck somewhere is relative safety from the threats of an unknown outside world. Often, this safety facet of entrapment is neglected because of our obsession with freedom. Being entrapped is often a dream about self-awareness. As the old saying goes, Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. As this relates to dreams, being unable to escape usually is a picture of being unable to grow or accomplish in life what you desire to do. Jung's theory of archetypal individuation may be helpful for interpreting this dream.
Entrapment can be portrayed as either an absence of choices or too many choices. The absence of choices is a one-room cell. You are alone with no where to go. Too many choices is the mansion with no exits. Wherever you go, you are still stuck. This dream indicates that while choices may exist, they are unsatisfactory for effecting the new freedom or opportunities desired by the dreamer.
Discerning the solution to your captivity may often be revealed by who your captors are or where you are being held in captivity. To gain additional insight into the prison dream, look for familiarity among the guards, the decor of the mansion, and your sense of why you need to escape. Are you just uncomfortable being told what to do, or is there an actual threat within the prison, mansion, or inescapable dwelling?
Some inescapable dwellings are protective while others are punitive. Which one are you trapped in by your dream?
In waking, did you assume a negative feeling about a place that actually provided safety and predictability in your dream?

Throwing Things

Throwing things is a dream of either removing influences from your life or seeking to reduce the clutter in your life. If you throw things directly at someone, this could also be a dream of anger, beating, or power against another.

Bus

Traveling by bus is considered by many to be the most uncomfortable means of transportation. Indeed, bus terminals are often very small, and reveal an interesting cross section of society.
Bus travel can also be very time-consuming, although it allows a fuller experience of the country. You may feel inefficient or unable to afford better means when you dream of travel by bus. In defense of busses, the passenger camaraderie is very high, especially on long trips or packaged tours. Who your dream companions are during the bus trip should be considered carefully, as well as your interactions with them. It may be that you have collected a valued set of friends for a journey of particular shared interest. If this is the case, finding a common thread amongst either the people or the sights would be useful.

Time Riddles

Timing and time riddles can be a difficult element of dream interpretation. Since dreams occur in a fantasy-like mindset, there are few controls on how time is perceived. One dream may seem to happen in real time: twenty minutes of events in a given REM cycle. Another dream may occur in a series of edited scenes that happen over the course of days, weeks, years, or an unfathomable period of time. Other dreams still may seem outside of any time constraints whatsoever.
One way to discern elapsed dream time is to simply recall the scenes and then try to identify any chronological changes. Another is to think about numbered items in the dream and associate that number with time periods in your life. If your dream watch says 5:15, this could be the time, the date, or an elapsed time between two ages; in this case, perhaps five and fifteen years old.
These riddles are both frustrating and wonderful. In them are the deeper nuances of dreaming. You may readily observe a cyclical pattern to life that repeats periodically. You may recall when your maturity or self-awareness changed and how long that transition took. Numerous insights are available in these ways.
Sometimes the aspect of time within a dream may affect the emotional milieu of the dream; a real time dream will probably offer a different emotional background than a scattered time dream.

Jury

If you dream of being on a jury, you may feel that an important decision needs to be made in your life, or that you need to help a friend or loved one make a decision.
If you find yourself on trial before a jury, you likely are experiencing some sort of pressure or judegement form others in your waking life.

Helicopter

The helicopter is an interesting object in our culture. Originally, it was thought that the helicopter would replace the car someday. However, prices never came down, leaving the helicopter as an icon of wealth or authority. Since the Vietnam War, helicopters have become more associated with conflict than commuting.
To dream of a helicopter probably means that you envision yourself in a situation of potential hazard or needing to be whisked away from your present circumstances. The former would be expressed in a helicopter as a means of escape. The latter equates images of romance and wealth.

Balding

Losing hair or becoming suddenly and completely bald are two common dream events. Often dreams of this nature reflect concern about your attractiveness or sexual virility. If you are forcibly shaved during your dream, this may be a concern over sterilization, as hair often plays a significant role in male gender identity.
For many men and some women, the loss of hair in dreams may also reveal anxiety about growing old. Even if the dreamer is not showing signs of balding in waking life, he may lose his hair in an age-anxiety dream.
Yet another possible interpretation of hair loss in a dream is the feeling that an illness of some sort may be imminent.

