Candlestick in a dream: what does it mean?
The holder rather than the flame, and one of the few household objects designed entirely around catching what falls.
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 be interested in the dreamer's attention landing on the stand rather than the light, since noticing the support instead of the thing supported is itself a choice worth asking about.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the candlestick as what a person builds to hold a small light steady, and would notice whether it was heavy enough for the job.
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?
Candles now belong to power cuts, religious services and deliberate atmosphere rather than to ordinary lighting, so the dream usually carries one of those three settings with it. Which one it is tends to be obvious to the dreamer.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Silver candlesticks were among the first things a household pawned and among the last it sold, which is why they appear so often in accounts of families going down in the world. They were savings that happened to be useful. Silver was weighed and valued by the ounce whatever the workmanship, so a pawnbroker cared nothing for how fine they were.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
It has been a murder weapon in so much fiction that using it as one now is a joke whether or not you meant it. The drip tray is fresher ground.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The thing built to hold a light and catch what it loses.
What are the genre conventions?
Carried up a staircase, or produced in a board game.
How to subvert it
Let somebody sell them and be relieved.
Try this
Two hundred words in a house during a power cut.
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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