Dynamite in a dream: what does it mean?
An explosive invented to make blasting safer, by a man whose obituary was printed early and badly enough to change what he did with his money.
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 a fuse rather than a blast, since something lit and then waited out is a sustained dream situation while an explosion is over at once.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take stored force with a known trigger as an image of held anger, and would ask who in the dream was holding the match.
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?
Explosions are commonly reported in dreams and frequently arrive without sound, or with the sound arriving late. Dream audio is unreliable in ways dreamers rarely notice until they try to describe it afterwards.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Alfred Nobel invented it in 1867 to make nitroglycerine safe enough to transport, after an explosion at the family works killed his brother. A French newspaper mistakenly printed his obituary as the merchant of death, and he rewrote his will to found the prizes. The paper had confused him with his brother Ludvig, who had actually died.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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 early obituary is one of the best true stories available to a writer: a man reading what the world will say about him, in time to do something about it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The stored force waiting on one small act.
What are the genre conventions?
A countdown, a bundle of red sticks, and wire cutters.
How to subvert it
Write the quarry, where it is used correctly, every day, by bored professionals.
Try this
Two hundred words about reading your own obituary. Decide what to do before the end.
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.
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.