Penis in a dream: what does it mean?
The body part appears in dreams the way other body parts do, and the anxiety people bring to this page is usually about what it means rather than about the dream.
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 is unavoidable here and also the reason the subject is unreadable for many people, since he read a very wide range of dream objects as standing in for this one. That reading is not testable, was contested in his lifetime, and is not the only thing available.
After Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Brill trans., 1910), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would be more interested in what the dream did with the body than in the anatomy, and would treat a dream about a body part as being about the dreamer's relation to their own body first.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Bodily dreams frequently have bodily causes: erections occur in REM sleep as a matter of physiology in people of all ages, entirely independently of dream content, and this is well documented. That fact alone explains a great deal of what people arrive at this page worried about.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).Mythological
Traditions treat the image as a protective and fertility charm far more often than as an obscenity, and the objects survive in quantity from societies that were entirely unembarrassed by them.
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.
In literature
The subject is where a great deal of otherwise careful prose becomes either coy or strenuous, and both failures are visible from a distance.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It is the fastest available route to a character's private uncertainty, which is why so much comic writing lives here.
Genre conventions
Comic fiction exaggerates. Literary fiction goes clinical, which is its own kind of flinch.
How to subvert it
Write it entirely without either anxiety or bravado, in a medical register, and see what survives.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a conversation between two people who are entirely comfortable.
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.