Hands

Hands in dreams are the organs of agency. To lose one’s hands is a classical dream of helplessness; to find them newly capable, a gift arriving. Christian iconography gives the hand extraordinary weight — the hand of God, the stigmata, the blessing. Folk palmistry reads the life in the hand’s lines. Jungian analysis treats hand-dreams as the capacity to give and receive, to make and to hold. Notice whose hands you see and what they are doing. Hands that will not move often indicate a waking paralysis around a decision; hands that make something unexpectedly beautiful, a creative capacity the psyche is reporting newly available.