Crazing in a dream: what does it mean?
A fine network of cracks in a glaze, which is caused by the glaze and the body shrinking at different rates and can appear years later.
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 delay. The disagreement was built in and shows up long afterwards, and he would ask what mismatch in the dreamer's life is still working itself out.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is sometimes wanted. The same effect is deliberately produced and admired on some ware, so a fault and a feature are the identical thing.
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?
Cracks and things ageing 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?
Pieces can craze audibly, giving small pings as the cracks form, sometimes long after the pot has left the kiln.
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?
It can happen with a small audible ping, years after the pot was made, because two materials that never agreed are still arguing.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A disagreement built in and settled slowly.
What are the genre conventions?
A teacup held to the light, with brown lines all through the glaze.
How to subvert it
Write the crazing that appears immediately.
Try this
Two hundred words about a fault and a feature being identical.
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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