Gasoline in a dream: what does it mean?
A liquid that is useless until it is vapour, which is why the danger is never the puddle.
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 something that has to be handled carefully and is handled daily without thought, and would be interested in a dreamer who suddenly noticed the risk.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take stored energy that is inert until conditions change as an image of potential rather than threat, and would ask which the dream was showing.
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?
The smell is the detail dreamers report, and it is one of the few smells almost everybody can summon deliberately. Smell is rare in dream reports, so its presence here is worth noting rather than interpreting.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Petrol was a waste product of kerosene refining and was sometimes dumped into rivers before the internal combustion engine gave it a use. The most valuable fraction of the barrel was, for a while, the part nobody wanted. Refiners were fined for dumping it, which is a useful reminder that waste is a statement about demand rather than about a substance.
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 vapour rather than the liquid is both the accurate detail and the more frightening one, and it costs one clause to get right.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The waste that turned out to be the point.
What are the genre conventions?
Poured in a trail, with a match held above it.
How to subvert it
Write a forecourt at three in the morning, and the person working it.
Try this
Two hundred words about a smell that brings back a specific year.
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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