Vibrator in a dream: what does it mean?
The object appears in dreams the way other private objects do, and the anxiety attached is usually about discovery rather than about sex.
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 discovery rather than the object, since these dreams are nearly always organised around somebody else finding it, and would ask who.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would be more interested in privacy than in the object, and would treat a dream about a hidden thing being found as being about the hiding.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Sexual dreams are among the most commonly reported types in every large survey, and their specific content carries no diagnostic weight. There is nothing to interpret here beyond the ordinary fact that dreams reproduce what is in a life.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.Mythological
The device has a documented and frequently misreported medical history, and the popular story about Victorian physicians is considerably less well evidenced than its retellings suggest.
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 object is written almost entirely as a joke or as a scandal, and the ordinary version, an item in a drawer that nobody thinks about, is barely written at all. The retail context is also entirely different from what fiction assumes, since these are now sold in ordinary shops, and a scene written on the assumption of furtiveness will read as thirty years out of date.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It is a private fact that can be found, which makes it a very efficient device for exposure without anybody doing anything wrong.
Genre conventions
Comic fiction uses the discovery. Literary fiction, when it bothers, uses the buying of it, which is a better scene.
How to subvert it
Write it as entirely unremarkable, mentioned once, in a list of things being packed.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a drawer being cleared out by a relative.
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.