Asp in a dream: what does it mean?
A small snake carrying an enormous amount of borrowed meaning, almost all of it arriving through one death that may not have happened that way.
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 read snakes in a fairly narrow way and would not make an exception here. It is worth knowing that is what he would say, and worth knowing that a dreamer who has just watched a film about Cleopatra has a simpler explanation available.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would probably separate this from snakes generally, because the asp arrives already attached to a story about a chosen death. It would ask what the dreamer knows about that story rather than what snakes mean.
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?
Almost nobody has met one. This is a dream image that comes through culture rather than experience, which makes it unusually easy to trace: the dreamer has read something, seen something, or been taught something recently.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
The rearing cobra sat on the Egyptian royal headdress as a protective figure, so the animal was a guardian of monarchs long before it was said to have killed one. Ancient accounts of Cleopatra's death disagree with each other, and several do not involve a snake at all.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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 word is doing period work more than animal work. Writing asp instead of snake places a scene in a register before anything happens in it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The small chosen danger, held deliberately.
What are the genre conventions?
A basket, a queen, and a decision already made.
How to subvert it
Write the snake as an animal with no opinion about any of it.
Try this
Two hundred words from the point of view of the person who brought the basket.
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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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