Blood

Your energy and sense of existence; link with your family such as feelings of connection or bonding, inherited tendencies – what we now call genes, but also includes inherited strengths and weaknesses of character; universal life or power in your life, therefore connection with humanity; pain or struggle; injury; death.

Very often it links with a feeling of being hurt or injured and of losing energy or the strength that enlivens you. But blood can represent pain, but also passions, deep feelings. It can refer to things that are deeply felt. We have passionate involvement with things. There are certain things that enter into us and cut us deeply. In some relationships we are opened up and we bleed even if the relationship is largely joyful, there still may be deeply felt and painful feelings in it.

Blood can also mean fertility as when it is connected with menstruation. It can be a painful cleansing and difficult period of releasing the old. The old dies away and leaves space for the new to grow.

In a more general sense blood can indicate one’s energy and sense of existence. In common language we link it with our family through feelings of connection or bonding, inherited tendencies – what we now call genes. It therefore includes inherited strengths and weaknesses of character. We say of such things – its in my blood.

Blood is often used as a symbol of universal life or power in ones life, therefore connection with humanity. Through this it depicts the universal pain or struggle met in human life, along with the possibility of injury and death. In ancient times blood was used as the first ritual sacrament. Later this was symbolised by wine or red ochre. It was noticed that at times of great change, such as birth or death, blood often preceded the change. Blood was seen as the carrier of the spirit of life and character that lived in a person or animal. If we think of what genes now are known to carry, the untold generations of human life, with all its pain, tragedy and wonder, then blood was seen as carrying this collective human experience. The blood brings to our consciousness the racial past. The blood brings to life within us the past lives of those who gave us our body.

Blood is sometimes felt as a link with the unconscious forces and sub-personalities within. It is a doorway to the subtle world of the unconscious. This connection is perhaps obvious in that for thousands of years, the blood was seen as the substance that carried in it the mystery of inheritance of physical and psychological features. What we now call genes was represented by the blood, and this is still true in some dreams. The blood in a dream can be the doorway through which you touch your racial and family past. The blood brings to life within you the past lives of those who gave you your body. In quite a real sense they live within you as a great group of people, or influences that need to be integrated for you to become a true individual.

When we see blood on the earth or on someone’s clothes, it suggests great injury or death. Blood on the earth therefore marked the spot of either a great battle, a death or a deep wounding. As such it was a marker, a memorial or sign of the act. So this aspect of blood in our dreams must be remembered.

In cultures such as the Macedonian, where symbols were often thought of in terms of good or bad luck, light blood represented good news, dark blood bad news.

For women there is obviously a strong link between bleeding and menstruation. Therefore in women’s dreams involving blood, the blood may depict whatever feelings, pleasure, difficulties are associated with menstruation and the power of female fertility for the dreamer. But you need to look to the theme and drama of the dream to see if this is a correct connection.

Bleeding: Most often relates to emotional or psychological hurt and loss of energy, but can also depict physical injury, or presentiment of it. Emotional hurt could mean hurtful remarks, for instance being told we are not loved – these can sap our motivation to live and may be depicted as blood. The dream blood can denote injury, often from past trauma, which is causing us to lose energy or motivation. It can represent our fundamental biological, evolutionary life – thus a link with all life, so seen as a sacrament, the sacred wine that links our separate existence with the universal sentience and energy of life. This is portrayed not as injury but nourishment, wine or bloody meat.

Blood on hands: Feelings of guilt about something. Perhaps you have killed the best in yourself or your children in some way.

Sometimes, as mentioned above, the blood can be a sacrament. As such it is not shown as emerging from an injury or wound but as nourishment, wine or bloody meat.

Blood flowing from a crack: Possibly menstruation or loss of virginity.

Blood on the ground: Someone hurt or dead.

Bloody clothes: Personal emotional hurt or injury, perhaps even death of someone.

Blood Sample: This can represent many things depending upon the rest of the dream. It could suggest and illness, a way of tracing your identity with DNA, or it could be a drug test.

Blood sucked from you or sucking from another: Feeling that you are losing your very life force to someone, or taking energy and life from someone else. Sometimes sex is felt as this. The umbilical connection in the womb is sometimes felt as the life giving connection that if cut off prematurely, is such a loss that expenditure of energy in sex may be felt as vampirism.

In sexual dreams: May refer to loss of virginity, menstruation or fertility; or hurt to sexual drive.

See blood under archetypes.

Idioms: After ones blood; bleeding heart; bleed someone white; blood boil/run cold; blood brother; blood is thicker than water; blood letting; blood money; blood on ones hands; blood out of a stone; blood relative; blood sucker; blue blood; cold/hot blood; draw blood; fresh blood; in the blood; in my blood; ones heart bleeds; out for blood; sweat blood; taste blood; young blood.

Useful questions:

What part of my body – or the body – is the blood coming from, and what does that suggest about any hurt I may be suffering? (Look up part of body).

What is my relationship with the blood in terms of what I feel, my interaction or how I deal with it?

What can I understand from the theme and drama of the dream in terms of my life giving processes?