Bomb in a dream: what does it mean?
An explosive in a dream is nearly always about the waiting rather than the blast, and the reported detail is usually a timer or the knowledge that one exists somewhere.
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.
Freud
Freud would attend to the delay, since a dream that supplies a device and a countdown has arranged suspense rather than harm. He would ask what the dreamer expected to go off.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung the concealed device can image something in a life that everybody is managing around, and the dream question is usually whether anyone will name it before it goes.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Threat-simulation would read this as the theory's central case, rehearsing a threat that must be detected and escaped. Under the continuity view it follows real exposure, real news and, for people who have lived through bombing, real memory. Those dreams are a different matter and are better taken to a person than to a page.
Our summary of threat-simulation theory. See Revonsuo, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23(6), 2000, 877-901. The theory is contested. Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.Mythological
There is no old folklore for the bomb, and the absence is worth stating: it is a modern object. What traditions supply instead is the hidden ruin, the curse laid on a house, which is the same shape at a different speed.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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.
In literature
War writing has the honest literature of this, and its recurring insight is that the sound arrives after the event for anyone close enough. Fiction that gets the order wrong is written by people who were not there.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It supplies a deadline that everyone in the scene can feel, which is the cheapest and most effective tension available. Structurally it is a clock with a location attached, and readers will follow it anywhere.
Genre conventions
Thriller uses the countdown, which is now almost parodic. War fiction uses the aftermath and the clearing. Literary fiction uses the unexploded one in a field, which is the version with the most in it.
How to subvert it
Write the device that is found, made safe, and carried away by professionals, and give the scene entirely to their competence.
Try this
Write the ninety seconds after an explosion somewhere out of sight. Sound and dust only, no information.
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.