Diamonds

The diamond is a crystal of riches, romance, and strength. It is the hardest and most valuable stone. Dreams containing diamonds may be a wish for wealth or a reflection on the futility of riches. Do you perceive others as substantially more or dramatically less well-off than yourself? Do the diamonds inspire fear, embarrassment, or boasting on your part towards others?

Message Received in Code

The dream plot often is forwarded along by very unusual events (e.g. suddenly the room turns blue and everyone disappears). Other times, a cryptic message works its way into the dream event.
Often the code is symbolic rather than alpha-numeric, though it can be either. Other times, it is a riddle. Whether or not you can decode the message becomes the dream conflict.
If you can decode the message, does it mean anything to you? It may make perfect sense to you, but mean nothing to others in the dream, or vice versa. The point is that the message was decoded, showing insight. The relative meaning lies in whether or not the insight can be appropriated by the dreamer.
If you cannot decode the message, you may be experiencing life as incomprehensible at some level. This dream reveals that truth of your conscious life. The key is to look at who in the dream serves as a source of knowledge about the code.
Who gave you the message?
What was the reaction of others is when they learned of the message?
Are they worried for you, nonchalant, or joyful?

Violence

In dreams, facets of personality that never get displayed in waking life can become quite animated. Nowhere is this more apparent than with violent behavior. The violence may be justified or random, but it is often extremely graphic. It is so graphic, in fact, that you should understand that this is normal-albeit disturbing-and that its presence is almost always an exaggeration of another point.
Violence can be an off-shoot of heroic behavior, especially in rescuing dreams. Terrorism in the news has made all of us aware that the enemies can be in our midst. Kidnapping dreams, escape dreams, and protecting dreams are other versions of this type of violence.
Violence may come unexpectedly, as well (suddenly, you are just stomping some poor guy's head with no apparent provocation).
Often these dreams deal with repressed anger towards authority figures. While wanting to become physically aggressive toward others is a common desire, it should never be acted on in waking life, and it very rarely is. However, the dream releases the anger for you. If you have recurring dreams of this nature, you may want to consider a mediated session with the object of your anger; or re-arrange your circumstances.
If you are the aggressor, does the violence frighten you or make you feel powerful?
If you are the witness to violence, do you feel ambivalent to it or does it somehow affect you?

Poison

Dreams of poison often fall into general categories of power, suicide, or revenge. Poison is a powerful image for us, as from childhood we were all taught the dangers of it.
Power dreams often involve drinking poison without consequence. Many times, the dream world provides the ability to act without concern for outcomes and to assert free will over social constraints. The poison dream can represent this, depending on what poison was consumed, under what initiative, and who watched the deed.
Suicide-by-poisoning dreams often have little to do with suicide, but much to do with peer-pressure, difficult work relationships, or a lack of personal power. In dreams of this nature, the dream may be teaching you that a certain part of your life is self-destructive.
Finally, the dream of poisoning as an act of revenge may reveal latent or unexpressed anger towards the object of your revenge. Poison is a satisfying way to commit a crime because we often associate it with painful death and sneakiness.

Colors

Most of the time, we dream of colors because visually we live in a colorful world. However, when those colors become prevalent or unusual in the dream, they may be an interpretive object in themselves. This is especially true if an entire dream setting in is different hues of a particular color or if a significant object seems unique for its coloring.
Since many colors have archetypal feelings and emotions attached to them, the approach taken by Jung is often helpful. However, it may be that a particular color transcends a Jungian meaning because of an experience you have had with it. If Jungian types do not fit, try freely associating significant objects from your waking life with the same color as the dream object for meaning.
Color -- positive meaning (negative meaning)Blue -- nobility or tranquillity (depression)Black -- power (death or mourning)Brown -- Earth, nature (scatological)Gray -- neutral (passionless, death)Green -- fertility, renewal, wealth (greed, envy)Red -- sacrifice, sex (carnality, taboo sex, humiliation, physical injury)Orange -- adventure, change (forced change, disruptiveness)Purple -- royalty, positive personal growth (injury)Yellow -- enlightenment, (cowardice, illness)White -- purity, wholesomeness, sacred ritual (emptiness)

