Choke damp in a dream: what does it mean?
Air with the oxygen used out of it, which kills quietly and without warning, and is the reason a caged bird went underground.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the absence rather than the presence. Nothing has been added and something has been removed, and he would ask what harm in the dreamer's life came from a lack.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the difference from the other one. One kills by exploding and one by there being nothing to breathe, so the same word covers a bang and a silence.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Suffocation and difficulty breathing appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records such bodily distress among persistent dream themes.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
A canary shows the effect before a person does, which is why the bird was carried, and reviving it in fresh air was part of the arrangement rather than an afterthought.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
Nothing has been added to it. Something has been taken out, and that is enough, and there is no smell and no warning at all.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Harm done by an absence rather than a presence.
What are the genre conventions?
A small cage set down on the ground, and everybody watching a bird.
How to subvert it
Write the choke damp that announces itself.
Try this
Two hundred words about a danger that is a lack of something.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
-
The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.