Ebony in a dream: what does it mean?
A wood so dark and dense that it sinks makes an unusual dream material, and the reported detail is usually the weight rather than the colour.
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 density and the darkness together, since a dream that supplies a material with both has arranged something valuable and heavy to carry.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
For Jung the dark dense material can image something in a life that is both prized and burdensome, and its rarity is part of the reading: this is not ordinary wood.
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?
Under the continuity view this usually arrives through objects, instruments and furniture rather than through trees, and most dreamers have handled it without knowing what it was.
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.What do myth and folklore say?
Ebony has been traded over very long distances for millennia and its history is bound up with colonial extraction, which is worth stating: the object in a European drawing room had a supply chain behind it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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.
Where does this appear in literature?
Materials are under-used in fiction and ebony is a good example: the weight, the polish and the price all carry information that description of a colour does not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It signals expense and age in one word. Structurally it is a detail rather than a device, but it dates and places an object precisely.
What are the genre conventions?
Historical fiction uses the trade. Literary fiction uses the piano keys, which is where most people have touched it. Craft writing uses the working of it, which is genuinely difficult.
How to subvert it
Write a cabinetmaker refusing a commission in it, for reasons of supply, to a customer who does not want to hear them.
Try this
Write four hundred words about the keys of an old piano. Weight and surface only.
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.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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.