Movie

Attending

What kind of movie do you go see and with whom? If this is among the most memorable dream images, you may be trying to initiate or resolve a relationship issue by watching others portray it. The movie plot will often provide guidance on how to do this. Even if the movie is a film with nonsensical or overwhelmingly destructive events, your subconscious chose it for some desire that lurks below the surface.
You may be searching for a vicarious substitution for a life you consider mundane. In the film, what particularly (un)satisfactory events are portrayed by whom and how do those events parallel your own life?

Starring In

One of the strangest feelings to have is the dream that includes watching yourself in a movie. For starters, you are two places at once-watching yourself and being in the movie. While sometimes your dream logic says, oh yeah, this is a film I am in, other times it fails you. These turn into dream events that contain an out-of-body experience.
In either case, there is often a sense of derealization of whatever is occurring in the movie plot. There can be several reasons for this. One is to lower the psychological pain of a dream. Since you are watching yourself in the dream, you can reinforce your defense mechanism even in the subconscious state by saying, It's only a dream. Another is to allow you to evaluate the events more objectively. Insight requires self-awareness. Self-awareness requires being able to discern your power and action in the world. The movie makes power and action more observable.
The other version of the movie dream is simple wish-fulfillment. Hey, you oughtta be in pictures. So you are.
Is your life so good or so bad that at times you wonder when the dream will end? These feelings in waking life can create derealization in dreaming perceptions.

Boss

The boss relationship can be translated from dreams in two ways:
1. A significant relationship from some other area of life-spouse, sibling, parent, or friend-may become your boss. If someone from another corner of life becomes your boss, it is likely that you feel that person exerting too much control over your life. It is easy to allow constructive relationships to become controlling at times. You may experience this dream in your usual worksetting, or in some nonsense environment. The place where you and this surrogate boss work together in this dream says something about the area of influence in question.
2. Conversely, your boss may become a sibling, spouse, or someone other than a vocational supervisor. If your boss is squirting into your personal life through images of some other, more personal relationship, it may be time to assess your work. Workaholism is the great debilitator of many homes. If your employment is fulfilling other roles reserved for other persons in waking life, it may be time to assess the emotional investment you have in your work. This dream can be healthy in the collegiality it reflects, or as a warning sign for the drain work is putting on your emotional resources.
Finally, if you dream of your boss in the worksetting, you probably are stressed out by your job for any number of reasons. Dreaming of your job in general-particularly if the dream is unremarkable and takes place in real time-usually indicates that you are feeling overworked or are behind at work.

Sarcasm

Dreams are as open to humor as they are to any other part of your personality. Sarcasm is a particularly interesting facet of humor that emphasizes the shortcomings of a person. Consequently, whether you initiate or are the butt of the sarcasm shows something about your place in the dream.
Sometimes, the entire dream falls into this category. The dream is almost a cruel joke played upon you. This may be a dream that sheds light on your relationships or potential in the world. This dream may occur when you are in a situation that could potentially place you in circumstances that are way over your head.
Dream sarcasm often has metaphorical meaning related to waking events and vice-versa. For example, a phrase used by others to torment you may become a central object in the dream that you either worship or loathe.

