What Does Dreaming of Grasshoppers Mean?

If you find yourself dreaming of grasshoppers, chances are, you would wake up and forget about your dream. Grasshoppers, after all, are small insects and they are very easy to overlook.

Keep in mind that grasshoppers are quite different from locusts.

Locusts are hard to overlook. They travel in swarms. They can eat up all the vegetation surrounding you in a very short period of time.

It’s safe to say that when you dream of locusts, it usually portends negative things. But with grasshoppers, it’s quite a different picture altogether.

Since they are generally harmless and they are quite small, it’s very easy to forget about dreaming of grasshoppers. Chances are, they are just one of the many dreams that you experience in a typical eight-hour sleeping period.

If you’re like most people, you probably would remember that dreams that have more graphic elements like dreaming of witches, being chased by the Devil, or possibly being eaten up by cannibals.

But grasshoppers? Nah! They’re so easy to forget.

But if you have been dreaming of grasshoppers and the image of these small, six-legged insects keep appearing again and again, you might want to sit up and pay attention. Your subconscious is trying to get across very nuanced truths about your daily waking life.

These might exactly be the kind of messages that you need to be aware of, but you’re having a tough time learning about them because they are so easy to overlook.

Grasshopper Dream Meaning and Interpretation

At its most basic, a grasshopper symbolizes your natural side. This is the part of you that is at one with Nature.

With all things being equal, you are part of the natural flow of life and you contribute to the balance of nature.

What does this mean in practical terms? This means that your grasshopper dream relates to your power to get along with others and be part of the flow of value among people.

The fact that you have a job or you have a business where your money comes in is an indication of your value to other people. Otherwise, you won’t be earning that money. That’s the bottom line.

A Grasshopper Symbolizes Your Ability to Provide Value

If you don’t provide value to somebody else, they have no business giving you their money. It’s value for value.

The grasshopper points to this central truth. Just as this insect eats plants to make way for new growth, it plays a crucial role in preventing overgrowth, crowding, and by extension forest fires or grass fires.

You might be thinking: “Well, a grasshopper could be a pest! After all, if you plant a crop in, there’s a whole bunch of grasshoppers that show up. You won’t have a crop for too long.”

That’s how destructive they could be.

But you need to look at the natural cycle of that field you planted your crop on. If you didn’t plant a commercial crop like maize and instead planted a natural collection of the kind of flora that could be found on your land naturally, what do you think will happen?

Well, not much of anything because the grasshoppers come and go, and the plants will remain. There’s a natural balance there.

Be Aware of the Part You Play in Social Balance

Wherever you go, you have an influence on people. I know that’s kind of hard to believe for many people.

Unfortunately, many people believe that they are just another face in the crowd. They look at their lives and what they think they have to offer and are quite disappointed, to say the least. They think that they really have nothing to bring to the table so they are very easy to overlook.

This really is too bad because everybody has value. Even if it just means being there to say the right word at the right time to the right person so they can go on to do great things, you have done your job.

Similarly, by earning money by providing services to others, you contribute to the lives of other people because you’re part of this flow of value much like a small grasshopper eating grass can individually contribute to the greater ecological balance of a large field or even a forest.

You have to stop looking at your small individual activity and think of what would happen if what you do on a regular basis isn’t repeated in the lives of many other people around you.

The Grasshopper Signifies Your Self-Worth

Since so many people feel so small and insignificant, they automatically confuse this with a sense of powerlessness.

You may be thinking to yourself: “What’s the value of my vote? It’s only one vote after all.”

Similarly, you may be wondering:

“What’s the value of the dollars in my pocket. I make less than $75,000 a year.

How far will that go? Does it really have much of an impact?”

I can go on down the line, but you get my point.

So many people believe in their own smallness that they fail to see just how big of a role they play when their daily activities are added up.

The truth? You are not alone.

Sure, you don’t spend that much money, but the money you do spend, when multiplied by the spending habits of people in the exact same situation as you, is huge.

And if there’s a small change in how you choose to do things, you best believe it’s going to have a big impact on the economy of the place you live in.

This is the reality of your existence. The world doesn’t just turn on your individual actions.

You have to look at yourself as a representative of many repeated actions over an extended period of time. This is where your real power comes from.

The Beating of Butterfly Wings and Tropical Storms

One of the oldest anecdotes about the interconnected nature of human activity involves butterfly wings. According to this old saying, “the beating of butterfly wings somewhere in the Amazon can trigger tropical storms halfway around the world, even in places like the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, or even Vietnam.”

What gives?

