Flypaper in a dream: what does it mean?
A strip hung in a kitchen that works by being visible and disgusting, and which nobody has ever found a pleasant way to dispose of.
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 trap that displays its catch, since the whole design keeps the evidence in view. He would ask what the dreamer was being made to look at.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take being stuck while still alive as the material rather than the insect, and would notice whether the dreamer felt pity or satisfaction.
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?
This is a dated domestic object for most readers, so it tends to arrive with a specific kitchen attached, usually a childhood one. Objects that have gone out of use date a dream setting more precisely than almost anything else.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Arsenic-based flypapers were commonly available in Victorian households, and soaking them to extract the poison featured in more than one notorious murder trial. A grocery item was, for a while, the easiest poison in Britain to obtain without questions. The Arsenic Act of 1851 was passed partly in response, and required a purchaser to be known to the seller and to sign a register.
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?
The arsenic trials are the material, and the detail that makes them work is how ordinary the purchase was.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The trap that shows you what it caught.
What are the genre conventions?
Hung in a grim kitchen to establish squalor.
How to subvert it
Write somebody taking it down and putting up a screen door instead.
Try this
Two hundred words in a kitchen in August. The windows have been open for a week.
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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