Children

Children are fascinating characters in dreams because they reflect so honestly our own thoughts and feelings. Children are often afraid of what is worth being feared, have deeply held senses of right and wrong and show reckless abandon in both likes and dislikes.
To dream of being befriended by a child can be a complex event. If you know the child in waking and dreaming, this may reflect a wish-fulfillment or projection. If you do not know the child from your waking life, he or she may be a reflection of yourself at a particular time in your past. The main puzzle piece to discern is the nature of your activity and relationship with the child.
Parenting a child can also be a simple wish-fulfillment dream or something more complex. Parenting a child may be a way that your brain is working out some difficulty in your own relationship to your parents or another relationship of responsibility.
Parenting can also be a power projection dream. There may be a relationship in your life where you feel out of control and want to bring it back under control. Since most of us have felt our parents exert emotional power toward us at different times, we are now doing likewise in the dream relationship.
The converse of this is dreaming of yourself as the child while other figures from your life exert power in different areas. You may have dreamt that you were playing dress-up in the office and your co-workers were all regular adult figures. In waking, you may in fact experience them as more powerful than yourself or even excessively powerful.

Journey

The longer one's life, the more apparent it becomes that life is not a destination, but rather a journey of searching for meaning, understanding, and ultimately happiness. While we don't necessarily characterize our dreams as journeys, there is a sense in which our waking journey is sometimes affected by our most powerful or memorable dreams.
Many dreams include needing to travel from A to B before progress is made in completing the dream task. Many times, this traveling is the challenge. The elements may be uncooperative or contrary. Traveling machines may be magically powerful or nonsensical and unreliable. Sometimes, we are simply walking across a field, down a road, up a hill, through the forest, or along the cliffs on our journey. The environment around us along the way can be familiar, strange, friendly, anxiety-ridden, and a host of other possibilities. The purpose of the traveling and the companions along the way can be significant.
The journey is often a symbol for trying to find what is needed to bring life into equilibrium. This is the task of finding one's place in the universe. It could also be characterized as the archetypal search for the most authentic self. In either of these metaphors, there is the idea that our souls tend to be a little restless at times. The journey is the task of finding out what the soul needs to quiet that restlessness.
In waking life, this is played out by the I need a change feeling that crops up every now and then. The process of individuating yourself from the expectations and influences of others conjures feelings along these lines. In dreaming, we often travel alone, leaving others behind by choice or necessity, to find what our next task is.
Along the way, who we meet and what we partake in may reveal much about where our individual struggle is in the waking, conscious self. We may encounter strangers with whom there is an adversarial relationship or a romantic one. We may encounter mystical strangers who unlock unknown powers within us or withdraw particular powers from us. In either case, the journey is our personal goal, and how we experience others during the process says much about the relationships of our waking world.
Is your destination known to others, or held in confidence?
Do others invite you to accompany them, vice versa, or are you on a solitary trip?
Can others direct you, or are you traveling to an unknown place? Answers to these questions influence the meaning of the dream in your life.

Aloneness

There is a pronounced difference between being alone and being abandoned. Being alone can be an intentional choice by the dreamer. This usually means finding a time for personal reflection and inner growth. The waking equivalent is the cocooning phenomenon. People are staying home more-regrouping and rebuilding their inner strength.
Aloneness may herald transition or rites of passage. When we move from childhood to adulthood, there are habits, attitudes, and relationships that are left behind. This void can create an image of aloneness. Dreams like this often present themselves as the dreamer traveling somewhere alone. Who is separating from you, and why, in waking life? Is this mutual, at your initiative, or another's wishes against your will?

Pillow

The pillow is a central feature of sleep and works its way into dreams at times. Mainly, it is as an object of protection and security. Many times, dreams of pillows include either numerous pillows or rooms that are like gigantic pillows. The former is a desire to experience the world as benevolent. The latter version may be defined as a Freudian desire to return to the womb or motherly protection.
Some people believe that certain stones or crystals can be placed under the pillow as part of the dream incubation process.

Archetypes

An archetype is a way of seeing oneself in a dream experience. Many people dream at one time or another of doing something heroic. We all know what a heroic action is by a sort of mystic human understanding of goodness and sacrifice. This mystic understanding is the archetype-the event of being a hero is an archetype experience.
There are many archetypes in life. Carl Jung formulated these out of his studies of human beings and mythologies around the world. In many ethnic and religious backgrounds, there are myths that embody the ultimate version of various archetype experiences. An example of a hero myth may be Hercules or Sinbad.
We are prone to see ourselves as archetypal figures at transition points in our lives.
Change generally brings about anxiety and self-reflection. Going from education to the work force, singlehood to marriage, or childless to parent are some archetypal transitions.

