Seaweed is a common sight in many people’s dreams. It has various meanings, ranging from fertility to spirituality, depending on the context in which it is seen. In general, however, seeing seaweed in your dream indicates that you are going through some kind of life change or spiritual transformation.
Right here on Churchgists, you are privy to a litany of relevant information on spiritual meaning of seaweed, how seaweed shapes our past and future, and so much more. Take the time to visit our catalog for more information on similar topics.
Spiritual Meaning Of Seaweed
We never tried to hide our love for the sea. Actually, we’ve got several articles on Sea Magic. After all, for some of us, Poseidon is a patron god. Nevertheless, the sea is a source of endless wisdom, healing and magical powers. However, no one has paid enough attention to the herbs and powers of the sea, leaving a great source of life and magic away from their practice. We are not among those. Here, we are going to talk about seaweed, the common seaweed that is found anyway and is usually washed away from the depths of the seas and oceans. Old witches called the seaweed “Lady’s Tree.”. This plain and humble seaweed possesses many magical powers, according to the old witches.
The Magical Powers of Seaweed:
Spiritual Meanings of Seaweed:
To further explore the spiritual meanings of seaweed, we can look at the Bible for symbolism and stories that resonate with the qualities of this humble ocean plant. In the book of Genesis, it is said that God created the seas and all that dwells within them. Seaweed, as a product of the sea, can be seen as part of God’s creation and a symbol of His power and provision.
Furthermore, in the Bible, there are stories of Jesus using the sea as a backdrop for his miracles, such as walking on water and calming the storm. This connection between the sea and divine power further emphasizes the spiritual significance of seaweed and its magical properties.
| Symbolism | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Protection | Creating a shield of protection |
| Resilience | Ability to overcome challenges |
| Connection to the Divine | Enhancing spiritual connections |
| Manifestation | Bringing desires into reality |
Seaweed symbolizes fertility.
Seaweed is a symbol of fertility. The plants grow in the sea and reproduce quickly, producing many seeds or spores that drift on ocean currents and are eventually deposited on land. The meaning of this plant’s growth pattern suggests that an individual may be able to reach their goals quickly through hard work.
The motherly aspect of seaweed gives it another meaning: it can represent a protective presence watching over someone. This quality makes it appropriate for those who desire comfort from those around them, but do not wish to burden others with their problems or needs.
Seaweed suggests a motherly presence in your life.
Seaweed is a symbol of fertility, motherhood and nourishment. It is also associated with life, growth and the earth. This makes sense because seaweed grows in water and attaches to rocks or other surfaces in the ocean. If one has dreamt of eating seaweed or wearing it as clothing, then the interpretation will depend on whether you are male or female, but generally speaking, these dreams indicate that there is something in your life that needs attention—a matter that requires care and nurturing before it can grow to its full potential as part of you (or your family).
If you were eating seaweed, then this represents your need to look after yourself better if you want to experience greater success at work, school, etc., while if someone else was eating it, then they represent an aspect of yourself that needs looking after by taking better care of their health, emotional state, etc. For instance, if someone else was sitting down quietly eating seaweed while staring out across some water, then this would suggest that there may be someone close by who needs help finding their motivation again—perhaps even within themselves!
Seeing seaweed in a dream can mean you are going for a vacation.
Seeing seaweed in a dream can mean you are going for a vacation. Seaweed is associated with water, which of course is associated with travel. Travel itself is associated with vacations, and vacations are associated with rest and relaxation. So it makes sense that seaweed, which offers a relaxed feeling when you hold it in your hand or wear it around your neck, would be symbolic of the kind of rejuvenation that comes from taking time off from work to recharge.
Seaweed in a dream is also associated with gifts and celebrations
You may also see seaweed in your dream as a symbol of prosperity. Fertility and abundance are also associated with the meaning of seaweed. When you dream about eating seaweed, this may be a sign that you need to change your attitude toward life. You can choose to be more positive about things and enjoy what’s happening around you, or let negative feelings take over and bring down others around you as well.
