Target in a dream: what does it mean?
A target in a dream is reported as being aimed at rather than hit, and dreamers frequently say the distance kept changing.
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 aiming rather than the object, since the dream has arranged an intention and withheld the result, and would ask what the dreamer has been trying to achieve.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would notice concentric rings, which is a form he took seriously, and would treat the centre as the notable part rather than the shooting.
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?
Dreams in which a goal recedes or a distance changes are commonly reported, and dream space is generated rather than measured, which is why a target can be near and far in the same moment without the dreamer objecting.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Archery as a formal discipline with ceremonial rules exists in several traditions, and in more than one of them the shooting is explicitly a practice of attention rather than a test of accuracy.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; 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?
The metaphor has been worn flat by management language, which is a real problem for a writer, since a target in a novel now sounds like a quarterly report. The other version worth writing is the paper one taken home and pinned up, which turns an afternoon into evidence.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It gives a character a stated aim, which is convenient and slightly false, since most people do not have one.
What are the genre conventions?
Sports writing uses the discipline. Literary fiction uses somebody who hits it and is not satisfied.
How to subvert it
Write an archer who has stopped caring where the arrows land.
Try this
Write three hundred words of a range on a still afternoon.
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.