Ironing

The iron is a pretty mundane item and a generally despised chore. Feeling a little like Cinderella, you may be wondering if your life will ever be exciting. The iron can also be a symbol of conflict or servitude if the ironing is not for ones own benefit.
Usually, a dream involving ironing is just a mundane dream that may cause you to realize how mundane your life has become and possibly encourage you to try something new.

Time Travel

Time travel is a common dream event. There is rarely a time machine involved. Rather, the dream story simply unfolds in another era of time, past or future. These dreams often represent either the romance or hopes we attribute to moments other than our present. You may find that the dream stems from your desire to identify with particular mores of a time period or to influence certain events.
If you spontaneously dream of going backwards in time, it is most likely a dream of romantic wish-fulfillment. The good old days seem to conjure images of heroism, nobility, morality, and social life that, while not altogether accurate, draw our admiration. Often there is a facet of your personality that you feel you could more easily tap into as a pioneer, statesman, damsel in distress, or some other stereotypical image of history.
Most times, the time travel is confluent with your particular image of an archetypal dream character. For example, if you are dreaming a warrior/hero archetype, you may personify yourself in the dream as a medieval knight.

Mother

Dreams that include your mother can be extremely varied in meaning depending on your relationship with her and particular situations at any given time.
Did you perceive your mother as omniscient and all-loving at a particular phase of childhood?
Has your mother's relationship with you included power struggles or inappropriate intrusions into your affairs?
Have you lost contact with your mother (either by death or by choice) and left some issues unresolved?
The answers to these questions will help decipher many of the images that appear with your mother in your dreams.

Cliffs

Cliffs are majestic, dangerous places. If you are on cliffs in your dreams, you probably feel your life has a combination of these two qualities. Determining which one is prevalent depends on who is with you, or why you are on the cliffs. The thrill of the danger may be the allure of the cliffs, depending on your companionship. Is there a secret crush or forbidden love with you on the cliffs?
Dreams of cliffs may lead to that falling sensation that wakes you up. The cliff, in this case, may be a metaphor of your own consciousness at that moment. If your cliffs are on the seashore, you may be conjuring something out of the ocean or expecting to see something out upon the ocean. Dreams of this nature may reflect the archetype of fertility or creative power.

Selling

Selling can be presented as your employment, as in selling to others in a retail environment; or it can be more personal, as in selling your possessions. Obviously, if your waking livelihood includes sales, dreams of selling will not be unusual. Unless you sell something particularly sentimental, most of the remarks here will not apply to you.
If you are employed in selling in dreamland, the emotional transaction at work is persuasion. The object you are trying to sell may be ridiculous or an actual consumer item. Depending on which it is, this may reflect whether or not you feel you will ever be persuasive. Your clientele also is important to this dream. Do they have something in common?
Do you see yourself as persuasive in waking life, or do you need to develop those skills more fully? If you are having a yard sale in your dream, you may be trying to creatively solve a financial problem or be feeling burdened by your possessions. If the yard sale has an element of emotional darkness, there may be financial anxiety involved that precipitated the need for downsizing the household. Dreams of this nature often try to show feelings of over extension. Heed them.
If you are selling items of great sentimental value, you may be seeing yourself as divesting from a particular relationship. This can happen at times of transition into adulthood or (desire for) marital separation. Many times, you do not actually perceive the emotional content of the items in your dream the way you would in waking. They are simply extras that you no longer wish to carry through life.
The act of selling in a dream, usually, is in the most general terms symbolic of some sort of emotional transaction that may be taking place in life.

