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The Book of Psychic Symbols: Interpreting Intuitive Messages
A strong feeling, a remarkable coincidence, a strange dream . . . What may seem ordinary could actually be an important message from a deceased loved one, spirit guide, or your higher self. Open to a wealth of guidance and opportunities by learning how to recognize and interpret the signs and synchronicities all around us. Expand your awareness of the symbols in your life, strengthen your intuition, overcome challenges, and manifest your desires. This experiential guide includes:
A dictionary of more than 500 traditional symbols Practical exercises to develop your intuitive abilities Guidance in defining your own personal symbols Explanation of how to use chakras and auras Stories and true-life psychic experiences Praise:
Melanie Barnum offers a vast array of traditional interpretations sprinkled with her own insightful experiences, making The Book of Psychic Symbols an invaluable contribution to every psychic's library.--Elizabeth Harper, author of Wishing: How to Fulfill Your Heart's Desires
A dictionary of more than 500 traditional symbols Practical exercises to develop your intuitive abilities Guidance in defining your own personal symbols Explanation of how to use chakras and auras Stories and true-life psychic experiences Praise:
Melanie Barnum offers a vast array of traditional interpretations sprinkled with her own insightful experiences, making The Book of Psychic Symbols an invaluable contribution to every psychic's library.--Elizabeth Harper, author of Wishing: How to Fulfill Your Heart's Desires
271 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 20, 2012
Loved it! Keeping it next to my bed for referencing dreams also. Did most of the exercises and look forward to repeating and doing the rest!
March 6, 2017
This is a fabulous book for anyone dipping their toe into the world of intuition. This book reveals secrets that anyone can learn about the different kinds of psychic ability and says that everyone has psychic abilities and can learn how to use them in every day life. It's clear. It's easy to read and I've got it on my coffee table for every day reference.
December 29, 2024
This is a fabulous book! Easy to understand, very clear and good writing, and a must for everyone wanting to learn and become more confident in their abilities. There are some quick and fun exercises to do as well. Can't recommend this book enough!
March 27, 2018
This is a comprehensive and interesting book about how to connect with different symbols and what they mean for you. By giving you the traditional definitions of more than 500 common symbols that you may receive when you connect with Spirit and your intuition, you can decide for yourself if that's the right definition for you, or if your meaning is a little (or a lot) different.
The book is also full of exercises to help you connect with your own intuition and inner knowing so you can develop your own intuitive and psychic abilities. It's a great resource and I highly recommend it to my students as I teach them about symbols and signs from Spirit and how to develop their own symbol dictionary.
The book is also full of exercises to help you connect with your own intuition and inner knowing so you can develop your own intuitive and psychic abilities. It's a great resource and I highly recommend it to my students as I teach them about symbols and signs from Spirit and how to develop their own symbol dictionary.
June 9, 2013
A good reference book for dream work and everyday symbology.
January 25, 2014
Read entire book and took notes. I feel that it is a good reference book for anybody.
January 14, 2019
A very helpful book to introduce you to basic psychic meaning.
April 10, 2019
Amazing, love it. Definitely helpful resource.
September 3, 2026
The Book of Psychic Symbols is a very useful exploration of something that becomes increasingly important once you start doing psychic work regularly. Psychic information rarely arrives as a perfectly articulated sentence. It tends to come through images, sensations, fragments, dreams, associations, coincidences, and symbols, and learning how to interpret that material is a skill in itself.
What I liked most about Melanie Barnum's approach is her recognition that symbols have both collective and personal meanings. The book includes more than 500 traditional interpretations, but she encourages you to develop your own symbolic vocabulary rather than treating the dictionary as an absolute authority. A dog might conventionally symbolize loyalty, for example, while someone whose formative experience with dogs involved fear may have a completely different immediate association. Context matters.
That makes the subject especially interesting psychologically. Our minds are constantly forming associations through memory and experience, much of which remains outside conscious awareness. Dreams demonstrate just how readily the psyche can communicate through strange combinations of images and metaphor, and psychic perception can have a similarly symbolic quality. Learning your recurring symbols can therefore become partly an exercise in understanding the language of your own unconscious.
The more difficult question is whether every symbol originates there. If an unexpected image conveys accurate information about a person or situation that you had no ordinary way of knowing, we're moving from psychology into parapsychology. I think that boundary is one of the most interesting places in psychic development because the same internal vocabulary may carry material from memory, intuition, imagination, unconscious processing, or genuinely anomalous perception.