Well, the turbulence of small butterfly wings isn’t much. But when added to the turbulence caused by the beating wings of other insects, it can cause a small yet significant variation that can trigger a chain reaction in the climate that eventually makes its way to Southeast Asia.

Something Seemingly Insignificant Can Cause Significant Results

We’re talking about big factors over an extended period of time covering large areas of space.

This is the part where a lot of people get lost because the space is so vast and the timeline is so stretched that they lose track. All they can focus on is what they’re doing at a specific time and at a specific place.

The same goes with your decisions. You may be thinking that the choices that you make only impact you and, if stretched to its logical limit, possibly the people that you care about.

Rarely do you think about people that are located across state lines within the continental United States or even halfway around the world. Those places and people simply don’t exist in your day-to-day calculation when it comes to your actions.

But Everybody Is Interconnected

Just as the value that we produce can be aggregated to deliver significant impact, so do our decisions. When you keep dreaming of grasshoppers, your subconscious is telling you that your self-worth is suffering from a disconnect from the actual power you truly possess.

You’re not just another face in the crowd. You’re not just another statistic.

You are a unique individual with the power to become self-aware of the conscious decisions that you make.

Taking Responsibility for Your Impact

I suppose the most practical application of the meaning of the grasshopper in light of “the swarm” of aggregate action involves environmentalism. Let’s start there.

If you choose to eat certain foods instead of others and start preferring certain types of packaging instead of others, you might think that what you’re doing is a little too late.

But what if you influence five people and those five people influence five other people, and they in turn influence five other people? Pretty soon, everybody starts adopting your practices.

There’s less waste. There’s less energy wasted on producing the packaging for the wastes. And this leads to a drop in the total carbon footprint at least when it comes to certain industrial activities.

Choices Matter!

But they only have power if people like yourself decide to make certain changes. The same goes with political decisions.

For example, if you know that there are certain factories in certain parts of the world where human rights violations are rampant and people are paid very little money or are forced to work in slave-like conditions, you can do something about it.

No, I’m not talking about you getting on Twitter and getting on some sort of hashtag brigade.

I’m talking about something more profound. I’m talking about something that actually hits the perpetrators of such harmful actions right where it hurts.

I am of course talking about a negative impact on their bottom line. How do you go about doing this?

Very simple! Stop buying their stuff!

That’s it! That’s all she wrote.

Seriously!

For example, if you have a tough time wrapping your head around the reality that those $300 Nike shoes that you buy actually cost less than $5 to make in a factory in Vietnam because of very low labor rates, you can do something about it.

It’s as simple as not buying shoes with that Swoosh logo on them. Problem solved!

Why? You’re not the only one making that choice. When people start changing their behaviors, the world starts to change.

This ultimately is the symbolic power of the grasshopper. Your mind is trying to send you a message regarding your aggregate power.

But it cuts deeper than that.

A Better World Starts with You

I’m not talking about saving the planet. I’m not talking about going on some sort of moral crusade that changes the world from black to white or from Hell to Heaven.

I’m talking about something less grandiose. I’m talking about something that is closer to home.

If, for example, you treat other people the way you want to be treated, what do you think the effect would be?

At first, you may be thinking: “Well, I’m just bucking the tide. Everybody else is still a jerk. Everybody else is still mean to me. It’s not worth doing.”

But if you stick to it and you change your assumptions about other people along with your expectations, eventually you start leading by example. Eventually, people could see that when you open doors and you say “thank you” and you greet people and you smile at them, then you’re a small, flickering light in what would otherwise be a vast, endless black sea.

You may be thinking:

“Well, I’m just another light. What’s the big deal?

How far could this go? How big of a difference can I make?”

Well, you’ll be surprised!

Just like a grasshopper nibbling away at a blade of grass in one infinitesimally small corner of a field, when there are so many grasshoppers replicating and multiplying all over that field, each collective nibble can mean the difference between life or death for that field.

The same goes with your random acts of kindness. You may be thinking that you are alone and that you are just bucking against bigger trends and whatever kindness you put out there, whatever positive signals you emit, are not going to make much of a difference.

Well, think again! Because the duplication effect is plugged into the human collective psyche.

We Are Mirroring Creatures, That’s Why We Magnify Small Changes

Have you met somebody that, for whatever reason that you cannot explain, you like? I noticed that when I’m on a car sales floor, I tend to like certain salespeople instead of others.

A friend of mine pulled me aside and told me that one of the oldest tricks in salesmanship is for the salesperson to “mimic” their prospect. I decided to test my friend Thomas’ hypothesis.