If you see seaweed in your dream, there might be something nagging on your mind about work or school. It might also have to do with difficulties you’ve been facing at home.
- If you see seaweed in your dream, there might be something nagging on your mind about work or school. It might also have to do with difficulties you’ve been facing at home.
- Seaweed is associated with fertility and motherly presence. If you dream of picking up seashells, it could mean that someone close to you has been having trouble conceiving a child and wants your support. In this context, the shells represent the eggs of sea creatures such as mollusks.
- On the other hand, seaweed can also symbolize gifts and celebrations because seaweed was used for celebrations during ancient times when people didn’t have much wealth except for what they could fish out of their oceans for food or clothing needs! The Egyptians would even use seaweed as decoration during festivals like New Year’s Eve parties (also known as Yule). So if someone gives you an expensive gift while wearing beautiful clothes made from this kind of fabric material (like silk) then I hope it helps ease some financial burden off both sides too – especially those who don’t have access yet.”
Seaweed means freedom from oppression or distress.
Seaweed represents freedom from oppression or distress. The natural world is full of plants and animals that can help us find peace, so it’s no surprise that a plant like seaweed can provide these same benefits. If you’re feeling stressed out or worried about something in your life, try meditating on an image of seaweed.
There are a lot of associations with seaweed that may point to different interpretations of what it means when you see it in a dream.
Seaweed is a common food, and as such, it may be easy to associate it with nourishment in your dream. If you see seaweed in your dream, consider the following interpretations:
- Seaweed is used in Asian cooking as a wrap for sushi and other dishes. It can also be eaten on its own. Many people eat seaweed because it contains iodine, which helps maintain proper thyroid function and regulate metabolism.
- Seawage contains many nutrients such as vitamins A, B1 through 3, C, E and K; iron; calcium; magnesium; sulfur compounds (amino acids); amino sugars (polysaccharides) and fatty acids including omega-3s that are beneficial to the body when consumed regularly in small amounts.* Seaweed has been used throughout history by different cultures around the world for various purposes such as medicine or religious rituals.* People who practice eastern medicine often use seaweed wraps or poultices made from dried pieces of algae harvested off rocks near shorelines to treat pain from arthritis or back injuries.* Some Native Americans believe that eating certain types of seaweeds will help them connect with nature more easily because these plants grow close enough so water animals can feed off them too!
Magical Uses of Seaweed
Before we start though, we need to make it clear that
All Seaweeds are not the same!
Once we’ve established this, let’s see how we can safely and effectively employ the power of the sea in our practice.
In general, Seaweeds are considered carriers of good luck and abundance. As the sea is vast and full of hidden treasures, common seaweed is believed to be a link between the realm of the Land and the realm of the Sea. Therefore, herbs of the sea are conjuring the spirits that dwell in the deeps.
Element: Water
Alchemical Planet: Moon
Summoning Powers
Seaweed is considered to be a great tool to summon entities which dwell in the sea. Therefore we carefully burn it (usually close to sea coast – always use fire safety measures – don’t try it if it’s forbidden in your area) to summon
- Mermaids and Mermen to ask for their help.
- Undines as they are usually called the Elementals of the Water and the Sea
- Gods and Goddesses of the Sea like Poseidon, Amphitrite and Triton.
- Nymphs who dwell nearby.
- Summoning the Winds. As we’ve already told you, Winds are four Gods – which you can find here.
How to use Seaweed for Summoning Purposes:
Just gently and respectfully place in the waves a piece of dried seaweed, or burn it near the sea coast asking for what you desire.
How to Summon the Winds with Seaweed:
Before you try it, please make sure you know you really want it. Don’t just bother the Winds.
The spell is quite simple and it dates back to the Ancient Greece where Winds were Gods who came to support anyone who asked their help. It just requires you to find a long enough piece of seaweed. Now just whirl it clockwise over your head. Additionally whistle and call the name of one God of the Winds.
Naturally, the fame of this spell lived on in the Dark Ages. Back then it was believed that this spell is so strong that can even conjure a storm.
Attracting Customers
A common magical ritual is based on finding a small piece of seaweed. Witches gently rub it on new furniture and doorknobs to consecrate their new business place and bless it with the abundance of the sea. Another small piece (not the one you rubbed the place) is placed in pocket to attract money.
Repelling Powers
Sea is believed to be pure and cannot be desecrated. Therefore, its salt is believed to possess unlimited banishing powers. This is why we use it in Recipes like the Black Salt (soon to get it from our Official Magical Store) and Holy Water.
Therefore, Seaweeds are believed to embody the living powers of the Sea. So when waves wash out seaweeds, sea Witches gather it and place it outside their doors, on door knobs and hang it beside doorsteps to change bad luck and drive away evil forces. It is believed to possess magical powers to:
- drive away evil spirits
- change bad luck
- neutralise negative vibrations
- some sailors still carry a small piece of seaweed to ensure safe journeys
Protection Against fire and harm
Due to the fact that seaweeds are considered to embody the powers of the Sea, are kept in vases usually on mantelpiece or over the hearth and fireplace to protect the house against fiery fiends who bring violence, destructive fire and physical harm.
How Seaweed Shapes Our Past and Future
The cliffs carried the wind down, blasting the Margate shore on which we stood. The North Sea, gray and flat, pooled around my boots, and the dog—seeing waves for the first time—skipped away from the rising surf. There wasn’t any clear ground for us to stand on: The beach was blanketed in weeds spent by the winter tide. The smell of rot and salt had accumulated as I watched the waves lump new seaweeds onto the Kent coast—one of Britain’s richest for seaweeds.
No one was coming to the beach that day. It was only just April and cold. Britain was still held tight by travel restrictions, and we couldn’t leave the land we stood on. But the wrack and algae and brown kelp still moved—thriving amid the chalk reef of the shoreline. I lifted a frond of kelp with the toe of my boot, letting its length twine around me, and imagined its journey to shore. For seaweeds move wherever the sea—or we—might take them.
Algae, as a term, is a broad brushstroke: It gestures toward the difficult, unclassified things that live in the otherworld of water. Taking in some fifty thousand species in freshwater and salt, they span taxonomic kingdoms—from bacteria to the not-quite-plant, single- and multi-cellular—and depending on where you live, these classifications themselves can shift. Much of this is down to size. But seaweeds like kelp and wrack—the macroalgae of the world—capture our attention more readily.
Some twelve thousand species of seaweed have been recorded, and it is likely you’ll be familiar with some of them. They are the algae we eat: dulse, wakame, kombu. Or like bladder wrack, a source of iodine in medicines. Porphyra algae is processed to become the nori used in sushi or to make Welsh laverbread. They are a staple for nearly every coastal community. But move inland and seaweeds take on another connotation entirely, not as staple food, but as fertilizer and farm fodder.
They pervade even our land-bound lives: If you brushed your teeth today, your toothpaste may have contained seaweed as a gelling agent. Seaweed products are in everything from paper to pharmaceuticals to fuels. And in this shape-shifting space, they come to mean so much to humans: sustenance, familiarity, otherness, and futurity.
As a child, I was no lover of seaweeds. They were weeds after all, with the unwanted tendency to drift out of place. No matter that in my Taiwanese mother’s language they were seavegetables (海菜 | hǎicài), a term more resonant of sustenance. They were the things of another world that brushed at my legs as I swam, that evoked a rising terror.
And in this shape-shifting space, they come to mean so much to humans: sustenance, familiarity, otherness, and futurity.
I was a fearful child, and the same fear of seaweed I had while swimming carried over onto land. At the dinner table, I pushed away stray pieces of it, picked it out of stir-frys, and turned up my nose at nori. I couldn’t bring myself to eat the tofu-and-seaweed salads my sister loved or my mother’s sparerib soups strewn with kelp. For a long time, seaweed felt to me too redolent of the sea.
My Welsh grandparents and father spoke of laverbread: a seaweed puree made of boiled Porphyra algae. I couldn’t understand wanting to eat it; the squidge between my teeth and that murky fug of sea turned my stomach. My mother, I knew, wanted me to love these foods. But I was picky—more than picky—and more accustomed to the crunch of North American snacks than the bounce and bite my family sought.
But somewhere in growing up, my curiosity about algae shifted. I had long loved being in water, and it began to make little sense to be fearful of something that so often came from the place I loved. I lay in my bed often, imagining I was immersed in water, a pattern of shifting light dancing on my bedroom ceiling. I cannot entirely account for it, and perhaps it was a childish wish: I wanted, if such a thing were possible, to dwell entirely in a world dim-lit, filtered by a haze of plankton, in the bottom of a shallow sea. I was drawn by color—by the blue-green and olivine light of kelp—more than anything. I wanted to make seaweed a familiar thing—not some distant, othered thing—to know it as more than food, as more than fertilizer. I knew that how I imagined seaweed mattered.
In adulthood I turned, as I often do, to historic flora. In the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth, as botany became an acceptable, polite pastime for women in Britain, algae—and seaweeds especially—became something of a fashion. Without showy, sexualized flowers, seaweeds were considered particularly suitable for women to study.
I marveled at the digital archive of Anna Atkins’s 1840s cyanotypes of seaweed, merging art and science in creating a historic record of seaweeds on the Kent shore. And Amelia Griffiths, a prolific nineteenth-century botanizer of the shore, for whom at least two species of algae are named; Margaret Gatty, who authored two volumes on the subject; and Isabella Gifford, author of The Marine Botanist. All were among the many in a “seaweed sorority” that made enormous contributions to our understandings of algae at a time when women’s contributions to science were often sidelined.
I read how, famously, in 1963, seaweed farmers on Japan’s western coast erected a memorial to a British phycologist, Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, dubbed the “Mother of the Sea.” She had never set foot in Japan, but her studies of seaweed in Britain, published in Nature in 1949, solved a vital puzzle needed to revive the local nori industry: She was the first to document the life cycle of Porphyra, discovering that the spore stage of the seaweed relied upon the shells of bivalves. In Japan, the shells that normally littered the seabed had been decimated by mines during the war. It was this woman’s discovery that provided a pathway to thriving harvests again.
Reading all this, I wondered if the women who studied seaweeds felt something of kinship for their central—but visibly marginal—role in our world.
What do we make of the weediness of seaweeds? Of that facet of their existence that eludes familiarity and containment? We write it into our stories, and we try, futilely perhaps, to ascribe it a rightful, delimited place in the world.
In Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, the protagonist discovers a lunch box wrapped in a Ziploc bag off the coast of British Columbia, washed across the Pacific following the Japanese tsunami. It glints out at her from beneath a tangle of bull kelp, a talisman of past disaster and a literal embodiment of the migrations the sea makes possible.
Ozeki’s plot was rooted in reality. In 2012, fifteen months after the Tōhoku earthquake brought the sea to shore, a dock from Japan’s Aomori Prefecture washed up on an Oregon beach. The dock, according to the EPA, was “covered with organisms not native to North America, including sea stars, barnacles, mussels, amphipods, and algae.” Among the species recorded as having made the 5,000-mile journey was wakame kelp—the seaweed you may know from soups or salads.
We write it into our stories, and we try, futilely perhaps, to ascribe it a rightful, delimited place in the world.
Culinarily, Undaria pinnatifida is prized for its sweetness and texture. Being quite tender, it is well-suited to salads and soups, where it floats, diaphanous, unlike other kelps. Among invasion biologists, however, the species is classed as being among the world’s worst invasive species. Indigenous to the coasts of East Asia, wakame thrives in the sublittoral zone near the shore: in shallow waters, estuaries, and—as if to underscore the degree to which our fates are bound—on anthropogenic structures like docks.
And not simply due to the anomalies of floating docks, but thanks largely to the ship hulls and ballast waters of our cargo industries, wakame is now a species with a “global non-native range.” Read that again: It is everywhere, but still out of place.
Wakame now grows steadily along the coasts of Britain and Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. And while eradication programs have held little success, some are turning to other possibilities, like farming and harvesting the kelp. Most winter afternoons, I cook rice cake soup flecked with green strips of “invasive” wakame. Reading the packet, I learn that the seaweed I buy is hand-harvested off the Portuguese coast.
And this is where my hope to know seaweeds on their own terms—as something beyond our uses for it—dissolves. Because seaweeds remain bound to us and to our human stories. Because our movements around this globe cannot easily be undone. As we drive our desires across the world, the seaweeds are our passengers.
Ultimately, as I learned as a child and in growing up, how we imagine seaweed matters. Off the coast of South Africa, in the patch of ocean recently made famous by a man and an octopus, campaigners are now working to cultivate an identity for a wild kelp forest in the hopes of conserving it. The Great African Seaforest, so-named by the network of storytellers, filmmakers, and scientists at the Sea Change Project, is a crucially biodiverse ecosystem.
Kelp forests cover nearly a quarter of the world’s coastlines, where they help to prevent coastal erosion and sequester enormous amounts of the carbon we are so readily releasing into the atmosphere. But giant kelp, Macrocystis pyrifera, thrives in water between fifty and sixty degrees Fahrenheit (ten to fifteen degrees Celsius), and the oceans can no longer be relied upon to stay in that range. As we warm the world, kelp forests are disappearing: In Australia and Tasmania, for example, just 5 percent of the once-vast forest remains. And we now know that seaweeds hold the records of such transformations fast: At the Ocean Memory Lab in California, century-old seaweed samples have been used to extract data on oceanic conditions of the past.
The efforts behind the Great African Seaforest tell us that seaweeds rely upon us, too, for the stories we tell about them. More than heritage, however, seaweeds and algae more generally have come to occupy an imagined future in our world. We are dreaming of seaweeds beyond the sea.
North American and European agriculture are poised to turn toward aquaculture—particularly of seaweeds. Distant from the quaint seaweed farms of yore, kelp and algae are becoming cogs in an industrially farmed future. Algae is grown in tanks and from enormous cultivation rigs laid on the seabed. A Singapore-based entrepreneur has built a vertical algae farm, where seaweed grows upward, far from the sea. Seaweeds could be used to sequester carbon on large scales and serve as fodder for potential biofuels. They have become bioplastics, and proteins from algae have been genetically manipulated into more-drought-tolerant tobacco crops. The language around seaweed farming often evokes sustainability—underscoring how deeply our thinking about it is bound up with the future.
From climate change and ecological collapse to carbon capture, seaweeds are repositories of our greatest fears and grandest ambitions for the future. They unpick scientific paradigms, politics, and nationalisms, all the things that ask for circumstances, species, and people to stay in place. Standing on the shore in Margate, it was hard to imagine all this could come from the kelp tangled around my boots. Still I walked the beach, dodging waves, knowing that seaweeds teach us about softening the hard borders of our human worlds.
Conclusion
If you’ve been wondering what the spiritual meaning of seaweed is, there are a lot of associations with this plant that may point to different interpretations of what it means when you see it in a dream. It could be a sign that you’re thinking about taking a vacation or celebrating something special with family members. On the other hand, if you’re having difficulty at home or work then seeing seaweed may symbolize some sort of liberation from oppression or distress—something we all need from time to time!