Barnum provides plenty of exercises for developing this awareness, along with material on synchronicity, meditation, auras, chakras, dreams, and intuitive development. I especially appreciated the emphasis on noticing symbols in everyday life because it trains attention. Becoming psychic isn't only about having increasingly dramatic experiences. A great deal of development involves becoming sensitive to impressions that were probably being overlooked before.
The section of traditional meanings is useful as a reference, although it was also the part I found somewhat less essential. Symbol dictionaries can give you possibilities, but the most valuable dictionary is eventually the one you build from your own experiences. I would have loved even more material devoted specifically to tracking symbols over time, testing interpretations against feedback, and learning how personal symbolic language develops through repeated psychic work.
That is also why I think keeping records is so important. If a red bird repeatedly appears in your mind before receiving particular kinds of information, the pattern becomes meaningful because you've observed it repeatedly rather than deciding in advance what a red bird must signify. That kind of feedback helps separate genuine patterns from interpretations constructed after the fact.
As a practical introduction to psychic symbolism, though, this is a strong resource and one I can imagine keeping nearby for reference. Barnum makes a good case that receiving an impression is only half of psychic perception. Learning how your mind translates information into a language you can actually understand is the other half, and The Book of Psychic Symbols provides a very accessible place to begin learning that language.
What I liked most about Melanie Barnum's approach is her recognition that symbols have both collective and personal meanings. The book includes more than 500 traditional interpretations, but she encourages you to develop your own symbolic vocabulary rather than treating the dictionary as an absolute authority. A dog might conventionally symbolize loyalty, for example, while someone whose formative experience with dogs involved fear may have a completely different immediate association. Context matters.
That makes the subject especially interesting psychologically. Our minds are constantly forming associations through memory and experience, much of which remains outside conscious awareness. Dreams demonstrate just how readily the psyche can communicate through strange combinations of images and metaphor, and psychic perception can have a similarly symbolic quality. Learning your recurring symbols can therefore become partly an exercise in understanding the language of your own unconscious.
The more difficult question is whether every symbol originates there. If an unexpected image conveys accurate information about a person or situation that you had no ordinary way of knowing, we're moving from psychology into parapsychology. I think that boundary is one of the most interesting places in psychic development because the same internal vocabulary may carry material from memory, intuition, imagination, unconscious processing, or genuinely anomalous perception.
Barnum provides plenty of exercises for developing this awareness, along with material on synchronicity, meditation, auras, chakras, dreams, and intuitive development. I especially appreciated the emphasis on noticing symbols in everyday life because it trains attention. Becoming psychic isn't only about having increasingly dramatic experiences. A great deal of development involves becoming sensitive to impressions that were probably being overlooked before.
The section of traditional meanings is useful as a reference, although it was also the part I found somewhat less essential. Symbol dictionaries can give you possibilities, but the most valuable dictionary is eventually the one you build from your own experiences. I would have loved even more material devoted specifically to tracking symbols over time, testing interpretations against feedback, and learning how personal symbolic language develops through repeated psychic work.
That is also why I think keeping records is so important. If a red bird repeatedly appears in your mind before receiving particular kinds of information, the pattern becomes meaningful because you've observed it repeatedly rather than deciding in advance what a red bird must signify. That kind of feedback helps separate genuine patterns from interpretations constructed after the fact.
As a practical introduction to psychic symbolism, though, this is a strong resource and one I can imagine keeping nearby for reference. Barnum makes a good case that receiving an impression is only half of psychic perception. Learning how your mind translates information into a language you can actually understand is the other half, and The Book of Psychic Symbols provides a very accessible place to begin learning that language.
September 1, 2026
One of the most frustrating questions when developing psychic ability is also one of the simplest: what does that mean? You receive an image during meditation, repeatedly notice the same animal, dream about a particular place, or have a color suddenly flash through your mind. Receiving the impression is only half the process. Learning how your own mind translates intuitive information into a symbolic language is where things become considerably more interesting, and The Book of Psychic Symbols does an excellent job exploring that territory.