I was in the market for a new Toyota truck so I struck up a conversation with the salesperson who is assisting me. I noticed a funny thing. Not only did he touch the base of my arm after our initial handshake and introduction, but he was also talking at the same pace as me.

I looked at his facial expressions and they seem to mirror the ones that I use.

Finally, I paid attention to the words he was saying, and he was phrasing his thoughts roughly similar to the way I normally talk.

Then, it hit me like a ton of bricks. My friend Thomas was absolutely right.

Mirroring People Leads to Rapport

Mimicking happens all the time in the sales process and expert salespeople do this because they want to seal the deal. They do it because it’s effective.

So, I tried to do it in the next mixer that I went to. It’s a professional mixer. People usually go to these networking events to see what’s up in the industry and possibly get some doors opened when it comes to finding jobs or finding new businesses.

It works like a charm!

When people can see that you are similar enough to them, their normal defensiveness disappears. I’m talking about straight-up disappearing like a vapor.

If you want to vaporize whatever awkward, artificial barriers separating you from the person that you’re talking to, try mirroring them. Pay attention to their facial expressions, their gestures, their verbal ticks, the words that they use as well as their body language.

Now, don’t go overboard. Try to ease into it.

If you go overboard and you take it too far, you’re going to go from pleasant mimicry to repulsive mocking. Know the difference.

But I noticed that when I establish enough familiarity and similarity between me and the person I was talking to, things went smooth. I got so many business cards.

People start talking to me about their families, their kids, and whatever else is important to them. I felt like I was a part of their family.

That’s how important a sense of similarity is.

What Does Similarity Have to Do with Multiplying Your Personal Impact?

This is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to the symbology of the grasshopper in dreams.

By itself, a single grasshopper isn’t going to do much. Sure, it can eat a lot of vegetation, but it’s very light and compact. It doesn’t take much to fill its belly and at the end of the day, you still have a long maize blade.

But if you triple or quadruple the number of grasshoppers in the field, you see the vegetation start to disappear more rapidly. If you multiply that number even more, all that maize will disappear almost instantly.

This is the power of replication. Human beings do the same way through mimicry.

Remember, when you’re doing something and it’s obvious that it’s producing good results for you, do you think people will sit back and just smile and give you a thumbs up?

No! They’ll copy you.

Now, in the back of their minds, they’re not consciously copying you, but this built-in behavior replication system is an evolutionary adaptation that we have. Because imagine yourself in the caveman days unable to mimic the reaction of those around you.

You probably would be able to live a few years but once a bear or a saber-toothed tiger appears on the scene and you cannot copy other people’s behavior, you’re gone.

What happened is those who are able to replicate others’ behavior through mimicry and a complicated dance of social signals are able to live long enough to pass on their genes. Those that can’t or won’t weren’t so lucky so their genes died off.

Mimicry and replicating social signals are hardwired into our genes. It’s part of our survival as a species.

Not surprisingly, when you make certain changes and people see it and it’s obvious to them that there is some utility to it, they start to copy it.

That’s how it works and that’s how you are able to replicate yourself in the lives of other people.

Now, you may be thinking, as I’ve mentioned at the beginning of this post, that you’re just another face in the crowd. But you do have an impact.

Don’t Confuse Your Low Self-Esteem and Lack of Self-Regard with Lack of Impact

For example, when it comes to Christian evangelization, more people are converted when they see the change in somebody who used to drink a lot, screw around with other people’s wives, cheat, lie, and steal. He has transformed into someone who doesn’t do any of that anymore and, more importantly, is actually helping other people heal and become better individuals.

When people see that kind of transformation, they sit up and pay attention. They’d say: “Isn’t that Jim who used to be no good and now he is helping so many people? What’s going on?”

No amount of Bible-thumping or memorizing Bible verses is going to convert people better than a converted life. Your life, believe it or not, is the only Bible many people would ever get to read.

And when they see you transform because of the living power of the Word of God, you best believe people would pay attention because they’ll be wondering:

“Maybe the way I’m worshiping the Lord is wrong. Maybe I don’t even believe the Lord, and that’s why my life is like this, and this other person who used to be an unbeliever is living in a completely different way. He is living the life that I want.”

That’s how you convert.

And I’m not just talking about religion or spirituality here. I’m talking about just making the world a better place.

Do you see my point? This is the power of the grasshopper.

Allow Yourself to Feel Big

You may feel small but be aware of the impact you have on others. They’re always watching.

And when you take ownership of the impact you have on other people, more doors will open, and more importantly, you will have a better impact on this planet.