Slip in a dream: what does it mean?
Clay watered down to a cream, used for joining, dipping and decorating, which is the same material behaving as a liquid.
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 sameness. It is not another material, it is the same one with water in it, and he would ask what in the dreamer's life changes entirely by being diluted.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the joining. Two pieces of clay are stuck together with clay, so the repair and the thing repaired are one substance.
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?
Water and materials appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among ordinary reported dream material.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Because it is the same body as the pot, it shrinks at the same rate in drying and firing, which is why nothing else can be used as the glue.
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 else will do as the glue. It has to be the same clay, because anything else shrinks at a different rate and the join opens in the kiln.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A repair made of the same thing as the thing.
What are the genre conventions?
A jug of grey cream, and a brushful along a scored edge.
How to subvert it
Write the slip made of another material.
Try this
Two hundred words about mending something with itself.
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.
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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.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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