Brick in a dream: what does it mean?
One unit of a wall, useless alone and permanent in company, and the only building material most people have actually held.
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 probably attend to a single brick, since a dreamer holding one is holding a piece of a structure that is not there. He would ask what has been taken apart, or not yet built.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the brick as the smallest unit of something a person is constructing slowly, and would notice whether the dreamer was laying them or counting them.
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?
Walls and buildings under construction are a common dream setting and tend to track periods when a dreamer is genuinely building something, including things that are not buildings. The imagery follows the effort rather than predicting it.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Fired brick made large permanent cities possible in places with no good building stone, which is most of Mesopotamia. The story of Babel is set in exactly such a place and turns on the technology, since the text pauses specifically to note that they had brick and used it for stone.
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?
The weight is the thing. A brick in a hand is an alarming object and a brick in a wall is invisible, and a writer can move between those two states in one sentence.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The part that only means anything alongside the others.
What are the genre conventions?
Thrown through a window, or laid to show patient work.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who can tell you where a brick was made and when, and is right.
Try this
Two hundred words about a wall being taken down brick by brick.
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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