What surprised me was how much actual psychic development Melanie Barnum includes here. I expected something closer to a dictionary of symbols, but she discusses intuition, clairvoyance, psychic senses, meditation, psychometry, remote viewing, chakras, auras, dreams, tarot and synchronicities, with exercises throughout for putting these ideas into practice. I particularly appreciated the distinction between traditional symbolism and personal symbolism. A snake, an ocean, the color red or a particular song may have generally accepted associations, but your subconscious and psychic faculties can develop an entirely individual vocabulary based upon your memories and experiences. Learning that vocabulary, recording impressions and looking for patterns over time strikes me as infinitely more useful than automatically reaching for somebody else's definition whenever an image appears.
There is a large dictionary containing hundreds of symbols in the latter portion of the book, and ironically this was less important to me than everything Barnum teaches before it. I can see myself consulting it for possibilities, particularly with dreams, but I wouldn't want a reference book to become an authority over my own intuition. Barnum thankfully seems to understand that. The traditional meanings provide somewhere to begin rather than somewhere you must end.
I've become increasingly fascinated by the idea that psychic development involves learning the peculiar language through which different layers of our consciousness communicate. Sometimes information arrives as a feeling, sometimes as an inexplicable knowing, and sometimes the mind seems to dress information in an image it knows we can understand. This book helped me pay considerably more attention to that last category. I finished it wanting to keep a separate journal specifically for recurring psychic symbols and discover which meanings reveal themselves through experience. For me, any psychic development book that inspires an entirely new practice has accomplished something worthwhile.
What surprised me was how much actual psychic development Melanie Barnum includes here. I expected something closer to a dictionary of symbols, but she discusses intuition, clairvoyance, psychic senses, meditation, psychometry, remote viewing, chakras, auras, dreams, tarot and synchronicities, with exercises throughout for putting these ideas into practice. I particularly appreciated the distinction between traditional symbolism and personal symbolism. A snake, an ocean, the color red or a particular song may have generally accepted associations, but your subconscious and psychic faculties can develop an entirely individual vocabulary based upon your memories and experiences. Learning that vocabulary, recording impressions and looking for patterns over time strikes me as infinitely more useful than automatically reaching for somebody else's definition whenever an image appears.
There is a large dictionary containing hundreds of symbols in the latter portion of the book, and ironically this was less important to me than everything Barnum teaches before it. I can see myself consulting it for possibilities, particularly with dreams, but I wouldn't want a reference book to become an authority over my own intuition. Barnum thankfully seems to understand that. The traditional meanings provide somewhere to begin rather than somewhere you must end.
I've become increasingly fascinated by the idea that psychic development involves learning the peculiar language through which different layers of our consciousness communicate. Sometimes information arrives as a feeling, sometimes as an inexplicable knowing, and sometimes the mind seems to dress information in an image it knows we can understand. This book helped me pay considerably more attention to that last category. I finished it wanting to keep a separate journal specifically for recurring psychic symbols and discover which meanings reveal themselves through experience. For me, any psychic development book that inspires an entirely new practice has accomplished something worthwhile.
July 3, 2017
Awful. Could only get through 2 chapters of nonsense.
March 16, 2021
Easy to read and fun! The author uses great exercises to help you understand the concepts!
September 26, 2017
Good reference book for those with metaphysical gifts. I found that it helped fill some gaps on what I've been seeing with my clients. Can also be used for dreams as well.
Easy to read and navigate format.
Easy to read and navigate format.
August 21, 2012
Good only for reference
April 18, 2017
Wished it contained more symbols and a better way to access the symbols
I purchased this book about a year and a half ago. I love that not only does it explain symbols, synchronicity, and psychic abilities as well as auras; but goes into detail about cultivating your abilities, understanding them, and using meditation and the importance of meditation. It contains about 500 symbols, but you'd have to flip through the pages to get through to a specific term/symbol which i hated and I wished it had more symbols. Other than that, Melanie Barnum covered many main key points regarding intuition, auras, synchronicity, symbols and the importance of symbols, the use of symbols for manifestation, visionary and meditative exercises, and talks about the importance of meditating.
I purchased this book about a year and a half ago. I love that not only does it explain symbols, synchronicity, and psychic abilities as well as auras; but goes into detail about cultivating your abilities, understanding them, and using meditation and the importance of meditation. It contains about 500 symbols, but you'd have to flip through the pages to get through to a specific term/symbol which i hated and I wished it had more symbols. Other than that, Melanie Barnum covered many main key points regarding intuition, auras, synchronicity, symbols and the importance of symbols, the use of symbols for manifestation, visionary and meditative exercises, and talks about the importance of meditating.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews