Pacifier in a dream: what does it mean?
The dummy is reported as lost more often than as used, and the search for it in the dream is usually urgent and slow.
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 connect it to his sequence beginning at the mouth and would treat the object as a substitute in the most literal sense, which is what it is.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would attend to the comfort being external and portable, and would notice that the anxiety in these dreams is nearly always about it being missing rather than about the child.
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 is parenting, and the frantic search for a small object at night is one of the most accurate pieces of day residue in the whole corpus. Sleep fragmentation raises recall, which is why parents of infants report so much of this.
Our summary of continuity research on waking activity and dream content. See Schredl and Hofmann, Consciousness and Cognition 12(2), 2003, 298-308.What do myth and folklore say?
Comfort objects given to infants are attested across many traditions in various materials, and the recurring feature is that the object matters enormously to one person and not at all to anyone else.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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?
Small objects with disproportionate emotional weight are the most economical device available to a writer, and this is the purest example, since the reader supplies the panic for free.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It stands for a soothing that can be lost, which is a fair description of the first year of a child's life from the outside.
What are the genre conventions?
Domestic fiction uses the loss. Comic fiction uses the search, which is the same scene played faster.
How to subvert it
Write the moment it is given up for good, from the parent who is not ready.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a car being searched at eleven at night.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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