This is a complete guess; although, it may provide a useful hint.

You might have code that's something like this:

$ perl -E 'use strict; my @x = qw{a b c}; my $y = @x; say $y->[1]'
Can't use string ("3") as an ARRAY ref while "strict refs" in use at -
+e line 1.
[download]

When you really wanted something like this:

$ perl -E 'use strict; my @x = qw{a b c}; my $y = \@x; say $y->[1]'
b
[download]

Note the differences in the assignments to $y.

If that guess doesn't help, you'll need to show us some code (as already requested). Take a look at "How do I post a question effectively?" to see what information we need and how to present it.