Relatives

Images also include Father, Mother, Sibling
Relatives are powerful features of both the waking and dreaming worlds. As a consequence, interpreting dreams of relatives is a complex task. There are hundreds of different possible interpretations that originate within the world of the dreamer as well as from classical psychology.
The reason dreams of family are so prevalent is that everyone has a desire to know what normal is, and then act that way in the world. Countless times, clients will come to therapy complaining, I just want a normal family, or I just want a normal marriage. The definition of this idea comes from our relatives and how well they fit into or detract from our idea of normalcy.
Dreams of family may affirm or undermine normal feelings about ourselves. Extended family relations are very significant in developing the family lore and ritual. As you mature and reflect critically on normalcy in your understanding of it, these rituals either affirm or work against the norms of your perspective. Who does what, why and when is often determined by influences in the extended family. The result is that we construct a family story that defines who we are in our family and what our family means in the world around us.
Relative dreams of this type lend themselves to archetypal interpretations that offer insight into how the dreamer sees him or herself in relation to the larger human community represented by the relatives. To interpret dreams of this kind, discern what relatives were in the dream and whether they are still living or dead in waking life. Many times, relatives who have passed away are alive in our dreams. Usually, one of two circumstances exist. Either the activity in the dream reminds you of a ritual aspect of the relationship with this relative, or your relationship with the relative is incomplete. Many times, dreams about relatives are recurring. These can have both prophetic or historic meaning. This is especially true in cases where the central characters are relatives with whom there is either emotional tension or uncertainty concerning their health. If there is emotional tension, the dream may be identifying the source of the tension to create an opportunity to resolve it. If there are particular relatives with precarious health, the dreams may resolve, or warn of, impending deaths in the family.
The place and occasion for the relatives' appearance in the dream are important to the interpretation of it. For example, if only the women in your family appear with you in a dream of an activity that they have historically participated in together, you may see yourself as joining with the family in new ways. There are numerous variations on this dream:
1. Not wanting to join the activity (ambivalence about traditional expectations).
2. Joining a group of exclusively opposite-gendered family members (confusion about fitting into the family on your terms).
3. Joining a group of family members with something unique in common; i.e., all bald, all with cancer, all widowed, all single, etc. (identifying with or having concern over ending up like others whom you chagrin or pity).
While family members are powerful dream icons, their meaning can be quite diverse. Often, free association is the key to discerning their impact on your dreams and the meaning of that influence.
Individual family members, especially fathers and mothers (or representations of them) are often prominent in dreams. For better or for worse, they are primary influences in the shaping of our personalities. This includes how we respond to our environmental stimuli, as well as how we value ourselves and our inner nature.
Consequently, another significant aspect of relative dreams is what these dreams show about how our individual ego development and personality strength have been influenced by individual relatives, for good or ill. Personality strengths and weaknesses often express themselves in alternating generations. For example, in one generation, the father is relentless in expressing anger. In the next generation, anger becomes taboo and inexpressible. In this way, dreams of the individual parent often have a compensatory effect.
Often you will have a dream that includes a particular family member in a very unusual situation for that person (for example: scuba diving with Grandma). Often in this type of dream there will be plenty of other symbols and images that point to the true meaning of what the dream has in store for you.

Amusement Parks and Carnivals

As settings for dreams, these are ambiguous places. It seems as though amusement parks often include elements that we consider to be the best and worst in life.
Many of us have enjoyed these places tremendously, but have also seen, smelled, or actually experienced the consequences of overdoing it: vomiting. Carnivals also include a very wonderful or frightening collection of personalities. These personalities may intimidate us at times. Sometimes the fright comes from a figure we love, such as a parent who doesn't really enjoy the carnival, but endures it for the children.
Eventually, the illusion of the idyllic family outing is transformed to an angry scene. Who are you with in the carnival and how do you experience the time there?
Finally, carnivals are full of out-of-control experiences. Being out of control can be ecstatic and wonderful. In these instances it may remind us of a sexual experience.
However, it can be terrifying to people with fairly rigid waking boundaries. Spinning and riding fast are two chaos images often associated with carnivals. Ferris wheels reflect times to remove oneself from the midway to a quieter perspective, unless one is afraid of heights. In what way are the rides metaphors for your life? In other words, how is your life like a rollercoaster, merry-go-round, or other central feature of the park?